Ellery Queen: Long May They Reign

"The whole world is a tragedy of errors..."

- Ellery Queen

When Manfred Lee passed away on April 3, 1971 he had been unable to expand and flesh out the 50-page manuscript, comprising the detailed plot outline for a brand new Ellery Queen novel, entitled The Tragedy of Errors, that was remitted to him by his cousin, and longtime partner in crime, Frederic Dannay. Despite numerous attempts to get the book completed, it never amounted to anything and the story was never developed into a full-fledged novel.

In commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the publication of the first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), Douglas Greene, of the exquisite Crippen and Landru, published an anniversary collection that contained this comprehensive plot outline – combined with a small, but excellent, selection of mainly short-shorts, insightful essays and touching personal reminiscences, makes this a valued addition to my personal library of mystery and imagination. 

The stories, from the bare outline of the titular story to the handful of briefly-told tales, are exactly what you'd might expect from mysteries written and plotted in the grand tradition by the champions of the puzzle plot approach – and the essays and personal recollections added a whole new dimension to my perception of the human beings behind the "Ellery Queen" byline.

I was especially glad to finally learn a little bit more of Manfred Lee, who quite literarily filled the role of silent partner, and at long last become more than just a name on paper. It wasn't all pleasant reading, of course, notably the descriptive passages of his death (hey, these people are, what you might call, heroes to me!), but there were also neat little anecdotes that put a big grin on my face – like him being mistaken for Ernest Hemmingway and his failure to elicit a response from a crowd of morticians during one of his lectures, but was assured afterwards that they were positively thrilled.  

But they also drove home the fact that most of them have been gone longer than I have been alive, and that I will never have an opportunity to personally tell Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Kelley Roos, Anthony Boucher, Stuart Palmer, Craig Rice and Rex Stout how much pleasure their books and stories have brought me – which is slightly depressing if anything.

However, we're not here to mourn the passing of giants, but to celebrate them and marvel at the footprints they've left behind on the literary landscape! 

The Last Adventure of Ellery Queen:

The Tragedy of Errors

This is only an extensive plot summery, but it's enough to justify the claim that upon its completion it would've unquestionable been one of their finest works from their late period – a return, in fact, to the complexity and multi-layered plots of the early years, but with the matured Ellery Queen of the midde, character-driven books. And the outline suggests that Frederic Dannay felt rejuvenated as a plotter.

The plot describes the successful, but ultimately sad, life story of a faded Hollywood starlet who dies a violent death, not very convincingly dressed up as a suicide, and evidence pertains the involvement of her young lover – a no good, two-bit actor. Even though Dannay only employed a small cast of characters, to throw suspicious glances at, it's a genuinely baffling and difficult problem that even succeeded in throwing me off balance with a smashing false solution. It was exactly the answer I had pieced together and felt very smug about it. Oh well...

But the best plot thread was perhaps the legal rigmarole concerning the will, which was dexterous in its technical execution and it's no mean feat to come up with a dazzling clever and fresh twist on an old gag like that in the 1960s – and the best part was that it was designed to collapse. I know that I tend to overuse the word brilliant for stories that I really like, but no other word suffice. It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! I wanted to start a slow clap at that point.

It's a pity and a lost to the genre that the estate was unable to work out a deal to turn the manuscript into a novel, but I'm glad that a publisher like C&L at least gave us a glimpse at what might have been. Thanks, Doug! :)

The Short Stories:

Terror Town

The disappearance of Tom Cooley was one those baffling, unsold mysteries that lingered on in the minds of the towns people, until, a few months later, his decomposed remains are uncovered in a roadside ditch – and the mud-caked skeleton heralds a series of brutal murders that nearly threw the town into a frenzy. Engagingly written and plotted, and understandable why some people nominate this as one of their best short stories.

Uncle from Australia

Ellery Queen is approached by the quintessential Australian uncle, who made a small fortune down under and has returned to America to bequeath his riches on either one of his two nephews or his only niece. The latter turns out to be picked as the lucky heir, but the man is having second thoughts, afraid that the prospects of all that money might proof to be temping, and the brassy-looking Oriental paperknife in his back confirms his fears. The solution is a clever variation on a very famous whodunit novel and has the added bonus of a simple, and believable, dying message.

Note that all the stories from this point on throws a gauntlet at the readers and challenges them to solve the mystery themselves.

The Three Students

The next three short-shorts are Puzzle Club stories, in which Ellery Queen is challenged by his fellow members to make sense of complicated problems they cooked up for him – and the first one involves a ring that was purloined from the office of a college president and the only clue is a folded slip of paper with some gibberish scrawled on it. Not a bad story, but not every reader will have the special knowledge required to solve it themselves.

The Odd Man

Members of the Puzzle Club take another shot at throwing an insoluble problem at Ellery Queen, but he turns the tables on them – and offers no less than three different solutions that perfectly fit the given evidence. Bravo, Mr. Queen! Bravo!

The Honest Swindler

A neat little brain teaser, in which Ellery Queen has to figure out how a dirt-poor desert dweller could've have coughed up $50,000 to pay back outstanding loans. I think this is the most solvable one of the bunch.

The Reindeer Clue (ghost written by Edward D. Hoch)

Ellery Queen and his father, Inspector Richard Queen, look into the murder of an ex-columnist and blackmailer at the zoo – and the only clue is a blood smeared dying message that was obliterated by the murderer. This is as good a story as anything written and plotted by Lee and Dannay themselves.

The Kindaichi Case Files: The Good, The Bad and The Average

"If I plagiarize, it's only because I like someone else's idea better than mine and I want credit for it."

- Anna Chin-Williams

If you would press me to pick my least favorite mystery writer, I would probably blurt out the name of Kanari Yozaburo – who possesses all the originality of a copying machine and imperiously passes swiped plots off as his own stuff. But what's really unforgivable is his failure rate at utilizing these stolen goods to produce at least a half descent story, even if we've seen parts of it before. Instead, he clings desperately to a rigid, hackneyed formula constructed around the avenger-from-the-past theme, closed circle of suspects, cut-off locations and cribbing plot ideas, mostly locked room scenarios, to fluff it all up.

But what I really hate, more than anything else, are Kindaichi's little emo-speeches to the murderers, after he caught them.

The murderer: They were responsible for the death of my kid brother; they deserved to die!

Kindaichi: But your brother wouldn't have wanted you to hurt them... he would've wanted you... to be HAPPY!

The murderer: OMG!1!! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!11! * breaks down sobbing and moaning *

Even though I can't manage to muster up any excitement or enthusiasm for this series, given up on that a long time ago, I will put all my personal disdain aside and briefly, but objectively, discuss three titles that I tagged as good, bad and average to give the readers of this blog a general idea of what to expect when they decide to pick up a volume.

A Short Introduction:

The protagonist of The Kindaichi Case Files is the high school student Hajime Kindaichi, who's the supposed grandson of the famous Kousuke Kindaichi, and, despite an I.Q. of 180, he's a lazy underachiever at school with a knack for attracting corpses wherever he goes – especially when he's taking a field trip or is on holiday with friends from his school.

The Good: House of Wax

I don't know who was being ripped off and repackaged in this volume, but his or her sense for clueing and creating locked rooms is on par with John Dickson Carr and Christianna Brand – and even that second-rate hack wasn't able to dilute the brilliance of the original ideas with his tired old formula and mediocre writing.

The set-up of the story is riddled with tired old clichés and reinforces the flawed image most people have of a classic detective story: Kindaichi and Miyuki are invited by Superintendent Akechi to be his tag-along guests at the House of Wax, a castle transplanted from Germany, where its owner will be throwing a murder party for people who have made a name in the world of crime. There are professional and amateur detectives (including the nephew of Lt. Columbo!), mystery writers, crime reporters and even a pathologist. Upon their arrival they discover the place is filled with lifelike wax dolls, including replicas of the participants, dressed up in fancy medieval costumes, and their mysterious host is only present as a disembodied voice bellowing through the ancient hallways of the castle.

The game's afoot and the guests have to solve the stabbing of one of the wax dolls, but this proved to be an eerie precursor for an actual and identical murder, this time under impossible circumstances, and what follows is an exceptional well-plotted detective story – in which the characters play around with assumptions and have to correctly interpret a galore of double edged clues (e.g. medieval costumes, wax dolls and the flickering of candle light). 

This is one of perhaps only two or three volumes really worth the effort of tracking and hunting down. 

The Bad: The Tokyo Zodiac Murders The Mummy's Curse

 

This is one of the most shameless acts of plagiarism in the series, in which Kanari Yozaburo audaciously lifts the best bits and pieces from Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981) and brings nothing to the table himself.

The story follows Kindaichi and Miyuki to a small, hexagram-shaped village were they plan to attend the wedding of a friend. The strange village is littered with themed mansions, and all of them harbor the mutilated remains of a mummified corpse – hinting at a dark secret buried deeply in the faraway past. But whatever was buried starts clawing its way to the surface and shortly after their arrival an impossible murder is committed, inside a locked chapel, and the aristocratic owners of the mansions start dropping like flies.

Yes, I know what you're probably thinking, but don't make the mistake of saying to yourself, "Well, that doesn't sound all that bad." The shaped village, the cutesy themed mansions and the gore fest only serve to distract your attention away from the fact that you're reading a poorly altered and abridged version of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. That's all the story has to offer, the main trick and a rejected solution from that book – everything else is just eye candy or filler.

The Average: Smoke and Mirrors 

Surprisingly, this story broke with the apparently adamant formula and consequently wangled an unexpected solution, but only because, as a regular reader, you were expecting the same old, same old. Still, it's one of the more readable entries into the series.

This time Kindaichi and Miyuki enroll into the school's mystery club, who are in the process of investigating the origin of a bunch of urban legends attached to their school and a possible connection to a shady figure calling himself The After-School Magician – whose been sending warning letters to the school not to tear down his old abode on the campus grounds. But his pleas fall on deaf ears and he decides to force his point home by scattering the school grounds with a few bodies, and he's not too shy to make an appearance in front of live crowd, including Kindaichi, and hang one of their friends in full view of them – only to disappear, together with his victim, from a locked and watched classroom moments later.

You don't have to overtax your brain too much to figure out how the murderer created the locked room illusion, but his identity comes as a genuine surprise if you were expecting the face of the usual Kindaichi killer underneath the magician's mask – and I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

However, much of the praise must be heaped on the translator, who was faced with the problem of an untranslatable dying message and simply, but effectively, cooked up a new one that fitted in with the story and artwork.

I hope that publishers, who may or may not be reading this blog and might be contemplating to publish foreign detective stories, will take notice of that and get themselves a translator who's up on his mystery stuff – like my friend Ho-Ling (whose excellent blog is simply one of the best of the online mystery community, loaded with interesting and enticing reviews, and a connecting link between the detective stories of the West and the East. Oh, and drop him a line asking when the review of The Frightened Stiff will be up. ;))  

Hey, let's end this negative tainted review on a positive note with a few more plugs: At the Scene of the Crime (from a very prolific blogger... seriously, give us a break to catch our breath), Pretty Sinister Books (read this... or else!), Only Detect (great blog), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel (aren't we all?), Classic Mysteries (weekly podcasts of classic whodunits currently in print) and Tipping my Fedora (glad to know there are still classy people with taste).

"Fighting crime in a future time"

"Mystery and science fiction have always had one oddity in common: each has devoted addicts who refuse to read any other kind of fiction. I hope there will be readers of this book who never before read any science fiction, and other readers who never before read any crime stories. And I hope, and believe, that both will find out to their pleasure how much they have been missing."

- Miriam Allen DeFord (from the introduction of Space, Time and Crime)

Over the past few years, I have heard several people suggest that the advent of revolutionary new technology and forensic science has driven the final nail in the coffin of the classic whodunit – which always struck me as a narrow-minded view of things. As if we are the first generation of humans to witness a rapidly changing world due to technological and scientific advancement. Back then, radio and telephone made the world a lot smaller, much in the same way as the internet has done for us today, and DNA shouldn't be any more of an obstacle, for a talented mystery writer anyway, as fingerprints did for the great pioneers of the genre.

But this shallow and near-sighted argument was already refuted long before it was made, and the person who shattered it to smithereens was science-fiction legend, Isaac Asimov, who published a groundbreaking detective novel, Caves of Steel (1954), that intertwined a formal detective story with a visionary image of the future – and it worked, flawlessly!

In spite of being set in the distant future, which has the advantage of super advanced technology, it managed to come up with a brilliant and perfectly fair solution and even offers several equally neat false solutions in the process.

The anthology Space, Time and Crime (1964) tries to continue that tradition, but, unfortunately, it suffers from nearly every flaw a short story collection can have: the selection of stories are very uneven in quality, ranging from quite good to absolutely bland, and some of the stories really make you scratch your head and ponder why they were included into the book. However, none of the stories are really bad, and it makes for a nice, experimental read, but overall it holds more interest for a SF than a mystery fan.

Here's a complete overview of all fourteen stories:  

Crisis, 1999 by Fredric Brown

This tale was published at the tail end of the golden era of the detective story, 1949, and is the only entry in this collection that represents that particular period in literary history. The story itself is set 50 years into the future, 1999, and describes an advanced, but troubled, civilization – whose professional criminals are literarily getting away with murder by beating the lie detector. It's fortunate for that society that great detectives haven't gone the way of the dinosaurs, and Bela Joad descents into the underworld to undrape what covers up all these seemingly undetectable lies, but instead finds a method to root-out criminal behavior once and for all. The story is not without interest, but more so as a classic science-fiction yarn than as a clever detective story – as the proposed solution would've never been accepted in a straightforward mystery.

Fredric Brown is also the author of several detective novels and short stories, including the phantasmagorial Night of the Jabberwock (1951) and the nightmarish locked room mystery, "The Spherical Ghoul" (1943). Both highly recommended.  

Puzzle for Plotters

It's funny how neatly the previous two blog entries tie-in with this review, which discusses not only another book from the collective hands of that shamefully neglected writing team, operating this time under the nom de guerre of Patrick Quentin, but one that also happens to star two of their series detectives: the troubled Peter Duluth and the methodical Lieutenant Trant. But don't think that the maddening, and hauntingly ingenious, problem put forward in Black Widow (1952) is solved by this dream-team of super-sleuths, because crossing paths means in this case crossing swords – as Lt. Trant doggedly pursues Duluth as he tries to tag him for the death of a young woman.

The Plot Against Peter Duluth

The menacing plot, contrived against the ever-troubled Peter Duluth, ticks and moves with the same meticulous precision as the cogs and wheels that make the hands of a Swiss pocket watch move – and once again showcase their talent for combining a knotty, twisted and complex plot with an exploration of the darker depths of the human soul.

Black Widow was put down on paper more than a decade after Death and the Maiden (1939), but I'm also glad to report that the intermediating years didn't deteriorate their talent for gauging the intelligence and experience of their readers – and mercilessly use it as a tool to lead them by the noose.

This diabolical scheme starts when a depressed and lonely Peter Duluth is persuaded by a friend to stop moping around the house and join a dull party, where he meets and befriends a young woman – who's also an aspiring writer. He sort of looks out for her, in a purely platonically and fatherly manner, and even offers the use of his house for her to work quietly on her writing. But no good deed goes unpunished, and one day, when Duluth returns from fetching his wife, who just came back from a trip, they find the girl in their home with a scarf tightly knotted around her neck – dangling from a chandelier.

Enter the ever-persistent and efficient Lieutenant Trant, whose careful examination and questioning of witnesses turn up a pile of damning evidence against Peter Duluth – that brands him, not only as an unfaithful husband and a seducer of young women, but also marks him as potential and particular ruthless murderer. I was getting a real kick out at seeing these detectives interact as antagonists, instead of sitting down and discussing the case over a drink, however, the methods employed by Lieutenant Trant seemed a bit crude at times, and one of his remarks was loaded with so much venom that it would've rendered even Archie Goodwin speechless.

This is a frighteningly good constructed persecution story, that does such a fine job of stacking up the odds against Peter Duluth that you tend to forget that you're reading a fair play detective story – and the possibility you have as reader to skewer through the many layers of plot and figure out for yourself what the heck is really going on.

Not to brag, or anything, but I managed to do exactly that! Early on, I stumbled across part of the truth and slowly developed it into a workable theory, but for the most part of the story, it was mere conjecture, until certain clues started showing up that snugly fitted my solution. At that moment, everything clicked into place and suddenly everything made sense. However, they anticipated upon an observant reader coming that far and nearly swiped that smug grin off my face with a completely fair twist, but I was able to work that one out as well – just in the nick of time.

To sum the book up: Black Widow is a very dark story, in which an innocent person is trapped in a poisonous and tightly woven web of lies and deceit – designed to slowly kill its prey, but the complexity of its plots makes the book so much more than merely a story of suspense and peril. And the fact that the book is a crossover is the icing on the cake.

This is another five star detectives from the geniuses whom we collectively call Patrick Quentin. 

Final note: I will update this post if anything like this happens tonight. Stay tuned. ;)

The Student Body

I alluded in an earlier review to the intricate relationships and ever changing combinations of the participating members of a collaborative writing team, primarily known under the shared penname of Patrick Quentin, and the near impossibility to shortly summarize the inner workings of the group for a simple review as this one. Therefore, I will confine myself to the rudimentary facts, and tell you that Death and the Maiden (1939) was written by Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb, one of the regular tandems of the group, and was signed as by Q. Patrick (as "inconspicious" as an anonym as "Carter Dickson").

Ruckus on the Campus

Death and the Maiden is easily one of the best detective stories I read this year, and has all the ear-marks of a first-rate whodunit: an elaborate, multi-layered woven plot, well-rounded, believable characters and a fairly good setting, however, the best part of the story is that the Webb and Wheeler have taken the intelligence and experience of their readers into the equation. The observant and experienced mystery reader will probably spot the murderer, either deductively or instinctively, before the final chapter, but the story is so diabolically clever and trickily plotted that you're in for a surprise no matter how solid your deductions were or how sensitive your intuition is.

Being able to gauge your readers' intelligence and knowledge of the genre, and acting on them to cleverly mislead them, is one of the greatest gifts a mystery writer can possess – and makes for a satisfying read. It's like both men crossed time and space to point and snicker at me, while saying, "Ha! You thought we came at you from this angle, but then we turned around come at you from that spot." Well played, guys. Well played.

This fiendishly cunning story revolves around Grace Hough, not one of the most popular woman on campus, who's been receiving a string of special delivery letters – which everyone presumes to be love notes from a mysterious admirer or even a secret lover. But the letters become sinister tell-tale clues, when, after a short disappearance, her body is dragged from the river of a small town – twenty miles removed from the campus grounds.

The efficient Lieutenant Trant is put on the case and skillfully unsnarls a tangled and complicated web of lies, motives and clues to discover who from the small pool of suspects, consisting of fellow students and faculty members, murdered the unpopular and dangerous Grace Hough – who's final actions resembled that of a kamikaze pilot. It's really no wonder she ended up with a dent in the back of her skull.

Lieutenant Trant is a memorable detective without being an overbearing, eccentric snob who spouts Latin phrases and quotes obscure passages from Shakespeare every five minutes. He's a shrewd, scheming homicide detective who's cut from the same mold as his colleague Lieutenant Columbo. Just like him, Lt. Trant has a knack for wreaking havoc on the nerves of suspects and knows how to give them more than enough rope to hang themselves with. In a way, his personality and police methods makes it almost disappointing that the plot wasn't constructed as an inverted detective story.

On a final note, I have to say that Patrick Quentin has impressed me as a mature equivalent of Ellery Queen. Quentin's detective stories boost the same complex, multi-layered plots and clueing as Ellery Queen, but their tone was more serious, their themes darker and they were simply better at creating characters.

Concisely, this is a five-star detective story – worthy of being labeled a classic.

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you"

"There are many doors to Fantasia, my boy. There are other such magic books. A lot of people read them without noticing. It all depends on who gets his hands on such books."

- Mr. Coreander, The Never-Ending Story (1979). 

I always had a weakness for crossovers. It's difficult to explain where this fascination came from, but there's something positively thrilling about watching two different universes collide with one another and merge into one – and a character from one book acknowledging a character from another book, as an actual person, is enough to send a tingling down my spine. It's for this reason that I enjoy Rex Stout's non-series detectives as much as the ones he wrote featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. They are jam-packed with places and secondary characters that make it very clear they all inhabit the same universe, but, to my great sorrow, Wolfe, Fox and Hicks were never destined to cross paths.

So you can imagine my glee when, a few years ago, I discovered that Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice had collaborated on a bunch of short stories, collected in The People vs. Withers and Malone (1963), in which their series detectives actually worked together on half a dozen cases (was there a god, after all?)!

But as great and fun as the stories were, and the experience of reading them, they somewhat pale in comparison to what happened after I turned over the final page. This is not a book review, but an account of the night I stepped through one of the Fantasia's hidden doors and met Hildegard Withers and John J. Malone face-to-face. ;-)  

The Dream

I swear, they're sneaking up on me!

I vividly remember the night that my conscious mind dislodged itself from my sleep-wrapped brain, entered an alternate dimension, and walked into a dimly-lit room, dressed sharply like a 1930s gumshoe (think Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin, but I felt more like Sam Tyler at that moment), and there, on the floor, was the body of a man. Near him lay a revolver that hadn't given up smoking yet.

Well, here was a unique opportunity to prove my prowess as the cerebral detective I always fancy myself to be, and went down on all four to methodically study the remains and the murder weapon, when, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Hildegard Withers and John J. Malone burst onto the crime-scene. They grabbed me, each under one of my arms, and started dragging me out of the room. The police were on there way, they told me, to arrest me for this murder, but rest assured, they would prove me to be innocent of this dirty deed – and all this time I was kicking and screaming that I didn't want their help, because they always make things worse than they already are.

Then the dream cuts to a bizarre, almost surrealistic car chase with a few dozen patrol cars. I'm locked in the trunk by the dynamic duo, banging and screaming to be let out, and lurched over the steering wheel (with a gleam of madness in her eyes) is Hildegard Withers – while Malone hangs out of the side window, with an half empty bottle of whiskey, hollering a song about pretty girls and booze.

And then I woke up... but was it all a dream? Well, I can tell you it was one of the most realistic and lifelike ones I ever had in my life. Withers and Malone weren't vague, dreamy images but actual, three-dimensional human beings. I remember the pressure of their grip on my arms. Heck, I even smelled the booze on Malone's breath!

This means one of the following things: a) my brain couldn't fully comprehend that I had just read an actual GAD-crossover, and as a result I was having a full-sensory hallucination b) the stories were so epic that they ripped a hole in the time-space continuum and allowed me to travel to a parallel universe were detective stories are the reality c) for a brief moment, my sleep induced mind figured out how to open one of the doors leading to Fantasia.

But what do regular visitors who haunt this blog think?

Which Witch is Which?

Journalist and author, Zelda Popkin, is today better remembered, if she's remembered at all, for her novel The Journey Home (1945), selling close to a million copies, in which she sets forth the story of a chance meeting between a homeward soldier and a career woman against the backdrop of a catastrophic train crash.

But she also wrote a series of detective novels featuring one of the first professional female detectives, the independent-minded Mary Carner, who works for a large department store as a security detective – looking out for their merchandise and tackling shoplifters. In Murder in the Mist (1940), her second recorded case, she also demonstrates a very feminine mindset, that was definitely ahead of her time, by humiliating and verbally burning an incompetent police chief to a crisp and leaving her newly acquired spouse at the hotel, to take care of a child, while she goes on the hunt for a murderer.

A touch gal who should go over very well with a contemporary reading audience and scholars.

The Wicked Witch of Laneport

When Mary Carner and Christopher Whittaker, New York City's most credible department store detectives, take a wrong turn on their honeymoon, they end up in the picturesque New England coastal town of Laneport – a flocking place for two-bit artists and gossipy old coffin dodgers.

The newlywed couple decides to check into the local hotel, The Rockledge, for the night, but after snugly turning in, Mary is awakened by a little girl tugging at her arm – whispering complainingly that it's chilly and how she's unable to rouse her mommy. What follows is a powerful scene, in which Mary discovers the marble-white, stone-cold body of the girls' mother in the next room. A black metal spike is projecting from her bare chest.

The child is inconsolable with grief when she learns why her mother didn't respond to her calling and tugging, but after they managed to calm her down a bit they learn that she actually saw the assailant who killed her mother, however, how tenable is her statement when the only description she's able to give is that of a cloaked witch with a broom. These moments, in which reality and fantasy seem to merge for a brief moment, are the best aspects of the plot.

Crime Map of Laneport

Zelda Popkin shows plenty of imagination and has a flair for telling a fascinating story, in which she smoothly blends fantastic plot elements, such as murderous witches, cloven hoof-prints and a deserted village, with a sincere, down-to-earth effect of murder (the orphaned kid of the murdered woman) while also going through the motions of a proper detective story – lining up, some usual and unusual suspects, ranging from a sculptor and his jealous wife, an ex-murderer in hiding, a fleeing millionaires son and an elfish old codger, who, at times, gets wrapped-up too much in his daydreams.

However, the professed solution, and the events leading up to the unmasking of the murdering witch, leaves a lot to be desired for the self-proclaimed armchair detectives whose only desire is a fair shot at cracking the case before the detective does – and the fact that Mary doesn't work out the solution by logical reasoning from clues, or even a single flash of intuition, either, but by pure happenstance, as she witnesses the murderer accidentally recreating the tell-tale hoof-prints, doesn't do much to uplift the disappointing feeling.

In many ways, Murder in the Mist, reminded me of a Gladys Mitchell novel, in which she interestingly underplayed her wildly effective imagination, but with her greatest weakness, a penchant for weak, ineffective and muddled endings, in full-swing.

That's why I can only recommend this book to mystery readers who don't care about the puzzle element or fans of Gladys Mitchell, who want to contrast her work with this book.

Redrum and Other Mirecs

In 1965, the illustrious Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine began publishing a series of standalone detective stories under some of the most astonishing bylines: Handon C. Jorricks, Leyne Requel and Rhoda Lys Storey. The puzzle solving brains among us will at once notice that this outré collection of names have a coded quality to them and will have figured out by now that they are anagrams of names of some renowned mystery writers, however, these stories weren't jotted down by John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Norma Schier was the brain behind these puzzling conundrums, in which she paid homage to her favorite mystery writers by burlesquing them in a humorous and clever manner – and most of them perfectly captured the heart of soul of the originals. They also have the added bonus of being anagram puzzles. You can solve a case in two different ways: by correctly interpreting the clues she provided or scrambling the anagrammatic names in the right order to learn which role which character plays in a story. A truly unique interpretation of the sacred rule of playing fair with your readers.

These risible pastiches easily stand up against those gathered in Agatha Christie's Partner in Crime (1929) and Leo Bruce's satirical masterpiece, Case for Three Detectives (1936), and when they were collected in a book, entitled The Anagram Detectives (1979), the result was an excellent collection of short stories that can boost that it doesn't have a single real dud among its fourteen stories – a rarity for an anthology.

Of course, some tales are more interesting or better constructed than others, but I wouldn't apply any such labels as poorly plotted or badly written to any of them – which really show how remarkable these stories are.    

The Gramana Aragman Anagram Detectives

The Adventure of the Solitary Bride by E. Aldon Canoy

In case the title wasn't a dead giveaway, the story was written down by Hoskell Chomers' chronicler, Sandwort, who relates a singular problem that was brought to them by a newly wed woman – whose husband abruptly fled the house on account of pressing business matters. But the curious behavior of the butler, a skulking, weak-chinned stranger dilly-dallying around the house and mysterious coded messages makes her mighty suspicious and prompts her to consult the great detective himself. 

This proved to be one of the most delightful Holmesian pastiches I have ever read, and Chomers' chain of deductive reasoning in the story's opening pages is spot-on! He also doesn't fail to deliver a satisfying solution, that's both logical and charming. A perfect start to a great collection.

The Object Lesson by W.H. Geurnon

It seems only logical that after a reading from the casebook of one of the greatest detectives who never lived, we learn of the exploits of one of the most notorious cat burglars in popular-fiction – the audacious L.A. Jeffars. The infamous gentleman burglar has set his sights on a greedy, disagreeable old hag, who drips with diamonds, and plans on cleaning out her burglar proof safe to teach her a well deserved lesson.

Unfortunately, Murphy's Law rears its ugly head and nearly upsets his carefully plotted scheme, but a twist of fate provides his suffering companion in crime, Namby, with an unexpected opportunity to upstage his lawbreaking buddy. A def caper. In fact, I found this story to be better than most of the stuff Hornung wrote himself, and more praise than that can't be given to someone who specializes in writing pastiches.

If Hangman Threads by Norma Haigs

The seasoned mystery readers will immediate recognize who are hidden behind the anagrammatic names of Carroll Dikeyne, chief inspector of police, and his artistic wife Thora Gatay – and anagrams are the key to solving the murder of on unpopular artist at an art exhibition. The mechanics of the plot are actually more interesting than the mystery itself, which, sadly, is an unexciting one, but that's a minor complaint as Schiers obviously had a lot of fun writing this story – and that rubs off on the reader. 

The Teccomeshire Fen Mystery by Cathie Haig Star

A successful pastiche of the Queen of Crime, in which the celebrated detective, Pierre Choulot, and his dense friend Stangish visit a quaint little village and unhesitatingly get themselves involved in a murder case. A local gentleman, who was fond of out door painting, was shot while playing around with his brush, and the murder may have something do with the village beauty. Choulot does a neat job of tying the psychological and physical clues together and provides a bang-up solution for this little mystery.

Hocus-Pocus at Drumis Tree by Handon C. Jorricks

Drumis Tree is a restaurant of great repute and not the kind of place where you suspect poisonous glasses of champagne to be passed around, but that's exactly what happened – and what's worst, there seems to be an impossible angle as to how the poison was slipped into the glass. Enter Sir Marvin Rhyerlee! Who's a bit miffed that he can't enjoy a peaceful lunch without someone keeling over in a manner that seems to defy the reality of natural law. Guess who's being spoofed? If you don't know already, here's a hint: he's my favorite mystery writer.

Schier freely admits in the editors' note that her little pastiche doesn't do fully justice to his plotting technique and knack for coming up with impossible situations, but the endeavor is definitely appreciated. 

An Ax to Grind

Yes, I know that it may be difficult to wrap your mind around it, but I'm about to review my first thriller, The After House (1914) by Mary Roberts Rinehart, for this blog!

What's next? Discussing Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett? Chatting incessantly about the "literary" crime novels on today's best seller lists? Oh, for Carr's sake, what's becoming of me? ;D I promise that the next book will be a return to the great old detective stories... well... sort of... but for now let's embark on a frightful journey aboard a blood-soaked craft that might have gone the way of the Mary Celeste had it not been for a resourceful young man posing as a sailor. 

The Cursed Ship

The story of the massacre aboard the Ella, an old coasting-vessel reequipped as a pleasure-boat by the boozer millionaire Marshall Turner, on that "terrible night of August the twelfth," is retrospectively narrated by Ralph Leslie – a newly graduated, but nearly penniless, doctor, who still hasn't fully recovered from his bout with typhoid fever. While being hospitalized, he developed a yearning for the open sea, where he hopes to regain his strength and earn some money, and upon his release he jumped at the opportunity to join the crew of the Ella and is put to work as a deck steward – mainly looking out for the passengers residing in the ship's after house.

With its crew and passengers all present, the ship sets sail to sunnier climes, but even before that blood-streaked night the voyage was troubled by dark undercurrents and ill-omens of things yet to come. The ship's owner and his drinking buddy, a ship officer named Singleton, act as a menacing scourge to pretty much everyone around them, and end up passing around motives to justify a small-scale holocaust.

During the faithful night of August the twelfth and the early morning of August the thirteenth, someone emerged from his berth or abandoned his post, and, under the cover of darkness and slumber, picked up a red painted emergency ax and gruesomely hacked three people to death – including ship's captain!

With three horribly mutilated, blood spattered corpses on their hands, the aghast crew puts Singleton, who had a one-sided skirmish with the captain, in irons, strip Turner of any authority he thought he had and nominate the levelheaded Leslie as their new captain to help them get out of this mess. But how do you lead a crew of experienced, seafaring men to a safe harbor when you lack their nautical knowledge and experience, and how do you keep them, and the passengers, safe and sane when there's a very real possibility that the actual ax-wielding killer is still prowling the decks with them?

Suspicion is abound as well as loyalty to one another as some of them try to obliterate tell-tale pieces of evidence that might identity the murderer, but don't make a mistake about it, this is not a straightforward, puzzle-orientated detective story, since there really aren't any legitimate clues to look at, but an atmospheric thriller not entirely unlike Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939).

For an early thriller yarn, this wasn't all that bad of a story, and I really liked the macabre picture Rinehart painted of the Ella towing a jollyboat that's been converted to a floating crypt for the three slain victims, nonetheless, she slipped up and botched the ending. The final quarter of the book transforms from a slightly paranoia inducing thriller to a full-fledged courtroom drama, which doesn't even yield the solution in a dramatic dénouement and only serves to suck out all of the atmosphere – which was the best thing the book had going for itself.

This feels like a stylistic anomaly. The murderer, who, by the way, is a complete whacko, should've been confronted before they reached their port of call, and not after a mistrial when Leslie revisits the ship, which felt like the solution was hastily given as some sort of after thought – and it shows... badly!

To sum up the book in one sentence: some good, some bad, but overall a readable enough story if you don't expect too much from it.

"They were all dead by the end of August"

Note: a regular book review, this time of a detective story actually published before 1950, will be up in the next day or two. Stay tuned!

The concluding volume of Spiral – The Bonds of Reasoning has been looming at me from my desk ever since it arrived in the mail, but I find myself unable to pick up the book and burn through it at my usual breakneck speed – insatiable devouring all the answers that I have waited so many years for. But with the ending of another series, Hikaru no Go, which I enjoyed reading as much as Case Closed and Spiral, and the cancellation of Deadman's Wonderland, I'm practically left without series to read – not many regular series anyway.

So instead of greedily gobbling down this treat, I'm going to savor it for a few days and let it ripe – and meanwhile I have been sampling a potential replacement, Amnesia Labyrinth, which is described on the back cover as a new offbeat tale of murder and twisted love.

The Three Sisters

The protagonist and sometimes narrator of this series is a rather stereotypical manga character named Souji Kushiki, a reserved, good looking student from an affluent family who aces all his school tests and excels at sports, and has just returned home from an extended stay at an far-away boarding school – much to the delight of his three sisters, who are more than merely overjoyed when they learn of his return.

He enrolls into a local school, where he meets the incessantly energetic Sasai, who seems to know a good deal about his personal life, and learns from her that three of their fellow students were brutally murdered over the summer holiday – and she's determined to pick up the investigation where the police left off and wants to enlist his help in cracking the case.  

Up till this point, the plot bears all the hallmarks of your typical high school murder mystery, in which two students try to connect the dots of a series of unusual crimes that are, in one way or another, linked to their school, but that's where the story, like Spiral, is deceptive in its initial appearance. However, where Spiral morphed into a clever and intriguing, multi-layered game of chess, the plot of Amnesia Labyrinth quickly distorts itself into a dark and twisted character driven crime story.

The prodigal son returns home

Souji's family life is one that will probably disturb many readers of this blog. His step-sister, Harumi, has a crush on him, but she's too shy to actually make a move on him, while his full-blooded sister, Youko, constantly wraps her arms around him and simply can't stop fondling with him and he actually has a sexual relationship with his half-sister, Saki, which they deem as normal. An already difficult family relationship, to say the least, strained by the fact that his sisters may be involved in the murders at his new school.  

It's too early to say for sure which direction the series will eventually take, but as things stand now, it has all the potential to be either a total disaster, in a modernist, thrillerish kind of way, or a complete and welcome surprise. But in case of the latter, it pretty much all depend on how well the mystery elements of the plot will develop in the upcoming installments.

Amnesia Labyrinth is published by Seven Seas, and the second volume is lined up for a release in early June.  

Final note: You can read a free sample of the first several pages on the website of the publisher. Remember: it's manga, so read right-to-left.