Up This Crooked Way (1946) by Hugh Holman

Hugh Holman was a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina and "a distinguished Southern US academic," who co-founded the Southern Literary Journal, but, more importantly, Holman authored six detective novels – three of which are listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). This is not very surprising since Holman expressed his "highest admiration" for constructors of complex, elaborate plots and impossible crimes. And he was "inordinately proud" that John Dickson Carr dedicated his last novel, The Hungry Goblin (1972), to him.

 

So here we have a long-forgotten mystery writer who wrote good, old-fashioned detective stories, full of southern local color and impossible crimes, but Holman's novels have been out-of-print for decades. It probably would have taken me a lot longer to get around to him had I not been gifted a copy of one of Holman's obscure locked room mysteries, Up This Crooked Way (1946).

Five of Holman's detective novels feature Sheriff John Ewell Macready, who represents the law in the fictitious Hart County, South Carolina, which were written during the 1940s and was followed by a standalone mystery, Small Town Corpse (1951) – published as by "Clarence Hunt." Apparently, the Sheriff Macready stories fused the American regional novel with the campus murder mystery. I suppose you can describe Up This Crooked Way as a mix of Timothy Fuller and Addison Simmons, but with an undeniable, erudite hint of Michael Innes.

Sheriff Macready has to share the stage in Up This Crooked Way with Philip Kent, associate professor of English at Abeton College, who has been living under a dark, secretive cloud of suspicion.

Kent used to teach at Axminster College, in the Mid West, where a public quarrel with a colleague provided him with a motive for murder, but a jury finally gave him "a clean slate." The trial had ruined him in the Mid West. Luckily, the president of Axminster believed him to be innocent and arranged a teaching position at Abeton College. Where he rents a room at the home of Walter G. Parkings, of the Abeton Greeting Card Company, who lets rooms exclusively to college folks, but it has come to his attention Kent had once been indicted for murder and doesn't want a possible murderer living under his roof – gives him his ten days' notice. Kent's anger is described as "a white-hot steel rod, tipped at each end with acid." Something that becomes a problem when, mere minutes later, Parkings is found slumped in his chair with a knife-handle sticking out of his chest.

A second problem is that the only, unlocked, way into that room is the door at the end of a hallway, which was under constant observation. Kent even looked into the room minutes before the body was discovered and saw a very lively leg, in green trousers, moving over the arm of the chair. Since nobody came in, or went out, the front door, "somebody in the house must be guilty."

This small circle of suspects comprises of Jacqueline "Jackie" Dean, a reference librarian at the college, who went in the room to pay her rent and found the body. Steele Carlile, a physics instructor, who had an argument with the victim over an unpaid bill after Kent had received his notices. Robert Herbert teaches history and was upstairs when the body was found. John R. Albert is a pressman in the Parkins printing shop and came to see his boss on "a little union business," but stopped on the way out to chat with the new widow, Mrs. Olga. A woman who turns out to have a very unpleasant personality. And the role of outsider is fulfilled by Jackie's older half-sister, Celia Dean.

He understands Macready

A good and promising opening with a murder in a locked and watched room, but it's Sheriff Macready who carries the story with his personality and the way in which he grappled with the case.

Sheriff Macready is a "big, quiet, uncouth man," honest and friendly, but "almost illiterate in speech and a lover of Chaucer." A man who "never had much schooling," but is often found in the college library reading classic literature, philosophy, history and science books. So not "a country hick who had been lucky on two murder cases" and "will grab up the first suspects he finds to keep his reputation," which is what previous experience had learned Kent, but Kent "hastily revised all former opinions of John Macready" when he attended one of his lectures as a special guest – surprising him when he begins to quote Chaucer. This reminded me of Lt. Columbo in the episode The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case (1977) in which Columbo confessed he had always been surrounded by people who were smarter than him and had to work harder, put in more time and read all the books to make it, which worked as the ending of the episode showed. Macready can be viewed as a rural counterpart to Columbo.

Macready confesses to Kent he still has an "an inferiority complex where smart folks are concerned" and enlists him to help dig around the college town, which is highly irregular, but Macready has never "been famous for regularity." There's more than a seemingly impossible stabbing that comes their way.

There are mysterious letters, a blackmail plot, a second, very gruesome murder and a quasi-impossible disappearance from a guarded house, but the murder of Parkins is the strongest aspect of this relatively light plot. How the murderer got in, and out, of the room is a play on an old, shopworn piece of misdirection, but the bit with the leg lifted the locked room-trick above that of a routine job. However, it's not something that will fool any seasoned mystery reader or anyone who has read a copious amount of Case Closed. If you know how the trick was worked, you can spot the murderer by the end of the third chapter and clumsy handled clue didn't exactly helped either. Holman pretty much directed a bright spotlight on it to ensure the already suspicious-minded armchair detective didn't miss it.

Something else that baffled me is that the Axminster College murder eventually faded out of the story, unresolved, without even giving an explanation why the past and present murder were committed under practically identical circumstances. I've only Up This Crooked Way as an example, but I strongly suspect Holman was a better writer than plotter.

So, plot-wise, Up This Crooked Way is not a perfect example of the kind of complex and elaborate impossible crime stories Holman admired, but it's a spirited attempt at constructing one by someone who was described by Steve Lewis and Bill Pronzini “one of the classiest writers to be published by Phoenix Press” – with an appealing lead detective carrying the story. Sheriff Macready is a character you want to spend time with. So my intention is to return to this series by trying to get my hands on such promising-sounding titles as Slay the Murderer (1946) and Another Man's Poison (1947).

Murder at Mt. Fuji (1982) by Shizuko Natsuki

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed my affection for the Japanese detective story and have read some twenty novels, several short story collections and countless episodes and volumes of anime-and manga detective series over the years – nearly all of them translated in the past few decades. Since 2000, the number of translations gradually changed from a slow, barely existent drip to a steady stream with Locked Room International, Pushkin Vertigo and Bento Books regularly adding new titles to the English catalog. Keigo Higashino even became an international bestseller with the translations being deemed good enough to brandish the label "a novel" on their front covers.

For today's review, I picked a much older translation that, regrettably, betrayed the Japanese detective novel wasn't held in the same regard thirty-five years ago.

Shizuko Natsuki was an incredibly productive mystery novelist, writing more than eighty novels and short stories collections, whose detective stories formed the basis for roughly forty movies and six of her novels were translated into English – published between 1984 and 1991. One of Natsuki's most well-known novels is arguably W no Higeki (The Tragedy of W, 1982), translated in '84 as Murder at Mt. Fuji, but the translator, Robert B. Rohmer, took some liberties to make the story more palatable for Western readers.

Ho-Ling Wong noted in his 2012 review that he had no idea why one of the main characters, Jane Prescott, had to be "a double outsider" (a foreign friend of the family) for the story to work, because she's changed to a Japanese women in screen adaptations. An anonymous comment pointed out that the translator had replaced the character from the original with Jane Prescott to give Western readers "an American heroine among all the exotic creatures." Regrettably, this character change is noticeable and unnatural enough to give Murder at Mt. Fuji a sense of inauthenticity. Ho-Ling blamed the title change from the Ellery Queen-inspired The Tragedy of W to the nondescript, uninspired Murder at Mt. Fuji on Orientalism and a lack of interest, or knowledge, of Golden Age detective stories, but it probably was a marketing decision to make the book standout as something different – as it introduced Natsuki to an English-reading audience. But the title certainly oversold the story's background scenery just a little bit. Mt. Fuji is referred to only a handful of times throughout the story.

Yet, in spite of these changes, Murder at Mt. Fuji treats the reader to an unusual inverted detective story that stands much closer to Anthony Berkeley than Ellery Queen. Natsuki is billed as the Agatha Christie of Japan, but her Western debut was pure Berkeley with an altruistic conspiracy and a twisted ending. Although some would probably argue the plot is an inversion of a very famous Christie novel.

Jane Prescott is an American exchange student from the University of Oregon, who specializes in modern Japanese literature at Japan Women's University, but she had to take a part-time job tutoring Chiyo Wada, in conversational English, to cover her living expenses. Chiyo is the grandniece of the family patriarch and president of Wada Pharmaceuticals, Yohei Wada. A tradition of the Wada family is to get together for the New Year's holiday at one of their villas, where the entire clan would spend a few quiet days in seclusion, but this year, Jane had to be invited to help Chiyo prepare for her graduation thesis. Jane travels to their summer villa on the shores of Lake Yamanaka, Mt. Fuji "soaring majestically" in the background, but she's warned by one of Chiyo's relatives that all the men of the Wada family have "a reputation for womanizing." A lecherous trait that "even the men who marry into the family develop." This serves as a prelude to a deadly domestic drama.

That evening, the peace is shattered by a distraught cry, "my god, Chiyo! Why did you do it? Why?" Chiyo had attempted to slash her wrists after stabbing and killing her great-uncle.

Chiyo tells them Yohei had asked her to come to his room later that night, where he tried to rape her, but she defended herself with a fruit knife and, since Chiyo is "the one person everyone loved," they decide to make "every effort to conceal her crime from the police" – voluntarily putting their necks in the noose by tampering with the evidence and concocting an incontestable alibi. Chiyo is send back to Tokyo with the excuse that she had forgotten an essential reference book while the family stage a burglary, but also make it appear as if Yohei was still alive when she left. One of their tricks involves a late-night delivery meal and a stomach pump. Japanese mystery writers really like to play with corpses, don't they? I'll never stop being amazed how easily they wring cast-iron alibis or baffling impossible crimes from a body!

So the first quarter of the story details the conspiracy, showing the reader every step they take, before the faked burglary and murder is reported to the local police, but the amateur conspirators turned out to be no match for the experienced, well-oiled police apparatus. The competent Detective Ukyo Nakazato and mediagenic Superintendent Katsubei Aiura need less than a day to gather enough evidence to prove the murder was an inside job. However, they might have had some help from someone within the Wada family. A mole who wanted to see Chiyo arrested and sabotaged the conspiracy.

On a side note, there's hole in the conspiracy nobody noticed, not the conspirators or the police, which concerns the playing-and score cards. The family wanted to make it appear that Yohei had been playing poker with them, after Chiyo left, but had the cards been dusted for fingerprints the whole scheme would have collapsed, because Yohei's prints would not have been on them.

Just as an inverted mystery novel, Murder at Mt. Fuji has something completely different and fresh to offer, but have to agree with Ho-Ling that the story feels a little light and rushed in parts. Even with the assistance of the Wada mole, the police very easily pulverized an incredibly elaborate plot and cut through the web of lies. A little too easily and a little too fast. This is what makes the story feel lighter, and lighter, with each passing chapter that followed the setup, which is unquestionable the best portion of the book, but the ending gives the reader a glimmer why Natsuki picked an EQ inspired book title – a title that makes sense when you imagine the case from the point-of-view of the police. Everything else screamed Berkeley.

The tragedy of Murder at Mt. Fuji is that it has since been overshadowed by better translations of better novels by some of the grandmasters, past and present, of the Japanese detective story and the translator tinkering with one of the characters certainly didn't do it any favors. It tainted the atmosphere of Murder at Mt. Fuji and this makes it difficult to recommend to anyone who has enjoyed the novels and short stories by Takemaru Abiko, Yukito Ayatsuji, Keikichi Osaka, Soji Shimada and Seishi Yokomizo. But if you enjoy inverted mysteries, Murder at Mt. Fuji comes highly recommended.

Detective Conan: Who's the Boss?

Some weeks ago, I discussed Tetsuya Ayukawa's The Red Locked Room (2020) and ended the review with the promise to post my fan theory regarding the secret identity of the leader of the Black Organization, which is the red-thread running through the main storyline of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed – published outside of the English-speaking world as Detective Conan. Mild spoilers ahead!

I'm currently at vol. 73 and wanted to bridge the gap with vol. 74 by rereading and reviewing the landmark story, The Sunset Manor Case, from vol. 30. A story that takes place in palatial, Western-style manor house where six detectives have gathered to solve a decades old mystery and getting murdered. I'm not far enough in the series to officially know that the elusive boss made an appearance, of sorts, in that story, but bits and pieces have been spoiled to me over the years. And when going through the story, it suddenly occurred to me who the boss could be. A character who shrewdly cloaked himself in someone else's feathers, but not in the way long-time readers of the series might assume.

First, I've to get those annoying, but necessary, spoilers out of the way. Continue to read at your own risk. The reader has been warned!

On December 13, 2017, Gosho Aoyama revealed that the boss is, or was, the multi-millionaire who owned Sunset Manor, Renya Karasuma, who "died half a century ago under mysterious circumstances" and, if he's still alive, he would be over a 140-years-old – suggesting he was the first one to rejuvenate. And assumed a new identity. Just like Jimmy/Conan in vol. 1. Very likely, he has appeared more prominently under that identity and has interacted with Conan. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that this identity had already been decided on when the series started with the idea existing some time before the first chapter was published.

So, if you take a look at the earliest characters Aoyama created, one character stands out as a possible candidate to be revealed as the rejuvenated boss. A character who did not originate in Detective Conan and would not appear in the series until that important story in vol. 30. I'm talking about the great teenage detective and arch rival of Kaito KID, Saguru Hakuba! Admittedly, I've only so-called "psychological clues" and a bit of educated guesswork to give as evidence, but they make sense to me. You can decide for yourself.

Saguru Hakuba: "Do you have any proof of that, Tom?"

Renya Karasuma is depicted in vol. 30. as an ominous silhouette with a pet crow perched on his left shoulder and, considering how he has clung to life, the passage of time is likely to great concern to him. Hakuba is hyper-conscience of the flow of time and can note time down to the millisecond, which is quite a developed sense of time for a 17-year-old. Something you would expect from a much older man whose "mind time" quickened its pace as he started to grow older. Since it's very possible Renya rejuvenated more than once, his "mind time" could have developed to the point where he's not only aware of the minutes and seconds ticking away, but the milliseconds as well – making it all the more interesting they appeared in vol. 30. A story in which clocks and outward appearances were integral to revealing the secret of Sunset Manor. You could read it as a metaphorical clue that someone more brighter and appealing was hidden behind that dark silhouette. This leads me to what is perhaps the most tangible clue.

Aoyama is very fond of parallel, or mirrored, characterization that he primarily reserves for his main and recurring characters. Jimmy/Conan and Kaitou KID are the most obvious example of this. But if you accept Hakuba and Renya are one and the same person, you can see this mirror approach to characterization all over their double identities.

I believe the most blatant clue is Renya's depiction, in vol. 30, as a dark silhouette with a black crow on his shoulder and Hakuba debuted in that same story carrying his pet hawk, Watson. Crows and hawks are natural enemies! Renya and Hakuba also mirror each other outwardly, an old, Moriarty-like master criminal and a young, Sherlock Holmes-inspired detective, but apparently, Renya tends to overthink his schemes – which makes him prone to mistakes. If my idea is correct, you can see this mistake reflected in his disguise.

Jimmy and Conan

A disguise that was put on a little too thick when he debuted, in Magic Kaitou, wearing a cape and deerstalker, which he later ditched, but could indicate Aoyama had already decided to make him the boss in Detective Conan. Renya is based on Professor Moriarty. So why not make him pose like a young detective who used to dress up like Sherlock Holmes who has the Japanese Arsène Lupin as his nemesis, which also gives him a double-layered motive to hunt down the KID. Firstly, KID is the kind of character who could become a potential threat to his organization and, one way or another, has to be eliminated. Secondly, a long-standing rivalry with a master criminal cements his position as one of the good guys. Thirdly, it would be a masterstroke to hide your main villain in another series and only have him appear in the main series as a novelty, crossover character to make some of the bigger stories even more special. It would be one of the greatest play on the least-likely-suspect!

There is, however, a weakness in my theory: Hakuba has two known relatives, a father and uncle, who can only be explained as members of the organization posing as relatives and help prop up his false identity. I know this is stretching things, but remember Renya has the resources and time to create such an elaborate identity that he could (literally) grow into over the years. And the relatives hold positions in society that can be very handy to a criminal organization. Hakuba father is the Superintendent General of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and his uncle is the owner of a research laboratory, which is another aspect that could be tied to the main storyline of Detective Conan.

When you take all of this together, there's one more thing that stands out as a potential clue. As previously mentioned, Hakuba made his first appearance, in Detective Conan, in the Sunset Manor Case and remarked that, "after 40 years," he was "finally able to step inside the scene of the tragedy" he had "long heard of only in frightened whispers" – not that he had never been inside before. And that the decades-old tragedy was hardly his "first reason for coming." In the story, his reason for being there is Kaitou KID, but if Hakuba is Renya, his remarks meant something very differently.

So what do you make of my theory? Do you think its close to the truth or just another internet fan theory that will turn out to be completely wrong? This is one post I would very much like some feedback on.

If this post happens to attract Detective Conan readers, I reviewed volumes 38-73 under the Gosho Aoyama tag. I also discussed two brilliantly original impossible crime episodes, The Case of the Seance Double Locked Room and The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly, and compiled a list with my favorite locked room mysteries from the manga series. Occasionally, I dip into The Kindaichi Case Files or Q.E.D., but the primary focus of the blog is on classic, or neo-classical, detective stories and novels. That where I'll return to with my next post. So stay tuned.

The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) by Christopher Bush

The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) is the 49th Ludovic Travers novel by Christopher Bush, now "an Elder Statesman of Murder," while Travers has completed his transition from an amateur detective to a genteel private investigator with a controlling interest in the Broad Street Detective Agency, but this late novel hearkens back to the quiet, rural village mysteries of previous decades – rife with blackmail, gossip and murder. Something very different from the post-war malaise or the seedier murders found in The Case of the Fourth Detective (1951) and The Case of the Amateur Actor (1955).

The Case of the Flowery Corpse begins with Travers driving down to roads of rural Suffolk, where he was born, to spend a belated holiday with an old college friend, Sir Henry Morle, who bought a little place in the village of Marstead. When he was close to being lost, Travers was overtaken on the road by a reckless driver who must have been either "drunk or mad." So he was not surprised to find the car ahead of him "piled up against a scrub oak in the hedge" with its front in shambles and the driver without a heartbeat.

An unfortunate, if unsurprising, roadside accident without an apparent hint of foul play, but a closer examination and a strange coincidence turns Travers' vacation into a busman's holiday.

Norman Ranger is the name of the dead driver, "virtually the stage type of Irishman," who deliberately set out to to ingratiate himself with the villagers, but, once accepted, suddenly changed his behavior and "had made himself objectionable to practically everybody" – while never divulging a single thing about his past or the source of his income. Curiously, on the night he got killed, someone tried to burglarize his home and that's quite a rare crime in the peaceful village. What are the chances the burglary and the car crash happened on the same night? And to make it even more suspicious, the doctor send the organs to the county analyst to be tested for poisons. So they're either looking at a bizarre accident littered with coincidences and mysteries or deliberate murder.

Sir Henry is elated at the possibility of a crime and getting to see the "unofficial expert" of Scotland Yard tackling their little domestic murder, but the Chief Constable quickly decided to call in the Yard. Sadly, the case is too unimportant for Superintendent George Wharton to handle. This is where The Case of the Flowery Corpse begins to differ quite a bit from the early and later novels in the series that I have read.

So my favorite Scotland Yard detective is replaced with the quiet, competent and keen-eyed Chief-Inspector Jewle. Where Wharton "would have raised hands of despair and upbraiding to high heaven," Jewle "would shrug his shoulders and carry on," but I can understand why Bush sidelined Wharton here – because the plot required a more plodding detective. There are no alibis that need destroying and even the identity of the murderer is not central to the plot, but peeling away the layers of mysteries surrounding the victim's identity and his past, which eventually exposes a link between him and his murderer. Interestingly, the plot is propelled by a surprising amount of forensic detective work carried out in the background of the story.

I've already mentioned the chemical analyses, but an examination of the second victim's clothes, found covered in straw, reveals he had come in very close contact with chrysanthemums and microscopic fibers inextricably linked the two deaths together. Casts are made of footprints and tire marks found at the crime scenes. Travers asks the police to get him a picture of Ranger with the hair lightened up. So that people who knew him with lighter hair can easier recognize him. An early example of (forensic) photoshopping.

So the structure and feeling of The Case of the Flowery Corpse differs quite a bit from the novels Bush wrote during the 1930s and 1940s. It actually felt like a J.J. Connington or Freeman Wills Crofts novel from the 1920s with the same quiet, unassuming competence of the British detective story from that period. Bush was 70-years-old when The Case of the Flowery Corpse was published and you have to wonder if he was feeling a little nostalgic, but the ending was a reminder he had taken the series in a new direction. And the ending finally gave Travers the full detective experience! So, yeah, another welcome, long overdue reprint from the wonderful Dean Street Press.

The Thieving 'Tec: "The Theft of the Venetian Window" (1975) and "The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" (1983) by Edward D. Hoch

For the past two years, I've been reading a lot of single short stories covering a 100-year period, ranging from the anonymously published "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909) to Anne van Doorn's "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018), but noticed my last short story review was posted in March – discussing Mike Wiecek's techno-thriller "The End of the Train" (2007). So it was time to return to the short story and decided on a pair of locked room mysteries written by the master of the short detective story, Edward D. Hoch.

Over a career that spanned half a century, Hoch wrote close to a thousand short stories and created a whole host of popular detectives-characters. Some more well-known than others.

Nick Velvet was created in 1966 as, to use Hoch's own words, an answer to Ian Fleming's James Bond. A modern, sophisticated thief specialized in "unlikely thefts of valueless objects," but, like many fictional thieves before him, Velvet often had to play detective in order "to accomplish his mission, free himself from a frame-up or collect his fee" – which is easier said than done. Particularly when the problem he has to solve is of the impossible variety.

"The Theft of the Venetian Window" was originally published in the November, 1975, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Velvet is engaged by Milo Mason to go to Venice, Italy, to steal a mirror that he considers to be "the most valuable object on the face of the earth." Mason assures Velvet that the value of the mirror is not monetary, but spiritual, because the mirror is a window, or doorway, to an alternative universe and claims "the mirror might have inspired Lewis Carroll." So he accepts the assignment and goes to Venice to meet with the owner of the mirror, Giorgio Lambazi, but then everything goes horribly wrong.

During their conversation, Velvet drops sleeping pills into Lambazi's espresso, but, before the drug took effect, Lambazi asks him to leave and he has to wait outside the door until the old man goes to sleep. After fifteen minutes, Velvet begins to skillfully pick the lock and unscrewing the chain-link bolt, but, upon reentering the apartment, he finds Lambazi apparently peacefully slumbering in his chair before the mirror – except that his throat had been neatly cut! Lambazi had been alone in the apartment. The only door was locked and bolted with Velvet standing outside it all the time and the only window, overlooking the canal, was "shuttered and bolted on the inside." So how did the killer get in and out?

Surprisingly, considering the premise of the story, "The Theft of Venetian Window" worked better as whodunit than as an impossible crime story, because the locked room-trick is disappointingly simplistic. Easily one of Hoch's most basic and simplest locked room-tricks, which is disappointing coming on the heels of an intriguingly posed impossibility. Nevertheless, Velvet still has to earn his $20,000 fee and how he collects it makes it a worthwhile read, but certainly not one of Hoch's classic short stories.

If you want a second opinion on this story, I recommend you read Christian Henriksson's "Stray Impossibilities – Part Hoch," posted on Mysteries, Short and Sweet, who praised the solution to the locked room murder as "excellent in all its simplicity."

"The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" was originally published in the March, 1983, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and introduces "a highly skilled antagonist," Sandra Paris a.k.a. The White Queen, who specializes in impossible feats before breakfast – in the manner of the White Queen from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Velvet first heard of the White Queen from Rooster Vitale, a minor organized-crime figure, who wants to hire him "to steal a roomful of furniture." But he never steals anything of value. So the job goes to the White Queen and she delivers on her promise in a seemingly impossible manner!

One morning, Douglas Shelton passes his study to the kitchen to make his breakfast, glancing inside to see if everything was already, but, as he was squeezing oranges, he gets a phone call asking him to take a look at his study. The study was completely empty. In the few minutes Shelton had been preparing breakfast, someone had managed to remove all the furniture, but this was not the last escapade of the White Queen. The next day a roulette wheel from an unused gaming table at the Golden Fleece casino vanished with the place full of people!

Velvet decides to confront Sandra Paris about cutting into his business, but learns Rooster hasn't paid her fee yet, because there was supposed to be papers hidden, somewhere, in the stolen furniture. So she offers him his usual fee to find the papers in the stolen furniture that she had already "reduced to rubble in a futile attempt to find the papers," which makes for a good, Ellery Queen-like hidden object puzzle with a double-layered solution. Velvet also to figure out how every stick of furniture was taken out of the study within a couple of minutes and how the roulette wheel vanished from the middle of a crowded casino, but Velvet also has reputation to protect and makes a bet with the White Queen that he can steal her menu at breakfast some morning – she promises to pay him twenty-five thousand dollars if he succeeds. And he earns his money by making the menu miraculously disappear from her hands. Hoch showed why he was master of the short story with the casual revelation of the solution to this third and final impossible disappearance.

My only objection is that Paris should have immediately figured out how the menu disappeared, but, in every other regard, "The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" is a splendid and richly plotted caper with no less than three miraculous disappearances. Somewhat reminiscent of Norman Berrow's caper The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) with the solution to disappearance of the furniture being the absolute highlight of the plot. The problem of the stolen roulette wheel and menu were very minor in comparison, but certainly added to the charm of the story about two master thieves locking horns. Definitely recommended!

The Penny Murders (1979) by Lionel Black

Dudley Barker was a British journalist and literary agent, who turned to fiction, becoming a full-time writer in the 1960s and wrote seventeen crime, detective and spy novels over the next twenty years – all published as by "Lionel Black." One of his books is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but, believe it or not, the impossible crime element is not what attracted my attention. Not entirely, anyway.

The Penny Murders (1979) is the fifth of seven novels in the Kate and Henry Theobold series, a modern interpretation of the husband-and-wife detective teams of Frances Crane, Kelley Roos and the Lockridges, which takes place in the world of rare coin collectors. Everything I read about The Penny Murders suggested it was an English precursor to the very distinctive locked room mysteries penned by Herbert Resnicow in the 1980s. And my impression was pretty much on the money!

Kate Theobold is a nosy reporter for a London newspaper, the Daily Post, while her husband is barrister and a humble collector with a "coin cabinet he coos over." So when a coin collection comes up for auction, one of the biggest in over fifty years, Kate decides to cover it for her newspaper and takes along her husband to watch how a tray of old coins is sold for "twelve thousand smackers" – followed by a bidding war over a Charles I Oxford crown. Henry identifies the bidders as Cornelius Ball, one of the best-known coin collectors in United States, who is going at it with a with a well-known London dealer, Harvey Foskett. Henry suspects Foskett bidding on behalf of Ball's long-time rival, Miles Cabral. A millionaire who made his pile during the newspaper takeover games of the '60s and survived the crash in the '70s.

Cabral is reputed to have one of the finest collection of coins in England and particular a so-called 'small change' collection ("Athenian fractions of the obol, the first English pennies, rare United States dimes, that sort of thing"). And they have been at each other hammer-and-tong for years.

So, when Kate learns Henry's father is an old acquaintance of Cabral, she asks Henry to introduce her to him and they get invited to his house for drinks at six o'clock, but they arrive at a silent and locked house! Kate decides to enter the home through the unlocked garage door, assuming Cabral has fallen ill, but, when she goes into the coin-room, she finds his body sprawled on the floor – a gunshot wound to head and a gun lying nearby. The house has "one of the most elaborate and effective burglar alarms in London," which got triggered when Kate opened the garage door, immediately summoning the police when the alarm goes off.

Cabral died in "the best-locked house in London," locked electronically with the keys in the corpse's pocket, which can only mean he died by his own hands. Nobody else could have entered, or left, the premises without setting off the alarm system. However, Kate is convinced he had been murdered and launches a journalistic investigation with Henry helping out in the background.

The main focus of the investigation is the coin collection and Henry, who examined the collection, noticed Cabral had left open "a few very optimistic spaces" in his cabinets that even he can never seriously have expected to fill. A spot had been reserved for an Edward VIII twelve-sided three penny piece and two placed for the 1933 and 1954 English pennies. The 1954 penny is the rarest coin of them all and the possible existence of a second specimen is a central plot-thread of the story.

Black's The Penny Murders is not solely concerned with the tug-of-war between two collectors with deep pockets, but there are also the various plots, and counter plots, between the characters and victim – such as the battle with his ex-wive and her soon-to-be husband. They both have enough pull, or incriminating material, at their disposal to destroy each other. And there are some other possibilities to consider. Who's threatening Kate to stop writing articles on Cabral and why? Does it have any connection with the Lebanese silversmith who's always lurking in the background? And did Cabral help himself to some rare coins from the collection of his former mistress's dead uncle? And does it give the girl, or her boyfriend, a motive for murder?

Whoever pulled the trigger, the problem that has to be solved before the murderer can be apprehended is figuring out how this person entered, and left, the house that was equipped with a sensitive, high-tech burglar alarm. This is where the story becomes a little frustrating and difficult to explain.

You see, Black found a way to break an unwritten, but cast-iron, rule of the locked room mystery, a really big no-no, without actually breaking it. Something you'll probably never stumble to. Just to give you an idea, imagine a locked room with the murderer exiting through a secret passage, but the passage was created by the murderer when he was locked inside with the victim – somehow finding a way to cover the passageway behind him. This is the kind of locked room-trick Black cooked up here, but slightly more ingenious and frustrating. A solution that left me torn whether to applaud the infernal cheek of it or toss the book across the room in disgust.

Anyway, the solution to the locked house did give the story a much needed punch in the end, because the who-and why were either a letdown (who) or obvious (why), but the how certainly made it memorable. It successfully pulled the wool over my eyes. I had reasons to believe that the solution to the electronically locked house was a modern redressing of an age-old trick, which is why I suspected a completely innocent person. And than the explanation revealed something else all together. Sometimes, I'm just a really shitty armchair detective.

All in all, Black's The Penny Murders is an enjoyable mystery novel with an interesting background milieu of numismatics and coin lore, but the overall solution isn't perfect or particularly exciting. So I can only really recommend it to fanatical locked room readers on account of the bold solution, because it would probably generate some discussion among fans.