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.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey wrote in his preface to the second, revised edition of Locked Room Murders (1991) that after the 1930s, "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels" was John Dickson Carr with the only other author "who produced them in any quantity" being a little-known pulp writer, John Russell Fearn – who wrote (roughly) twenty locked room novels between Black Maria, M.A. (1944) and his untimely passing in 1960. These include the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005) and Pattern of Murder (2006).

In my reviews of The Fourth Door (1948) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951), I went over the wealth of fresh ideas and originality Fearn brought to the detective story. And, in particular, to the impossible crime story.

Regrettably, the pile of unread Fearn novels have dwindled over the years and only one, of the twentysome, locked room mysteries remained on my wishlist. An extremely obscure, hard-to-get Western-style mystery, Merridrew Marches On (1951), which has a curious backstory that has remained invisible to most locked room readers until now.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle, editor, writer and Fearn's long-time literary agent, was first published by Robert Hale in their hardcover "Black Horse Western" series and the synopsis had a specific line that attracted my immediate attention – a dead man is found on a mountain trail with "no footprints in the dust beside his body." What can I say? Every body of water has its shallow parts. However, when I contacted Harbottle to inquire about Meredith's Treasure potential status as an impossible crime novel, he told me that it was actually based on two separate already published novels written by Fearn. Namely the previously mentioned, very obscure, Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again (1952). So what's the backstory?

Harbottle explained that, in 2000, Robert Hale had lost a lot of their regular writers and his Cosmos Literary Agency had been hired to help them maintain their ten new titles every month "Black Horse" line. His still active writers were able to supply new novels along with scores of their older titles, which Hale reprinted with due acknowledgments and Harbottle himself supplied a number of new novels that were based around a number of disparate Fearn short stories and novelettes. As copyright holder of all Fearn's stories by virtue of his widow's will, Harbottle was legally entitled to create these posthumous collaborations.

Harbottle explained that he had "to completely rewrite and "stitch" two, and sometimes three, separate stories together, changing all the different heroes and heroines to the same person" to "expand them to novel length" – whilst "retaining much of Fearn's original text." There was, however, an important proviso imposed by Hale's library buyers. They could only reprint old paperbacks and, under no circumstances, would the library buyers accept hardcover reprints. Fortunately, most of his clients had published Westerns mostly in paperbacks and only Fearn had done hardcovers in any quantity, which left out the Merridrew Westerns. A series Harbottle thought "represented some of his very best work." So he decided to rewrite the Merridrew character/books, which made them qualify as brand new works to satisfy Hale's library buyers. Harbottle explained that the originals had modern setting, the 1950s, but all the characters in the small, isolated Arizona town ride around on horses, carry gun belts and six shooters and act just like old-time cowboys. Every now, and then, the town is "invaded" by the modern world when outsiders arrive in cars, or trucks, who bring modern equipment with them. So he decided to rewrite them as all taking place in the old west (c. 1890). No cars, no airplanes, no radios. Merridrew became Meredith. He rewrote the first and second novel, but the third and fourth posed a real problem.

Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again have plots involving their modern-day setting, such as the discovery of uranium and initially secret mining operations, which is why he decided to merge the two novels into Meredith's Treasure. A merger that retained all of the original plot strands, motivations and impossible crime elements, but with all the names of characters changed to those of relatives and friends of Harbottle. One of the characters is named after Robert Adey! Something he very much enjoyed.

So why this long introduction to a pulp western/detective novel? Merridrew Marches On is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders and so will be known, in name only, to readers of this blog. A blog with a special interest in locked room and impossible crime fiction. However, I doubt very much whether many of you have actually read Merridrew Marches On, because it is extremely scarce and expensive. So the question is whether Harbottle's more readily available Meredith's Treasure, in which he asserts has preserved Fearn's impossible crime plotting, is worth our attention – purely on its own merits. Let's find out!

First of all, I've to acknowledge that the blending, an stitching together, of two different novels was indeed seamlessly done, because the whole plot coherently stuck together. However, it does explain why the story cycles from one genre to another. Story begins as an old-fashioned Western, but quickly turns into a detective story with an impossible crime, covered in the fingerprints of the scientific mystery, before it turns into an all-out adventure-and thriller yarn with all the trappings of the Western. And, all the while, Fearn's science-fiction and pulp roots were showing.

Meredith's Treasure takes place in "a sweltering little township," Mountain Peak, where "every board was warped and every trace of paint had been blistered" by the torrid Arizona sunlight. The small township is governed by the potbellied Mayor Randle Meredith and his son, Sheriff Bart Meredith.

On a blistering, mid-afternoon, Sheriff Meredith is visited by Reverend Maurice Peregrine, creator of the Reformed Sinners' Gospel, whose lectures and sermons converted many hardened criminals in other towns – picked Mountain Peak as his present port of call to spread his gospel. Legally, or morally, there are no objections to him preaching, but the Merediths are worried about the dozen dusty, gruff and impatient-looking horsemen he brought with him. All of them converted criminals. What could go wrong? Their arrival coincides with the appearance in town of a wanted criminal, "Holdup" Hogan, who has been involved "in a sundry of stage holdups and train robberies." As to be expected, this leads to a confrontation between Hogan, Peregrine and the Mayor, but they're interrupted by Brian Teviotdale storming into the saloon. On the foothill trail, Brian encountered a phantom horseman who began to chase him and he fled "like a man with the devil at his heels." One of the patrons, Bob Cook, is skeptical and immediately goes to the spot where Brian saw the phantom horseman, which is where his body is eventually found. There are no marks on the body and no accounting how the body got there or the lack of footprints in the dust. Dr. Adey makes it even more of an impossible situation when he tells the Meredith's Cook was gassed to death!

This is not the last murder, or impossibility, in the first half of the story. A local girl is found murdered in the streets with "Holdup" Hogan next to her. So the towns people are ready to string him up on the spot, but, before he can be swung into eternity, a third body appears out of nowhere in the middle of the main street! The entire crowd stared into the dark sky for an answer, but there was nothing there "but the stars and the silence of the night." Cleverly, the possibility of a hot-air balloon is quickly eliminated as too large and slow moving not to have been spotted by the crowd.

What I liked about the detective bits and pieces, roughly taking up the first half of the story, is how they quickly come to the conclusion that they're "not dealing with hillbillies" who only know "the trigger of a gun" – which doesn't rhyme with the deaths suggesting "intelligence and scientific knowledge." And this apparent fact was cleverly woven into the plot. Admittedly, the people who read Meredith's Treasure as a detective novel will very likely spot the brains behind the plot, but how the bodies miraculously appeared in impossible places is a lot trickier and more in line with the weird menace pulps than with the pure locked room/impossible crime story. On first sight, the method seems out-of-time and the imagery of how it was done would be more at home in a fantasy/science-fiction story, but it actually existed in the 1890s. And it actually figured in one of Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his gun-slinging cowboy sleuth, Ben Snow.

Yes, Harbottle definitely succeeded in preserving Fearn's impossible crime plotting and ideas here, because the solution is unmistakably one of his. It perfectly fits in his with his other pulp-style locked room mysteries, Account Settled (1949) and The Rattenbury Mystery (1955).

After this halfway mark, the story becomes, more and more, an adventure-and thriller yarn with a Western setting centering around the planned assault on a mountain stronghold and the long-buried secrets held inside it. This second half is full of dangerous bluffs, deadly double crosses and a cunning piece of misdirection with the Meredith's finding themselves, more than once, in a very tight corner where death is only a heartbeat away. Mayor Meredith is not exactly, what you would call, an infallible detective and surprisingly hardboiled in his approach, which include a bit of (mental) torture to extract information. An explosive and dangerous situation that eventually devolves in Mexican standoff between the Meredith Posse, a gang of outlaws and a group of natives trying to protect the mountain's long-held secret. This becomes quite a bloody affair that can match one of Paul Doherty's historical bloodbaths. Mayor Meredith concludes the case with a puppeteering act that even Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. would find questionable. Very hardboiled!

So, on a whole, Meredith's Treasure is a busy, fast-moving and interesting pulp-style take on the Western, but where does it rank among Fearn/Harbottle's output and the former's impossible crime novels? I wouldn't rank it with their best detective/locked room novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder, but still towers over lesser novels like The Tattoo Murders (1949), Ghost Canyon (1950), Lonely Road Murder (1954), Robbery Without Violence (1957) and One Way Out (2012). So very much a mid-tier, or second-string, novel. Nevertheless, it can stand on its own as a fun, pulpy treatment of the Western blended with the traditional detective story that's well worth a read as long as you keep in mind that it was written as a Western first and a detective story second.

I'll return to Fearn's original work sometime in the near future, because my private stash of pulp has been replenished and look forward to reading Fearn's attempt at a mystery novel with real vampires in it.

Edward D. Hoch: The Bullet from Beyond and Other Ben Snow Tales

Edward D. Hoch wrote nearly a thousand short stories and created a retinue of detective characters, some with more storied careers than others, who were, as Mike Grost so astutely described it, custom designed "to personify different mystery subgenres" – allowing him to write or indulge in any kind of detective story and trope. Hoch pretty much used his series-characters as a set of skeleton keys to go from the locked room mystery to the historical mystery, police procedural or the spy story. Clever guy!

So everyone has their own favorite series-character, or characters, that tend to reflect their personal taste to some degree. Unsurprisingly, my personal favorite is Hoch's 1930s New England country physician, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, who exclusively solves locked room murders and other seemingly impossible crimes. Dr. Hawthorne is nipped at the heels by Ben Snow and Nick Velvet.

The most important difference between these three divergent characters, a country doctor, a gunslinger and a professional thief, is that there have been multiple short story collections featuring Dr. Hawthorne and Velvet, but only one that stars Snow – namely The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales (1997). Since C&L have no immediate plans to publish a second volume, I decided to make up my own collection (all in my head) with uncollected stories.

Ben Snow is a turn-of-the-century gunslinger roaming the Americas around the time modern civilization began to encroach, and tame, the Wild West, but not without a fight. Old customs and legends lingered on, up and down, those dusty trails. Such as Snow's remarkable resemblance to that notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid, who had been reportedly shot and killed in New Mexico! So he regularly comes across people who either want to take a crack at the ghost of Billy the Kid or hire the fastest gun in New Mexico.

I assembled a six-shooter loaded with, as of now, half-a-dozen uncollected Ben Snow tales with story titles or plot descriptions that sounded promising. Yes, my selection includes more than one locked room and impossible crime story. Let's hit the trail!

"The Victorian Hangman" appeared in the August, 1988, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) to the town of Oceanfront, California, where he's hired by the owner of the Oceanfront Hotel, Douglas Rutherford. A guest had apparently hanged himself from the bandstand roof with "the traditional thirteen turns of the rope such as hangmen use," but his wife claims he couldn't even tie a square knot. Shortly after his death, the hotel received an ominous note in the mail: "ONE FOR THE HANGMAN. MORE TO COME." A promise that's kept during Snow's short stay at the hotel and the key to solving the murders is finding the motive linking the victims together. An unusual, but well done, serial killer/whydunit story.

"The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek" was published in the June, 1991, issue of EQMM and opens with Snow heading south to avoid the Montana winter, which, one evening, brings him to Buffalo Creek just after sundown. In the gathering gloom, Snow sees with his own eyes a rider, "dressed like a cowhand and urging his horse on with a beating of the reins," who has no face or head! A headless horseman!

Snow meets a local newspaper reporter, Thelma Blake, who tells him that the headless horseman is a recent addition to the town and she has been staking out the place where a regular appears, near the Clayton ranch, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the ghost – which is why he decides to accompany her the next night. They're rewarded with a headless horseman, but, this time, it's not a ghost or someone playing a ghost. It's a headless body riding a horse! Something had just whisked off the head as he rode, but there's no sign of a wire. Very clever to immediately eliminate the possibility of a stretched wire, because it added to the overall mystery.

I'm not sure whether, or not, to classify "The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek" as an impossible crime story, but the explanation is excellent and has a first-class, double edged clue alluding to both the who-and how. The answer to the subplot of the ghostly horseman places the story squarely Scooby Doo for grownups territory. One of the better stories in the series with a solid plot, clever clueing and a satisfying end.

"The Granite God" was published in the June, 1995, issue of EQMM and is a minor story, compared to the others reviewed here, which begins when Snow is hired by a retired cavalry officer, Colonel Faraway, to bring back his maid, Esmeralda. Colonel Faraway tells Snow she had "gone to the mountains to see the Lord." The mountain in question is near a silver mine, where they were blasting rocks, when the image of God appeared on a slab of granite. So people began to flock to the granite image, which is where Snow finds Esmeralda, but she's stabbed to death while kneeling in front of the image. I appreciated what Hoch tried to do here, but somehow, it left me completely underwhelmed. So moving on!

"The Bullet from Beyond" was published in the August, 1998, issue of EQMM and brings a creature to turn-of-the-century Oregon commonly found roaming "musty castles and fog-bound streets" of the Old World – an alleged vampire! Snow returned from the Yukon Territory, in Canada, to Grants Pass where he had stabled his horse five months previously. Something had changed since he was away. Six weeks previously, someone, or something, started killing animals and "the veterinarian who examined them said the blood had been drained out of their bodies." Snow is roped in to confront this alleged vampire, Ray Ridge, who's suspected of having "killed his wife up north about twenty years ago" and now lives as a recluse in an isolated cabin in the woods. But what he gets to witness is an impossible murder.

Ray Ridge is shot in front of his eyes, shots were heard outside, but "the windows were unbroken" and "the walls unpunctured," which means that the three armed men outside couldn't have fired the silver bullet. And the two other people inside the cabin were unarmed. So is there's any truth in the old legend that a silver bullet can penetrate a wall, or window, without leaving a mark and still kill a vampire?

Hoch naturally provides the story with a rational explanation, which is not one of his most ingenious locked room-tricks, but a footnote revealed that the solution was plucked from the pages of history. I checked it and, sure enough, it's true. You can read about it here (spoiler warning). So, on a whole, a pretty decent and readable locked room story.

"The Daughters of Crooked River" was published in the November, 1999, issue of EQMM and has Snow arriving in the middle of a racially charged dispute in the small town of Crooked River, Saskatchewan, part of the Northwest Territories – a place settled a generation ago by French-Canadian hunters and fur trappers. Indian women bore their children, the Metis, who now claim the land as their own. But the railroad has opened Saskatchewan to eastern wheat farmers and immigrants who want their share of the land. A complicating factor in the dispute is the death of the Metis leader, Anatole Dijon, who was shot and killed in his cabin with the door bolted on the inside. Only representative of the law, a Mountie, concluded that “his dog put its paw on the trigger of his rifle and fired it.” But not everyone is willing to swallow that story.

Usually, Snow's detective work is limited to observing and noticing small mistakes or incongruities, which spells the truth to him, but here we actually get to see him do some old-fashioned detective work. Snow tries to reconstruct the shooting in the victim's cabin, before realizing that he approached the locked room problem from the wrong angle. The locked room-trick is a good one and neatly fits the exact circumstances of the murder, but it's a variation on a trick that has been used before in the series. However, it's different and original enough to justify it being reused here.

"The San Augustin Miracle" was published in the January, 2001, issue of EQMM and Snow has drifted south to Tucson, a city of about 7,500 residents, located on the often-dry Santa Cruz River. Snow decides to stay when he hears a balloonist, Pancho Quizas, is en route with an hot-air balloon to give an exhibition, but he's not the only one looking forward to see the balloonist. A gruff, old-school gunslinger, Scooter Colt, is waiting for him with his right hand resting on the butt of his gun, but it never comes to confrontation as Pancho miraculously vanishes from the balloon basket as it descended. This situation becomes even more impossible when an irate Colt begins firing his six-shooter at the sky. Believe it, or not, but "the sky fired back." Colt dropped to the ground with a bullet in his eye!

A marvelous setup for one of those rare, two-way impossibilities with the strength of the solution laying in how these two impossibilities, minutes apart, connect and not how Pancho disappeared or how Colt was shot – which, by themselves, are nothing special. But with everything stitched together, you have a good and entertaining detective yarn.

So, all in all, my random selection of stories turned out to be a strong sampling of the Ben Snow series with the quality of stories ranging from outstanding ("The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek") to fairly decent ("The Granite God"), which is not a bad score for a hypothetical short story collection. Hopefully, this review will help a little bit in helping justify that second (official) volume.

A note for the curious: Nothing is Impossible: The Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2014) collects a rare crossover story, "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee," in which an elderly Snow meets Dr. Hawthorne. I love crossovers almost as much as a good locked room mystery and would love to see Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller writing a crossover in which Snow crosses paths with their 1890s San Francisco gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter. I know they'll treat Snow as if he was one of their own characters.

The Four Horsemen

"The more you know, the shorter your life is."

- Electra (Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' On Heaven's Door, 2001)

John Russell Fearn hardly requires an introduction on this blog, especially after the past year-and-a-half, but for the benefit of the uninitiated I'll very briefly go over his career again.

Fearn was an astonishingly prolific writer of science-fiction, westerns and detective stories, published under a legion of pennames, which largely appeared in such popular periodicals as the Toronto Star Weekly, Astounding Stories and Amazing Stories – marking a British success story in the American pulps. However, he was more than just a remarkably productive writer of magazine stories.

If you look at his bibliography, you'll notice that Fearn churned out full-length novels as fast as his short stories and they practically covered every single form of popular genre-fiction. So far, I primarily looked at his regular detective stories, like Except for One Thing (1947) and Death in Silhouette (1950), but also reviewed a science-fiction novel, The Lonely Astronomer (1954), which transported the classic locked room mystery to the distant, far-flung future. Earlier this year, I discovered Fearn might have done something similar with one of his westerns and thought of it would be a nice followup to my previous review to take a look at a western-style mystery novel.

Ghost Canyon (1950) was originally published under one of Fearn's many pseudonyms, namely "Matt Francis," and was based on a lengthy plot-outline written by a friend, Matthew W. Japp, who was a greengrocer and was decorated World War II veteran – who fought in Normandy, the Netherlands and Germany. Japp also wrote a western solo, titled Jackson's Spread, but the lion's share of his literary endeavors consisted of plotting six westerns for his friend. Ghost Canyon looks to have been their third collaboration and has an impossible disappearance mystery at the heart of the story.

The protagonist of the story is "a saddle tramp," Jerry Carlton, who arrives at a small outpost in Arizona, called Verdure, which has "an oddly deserted aspect" and resembled a ghost town. There were, however, strips of lights visible between the cracks of the wooden shutters that had been placed across every window in town. So there were people living there.

Carlton stops at the gateway of a "solitary wooden dwelling" and is met at the doorway by a woman with a gun, named Hilda Marchland, who lives there with her old father. It's from them that Carlton learns that the town is regularly haunted by the ghosts of four horsemen, "like they came out of the Apocalypse," clad in spectral white and the townsfolk have become too frightened to leave their homes after dark – some are now considering to abandoned the "hag-ridden" town. Even though the town is surrounded by rich, green patches of pastureland. Carlton has done enough riding under a clear sky and in the wind to start believing in spooks.

Hilda is delighted to have finally found someone who shares her skepticism and together they decide to tail the phantom horsemen to see what, and who, are behind the haunting, but they find more than they bargained for.

Each time the horsemen were seen, they rode into Star Canyon and staking out the mouth of the gorge yields immediate result. Carlton and Hilda saw the phantom horsemen appear, "dead in line with each other," slowly riding into the canyon and they followed behind to see where they were heading, but in the narrowest part of the canyon the hoof-prints came to a halt. As if they had ridden into a portal to the Other World! The walls at that point are smooth, and steep, without any rockery niches, acclivities and umarred by a single seam, which appear to be completely immovable "except by blasting" - which had all the potential of a first-class impossible problem. Regrettably, the gentlemen who wrote and plotted this story were not playing entirely fair with their readers.

You see, they early one discarded one possibility, a tired old trick, but the ending revealed that this discarded trick is exactly how the ghost-trick was accomplished, but by that time I had already grown fond of my own explanation.

My solution was based around the narrow passage and three hundred feet high walls. I imagined that, on the flattened top of the rocky canyon, a (movable) ramp-lift, like a mine-shaft elevator, stood that could be operated with a hand-winch and the horsemen were simply "air-lifted" out of the narrow passage by an accomplish. On top of the canyon, out of sight of everyone, the horses could be put away for the day in a tiny, makeshift stable. Nobody from the town below would dare to come there anyway. Sadly, the actual answer to the seemingly impossible disappearance of the horsemen turned out to be more prosaic, unfair and very, very dated.

So the only detective-element of any interest proved to be a monumental letdown and the remainder of the story was more reminiscent of a hardboiled western than a cowboy-detective.

For one, there's no real mystery about who's behind the business of the ghostly horsemen. Verdure is under the control, and run, by a small circle of men: Sheriff Harrison (who has an eye on Hilda), Mayor Burridge and the owner of the Black Coyote Saloon, Grant Swainson, who have clear motive for pulling this Scooby Doo stunt. So the primary problem for Carlton is how he has to deal with these men and trying to convince the towns people that they're being frightened out of their property.

A task slightly complicated when the people behind the swindle start murdering people who knew too much. Tragically, one of the victims is Hilda's father, but the villainous sheriff is also shot in the most stereotypical manner imaginable. After the death of Old Man Marchland, Carlton was roughing up the sheriff in the office, promising him he would stop when he starts talking, but a bullet whizzed through the open window to permanently silence him. By the way, it would have made more sense for the murderer to have shot Carlton, because he was physically attacking the sheriff and therefore could be passed off to the people of the town as a justifiable homicide.

So, yeah, the crime-elements are pretty sub-par in Ghost Canyon, but this is slightly made up by the action-scenes towards the end. Such as a very memorable scene when a destructive animal stampede passes through the town. I also snickered at the scene when the murderer is confronted by the angry towns people, ready to lynch him, but tells him he's entitled to stand on his constitutional rights. As to be expected, the people of Verdure were not having any of it.

Well, Ghost Canyon is a very readable and even fun story to read, but the plot is decidedly second-rate and can not be recommended as an example of the western-style detective story like Edward D. Hoch's Ben Snow stories. So I'll probably stick to Fearn's regular detective-fiction for the foreseeable future. Luckily, he wrote enough of those to last me a while.

A Note for the Curious: Fearn's collaborator on this book, Matthew Japp, passed away in January of this year at the grand old age of 102. Only four days short of his 103rd birthday!

Quick on the Draw

"I'm sure you have lots of stories about the Old West."

- Mary Best (Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee," collected in Nothing is Impossible: Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 2014)

Edward D. Hoch's The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales (1997) is the only collection of short stories about his gunslinger character, Ben Snow, who's always "a long way from home," as he travels from town to town, but everywhere he goes he's followed by the ghost of the Wild West's most legendary gunfighter, Billy the Kid – to whom he bears a resemblance.

Snow is lightening quick on the draw and hailed from the State of New Mexico, where Billy the Kid was reportedly shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett, which convinced enough people that the outlaw had survived and adopted the name Ben Snow. This makes him a magnet for all kinds of problems. Everywhere he goes in the Old West, there are people who either want to take a shot at "the ghost of Billy Kid" or "hire the fasted gun in New Mexico." So the series places the traditional detective story within the framework of a Western and it worked like a charm.

I've to note here that I'm not very knowledgeable, or well-read, where Westerns are concerned, but, going by these fairly modern incarnations of that genre, I can understand why horse-and-cowboy tales were once as greedily consumed as the other popular forms of genre-fiction – such as our beloved detective story and the science-fiction genre.

According to the introduction, this collection of the first fourteen stories in the Ben Snow series "is really two books in one."

The first seven stories appeared between 1961 and 1965 in the British and American publications of The Saint Mystery Magazine, which are supposed to be read with "a bit of tolerance for a young writer," but these earlier stories are as good as the later ones. After 1965, Snow rode off into the sunset and would not be seen for another twenty years when Hoch resurrected the series for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It would be a home for the wandering gunslinger until his literary father passed away in 2008.

So, now we got that out of the way, let's take a look at the short stories that makes up this splendid collection of historical mysteries, which all take place during the late 1800s and early 1900s!

"Frontier Street" was the secondly published story in the series, originally appearing in the May 1961 issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine (hereafter, SMM), but was intended by Hoch to be the series-opener – which is a mistake that has been corrected in this volume. Ben Snow has been hanging around the titular street for the pass two months, mostly enjoying complete obscurity, but then "the power on Frontier Street," Len Antioch, summons him to the Golden Swan. The gambling boss has gotten wise of the rumors surrounding Snow's identity and wants to hire his gun to get rid of the pesky deputy, Reilly, but his refusal places him a tight, dangerous spot. A spot that's tightened, like a noose, when the gambling boss is clubbed to death with a gun butt on the same day as the hit on the deputy was issued.

This is a pretty good story that only serves as an excellent introduction to the character of Ben Snow, but also has a very decent plot that plays on the least-likely-suspect gambit and how this character is brought to heel is exactly what you'd expect from a Western. Snow challenges the murderer to a showdown in the street with only a single bullet left in the cylinder of his six-shooter, which he spins to make it as dangerous as humanly possible. So he has no clue which chamber holds that all important bullet. It's like Russian Roulette for people who are bored with playing Russian Roulette! A solid opening story of this fine collection of stories.

"The Valley of Arrows" was the first story to be published in the series, printed on the pages of the May 1961 publication of SMM, but had originally been written as the second one and the plot might explain why they were, initially, published out-of-order. It has a relatively simple, but memorable, premise reminiscent of Robert van Gulik's "The Night of the Tiger" from The Tiger and the Monkey (1965). So it was probably picked by the magazine editors as the series-opener, because it would leave a stronger impression on their readers.

The story begins with the arrival of Snow at Fort Arrowhead, "a city in the making" or "a last outpost against the red man," where he came with a serious warning. Snow had come across hoof-prints in the valley, "showing that someone from the fort had met with two Navajos," which obviously was not a place where a peace meeting or truce talk had taken place – suggesting the potential presence of a traitor within the walls of the fort. After his arrival, the body of the legendary commending officer of the fort, Colonel Noakes, is found with "a Navajo arrow protruding from the left side of his neck." However, this is not even the beginning of their problems.

Snow is part of a two-men truce mission, conducted under a white flag, to offer the Colonel's body to the chieftain, Running Bear, in exchange for the safety of the people at the fort. Only problem is that the traitor has promised "the lives of one hundred men," which ends the truce talks in an exciting horse-race back to the fort that's followed by a full-scale siege of the place. So this is more of a Western than a detective, but a very good and memorable one.

"Ghost Town" was originally published in the September 1961 issue of SMM and brings Snow to an abandoned, reputedly haunted, town in a valley, called Raindeer, where he finds an ill-assorted group of people. There's the apparent leader of the group, a priest, whose obviously wearing a gun under his black suit and has two very mismatched companions: an Indian dressed as a cowboy, but with a knife, instead of a gun, on his belt and a foul-mouthed, tobacco-chewing old man with a beard. Finally, there's a woman who fired a bullet at Snow and tied him up for the night.

Unfortunately, for the group, the place is living up to its reputation and one of them is gruesomely murdered. The old bearded man is found "pinned to the wall like some giant butterfly" with a harpoon and the floor surrounding the body is soaking wet. As if some "creature from the sea" had struck down a man in "the middle of the desert." A story with a very enthralling, well executed premise, with a mounting body-count that turned the ghost town into a small graveyard, but Hoch did not neglect to drop a clue, or two, that hinted at the truth. Such as how the murderer was able to strike in dark places or the water-drenched floor. I liked it.

"The Flying Man" appeared in the December 1961 issue of SMM and the premise of the story showcased Hoch's sorely missed talent for setting the stage.

Snow has been spending time among the three-hundred odd citizens of Twisted River, "a dried-up hole," which is one day visited by a man in a wagon, Doc Robin, who calls himself The Flying Man. Doc Robin has brought an amazing invention from the East Coast of the United States: a contraption with a giant set of wings that is used in big cities, like New York, to glide off buildings. He has even brought newspaper articles with him to proof his claim and promises a demonstration before taking one-hundred dollar orders from the town folks with a ten buck down payment. But before the big demonstration, Doc Robin approaches Snow with an offer to become his bodyguard and ensure him a safe departure from the town (with the money). Snow refuses the offer.

On the following morning, the town had gathered to watch Doc Robin glide down from the hill on his mechanical wings, but what they saw instead was a man crashing down to earth. And the cause of the crash was a well-aimed bullet. This fact makes the murder a borderline impossible crime, because the shot could've only been made with a rifle and nobody in the crowd was seen carrying a large, cumbersome rifle – or even a simple sidearm. Hoch is daringly fair in dangling the tell-tale clue in front of the reader and the fact that the victim had approached another gunman with his offer provided the plot with a solid motive. Plot-wise, this is easily the best Snow story from the 1960s period of the series.

Assassination of President McKinley

"The Man in the Alley" was printed in the April 1962 issue of SMM and, story-wise, is arguably the most interesting entry in the series for two reasons. One of them is that the plot actually deals with the rumors that Snow is Billy the Kid and the other places him on the scene of the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. I can't say much else about the story except that the plot is a great example, or recipe, of how fiction can be mixed with actual historical events without having to take liberties with the latter (see the final lines of the story).

"The Ripper of Storyville" was originally published in the September 1962 issue of SMM and, according to the introduction, Cornell Woolrich approached Hoch at a Mystery Writers of America cocktail party to tell him personally how much "he admired the story" - which, at the time, was considerable praise for a then still young writer. And the compliment was more than deserved.

Snow is hired by a dying Texan rancher and oil millionaire, Archer Kinsman, whose daughter, Bess, ran away from home and ended up in the red-light district of New Orleans, but Kinsman wants to make amends before his time is up. Snow accepts the assignment and travels to the Storyville, New Orleans, where the preparations of Mardi Gras are in full swing. There is, however, a slight problem complicating his task: a number of woman have been brutally murdered and the general belief is that Jack the Ripper has come to the Americas. Initially, I assumed to plot would prove to be very simple and transparent ("you don't know what I've become"), but Snow uncovers a hidden connection between all of the victims.

A connection that had to be obliterated in order to obscure the all-revealing motive behind a previous crime that fueled the string of murders. This is one of those excellent serial-killer detective stories in the same vein as Ellery Queen's A Cat of Many Tails (1949).

"Snow in Yucatan" was printed in the January 1965 edition of SMM and marked the end of the first period in the series, which went into dormancy until the mid-1980s.

Once again, Snow was offered a big chunk of cash, two-thousand dollars, by three ex-soldiers to murder a man, Wade Chancer, who's a thousand miles away in Mexico. Chancer had served with the ex-soldiers under Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba, but had deserted his brothers-in-arms and good men had died as a consequence. So he has to pay with his own life. Only problem is that he has fled to Mexico and made himself a general with the ambition to take over the country. Or a large swath of it. Chancer wants to use to the native population for this purpose and appears to have a magical hold over the Indians, which becomes a problem when the self-appointed general dies under inexplicable circumstances.

The story has a ton of local color and great story-telling, but the plot is rather thin and easily seen through. You can easily guess the source of Chancer's power over the natives and figured out how he died based on the photographic clue, which immediately brought Rufus King's A Variety of Weapons (1943) to mind. So not a bad story, but not particular great either.

"The Vanished Steamboat" marked the resurrection of Ben Snow and made his debut on the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) of May 1984, which also happens to be the first full-blown impossible crime story of the series.

Snow has been hanging around Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he has made some good friends, such as a riverboat gambler, Eddie Abilene, but Snow has to play detective again when a steamboat, known as River Ridge, vanishes impossibly from a stretch of the Mississippi River – as if it had suddenly ceased to exist between two ports. One of the people aboard had been Abilene. So the old gunslinger accepts an offer from the steamboat's owner to find out what happened to the River Ridge and does some old-fashioned detective work to reach the only correct conclusion, which even included a false solution based on Conan Doyle's famous 1898 short story, "The Lost Special."

Hoch came up with a perfectly acceptable and believable explanation for the impossibility of a vanishing steamboat, but one that most readers will probably instinctively guess and the clues only serve as a confirmation of your gut-feeling. A limited range of possibilities will always be a weak spot of impossible crime stories that attempt to make streets, houses, planes, trains or boats vanish into thin air.

"Brothers on the Beach" was published in the August 1984 issue of EQMM and is another story that mixes actual history with fiction, but not quite as successful as "The Man in the Alley."

Roderick and Rudolph Claymore pay Snow to protect a stretch of private beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Orville and Wilbur Wright are planning to make test flight with their heavier-than-air flying machine, which is going to attract a large crowd and the Claymore brothers want Snow to shoo away any trespassers from their private beach – which has something to with an archaeological discovery on the beach. A discovery pertaining to the site of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony of Roanoke.

So there's enough material here for a good story, but the experiment of the Wright brothers only served as background decoration and the plot regarding the murder on the beach, and the archaeological angle, was pretty basic at best. A decent enough story, but nothing more than that.

"The 500 Hours of Dr. Wisdom" was published in the December 1984 issue of EQMM and takes place early on in Snow's career as a cowboy-detective, which can also be labeled as a borderline impossible crime story.

Snow arrives at a far-flung, sleepy town, called Waycliff Station, where the only excitement appears to be the regular visitations of Dr. Wisdom's medicine show. The patent medicine was a staple of the Old West, but this time the charlatan in the covered wagon had something genuinely interesting to sell: an extra hour in the day to spend as they wished. Dr. Wisdom guarantees that time will stand still outside of the town and resume again when the hour has drawn to a close, which he demonstrates on the following Sunday. The only train that day arrives at the station at noon, which is on schedule, but according to all of the clocks in town the train was an hour late. The town was given an "whole extra hour" that day!

I loved this portion of the plot and was placed in the father into the past on account of a historical event, in 1883, that made this time-trick possible, but was less enthusiastic about the murder of Dr. Wisdom and the sub-plot of a missing wad of cash – which cribbed a horrendously bad trick from Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933). However, the resolution to the case was well done and Snow is pretty much run out of town after fatally shooting the murderer.

By the way, Snow shoots and kills nearly two dozen people over the course of only fourteen short stories.

"The Trail of the Bells" was published in EQMM of April 1985 and begins with Snow's discovery of a dying man by a water hole. The name of the man is Tommy Gonzales, a half-Mexican gunman, who had been the right-hand man of a masked outlaw, named "Poder," notorious for robbing banks and stagecoaches all over the New Mexico territory – culminating with the murder of a banker in Tosco. Snow happened to be in town on that day and was hired as a one-man posse to bring the two desperadoes to justice, but the last words spoken by the dying gunman is to "listen to the bells" if wants to find Poder. This dying clue leads Snow to a mission station, in San Bernardino, where he has to figure out which of the priests is moonlighting as a bank robber. What really makes this story memorable is the solution and the deductive reasoning that brought Snow to that conclusion, which evoked the works of both Ellery Queen and Victor Hugo.

"The Phantom Stallion" was originally published in the October 1985 issue of EQMM and is a locked room mystery in spirit of John Dickson Carr, which naturally makes this a personal favorite of mine, because you know me. :)

Snow is hired as a temporarily ranch hand at the Six-Bar Ranch of Horace Grant in West Texas. Grant is a broken man in his seventies and confined to bed, following a fall from a horse, but his sons have made life as pleasant as possible for their father. The bedroom is cooled with an expensive, and early, model of an air-cooling device (i.e. air conditioning) and from his window he can see the construction of a new family home some distance away. However, the man still has intense nightmares about being trampled by his now dead stallion.

Otherwise, everything seems pretty normal at the ranch and they even have a healthy, long-standing rivalry with the owner of the neighboring Running-W Ranch, Nathan Lee ("it's like the Civil War all over again"). However, Snow quickly comes to the conclusion that not everything is what it seems at the ranch and the illusion is shattered when Grant is brutally beaten to death in his bedroom, which had been securely latched from the inside – both the door and the window. The earth beneath the window showed no traces of footprints, but there was "a bloody horseshoe" imprinted on the skull of the victim!

Hoch cobbled together an excellent impossible crime story that made good use of the situation at the ranch, the bed-ridden victim and the air-cooling device, but also supplied a logical reason as to why the bedroom had to be locked from the inside. The locked room here actually function as a clue to the identity of the murderer. Same goes for the murder weapon. So, yes, easily one of my favorites from this collection.

"The Sacramento Waxworks" was published in the March 1986 issue of EQMM and finds Snow in the capacity of adviser to the new owner of a waxwork theater, Seymour Dodge, who plans to add a section of famous, and infamous, Western sheriffs and outlaws – on which he needs advice from an actual cowboy. There is, of course, a darker plot behind all of this, which could very well have placed a noose around Snow's neck. And that's about all that can be said about this fun, but minor, story in the series.

Finally, we come to the last story in this collection, "The Only Tree in Tasco," which originally appeared in the October 1986 issue of EQMM and has Snow arriving in town when they town folks were preparing "the only tree in Tasco for hanging."

Pedro Mapimi, a Mexican, had been tried and convicted of murdering a local banker by nearly cutting his heart out of his chest, but trial had been a quick one and the presiding judge was the victim's son – who had ignored the alibi offered by the accused and backed up by a witness. So the wandering gunslinger takes upon himself to proof that the man had been innocently convicted and tries to delay the hanging by dynamiting the tree, which only slows down the sheriff's determination to have the hanging down before too long. So the only option left is to find the real murderer and the peculiarity of the wound proves to be a dead giveaway.

This is where the story began to bother me: long, long ago, I've seen this exact same story play-out in a TV-series or movie, but can't for the life of me remember the title of the series or movie in question. However, I'm absolutely sure I have seen that wound-trick, in combination with a small town setting, before on the small screen.

Anyway, The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales is easily one of my favorite short story collections by Hoch. The quality of all fourteen stories is not only consistent throughout, but of a high caliber without a single dud among them. Sure, there are one or two minor stories, but they hardly qualify as bad or even mediocre. So I really hope we can look forward, in the hopefully not so distant future, to a second collection of Ben Snow stories, because it has been twenty years since this one was published. I believe there are more than enough stories left to fill out one or two additional volumes.

Well, this review has gone on long enough, like all my short story reviews, but I can tell you that the next one will probably be of a short novel, or novella, in the same Western framework as these stories. It might even have an impossible crime sub-plot, but we'll both see how that pans out in my next post. So stay tuned!