Off the Rails

"The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances." 

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, 1934)

The seemingly impossibility of making something of an enormous size, such as an elephant, vanish from the face of the Earth is one of the time-worn tricks of the stage magician, but not an act often attempted by the members of the impossible crime movement from any era.

Of course, the magician has a marked advantage in that he isn't obliged to point out the sliding-mirrors secreted in the bars of the animal cage, concealing the elephant from the audience without being moved an inch, but the mystery writer has to explain the trick at the end of the ride – which makes it harder to find new ways to make a train disappear between stations. The well appeared to have dried out with the publication of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost Special," a short story from 1898, and Ellery Queen's “Snowball in July,” collected in Q.B.I: Queen's Bureau of Investigation (1955). However, I had been aware of a mystery novel from the 1980s with a different take on the problem and this particular item finally fell into my hands.

Kyotao Nishimura's Misuteri ressha ga kieta (The Mystery Train Disappears, 1982) is a Grand Caper masquerading as a police procedural and the mark is the Japanese National Railways, who run the one-time Mystery Train. Its destination is unknown, but the J.F.N. promises an entertaining ride. There were only 400 tickets to allot among 8000 applicants and thus The Golden Ticket for railroad aficionados. A day after The Mystery Train departed from Tokyo Station, the director receives a phone-call demanding one billion yen ransom in exchange for their train and passengers. The twelve-sleeper coach from J.F.N. vanished between Kyoto and Tottori, as if it sprouted wings and took off, and they turn to the discreet Inspector Totsugawa from the Metropolitan Police Department – a bland policeman attracted to railway crimes.

What ensues is a chapter-by-chapter struggle with shadows as Totsugawa and the J.F.N. attempt to find the hostages and criminals, which makes for exciting (and fun) reading because every new discovery and development brings a new set of problems for the police. The shadows are due the vastness of the crime, the professional character of the people who executed it and the uncertainty of the amount of people it took to pull off. Totsugawa hopes to capture the criminals and retrieve the ransom money before they can split with it, but they manage to unload the bulk of money from a moving train, in which all the windows were locked and luggage of disembarking passengers searched by the police. This impossibility was better done and more convincingly explained than the disappearance of the titular Mystery Train, however, I tended to still like it because I didn't expect a polished diamond. I was also warned it had its flaws. The bit with the vanishing train is basically text-book stuff, as Jonathan Creek would’ve remarked, but I probably absorbed so many locked room mysteries that I can appreciate new ideas, even if flawed, more than I used to.

If The Mystery Train Disappears faults, it's lacking either a clear, definable opponent (caper-wise) or a pay-off at the ending (mystery-wise), but the Nishimura gave the reader neither and the book ended with a sudden whimper instead of a bang. Its weaknesses stands out especially among the small crop of (better) Japanese detective-and mystery stories translated in English. However, The Mystery Train Disappears is not a completely unrewarding read and there is some genuine detective/impossible material between its covers, but lower your expectations or you'll probably end up feeling disappointed. It's somewhat of a cross between Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) and Seicho Matsumoto's Ten to Sen (Points and Lines, 1958) without reaching the heights of either, but an interesting curio nonetheless.

Finally, I was surprised at the cooperative portrayal of the train-passengers and media towards the police, because I imagine nothing but sneers for the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways) for outdoing themselves by losing an entire train alongside a few hundred people. And it would be a case of life imitating art, if they ever attempted their own version of a Mystery Train. The US media would probably go in a full, 24/7 meltdown and finally lose themselves in a courtroom, collectively frothing from the mouth, demanding a photo-opt with the bloated corpse the police dragged from the river.  

The Train-Ride from Hell

"Accursed be he who plays with the devil!"

 - Friedrich Schiller 

After posting my review of Donald McGibney's 32 Caliber (1920), I glanced at the hillocks of Mount To-be-Read and indecision made its move to the forefront as primary advisor, but I was able to counter the initiative after Ho-Ling posted a review of Jan Apon's Een tip van Brissac (A Tip from Brissac, 1940) – an obscure, Dutch-language mystery novel.

I happened to have one or two little known, home-grown detective stories laying around and picked Herman Heijermans' Moord in de trein (Murder on the Train, 1925), which has the dark clouds of literature and history hanging over its authors. Yes. Plural. Heijermans passed away in 1924 and left behind an unfinished manuscript, but an eminent writer, A.M. de Jong, was able to complete the final chapter based on the directions and notes from its original author. A.M. de Jong was a prolific writer and contributed to a socialist comic strip (apparently) known for handling sensitive and controversial topics, but his socialist sympathies were not appreciated during the German occupation of '40-45. On October 18, 1943, assassins of the Dutch-SS rang De Jong's doorbell and stepped back into the darkness in order to have a clear shot at the silhouetted outline in the hall-lighted doorway – signature method of the Silbertanne (Silver Fir) murders. I'm glad to report a few of them got an appointment with a firing squad after the war ended, which, I'm sure, was an experience far more threatening to the personal security than the ideas of an ailing, middle-aged writer... even if De Jong had resorted to puns.  

The dark touch comes in the opening and closing chapters of Murder on the Train, written respectively by Heijermans and De Jong, in which Satan himself visits the key players of the story and one them is a self-absorbed writer, Hans Thyssen, but there's also a rich-banker, Arthur Rondeel and the hotel rat Karel Johan Tulp (a.k.a. Charles Jean Tullipe). The only thing they seem to have in common is a ticket for the D-train to Paris, however, it's going to be an extraordinary journey filled with shenanigans. A German widow, Mrs. Menzel Polack, is drugged and robbed of her jewelry in the ladies room, while another passenger, Nathan Marius Duporc, Inspecteur of the Amsterdamse Centrale Recherche, witnesses how a body is being pushed from the train crossing the Maasbrug and disappear into the waters below – making him grab for the emergency brakes.

There's one passenger presumed dead on account of a blood-soaked compartment bunk and the red smeared brake-handle tells the story of what must have been a battle for life and death, in which the victim was forcefully pushed through the window. A triangle is drawn in blood at the foot end of the bed. Another person is unaccounted for and Duporc has to map out the complex movement through the compartments and stations stops to get a reasonable picture of what happened, but the rough, short-spoken Duporc has to spar with nearly every suspect he encounters. And he does so as he hops from city to city, hotel to hotel, and through the various layers of society – from the daughter of the banker to checkmating the small-time criminal and crony of the hotel rat, Jaap Eekhoorn.

Ho-Ling mentioned in his post on the Jan Apon novel his strange habit of reading Dutch mysteries that aren't set in the Netherlands, such as Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee (ancient China) and Bertus Aafjes' Judge Ooka (18th century Japan), which he puts on his eclectic reading rather than a trope of the genre. But that's not true. Up to the mid-1920s (with the arrival of Willy Corsari's Inspector Lund), Dutch mystery writers imported their detectives: Ivans had the British Geoffrey Gills and Havank the French Charles C.M. Carlier (a.k.a. De Schaduw). I think there are perhaps two explainenations for this: a) detective stories have never stood in very high standing over here and this might have been an excuse for those early writers to get away with it b) mysteries with a foreign flavor simply sold more, because people didn't had the wealth back then to go mass-holidaying. The exploits of a detective attached to the Sûreté may've been more appealing to the reading audience than an intrigue in their own backyard, but the intercontinental flavor has always been very strong in these early Dutch mysteries – including Murder on the Train. There are characters from Australia and Germany and the text is littered with phrases and snippets of conversations in French, German and English. It was definitely a trope of the time. If anything, Van Gulik, Aafjes and Van de Wetering's Inspector Saito are continuation of this international tradition.

Anyway, I read Murder on the Train under the assumption it was an amusing, busily plotted and intelligently written detective story with a strong opening that the ending simply couldn't live up to, but the middle part served its purpose for the solution. And it was very Carrian! I could draw some comparisons here with some of his and another famous detective story, and if this book had been translated in English at the time, it would've probably been tagged as the ancestor of those stories. But I won't be messing around here with spoiler-tags, because the posts on foreign, untranslated stories are mostly ignored (see Ho-Ling's post) and that means it will be read by a very small number who have read this book and happened to stumble across my blog. I'm also sleepy.

However, the motivation and resolution was not something John Dickson Carr would've stuck with, more reminiscent of Anthony Berkeley, but it does defy the common notion that Golden Age mysteries snug up to the upper-classes, ignored the lower-classes and were all about restoring order. You could argue order was restored, but every way you turn it, this is more a cruel than a cozy mystery novel, but a good one at that. Just take the last sentence for example, "it was simply the tip of Satan's vanishing tail..."

The trail of obscurity has really brightened up lately.

"Who is in charge of the clattering train..."

"...Death is in charge of the clattering train!"

- Edwin J. Milliken (Death and his Brother Sleep) 

C. Daly King opened one of his lauded mystery novels, Obelists Fly High (1935), with the epilogue of the story and thought it would be a nice touch to begin this post on Todd Downing's Vultures in the Sky (1935) in a similar vein: it's as if we have entered a period of redemption!

As the post-title and opening quote suggests, Vultures in the Sky takes place aboard a passenger train bound for Mexico City, but sundry shadows are cast over the journey and not all of them are from the zopilotes (vultures) dotting the desert sky. Rumor filled compartments of an impending railway strike and saboteurs of the Cristeros (a religious splinter faction) become the prowling ground of a murderer who snuffed out a passenger before he even boarded the train! There's even talk that there may be people aboard who are connected to an infamous kidnapping case, which is not entirely coincidental, as Curt mentioned in his review that Downing had "read Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) the year he began writing Vultures and he immediately praised the Crime Queen's novel unreservedly" – giving perhaps the first of many nods to one of the most famous whodunits ever written.

Downing's regular detective, Hugh Rennert of the United States Treasury Department, Custom Services, tries to take charge when he suspects foul play after one of the passengers, an American of Mexican extraction named Torner, dies while they passed through a darkened railway tunnel and Rennert does not entertain the theory that it was the bad air in the tunnel that got to him. He receives official clearance to take charge of the case, until they reach their destination and the proper authorities can take it from his hands, but this murderer is not deterred by red tape and continues to plough through the list of passengers.

I wonder if Vultures inspired the opening sequence of Stuart Palmer's The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937), in which Inspector Oscar Piper is on a train heading for Mexico City when a customs inspector takes a sniff from a bottle of cheap perfume and falls to the floor in a dead faint.

The plot rattles along at a nice, but brisk, pace and Hugh Rennert functioned as both a knowledgeable guide, who speaks his languages and appreciates the culture and history of the land, and as a proper detective – trying to make sense of hatboxes and the movement of suspects. In many ways, this was the kind of detective story that I was hoping to find when I picked up Downing's The Cat Screams (1934), actually two years ago this week, and I think my poorly written, two-year-old review still conveys my lack of enthusiasm for the book. I actually referred to Clyde B. Clason in that review and I think Vultures compares best to his work except that we move from the remnants of an erstwhile civilization, piled up in a private museum or library, to a railway track carving through the deserts of Mexico – where everything is very much alive as opposed to dusty museum pieces in the possession of a soon to be murdered private collector (c.f. about half of Clason's output).

Downing redeemed himself with Vultures, after my initial disappointment over Cat, and second chances appears as of late to be a trend on this blog. Zelda Popkin's Dead Man's Gift (1942) was a marked improvement over her slapdash performance in Murder in the Mist (1940) and Kay Cleaver Strahan's Death Traps (1930) made the award-wining Footprints (1929) look even worse in retrospect: it's as if we have entered a period of redemption! 

Lets hope this trend continues and I will definitely check back on Downing. All of his books have been reprinted by Coachwhip and have an introduction by Curt Evans (a.k.a. The Passing Tramp).

This also reminds me how horrible behind I am on my reading and working off my wish list.

The Vanishing Magician

"A good magic trick is like the perfect crime. Not a loose end in sight."

- Akechi (The Magic Express, 1996)

I was inspired to pull The Magical Express (1996), which is the sixteenth volume in The Kindaichi Case Files series, from the congested shelves that give a home to my vast collection of mysteries after reading a post on Pretty Sinister Books – in which John elaborated on his past as a puppeteer and admitted to being a total magic geek. This put the cog-wheels of this Mycroftian brain of mine in motion and dredged up attenuating memories of one of Hajime Kindaichi's cases that is actually quite clever, The Magical Express, and decided to shed some light on those dimming impressions I had of the story.

The plot revolves around a wraithlike presence, emblazoned with the moniker The Puppetmaster or Hell's Puppeteer, who's in the middle of on-going magic trick to make a troupe of magicians disappear, one after another, from the grand stage called life – and one of these disappearance acts involves a brilliantly clued and ingeniously executed impossible situation situated in a train compartment under observation.

The first chapter of The Magic Express departs with the arrival of a sealed box at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Department, containing a twisted marionette, posed like a mangled corpse, and a dire warning that a spell of death and fear has been cast on a train bound for Hokkaido. It also has some wacky embarrassing high-jinx, involving an adult videotape Kindaichi has in his possession, but these are best glanced over and banished from your mind. Anyway, the line that owns the now star-crossed express provides a bit of entertainment for their passengers with a troupe of renowned magicians, who conjured up a reputation for themselves with a trick known as The Living Marionette, which involves a doll that is magically endowed with life and cuts his own strings before cycling across the stage, but before reaching the final terminal their leader is murdered – and his body disappears under miraculous circumstances.

Gentle Yamagami, a maven where fire illusions are concerned and head of his own enchanting pack of conjures, is found with the handle of a knife protruding from his left temple in an unoccupied compartment, scattered with roses and strewn with balloons, after the train was hastily evacuated after The Puppetmaster called in a bomb thread, but the remains are spirited away in front of several eyewitnesses – including Hajime Kindaichi! The solution is inspired, even though Yazoburo Kanari probably stole a page from the book of one of his fellow brethren, and the (visual) clueing is impeccable! Various parts of the solution, from the inexplicable disappearance of the magician's body to the identity of Hell's Puppeteer, are dangled in front of the reader, like a hypnotists' pocket watch, but it's so in your face that it's easily overlooked and can effectively lead you astray.

By and large, The Magical Express follows a predetermined track decided upon in previous entries, as there's an unresolved death in the past of the magic group, which betrays another avenger-from-the-past ploy to readers familiar with the tropes of this series, but there are some unexpected and pleasant departures along the way. The aforementioned plotting and clueing is one of them, which is continued after the death and disappearance of Gentle Yamagami, as the puppeteer happily dispatches more members of the troupe – saturating the pages with even more clues! It was also a refreshing to watch the murderer, during a theatrical dénouement, slowly morph in a different breed of killer than the ones that usually put in an appearance in these stories and that Kindaichi is accompanied by both Kenmochi and Akechi. Kenmochi continues the tradition that began with Lestrade, while Akechi acts as a foil to Kendaichi, but, more often than not, ends up playing second fiddle – like Simon Brimmer who only seems to fail when he works with his rival on the same case.

Overall, this is one of only two or three volumes from this series that I would unhesitatingly recommend to any mystery fans and shows how underutilized comics are within the genre. So much can be done with visual clueing and you can come up with a lot more labyrinthine-like solutions as they are visualized for you. Shortly put, an excellent mystery on nearly all counts.

Oh, and to everyone who wants to point an accusing finger at me that I pounced on this opportunity to tempt one of our own into reading mystery manga's and hoping that this story will function as a back door introduction to Detective Conan/Case Closed... well... you're completely right! ;)