The Oldest Trick in the Book

"Now, brought to this conclusion in so unequivocal a manner as we are, it is not our part, as reasoners, to reject it on account of apparent impossibilities. It is only left for us to prove that these apparent 'impossibilities' are, in reality, not such.”

- C. Auguste Dupin (Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgues," originally published in Graham's Magazine in 1841)

Back in late July, a scathing blog-post appeared on The Invisible Event, "The Lazy Waste of Time That is Classic Locked Room Mysteries (Ed. David Stuart Davies 2016)," in which JJ berated the editor of a recently published anthology of impossible crime stories for the shameful laziness that yawns at you from behind its table of content – as nearly all of the stories were previously published in either The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) or The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014).

There were two further entries: one of them a non-impossible crime story (!) plucked from the Sherlock Holmes canon and the other a locked room tale by Davis himself, which he had previously added to the lineup of Vintage Mystery and Detective Stories (2006). So you can understand the disappointment upon discovering that this brand new collection, promisingly entitled Classic Locked Room Mysteries (2016), turned out to be one of the laziest and cheapest anthologies in existence.

As a response to JJ, I compiled a blog-post, "The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist," in which I assumed the role of armchair anthologist and imagined a hypothetical collection of locked room and impossible crime stories – all of them out-of-copyright. I had only read half of the short stories I listed and selected the other half with the help Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), but both columns had one thing in common: they were rarely, if ever, included in any of the well-known locked room anthologies.

I compiled the list to demonstrate how easy it was to create a brand new and appealing collection of short stories by simply culling "fresh" material from the public domain, but JJ, with the zeal of a true believer, immediately set out to work and turned the book into reality – which is now available to everyone free-of-charge. The book is called Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums (2016) and you can download it in various formats here.

I'm well aware that you can't review something you had a hand in yourself. Well, obviously, you can do that, but we mockingly refer to that in my country as een slager die zijn eigen vlees keurt (a butcher judging the quality of his own meat). However, the book is only a collection of short stories from the 1800-and early 1900s. So why can't read and talk about the ones I had not read before? Besides, you know I can only be stopped obsessing over impossible crime stories by being beaten in a messy knife fight on top of a speeding train.

Well, that should give me a ghost of an excuse for the questionable ethics behind this review...

So I'll be giving the following entries a pass, not because they're bad (far from it), but I had either already read them or even reviewed them, which consists of the following short stories: "Rhampsinitus and the Thief" (c. 440 BC; reviewed here) by Heredotus, "The Suicide of Kiaros" (1887) by L. Frank Baum, "The Story of the Lost Special" (1898) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Mystery of the Circular Chamber" (1898) by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, "The Mystery of the Flaming Phantom" (1907; reviewed here) by Jacques Futrelle and "Flashlight" (1918; reviewed here) by Laurance Clarke.

Anne and Annabella Plumptre's "The Spectre of Presburg: A Hungarian Tale" is a 198-year-old novella from Tales of Wonder (1818) and an early incarnation of both the locked room mystery and the more widely defined stories of impossible crimes – as the plot concerns a ghostly apparition vanishing from a room under observation. The story is set during the first half of the eighteenth century and "the troubles which agitated the continent of Europe on the death of Charles the Sixth," which "afforded ample matter for the pen of the historian to expatiate upon." One of these events happened in the small town of Presburg.

A large number of troops were assembled in the town, who occupied nearly every public house, but the backdrop of this story is one particular inn where the soldiers had turned the largest space into a mess-room – passing their evenings round a crackling fire, drinking and discussing "that awful histories of specters." So one evening, after the stroke of twelve, the door of the mess-room opened and an officer in an Austrian uniform entered. Someone recognized him as Count Molziewitz, but the solemn figure walked silently across the room, head down, entering a second room and "was seen no more." They later learn that the Count was killed in battle prior to his ghost being seen at the inn and he makes a second appearance only a week later. However, the ghost of Count Molziewitz is not the only entity roaming the demon-haunted region of Presburg: a figure of a giant man has been seen wandering along the misty mountain passes a stone's throw away from the town.

The explanations for these supernatural phenomena are fairly straightforward and almost what you'd expect from a story this old, but certain aspects of the plot foreshadows the locked room mysteries that would appear over the next one-hundred years. I assume this story was too obscure to have had any serious influence over the development of the genre, but, when framed as a detective story, it was somewhat ahead of its time. But to do this story justice, it should be read as a ghost story with a logical and natural conclusion.

Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens" originally appeared in an 1858 issue of The Atlantic Monthly and collected in The Diamond Lens and Other Stories (1887), but the story is a bit of an odd duck in this collection. The story basically consists of three components: the first part is a prologue in which the narrator, a Mr. Linley, tells about his childhood fascination with microscopes and how it allowed him to look pass "the dull veil of ordinary existence" – which became an all-consuming obsession during his adult life. In the second part, Linley consults a medium, Mrs. Vulpes, who brings him into contact with the spirit of my compatriot and the Father of Microbiology, Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek.

The spirit tells him to create a lens from "a diamond of one hundred and forty carats" and expose it to electro-magnetic currents, which would rearrange its atoms and form a stone that's, essentially, a universal lens. But to get his hands on such a precious stone, Linley has to bloody them first and engineers the "suicide" of the owner of such a diamond. Of course, the body was left in a room that appeared to have been locked from the inside. Finally, the last part of the story tells of the wondrous world Linley discovered with the titular lens and this portion can be described as one of those scientific romances from the era of Jules Verne. A very strange story, but a well-written one that tells an intriguing story.

Two observations about the locked room situation: how could the servant "peeped through the keyhole" and saw the body when only few paragraphs before it was mentioned that the key was inside the lock? Secondly, the whole murder plot bears a striking resemblance to the one on from L. Frank Baum's "The Suicide of Kiaros," but Baum (IMHO) delivered the better locked room mystery.

Victorien Sardou's "The Black Pearl" came from the pages of Three Romances (1888) and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the story takes place in the Netherlands. The story is set during a period when the Province of Flevoland was still below the troubled waters of an inland sea, De Zuiderzee, which blew a cold, harsh wind across the landscape and canals of North-Holland – accompanied by heavy rain and thunder. And it's in this hondenweer (bad weather), that the two principle characters are introduced: Balthazar van der Lys and Cornelius Pump. A couple of friends who happened to bump into each other, but the former drags the latter back to his home where they exchanged some good news about their personal lives. Both men have the intention of getting married, but the celebratory mood sours when Balthazar discovers that his study has been ransacked.

The window was closed and the study was fitted with a massive door, "which was provided with an old-fashioned brass lock," a type that's only used "in the Netherlands at present time," but this did not prevent a thief from taking all of the ducats, florins and jewels – without leaving a trace behind. The police suspects Pump's fiancée, Christina, but he comes up with an entirely different explanation for the miraculous theft. As Adey observed, the explanation is inventive enough, but hardly a credible one.

H. Greenbough Smith's "The Case of Roger Carboyne" was published in the September 1892 edition of The Strand Magazine and is one of the shorter stories from this collection, which takes place during an inquest on the body of Roger Carboyne in North Wales. Carboyne was spending his Easter holiday on a riding tour when, one day, his friend heard a scream, "uttered as if in extremity of agony or terror," but he had completely vanished – only leaving behind evidence of a struggle in the snow. However, there were no footprints in the snow. A similar problem arises when his body is found on a plateau and "the snow was absolutely undisturbed." A last-minute witness, who acts as a deus ex machina, gives the explanation but you can probably work out what happened from the given evidence. A fairly simple, but fun, short story.

Tom Gallon's "The Mystery of the Locked Room" was lifted from the June 3, 1905 issue of The Pictorial Magazine and prompted the following post by JJ, "Some Reflections on Editing," which kind of spoiled the story for me, because I had to see the illustration from its publication in the Chicago Daily Tribune – which did a thoroughly good job at giving the whole game away. The problem concerns the theft of a diamond necklace from a locked hotel room and the only clues were the peculiar behavior of the burglar: a cardboard box of chocolates had been half emptied and a jewel box that was not even locked was left untouched. Even if you've seen the illustration, you might instinctively guess the correct solution, because in 1905 this trick was already old hat and the person behind the theft was rather obvious.

Granddaddy Poe!

So it's a rather unchallenging mystery owning some debt to a pair of rather famous short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle, but not an unpleasant one to read.

Rafael Sabatini made his name as an author of romance and adventure novels, such as The Sea Hawk (1915) and Scaramouche (1921), which is reflected in one of his short stories, "Plague of Ghosts," originally published in a 1907 issue of The Storyteller and has a reformed criminal, Capoulade, as its protagonist – who is send on a mission to Château de la Blanchette. A mission involving an infestation of ghosts and a ring of counterfeiters.

The impossible situation presented in this story is interesting and shows some imagination: out of a luminous cloud emerged in an immensely tall figure, "swathed in a winding sheet," surmounted by "a hideously grinning skull" with "eyeballs of glowing fire." A character takes a shot at the ghost with a brace of horse-pistols, but the ghost responded with a burst of laughter and a skeleton hand dropped the two bullets on the ground. Sabatine gave a logical explanation for the phantom's bullet-catch trick, but now how the ghostly effects were accomplished. Jacques Futrelle's "The Mystery of the Flaming Phantom," published around the same time, handled a similar plot and impossibility with far more skill and ingenuity. That being said, I loved the moment when the ghost laughed and dropped the bullets. 

M. McDonnell Bodkin's "The Unseen Hand" comes from The Quests of Paul Beck (1908) and can be categorized as a railway mystery, in which a ticket collector stumbles across the body of the sole occupant of a carriage – a violent blow had "cracked the skull like an egg-shell." Mr. Paul Beck is summoned to take complete control of the case and constructs a particular ingenious, but very risky, method from such clues as the foul smell of asafetida, the strength of the blow and a missing item from the victim’s home. As I said, the trick is very risky and probably impossible to pull off on the first attempt, but Bodkin obviously gave the idea some thought.

Half a year ago, I reviewed another short story by Bodkin, "The Murder on the Golf Links," which was collected by Martin Edwards in Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015).

A. Demain Grange's "The Round Room Horror" is an obscure tale from a long-defunct publication, Everybody's Story Magazine, which published this particular story in March 1911. JJ dedicated an entire blog-post to the work he had done on tracking down and editing this particular story, which is well-worth a read in itself and the work was more than worth it – because this long-forgotten sealed room mystery is an interesting item for the period. The 1910s was not a decade known for its impossible crime fiction.

The round chamber of the story-title is a fortified tower room in Tor Hall, "a roomy, Jacobean mansion" situated "in one of the loneliest spots in England," which became the home of John Morden. A older man in his late sixties and reputedly possesses a great wealth, but his character had several marked peculiarities and one of them was "a morbid dread to be assassinated in his sleep." So he picked as his bedroom the impenetrable and windowless tower room, "used in former times as a muniment-room," but the heavy iron door proved insufficient to guarantee his safety. However, it took an entire party of workmen and several hours to remove "the ponderous mass of metal."

What they found inside the round tower room was the body of its owner, lying in his bed, with a deep, bloody wound in his forehead. A wound that was inflicted by a long, sharp instrument that was triangular in shape. It appears to be an insoluble problem and this attracts the attention of Montague Steele, who has some "brilliant achievements in the detection of crime," but even he struggled at first with the problem of the sealed nature of the room. Eventually, Steele reconstructs the complex and involved method of the murderer, based on the dimensions of the room and the murder weapon, which showed the genre as a whole was definitely moving away from the clichés of the previous century – which consisted of hidden passages, murderous animals and unknown poisons.

On the other hand, we have the murderer's identity... I mean... really, Grange? You picked that character to be the killer of this noteworthy locked room story from the early parts of the previous century? Well, you can’t have everything, I suppose.

Finally, the end of this overlong review comes on a lighter note with Herbert Beerbohm Tree's "The Mystery of Howard Romaine," from Nothing Matters and Other Stories (1917), which is the literary companion to MacKinlay Kantor's humorous "The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz" – collected in It's About Crime (1960). A large, heavy object disappears under seemingly impossible circumstances in both short stories: Kantor made a baby grand piano vanish from an upstairs room, while Tree pulled off a similar trick with a pine-wood coffin containing the body of a washed-up actor who had previously committed suicide. The presentations of both impossibilities and the slightly sardonic sense of humor were very similar, but the given explanations and respective resolutions were very different. Regardless, the professional anthologist should keep these two short stories in mind for any future locked room anthology, because they ought to be published as companion pieces.

So, far another one of my seemingly never-ending blog-posts about a handful of short stories. I can never keep this kind of reviews very short, but I hope you found my commentary fair and keep in mind there are six additional tales in Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums. I can particular recommend the ones written by Baum, Doyle and Meade.

Well, I'll try to keep it short for my next review. Whatever it may be.  

A Winter Wonderland

"I told you these were shadows of the things that have been... that they are what they are, do not blame me."

- Ghost of Christmas Past (Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, 1843)

One of the most remarkable resurgence from obscurity has to be the small-scale renaissance of J. Jefferson Farjeon's fanciful crime-fiction (e.g. Holiday Express, 1935), which can be traced back to a 2012 blog-post from genre historian and critic, Curt Evans – who spoke warmly about Mystery in White (1937). A wondrous and wintry crime novel that became "a festive sleeper hit" when it was reprinted by the British Library in 2014. Everyone was astonished when the book, out of nowhere, sold over 60,000 copies!

So, I'm kind of late with my review of the book, but still well ahead of this years' festive season and you can expect two or three further reviews of Christmas mysteries in the coming months. But first things first!

Mystery in White is a rattling yarn of Mitchellian crime and wonder, which embarked on its fantastical journey when the "half a dozen inmates of a third-class compartment on the 11.37 from Euston" found themselves stranded on a snowbound train. The seemingly never-ending snowfall blocked the railway tracks, back and forth, turning the unofficial halt into a permanent one. However, this extreme Christmas Eve blizzard does not worry Mr. Hopkins, "the elderly bore," who experienced a month-long tempest in the Yukon town of Dawson, but he's the only one in the compartment who "pooh-poohed the whole thing as insignificant" – as most of them wished they were somewhere else.

The young woman next to the bore is a beautiful chorus girl, named Jessie Noyes, who is on her way to Manchester for an important audition. Robert Thomson is a tall, pale and unhealthy looking youth, which is "due partly to the atmosphere of the basement office in which he worked," but the clerk also has a rising temperature. David and Lydia are brother and sister en route to a Christmas party, which they probably have to miss due to the complete whiteout outside of their railway compartment.

Finally, there's the fascinating personality of Mr. Edward Maltby, of the Royal Psychical Society, who has an appointment to interview the ghostly residue of Charles I of England – reputedly stored inside the walls of an old house in Naseby. Maltby believes that "the past is ineradicable," stored away, which can be revealed and replayed like a gramophone record. And he proved to be an interesting detective-like character in the tradition of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (1910) and John Bell from A Master of Mysteries (1898) by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace.  

Malty is also the one who set the train of events in motion when he out of the compartment, "into the all-embracing snow," in an attempt to reach a different line.

Not long after his departure, Jessie, Robert, David and Lydia decide to follow in the footsteps of the psychic investigator, but Mr. Hopkins, the eternal bore, frowns at the notion of venturing out in the snow. So he stays puts. But "the four adventures" are determined to track across "the motionless white scene" of the "strange fairyland" outside, which is fraught with more dangers than they initially anticipated. Luckily, they manage to survive a renewed blizzard, a small avalanche and a pitfall, but they manage to penetrate "the curtain of whirling white" and the reach the threshold of a lonesome house – where a welcoming log fire is roaring in the hearth, tea has been laid and a kettle of water is boiling. There is, however, one problem: nobody appears to be home! In fact, the place seems to be completely abandoned.

On a quick side note, the lonely house, in combination with the holiday theme, reminded me of Bill Pronzini's "No Room at the Inn," which can be found in the short story collection Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998). It makes for an interesting comparison.

Anyway, the marooned party from the train slowly ease into their role as comfortable trespassers, because having two wounded (or sick) members is as good an excuse as any, but they begin to realize that something is not quite alright – such as noises and sounds coming from behind a locked door of an attic room. A room that is later found to be unlocked and empty! Soon, they find Maltby on the doorstep and a man, who calls himself "Smith," with a Cockney accent and a suspicious act, accompanies him. Smith claims he knows nothing about a snowbound train, but is in the possession of a train ticket.

An obvious lie that might be easily explained by news that’s brought to the stranded party by the half frozen bore, Mr. Hopkins: the body of a man, strangled to death, was found in an adjoining compartment not long after their departure. So is the murderer one of them and is there a possible connection between the murder and the empty house?

I could go on to describe the subsequent events, but, after a quarter or so of the book, it turns into the kind of story you really should read for yourself, because the overall plot is not easily pigeonholed. Mystery in White can hardly be described as a traditional whodunit with a logically constructed plot or a thriller with breathtaking scenes of suspense. The story is far too gentle to be a thriller and the explanation really disqualifies it from being a whodunit. However, the plot does borrow components from these types of stories: Maltby makes a series of deductions based on several items he found in the house and stages an excellent dénouement, in which he brings an old portrait to life to explain a long-forgotten murder that happened there on Christmas Eve of 1917.

There was also a nice touch about "the official version," described in the next to last chapter of the book, in which the reader is told about the police's official, but incorrect, view of the case and its explanation. So you can have a chuckle at their expense.

I really liked these particular scenes, however, they did not make for the sort of detective story that was typical of the 1930s. I labeled the book earlier as a Mitchellian crime fantasy, but I suppose a Poean tale of mystery and imagination would be a better description. One that only allows you to take it one chapter at a time, but even after eighty years, the book still feels like a breath of cold, fresh air in the genre. Something that's genuinely out of the ordinary, strange and original, but can still be enjoyed and appreciated by such fervent classicist as yours truly. I guess the best way to view the book is as our genre’s version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843).

But enough of my blabbering. Mystery in White is a good, likeable and imaginative Christmas tale, which happened to have a criminal element. It's good to know the book not only found its way back into print, but also enjoyed some success. Well, I guess I'll leave it that and try to find something more traditional for the next review. So stay tuned!

Devilish Conspiracy

"The affair attracted enormous attention at the time, not only because of the arresting nature of the events, but even more for the absolute mystery in which they were shrouded."

- Freeman Wills Crofts' "The Mystery of the Sleeping Car-Express" (1921), collected in The Mystery of the Sleeping Car-Express and Other Stories (1956)

I have covered John Street, or "John Rhode," before on this blog, but not as often as I would have liked to.

Rhode had a technical mind and he could be described as a mechanic of detective fiction who engineered and constructed over a hundred tricky plots, which was not necessarily restricted to his own body of work – as he was credited by John Dickson Carr as the co-author of Fatal Descent (1939) for his relatively small, but very technical, contribution to the plot. But his reputation as a wholesaler of clever and ingenious contrived plots is best illustrated in an anecdote from Christianna Brand. She once suffered from a pesky case of writer's block and Rhode kindly offered the then young novelist to come down to his place, examine his bookshelves and help herself to one of his plots. Assuring her that she was "most welcome" to do so. What a gentleman!

Evidently, Rhode was a man who knew his way around a plot and his output was probably the closest you could get to an emporium of nefarious schemes, devilish plots and cleverly fabricated puzzles, but they tended to be technical in nature – which earned him an undeserved reputation in the post-World War II landscape of the genre as a boring, sleep inducing writer. You only have to read such titles as The House on Tollard Ridge (1929), Death on the Board (1937) and Men Die at Cyprus Lodge (1943) to know how wrong the detractors of the so-called humdrum writers were about Rhode. He was first and foremost a plotter, which meant characterization often took a backseat in favor of the plot.

One of the negative side effects of being reputedly dull was Rhode's name sliding into obscurity and a large swath of his work became rare or fairly hard to get, which naturally meant prize-tags with double, triple or even quadruple digits scrawled on them – effectively keeping them out of the hands of ordinary readers. So I have been carefully rationing the small stack of his books acquired over the years, but, recently, they appear to have reached the front of the line of Golden Age mysteries that were waiting to be reprinted. That brings us to the subject of today's review.

Death in the Tunnel (1936) originally appeared under Rhode's second byline, "Miles Burton," which has recently been republished by the Poisoned Pen Press as a British Library Crime Classic and is prefaced with an excellent introduction by Martin Edwards – who recently swooped up an Edgar statuette for The Golden Age of Murder (2015).

Sir Wilfred Saxonby is the president of an import company, Wigland & Bunthorne Ltd, who serves his community as the chairman of the local Bench of magistrates, but he "was a man of temperate" and "frugal habits." As a magistrate, his philosophy was that "the law was an excellent thing" and considered himself "a firm supporter of it," but it was made for a different class of people and did not always felt bound by it himself – which did not prevent him from being reluctant "to temper justice with mercy" when acting in the capacity of magistrate. So not exactly "the sort of character who inspires affection."

There seems to have been something very irregular on Sir Wilfred's mind when he boarded the train from London's Cannon Street to his home in Stourford for the very last time. He pressed a one-pound note in the hands of the train guard, Mr. Turner, to find him a first-class carriage to himself, which he was able to do and locked him into the compartment. Sir Wilfred is left to his own devices, but when Turner returns to the supposedly secure and impromptu private-compartment he discovers the body of his once generous passenger. Shot through the heart!

Inspector Arnold of Scotland Yard is assigned to the case and the problem confronting him is rife with contradictory evidence. The death of Sir Wilfred is either a case of suicide or murder. There are some points in favor of the former: a small, automatic pistol engraved with his initials is found near the body, the request for private carriage that was locked and he sent his children abroad – which could have been done to make sure that they would not be suspected if the authorities mistook his death for a murder. Only problem is that he lacked a clear and conceivable motive for taking his own life. Business was thriving and he was opposed to the idea of suicide, but the presence of a mysterious murderer seems, literarily, an impossibility.

So Arnold turns to his good friend, Desmond Merrion, who's "something of an amateur criminologist" and even he remarks how "there is at least as much evidence in support of the theory of suicide as there is against it," which makes for an engrossing and meticulous investigation – as they sift through the evidence and hypothesize about the various clues. The best part of their investigation is figuring out what exactly happened when the train went into the titular tunnel on that fateful journey. A situation that forms the meat of the impossible situation of the plot.

When the train entered the Blackdown Tunnel, the driver claims to have been "held up by a man waving a red lamp," assuming it was simply someone working on the line, and "clapped on the brakes," but then the light changed to green and the train rattled on without losing too much time. There is, however, one peculiarity about this seemingly unimportant incident: nobody was reported or scheduled to work in the tunnel at the time and "some unauthorized person" could not have entered the tunnel, because at each end there's a signal cabin and "nobody could possibly get in without being seen by the men on duty."

My favorite part of the book is probably the exploration of the tunnel as trains murderously roared past them and more than once they had to crawl into one of refuges in the wall for safety. Arnold and Merrion are well rewarded for braving these dangers, because they discover some important pieces of evidence, such as shattered fragments of glass, which seem to indicate Sir Wilfed was the victim of a vast, strange and sinister conspiracy. But even better is the explanation they work out for entering and leaving a sealed and watched train tunnel, which does not hinge upon a spare uniform from a railway worker.

The method is very involved and perhaps a bit too clever for its own good, but you have to admire Rhode for finding a hidden Judas window inside a train tunnel!

Anyway, Death in the Tunnel concerns itself almost entirely with the reconstruction of the shooting and the particulars found on the body, which is both a major strength and weakness of the book. If you love pure, unadulterated detective work this book is for you, but, as a consequence, even I found the characters to be cardboard-like. I can usually forgive shallow characterization, if the plot is good, but even I can't deny the characters here where nothing more than chessmen. Death in the Tunnel is also primarily a how-dun-it and this came at the cost of the who and why, which is what bars the book from a place in the top ranks of the genre because the plot-thread explaining the motivation for this admittedly devilish ingenious conspiracy was introduced in the final part of the story.

I believe that could've been handled a bit better by a professional plotter, which Rhode was, but, if you read the book purely as a how dun it, they become fairly minor complaints. Above all, it's simply a lot of old-fashioned fun to read how Arnold and Merrion take apart the mechanics of a very tricky criminal conspiracy. It makes for an engaging and involved reading experience.  

Finally, Death in the Tunnel also made me want to read more from the so-called school of humdrum detectives, which even include writers I have not even touched yet! Scandalous, I know. How dare I label myself as rabid and fanatical when it comes to vintage mysteries, but give me some time. I'll get there and, in the mean time, you can look forward to more of these reviews. Oh, you lucky, you!

Tiger's Cage

 "Aw, c'mon, you can't fool us! A genie is supposed to grant wishes."

- Louie (Duck Tales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, 1990)

Paul Halter's La tête du tigre (The Tiger's Head, 1991) is the fifth novel, alongside a dusting of collected and uncollected short stories, to be translated from French into English by our very own purveyor of miracles – John Pugmire of Locked Room International.

The first half of The Tiger's Head is divided between chapters entitled "On the Trail of the Suitcase Killer" and "The Leadenham Chronicles," in which we follow Dr. Alan Twist, Inspector Archibald Hurst and the inhabitants of a normal sleepy village before their respective problems collide in the second half. Twist and Hurst are tasked with roaming train stations for clues in a particular brutal murder case. Someone has been discarding suitcases containing the severed arms and legs of women, however, they've been unable to locate any of the heads or romps – which is not a case you'd think interest Twist. Until the "Suitcase Killer" strikes again in unfathomable circumstances.

Jenny Olsen is a flower girl of reputedly questionable virtue and was seen by her boyfriend, Tom Ross, entering her apartment in the company of a shadowy figure and flees to the nearest pub. A friend convinces him to go back and confront the bloke, but they find the door and windows secured from within. However, the lights are still on and the sound of running water can be heard. They force the front door and the place appears to be deserted, but someone turned off the water tap, made a bloody mess of the bathroom and left a suitcase behind – containing a severed set of woman's legs and arms. The murderer and the remaining body parts seem to have faded from existence!

Meanwhile, in the otherwise quiet and dormant village of Leadenham, another series of crimes are being perpetrated, but the petty thefts of chocolates, candles and hats are fairly tame in comparison with the Suitcase Murders. The best part of these so-called village chronicles is the introduction of the people who live there and those who'll be there for the second act. I have often criticized Halter's depiction of villages as nothing more than a small, tight cluster of houses where the suspects happened to be living for the purpose of the story (e.g. The Fourth Door, 1987), but here there's more of a communal feeling – even though the characterization remains on the surface. 

Major John McGregor is one of Leadenham's citizens with a bagful of tall stories and anecdotes from his days in India, which includes witnessing the famous Rope Trick in person and an account of an unsolved murder case eerily similar to the suitcase murders.

The major finds a new audience for his tales with the arrival of his nephew, Jim, who's a professional tennis player and his fiancée, Evelyn Marshall, but there's also the engaged couple of Clive Farjeon and Esther Dove and the former adopts a skeptical attitude towards the stories. One of the prized items in Major McGregor's collections of swords and daggers is in fact a bamboo cane with a lump of bronze as big as a fist and shaped like the head of a tiger, which he won from a fakir in a crooked bet. It's said that the head of the tiger is the home of an ill-tempered genie and prone to violence after being summoned, especially towards those who refused to believe in him before appearing.

Major McGregor and Clive Farjeon lock themselves up in the lounge room and every possible exit is being guarded by their friends, which does not prevent something from viciously attacking both men with the titular cane – killing the major and seriously injuring Farjeon. However, there's nobody else to be found in the room afterwards! The nature of Farjeon's wounds clears him from suspicion and the actual solution was far cleverer, original and better executed than the first locked room murder, which had an intriguing set-up but a lousy explanation.

Plot-wise, The Tiger's Head is the most complex and ambitious novel I have read from Halter since La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door), but (alas!) this intricate braided rope of plot-threads has a few weak spots and flaws. It's so complex you can understand and forgive Halter for bringing luck and coincidence into the game, which were words too often dropped by Twist in the explanation. But in the authors defense... what an imagination! However, the real flaw in Halter's works (IMHO) remains the lack of sense of time (and often a place), which is not an unimportant aspect of stories set in the past. I wonder how different the writing in these stories would've been, if they had been set in France instead of England. Anyhow...

To sum this review up, The Tiger's Head is not a novel of crime that fleshes out characters by going over every minutiae of their life, with a dash of social commentary, but a detective story that takes great pride in being elaborate for the sake of being elaborate. I liked it in spite of some of its shortcomings.

True Crime: A Journey Back in Time

"Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air, it is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money — or because the heart aches. L’amour, it causes many fatalities, does it not?"

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train, 1928)

On New Year's Eve, 1921, a steam locomotive pulling an express train makes a stopover at Amsterdam Central Station and Mr. Jacques Wijsman, a promising young lawyer celebrating his thirty-second birthday and on his way to mark the turn of the year with his parents, boards the train – occupying a warm, first-class compartment. An hour later, they arrive at station Hollands Spoor, Den Haag (The Hague), where a female passenger makes a gruesome discovery. Mr. Wijsman lies on the floor of the compartment, partially covered with his overcoat, shot three times in the elbow, shoulder and chest.
 

J. Wijsman

This is not a sketchy premise of yet another obscure, untranslated detective story set aboard a train, but the curtain-raiser in an illustrious murder case I first read about in A.C.Baantjer's true-crime book Doden spreken niet: veertig onopgeloste moorden (The Dead Don't Speak: Forty Unsolved Murders, 1966). There are aspects to Mr. Wijsman's murder, professional and personal, which I can only describe as food for mystery writers and even gave raise to a bone-fide conspiracy theory. Yes, I have a possible solution tucked away at the ending. It's classic.

Let's take the known facts from the beginning: detectives found three, copper shell casings on the floor of the compartment and discovered the murderer had taken Wijsman's jacket (holding his personal documents and other papers). Curiously, a wallet containing 10 guilders was left on the body. 

Another, online source I consulted, described the police-investigation as hilarious fumbling and this evident when only a subsequent look at the moordcoupé reveals a crumpled up, paper bag from a sandwich store in Amsterdam – which still had one shrimp left in it. Granted, the station master had removed the body and sealed the compartment, which had badly affected the evidence, but it's still sloppy police work the bag didn't turn up during the first sweep of the crime scene. The police departments of Amsterdam and Den Haag were (from the given reports) everything but cooperative in their search for the unknown man who shared the compartment with Wijsman and nurse Greetje de Boer. Interestingly, De Boer was shown photographs and she made a positive identification, but the man was able to produce a satisfying alibi. Days after the murder, the police were inundated with tips from physic mediums, crackpots and people who may've thought they witnessed something of importance. But the point is that they had to be checked and basically amounted to chasing phantasms or passengers who were seen running to catch their last train home on the evening of the murder.

The Dead Don't Speak (1966)

What caused the turmoil surrounding the murder (all the way up to the 1930s), and led to questions being asked in parliament, wasn’t all on the bungling of the police, but the rampant rumors surrounding Wijsman’s private life – who was gay in a time when being gay condemned you to a double-life. Wijsman was linked with actor Gerard Vrolijk, who was known for keeping a house filled with unwed men and the papers buzzed with rumors of directions from above to sweep this embarrassing case under the carpet. 

However, as interesting an angle as Wijsman's private-life may've been to the press and their readers at the time, I would've personally followed a different trail from his professional life and it's according to one of the elementary rules of police work – follow the money. There were unconfirmed rumors of Wijsman possessing documents about the Renate Leonhardt, a German ship torpedoed in 1917 by the British after sailing from Rotterdam to Hamburg and became a lore of the sea as a goudwrak (gold wreck) on account of its cargo, 55 million guilders in gold, but there were questions asked how the British knew how and when to strike (they barely left the harbor). Was there even gold aboard the ship? And were the British in on the scheme and tied up the loose ends by sinking the evidence to the bottom of the sea? It's basically on conspiracy on top of another conspiracy. 

Well, I'm not going to drag an international conspiracy from The Great War into my version of the crime, but the fact remains that personal documents were taken from the body. A theft of papers doesn't fit the modus operandi of an enraged lover following Wijsman around on New Year's Eve, undoubtedly fingering the loaded firearm in the pocket of his winter coat, waiting for the moment to strike. Even if you assume the documents were love-letters and dangerous to the murderer's social status (and assume Wijsman carried them on his person), you also have to ask yourself why he took the risk of shooting Wijsman when they were both stuck on a moving train. It would've been safer and easier to get away, if he had struck when Wijsman got off the train and was on his way to his parent's home.

I think there was a work-related affair at the back of the shooting and someone hired an amateur to the job of a professional, which I base on two (admittedly meager) clues, but the circumstances of the crime weren't given in details. For example, I have no idea what the distance was between the murderer and Wijsman when the shots were fired, but I know Wijsman was sitting in a corner seat by the window in the first carriage of the train – practically with his back against the proverbial wall. I don't presume they were at opposite sites of the carriage when the shots were fired, and yet, the bullet wounds weren't grouped closely together. Two of the three bullets struck the shoulder and elbow, and only the third found the heart. I assume that someone who’s used to handling firearms would shoot with more precision, even inside a hunk of metal in motion, which is my other point and the most baffling aspect of the case...

The fatal shooting occurred in the first-class compartment of a moving train and the wounds of the body could suggest a murderer not entirely comfortable with handling pistols, but still did the job akin to Michael Corleone strolling into a restaurant and shooting Captain McCluskey in the throat. Murder under any circumstances would make a man nervous, let alone on an express train without an escape, but that's the cold and deliberate part of the killing. The murderer must have felt comfortable to premeditatedly fire three shots in a train carriage that's still on the run.

I know this sounds trite and hacky, but I would've closely investigated the complaisant witkiel (railway porter), who gallantly held open the door to the lady discovering the body (at least as a witness if he didn't hop the ride) and the conductor of the train as the main suspect. Wijsman had apparently a good relationship with his parents, who didn't hear about the death of their son until the following morning, after asking at the station if any accidents had happened, and it's safe to assume he made the journey before. You can safely assume people knew he was going to spend the last hours of his birthday and the old year with his parents (or guessed it), which gives our secret adversary an opportunity to snatch the documents from Wijsman at a vulnerable moment of presumed safety... this/these person(s) only have to grease a poor conductor's palm with some silver, supply him with a gun and instructions. 

A conductor can pass through a train unnoticed and talk with passengers without raising suspicions. The train is not moving prison to a conductor, but a familiar surrounding in which he naturally belongs. People hardly even notice them.

Oh, the sandwiches bag with the shrimp. It's probably nothing and left there by the mysterious, but innocent, traveler, however, if you insist on a clever explanation. Do you really think the police found shell casings and missed a wad of paper? The compartment was stored at the railways and it's not unthinkable the murderer, who probably read detective stories at moments of leisurely at a station house, planted it afterwards as an act of bravado to baffle the police (he could have had access). After all, the police would be asking the sandwich shop to describe the people who bought their shrimps before the murder and not after.

Now if I can be so rude to ask one of you to play the Dr. Watson to my Sherlock Holmes and marvel at my stellar deductions.

A Strain on Reality: More Examples of Everyday Impossible Problems

"Heck, my grandma used to spin yarns about a spectral locomotive that would rocket past the farm where she grew up!"

- Roy Brady, Reporter (Ghostbusters, 1984)

In late March of this year, I cobbled together the first of three (filler) posts on those so-called unrealistic, impractical and pesky "Locked Room Mysteries" and "Impossible Crimes" popping-up outside of the boundaries of the printed pages. Here are the links to parts I, II and III.

I reported on actor Wilfred Lawson, renowned for being one of the few from his trait "who could function quite well with a skinful" and "has a stockpile of thespian anecdotes second to none," counting an hilariously failed attempt at getting him sober in front of a live radio-mike. Lawson was put under supervision of a minder, who searched the actor and the dressing room before locking him in, but these trifles did not prevent Lawson from getting properly drunk inside a locked room bare of any traces of alcohol. As surprising as any plot-twist you can foresee from the get-go, I had to include my own solution to this unsolved mystery. However, there were also instances where there were answers to the impossible premises: a magician who plugs a leak of information in a tightly secured betting facility known as the "Horse Room" and the homely anecdote of a mystery writer's cat accidentally (or instinctively?) creating what could've been an entire locked house mystery – if only she hadn't been witnessed in the act.

I had run through the best stories after merely three posts and the left over material simply wasn't as tantalizing, but there's one that now gave me an excuse to add a fourth part to the series (hence the padded introduction retracing my previous posts).

Departing for the departed

The St. Louis Ghost Light (or Ghost Train) is a light phenomenon from a supposed supernatural origin seen near St. Louis, Saskatchewan, Canada and was a subject on the TV-series Unsolved Mysteries. The phenomenon involves unaccountable, varied-colored lights moving up and down along an old, abandoned railway lines and even breaking up the tracks failed to put a stop to the ghosts lights. Locals report the apparitions can still be seen almost every night. And where there are locals, you can bet there's a good campfire story to be told. There's one about a brakeman checking the tracks who was struck down and decapitated by a passing train, which he now wanders in search for his head with his lantern – causing the smaller, red lights. The bright, yellowish lights are ascribed to a spectral steam locomotive pulling its carriages. If there's something beyond this world we should do business with them, because ectoplasm-driven ghost cars and phantom planes will break our carbon footprint in several crucial places.

Unfortunately, a pair of bright Grade 12 students, Alysha and Shannon, from Northern Saskatchewan wrecked the whole epic thing with their science fair project based on proper research and field work – yielding a surprisingly natural and demonstrable explanation called diffraction. It's basically an optical illusion making light apparent from far away when it passes through a small opening and this won them a gold medal at the fair. You can read a more detailed account of the explanation here, but, interestingly, one of these self-styled miracle detectives is a believer and the other a skeptic. If you add up the story of the ghost lights/train and the nature of its solution, you're left with the perfect plot-outline for a crossover story between Thomas Carnacki and John Bell. All in all, a job well done and a deserved medal. 

By the way, the wikipedia page of the St. Louis Ghost Light (linked above) mentions the lights have been seen before cars were invented (a citation is still needed!), which should leave open the door for ghosts... if you ignore that back then there were still trains running over those lines... or assume that before cars people travelled without lanterns after dark... I'm just saying.

To pad out this filler post even further, I might as well throw in another one that didn't make the cut because it was too sketchy on the details. In a post from 2005 on a magician's forum, DrNorth tries to recalls a conversation from 20 years ago in which he was told about a fellow performer assisting the police by showing the Scooby Doo-like trickery in what appears to have been a brutal murder case. More than one person were apparently found slaughtered inside a locked warehouse with evidence abound of an occult ritual, including a burned hoof print in a cinder block, which he was able to reproduce to show how they used fear to manipulate the public and their followers. The demonstration was so convincing the officers at the scene drew their weapons when smoke began to appear from the hoof print, but I have to add that this is the only source I was able to find of the story. I want it to be true though. Or at least be given some clues to piece together a workable solution. 

Discussing locked room mysteries over a game of cards with Luci

Well, I guess my mind belongs to a period when it was possible to chase Sir Basil Zaharoff, the Mystery Man of Europe, across the continent or have been attached to some secret, Allied department of dirty tricks during the Second World War. I would've found Hitler's sense of security in his sealed, underground bunker adorable and unexpectedly polite to pose such a challenge to me. How did he know I loved locked room mysteries so much? That silly goose really was a tough nut to crack.

Enough mindless filler for one sitting and you can hopefully expect a fresh review this weekend. I feel strangely compelled to dig up some mystery novel set aboard a train or around train tracks. No idea if I have such a book on my TBR-pile.