Murder on the Orient Express (1934) by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) is arguably one of the most famous whodunits ever written, set aboard the Orient Express traveling from Istanbul to Calais, populated with a cast of characters as memorable as the assembly of gargoyles from Death on the Nile (1937) – topped with a rich, elaborate plot and grant solution. A truly iconic detective novel and a classic of its kind, but, during the internet era, the book seems to have been downgraded a little. Apparently, the story with its exaggerated characters, world famous setting and surprise ending is too gimmicked that does not stand-up to rereading. 

So I marked the book for rereading and revisiting Murder on the Orient Express was like rereading John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins (1934) all over again. Murder on the Orient Express is to the closed-circle whodunit what The Three Coffins is to the locked room mystery. The utterly bizarre and fantastically impossible done right! One of the characters remarked that "the whole thing is a fantasy." I agree. But it worked. There were few other mystery writers at the time, or even today, who could have pulled it off. Christie did it with flying colors! 

Murder on the Orient Express begins on a winter's morning in Aleppo, Syria, where Hercule Poirot has finished an unrecorded case that "saved the honour of the French Army" and is waiting to board the Taurus Express to Stamboul – intending to take a short holiday to see the city. A telegram is waiting for him at the hotel with an urgent plea to return to London and he books a sleeping car accommodation in the Stamboul-Calais coach of the Orient Express.

Normally, it's a slack period at that time of year and there are few people traveling with trains being almost empty, but it appears "all the world elects to travel tonight." Poirot finds an "extraordinary crowd" as his traveling companions as the Orient Express "on its three-days'' journey across Europe."

There's an unpleasant American businessman, Samuel Ratchett, who Poirot likened to a wild and savage animal in a respectable suit. Ratchett brought along his personal secretary and valet, Hector MacQueen and Edward Masterman. Mrs. Hubbard is an elderly, American lady and always complaining, raising an alarm or talking about her daughter and grandchildren. She has a presence, to put it kindly. Greta Ohlsson is a Swedish is a trained nurse and matron in a missionary school near Stamboul on holiday. Colonel Arbuthnot is the consummate soldier on leave and traveling from India to England, but he has own, secretive reason to come by overland route instead of the sea. Miss Mary Debenham is a British governess to two children in Baghdad and is returning to London on holiday. There are two American businessmen, Cyrus Hardman and Antonio Foscarelli, who are respectively a traveling salesman of typewriting ribbons and an agent for Ford motor cars. But there are also members of the old European aristocracy among the passengers. Count and Countess Andrenyi are a young diplomatic couple from Hungary. Princess Dragomiroff is remnant of a vanished world, "ugly as sin, but she makes herself felt," who's extremely rich with an iron-bound determination. She brought along her German lady's maid, Hildegarde Schmidt. Lastly there are M. Bouc, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, whose "acquaintance with the former star of the Belgian Police Force dated back many years." The attendant of the Istanbul Calais coach, Pierre Michel, who has been a loyal employee of the company for over fifteen years. Finally, a little Greek physician, Dr. Constantine, who provides Poirot with an important piece of medical evidence.

For three days these people, "of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages," are brought together under one roof only to go their separate ways at the end of the three-day journey – "never, perhaps, to see each other again." But this journey was never destined to go according to schedule.

Poirot overhears an intimate conversation between two apparent strangers and Ratchett tries to hire him to help protect his life, which has been threatened by an enemy. Poirot turns him down ("I do not like your face, M. Ratchett") and what follows is tumultuous night in the Istanbul-Callais coach. Sounds of cries and groans. Mrs. Hubbard making a big cry about a man in her compartment who couldn't have been there. A woman wrapped in a scarlet kimono stalking down the corridor and banging on doors. The conductor tending to the needs of the passenger as he moved from compartment to compartment to answer all the tingling bells.

On the following morning, everyone aboard awakes to the news that the train has run into a snowdrift and they're now stuck somewhere in Yugoslavia. What makes their position a particularly precarious is discovery that Ratchett was brutally stabbed to death in his berth. Evidence tells them nobody could have left since they ran into the snowdrift and the murderer is still with them on the train.

M. Bouc implores Poirot to solve the case before the Yugoslavian police can have their way with his highly esteemed customers and reminds Poirot he has often heard him say "to solve a case a man has only to lie back in his chair and think." So he wants him to "interview the passengers on the train, view the body, examine what clues there are" and then let "the little grey cells of the mind" do their work. Murder on the Orient Express certainly presents one of Poirot's most fascinating investigations on record as they have "none of the facilities afforded to the police" and "have to rely solely on deduction."

Firstly, Poirot takes a page from R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke by using an old-fashioned hatbox, spirit lamp and a pair of curling tongs to make words reappear on a charred fragment of paper – which he found on the victim's bedside table. The words Poirot briefly made legible told him who Ratchett really was and this knowledge places an entirely different complexion on the case and passengers. So the middle section of the story comprises of a series of interviews, but this portion can hardly be described as "Dragging the Marsh." On the contrary! It's an example how to write a series of interrogations without dragging the story to a snail's pace like a weighted rope was tied to it. Poirot acts as both a detective and armchair general as he varies how he approaches each potential suspect. Poirot's methods with one passenger could be a complete contrast to his handling of another passenger. Methodically, the little Belgian detective gathers all the crumbs his fellow passengers left on the table during these interviews and subsequent investigation, but that would understate just how brashly clued Murder on the Orient Express really is.

Christie recklessly alluded to the truth almost from the start and never stopped. If you already know the solution, you almost want to tell her to stop in giving the whole game away. But that's what separates the true masters from the second-stringer who too often guard a second-rate clue from the reader. However, Christie not only was overly generous with her clues and hints, but she openly casts aspersion on the red herrings she planted herself! Poirot notes that the victim's compartment is "full of clues," but wonders whether he can "be sure that those clues are really what they seem to be." Christie even had a physical manifestation of the red herring prancing around the train. All these clues and red herrings form a delightful and contradictory picture with the "affair advances in a very strange manner."

There's also the ghosts of the locked room mystery and impossible crime stalking the compartments and corridors of the Orients Express. The door of Ratchett's compartment was chain-locked on the inside and the communicating door bolted on the other side in addition to two people who were seen on the train, but they cannot be found anywhere. However, these are quasi-impossibilities instead of a full-blown locked room mysteries, which is why I didn't tag this review as a locked room mystery. But it was a nice touch to the story. 

Murder on the Orient Express cements its status as a classic with a beautifully handled ending as Poirot gathers everyone in the dining car to propound two solutions to the murder. One of them is simple and full of holes, while the second solution is complicated, grotesquely fantastic, highly original and strangely convincing. A resolution that will have some readers check their moral compass to see if its broken. Sure, the passage of time has dulled the surprise and originality of the solution a little, but shouldn't detract from an overall first-class performance demonstrating why she rivaled the Bible and William Shakespeare. Deservedly so! 

Notes for the curious: the character of Dr. Constantine was very likely a nod to Molly Thynne's series-detective, Dr. Constantine, who's a Greek doctor and amateur detective. Why a nod or acknowledgment to that obscure detective? The second of Thynne's Dr. Constantine detective novels, Death in the Dentist's Chair (1933), shares a rather unique, language-based clue with Murder on the Orient Express. I wonder if Christie intended her Dr. Constantine to be same as Thynne's Dr. Constantine considering his role in the story. There's another possible crossover, one of the characters seems to have had a previous appearance in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), which is never acknowledged, but it would make sense if they were one and the same person – since (ROT13) gur Oyhr Genva pnfr pbhyq unir tvira gur pbafcvengbef gur vqrn gb hfr gur Bevrag Rkcerff. Finally, I reviewed Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 78 back in August and the headline story, “Mystery Express,” is an ingenious and warm homage to Murder on the Orient Express.

The Logic of Lunacy: Ronald A. Knox's "The Motive" (1937) and Isaac Asimov's "The Obvious Factor" (1973)

It seems that today Father Ronald A. Knox is mostly remembered as someone who helped shape the genre, codifying "The Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction" (1929) and becoming "a pioneer of Sherlockian criticism," whose only well-known piece of detective fiction is a short story, "Solved by Inspection" (1931) – collected in The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (1990). This does Knox a great disservice as a not untalented mystery writer in his own right. The Three Taps (1927) can testify to this. A sparkling novel full with rivaling detectives, false-solutions and clues that possibly had a bigger hand in shaping the British detective story of the 1930s than it has received credit for over the decades. 

So I wanted to return to Knox's detective fiction before too long, but, before delving into his novel-length mysteries, I wanted to tale a look at his second, practically forgotten, short story. A satirical story-within-a-story published at the height of the genre's Golden Age. 

"The Motive" first appeared in The Illustrated London News, November 17, 1937, which was subsequently reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, MacKill's Mystery Magazine and The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018). Story begins in the Senior Common Room, or the smoking-room, of Simon Magus college where a "boorishly argumentative" drama critic, Penkridge, contrived to put Sir Leonard Huntercombe on his own defense. Sir Leonard is a defense lawyer and "probably responsible for more scoundrels being at large than any other man in England," which he considers to be "a kind of artistic gift" as you need to be imaginative "to throw yourself into the business of picturing the story happening as you want it to have happened" – always figuring a completely innocent client. So he tells them the story of a former client by the name of Westmacott.

Westmacott is a middle aged, restless and unhealthy looking man who retired early with more money than he knew what to do with and surprised his friends when he decides to spend Christmas holiday at "one of those filthy great luxury hotels in Cornwall." A place that attracts a modern, cosmopolitan and rather Bohemian crowd. Such as a modern novelist with a penchant for scandal, Smith, whose work "looked as if it was meant to be seized by the police." So not exactly the kind of holiday destination you expect someone to pick who's "well known to be old-fashioned in his views and conservative in his opinions." There's certainly something out-of-character about what happens next.

During the Christmas celebration, Westmacott suggests to play blind man's buff in the hotel swimming pool, but Smith and Westmacott eventually stayed behind to settle an argument with "a practical try-out and a bet." Westmacott argued that you couldn't know what direction you were swimming in when you were blindfolded, while Smith bragged it was perfectly easy. Smith is blindfolded and has "to swim ten lengths in the bath each way, touching the ends every time, but never touching the sides." So, when Smith did his ten lengths, he tried to touch the handrail, but it wasn't there! The whole place was dark and he pretty quickly figures out a lot of water had been let out of the pool, which effectively trapped and left him to drown when he got too exhausted to swim. A very observant night watchman saved him from potentially drowning over night. This naturally landed Westmacott in some hot water, but the lack of motive, the difficulty of proving he had tampered with the water supply and a handsome compensation ensured the case was hushed up. Sir Leonard had not seen the last of his curious client.

Less than a week later, "a seedy-looking fellow calling himself Robinson" became a regular visitor of Westmacott's home, always wearing dark spectacles, who evidently "got a hold of some kind over Westmacott" that frightened the wits out of him – arming himself with a revolver and even poison. Robinson even accompanies Westmacott on a train trip to his friends to celebrate the New Year, but Robinson mysteriously disappears from his (locked) sleeper compartment with the only entrance being the communicating door in Westmacott's compartment. Yes, this is kind of a locked room mystery. Sir Leonard has to defend Westmacott on an actual murder charge this time and he both confesses and denies to have murdered Robinson, but his motivation and behavior remain murky and incomprehensible. This is where the story becomes a minor gem!

You can easily poke through the locked room-trick in the sleeper compartment, but leaves you with an even bigger question of Chestertonian proportions! Why? Why in the hell would anyone do something like that? It makes no sense whatsoever. Sir Leonard explains "the logic of lunacy," which sounded perfectly logical, behind these two lunatic schemes. Only to pull the rug underneath the reader's feet with a very brazen, final twist. A twist that was beautifully clued and foreshadowed. I'm just left with one question: why, in God's name, did I neglect Knox for all these years?

I originally intended to only review Knox's "The Motive," but its final twist reminded me of another detective story, written more than thirty years later, which tried to do something very similar. So decided to pull my copy of Isaac Asimov's The Return of the Black Widowers (2003) from the shelf to reread that somewhat controversial impossible crime story. 

"The Obvious Factor" was originally published in the May, 1973, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and first collected in Tales of the Black Widowers (1974). Story is the sixth recorded meeting of an exclusive, men-only dinning club, the Black Widowers, who meet once a month in a private dinner room of an Italian restaurant in New York – discussing various subjects, solving puzzles and grilling the guest. Each month, one of the members brings along a guest who's always pestered with the same question, "how do you justify your existence?" However, this question always reveals that the guest has a problem or puzzle to solve, but it's always their personal waiter and honorary Black Widower, Henry, who comes up with the solution. Henry is the only armchair detective in fiction who never sits down as he works out a problem.

Thomas Trumbull is the host of "The Obvious Factor" and his guest of the evening is Dr. Voss Eldridge, Associate Professor of Abnormal Psychology, which turns the conversation from pulp magazines and Roger Halsted writing "a limerick for every book of the Iliad" to parapsychological phenomena. Dr. Eldridge tries to shine a light on telepathy, precognition and even ghosts. Not a month goes by without something crossing his desk that he can't explain, but the club of rationalists are naturally more than a little skeptical. Dr. Eldridge decides to tell them "a story that defies the principle of cause and effect" and thereby "the concept of the irreversible forward flow of time," which is "the very foundation stone on which all science is built."

Dr. Eldridge tells of young woman, Mary, who never finished school and worked behind the counter of a department store, but despite her odd, anti-social behavior, she kept her job. Mary has an uncanny knack to spot shoplifters and "losses quickly dropped to virtually nothing in that particular five-and-ten" despite being in a bad neighborhood. She eventually came to the attention of Dr. Eldridge and discovers "the background of her mind is a constant flickering of frightful images," occasionally lit up "as though by a momentary lightening flash," allowing her to see near future. During one particular session, Mary had a particular eerie premonition as she began to scream about a fire. And the details match a deadly house fire in San Francisco. Even more eerie, "the fire broke out at just about the minute Mary's fit died down" in New York.

Dr. Eldridge tells the Black Widowers that "a few minutes is as good as a century" as "cause and effect is violated and the flow of time is reversed," but the Black Widowers refuse to accept precognition as an answer. So they try to poke holes in the story, but every reasonable, logical answer is eliminated and the club members find themselves backed into a corner. If it wasn't precognition, what was it? Henry quickly comes to their rescue and explains what really happened as effortlessly as flashing a smile. The most obvious solution of all!

If I remember the comments on the old, now defunct Yahoo GAD list correctly, not everyone was particular charmed, or amused, with Asimov's solution/twist. I found it amusing enough to go along with it, however, there's an important and notable difference in quality between Asimov and Knox's stories. Knox's "The Motive" can still stand on its own, as a detective story, without that last, delicious twist, but Asimov's "The Obvious Factor" slyly used a very similar twist for somewhat of a cop out ending – which can strike some as lazy plotting or just plain unfair. But decide for yourself.

So, all in all, I very much enjoyed "The Motive," a glittering specimen of the short British detective story, which toyed with the same idea as "The Obvious Factor," but they came away being vastly different detective stories. It was a pretty good idea to read them back-to-back.

The Crimes in Cabin B: Case Closed, vol. 78 by Gosho Aoyama

The 78th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published as Detective Conan, which has the longest story since vol. 58 that was setup in the previous volume and covers seven chapters with the second, three-chapter story acting as its aftermath – while the last chapter sets the stage for the return of Kaitou KID. A return alluded to in the opening chapter as KID's long-time nemesis, Jirokichi Sebastian, announced he was planning to use the Mystery Train to exhibit "one of his rare gems." Somewhat of a baited trap, as usually, but more on that in a moment. 

The Bell Tree Express is the "Mystery Train," owned by the Sebastian Conglomerate, which hosts an annual murder mystery game with "no stops until the final destination." A "murderer" and "victim" are chosen at random from from among the guests with the other passengers playing detective and "try to solve the mystery before the train reaches the station."

Anita presented Conan with a Mystery Train Pass Ring in the previous volume to lay the groundwork for a truly special kind of detective story. A story that succeeded in being both a classically-plotted, baroque-style mystery with no less than two impossibilities and a character-driven thriller with a galore of recurring characters and some major plot developments.

Firstly, the murder mystery game begins early when Conan and the Junior Detective League receive a note telling them they've been selected as the detectives and to follow instructions, namely visiting "Cabin B of Carriage 7 in ten minutes," where they witness a shooting – turning the murder mystery into "a game of tag" with the fleeing assassin. But when they meet one of the conductors, he tells them the mystery game is scheduled to begin in about an hour. So they rush back to Cabin B, which is when they make a startling discovery. Carriage 7 has "disappeared from a moving train" along with the victim in Cabin B!

Conan only needs a handful of pages to solve the impossibility of the vanishing train carriage, but the reappearance of Cabin B presents him with another miraculous murder. This time, the victim is actually dead with a very real bullet in his head, but the cabin door was "chained shut" from the inside and the conductor in the corridor "didn't see anyone enter or leave the cabin." A seemingly impossible murder in Cabin B begs to be compared to John Dickson Carr, but the story is unmistakably a clever and warm tribute to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934). There are many nods and winks to the story and Aoyama very effectively recreated a well-known scene for his own ends. Most amusing of all is Richard Moore badly imitating Hercule Poirot throughout the story and he barely broke character.

However, the story is not merely a lighthearted sendup of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express as the plot is quit good. The locked room-trick is a clever combination of simple trickery and elaborate misdirection strengthened by some good clues like the defective light above one of the cabin doors.

So the puzzle-side of the story is absolutely solid and a first-class specimen of the railway mystery, but there's a darker, parallel story taking place in the background involving a ton of recurring characters and agents of the Black Organization.

Black Organization received intelligence Anita, or "Sherry," is traveling on the Bell Tree Express, "a steel cell on wheels," which means the hunt is on and they intend to "flush her out like a deer" – catching a bullet as she leaps out. The opening pages revealed "Bourbon" is tasked with hunting down and eliminating Anita, but his, or her, identity has never been revealed. And, as to be expected, more than one familiar face has boarded the train who can all be the mysterious Bourbon. What follows is dangerous and explosive battle-of-wits crossed with a game of hide-and-seek, while Conan is busy investigating the impossible murder in Cabin B. A very well-done and handled piece of storytelling that not only added an extra dimension to the regular murder investigation, but furthered the ongoing story-arc and revealed the identity of Bourbon. My sole complaint is the surprise cameo, which pretty much was put to use as a deus ex machina. They were so lucky [REDACTED] decided to put in an appearance.

The second story is a strange and mixed bag of tricks, but not for the reasons you might think, because it's mostly a pretty decent detective story. The problem is that the various components don't "gel" together all that well.

A story best described as the aftermath of the previous case and "the Mystery Train was such a disaster" that "the Sebastian family decided to make up for it" and invited Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan to their villa in Izu – apparently famous for its tennis court. When they arrive, they find a group of college tennis players who use the court to practice and one of them gives Conan a light concussion with a flying tennis racket ("mada mada dane"). Bourbon is also there under the identity he was introduced to the reader. Conan is the only one who knows it. This seriously hampers his investigation when he wakes up in his room with a body blocking the inside the door, which places him smack in the middle of another locked room murder.

I liked the premise of Conan waking up in a locked room with a murder victim and the solution to the locked room found a new and original way to use an age-old trick. Something that has often been used for a very different type of impossible crime, but the premise and locked room-trick should have been two separate stories. I think it's a waste to not have used the premise for a story in which Conan is the only suspect. You can even have a never-before encountered police inspector who learns Conan has been involved in a ton of murder cases and begins to suspect he's a homicidal child. I don't think it helped the murderer stood out like sore thumb or that the plot played second fiddle to Bourbon looking over Conan's shoulder.

The last chapter sets the stage for another Kaitou KID heist, which was alluded to in the opening chapter, but Jirokichi Sebastian had to move the exhibit in the wake of the Mystery Train disaster. But the challenge to the master thief stands. KID already promised to steal the Blushing Mermaid on the opening night of the exhibition. Something that's easier said than done, because the pendant with a red diamond is stuck to the back of a turtle, named Poseidon, who swims in a large, bulletproof aquarium surrounded by twenty guards – which is as good as burglarproof. KID lives up to his reputation and stages a grand magic trick that makes both the turtle and pendant vanish from the aquarium. And leaves behind a note saying "the shy mermaid has dissolved into foam in my hand." This story will continue in the next volume.

So, on a whole, a pretty strong and interesting volume, but with all of its strength and interest lying in the Mystery Train story. The second story was not bad, but uneven and can't judge the Kaitou KID story until I've read vol. 79. A volume containing another promising-sounding, half-a-dozen chapters spanning impossible crime story involving vampire lore. More than enough to look forward to!

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) by Bill Pronzini

Last year, I posted a short story review under the title "The Nameless Detective: "The Hills of Homicide" (1949) by Louis L'Amour," which is best described as a western-flavored, hardboiled locked room mystery solved by a Los Angeles private eye – whose name is never revealed. So labeled the story as a curious ancestor of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" series, but recently stumbled across a much more fascinating link with Pronzini's historical private eye novels. I'm not talking about the handful of Carpenter and Quincannon short stories that originally appeared in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine during the mid-1990s. 

"The Hills of Homicide" mentioned in passing miners, or high-graders, smuggling gold ore out of a mine under seemingly impossible circumstances, but it was an anecdote without an answer. I closed out the review with my own solution to the problem of the pilfering miners. Not a bad solution, if I say so myself. However, I was less pleased with past Tom's cleverness when coming across an identical impossible situation in one of the latest Carpenter and Quincannon novels. Did I inadvertently spoil a locked room mystery by coming up with the best possible explanation for a rather one-of-a-kind locked room problem? Only one way to find out! 

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) is the eight, of currently nine, novels about John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, Professional Detective Services, who operate in 1890s San Francisco when the glory days of the Old West began to wane and fade – as a new century dawned. A time when the line between the American frontier and the settled states blurred and motorcars, or horseless carriages, began to replace "horse-drawn conveyances as the primary method of transportation." One of the constants in this ever-changing world is the always adaptable criminal.

John Quincannon is summoned by one of the city's wealthiest businessmen, Everett Hoxley, to his social club to discuss a particular vexing and costly problem.

Hoxley is the head of a large mining corporation that "owned several gold and silver mines in northern California and Nevada," but the production of high-quality ore in the Monarch Mine has dropped noticeably and there have been rumors of high-grading. So he wants Quincannon to go undercover as a newly hired timberman to "identify the individuals responsible for an insidious high-grading operation" and "to put a satisfactory end to their activities," which comes with a generous fee, expensive and a possible bonus. Only obstacle is that it's likely a four-week assignment and his marriage to Sabina Carpenter is planned three weeks from then. But that's the life of a detective.

Quincannon arrives in the small mining settlement of Patch Creek, northeast of Marysville, under the alias J.F. Quinn where's confronted with multiple, quasi-impossible crimes and a full-blown "locked room" murder – twelve-hundred feet underground! Firstly, he not only has to identify the gang of high-graders, but figure out how they were refining gold-bearing ore to produce pure gold dust in "a mine operating with mostly full crews twenty-four hours a day." Secondly, the method used to smuggle the gold out of the mine. Thirdly, he has to do all that while doing eight-hour of backbreaking, mining labor in "the dangerous bowels of the earth." A place where cave-ins, premature detonations, rock gas and runaway cages or tramcars were greater threats to his health than "the actions of a gang of gold thieves." Quincannon believes there's "no better detective in the Western states" and gets some quick results, but, having stumbled across an important piece of evidence, he is knocked out in a abandoned, dead-end crosscut. He's awakened by the sound of a pistol shot and is found next to a dead body. There's only one way in and out of crosscut, which was in sight of several miners when the shot sounded. Nobody else entered or left the crosscut. So "as pretty a frame as ever had been set around an innocent man."

The passages of the story that takes place in the mine are the best part of the book, but the solutions to the various problems vary enormously in quality. The locked room-trick used for the shooting is good and simple, which nicely fitted both the underground conditions and the circumstances in that crosscut. Indubitably, the best plot-strand of the Monarch Mine case. Quincannon more or less stumbles across the refining process, but a clever little criminal operation nonetheless. Regrettably, the method used to the smuggle out the gold was a huge letdown, because I expected something a little more ingenious rather than a gross oversight on the part of the shift inspectors. But they remain the best and most memorable parts of the whole book.

So, while Quincannon is playing the Sherlock Holmes of Agartha in the Earth's crust, Sabina is holding down the fort, but the detective business experiences one of its slack periods and only has two minor cases on her hands.

Firstly, Sabina is doing a background check on an unsavory character who turned up in Quincannon's case and how to get that information to him, because Patch Creek didn't have a Western Union office. Secondly, she unofficially and unethically ended "the criminal careers of a confidence man and an embezzler" without a paying client or earning "so much as one thin dime," which is a cardinal sin – to "John's way of thinking." They meet up again in the last quarter to hunt down the last high-grader as the story becomes a charming, well written period railway mystery with an impossible disappearance as their quarry vanishes from a moving train without a trace.

One thing to remember is that the novels in this series are rewrites and expansions of the short Carpenter and Quincannon stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Louis L'Amour Western Magazine from 1994 to 2018. The Stolen Gold Affair is an expansion of "The Desert Limited" (LLWM, Nov. 1995) and "The Gold Stealers" (EQMM, Sep/Oct. 2014), but had previously only read "The Desert Limited" in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Servives (1998) and hoped the solution would be better in a novel-length treatment. There are some clever touches to it (how Sabina solved it and why Quincannon missed it), but not everything holds up. I thought (ROT13) Zbetna hfvat “fbzr fbeg bs ehfr gb trg gur onttntr znfgre gb bcra hc” was a cop-out answer and too easily glossed over. That was suppose to be a legitimate obstacle in closed, moving locked room and presenting it as "an educated guest" doesn't make it any less unfair.

That being said, my opinion of the short story at the time is that the whole trick and setting would probably work better in a visual medium, which is also true for its expanded version in The Stolen Gold Affair. I believe this series, particular its novel-length treatments, would make perfect source material for a television series as it has everything on the ready. A beautiful, striking period backdrop during a time of great change with two great, memorable lead-characters who came with their own personal, and intertwined, storylines – culminating in their marriage. There's also the ongoing storyline with the crackpot Sherlock that ran through multiple novels (beginning with The Bughouse Affair, 2013) and ready-made plots that are neither overly complicated or insultingly simplistic. Some of the impossibilities from this series would translate beautifully to the small screen like the ghostly apparitions in The Spook Lights Affair (2013). Not to mention Pronzini and Marcia Muller's time-crossing crossover, Beyond the Grave (1986), can be adapted to give such a TV-series a strong and memorable ending.

So, on a whole, I did enjoy my time with The Stolen Gold Affair with the chapters that take place underground and the impossible shooting in the crosscut standing out, but the problem is that they were noticeably better done than the other plot-strands. So it's the Monarch Mine case that's the main attraction of The Stolen Gold Affair and comes particular recommended to locked room readers as there are not that many impossible crime stories that use the woefully underutilized mine setting. Pronzini demonstrated what you can do with a deeply buried, rock-solid locked room situation. Just one question remains... did that throwaway anecdote from "The Hills of Homicide" gave Pronzini the idea for the "The Gold Stealers" or was it Clyde B. Clason's Blind Drifts (1937)? An impossible crime novel with a mine setting Pronzini fanboyed all over it.

The Heel of Achilles (1950) by E. and M.A. Radford

I can't remember where I read this, or who said it, but someone once posited that if the dead who had been murdered and buried as tragic victims of accidents, suicides or simply natural causes would rise from their graves to hold a candle – every cemetery in the world would be brightly lit. Whoever said it, the mystery writing husband-and-wife team of Edwin and Mona Radford would have disagreed with him.

The Heel of Achilles (1950) is the eight case of Dr. Harry Manson and, unlike the previous novels in the series, the book is an inverted detective story in the mold of R. Austin Freeman. In their foreword, the Radfords wrote that they hoped the story may act as "a warning to those people who may think that they can commit a crime" and "get away with it." Because they can't. The Heel of Achilles is a demonstration why the logical, scientifically educated detective invariably gets his man.

The Heel of Achilles takes the classical approach to the inverted mystery with the first part telling the story of the murderer and his victim-to-be, showing every detail of "a cast-iron plot of murder" that "nothing could detect as being other than an accident," while the second part unmercifully lays bare all the mistakes the murderer made along the way – ending the story on a somewhat depressing note. So the book is really two novellas in one that can actually be read as two separate, standalone tales of crime and detection.

In the first part, entitled "Story of a Murder," the reader is introduced to Jack Edwins, a humble garage mechanic, who became the unwitting accomplish in a scheme hatched by a petty crook and racehorse gambler, James Sprogson. A simple burglary to quickly snatch "thousands of pounds' worth of stuff," but a police whistle interrupted them and Edwins was left standing with his pockets stuffed with jewelry! Sprogson was the only one who shot from the house into the waiting hands of the policemen and this meant Edwins had an opportunity to silently make his exit, which he did without being weigh down by the fortune spilling from his pockets. A fortune he used to change his name, marry the love of his life and a buy his own service station, but put some of his hard earned money aside to anonymously repay the owner of the stolen goods.

Sprogson, on the other hand, was sentenced to three years penal servitude and, when he was released, Edwins had vanished from the face of the earth and Jack Porter, of the Green Service Station, had taken his place. Only a fluke brought Sprogson, now James Canley, back to Porter. What he wants is his cut of the money and then some. So he decided to kill Canley in order to keep what he had built for the woman he loved so much.

Porter is "an omnivorous reader of detective stories" and "modelled his plan on the mistakes made by the lawbreakers in the novels he had read," which gave him the idea to stage an accidental death and meticulously goes to work – presenting the local police with a decapitated corpse lying on the track of a railway line. The local authorities are willing to accept that it was nothing more than an unfortunate railway accident, but the railway doctor insisted on calling in Scotland Yard. Enter Dr. Harry Manson.

As an aside, if The Heel of Achilles had been a regular detective story, the murder would have come very close to being an impossible crime, with a single track of footprints leading from the victim's cottage to the tracks, had it not been for "the long grass verge that edged the track."

The second part of the story, "Cherchez L'Homme," brings Dr. Manson to the scene of the crime and laboriously begins to poke holes in, what seemed to be, a relatively watertight scheme. Dr. Manson patiently explains every step of his investigation and reasoning, but, to do this properly, the local police officers had to be little denser than usual ("very trustworthy, you know, but no thinker").

However, the payoff is that you get to see a painstaking destruction of a carefully laid plan with apparently nothing linking the victim with his killer. A beautiful combination logical reasoning and forensic detective work. On top of that, Dr. Manson tells the story of two locked room murders, over the course of his investigation, as a basic exercises in logic and gives the story of Maria Lee, a.k.a. Black Maria, as the origin of the police van's name – a claim that has since been disputed by the internet. Still, it was a fun little story and coming across these shreds of arcane history and knowledge is always a bonus you get from these vintage detective novels.

Slowly, but surely, Dr. Manson proves the accident was murder and treads closer to the murderer with every passing chapter, which made realize that a truly scientific mystery novel is playing the detective story in god mode. Where the more intuitive or workman-like sleuths have to interpret nebulous clues or pick apart alibis, the scientific investigator can pick up the trail of nameless, faceless killer by studying cigar ash, dust and small fibers. It's almost unfair to the hardworking, sympathetic murderer and even Dr. Manson says at the end of the story that he never "concluded a case with less satisfaction." An ending painfully showing that justice and restoration of order isn't always what it's made out to be.

The Heel of Achilles is a well written and carefully plotted inverted detective novel with the first half focusing on the personal side of the murder and the second half presenting the impersonal examination of the crime, in which Dr. Manson demonstrates that every contact leaves a trace – wringing the truth from the physical evidence the murderer so cleverly tried to alter or destroy. More importantly, the hardest thing to do with an inverted mystery is to keep the reader interested when they already know all of the answers. I believe the Radfords succeeded here by making it a challenge to the reader, of sorts, by serving their readers with a seemingly airtight murder plot and than pointing out the holes. So easily one of the most meticulously plotted inverted detective stories, right up there with John Russell Fearn's Pattern of Murder (2006), and comes highly recommended!

Death of a Frightened Editor (1959) by E. and M.A. Radford

Earlier this month, Dean Street Press revived three obscure, long out-of-print novels by a forgotten mystery writing couple, Edwin and Mona A. Radford, who collaborated on thirty-eight forensic, puzzle-driven detective novels that were originally published between 1944 and 1972 – most of them starring their series-detective, Dr. Harry Manson. A detective with the unique dual role of being "in charge of the Crime Laboratory at Scotland Yard" as "the chief of the Homicide Squad."

Back in February, in anticipation of these releases, I reviewed the Radford's nostalgic adieu to the detective story's Golden Age, Death and the Professor (1961). A standalone detective novel presented as a collection of short (locked room) stories, but the nostalgia came at the expense of the ingenuity and originality that can be found in their Dr. Manson novels (e.g. Who Killed Dick Whittington?, 1947). So my next stop was going to be, unsurprisingly, the reprint of one of the Radford's impossible crime novels, Death of a Frightened Editor (1959). I was not disappointed.

Death of a Frightened Editor is the eleventh entry in the Dr. Harry Manson series and revolves around an inexplicable poisoning aboard the first-class Pullman coach of the 5.20 Victoria to Brighton train.

Over a stretch of six months, a group of seven men and one woman traveled together in the same coach, occupying the same seats, five nights a week and the Pullman had slowly become "a traveling club" – where "conversation was mutual" and "drinks were stood round by round." A mixed company made up of a dreary general manager of an insurance office, Marriott Edgar. A wealthy and ponderous stockbroker, William Phillips. A charity worker and a prominent executive of the Unmarried Mothers' Association, Mrs. Freda Harrison. A manager of the share-buying department of a great bank, Alfred Starmer. A well-known crime reporter for a London morning paper, Edwin Crispin (no relation of Edmund Crispin). An eminent Harley Street surgeon, Thomas Betterton, and a jolly Cockney bookmaker, Honest Sam Mackie. The group is rounded out by the soon-to-be-dead Alexis Mortensen.

Mortensen is the editor and owner of Society, "a scurrilous rag-bag of gossip and pictures," whose extremely rigid body is found inside the locked lavatory of the coach. Fortunately, Dr. Manson was traveling in the next first-class coach and immediately takes charge of the case.

The cause of death is strychnine poisoning, but suicide is unlikely, because "there are other and less painful means," which is an assumption cemented by such clues as a stolen keyring and a small, crumpled piece of paper found on the lavatory floor – convincing Dr. Manson the editor had been poisoned. There's just one problem. Strychnine "acts within a quarter-of-an-hour" and Mortensen "had gone double that time without having taken anything in food or drink."

So murder appears to be a complete impossibility with the additional complication that it's "exceedingly hard to obtain." But the how is merely a single piece of the puzzle.

The whole police apparatus, headed by Dr. Manson, is set in motion to disentangle a procession of double and false-identities, play a game of three-card monte with private safes and bank deposits boxes and digging out a cache of long-buried secrets and potential motives – all tied to the reason why the victim had acted so frightened leading up to his death. There are more points that need consideration. Such as a free-for-all bottle of Bismuth that was passed around the coach, a string of unsolved burglaries and the mysterious woman who had been secretly living with the victim.

Slowly, but surely, piece by piece, the murder and its background are reconstructed until the full picture emerges. Only downside is that certain pieces of vital information arrived a little late to the story. Nonetheless, the step-by-step reconstruction, eliminating possibilities and testing theories makes Death of a Frightened Editor a pleasantly complex and engaging detective story with a well-done impossible poisoning.

Death of a Frightened Editor shows Edwin Radford was "an avid reader" of R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke mysteries with its use of forensic science to find the murderer, but the solution to the impossible murder is pure John Dickson Carr. A clever, ultimately simplistic, twist on a poisoning-trick that I've only seen once before. And made for a great play on the Carrian blinkin' cussedness of things in general. I don't think many readers will have a problem with working out the motive or how that tied-in with the gossip columns in Society and the secreted content in the deposit boxes, but getting there made for some engaging and fun police work. And the murderer was a nice surprise. I didn't (quite) expect that person to have been the one who gave Mortensen the poison.

So, on a whole, Death of a Frightened Editor is a well-written detective novel with a tricky plot and a good impossible crime, but the clueing was a little shaky and this is probably why the Radford's didn't include a single challenge to the reader. Regardless, the murder-among-commuters plot makes Death of a Frightened Editor standout as an original take on the train-set mystery novel and that alone makes it worth a read.

By the way, Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) lists another impossible crime novel by the Radford's, Trunk Call to Murder (1968), in which safes are mysteriously looted. Just throwing that out there.

Lost and Found: "The End of the Train" (2007) by Mike Wiecek

One thing I noticed when thumbing through my copy of Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) is the increase of novels, short stories and TV episodes in which cars, houses, ships, large statues and trains disappear, or reappear, under seemingly impossible circumstances – making them a little less rare than I believed. In particular, the stories about vanishing locomotives and modern, high-speed trains.

Henry Leverage wrote an early locked room mystery, entitled Whispering Wires (1918), but Skupin listed a second novel, The Purple Limited (1927), centering on the "disappearance of a locomotive from a section of track monitored at both ends." Three years later, John Coryell wrote a Nick Carter novel, The Stolen Pay Train (1930), with a similar positioned impossibility, but there were also two modern-day writers who tackled the problem of how to make a train vanish like a burst bubble. Andrew M. Greeley lost "a rapid transit train between stations" in The Bishop and the Missing L Train (2000) and there's a short, ambitiously-plotted thriller story in which a computer-monitored train with 32 cars "disappeared off the face of the earth."

Mike Wiecek's "The End of the Train" has, as of this writing, only appeared in the June, 2007, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

"The End of the Train" takes place around the train yards in Newark, New Jersey, where David Keegan has worked for nearly four "tumultuous decades" as a Special Railway Officer. Keegan is now close to retirement and in charge of "two thousand miles of track" crawling with "more vandals, thieves, vagrants, criminal rings, and white-collar fraud" than "anywhere else in North America" – never before had an entire train vanished! One morning, Keegan is summoned to the yard's dispatch center, overlooked by "a 360-degree glass tower," already overflowing with executive limos and police cars.

Train number 432 was en route to Tennebrul, a flat yard in Connecticut, when the GPS equipped locomotive "just blipped out a few miles past Croxton." A nearby maintenance-of-way crew checked a twenty mile stretch of track, but didn't see or find anything. Somehow, "half a mile of rolling iron" had unaccountably gone missing.

Unusually, the train was transporting a dangerous cargo of industrial tankers full of toxic and flammable chemicals to place without much heavy industry. Disturbingly, a multi-million dollar ransom note is emailed to the authorities or they'll "detonate the entire package." This package is the train with its specially assembled cargo that, when detonated with explosives, creates "a cloud of poison" that "could kill people for miles around."

Mike Grost aptly described "The End of the Train" on his website as "an impressive combination of the techo-thriller and the impossible crime tale" and the technological elements are not only the motor and fuel of the plot, but provided the story with a new variation on the one-track solution to make an entire train disappear – which, out of necessity, all run along similar lines. Wiecek's technological spin completely reinvigorated the idea and made it feel fresh again! Add the specialized setting with an inside look at a modern, largely computer operated/supervised train system and you got is a 21st century take on Freeman Wills Crofts.

My sole complaint is that "The End of the Train" is a short story instead of a fleshed-out, full-length novel that took the time to show the reader all the nuts and bolts of the plot. So much more could have been done with the characters, setting, impossible disappearance and the technical-and thriller parts of the story. Nonetheless, Wiecek's "The End of the Train" is still a good and interesting blend of the detective story and techno-thriller. More importantly, Wiecek demonstrated that even in the world of today a train monitored by computers and tracked by satellites can vanish without a trace.

Death and the Professor (1961) by E. and M.A. Radford

A year ago, Dean Street Press reissued three detective novels by a British husband-and-wife writing team, Edwin and Mona A. Radford, who together concocted close to forty complex, scrupulously plotted and richly clued forensic detective novels – strongly influenced by R. Austin Freeman and Ellery Queen. Murder Isn't Cricket (1946) and Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947) were two of the titles specially selected as strong examples of their ability in constructing and tearing down intricate, unpadded plots. Radfords peppered their detective stories with challenges to the reader!

Nearly a year later, on March 3, DSP is going to release a further three novels, introduced by Nigel Moss, each "quite different in approach and style," but "retaining the traditions" of the great detective stories of yore.

The Heel of Achilles (1950) is an inverted mystery and Death of a Frightened Editor (1959) an impossible crime novel about a poisoning on a London-to-Brighton train, but the obscure Death and the Professor (1961) is of particular interest to every locked room reader. A collection of short stories structured as a detective novel with seven of the eight stories covering an entire page in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

The stories from Death and the Professor are centered around a small, exclusive dinner club, The Dilettantes' Club, whose distinguished members gather once a fortnight at a Soho restaurant where they dine in a private-room and debate any problem "besetting mankind" – a varied "selection of brains" browsing "the bric-à-brac of events and happenings in the world." Every member is "a doyen of his own particular profession." Sir Noël Maurice is an eminent surgeon and "one of the world's greatest authorities on the heart." Norman Charles is a psychiatrist of international repute and Alexander Purcell a Cambridge mathematician who holds a Chair in Mathematics. William James is a pathologist and Sir Edward Allen, Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, whose presence places these stories in the same world as the Dr. Harry Manson series! A very rare, but genuine, Golden Age detective crossover!

The sixth and last member of the club is a former Professor of Logic, Marcus Stubbs, who's an elderly, mild-mannered man with a goblin-like head, a shock of gray hair, "gig-like spectacles" and a stammer. A quiet, unimposing figure of a man, but appearances can be deceiving. Very deceiving! Professor Stubbs is nothing less than an armchair oracle who uses strict logic and reasoning to find solutions to the most unfathomable mysteries discussed by the club.

Nigel Moss compared The Dilettantes' Club to the Crimes Circle from Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) and Isaac Asimov's Black Widower series, but I think Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime (1929) is actually a lot closer to Death and the Professor. I've seen Partners in Crime being described as a nostalgic farewell to the 1920s with a thread running through the stories that tied everything together. Death and the Professor was published in the early 1960s, when the Golden Age had come to an end, which gives you the idea it was written as a fond farewell to that period with an armchair detective and plots paying tribute to some of its greatest hits – like a tribute band playing all the old songs. There's a red-thread running through the stories ending in knotted twist.

If a novel such as Who Killed Dick Whittington? demonstrated the Radford's plotting skills, Death and the Professor is an exhibit of their knowledge and love of the traditional, puzzle-driven Golden Age detective story. So let's dig into these (untitled) stories!

The first story briefly goes over how Professor Marcus Stubbs became the sixth member of the club before they settled down with port and cigars to listen and discuss "a very intriguing problem" brought to them by Sir Edward. A problem of a possible criminal nature that took place in the The Lodge Guest House, in Coronation Road, South Kensington, where one of the nine residents was an unlikable businessman, Frederick Banting, who was "cordially disliked by one and all." One day, after dinner, Banting retreated to his upstairs room, annoyingly slamming the door behind him, which was followed by "a second bang." A gunshot!

So the whole household rushed upstairs, opening the door with a spare key, where they find Banting lying on the floor with a revolver besides him, but the local police inspector, who spent twenty minutes in the room, called in the Murder Squad – because papers were missing. But how? Every possible exit, doors and windows, were either locked or under observation. There were only two minutes in which to commit the murder and the eight guests alibi each other. So how did the murderer manage to vanish into thin air without leaving a trace? Stubbs logically reasons his way to the answer, "logic, purely applied, can make no error," but the locked room-trick and left-handed clue are old hat. However, I appreciated how the clue eliminated all of the innocent suspects in one fell swoop!

The second story brought the distinguished company concerns two people, John Benton, who's a 68-year-old jeweler and his much younger, more ambitious, partner, Thomas Derja. Benton and Derja boarded a 9.18 train to London to personally deliver a £5,000 necklace to a client and, along the way, Derja bought a packet of wrapped sandwiches from a trolley. Derja cut the sandwiched in half and gave one piece to Benton, who took a bite, gave "a kind of gurgle" and slipped down half under the table as dead as a door nail. A post-mortem revealed cyanide had been mixed with his food and the necklace turns out to be a forgery! So did Benton commit suicide, because he knew the necklace would be recognized as fake? Or was he cleverly murdered? More importantly, how was it possible that only one piece of the sandwich was poisoned?

Stubbs uses irrefutable logic to demonstrate Benton had not committed suicide, but was murdered, why and how his sandwich was poisoned. Arguably, this is the best impossible crime in the collection with the blemish being that a well-known mystery writer used exactly the same solution in a 1950s short story.

The third story begins with a discussion on the difference between truly unsolved, practically perfect murders and murderers who are known to authorities, but there's no evidence to convict. Sir Edward tells his fellow dilettantes about "the most perfect murder" committed in Sam Reno, on the Italian Riviera, where four dead men were seated around a table – a pile of large, pigeon-blood rubies lay on the table. Three of the victims were British who were known to the police as receivers of stolen goods and the police had followed a suspicious trail to the doorstep of Villa Pinetta. Where they discovered the bodies. But how were they poisoned? Why did the murderer leave the £6,000 worth of rubies behind?

Sir Edwards ends his stories with a list of five questions, illustrating the impossibility of the murders, that "modern detective skill" have "failed to find the answers." Stubbs doesn't have to think very long to come up with the answers and an explanation how the rubies were smuggled pass customs. Solution to the impossible poisoning is another golden oldie.

The fourth story brings another jewel haul and one of those "dashed locked room problems" to The Dilettantes' Club. Ambrose & Company in Conduit Street, jewelers of some standing, where looted when burglars bypassed the steel grilled windows, treble locks and anti-burglar alarm by breaking into the tailor's shop next door and drilling through the wall – getting away with £18,500 in merchandise. The police recognized the modus operandi of a certain group of a men and the safe-cracker of the crew is a character known as "Lady Dan." A dandy, impeccably dressed womanizer who followed "every pair of trim ankles which came into his line of vision," but the police had no evidence and the case gets another dimension when the body of Lady Dan is found inside a bolted, first-class sleeping compartment of the Blue Train. He had died of a heart attack with an expression on his face of "complete and utter stupefaction."

Police found a half-full bottle of champagne and two tumbles, one with traces of a strong sleeping draught, in the compartment. Lady Dan had been seen with the lady from the next compartment, Liza Underwood, but she "disappeared as though she had never been" and there has never been passport issued in that name! And the communicating door between the compartments were bolted on both side. So how did she vanish? Stubbs gracefully thanks Sir Edwards for the "intellectual labyrinths" he has presented for their consideration and explains facts that do not conform, or are "alien to logical explanation," are impossible and therefore unacceptable. And demolishes the case. The problem of the locked compartments has a simplistic, routine answer, but the explanation for the stupefied expression on the body's face was a nice, perfectly done touch to the plot that clicked together with the premise like two puzzle pieces.

The next story is the only non-impossible crime story of the collection and is, as Moss described it, "a cleverly plotted 'eternal triangle' murder" a la Agatha Christie (c.f. "Triangle at Rhodes" collected in Murder in the Mews and Other Stories, 1937). Stubbs is the one who brings the problem to the attention of the Dilettantes.

Stubbs is convinced that the conviction of John Parker for the murder of Mary Bloss was a grave miscarriage of justice. Parker is a businessman and an enthusiastic lepidopterist (a moth collector) who had a motive, means (killing bottles loaded with cyanide) and opportunity to poison to dental cream of his mistress, Miss Bloss – who had also been a close friend of his wife, Eileen. A sordid, dime-a-dozen murder that ended with Parker being convicted for premeditated murder. So they go over the sordid history, examining every detail, with Sir Edwards representing the police case and Stubbs taking on the defense – "demolishing by pure logical reasoning" their case point by point. And, in the process, reveals what really happened. Undoubtedly, the most original and best story in the book!

Sadly, this excellent story is followed by the worst story in the collection, which is called in the story "The Strange Case of the Sleepers," in which people inexplicably lose consciousness and are robbed without remembering a thing. A very pulp-like, uninspired story reminiscent of Max Rittenberg's "The Bond Street Poisoning Bureau" (The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases of Magnum, Scientific Consultant, 2016) and C.N & A.M. Williamson's "The Adventure of the Jacobean House" (The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, 2000). But this is the only real dud in the series.

The seventh story centers on another locked room murder, known as "the Chelsea flat puzzle," brought to the Dilettantes by Sir Edwards. Three days ago, the body of Miss Menston had been found in her ransacked flat, strangled to death, but various witness statements and a side door to an outside passage, closed from the inside by a thumbscrew bolt, turned the case into a locked room mystery. However, the whole plot borrowed a little to liberally from S.S. van Dine's The Canary Murder Case (1927). It goes way beyond saluting a past master or a classic detective novel.

Thankfully, Death and the Professor ends strongly with a two-pronged story of a man who had been murdered at 7.30, but "was seen alive at 10 o'clock" and "again at 10.30" by two different witnesses. Once again, the solution to the impossibility is not terribly original, but there's a twist in the tail tying all of the stories together that beautifully tipped its deerstalker to two classic pieces of detective fiction. I can say no more without giving anything away.

So, on a whole, Death and the Professor was obviously written as a nostalgic tribute, or a fond farewell, to the detective story's Golden Age brimming to the rim with all the classics from locked room murders and stolen gems to mysterious poisonings and a surprise ending. A tribute tour that came at the expense of the ingenuity and originality that can be found in the Radford's novel-length detective stories, but every, long-time mystery addict will appreciate this warm homage to their drug of choice.