The Man on the Moon

"I think we're going to the moon, because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges."

- Neil Armstrong (Commander of the Apollo 11 Mission)

I'm not sure if James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977) would've captured my attention, if it weren't for a very tantalizing review on Ho-Ling's blog.

Inherit the Stars is categorized by some as a science-fiction mystery and procured a high-ranking spot on Japan's Tozai Mystery Best 100, which left behind many classics and fan-favorites – such as Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) and William L. DeAndrea's The HOG Murders (1979). That's something that'll get you noticed around this neck of the woods!

The events described in the book take place between the years 2027 and 2029, which is only a mere 12 years away from us, but, evidently, it's set in a world where history took a different path.

It's an alternative universe that saw "the ideological and racial tensions inherited from the twentieth century" being swept away as a result of a "tide of universal affluence and falling birth rates that came with the spread of high-technology living." A surplus of funds and resources, that became available after worldwide demilitarization, where shoveled in a rapidly expending United Nations Solar System Exploration – which has a floating laboratory above Venus, exploring Martian surface and has settled the Moon.

Than they make a discovery that could "keep the entire scientific world arguing for decades."

A normal-sized, anatomically modern remains of a human in a spacesuit is uncovered on the Moon, who’s christened "Charlie," but carbon-dating poses a serious problem to the scientific community and recorded history: the semi-mummified corpse and equipment is over 50.000 years old! It's a problem of the impossible kind, because humans were primitive hunters-gatherers at that period in time and than there's the lack of archaeological evidence of an ancient, technological advanced civilization in Earth's prehistory.

Japanese cover of Inherit the Stars

There are droves of scientists examining Charlie and his equipment, which range from physicists and linguistic experts to mathematicians and evolutionary biologists, but the main character the readers follows around is Dr. Victor Hunt – who's the one who eventually pieces everything together and comes up with a beautiful, unifying hypothesis to explain all that they've discovered.

It's next to impossible to give a brief, teasing summary of the investigation between Charlie's discovery and Hunt's explanation, because of the enormous scale of events and potential spoilers involved.

The extensive reconstruction of the distant past, analyzing of evidence and tossing around theories is very reminiscent of the detective genre, but key elements of Inherit the Stars are firmly rooted in science-fiction and this makes the book very different in nature from other science-fiction mysteries that attempt to find a balance between the two – such as Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) and Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954).

On the other hand, you should be able, based on the given evidence, to arrive at a similar conclusion as Hunt and that's quite an accomplishment if you know what the explanation is – which is, as Ho-Ling noted in his review, something that goes beyond a simple murder case with an alibi-trick or a locked room.

I actually feel embarrassed about my second-rate solution that had the carbon dating pegged as a red herring that covered the fact that Charlie was actually from a far-flung future instead of the distant past. Luckily, I was as wrong about that as my first impression that the solution might've been a cross between the Piltdown hoax and legends of missing Soviet cosmonauts.

So, before this becomes another shabbily written, outdrawn review that uses a lot of words to say very little... I'll conclude by saying that, read as a mystery, you'll find something far, far off the beaten track – which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The only sad part about Inheriting the Stars is that we, in 2027, won't have any people "exploring the Martian deserts" or plummeting "down, down, deep into the ice crust of Ganymede" inside a protected capsule to witness something truly special.

Finally, I tagged this review as a "locked room mystery" and "impossible crime" for one simple reason: we're culturally appropriating this novel. It's ours now!

Across and Down

"Well, it's all clues, isn't it? On a whole, crosswords are far more exotic and exiting than police work."

 - Morse (Inspector Morse: The Settling of the Sun, 1988)

During his lifetime, E.R. Punshon garnered favorable reviews as a fully-rounded mystery writer from the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers and the pseudonymous "Torquemada," but decades of shameful neglect preceded his slow rediscovery during the 2000s and now his work is finally brought back into circulation – courtesy of Dean Street Press.

I first took notice of Punshon when I read Nick Fuller's now defunct website, which described his "ability to construct labyrinthine plots" as being "rivaled only by John Dickson Carr."

Well, that comparison made me perk up like a prisoner receiving a jolt from the electric chair and I could see why the comparison was made when I finally read Information Received (1933). It was an excellent mystery novel reminiscent of Carr's darker, standalone work such as Poison in Jest (1932) and The Emperor's Snuff-Box (1942), but it was the only one I could get my hands on at the time. So I'm glad Punshon's is made accessible again to today's horde of mystery readers.

Crossword Mystery (1934) is one of the titles reissued this past summer and has an introduction written by our crime-fiction historian Curt Evans, which described it as "a novel with an intricate, fairly-clued puzzle, incisive social observation" capped with "an astonishing climax that surely is unique within the literature of crime fiction" – alongside some glowing quotes from Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams. The latter saw in the book hope for the detective story's future and placed it alongside Ronald A. Knox's Still Dead (1934) and Sayers' The Nine Tailors (1934). You could argue that Evans' preface is more of an appetizer than an introduction.

The book opens with Punshon's series-character, Detective-Constable Bobby Owen, being send to Suffby Cove, which is a quiet, seaside village that had remained largely untouched by the 20th century. Owen's task is to pose as a houseguest in the home of a retired stockbroker, Mr. George Winterton, who's convinced that his brother's drowning was murder and requested protection – because he fears he may be next.

There are, of course, multiple suspects milling around the place, which includes three of Winterton's nephews: a horse-racing fanatic, named Colin Ross, a painter and black sheep of the family by the name of James Matthews and Miles Winterton – who was reprimanded by his uncle for flirting with his secretary.

Miss Raby is Winterton's secretary/typist and types out the pages for his book, Justification of the Gold Standard, while in her spare time she constructs crossword puzzles for the Daily Announcer. The list of suspects are rounded out by the servants, Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, and a businessman from London who wanted to turn Snuffby Cove into a seaside resort, which George's brother managed to prevent before his drowning.

All of the ingredients for a proper, thoroughly English country house/village mystery are present, but Owen wonders, early on the case, who "would want to murder two quiet, inoffensive, retired business men" spending their old-age at the coast – writing books, solving crossword puzzles and swimming in the cove. The answer is that there's obviously someone when an unmistakable case of murder occurs and it's (briefly) presented as a locked room mystery!

Owen has instructed Winterton to lock his bedroom door and fasten his windows, which are still in place the following morning and even the key is sticking in the lock from the inside.

E.R. Punshon

However, the body of the locked room's occupant has been mysteriously transported to the lawn outside, but the mystification about this aspect is cleared up within one chapter and the explanation is pulled from an old bag of tricks – very similar to the impossible elements from Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) and Nicholas Blake's The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941). So I have to tag this as a locked room mystery, but with reservations.

After the second murder, the story slowly moves away from the traditional country house-and village mystery to a treasure hunt-type of thriller. A clumsily made crossword puzzle with a keyword, "Gold," made by Winterton's is key to this hunt and beautifully reproduced in this edition. Anywhow, I have seen this portion of the novel being compared to (there she's again) Sayers' "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will," from Lord Peter Views the Body (1928), but I thought the plot was more indebted to Sherlock Holmes than Lord Peter.

There are light signals seen in the garden that might be connected to a recently released criminal (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902), but there's also a dog that doesn't bark when he's supposed to ("Silver Blaze") and the treasure hunt reminded me somewhat of one of my favorite Holmes story, "The Musgrave Ritual." However, the most intriguing aspect of Crossword Mystery is that it was published in the same year as Darwin L. Teilhet's The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), which are among the earliest examples in fiction that took a critical look at the then new Nazi regime in Germany.

This aspect in Crossword Mystery is poured into a late chapter, but it's there and with its connection to the solution one could argue that it's a prelude of the deluge of WWII mystery/spy-thrillers that would flood the market less than a decade later – making Punshon somewhat of a visionary. I would have preferred if Punshon's would've stayed within the territory of the country house/village mystery, because that was the best part of this book, but, historically, the final stretch of the story isn't without merit either.

So I'll end this messy, over-referenced review on that note, because I can't seem to write anything short and to the point these days.

Death and His Brother Sleep

"I'm afraid you'll think I haven't exactly been minding my own business. Why should I, anyhow? Two months in this place ought to reveal all our secrets, if we have any. Mind you, it was a sheer accident in the way it happened..."

- Captain Charles Mallinson (James Hilton's Lost Horizon, 1933) 

There are several well-known documented cases of hobby deformation among mystery readers, which include associating the literary father of Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne, with The Red House Mystery (1922) and Gaston Leroux with Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907) instead of La fantôme de l’opéra (The Phantom of the Opera, 1910).

Well, was it murder?

Similar examples dot the landscape of the genre, but there's one writer I'll never be able to associate solely with his one-off contribution to the detective-and thriller genre.

James Hilton was an English novelist best known today for Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934) and a wonderful adventure-fantasy novel, Lost Horizon (1933), which I read during a short period when I was reading "Lost World" stories. There were, however, only a small amount of such books available at the time. So it was only a brief excursion outside of the detective story, but it did put Hilton's sole mystery novel on my radar.

Was it Murder? (1931) originally appeared as Murder at School, under the byline of "Glen Trevor," which remained an obscure fact for decades after success came knocking on Hilton's door and one presumes the book was filed away as a youthful indiscretion – until Dover Publications brought it back in circulation in the late 1970s.

I enthusiastically bought a copy years ago, but continuously put off reading it after perusing some decidedly mixed reviews of the book. Well, the book left me with some mixed feelings now that I have read it myself. Lets begin at the beginning...

The backdrop of the book is a minor, unassuming public school, named Oakington, where a student by the name of Robert Marshall fell victim of a peculiar accident when a heavy, old-fashioned gas fitting crushed his skull in the dormitory during the night. Dr. Robert Roseveare, current Head of Oakington, would've let the dead rest in peace were it not for a strange note he found inside the boy's algebra-book, telling that "if anything should happen to me, I leave everything to my brother Wilbraham" – which aren't the kind of thoughts you'd expect to be on the mind of a public school boy.

Dr. Roseveare calls in the help of an old student, Colin Revell, who once solved "a little affair at Oxford" when "a rather valuable manuscript had disappeared from the College libraby" and had solved the case "by means of a little amateur detective-work." The first impressions of Revell begs for comparisons with Roger Sheringham and Philip Trent, but there's a difference between the fallibility of the later two and the incompetence of the former.

A Mysterious Story of a Different Kind

Oh, there's enough to enjoy about Revell's handling of the case for the plot-driven reader. There are plenty of possible explanations bandied about and leads to follow up on around the school grounds, but Revell never appears to be fully on the mark and eventually has to leave without having cleared up the first death – not to the readers satisfaction anyway. I mean, why were the students who were sleeping right next to Marshall never considered to be suspects or even questioned as potential witnesses? That's just sloppy.

There are several months between Revell's first and second visit to Oakington, which occurs when learning about the supposedly accidental death of Wilbraham Marshall in the empty swimming baths of the school. It smacks of murder and has attracted the attention of an actual detective from Scotland Yard, Guthrie, but he only gives off the impression of being more competent than Revell and eventually leaves empty handed after a third fatality – which is annoying because I had correctly figured out the correct solution at this point.

And they were still roughly a 150-pages removed from stumbling across the solution themselves, but Hilton's pleasant, often light-hearted style has to be commended here as it sustained my interest in the story. The "surprise" revelation fell somewhat flat, but the effort was appreciated.

I also found it interesting that, in spite of the witty writing, there's somber shadow cast over the story by the Great War and its lingering affect it had on some of the characters. I've always been interested in detective stories that are tied to the World Wars of the 20th century, but I don't remember having ever read one in which the ghost of World War I was almost background character in itself. A very interesting aspect of the book.

Anyway, Was it Murder? is a prime-example of the amateur detective and mystery novel, but whether that's a good or bad thing is up to the individual reader. I'm still very divided on that question, but I do want to re-read Lost Horizon now, because that's a prime-example of an excellent potboiler!

Where the Truth Lies

"Well, whatever it is, it sure must be most unusual. Uh, the reason I say that is because, you know, when my wife and I try to remember what happened yesterday or the day before, well, we don't agree on anything."

- Lt. Columbo (Dagger of the Mind, 1972)

A warning to the reader: this is going to be a filler-post involving conflicting memories, parallel universes, Columbo and Dr. Watson's brain. This is your only chance to turn away and come back within a day or two when I have regular review up. You've been warned!

Recently, I stumbled across a website, The Mandela Effect, collecting shared, alternate memories of events and popular culture that contradict the recorded history of our plain of reality – indicating to some that we're sliding between parallel universes.

A popular series of children's books, The Berenstain Bears, is central to this phenomenon, because people across the world swear they remember the name being spelled as BerenSTEIN.

It became enough of a thing that (reputedly) the son of the creators, Mike Berenstain, felt compelled to respond to a particular blog-post to explain the history of his family name and how "most people have just misread the name." A reasonable that has done nothing to make the debate subside. Other examples include confusion over the date of Nelson Mandela's death, the number of states within the U.S. and the titles of TV-series or movies. 

Dr. John H. Watson

As a consummate reader of detective fiction, I was immediate reminded of a phenomenon known within mystery circles as Dr. Watson's faulty memory, which is especially notable in two particular short stories: "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" from His Last Bow (1892) and "The Adventure of the Resident Patient" from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893).

The stories open on a very similar, almost identical scene that has Holmes performing a mind-reading trick on Watson, which was the result of some editorial acrobats, but in their universe it's Watson's unreliable memory that recollected that moment at the start of two completely different cases. And this wasn't the only time Watson's mind became fuzzy on the finer details. He ascribed the first name of James to both Holmes' arch-nemesis, Prof. James Moriarty, and his brother, Col. James Moriarty, which makes no sense at all!

So I agree with Mike Berenstain's simple explanation. However, I can understand why some people would freak out over this, because I have a crispy clear memory of an alternative ending to one of my favorite Columbo episodes. A faulty memory I had shelved away as a Watsonian lapse of the mind, but when I came across the Mandela effect I saw an opportunity for a filler post! 

Columbo: Oh, the mind boggles, sir!

Try and Catch Me (1977) is arguably one of the greatest Columbo episodes, in which Lt. Columbo's opponent is one of the most likeable murderers you'll ever meet on the small screen: a small, somewhat elfish-looking mystery writer, named Abigail Mitchell, who avenged her niece by locking the murderer inside her walk-in safe – which eventually began to lack the oxygen needed to breath.

Well, I was quite surprised, even a little shocked, upon re-watching Try and Catch Me for the second time, because I remembered a completely different ending to the episode. I remembered Columbo allowing Abigail Mitchell to get away and even handed over the car keys, a key piece (pun!) of evidence, to her, but that was not the ending I saw the second time around. On the contrary! Columbo makes no bones about it: she's coming with him to the police station.

Abigail Mitchell even asks Columbo if he "would consider making an exception" in her case. After all, she's "an old woman, quite harmless, all in all." To which Columbo replies, "you're a very professional person in your work and so am I." However, the episode ends with a line suggesting an alternate time-line, "if you had investigated my niece's death, all this need never have happened," but that would've made for an entirely different story altogether.

There's nothing in the episode that would justify the ending I initially remembered, but I've got a possible explanation as to why my mind butchered my recollection of the episode: it was during the time I began to discover the detective genre in earnest and wanted everything to be exactly like my favorite detective stories, which, at the time, included Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express (1934) – which is a book that shares in the blame of turning me into the mystery addict you know today. If you know the solution of that mystery and its morally ambigious ending, you probably understand why my mind did what it did.

Well, that's all I've to say on this subject. I wish I could've delivered the definitive proof of dual realities, but hey, what you gonna do.

Hopefully, I have a new review up before long and meanwhile, you could check out my recent reviews of Freeman Wills Crofts' classic debut novel, The Cask (1920), or Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee at Work (1967), which is collection of short stories.

Oh, and my sincere apologies for wasting your time with this post.

Packed for Shipping

"We have every hope of clearing the matter up, but we find a little difficulty in getting anything to work upon. We have, of course, wired to the Belfast post-office, but a large number of parcels were handed in upon that day, and they have no means of identifying this particular one, or of remembering the sender."

- Inspector G. Lestrade (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," from His Last Bow, 1892)

Since early 2011, I have reviewed a wide variety of detective-and crime fiction on this blog, from Pat McGerr and John Dickson Carr to Louise Penny and Keigo Higashino, but I consider my reading of the genre to be still rather shallow – especially when compared to a scholar such as Curt Evans or a professional fan boy like Bill Pronzini.

You might think that's an exaggeration on my part, but take a look at the authors whose work I have barely touched or ignored altogether.

My bookshelves are entirely bare of any traces of the works penned by Milward Kennedy and Margaret Millar. There's a tiny, largely unread clustering of mystery novels by J.J. Connington, Henry Wade and G.D.H. & M. Cole collecting dust on those very same shelves and the only thing I had read by Freeman Wills Crofts was a short story, entitled "The Mystery of the Sleeping-Car Express," in The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (1990) – which is embarrassing for an enthusiastic advocate of Golden Age mysteries. Something had to change!

Since you have to begin somewhere, I decided to pick up Crofts' famous debut novel, The Cask (1920), which was written in 1919 "during a slow recovery from a long illness" with a "pencil and exercise book." A revised, more polished version of the draft was published a year later, which sold over a 100,000 copies and was translated in nine languages by the time my edition from 1946 rolled off the presses. The book was a commercial success and cemented Crofts reputation as a (Golden Age) mystery writer.

The Cask is an exuberant, old-fashioned story that takes place between the month's of March and May of 1912, but, stylistically, the book reminded me more of the stories from J.E. Preston-Muddock's Dick Donovan: The Glasgow Detective (collected in 2005) than (lets say) Conan Doyle's post-1800s Sherlock Holmes stories or A.E.W. Mason (e.g. At the Villa Rose, 1910) – even though the story is plotted like a Golden Age mystery.

The Insular and Continental Steam Navigation Company has a cargo ship by the name of Bullfinch arriving from Rouen, France, but one of the casks it was transporting appears to have suffered damage. Sawdust poured from a crack alongside several golden sovereigns. The content of the damaged casket is far less benevolent than the stuff it's spilling: a body of a woman, instead of a statue, and the managing-director of the company personally fetches Inspector Burnley of Scotland to investigate the matter.

However, when they arrive at the docks, someone, somehow, carried off with the burdened cask and the first portion of this three-part structured novel is concerned with finding it again. The makeshift casket disappears a second time over the course of this investigation and the golden sovereigns are possible linked to a 50,000-franc lottery prize, but, overall, this part can be considered as a very long prologue.

A small point of interest from this portion of the book that I have point out is that there's police-constable, named John Walker, who "had read Conan Doyle and Austin Freeman, and other masters of detective fiction, and their tales had stimulated his imagination," and whose heroes he tried emulate – as he "climbed to the giddy eminence of an Inspector of the Yard." I instantly liked this character and namedropping mystery writers would become something of a trope in the decades ahead. 

The second part of the book takes Inspector Burnley to France, where he's reunited with M. Lefarge of the Sûreté, having previously collaborated in the Marcelle murder case, "which attracted so much attention in both countries."

The work both investigators have to do in the second part is closer to classic detective, as we know it, than the first part as they establish the victim's identity and retrace the steps of a couple of suspects, which covers England, France and Belgium – and even Stockholm, Sweden is mentioned. A rigorous testing of alibis is something Crofts build a reputation around and even become something British mysteries were mocked for, but there was nothing tedious about it here. And their work eventually pays off, when they procure the evidence needed to make an arrest and bring the case to court.

In third and final part of the story, a solicitor engages the services of a private detective, Georges La Touche, to go over the evidence and prove his client's innocence, in which he succeeds, but the dénouement shows Crofts was still somewhat inexperienced. 

Freeman Wills Crofts, Professional Plotter

The Cask is, at it’s core, a fairly simple case and the murderer successfully muddled the waters, which is probably when Crofts realized he had plotted himself in a corner and this resulted in a rushed, somewhat forced ending – complete with a confession and an off-page suicide. I think the book would've had genuine status as a classic today if the murderer had laughed in Le Touche's face and wished him luck with proving his case in court, especially as an ending to an old-fashioned, almost charming story, but would such darkness have gone over well at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties?

In any case, The Cask was a successful debut that promised much from its author and the genre it belonged to, which was a promise that was most definitely kept by everyone involved.

On a final note, in the weeks ahead I'll tackle one or two mystery novels by E.R. Punshon. I have (yet) another foreign collection of stories from the East on the pile and I'll finally be tackling a detective novel that gave me serious case of hobby deformation. Stay tuned!

Sitting in Judgment

"Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame and come to be good."

- Confucius 

Robert H. van Gulik was a diplomat, sinologist and a writer whose career highlights included being the Dutch ambassador to Japan and authoring a series of novels, short stories and a couple of novellas about Judge Dee – which popularized historical mysteries and established them as a proper sub-genre in the 1950-and 60s. 

The series is set in 7th century China, during the Tang dynasty (AD 600-700), when a lauded magistrate and statesman, by the name of Di Renjie, presided over the courts of the Imperial Governments of the time.

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (c. 1949) is a translation of an 18th century novel, Dee Goong An, which was loosely based on some of the cases handled by Di Renjie and formed an unofficial starting point of the series. And Di Renjie was, of course, the model for Judge Dee.

The plots were constructed along the lines of the classical, Chinese detective stories, in which several, seemingly unrelated, cases are braided together, but Van Gulik threw out the supernatural agencies and replaced them with 20th century plot devices – such as a stronger emphasis on whodunit and the occasional locked room mystery.

Judge Dee at Work: Eight Chinese Detective Stories (1967) is a collection of short stories and I have read them before, but they were spread out over two different volumes. The title of the Dutch edition of Judge Dee at Work is Zes zaken voor Rechter Tie (Six Cases for Judge Dee, 1961), which didn't include "Five Auspicious Clouds" and "He Came With the Rain." They were published separately as Vijf gelukbrengende wolken (Five Auspicious Clouds, 1969) and included the novella Vier vingers (Four Fingers, 1964), which was published in The Monkey and the Tiger (1965) as The Morning of the Monkey.

This was also the first time I read a Rechter Tie book in English. So it was somewhat like rediscovering this wonderful series.

"Five Auspicious Clouds" is the first story from this collection and occurred when Judge Dee served for only a week as magistrate of Peng-lai, which is where my favorite entry in this series took place – namely the fabulous Fantoom in Foe-lai (The Chinese Gold Murders, c. 1959). Judge Dee is confronted with the apparent suicide of the wife of a notable legal-mind, but there are enough signs pointing towards murder and the extinguished, pentagon-shaped incense-clock seemed to have fixed the time of death. A good, somewhat clever story of domestic murder and notable for having found a way to use the smashed-watch-trick... in the year 633!

"The Red Tape Murder" takes place in the same coastal district as the previous story, Peng-lai, in which Van Gulik allowed Judge Dee to be drawn into a military affair and exonerate Colonel Meng of a murder-charge and solve a pesky, bureaucratic problem of a missing document – a document interestingly titled P-404. They were unable to find that page! Anyhow, the murder of Colonel Soo turns out to be an impossible crime, because the innocent Meng appears to have been the only one who could've loosened the deadly arrow, but Judge Dee finds an alternative explanation and one that's reasonable clued. I've grown quite fond of this story, but not everyone is going to like it.

Six Cases for Judge Dee

Judge Dee still presided over Peng-lai as magistrate in "He Came With the Rain" and takes place on one of the hottest, wettest days of the dog-days. A pawn-broker is found stabbed and hacked to pieces at an old, abandoned watchtower in the marches and the only witness is a deaf-mute girl – who lived in the crumbling tower. A couple of soldiers apprehended a blood-covered suspect, but, of course, Judge Dee comes to a different conclusion. This is one of those stories that should be read as a historical story and it’s character development instead of as a detective story.

"The Murder on the Lotus Pond" has a change of scenery, the district of Han-yuan, which was the backdrop for The Chinese Lake Murders (1960) and The Haunted Monastery (1961), but in this minor case an elderly poet is killed in his garden pavilion. The setting and characters are very well drawn, but it's a minor, rather forgettable case and the murderer only got caught because he/she jabbered too much.

"The Two Beggars" takes the reader to yet another district, Poo-yang, where The Chinese Bell Murders (1958) and The Emperor's Pearl (1963) took place, but Judge Dee's time as magistrate of this district also coincided with his visit to Paradise Island – recorded in The Red Pavilion (1964) and features several impossible murders. However, this short story seems to have been missed by everyone as just such a story, which begins when Judge Dee witnesses a ghostly apparition during the Feast of Lanterns. The escape of the apparition from a watched, moonlit garden, in which the "garden gate to the park outside was securely locked and barred," coincides with the discovery of a dead beggar at the bottom of a drain. The encounter in the garden is explained by itself towards the end of the story, but initial sighting gives Judge Dee a good reason to take a closer look as the supposed accidental death of the beggar and eventually discovers a murderer. A well-told and constructed story.

The following story, "The Wrong Sword," remains in the district of Poo-Yang, but Judge Dee is absent for a large portion of the investigation and leaves two of his lieutenants, Ma Joong and Chiao Tai, in charge of tribunal. A case and an opportunity to prove themselves presents itself during a street performance: someone swapped a "trick sword" for a real one and that came at the expensive of a young boy's life. It’s an interesting approach to allow a troupe of Watson's investigate a flurry of potential murderers, before Judge Dee correctly arranges the gather information and evidence upon his return.

"The Coffins of the Emperor" takes place in the isolated district of Lan-fang, the location of The Chinese Maze Murders (1952) and The Phantom of the Temple (1966), which is situated on the Western border of the empire – which has become a dark and desolate place during a warring conflict with the Tartar's. Judge Dee offers his assistance to the local military leader in solving a potential case of treason and clearing yet another military officer from a murder charge, before his head rolls off his shoulder the next morning, but the main attraction of this story is dark, sickly mood of impending doom permeating the plot.

The final story of the lot, "Murder on New Year's Eve," takes place in that same desolate place, but the explanation ends both this collection and Judge Dee's run as magistrate of Fan-lang on a positive note. It's a short, touchy story and that's all that can be said about it without giving anything away.

So, all in all, Judge Dee at Work is an excellent and well-balanced collection of stories, which can be read as both detective stories or historical fiction. And that makes it hard to be disappointed if you're a fan of one or both genres, but that goes for the entire series. Recommended!

Finally, if this review appears clunky or overwritten without the usual amount of detail... well... I finished this collection nearly two weeks ago and was in the hospital at the time. So not every detail was as clear as it should be when I finally began cranking out this review, but I'm getting back on track.

Presents from the Past

"...And all that was left to do was put together the pieces."

- Hajime Kindaichi (The Kindaichi Case Files: Smoke and Mirrors, 1993)

Some time has passed since I last read a novel from Bill Pronzini's four decade spanning series about his "Nameless Detective," but the previous review on this blog, covering the recently translated The Decagon House Murders (1987) by Yukito Ayatsuri, gave me a splendid excuse to delve into Quicksilver (1984) – which has a plot touching upon the unique history between the United States and Japan. 

In the opening chapter of Quicksilver, Nameless has gone into an official partnership with an old friend, ex-police lieutenant Eberhardt, who found office space in a good location, but the rent is pushing nine-hundred bucks a month. Luckily, there's a client waiting in the wings.

Haruko Gage has been the target of an anonymous, but generous, admirer who keeps sending her expensive gifts in the form of jewelry, which appears as an easy enough of a job for Nameless. It's simply a case of checking on some of Haruko's former lovers and hopefuls who were rejected. But things are seldom this easy for him.

These inquiries take Nameless to San Francisco's Japantown, but what began as a fairly benevolent problem turns into something far more sinister when Nameless visits a public bathhouse and stumbles upon the remains of a member of the Yakuza – hacked to the death with a katana!

It's not the only unnatural death Nameless finds on his path, but, in spite of the presence of the Yakuza, the book isn't a repeat of Dragonfire (1982) and his descend into the mafia-controlled quarters of Chinatown. Dragonfire was a hardboiled tale that put Nameless in the hospital and Eberhardt in a coma, which came on the heels of two unapologetically, classically styled-and plotted novels, Hoodwink (1981) and Scattershot (1982), but Quicksilver falls somewhere in between – i.e. a character-driven detective story with professional criminals lurking in the background.

The trail of bodies is slowly guiding Nameless many decades into the past, all the way back to the early 1940s, when American citizens of Japanese descend where thrown in internment camps for the duration of World War II. And the now often forgotten crimes that took place there.

I think mystery fans that've read a fair amount of Japanese detective fiction will recognize a familiar theme in the motive and identity of the murderer, but I don't know if that was done as a conscious nod to their corner of genre – considering there was even less Japanese crime fiction available in 1984 than there's now.

There's also the all important difference that Quicksilver was written from an American point-of-view, in the hardboiled vein of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, which makes this an item of interest for scholars/connoisseurs of the Japanese crime story. It is interesting as comparison material to how Japanese mystery-and crime writers tackled this subject.

What makes the "Nameless Detective" series of interest to a plot-obsessed classicist, like myself, is not only the occasional excursions to the locked room niche (e.g. Hoodwink, 1981 and Bones, 1985), but also how relatable Nameless (and Pronzini) is as a fellow mystery fan boy. Nameless observes how a police-inspector, named Leo McFate, "talked like Philo Vance" and how a door "creaked open like the one on the old Inner Sanctum radio program."

And than there's Nameless' collection of pulp magazines, which feature or is mentioned in nearly every novel. In this story, Kerry Wade borrowed an issue of Midnight Detective with a luridly illustrated cover in the Yellow Peril tradition. My "Paperjack" edition has a synopsis that was written in that frame, because it promises such things as "a violent ritual murder" and "perverse kidnapping."

That's not at all the well put together, calm and slow moving story, which has the patience of meandering river that knows it'll eventually reach its inevitable conclusion – and doesn't need any gore to disturb its readers.

In short, Quicksilver is a great entry in the Nameless series and this badly written review really doesn't do it any justice. Read it for yourself.