The Ghost and the Canary: Two Real-Life Impossible Crimes

During 2013 and 2014, I put together a short series of blog-posts with examples locked room mysteries and impossible problems appearing in our seemingly normal, everyday world.

A short series consisting mostly of common, everyday miracles such as a notoriously drunk actor who was locked into his dressing room without a drop of liquor, but emerged an hour later absolutely hammered – leaving everyone baffled as to how he got his hands on enough booze to get properly drunk. Another impossibility deals with the inexplicable leakage of information from a sealed and soundproof betting room, while in another example a magician (unwisely) gives step-by-step instruction on how to create a disgustingly simple locked room trick. A locked room gag best played on unexpected hotel guests.

You can read all five blog-posts about these real-life impossibility by following these links: I, II, III, IV and V. I wanted to do further installments, but my backlog of good examples had dried up and the ones I missed were recently printed as part of John Pugmire's marvelous anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017).

So I probably would not have been able to do this post were it not that I recently came across two interesting examples, which allowed me to cobble together another one of these long anticipated filler-posts.

The Knocking Ghost of Boise

I came across this very unusual account of a faked poltergeist on a website dedicated to recording hoaxes throughout time, which covers hoaxes from the middle ages all the way up to the 21st century, but the story of the ghost that rapped messages to puzzled policemen caught my attention – because it read like a spoof of John Dickson Carr done by Anthony Boucher. You'll know why when you learn the solution.

"They're heeere..."

Peggy Zimmerman was a 53-year-old woman who lived with her 12-year-old daughter, Shelley, in Boise, Idaho, but in late September of 1973 she called in the police to investigate the rapping coming from underneath the floorboards. An intelligent knocking that could rap out answers and appeared to be attracted to Shelley, because he could only communicate when she was present in the room. However, the girl was "merely standing quietly in the room" and could not have produced the rapping.

So four policemen arrived at the house, headed by a police lieutenant, who set up traps “to make sure that no one was entering the crawl space” and began to ask questions to the knocking ghost.

How many people were in the room? Six raps! How many policemen? Four raps! And so on. The policemen observed that raps were felt as well as heard and "the sounds vibrated through the soles of their shoes," but the traps were empty and Shelley passed a clever test by the policemen. One of the policemen asked the ghost how many guns they were carrying and the question was answered with five raps, but only two of the officers were openly carrying a firearm and Shelley could not have known they also had three concealed weapons on them – which forced the police lieutenant to admit he had "no logical explanation for the phenomena." However, the mystery was solved the very next day when a news team dropped by the haunted house.

A newsman noticed that the ghost only rapped when Shelley was standing in "a certain, rather peculiar way" and passed this information on to the police. When confronted by the police, Shelley admitted she was the ghost and the answer to the knocking ghost lay in the abnormal condition of her ankles. It allowed her to make a loud knocking sound whenever she flexed her leg muscles, but this prank was reported to the juvenile court. What can I say? Little kids and poltergeists will always be a troublesome pairing.

You can read the full account here.

The Canary Who Could Sing, But Couldn't Fly

The second example I found of a (semi) impossible crime unexpectedly turned up in the ruthless, cut-throat world of American, prohibition-era gangsters and deals with the questionable death of a prominent mobster who became a stool-pigeon – an unhealthy life decision in the underworld.

Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was a well-known figure in the Jewish mafia of the New York underworld and a feared member of a group of contract killers, Murder Inc., who worked for the National Crime Syndicate, but by the early 1940s the authorities were closing a new around Reles. So he turned state evidence and became a witness whose testimonies sent a number of his former business partners to the electric chair. Reportedly, Albert “The High Executioner” Anastasia placed $100,000 bounty on Reles' head and Frank Costello reputedly raised another one-hundred grand to bribe guards to kill Reles in police custody. I think this piece of information could help explain his peculiar death.

The sixth floor plunge of Abe Reles

On the morning of November 12, 1941, Reles plunged to his death from the sixth floor window of Room 623 at the Half Moon Hotel. The evidence suggested Reles had tried to lower himself on to the window below by tying two bed sheets together, but the wire knot came undone and he fell to his death. However, this poses the interesting question why he tried to escape. Reles became a witness to escape the electric chair and the only one who could protect him from retaliation was the government, who had a vested interest in keeping him alive, because he was set to testify against Anastasia in a murder case. And it has been suggested that Reles didn't even wanted to be out of earshot of a policeman. So why voluntarily dangle out of a sixth floor window?

The door of the hotel room was guarded police officers and a possible answer could be that Reles overheard referencing his impending murder.

There could have been a bribe and this knowledge would have left the window as Reles only escape, but rumors claimed he was murdered by being pushed out of the window and the bed sheets were arranged to make it look an accidental fall during an escape attempt – which would make this somewhat of a locked room mystery. Unless the police officers were bribed, you have a murderer who entered a guarded hotel room on the sixth floor without being seen, committed a murder without being heard and threw the bed sheets after him to make it look like an accident, before vanishing into thin air.

There is, however, a possible explanation for the murder scenario and the method is exactly the same as the one used by G.K. Chesterton in "The Miracle of Moon Cresent" from The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). This is the only way an outsider could have circumvented the police guards at the door and flung Reles out of his hotel room window.

So, in a nutshell, this is the story of a canary who could sing, but not fly, and whose death is full of questions, false solutions and was perhaps a cleverly disguised locked room killing. Surprisingly, this case took place against the genuinely hardboiled background of ruthless, trigger happy gangsters.

I wish I had more to pad out this post, but this was all that was left in the tank. If come across any other real-life locked rooms in the future, I'll do another one, but we might be living in the middle of the 2020s when that happens.

What Happened to Hammond? (1951) by John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey observed in Locked Room Murders (1991) that there were only two mystery writers, John Dickson Carr and John Russell Fearn, who regularly produced impossible crime novels during and after the Second World War. While Fearn was not as prolific as Carr, he was able to match the master when it came to the sheer ingenuity of his impossible situations and the answers he conjured up to explain all those criminal miracles – which is a contribution that deserves to be acknowledged. Fearn is a fun, pulpy second-stringer with a repertoire of (scientific) locked room stories that should delight fans of Arthur Porges, Paul Halter and Jonathan Creek.

A ghost and a demonic entity physically manifest themselves inside a cursed room in "Chamber of Centuries" (1940) and Within That Room! (1946). A house that kills appears in Account Settled (1949) and a whole laboratory vanishes from a watched room in Vision Sinister (1954). The Silvered Cage (1955) has a woman gradually fading into nothingness during a stage performance and Pattern of Murder (2006) uses the inverted mystery format to show how an impossible murder is engineered, which is unusual, but the method is brilliant. And there are a host of regular locked room mysteries such as Black Maria, M.A. (1944), the Halter-like The Five Matchboxes (1946) and Death in Silhouette (1950). 

What Happened to Hammond? (1951) plays with a rarity of the impossible crime genre, a possible case of teleportation, of which I only know one other example: the Kaito KID heist story from Case Closed, vol. 61.

Before taking a crack at this book, I have to point out that the splendid cover of the 2006 Borgo Press edition was commissioned by Philip Harbottle during the 1980s from Ron Turner, because he had done covers for Fearn in the 1950s and Harbottle envisioned new editions of Fearn's work with old-school Turner covers – placing the commissioned art work in cold storage for when he was able "to get the books reprinted in the future." Harbottle also provided me with a scan of the book cover of the original and rather rare edition of this book. Yes, I'm using the poor man as my personal, interactive encyclopedia on all things Fearn. Just try to stop me! :) 

What Happened to Hammond? was originally published as by "Hugo Blayn" and begins with a shipping-yard tycoon, Benson T. Hammond, consulting Chief Inspector Mortimer Garth of Scotland Yard on a string of weird notes he has received. The latest note read, "Any Moment Now," implying without being actually threatening, but Hammond has a good reason to fear "the lingering threat" of physical violence. Hammond suffers from fragilitas ossiumtarda, an abnormal brittleness of the bones, which makes him "a walking glass ornament" and a series of blows could make him a bedridden invalid for life – or end him permanently. So Garth decides that the strange complaint and his standing in the community entitles him to police protection. Hammond also has trouble brewing at home.

Harvey Dell works as a senior electronic engineer at the Noonhill Teleradio Combine and wants to formally ask Hammand permission to marry his daughter, Miss Claire Hammond, but as soon as he consented to the engagement Dell asked him for a business loan of two million pounds! A quarrel erupted and Claire caught snippets like "some high-flown notion," a chance "to beat the airlines at their own games" and "cuts in shipping rates." The quarrel ends with Hammond branding Dell as a fortune-hunter and kicks him out of the house. Later that evening, Dell sends a letter to Claire, asking her to come to 9 Stanton Street and to destroy the letter, but she only tears it up and throws it in the waste basket – where her father finds it and pastes it together. And, naturally, he goes after her.

When Claire arrives at the house in the dilapidated Stanton Street, the door is answered by a servant who tells him he has never heard of Harvey Dell and closes the door in her face. However, the next part of the plot took a sudden, unexpected turn into the Twilight Zone.

Hammond arrives at the home with two policemen on his tail and they, alongside with Hammond's chauffeur, witness how he entered the 9 Stanton Street, but he never came back out again. But when they enter the house, they found it completely empty. Not "a stick of furniture" and dirty, defaced walls. Even more astonishing is that the place is covered with "a thick, even layer of dust on the floor of the hall" and nowhere was it broken by the marks of where furniture might have stood – nor where there "a trace of a single footprint." Previously, lights have been seen in the house and the door had been answered twice by a servant. So how did a house that had been occupied only moments previously turned into a rundown, abandoned home with a thick carpet of unbroken dust on the floor?

This apparent miracle is compounded when the body of Hammond is found lying on a road between Shoreham and Worthing, sixty miles away from Stanton Street, but only ten minutes had passed since Hammond was seen entering the house and his remains being found on the road! A gruesome detail is that every bone appears not only to be broken, but shattered, which make the body like a partially deflated inner tube.

Chief Inspector Garth has his work cut out for him and the investigation by the police takes up three quarters of the story. This part of the book reads like an early police procedure and has Garth, alongside with his men, doing all of the legwork as they attempt to put together all of the pieces of this complicated puzzle. They figure out the dust-trick and find all of the bigger pieces of the puzzle, but the insurmountable wall they keep bumping into is the problem of a body traveling sixty miles in a mist-enshrouded winter night. So they call upon Dr. Hiram Carruthers, who looks like the bust of Beethoven, to help them figure out scientific end of the investigation.

I think the first three quarters make up the best parts of the story, because the last quarter exposes the same mistake that ruined Robbery Without Violence (1957). I like it when a pure, fair play detective story is placed in a science-fiction setting, but hate it when a science-fiction solution is used in a regular looking detective story. It's plain cheating!

There are, however, mitigating circumstances. Firstly, there's proper foreshadowing and even clueing that the plot is slowly inching towards science-fiction territory (e.g. the autopsy report). Secondly, the science-fiction element, weirdly enough, didn't feel like a cop-out explanation and this probably has to do that the method, like most new sciences, was in its infancy – therefore imperfect and unrefined. Something that needed fine-tuning. This treatment was very different from the way the science-fiction element was handled in Robbery Without Violence, which even had a bad, comic book-like villain who talked about getting delivering the world into the palm of his hand. However, this didn't diminish my disappointment that the teleportation problem didn't have really clever and original solution.

This makes the problem of the empty, dust-covered house bare of any footprints the only real impossible problem of the story. Interestingly, the idea behind this trick is not entirely new and have come across two variations on this trick, but Fearn applied it here to an entire house.

So, on a whole, I was not too let down by What Happened to Hammond? The first three solid quarters read like an early police procedural without the troubled cop trope and a good stand-in impossible crime, but hated that the second impossibility relied on pure science-fiction – which simply does not work for me. I'm too much of a purist to go along with it. Still, I appreciated Fearn clued his way to this U-turn and the book is a decent, middling effort in his body of work, but not one you'll find on my inevitable list of favorite Fearn mystery novels.

On a final note, you might also be interested in reading John Norris' take on this book, which he reviewed here.

The Mystery of the Dead Man's Riddle (1974) by William Arden

The Mystery of the Dead Man's Riddle (1974) is the twenty-second book in The Three Investigator series and the sixth title penned by "William Arden," a penname of Dennis Lynds, who has become my favorite contributor to this series and this fast-paced, cleverly concocted story demonstrates why. A near classic example of the code-breaker.

Traditionally, the book begins with an introduction by the reluctant mentor of the three boys, Alfred Hitchcock, who denies any involvement in the shenanigans of the late Marcus "Dingo" Towne. Hitchcock tells the reader that "the old scoundrel" had no right to involve him "in his scheme from beyond the grave," but humbly points out that without his cunning the problem would have remained unsolved, because he handed over the case Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews – known locally as "the junior detective team" of The Three Investigators. And they tackle the problem with a great deal of energy, enthusiasm and determination.

Marcus "Dingo" Towne was an old Australian, "who made his pile by hard work," but sees no reason to it all to his "shiftless, greedy, stupid and otherwise useless" family. So he only left his daughter-in-law, grandson, niece and nephew "the sum of $1.00 each."

What remained of Dingo's hard-earned pile was turned into gemstones. A million dollars worth of opals, sapphires, rubies and emeralds, which belongs to the person clever enough to find it – which can be done by cracking a six-part riddle. Dingo was a cunning man who laughed to taunt and laugh at people. This is reflected in his complex, multi-layered riddle that's loaded with hidden riddles, double clues and even "a shortcut clue" that can only really be spotted by readers with an encyclopedic mind with a storage capacity for arcane knowledge.

Dingo had appointed Hitchcock ("who likes mystery") as one of his executors and he's contacted by Dingo's daughter-in-law, Molly Towne, who's worried that her almost 8-year-old son, Billy, is getting cheated out of his inheritance. Her fiance and lawyer, Roger Callow, plans to challenge the will in court, but, by that time, the gemstones might already be found. And the finder has no reason to come forward. So the famous movie-director advised them to give Jupe, Pete and Bob a chance to crack the code.

However, they soon find out that this is not going to be one of those ordinary, dime-a-dozen treasure hunts of popular juvenile fiction, but an out-and-out rat race.

When they arrive at the saggy, dilapidated house of Dingo, there's a crowd "swarming the property like ants" and fighting over a collection of empty bottles in the yard that are being mistaken for clues – one of the treasure seekers is their long-time nemesis, "Skinny" Norris. Unsurprisingly, Norris acts like a proper nuisance throughout the story and is responsible for the thrilling scene depicted on the covers of practically every edition of this title. This time, his actions aren't merely motivated by his dislike for the three detectives, particularly Jupe, but by an opportunity to upstage them by finding a small fortune in precious stones. And this is one of the many aspects that makes The Mystery of the Dead Man's Riddle standout in the series.

There are, however, more people who try to get their hands on the gems or appear to be very interested in the movements of Jupe, Pete and Bob.

Cecil and Winifred Percival are Dingo's niece and nephew from England and they're proper pair of Disney-like villains who come within inches of getting the treasure, but the boys are also shadowed by two men in a blue car – one of them being a giant of a man. But they also have a loyal ally in Billy Towne. The 8-year-old wants to be a detective, who even appears at one point wearing a cape and deerstalker, but Billy proves to be a burden during the first half of the story. However, he's able to redeem himself by solving one of the riddles and used their Ghost-to-Ghost Hookup to help the trio out of a real jam. A great example of how to use such a young character in a mystery story.

These characters are roaming around Rocky Beach, California, which is fantastically employed here by Arden and constantly moving these characters across the map is what this such a fun, fast-paced novel. One of my favorite scenes is when they take the bus out of town to followup on a clue, based on fare zones and the travel habits of Dingo, but on their way back they see the Percivals are on their track. And a sweaty, red-faced Norris is seen digging holes around a billboard. This really gives you an idea that this is a race and not a leisure treasure hunt.

But the absolute highlight of the story is how every event and character are either directly linked or interconnected, which means that everything has a reason without a single side-distraction to pad out the plot – something I feared would be the case when the two gangsters turned up. Even they had a reason for being present that linked up with the main plot. This also goes for the people who witnessed the will and were assigned executor to the quaint tea shop Dingo used to frequent. There are puzzle-pieces all over the place!

So the plot is pretty tight and the only thing that can be said against it's not a solve-it-yourself type of detective story. I guess you can compare the plot-structure of The Mystery of the Dead Man's Riddle with G.K. Chesterton's "The Blue Cross" from The Innocence of Father Brown (1911).

As impressive as the tricky plot of this juvenile mystery is how Arden made the lingering presence of Dingo's forceful personality emerge as an omniscient puppeteer by the end of the story. Dingo came out on top as the undisputed winner and he did it without even taking a breath. What can I say? Beware the Eternal Aussie!

So, all in all, The Mystery of the Dead Man's Riddle is a well-written, fast-paced and nicely characterized entry in the series with a code-breaker plot that makes it rank alongside The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965), The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966), The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972) and The Mystery of the Headless Horse (1977).

Detective Conan: The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly

Recently, our guide in the land of the Japanese detective story, Ho-Ling Wong, posted an enticing review on this blog of an old episode from a long-running anime series based on the popular manga often raved about on this blog, Detective Conan, which has been running since 1996 – culminating in 26 seasons and 900 episodes at the time of this writing. Understandably, the source material proved insufficient to keep the anime running for over twenty years and original stories had to be produced.

However, the TV originals are generally considered to be the poorer episodes and one of my reasons for sticking with Gosho Aoyama's original work. The other one is the frightful prospect of a backlog of hundreds, upon hundreds, of episodes!

The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly is episode 184 from season 7 and originally aired on March 13, 2000 as a one-hour special. According to Ho-Ling, this episode has not only been "lauded as one of the best anime original episodes ever," but is considered to be "one of the best episodes" period. So my curiosity got the better of me and decided to give the episode a shot. I can already reveal that the plot has a ghoulish gem of a locked room trick! An absolute work of art!

Anyway, in order to stay consistent with my on-going review of the U.S. publications of Detective Conan, re-titled Case Closed, I'll be calling the characters by the names used in the English version. Yes, I know. Heresy and all that. You may vent your purist anger in the comments.

The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly begins with Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan driving to the imposing mansion of Beniko Suo, President of Mahogany Promotions, which is a charity organization for children who lost their parents in a car accident, but they nearly crash themselves into a tree trunk that had been placed on the road – a note had been pinned to the trunk. It told them to turn around or "you'll regret it." The warning was signed with The Phantom of the Cursed Mask.

Not deterred by this threat, they arrive at the mansion and, upon entering, they're greeted by walls decorated with masks. There's even a mask room, or Chamber of Masks, which is the only room in the house connecting the east and west wings.

One part of the collection in the mask room are two-hundred, identical-looking masks that were made by a Spanish artist, Julio González, who was consumed by his work and committed suicide when he had carved the last mask. All two-hundred masks were found around his body and the blood made it look as if "the masks themselves had sucked it out of him," which helped them acquire the reputation of being cursed objects. As a precaution, every night at the stroke of twelve, the mask room is locked from both the east and west side, because "the masks like to do pranks" and after midnight "they will start to walk" – terrifying everyone unlucky enough to encounter them. And against this backdrop the other participants of the upcoming charity event arrive.

This group consists of a rock star, a well-known photographer, a popular baseball player and tarot prophet. The cast of characters is further rounded out by the assistant of the president and a pair of twin sisters who work at the mansion as maids. So the stage is properly set for some good, old-fashioned shenanigans.

During the night, Conan gets a phone-call from inside the house and the caller is nobody less than the Phantom of the Cursed Masks. The Phantom tells Conan that "the Cursed Masks are high for blood," a sacrifice and to hurry, or they won't make it, but there's a lot of confusing and running around – because the locked doors of the mask room separates the house in the east and west wing. However, they eventually arrive at the bedroom door of Beniko, but the door is double-locked from the inside. One of these locks is a big, sturdy padlock. So the window above the door is shattered and Conan climbs through the opening to open the room from the inside.

The "Case Closed" Look

The bedroom is littered with the González masks and Beniko is on her bed, a knife-wound to the throat, but nobody else is found in the room! A second door in the room was sealed years ago with bolts and the windows were shut air-tight. You couldn't fit an arm through the narrow bars of the grill above the bolted door. So how did the murderer enter and leave this tightly-shut bedroom?

I accidentally stumbled to the first step of the locked room trick, because the divided layout of the mansion and the bloodstained handle of the knife recalled Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932). You can say that these stories handle the knife in a somewhat similar way, but the comparisons end when the murderer of this story elaborates on this idea by creating a diabolic and nightmarish way to kill inside a locked room – an original idea complemented by the visual medium. You get to see the locked room trick unfold in front of your eyes and this ensures the explanation of this seemingly impossible murder is played-out to full effect, but the natural, down-to-earth solution does nothing to diminish the nightmarish quality of the murder's work. Some would probably argue that the trick is more terrifying than an unsolved murder with hints of the supernatural. Edgar Allan Poe would have approved.

The murderer and motive were easier to spot, but you only need a passing familiarity with a certain trope of these mystery anime and manga series to be able to do that. Somehow, the writers of these series have a fondness for a particular plot-motif, which tend to make the murderer standout in a crowd of suspects. Yozaburo Kanari mastered that like no other.

But the main attraction of The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly is the ingenious, nicely clued impossible murder and the combination of originality, execution and presentation makes it a (minor) classic of the locked room genre. Highly recommend!

I'll end this post with a thank you to Ho-Ling for bringing this delightfully macabre locked room mystery to my attention. Now we'll wait and see how long it will take me to get back to the Detective Conan movies!

Murder at the Tokyo American Club (1991) by Robert J. Collins

The Tokyo American Club was founded in 1928 by "a group of American and Japanese businessmen" as "a facility for family dining and social intercourse" and the club only ceased its activities during "the 1941-45 misunderstanding," but by 1947 they were off and running again – one of the club's former presidents used the place as a setting for a detective novel. Robert J. Collins is an American author who became a resident of Japan in 1977 and served as the president of the Tokyo American Club from 1984 to 1990.

Collins' most well-known work appear to be Max Danger: The Adventures of An Expat in Tokyo (1987) and More Max Danger: The Continuing Adventures of An Expat in Tokyo (1988), but he also penned two detective novels about a Japanese detective-character.

Captain "Tim" Kawamura of the Azabu Police Department was brought up on "a collection of dog-eared British mystery books" and this helped develop a linguistic talent, which proved to be a useful and helpful skill. Bilingualism was still "a special and relatively rare gift" in Japan. So the police had approached Kawamura with an offer of permanent employment and assign him to handle "whatever it was that had happened among the foreigners" in Tokyo.

There are only two books in the series, Murder at the Tokyo American Club (1991) and Murder at the Tokyo Lawn Tennis Club (1994), but, as a refreshing change, I decided to go with the first book in the series.

Firstly, I have to point out the dedication of the book, which acknowledges someone named Cork, who had "the kindred spirit to publish this as a newspaper serial before anyone, including the author, knew the outcome" – which explains the stronger and weaker points of the story. I was unable to the find the name of the newspaper that originally serialized Murder at the Tokyo American Club, but my suspicion is that it might have been in The Japan Times.

Captain Kawamura is summoned to the Tokyo American Club where a gruesome, double murder was discovered during the annual dinner.

Out in the courtyard pool, at the bottom of the shallow end, a severed head was gently bobbing and rolling, while at the deep was a formally clad torso of a man. There is, however, one puzzling problem: the head is identified as the club manager, Pete Peterson, while the torso belongs to a Japanese man. One thing Collins got spot on is the tendency of Japanese detective stories to toy around with severed body parts, e.g. and Akimitsu Takagi's Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948) Soji Shimada's Senseijutsu satsujinjinken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981). Something I have come to refer to as Corpse Puzzles.

Despite the gruesomeness of the murders, the story is written in a humorous, tongue-in-cheek way that looks at the life of expatriates living in Tokyo. The writing is definitely the strongest aspect of the book, but the very short chapters, showing its origin as a newspaper serial, prevents the plot and characters from fully developing to their full potential – giving you the idea that you're reading a first draft based on a plot-outline that needed polishing. And it's the plot in particular that suffers from this.

However, I have to give Collins props for coming up with an answer as to how a severed head and a headless torso, belonging to two different men, ended up in the swimming pool. Collins even inserted an interesting clue of a cold body suddenly becoming warm again, but the drawback of this explanation is that it required a lot of coincidences and moving about. By itself, this flaw could have been easily forgiven, as it fitted the tone of the story, but the plot has some problems. One of these problems is that Collins made the same mistake Craig Rice made in Having Wonderful Crime (1944). He completely underestimated how difficult and bloody beheadings are when a knife or cleaver is all you have to work with.

A good example of this is the account of one of the two murders and tells how the murderer "swung the knife down" on the back of the victim's neck and the head simply fell off. Just like that! This is where the plot becomes hard to defend, because where the head landed is one of those unbelievable coincidences that already asks a lot from the reader to accept. And it didn't help that it was later explained that the murderer did not really respond to this coincidence by saying this person was not the right frame of mind at the time. You won't say!

A second problem concerns the missing, headless body of the club manager, Peterson, which doesn't turn up until the final page of the story, but how did the police miss finding it in such an obvious place? I remember it was being said that every nook and cranny of the club was being searched. So why did it not turn up sooner or did I miss something? Like I said, the plot sometimes felt as a first draft of a plot-outline that needed more work and fine-tuning.

So you can hardly qualify this book as a Westerner's take on the shin honkaku school of detective fiction. That's a real shame, because the potential was there.

Still, Murder at the Tokyo American Club was a fast, fun read, but more for the writing and the backdrop of expatriates in Japan than the actual characters or plot. This will, however, not deter me from giving Murder at the Tokyo Lawn Tennis Club a shot sometime in the future.

Death Must Have Laughed (1932) by John V. Turner

Last year, I read and reviewed three mystery novels by John V. Turner, published as by "Nicholas Brady," which are part of a little-known, lamentably short-lived series about a passionate botanist and amateur criminologist, Rev. Ebenezer Buckle – who shined as a gumshoe priest in The Fair Murder (1933) and Ebenezer Investigates (1934). This once expensive, hard-to-get series was rescued from obscurity by Black Heath and they recently reprinted another series of forgotten detective stories by Turner.

Between 1932 and 1936, Turner penned six detective novels, all of them published under his own name, which stars a solicitor and fisherman as its series-detective.

Amos Petrie is a short, five feet four, bespectacled man with an exhaustive knowledge of angling and has the habit of rubbing his hands on a huge, gaudy handkerchief every two minutes. He also has a proclivity of making riddles out of questions and conundrums out of riddles. Admittedly, this makes Petrie little more than an assortment of unusual character-traits and ticks without a real personality of his own, but he serves his purpose as a "Great Detective" who can get to the bottom of seemingly insoluble murder cases – such as the impossible poisoning of a boxer smack in the middle of the ring.

Death Must Have Laughed (1932) was published in the U.S. as First Round Murder and concerns the death of the middleweight champion of the world, Al Fanlagan, who has been undefeated in nearly "a hundred fights." A ruthless winning streak that earned him the moniker of "the Great Unbeatable."

The story begins on the evening of Fanlagan's title defense against Archie Polder at the Albert Hall, but the title bout is preceded by three, emotionally-charged rows in his dressing room.

Firstly, Fanlagan tells his manager, Harry "Socker" Mottram, in no uncertain words that he no longer has any use for them, which does not sit very well with the grizzled, in-ring veteran. Mottram had slugged his way to the lightweight championship in "the hazy, distant past" and had made an unbeatable prize-fighter out of his protege by teaching him how to hit "like nobody's business" with both hands, because before that he had been a right-handed, one-trick pony – who was "absolute cold meat" for any opponent with a left hand and a pair of fast feet. And now the old, broken down ex-champion is being cast aside by his golden pupil.

A second confrontation happens when one of Fanlagan's many women, Miss Doris Shannon, turns up in the dressing room. Miss Shannon had been very much in love the "coarse champion of the ring," but Fanlagan tells her he's through with her and she retorts by telling him that it would be better for everyone around him if he simply died. The third row came with the arrival of Edward Franklin, an eminent toxicologist, who demands that the boxer stops seeing his wife. Fanlagan yells at him to go to hell and Franklin tells him he'll be there long before himself.

Words that'll turn out to be somewhat prophetic when "the champion of the whole globe" goes down in the first round and doesn't get up again. At first, it looks as if Polder has slammed the champion into oblivion in less than three minutes, but then the Master of Ceremonies addresses the crowd with a grave announcement: Al Fanlagan has passed away.

So he had "three rows, one fight, and then the mortuary" on his last night and this brings Amos Petrie, who was in the crowd, to the ring and he's soon joined by his policeman friend, Detective Inspector Ripple of Scotland Yard – who are faced with a crime that "looks more like a miracle than a murder." Fanlagan's ate his last meal five hours before the fight and had his last drink three hours before he got through the ropes, but the poison that killed him acted within two or three minutes. And nothing he touched showed the slightest trace of poison. So how did the murderer administrate a lethal, fast working poison to a boxer who's in the middle of a fight?

Overall, the plot and the explanation for the impossible poisoning are pretty easy to pick apart. However, it took me a while to get around to the obvious explanation, because I was nursing a pet theory and the first quarter, or so, appeared to confirm my educated guess – which turned out to be completely wrong. You see, I assumed the poison was dabbed on the boxing gloves of Fanlagan's opponent and this pet theory looked to be confirmed when it was revealed that the poison in question can kill "whether a person smells, swallows or takes the acid on their skin." So this anchored the theory in my for the first half of the story and even pegged Polder's American manager as the murderer. Polder was too broken up about what happened and wanted to retire, but his manager had a gem of a motive.

Fanlagan was a ruthless fighter with a killer temperament and a reputation of physically, and mentally, whittling down his opponents and in the "alleyways of the boxing world were many shadows who had crossed gloves" with the champion – men with broken bodies and spirits who cursed the day Fanlagan was born. So whoever ended his winning streak would not only win a championship title, but a reputation that brings in buckets full of money. An unscrupulous manager might have seen an opportunity here and used poison-smeared boxing gloves to ensure his client's opponent would go down for the long count.

I suspected this would turn out to be a boxing murder, through and through, with all of the personal motives and suspects being nothing more than red herrings. Well, I was completely wrong, but I hope you liked my reading false solution. And I began to catch on the truth halfway through the story. Hey, better late than never. Anyway, the actual solution turned out to be more practical and less dangerous than my solution.

My only real complaint about the poisoning is that the pathologist missed that during his initial examination of the body. Particularly when looking for poison, but that's a minor offense that can easily be forgiven. What's not as easy to forgive is how Petrie conducted himself towards the end of the story, which is even worse than Dr. Gideon Fell's behavior in John Dickson Carr's Death Turns the Tables (1941), in which he allows the shadow of suspicion of the (officially) unsolved murder to fall on an innocent person – only Petrie went a step or two further than Dr. Fell. Petrie allowed one of the suspects to sacrifice his, or her, life, in order to save the murderer, only to turn around and hand over that person to the authorities. Not only that, he actually prevented the actual murderer from committing suicide. Or so it appears. Maybe I read too much into these scenes, but Petrie didn't emerge from them like an overly sympathetic character.

Regardless, this is only a small blotch on a pleasantly written, leisurely paced detective novel with a truly grand stage for an impossible murder and that's what makes Death Must Have Laughed an interesting title for every locked room reader. The story also made me wonder whether there are any detective stories from this period that take place in the “squared circle” of professional wrestling. Now that would make for an interesting mystery novel with a cast of truly unique and odd characters! Just imagine a classic detective story filled with character reminiscent of Gorgeous George, Ed "The Strangler" Lewis and Andre the Giant.

Anyway, Death Must Have Laughed turned out to be another interesting, if imperfect, discovery from the ever-expending catalog of Black Heath Crime Classics. Hopefully, they'll republish more obscure impossible novels in the future. It would be great if they would focus some of their attention on the work of a specialized locked room writer, like Anthony Wynne, because I think we would all welcome affordable editions of Sinners, Go Secretly (1928), The Case of the Gold Coins (1933), Door Nails Never Die (1939) and Emergency Exit (1941).

So, if someone from Black Heath is reading this, please consider a (locked room) writer, like Wynne, for a future run of reprints. I can assure you that I would not be the only one who would appreciate that.