Murder at the New York World's Fair (1938) by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (Writing as "Freeman Dana")

Phoebe Atwood Taylor was an American mystery writer and creator of Asey Mayo, the Codfish Sherlock, who appeared in over twenty mysteries rich in New England atmosphere, authentic Cape Code characters and screwball-y comedy – kin to Craig Rice's boozy mystery farces. Taylor also penned eight novels featuring Leonidas Witherall under the name "Alice Tilton" and a special, once somewhat rare, standalone mystery as by "Freeman Dana."

Murder at the New York World's Fair (1938) was commissioned and written under supervision of Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House, who picked Taylor to represent 60,000, of a 10,000,000, words time capsule buried to commemorate the 1939 New York World's Fair. So, yes, the book fittingly takes place in the future or, as it's known at the New York World's Fair, the World of Tomorrow. It was republished in 2012 as an ebook by the short lived St. Swithin Press and a paperback reprint appeared in 2024 from Chosho Publishing. Why not finally take a crack to see if it's more than just a historical genre curiosity.

The story opens with 68-year-old Mrs. Daisy Boylston Tower, widow of a former governor, escaping from the home of her nephew and his wife, Egleston and Elfrida. She had been a guest of Egleston and Elfrida for months to recover from a broken hip and a bout with pneumonia, but, she simply had enough of being a prisoner a place "where her food was censored, where they choked beef tea down her throat, tried her door knob when she refused to answer a knock." So she borrowed money from the cook and exited the house stowed away in the back of a laundry van. Daisy Towers plan is to go to the New York World's Fair ("I've been to 'em all, since I was a mere child at the Philadelphia Centennial"), but getting there is not as easy as her disappearance has not gone unnoticed ("...dragging horse ponds for my body..."). Along the way, en route to the World's Fair, Daisy picks up a few friends.

Firstly, she comes across a newspaper reporter, Sam Minot, who unaccountably got fired that morning and is being stalked ever since by a man he calls Comrade Glue. Secondly, Daisy's former companion, Cherry Chipman, who's handing out coupons and special tickets to "De Luxe World's Fair Train, The Golden Dart." Sam has his doubts about the authenticity of the tickets as he knows the Golden Dart is the private train of "that millionaire with all the pictures," Conrad Cassell. The tickets turn out to be dodgy, but Cassell takes the deception in good stride and the party ends up at the New York World's Fair. However, Daisy, Sam and Cherry don't get an opportunity to go sight seeing as they have run around the place in disguise to dodge everyone who's looking for them. Such as the police when it's announced pictures from Cassell's collection have gone missing, presumably stolen.

So the first-half is very much a screwball comedy with mystery element apparently having to take a backseat to the adventures and antics of Daisy, Sam and Cherry. And, yes, promoting the World's Fair. The third chapter reveals a body had been found in Cassell's private office on the Golden Dart, but somehow not reported and this was done to keep the action at the World's Fair. In fact, the victim's identity is not revealed until chapter seven, of ten, but, when it was finally revealed, the victim's identity gave the plot a much needed jolt – as it raced towards it conclusion. A conclusion revealing the completely bonkers scheme underneath it all, complimented by one of the pettiest motives on record, which I found more of an attraction than the story's setting. A credible solution? Not really, but it entertained the hell out of me!

Taylor's Murder at the New York World's Fair is a light, fast paced screwball mystery unmistakably belonging to the American murder-can-be-fun school, because getting neck deep into trouble is more fun when you do it with family and friends. Murder at the New York World's Fair takes that sentiment to heart. While not as tightly plotted or fairly clued, it more than warrants comparison to other murder-can-be-fun writers like Craig Rice, Stuart Palmer and Kelley Roos. Murder at the New York World's Fair is well worth your time if you like your vintage comedy mysteries.

People vs. Withers and Malone (1963) by Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice

You know, I love a good detective trope as much as the next person and my enduring, tediously documented obsession with the locked room mystery has been called a "cause for concern," but they say that because they don't realize there's a trope even more potent than the impossible crime – a trope rarer than musgravite. The classic of literary guilty pleasures, the crossover. While not as rare in other fields of fiction, there have been very few genuine crossovers in detective fiction over its nearly two-hundred year run.

H.C. Bailey allowed his two series detectives, Reggie Fortune and Joshua Clunk, to make occasional cameos in each others cases, but never truly worked with, or against, each other. A panel of famous detective characters appear in Brian Flynn's The Case of the Painted Ladies (1940) to help out Anthony Bathurst, but their appearance is more in the way of a cameo than a crossover. Same goes for William Clerihew from H. Warner Allen's Mr. Clerihew, Wine Merchant (1933) briefly popping up in E.C. Bentley's Trent's Own Case (1936) to advise Philip Trent. So one of the first true and truly effective crossovers is probably Patrick Quentin's Black Widow (1952) pitting the innocently framed Peter Duluth against the tenacious Lt. Trant from Death and the Maiden (1939).

After the 1950s, Edward D. Hoch pooled some of his many series detectives on special occasions. Dr. Sam Hawthorne meets Ben Snow in "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee" (1990) and Captain Leopold crosses paths with Nick Velvet in "The Theft of Leopold's Badge" (1991). A writer who made serious work of crossovers in the (modern) crime-and detective story is Bill Pronzini. Pronzini's Nameless Detective has teamed up with Marcia Muller's Sharon McComb in Double (1984) and the short story "Cache and Carry" (1988), but their best crossover is Beyond the Grave (1986) in which Elena Oliverez from Muller's The Tree of Death (1983) comes across a historical mystery from 1894 involving Carpenter and Quincannon – the turn-of-the-century San Francisco gumshoes. Even before that, Pronzini's Nameless Detective found himself working alongside Collin Wilcox's Lt. Frank Hastings (Twospot, 1978). There are, of course, the missed opportunities. Carter Dickson and John Rhode's Fatal Decent (1939) not being a crossover between H.M. and Dr. Priestley or Rex Stout and Ian Fleming discussing the idea of James Bond, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin having a meetup that never happened ("Bond would have gotten all the girls").

So, while there have been few real crossovers, those few have been generally good, but even then, they're hardly known as crossover classics. In fact, the only work really known and celebrated for its quality as a crossover is a collection of half a dozen short stories, Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice's People vs. Withers and Malone (1963).

Stuart Palmer and "Craig Rice," a penname of Georgiana Randolph, were not only friends, but two of the brightest lights of the American detective story. Palmer debuted Miss Hildegarde Withers, "schoolteacher by profession and meddlesome old snoop by avocation," who made her first appearance in The Penguin Pool Murder (1932) giving the whole concept of spinster sleuth a bit more bite – which made her my favorite. Rice, the Queen of the Screwball Mystery, was said to have been "virtually the only woman writer of the distinctively American type of mystery, the tough, hard-boiled school that combines hard drink, hilarity, and homicide." She created my favorite shady lawyer, John J. Malone, who always right in the middle of some boozy, madcap antics, heavy drinking and solving crimes ("...usually by pure accident while chasing through saloons after some young woman..."). I take these two over Miss Marple and Perry Mason anytime!

Nobody remembers, exactly, who came up with the idea to pair the prim spinsters with the messy Chicago attorney. Rice thought it was Palmer. Palmer believed it was the editor "Ellery Queen." Queen named Palmer. Whoever came up with the idea, Palmer and Rice collaborated through correspondence on four stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but the last two stories were posthumous collaborations published after Rice's untimely death in 1957. Palmer wrote and parsed the last two stories together from "some Craigean scrap or Ricean fragment" in their letters and notes. Their partnership proved to be what you want and hope a crossover to be (i.e. not just a gimmick). While in a way different mystery writers with opposite characters as detectives, Palmer and Rice's style and plotting techniques proved to be far from incompatible with Malone and Withers playing off each other like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin at their best.

I first read this collection, years ago, in a Dutch translation (badly) titled Een advocaat en kwade zaken (A Lawyer and an Evil Business), but always wanted to reread it in English. So why not take a look at these six madcap capers during these final days of the year.

"Once Upon a Train," originally titled "Loco Motive," first appeared in the October, 1950, issue of EQMM and finds John J. Malone celebrating the "miraculous acquittal" of his client, Stephen Larsen. A machine politician who had been caught with his hand in the municipal till and Malone is now waiting for him to settle his much needed fee ("...two months' back office rent..."), but Larsen has boarded the Super-Century for New York ("next stop Paris or Rio"). Malone is in hot pursuit and boards the train, however, there's no trace of Larsen or the beautiful redhead he spotted. He meets someone else, a tall, angular woman "who somehow suggested a fairly well-dressed scarecrow" with a floral hat resembling "a well-kept grave," Miss Hildegarde Withers – where off to the races! Their first meeting aboard the Super-Century train is a crossover worthy event that keeps getting better when a body turns up in Miss Withers' compartment. Malone and Miss Withers are the wrong detectives to try such a stunt on, because they immediately start tempering with evidence by moving the body back and forth between their compartments to delay discovery. Not only is "Once Upon a Train" a very entertaining story, putting two detectives from different series on the same page, but the plot is solid with a solution answering the question why the body was undressed and where the money (including Malone's fee) was hidden on the train. So a fantastic story all around!

"Cherchez la Frame" was originally published in the June, 1951, issue of EQMM and brings Malone and his secretary, Maggie, to Beverley Hills, California, on a discreet assignment. Joe Vastrelli hired Malone to track down his estranged ex-wife, Nina, who had abandoned him to become an actress and wanted to know if she wanted him back. Malone, "a pushover for a sentimental story," accepted and took the opportunity to meet back up with Miss Withers, but Maggie has to keep his date and confides in Miss Withers her worry Malone is getting himself into trouble. Not without a reason. Malone finds Nina's body in the bedroom of his bungalow hotel with his own, distinctively hand painted, necktie knotted tightly around her neck. Like I said before, Malone and Withers are the wrong detectives to try a frame job on. This time, the killer did a better job than the previous murderer ("a lovely, hand-painted frame") and it looks like Malone is in serious trouble towards the end ("...I'm licked"). That being said, Malone and Withers carry this story as the murderer, motive and method are obvious from the start. So not as good as the first, but still a thoroughly entertaining story mixing mayhem with murder.

"Autopsy and Eva" was first published in the August, 1954, issue of EQMM and opens with Malone ready to embark for Honolulu on holiday, "just collected a fat fee," but Miss Withers drops by to spoil the fun – announcing "we're thoroughly mixed up in another murder case." Miss Withers goes on to explain about the Ryan murder case in which an army colonel returning from Korea was found killed in his bedroom. So it's assumed the returning Ryan found his wife, Eva, together with her loves, got overpowered and shot with his own service pistol. Miss Withers has her doubts and done some sleuthing on herself, which seems to have borne fruit. Now she wants Malone to present when hearing the people who responded on her ad requesting information. Of course, one of them practically ends up dead on Malone's doorstep. Miss Withers casually informs Malone she's been harboring the fugitive Eva Ryan in her spare bedroom for the past four days. So this another entertaining outing for the two disaster creating murder magnets, but, once again, Malone and Withers carry the story.

"Rift in the Loot," originally published in the April, 1955, issue of EQMM, is not a detective story, but one of those thriller-ish gangster stories from the pulp magazine of previous decades. Malone and Withers get roped in to retrieve the hidden loot from a deadly robbery, which appears to be easy enough, but complications and corpses abound. Fun but minor stuff.

"Withers and Malone, Brain-Stormers," first published in the February, 1959, issue of EQMM, is the first, of two, Withers and Malone stories Palmer wrote following the Rice's untimely death in 1957. Malone again finds himself in deeper hole than the previous time. Nancy Jorgens had a secret relationship with Paul Bedford, of the canned-beef Bedfords, who got her pregnant and told her to go see some shady doctor. So she turned to Malone to bring a paternity suit against Bedford, but Bedford fought back veraciously and brought in a whole parade of men who "swore they had enjoyed the favors of my fair client." Fortunately, this resulted in a hung jury, but, while Malone was moving for a new trial, Nancy got arrested for forging Paul Bedford's name a $25,000 check. She claims the check came in the mail and thought it legit, but the D.A. is out for blood. And even Malone is the target. Even worse, Nancy skipped town and Malone turns Miss Withers telling her, "we've got to find Bedford before Nancy finds him." So, more or less, standard fare for this crossover series, but the ending elevates it a bit closer to the first story. Malone finds himself in court as a fellow conspirator, but uses his Perry Mason-like courtroom theatrics and wizardry to conclude the case during their bail hearing. These last two stories are a bit longer than the first four, but Palmer put them to good use here!

"Withers and Malone, Crime-Busters," originally published in the November, 1963, issue of EQMM, finds Malone in an even more trouble than the last time. Malone always boasts that he never lost a client, but his latest client was sentenced to death. Walter "Junior" Coleman, playboy socialite, stood accused of killing his secret girlfriend, Jeanine, outside Le Jazz Hot with his car and received a life sentence at the first trial. Malone got him a new trial and a death sentence, but Malone himself is in potential legal trouble and potentially faces bribery charges. That's not even considering the devastating prize-tag attached to it, a bribed witness who has bailed and Junior already sitting in the condemned cell – entirely resigned to his fate. And a potential clue, or lead, lost in the foggy mist of a legendary hangover. Miss Withers came as soon as she heard the bad news ("welcome to the wake"), but they first dig themselves even deeper into trouble before they start digging themselves out again. A highlight of the story is when Malone ends up in the hospital, one leg raised high in traction, and Miss Withers has to disguise herself as a nurse to speak with him. So another fun, incredibly entertaining story to close out the story, marred only by a rather obvious murderer spoiling an interesting take on an age-old motive with legal complications.

I think "Withers and Malone, Brain-Stormers" and "Withers and Malone, Crime-Busters" probably would have made for a great novel and punctuation to the collaboration had they been merged together. Two cases simultaneously exploding in Malone's face with Miss Withers coming to the rescue (Welcome to the Wake would have been a good title).

So, all in all, Palmer and Rice's People vs. Withers and Malone is best described as the detective story's equivalent of an amusement park ride and probably best read as an episodic novel rather than a short story collection. I think only "Once Upon a Train" can stand on its own as a detective story with the first meeting between the two Malone and Withers making it a very special short story indeed. Malone and Withers carry the remaining stories from start to finish and they're the reason to read this unique team up between two detectives from different writers. There you have my rare recommendations purely on the strength of character. A Christmas miracle only a few days late!

Notes for the curious: People vs. Withers and Malone is not the only crossover in Palmer and Rice's work, which even extends to the detective fiction by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green. Firstly, Malone has an off-page cameo in Palmer's Miss Withers Regrets (1947) and briefly appears in the 1946 episode "The Double Diamond" from Boucher and Green's radio serial The Casebook of Gregory Hood. Gregory Hood is also linked to the Sister Ursula series through the Derringer Society from Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942) and the Gregory Hood episode "The Derringer Society" (1946). Note that the Thrilling Detective Website mentions an untitled, 1948 crossover episode in which Hood appears alongside Sam Spade from the radio show The Adventures of Sam Spade. I don't remember if Fergus O'Breen or Nick Noble were ever alluded to/made cameos in the Hood or Sister Ursula series, but their inclusion would be the finishing touch to this extended pocket universe of detectives.

Anyway, I don't know if this going to be the last one of the year or one more gets squeezed in, but if this is the last one, I wish you all a happy new year and best wishes for 2026!

Obelists en Route (1934) by C. Daly King

C. Daly King was an American psychologist and mystery writer best remembered today for his Trevis Tarrant series of short stories, collected in The Curious Mr. Tarrant (1935) and The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003), which fared better than his half a dozen detective novel – five of which have become exercises in obscurity. King penned two sets of three novels starting with his so-called "Obelists" series, Obelists at Sea (1932), Obelists en Route (1934) and Obelists Fly High (1935). Closed out his stint as mystery novelist with his three CAB mysteries, Careless Corpse (1937), Arrogant Alibi (1938) and Bermuda Burial (1940).

Obelists Fly High escaped biblioblivion courtesy of several inexpensive, easily available reprint editions in the Dover Mystery Classics series. Obelists at Sea followed at a considerable distance as it received a paperback reprint in the Penguin Green Crime series, but that paperback with wrapper is only marginally less rare than the Knopf first edition. Whenever a copy of Careless Corpse, Arrogant Alibi or Bermuda Burial turns up, it tends to cost an arm and a leg. The last copy of Bermuda Burial I saw for sale had a $1350 prize-tag on it. However, the most well-known of his obscure, out-of-print and practically unobtainable mysteries used to be Obelists en Route. In fact, I remember it being considered as one of the ten, or so, most sought out, out-of-print rarities around the late 2000s.

Last year, Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics reprinted Obelists at Sea and a few months ago, they released a brand new edition of Obelists en Route. This new edition marks its first reprint in over 90 years!

First things, first! King invented the word "obelist" and defined it as "a person of little or no worth" in Obelists at Sea, but changed the definition to "one who views with suspicion" in the two subsequent novels – which is a more suitable definition in the context of a detective story. Especially when they take place in confined locations like this series. Obelists at Sea takes place during a transatlantic voyage, Obelists Fly High is set aboard a passenger plane and Obelists en Route is a good, old-fashioned railway mystery. Agatha Christie and Stuart Palmer famously wrote mysteries that can be linked with the murder on land-sea-and-air motif, but King is the only one who wrote and published them as a set.

Obelists en Route takes place during a three-day, non-stop journey from New York City to San Francisco on an exclusive test run of the newly built, luxurious Transcontinental Limited. A coast-to-coast train constructed like a ritzy, stretched out luxury hotel on wheels complete with wireless phone boots, barber service and even a swimming pool car. Transcontinental Limited is the railroad's answer to commercial air travel ("extra luxury against extra speed"). A small, exclusive selection of guests are invited along on the first, uninterrupted run across the continent aboard the Transcontinental Limited.

There's a prominent banker, Sabot Hodges, his daughter Edvanne, his private secretary Entwerk and a valet, Hopping. Hodges also brought along a world renowned psychoanalyst, Dr. Mabon Raquette, to have himself psychoanalyst. Dr. Raquette is only one, of four, famous psychologist on the train journey. Dr. Iva Poppas, a Hormic psychologist, Prof. Dr. Gottlieb Irrtum, a Gestalt psychologist, and a Integrative psychologist, Dr. L. Reef Pons – whom previously appeared in Obelists at Sea. Noah Hall, an industrial engineer, is part of the trip as an argumentative representative of the "representative of Technocracy" and Hans Summerladd is the publicity director of the Transcontinental company. Last, but not least, is Lt. Michael Lord of the New York City Police Department, who's assigned to trip "just in case." That pertained more to the usual petty crooks or cranks. Not a suspicious death.

On the morning following their departure, Sabot Hodges is found dead at the bottom of the train's swimming pool without a wound or marks of external violence on his body. So nothing to indicate foul play. Lord's initial investigation seems to reveal a bizarre suicide, but when a medical examiner boards the train to perform an autopsy, it's reveals Hodges hadn't drowned at all. The cause of death is undetermined. Now he has a death on his hands that could neither be murder or suicide nor an accident or natural causes. A tricky problem complicated by a Wild West-like shootout targeting Edvanne Hodges, but leaves someone else critically wounded. And the unidentified shooter got away in the melee. However, the shooting convinces Lord there's something fishy about Hodges' death and begins investigating anew now that he has "something to bite on."

Michael Lord is an well-off, upper class policeman who "went into police work for fun" without having to rely on salary. I've seen Lord being compared to other upper class police detectives like Thatcher Colt and Roderick Alleyn, but thought him here to be closer to Inspector French than characters like Colt and Alleyn.

Lord is an intelligent and observant detective with an eye for detail, but not an infallible detective who makes brilliant deductions from the strangest of clues. Lord simply gathers information and evidence from which he tries to reconstruct the truth. More than once, those reconstructions collapse like a false-solutions when new facts emerge ("...his hardly won solution knocked clean from under him"). What should be noted Lord is assisted on several of those solution by ideas (i.e. pet theories) brought to him by the psychologists aboard. For example, Dr. Raquette believes Hodges fell prey to his own "death instinct," while Dr. Pons contributed a traditionally-styled false-solution with a method to sneak poison pass a medical examiner's attention under certain circumstances. So their psychological take on the case made for a distinctly different take on the false-solutions complimenting Lord's investigation and the overall story and plot.

Speaking of the plot, you always hope when finally getting your hands on one of these legendary, out-of-print mysteries, they have a plot to match their near mythical status – like a Death of Laurence Vinning (1928) or Death of Jezebel (1948). That's always a gamble. For example, Leo Bruce's once extremely rare Case with Four Clowns (1939) turned out to be the weakest entry in the Sgt. Beef series upon its re-release in 2010. Fortunately, Obelists en Route more than delivers when it comes to the plot. A small masterclass in simplistic complexity. There's an almost pleasant crudeness to the well-hidden, ultimately simple murder method employed on the banker and simply loved the explanation for the good, old-fashioned American shootout aboard. Something very nearly Lord's denouement with all the suspects gathered in one of the railway compartments. More importantly, King played fairly as can be attested by the inclusion of his patented "Clue Finder" at the end of the book. This comes in addition to half a dozen diagrams and a host of Van Dinean footnotes. So a real treat for Golden Age detective fans.

Only rough patch, or blotch, on this otherwise readable, engaging train-bound mystery are the economic lectures grinding it to a halt several times. No idea why they weren't edited out of the original edition, because they barely serve a purpose to the characters or plot. Well, outside of giving one of the characters a hint of a motive, but that could have been done without those lectures. So you can read pass or ignore them altogether without the risk of missing something essential to the story. That's really its only shortcoming. Not something to sour me on everything else it got right.

So wish I remembered more of the previous two "obelists" mysteries, because I don't recall them being as well written or coherently-plotted as Obelists en Route. Jim, of The Invisible Event, famously gave Obelists Fly High zero stars and vaguely remember Obelists at Sea being a pleasant, but slow-moving, shipboard whodunit. Nothing more than that. Obelists en Route is a a different story altogether. A first-class Golden Age railway mystery and had it been reprinted as a Dover Mystery Classic instead of Obelists Fly High, King likely would have been remembered very differently today. Highly recommended!

Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (2023) by Benjamin Stevenson

I recently read Benjamin Stevenson's genre debut, Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone (2022), which perfectly blended the contemporary, character-driven crime novel with the plot complexity and fair play principles of the Golden Age detective story – starring crime fiction expert Ernest Cunningham. A reliable narrator, if there ever was one! This time, the promise to "modernize" the great detective stories of yesteryear without brutally butchering them was fully delivered on to the point where the book read like a modern continuation of the Golden Age traditions. So far from the usual pale, unfunny and cliche-ridden imitations of the Agatha Christie-style country house mysteries of the past. But neither is it a cutesy, sugary sweet cozy, or cozy adjacent, mystery as the book title and cover might suggest. It's as much a modern crime novel as it's a classically-styled detective story. I was incredibly pleased.

I was so pleased with Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone, I ordered, received and read Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (2023) post-haste. And it's even better than the first one!

Ernest Cunningham is back from his disastrous, deadly family reunion at the Sky Lodge Mountain Retreat and has gone on to write a modestly successful book about his experience, but the experience left him with the lingering symptoms of survivor's guilt and impostor syndrome. He also signed a lucrative publishing contract to write a second, fictional book and took a large advance, but Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone was a firsthand account of his personal experiences – not complete fiction. Just a little. So without inspiration, Ernest accepts an invitation from the Australian Mystery Writers' Society to attend a crime writing festival aboard the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, the Ghan. A four day tour cutting through the Australian desert with panels, Q&As and sight seeing stops.

The guest of honor and "major drawcard" is the international bestselling author of the Detective Morbund series, Henry McTavish, who's famous creation "is as close to a modern-day Holmes or Poirot as they come" with a dedicated fandom – calling themselves "Morbund's Mongrels." Scottish phenomenon is not the only writer on the card. Alan Royce is a forensic mystery writer who has written eleven books in the Dr. Jane Black series, SF Majors writes psychological thrillers, Jane Fulton wrote a widely acclaimed legal thriller twenty years ago and has been working on the sequel ever since. Wolfgang is a representative of the Australian literary crowd, "shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize," who's only link to the crime genre is "his rhyming verse novel retelling of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood." He reminded me of the characters populating Arthur W. Upfield's An Author Bites the Dust (1948) and enjoyed his confrontation with Ernest during the first panel ("...all you did was copy Capote"). Ernest represents both the debuting and non-fiction categories, because his book is a true-crime memoir, but he brought along his girlfriend Juliette Henderson. The former owner of the Sky Lodge Mountain Retreat who had also written a book about the murders that took place there ("her book had sold better than mine"). Naturally, there are some ill-feelings, bruised egos and buried secrets to be shared among the authors eventually leading to a dramatic murder.

Sounds conventional enough, so far, but Ernest takes a hands-on approach to the job of a reliable narrator with a lot of foreshadowing, fourth wall breaking and a bit of teasing. That's why Ernest is "a bit chattier than your usual detective" to ensure no "obvious truths" are concealed from the reader. For example, Ernest tells the reader that he uses the killer's name ("in all its forms") 106 times and gives a tally throughout the story of the name count. And, of course, it not even remotely close to being that easy to find the well-hidden murderer! Stevenson clearly understands that the ability to gracefully lie through your teeth without saying an untrue word is an invaluable tool when it comes to writing and plotting detective stories. It not only makes for an incredibly fun, fairly clued meta-whodunit with a bit of comedy and self-parody, but an engaging cat-and-mouse between armchair detective/reader and narrator. I appreciated the early heads up ("if you're hoping for a locked-room mystery, this isn't it").

 

 

Just like the first book, Everyone on this Train is a Suspect might still strike some as somewhat cozy adjacent, when summarily described, but another thing this series does very well is striking a balance between the classical and modern schools of the genre – which include a few sordid elements you would never come across in a Golden Age mystery. However, it's not merely the more sordid criminal elements making this series a perfect blend of the traditional and modern style, but how the world of today is incorporated into this whodunit. Particularly the plot-thread concerning (SPOILER/ROT13) Jbystnat'f vagrenpgvir neg cebwrpg Gur Qrngu bs Yvgrengher naq ubj vg'f yvaxrq gb nabgure cybg-guernq to reveal something that could only happen in today's world.

I noted in the past how the argument that advancements in technology and forensic science during the second-half of the previous century made the traditional detective story, popular during its first-half, obsolete was demolished by Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1953/54) decades before it was put forward. It simply depends on who's doing the writing and plotting. Stevenson's Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone and Everyone on this Train is a Suspect are exactly what I imagined the Grandest Game in the World could have evolved into had it been allowed to co-exist alongside the post-WWII psychological thrillers, crime novels and police procedurals. So was even more pleased than with the first book in the series and only the potential of spoilers prevents me from raving rambling on about this richly-plotted gem of a retro-Golden Age mystery, but you probably get the idea by now.

So I don't know what's more appropriate to close out this shoddy review, we're so back or nature is healing? Either way, I'm slightly pissed the third in the series is titled Everyone this Christmas has a Secret (2024) and we're not even halfway through April! I guess Christmas is coming early this year as that one is going to be cleared off the list long before December rolls around.

The Black Swan Mystery (1960) by Tetsuya Ayukawa

I pontificated in "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century" on how today's translation wave started when Keigo Higashino's 2011 translation of Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005) became an unexpected, international bestseller opening the door to invite future translation – which the late John Pugmire accepted in 2015. Locked Room International published the first-ever English edition of Yukito Ayatsuji's epochal Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) opening the floodgates to even more translations. And attracting other publishers to the joys of the Japanese shin honkaku mysteries.

Funnily enough, neither The Decagon House Murders nor The Devotion of Suspect X can be labeled as a locked room mystery or impossible crime, but the translation wave has been dominated by locked room novels and impossible crime stories. So the past ten years have been something of a locked room renaissance and the translation wave infused the form with some much needed fresh blood, which helped to revitalize it and even lead to a revival.

However, the locked room mystery is not the end-all of detective fiction, you don't always get that impression from reading this blog, but the impossible crime story is merely my favorite hobby horse – a hobby horse I enjoy riding into oblivion. I love and welcome good, craftily-plotted detective stories in any shape or form and wanted to see what the Japanese detective story can do outside a locked room or field of untrodden snow. This is one of the reasons why I've been so intrigued by their hybrid mysteries, tracked down Seimaru Amagi's Dennō sansō satsujin jiken (Murder On-Line, 1996) and jumped at the opportunity to sample Jun Kurachi's Hoshifuri sansou no satsujin (Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars, 1996). So was not dismayed at all when it became apparent Pushkin Vertigo was going to diversify their output of honkaku and shin honkaku translations.

This year, they're going to publish Yasuhiko Nishizawa's time-looping, hybrid mystery Nanakai shinda otoko (The Man Who Died Seven Times, 1995), Taku Ashibe's classically-styled whodunit Oomarike satsujin jiken (Murders in the House of Omari, 2021) and two strange novels by horror Youtuber "Uketsu." I'm not sure about Seishi Yokomizo's Kuroneko tei jiken (The Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, 1947), but it appears to be a whodunit without any impossible crimes. Don't worry. I'll be getting my Japanese impossible crime fix through Ayatsuji's Tokeikan no satsujin (The Clock Mansion Murders, 1991), MORI Hiroshi's Warawanai sugakusha (Mathematical Goodbye, 1996) and the various anime-and manga detective series. This move began last November with their publication of Tetsuya Ayukawa's Kuroi hakuchou (The Black Swan Mystery, 1960), translated by Bryan Karetnyk, whom readers will remember from the short story collection The Red Locked Room (2020).

Ayukawa's The Black Swan Mystery is best summed as a police procedural in the tradition of Seicho Matsumoto's Ten to sen (Points and Lines, 1958), but with the heart, soul and plot of the traditional, fair play detective novel – particularly Christopher Bush and Freeman Wills Crofts. Yes, the story largely hinges on the question of alibis, complete with time tables and railway schedules, but it's much more than simply retracing people's movement and breaking down alibis. It's also an excellent and absorbing police procedural/whodunit.

The investigation at the heart of The Black Swan Mystery is an involved one starting with the murder of Gosuke Nishinohata, director of Towa Textiles, whose body was found next to railway tracks near Kuki Station with a bullet in his back. Detective Inspector Sudo and Constable Seki get to take a crack at the case first and they get a lucky break as Nishinohata's body had been thrown from an overpass and landed on a train passing under the Ryodaishi Bridge. So the blood on the bridge and roof of the train gives the police an exact time and place to check everyone's alibis ("my, my, that's awfully precise, Inspector"). There are, of course, enough complications to make this everything but a routine murder investigation. This is a detective story, after all.

Firstly, the owners of the Towa Textiles Company are at "loggerheads" with the trade union who presented them with "a four-point list of demands and called a strike." One of the four demands is freedom of religious expression, because Nishinohata was a follower of the Shaman, a new sect of Shintoism, who tried to push his religion on the workers and that didn't sit well – neither with the workers nor the the Shaman. The Shaman have stranglehold on their followers, figuratively and literally, which is why they're not happy Towa Textiles is willing to give in on that specific demand. It would mean losing thousands of members at once. They employ an ex-secret serviceman, Hanpei Chita, who's job is to dissuade people from leaving the Shaman and considered to be capable of everything ("...even of killing a man"). Secondly, Nishinohata was a known philanderer coming with the usual complications and his position as director gets entangled with the personal lives of the people at the company. His private secretary, Takeshi Haibara, wants to marry the beautiful daughter of one of the directors, Atsuko, but she's in a secret relationship with the vice-chairman of the trade union, Narumi.

So enough to keep Sudo and Seki pleasantly occupied with trying to entangle this complicated knot of relationships, potential motives and those pesky, rock solid alibis, but then more bodies begin to turn up along the way – all curiously connected to the first murder. Sudo and Seki eventually hit a dead end and the top brass decides to assign the case to Inspector Onitsura to give it a second look.

Inspector Onitsura previously appeared in several short stories from The Red Locked Room, translated by Ho-Ling Wong, who described him "Ellery Queen wearing the face of Inspector French" and his short stories/novels are generally regarded as early police procedurals. But they're crammed with original tricks and EQ-style chain of logic/deduction. Tetsuya Ayukawa certainly allowed Onitsura to live up to his reputation in The Black Swan Mystery. Onitsura is as logical and methodical as French, but neither is above making the occasional mistake or overlooking a small detail. Once they got hold of something, they follow it to its logical conclusion. Whether there's a murderer waiting at the end of that specific trail or not. There's something really comfy about following Onitsura on those leisure train rides pass the small stations along the less frequent traveled lines. Or, to quote the story itself, "writer of children's stories with a fantastical mindset might have imagined that the train were a tortoise and that he were riding on its back towards the Palace of the Dragon King" ("...the inspector himself was too much of a realist to have such fairy tales in his mind"). So the first and second-half of The Black Swan Mystery already form an excellent, slightly classically-styled, police procedural published during the rise of the social school in Japanese crime fiction. The story definitely has a strong flavoring of the social school with a strike going on in the background and addressing certain issues of post-war Japan, but the overall plot and uncluttered, clear solution possesses all the ingenuity of the Golden Age detective stories of the West.

A solution that naturally turn on the question of alibis and opportunity, but those alibis don't come into play until Onitsura has identified the murderer with roughly a quarter of the story left to go, only to be stonewalled by a pair of cast-iron alibis – "unassailable from every angle." But the "very perfection" of those alibis makes him only more determined to tear them down. And tearing them down, he does! The tricks behind the two alibis honestly are something you would expect from a honkaku mystery novel rather than a police procedural with obvious ties to the Seicho Matsumoto's social school of crime fiction. Bush, Crofts and Queen could have hardly done better! That fact is also depressing as hell. Even when Japan moved away from the traditional, plot-oriented detective novels of Seishi Yokomizo and Akimitsu Takagi to make way for the social school, they continued to produce first-class detective fiction. Sure, it was often disguised as historical fiction or police procedurals, but they were still there. When the West abandoned the traditional detective stories of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, the genre descended into a dark age.

So, to cut long story short, Tetsuya Ayukawa's The Black Swan Mystery comes heartily recommended as one of those rare mysteries that fans of the classic detective story and modern crime novel can enjoy, but the former have to keep in mind it's a little different from what most have come to expect from a Japanese detective novel. A little different, but just as good.

The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012) by E.X. Ferrars

"Elizabeth Ferrars" ("E.X. Ferrars") is the pseudonym of prolific, long-lived British mystery writer, Morna Brown, who wrote seventy-one detective novels and filled two short story collections over a period of half a century – between 1940 and 1995. I thought the last holdouts of the British Golden Age were Gladys Mitchell (The Crozier Pharaohs, 1984) and Michael Innes (Appleby and the Ospreys, 1986), but Ferrars still had enough gas in the tank to go another decade. In his blog-post “The Country Cottage Murders of Elizabeth Ferrars,” Curt Evans wrote that "had Ferrars not suddenly expired in 1995 at the age of 87, there's every reason to believe that she would have keep going with her writing, perhaps even into the 21st century" as "there's no sense of the steep mental slippage" marring the later works of so many of her contemporaries.

I only sampled a few of Ferrars' detective novels over the years, while Give a Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Death in Botanist's Bay (1941) and The March Hare Murders (1949) have not moved an inch towards the top of the big pile in years. Recently, the name Ferrars came back to my attention and decided to move her up the pile starting with her second short story collection.

The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012), published by Crippen & Landru and introduced by John Cooper, collects seventeen short-shorts and short stories. The first six short-shorts feature a retired private investigator, Jonas P. Jonas, who badgered the wife of his nephew, a professional writer, to put his past triumphs to paper – fitting considering their publication date. Cooper writes in his introduction the stories were published "during one week in 1958 from December 8 until December 13 in the London Evening Standard" ("...a pre-Christmas treat for the readers of this newspaper"). So a retired detective trying to get his memoirs written at the very tail-end of the late, late Golden Age is a great premise, but only the first two stories are noteworthy with the remaining four being little more than amusing anecdotes.

In "The Case of the Two Questions," Jonas tells the story of the time a woman came to him with two strange questions. Can a middle aged woman go out of room, grab a rifle, run a hundred yards to shoot a man and come back within five minutes "without puffing for breath or having a hair of her head disarranged"? And is it possible for "a car to be driven through a watersplash and back again, without its tires getting wet"? Ferrars spins a clever detective story out of these question covering less than a handful of pages and its short length is its only drawback. A slightly longer treatment of the plot-idea would have made for a first-rate howdunit bordering on an impossible crime.

The second story, "The Case of the Blue Bowl," is the short-short done to near perfection. Jonas recalls the first time he heard about how birds learned to poke through the tops of milk bottles left on doorsteps to get to the milky cream. This fact came to his attention while investigating the disappearance and subsequent murder of a village miser, Old Mrs. Toombs, who was supposed to have a small fortune sewn up in her mattress. Jonas shrewdly uses this knowledge in combination with the titular blue bowl left on the victim's doorstep to deliver her murderer to the hangman. A fine example of the detective short-short and even better as a miniature replication of the British village mysteries of the 1930s.

Not much can be said about the other four short-shorts as they're little more than thinly-plotted, mostly forgettable anecdotes. "The Case of the Auction Catalogue" finds Jonas aboard a train when a woman is found strangled in the end compartment and the first suspect is the passenger who hurriedly left the train at the previous stop, but Jonas demonstrates his innocence based on an auction catalogue the suspect left behind. "The Case of the Left Hand" has Jonas recall the time he had to go to a pub to identify a wanted criminal in disguise and only knows the suspect has a partially paralyzed left hand. Jonas helps an old woman in "Invitation to Murder – One the Party Line" who believes "she'd been listening to a murder being plotted on the telephone." The last story of this short-lived series, "A Lipstick Smear Points to the Killer," comes the closest to matching the first two stories and concerns an elderly man found dead sitting next to the fire with a cup of coffee on the arm of the chair – an inexplicable half-moon of lipstick on the rim. But in the end, too slight to match the first two stories.

So an enjoyable enough series of short-shorts and loved the premise of a retired detective trying to get his memoirs ("nostalgic memories of crime and criminals") committed to paper in 1958. I just wish all the stories were either as good as "The Case of the Blue Bowl" or came with a somewhat substantial plot like "The Case of the Two Questions" to make this series a little more than an amusing genre curio/footnote.

The other eleven mysteries in The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries are not classically-plotted detective stories, but darker, character-driven crime fiction of the modern school. So not every single story in this section is going to be to my taste, which you should keep in mind when I'm giving some of the stories a short shrift. I do like a good inverted mystery with a biting twist and this collection has a few of them.

The first of these stories is "Custody," originally published in A Suit of Diamonds (1990), which follows Ray Bagstock in tracking down his ex-wife and children to the small town of Dillingford. Ray is determined to take the children away from Lucille and move abroad, because she's a bad mother and a violent fight over this ended in a divorce with Lucille getting custody of their two children – which proves to be easier planned than executed. Particularly when becoming the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his landlady. And the care he took in covering his tracks in finding his ex-wife only makes him look even more suspicious. Surprisingly, the depressingly dark conclusion is more opportunistic than the carefully laid trap I expected, but somehow it worked. Even though it required the shocking incompetence of the police to get to there.

"The Trap" was published in the May, 1961, issue of My Home and is a throwback to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches." Miss Isobel Allen takes the position of an elderly, invalided woman, Mrs. Buckle, who lives remote cottage. Isobel was hired by Mrs. Buckle's sister, Jean Chantry, but she notices something is off as soon as she arrives and even gets an ominous warning, "if unkindness is all you encounter in this house, Miss Allen, you'll be lucky" ("you should prepare yourself for far worse things"). Things move on from there. All I can say about this story is that the ending doesn't feel like the cop-out it is and that's something of an accomplishment.

The next story, "Stop Thief," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 24 (1992) and concerns a married couple, Peter and Coralie Gates, who recently suffered a miscarriage and their lost has affected Coralie's mental health. She has begun to shoplift from the village stores and to Peter's absolute horror word is getting around the much more modern minded, sympathetic village community ("I don't want sympathy!"). I struggled to care about the story, characters or what appeared to pass for a plot, but, fair's fair, the ending pulled it together and delivered with a cruel twist.

"The Long Way Round," first published in Winter's Crimes 4 (1974), is exactly the type of inverted mystery I enjoy the most. A type of inverted mystery sometimes referred to as "A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard" stories in which a carefully laid crime or scheme falls apart based on a small, devilish detail – which the oblivious culprit overlooked. One of the best-known examples around these parts is William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" (1965) and John Sladek's "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National" (1968) deserves a nod. This story is an excellent take on the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Leo and Melanie are married antique dealers traveling to Cyprus to visit a troublesome relative, Uncle Ben, who undeservedly inherited a big sum from his sister without sharing a penny ("...he had merely said that at least he could now afford to take himself off their hands..."). Leo has a foolproof plan to rectify that mistake and inherit the money from his soon to be late uncle. Only for a very tiny, but very important, detail to upset his whole plan ("Oh, God, God!") with the setting being more than just story dressing. Maybe my favorite short story from this collection as a whole.

The next story, "Fly, Said the Spy," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 15 (1983) and is an odd, but compelling, mixture of espionage with domestic intrigue. A nuclear physicist working at a secret research institute has been spilling secret for the past ten years and getting paid for it, but now he has received a warning that the gig is up. So now he either has to bite down on a cyanide capsule or leave everything, including his wife, behind to start a new life under a new name provided by the people who paid him. Not exactly my thing, but not a bad story.

"Instrument of Justice," published in Winter's Crime 13 (1981), reads like a modern crime story, dark, grim and populated with flawed or unpleasant characters, but the story is cleverly-plotted full with unexpected twists and turns. The story begins with Frances Liley reading the obituary of Oliver Darnell, "a painter of very abstract pictures," who had been blackmailing Frances ("two thousand a year...") with salacious photographs, but relieve makes place for horror. She has to find the photographs before someone finds them and sets out to ensure an opportunity to search his studio. What should have been a relatively save, risk free undertaking becomes a complicated situation when a murder is put in her way. Cold, calculated manner ("she was not a nice person, she thought") in which she takes care of both the blackmail material and the murderer makes "Instrument of Justice" the standout story of this collection. A plot, no matter in what shape it's bend or twisted, can do wonder even for the darkest, grittiest of crime material.

The next two stories are not particularly interesting, nor memorable, short-shorts originally published in the Evening Standard. "Suicide" (1963) revolves around two questions: did the dead woman found in an old quarry take her own life or was she murdered and why would she or her killer leave on the car's headlights? "Look for Trouble" (1964) brings the police to a hair salon following a string of burglaries and a murder. Short, not bad and completely forgettable.

"Justice in My Own Hand," originally published in Winter's Crimes 20 (1988), reads like a patchwork of ideas and plot points from other stories in this collection without improving on any of them. So not much to say about this story, except that I didn't care about it. Fortunately, the last two stories end this collection on a high note.

"The Handbag," originally serialized in two-parts in July 2 and July 9, 1960, publication of The Star Weekly Magazine, is the exact opposite of the previous story. It reads like the Golden Age has recently passed away, but its presence (or spirit) is still lingering around the place. Dorothy Clare's father recently passed away when an old friend, Vivian Alford, appeared out of nowhere to take her away for a much deserved break from grieving, but their holiday destination turns out to be a small, grayish inn – somewhere in the bleak, rainy border country. Dorothy slowly begins to believe Vivian has an ulterior motive to drag her along to that place. A suspicion that becomes stronger when Vivian strong arms her into coming along on a sightseeing expedition of Harestone House ("it's hundreds of years old..."). A strange house tour conducted by the blind owner of the house, Mrs. Hunter, during which both Vivian and a priceless cup go missing. So what happened? A modern crime story with all the trappings of a classic country house mystery complete with slippery red herrings.

The collection closes out with a story that could have easily been rewritten as a slightly lengthier Jonas P. Jonas short story. "Sequence of Events," originally published in Winter's Crimes 9 (1977), brings the celebrated Evening Standard reporter Peter Hassall to the village of Newton St. Denis. Hassall is writing a series of articles on forgotten murders, but always ends up solving "the problems which, over the years, had baffled the police." This story reads like the first in a series tells of the first forgotten murder Bassall investigated. The murder of Dr. Joseph Armiger, a retired researcher, who several years ago was found beaten to death next to a letter box in the village and the main suspects were a gang of boys on motor-cycles ("...seen that evening driving wildly through the village"). But no case against them could be made. So, five years later, Bassall travels to the village to make inquiries, but found nothing new until speaking with a local mystery writer, Everard Crabbe. And he has a story to tell. Or, to use his own words, "all I'm telling you about is a sequence of events." A sequence of events centering on a neighborly feud Armiger and Albert Riddle over stolen coronations, vandalized gardens and threats. The ending presents the reader with two possible solution: a simple, sordid and uncomplicated explanation and a more complicated one echoing a very famous detective story. Needless to say, I prefer Crabbe's sequence-of-events interpretation of events, but, either way, a solid story to close out this collection.

So, all in all, The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries is a surprisingly good, nicely balanced selection of short stories considering how far most of the stories are outside of my wheelhouse, but, looking back over the review, I liked more of them than expected. Most of the short-shorts are flimsy and forgettable, except the first two featuring the titular detective, but only "Justice in My Own Hands" truly disappointed. And while I didn't care for the majority of the story, most of the time, I admired how Ferrars manage to turn me around right at the end ("Custody," "The Trap" and "Stop Thief"). More importantly, "The Long Way Round," "Instrument of Justice" and the last two stories are first-rate short crime-and detective stories which gave me something different to chew. A little different than what usually gets reviewed on this blog, but variation is the spice of life and this collection shows our genre has plenty of variety to offer.

I suppose the biggest takeaway from The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas is that Ferrars, who debuted in 1940, could just as easily turn her hands at modern crime fiction in all its gory, depressing grittiness as a good, old-fashioned whodunit. So I'll also bump Give a Corpse a Bad Name up a few places on the big pile.

Cold, Steely Logic: "A Problem in White" (1949) by Nicholas Blake

Cecil Day-Lewis was a former schoolteacher, full-time writer and British Poet Laureate, from 1968 until 1972, whose poetic pursuits and income were financed and supplemented by "Nicholas Blake" – a penname created to keep his literary career separate from his detective fiction. However, it was more or less an open secret that the poet Cecil Day-Lewis and the celebrated mystery novelist Nicholas Blake were one and the same person. Between 1935 and 1968, Blake wrote twenty detective novels of which sixteen featured his series-characters, Nigel Strangeways. I personally enjoyed the earlier, purer detective novels ("blend of steely logic and pure moonshine") like A Question of Proof (1935), Thou Shell of Death (1936), There's Trouble Brewing (1937) and the somewhat latish Head of a Traveller (1949), but Blake has never been discussed on this blog. So time to remedy that oversight beginning with one of his seasonal short detective stories.

"A Problem in White" originally appeared in the February, 1949, issue of The Strand Magazine under the title "The Snow Line" and reprinted as "A Study in White" in the May, 1949, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That title change was very likely the handiwork of Fredric Dannay and it stuck as it appeared under that title in numerous anthologies ranging from Anthony Boucher's The Quintessence of Queen (1962), Eleanor Sullivan's Fifty Years of the Best from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (1991) and Peter Haining's Great Irish Detective Stories (1993). It first appeared under its current title in Jack Adrian's Crime at Christmas: A Seasonal Box of Murderous Delights (1988) and most recently in Martin Edwards' Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries (2015). It seems this short story enjoyed most of its success in the United States and particular within the pages of the EQ magazine and assorted anthologies. And not wholly without reason.

Blake's "A Problem in White" is basically the type of "Problem in Deduction" short story that can be found in Queen's Q.B.I. (1955) and Q.E.D. (1968). A pure puzzle ending the story with a challenge to the reader, "who did the Inspector arrest for the murder," pointing out "Nicholas Blake placed eight clues to the killer's identity in the text," two major clues and six minor clues, covering the who, why and how – inviting the reader to go over the story or skip to the end of the book ("where all is revealed").

The story opens with six strangers, Henry Stansfield, Arthur J. Kilmington, Percy Dukes, Irving McDonald, Inez Blake and Mrs. Grant, sharing a railway compartment while traveling through a blizzard. While the snow swirling and growing outside, the passengers discuss a robbery that had taken place on that very train just a month ago. At the time, the train "was carrying some of the extra Christmas mail" and the "bags just disappeared, somewhere between Lancaster and Carlisle." Some of the passengers appear to know more about the robbery than they should or could know. But then the train is derailed and stranded in a snowdrift. Some of the passengers set off for the village, "whose lights twinkled like frost in the far distance," two miles to the north-east, but one of them is brutally murdered along the way ("...nostrils were caked thick with snow, which had frozen solid in them, and snow had been rammed tight into his mouth..."). The story ends with the police inspector entering to compartment "to make an arrest on the charge of wilful murder" followed by the Ellery Queen-style challenge to the reader. So it's up to the reader to put together the pieces, but is it a solvable puzzle? Absolutely!

"A Problem in White" is an unvarnished detective story. There are no narrative tricks or slippery red herrings to misdirect the genre savvy mystery reader. No obstacles and side-puzzles like locked rooms or cryptic dying messages. Just posing a simple, straightforward problem of a train robbery and subsequent murder with enough clues strewn throughout to work out the solution. You don't have to be a genre savvy mystery reader to do it. Everyone who can put two-and-two together can do it. Only thing muddling the clarity of the story is Blake referring to the characters by both their names and descriptions ("Expansive Man," "Deep Chap," "Forward Piece," "Comfortable Body," "The Flash Card" and "The Fusspot"), which made some of the characters blend together during the first few pages. Something that was not necessary for the story or plot, but other than that, a solid and recommendable piece of detective fiction. And comes particularly recommended to fans of Ellery Queen.

I might return to Nicholas Blake sometime this month. After all, two of his Nigel Strangeways novels take place around Christmastime during a white December.

Final Destination: "The Locked Roomette" (1990) by William Bankier

William Bankier was a Canadian mystery writer from Belleville, Ontario, who specialized in short fiction with over 200 short stories published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1962 to 2010 – chiefly focusing on standalone stories with two exceptions. Firstly, there's a pair of short stories, "The Big Bunco" (1974) and "Real Bullets This Time?" (1997), featuring the detective duo of Joe Huck and Stan Percival. Secondly, Bankier penned some twenty stories with Baytown, Canada, as a series-character. Having a city or small town as the central "character" with the inhabitants acting as an ensemble cast is a rarity in detective fiction, but not unheard of. Theodore Roscoe wrote a series for Argosy about all the criminal activity, big and small, in the town of Four Corners and Japanese mystery writer Tokuya Higashigawa did the same in his Ikagawa City series. I would certainly be interested in a Baytown collection or track down a couple of stories to sample and compare to Roscoe and Higashigawa. But that's for another time.

The story under examination today is one of Bankier's numerous standalones, "The Locked Roomette," which was published in the November, 1990, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. You can probably gather from the title how and why it turned up on my radar. "The Locked Roomette" is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and described the impossible crime as "death by poison in a locked roomette on a moving train." A train-bound locked room mystery? Punch my ticket, I'm on board! 

"The Locked Roomette" opens with Bernie Loyola, Dean Parish and Penni Dandridge, employees of the R&B Advertising Agency, climbing aboard the Montreal-Toronto train en route to meet with an important client. But there's trouble ahead. Parish, a copywriter, is known around the agency as a manic depressive and has a mood on the down turn, which means he has gone to his roomette with four bottles of booze – one of them already empty when the train departed. Loyola drops in on him to check and tell him he has been forgiven. Loyola and Parish write songs as a sideline and Parish gave award winning lyrics, "one that won the CBC contest," to someone else. So the stage is set for the following morning, when they find Parish's compartment door securely locked from the inside and him unresponsive to their knocking. When the door is opened, they find Parish's body lying on the floor next to a syringe, a dose bottle and suicide note ("It's gone gone on far too long. It's time for me to end it").

Detective Sergeant Peter Cleary arrives to take charge of the case and the premise suggests he has to figure out whom of Parish's two colleagues, Loyola or Dandridge, cunningly staged his suicide. Clearly is prepared to accept Parish "injected himself with something lethal" and dismiss the case as a simple suicide, but Dandridge has her doubts and turns amateur detective to prove it was murder. That suddenly changed "The Locked Roomette" into an inverted detective story with an how-did-he-do-it angle as there is only one person left who could have done it. As we learned earlier this year from E.G. Cousins' Death by Marriage (1959), these type of stories can stand or fall on how that how-did-he-do-it is handled. I'm glad to report Bankier's "The Locked Roomette" passed that test a lot better than Death by Marriage.

I feared the locked room-trick might turn out to be routine in nature, like Parish getting drugged first and injected after the door was unlocked, but the trick proved to be a new wrinkle on a very particular locked room technique belonging to the category of (ROT13) whqnf jvaqbjf, hathneqrq cnguf naq nyvpr-qbbef – which incidentally is also the only real smudge on the solution. The trick is incredibly difficult to hide or camouflage in short story format and think most seasoned locked room fans will immediately zoom in on a particular detail. A detail that could have been better hidden in a novel-length story as emphasizing the state of the body and method of death would certainly would help draw some suspicious away from that very small, but mightily suspicious, detail. Nevertheless, I liked it and liked how the planted suicide note worked as an unintentional dying message.

So "The Locked Roomette" is a very good, solidly-plotted detective story, but I would be amiss if I didn't pointed out that, while being a classically-styled locked room mystery, the story also had some decidedly modern touches to the characterization and storytelling. Most notably, Clearly's brief backstory explaining why he's not eager on hunches without hard evidence backing it ("you could be too intense about this crime-solving business") and a bitter twist at the end making what happened on the train more of a senseless drama than an old-fashioned murder mystery. The plot perhaps needed a larger canvas to do it fully justice, but regardless of the story-length, Bankier's "The Locked Roomette" is a fine example of the inverted locked room mystery and worth considering for any potential future locked room-themed anthologies.