Everybody Loves a Good Mystery!

"You know I speak from experience

I live it each day

It's something she does, it's something she'll say

It's the maddest kind of love."

- Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

Before I began working on this post, I excavated the previous Case Closed / Detective Conan reviews from the archives and came to the dispiriting conclusion that this will only be the third volume, thus far, discussed on this blog – which threw me back to that wonderful period when every year six new volumes were released. Sadly, that was reduced from one new release every two months back to three months after the series was re-branded as a Shonen Sunday manga.

I still have absolutely no idea what that exactly entails, but suffice to say I don't like it one bit and prefer the old schedule. Yeah, I know, the old schedule wasn't as profitable as the new one, but I like to believe that making me happy should be a bigger concern to Viz than something as banal as paying their employers or providing for their families.

The Drug Known As Love

The fortieth volume opens with a Metropolitan Police Love Story, in which Sato and Takagi are laboring under the naïve assumption they have arranged a surreptitious date for two at Tropical Marine Land, a popular amusement park, but their colleagues have them under close surveillance and under the guiding hand of Santos make a serious attempt at wrecking their little tryst – which is easy enough with a drug runner on the loose and Conan unexpectedly turning up with his buddies. As you probably deduced from this brief synopsis, we're dealing here with a lighthearted, risible caper fraught with incredible coincidences, such as Takagi's bag pack accidentally being swapped with the one from the drug mule or when all of the suspects turned out to be athletes, making this somewhat of a madcap chase story. Simply amusing from start to finish.

Justice vs. Crime: 15-Love

Conan is feeling a bit under the weather, but nonetheless insisted on accompanying Rachel to Serena's summerhouse, where they want to spend a weekend on the tennis courts, but an unheralded cloudburst soaks their plans – and the party eventually ends up at a desolated house in the woods occupied by a young tennis instructor and his old father. Needless to say, this inauspicious day ends appropriately when Conan and Rachel discover the body of the old man in his room, suspended from the ceiling with a stout rope coiled around his neck, and everything indicated that took his own life. But our little gumshoe finds himself to be only person who really listens to the story that the silent witnesses are trying to tell the investigators. This story is basically a successful cross between an inverted detective story and a how-dun-it. We know who killed the old codger, but not how it was done, however, there are plenty of clues to work out the method and destroy the murderers craftily build-up alibi. A very satisfying story.

Lost Love

In this story, Doc Agasa takes a central role as Conan and The Junior Detective League offer a helping hand with cracking a code. This numerical cipher was left to Doc Agasa by a girl he was very fond of and refers to a special location where she'll be waiting for him once every 10 years, but the poor professor never managed to break it. Is Conan up to the task to pick the lock to the heart of the Doc's long-lost first love and will she still be waiting for him after all these years? A sweet and touching story, but you have to be a super genius to solve this conundrum (Aoyama admitted this in his after word).

Anyway, it's interesting to notice how Aoyama insists on connecting nearly every (recurring) character in his universe with one another – no matter how superficies that connection turns out to be.

The final chapter is a set-up of a new story, in which the Great Sleeping Moore bungles up a case and runs up a huge tap and both Rachel and Conan's mothers put in an appearance. But more on that in the review of volume 41, which will be released in early January of 2012. Can't wait!

Tomb Raiders

"Go West, into the Far West. May you land in peace in western Thebes. In peace may you proceed to Abydos and across the Western Sea to the islands of Osiris and their green, eternal fields."

- A lamentation for the dead.

I'm afraid that this review may turn out to be a repetition of the previous notice, which conveyed a garbed discontent over the fact that a favorite of mine wasn't up to his A-game, but I will attempt to maintain an upbeat pace – even though Paul Doherty's The Assassins of Isis (2004) proved itself to be the first dud in the Chief Justice Amerotke series.

The Assassins of Isis was published after a dormancy of three years, which could be offered as a convenient excuse to explain the sheer drop of quality and utter failure to deliver on all, but one, of the many plot strands that were so firmly grasped in a tight grip in the preceding stories. The first of these threads leads Judge Amerotke into the Houses of a Million Years, in the Valley of the Nobles, where a band of mercenaries, known as the Sebaus, are raiding the tombs of their valuable artifacts and committing sacrilege to the mummified remains of Egypt's aristocratic forbearers – one of them that of a former, disgraced vizier, named Rahimere, whose sarcophagus contains a book that holds information worth more than any human life.

After this promising opening, the tome that was pried loose from Rashimere's custody drops out of sight and is not mentioned again until the end – where its disappointing content is divulged during a mostly predictable and anticlimactic dénouement. Meanwhile, the Sebaus are dispatching assassin's left and right to remove the Pharaoh Queen's most valuable chess piece, namely Judge Amerotke, from the playing field.

Admittedly, watching the judge dodging these mercenaries make for a few enlivening scenes, during which death is literarily just a heartbeat away, but not that exciting to draw your attention away from the clues – which are conspicuous by the absence.

The introduction of a second plot thread gave rise to some hope, but the seemingly impossible murder of General Suten, bitten to death by half a dozen horned vipers on his terrace roof, was perhaps the biggest let-down of the book. Doherty sketches a thought-provoking situation that encapsulated the ex-army hero's death and the apparent impossibility of introducing a bag full of agitated serpents on the terrace roof, but the explanation for this fairly original miracle problem was dull, unimaginative and enraging – especially when a simple, but satisfying, solution is staring you in the face.

Why not carefully suspend the bag above the bed with a looped twine, leading out of the window, and when it's pulled the bag opens, showering the general with venomous, rattled vipers poised to strike, after which the murderer could simply retrieve the tell-tale sack by giving the piece of twine another pull. It's perhaps a bit too simplistic, but still a lot better than the one that was presented here. The plot also throws a second locked room problem at the reader, when a captured mercenary is found stabbed to death in a locked and guarded prison cell at the House of Chains, but that solution was just as dissatisfying and enraging as the one put forward to explain the other murder.

But I will stop here to lecture an acclaimed mystery novelist on how to properly device and construct a locked room mystery.

Finally, there's a third, major plot thread spanned through the book and this particular strand turned out to be strongest, as well as the cleverest, from this entangled yarn – and ties together the dark doings at the Temple of Isis. Over the period of one month, four temple maidens have disappeared and their chief guard is brutally murdered. There are also tongues wagging in Amerotke's ear that the priests help the sick and dying, which stay in their House of Twilight, on their way to the Far West. This part of the story still lacks the proper clueing needed to anticipate even part of the solution, but at least it evinced some cleverness and what happened to the moribund after twilight was the best part of the book – and should've been more of a focal point in the story.

Overall, this was a depressingly bad detective story, which is a melancholia strengthened when you think of the four outstanding novels that preceded it – two of them excellent locked room mysteries. On top of that, it entombs, buries and hides its one really good idea better than the crypt of King Tut! The only thing you can really say in its favor, is how everything tied together in the end. That, at least, was done well.

Recommended to completists only.

For the next Paul Doherty novel, I will probably take an excursion to the dark Middle Ages. But first back to the Golden Age! 

All the books I have reviewed in this series:

The Mask of Ra (1998)

The Horus Killings (1999)

The Anubis Slayings (2000)

The Slayers of Seth (2001)

The Assassins of Isis (2004)

The Poisoner of Ptah (2007)

The Spies of Sobeck (2008)

Too Hot for Comfort

"You're going about this wrong, Ed; trying to fit a normal motive to an abnormal situation in a straightforward way. Have you tried Warren's way of backward thinking?”

- Iris Guralnick (The Hot Place, 1991)

When I read the first chapter of The Hot Place (1991), I fully expected that at the end of the book another opportunity was waiting for me to force a link in the chain of laudatory reviews praising the neglected and undervalued Herbert Resnicow, but his sixteenth detective novel turned out to be a surprisingly routine affair – lacking the effulgence of its predecessor, The Dead Room (1987). 

The Hot Place starts off strong when entrepreneur Ed Bear strides into the main entry lounge of the sumptuous Oakdale Country Club, to which he and his son pay a Prince's ransom in membership fees, only to find it occupied with policemen – and a few of them are scowling down at his son, Warren, while scribbling in a notebook. Only a few hours before, Warren had entered the steam room, around eight in the morning, after an early workout and stumbled over the remains of Barney Brodsky.

Brodsky was a miserable old curmudgeon, who could only derive solace from needling and aggravating everyone unlucky enough to wander into his peripheral vision, but this hardly seems like an adequate motive for a murderer to plead a case of justifiable homicide to his or her conscience – and so everyone assumes the old geezer was merely overcome by the heat and density of the vapors that cloud up the steam room. But Warren believes it was murder and when a medical examiner takes a look at the body the diagnosis is death by asphyxiating. Murder, plain and simple!

The murder of Barney Brodsky appears to be closely entwined with the dealings of his business associates, who also form a closely-knit network within the club, and a big investment deal – which is interlocked with one of the Bear's latest commercial endeavors. As a result, father and son find themselves taking on the roles of Ellery and Richard Queen as they probe through the fog enshrouding this case, however, this time they have less than a week to clear everything up and safe an enterprising young man from ruination.

You'd think that after such a set-up that the plot had build-up more than enough steam required to effortlessly charge through the chapters towards the final dénouement, but after the opening the book becomes sedentary and takes it time to position all the pieces on the playing board before resuming again. As a result, intricate and ingenious plotting was sacrificed in favor of characterization – and it shows when compared to Resnicow's previous efforts. The clues are there, but they border dangerously close on the green tie variety, especially the central hint, and the solution mainly hinges on the movement of the murderer at the time of the deed. It's not an entirely uninspired solution, but it would've been better suited for the pages of a short story.

I was also somewhat disappointed that the crime-scene barely had any significant role in the execution of the murder. The exploitation of the architectural features and functions of a crime-scene was his specialty and I structured a fairly clever, but false solution, around that expectation. 

Brodsky always used the steam room from eight to nine and was usually its only occupant, since nobody could take it when he turned the thermostat all the way, and I reasoned that the murderer used the combination of this habitual visit to the steam room and high temperature to craft a convincing alibi for the police. Everyone expected him to be in that room between eight and nine and when his body was found it would be assumed that he was killed within that hour, but what if he was murdered before that time? Lets say 15-20 minutes before eight. Body dumped in the hot room, making it impossible to determine the actual time of death, while the murderer makes sure he can account for every minute during eight and nine. Yes, I know, I should write detective stories myself. 

On the other hand, the father-and-son team of Ed and Warren Bear do make up for some of the shortcomings found in the plot. They're not only excellent as a pair of enterprising amateur sleuths, but they also come across as a genuinely warm, but imperfect, family – as Ed is still grappling with the lost of his wife and worrying that he still hasn't any grandchildren, while Warren is wrestling with insecurity issues. But this never casts a grim shadow over their personalities and it's handles very realistically, IMHO, because in spite having lost their wife and mother, they find themselves trusted back into their normal, everyday life – which is what usually happens in real life. All of a sudden, you find yourself back in your old life again and that you can still laugh or worry about things that seemed trivial only a few weeks ago.  

So while The Hot Place is not Herbert Resnicow's magnum opus, it's still a very readable yarn with two enduring characters at its helm and I thought it was interesting to see him handle a closed circle of suspects situation for a change – although I hope to encounter another intricately plotted locked room problem in the next novel. I still recommend it if you're looking for a fun little mystery, but don't expect a masterpiece from it.   

On a final note, towards the end of the book there's a reference to Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe and Alexander Gold, but does this mean that Alexander and Norma Gold are fictional characters in the Ed and Warren Bear universe? Or do they share that space with Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin? 

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990) 

Mathematician at Law

"Life is a collection of ifs. We go from the buts of doubting childhood to the ands of accumulating knowledge, and finally to the ifs of questioning wisdom."

- Dr. D.V. Leonardo (Leonardo’s Law, 1978)

Before appraising yet another locked room mystery, I have to apologize for the slapdash job I did on the previous review. After going over it today, I was tempted for a moment to expunge it from this blog and replace it with a rewrite, but the opposition, consisting of the always present lack of time and just plain laziness, voted down that proposition – which means that it will stay up as a memento mori. This will hopefully teach me not to post stuff online that was scrawled when my mind was already drifting off to Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

But enough of this palaver, and onto today's feature: Warren B. Murphy's Leonardo's Law (1978), which has an inviting byline, "A Locked Door Mystery," plastered across its classy front cover. The effigy that passes for a scan really doesn't do the cover any justice. Anyway, I accidentally chanced upon a copy of this book and unhesitatingly picked it up, but without the strained expectancy of having uncovered the literary equivalent of a lost Rembrandt – which made for a nice surprise when I actually found a satisfying and interesting impossible crime story wedged between its covers.

Some of you might wonder why I'm still skeptical towards detective stories that rolled off the presses after the 1940s, when they so prominently manifested themselves on this blog for the past two months. It's true that writers like William DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini continued a tradition that started with Edgar Allan Poe, but even their exquisite, neo-orthodox mysteries haven't entirely subdued the nightmarish flashbacks to Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) and Frederick Ramsay's Stranger Room (2008) – atrocities second only to Hitler's genocide. But that's a story for another day.

Leonardo's Law is set against the scenery of a small Connecticut town, populated with an artsy, liberal orientated citizenry governed by a conservative municipality, which provides with an intriguing backdrop for the murder of Barry Dawson – an acclaimed novelist of sleazily written and sloppily plotted mysteries. Dawson may have been a noted man of letters, but he wasn't on the short-list for Walton's most popular citizen trophy and when someone bludgeons him to death with a claw hammer the region proves to be fertile with suspects and motives. However, the key problem facing the investigators is not figuring out who had written him off and for what reason, but explaining how the crime was perpetrated.  

Barry Dawson was found in his newly erected studio with the windows securely fastened and with the only door locked from the inside. The lock in the door is antiquated, but this makes the problem only more puzzling. It can only be locked and opened from the inside, with an old-fashioned brass key, which Dawson was clutching tightly between his stiffening fingers – making it an impossible feat for anyone to have slipped in and out of that studio.

Enter Lieutenant Anthony Jezail and Dr. David Vincent Leonardo! The novel is seen through the cynical eyes of the police lieutenant, whose narrative voice is wry, sardonic and occasionally laced with prejudice against gays – which probably explains why this book hasn't been wrung through the inner workings of a printing press for over three decades. On the other hand, it must be noted that Jezail constantly vexes his chief for being a cretinous racist who assumes that black people must've committed every misdeed in town. This makes Jezail somewhat of a schizophrenic character who can be lewd and funny on one page and boneheaded and embarrassing on the next. Dr. Leonardo is a literary descendant from the line of academic and scientific detectives, which includes the likes of The Thinking Machine and Dr. Lancelot Priestley, who's a mathematician with an expanding collection of honorable doctorates and a cushy teaching gig at a local university – and every once in a while acts as a special consultant to the police in cases they find difficult to crack. Going by the clues and hints strewn throughout the book, suggests that we should perceive him as the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci. 

As a locked room mystery, this book proved to be an engaging read that throws one or two compelling ideas around. For instance, there's a false solution that implicated Dawson's research assistant, Alfred Needles, because his tie-tack was found on his employer – which suggested to the police that Dawson locked the door himself to safeguard the evidence that would help them convict his murderer. I admit that it would've been a disappointing solution to the premise of the sealed studio, but there's a touch of mad genius about a victim accidentally creating a locked room problem to protect a tell-tale clue before finally collapsing.

The enigma's surrounding the murder of Barry Dawson are eventually satisfyingly explained, during a hearing in court by Leonardo who acts as an expert-witness for the defense, but Murphy walked a very fine tight-rope to get there. The identify of the murderer was perhaps too well hidden from the reader and the clues a trifle weak (one of them needed a floor plan to really have made it an effective hint as to how the locked room illusion was created), however, the most notably flaw was perhaps that both characters and publisher touted this book as a case that "turns the classical locked door mystery on its ear," but the ingenious explanation proffered to problem of the locked studio came straight from the pages of a detective story from the 1960s. Nevertheless, I disliked that particular book from start to finish and prefer this stories interpretation of that crafty, but simplistic, locked room gambit. Oh, and did I mention that Leonardo recapped Dr. Gideon Fell's locked room lecture from The Hollow Man (1935)?

All in all, Leonardo's Law is a satisfying, if somewhat flawed, detective story littered with some really nasty and repugnant characters, but Murphy's derisive and cynical writing style usually puts them in their place – which makes for another fine example of combining hardboiled story telling with orthodox plotting. It's therefore a shame that he only wrote one book in what could've been an excellent series.

Definitely recommended, but let the individual reader be warned about some of the opinions spouted by the characters that inhabit the pages of this book.

As If By Magic

"...that crocodile would have had me before this, but by a lucky chance it swallowed a clock which goes tick tick inside it, and so before it can reach me I hear the tick and bolt."

- Captain Hook (Peter Pan, 1911).

In my previous review, I briefly touched upon the fact that neo-orthodox detective stories, all of a sudden, started to hog all of the limelight in this place for themselves – which can be simply put down as a pattern that emerges in ones reading habits without malice aforethought. It's like natural selection, but driven by an ego's futile attempts to steer and control its evolvement. This is why, for the time being, the current domineering species, such as Herbert Resnicow and Paul Doherty, will continue to detract from their forbearers. But rest assured, I will never list their predecessors as extinct and for today's review I will even highlight one of them.

Darwin Teilhet's The Ticking Terror Murders (1935) added with Baron Franz Maximilian Karagôz von Kaz, an Austrian aristocrat in exile, another accumulation of oddities to a swelling crowd of eccentric detectives, but whereas Hercule Poirot and Henri Bencolin have a dash of continental quaintness the Baron is merely capricious – which sometimes borders on sheer malevolence. Admittedly, the Baron is at his best when he's at his worst behavior, like breaking and entering a premise for a private investigation or braining a shopkeeper with his trusty green umbrella in order to make a free phone call, but for the most time he's just an anomaly.

As I mentioned in the paragraph above, Baron von Kaz is a member of the Austrian nobility who was forced to escape his native stomping ground after a botched political plot to restore the monarch and fled to the land of opportunities to set-up as a consulting detective – and his first client is brought to him to by an American woman he met and helped before back in Vienna.

Lucille Tarn made a name as an actress before wedding herself to a rising political star, but recently she found herself having an extramarital affair with a famous screenwriter, Henry Kerby, who's being haunted after dark by inexplicable and indeterminable ticking noises. Kerby suspects that Lucille's husband, Charles Tarn, became wise of their affair and is extracting revenge with these subtle, but disturbing, night-time noises. However, the Baron believes there's something more to these tickings than reaches the ears and convinces the Hollywood scenarist to retain him to identify its source. But before he can unsnarl this problem another one presents itself: Lucille Tarn is murdered as if by magic! 

While attending a performance of Dacrokoff, a celebrated magician, Lucille Tarn is asked to take place in a cabinet to make her disappear, which is exactly what happens, but when her form reappears she's sprawled on the bottom of the contraption with a poisoned hatpin protruding from her chest. The arrangement and execution of the locked cabinet trick turned out to be as clever as it's simple, but I think Teilhet's sleigh of hand made a slip when he divulged the solution at 1/3 of the book.

Technically, it's understandably why the solution had to be thrown out at that point in the book, but it would've benefited the overarching story if more had been done with it or at least procured a better spot between its covers – such as the middle portion of the book. But I have to praise the inclusion of three, highly detailed diagrams depicting every step necessary to conjure up a deceptive image that instilled the audience with the false notion of having just witnessed a murder that should not have been possible – even though it's not a complex trick that can only be comprehended with visual aids.

Plot-wise, there's a drop-off in quality after Baron von Kaz solves the mystery encompassing the magician's cabinet and unmasks an accomplice – who's promptly disposed off under circumstances that simply begged for another locked room mystery. The rest of book seems, for the most part, dedicated to filling up time with mad cows, nocturnal adventures and a kidnapping of sorts, before reaching the simple and inevitable conclusion – in spite of the fact that there were still clues to be picked up along the way.

I'm afraid that the negative underpinning of this review hasn't given a too favorable impression of this book, but let me assure you that overall I found it a very enjoyable read. As a detective story, it's just very uneven in quality which failed to deliver the goods in the end. Nonetheless, despite a faulty structure it's still worth a read – especially if you're an enthusiast of impossible crime stories.

And thus ends this slovenly scribbled critique of The Ticking Terror Murders and was planning to announce here that, whenever time would permit me, I would take another look at Herbert Resnicow. But I came across something interesting and obscure that will require my attention first. It involves a dead mystery writer and a locked room. 

The Baron von Kaz series: 

The Ticking Terror Murders (1935)

The Crimson Hair Murders (1936)

The Feather Cloak Murders (1937)

The Broken Face Murders (1940)

A Query for Mystery Buffs: Come Into Our Parlor

"Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay!" 

- Sherlock Holmes.

The morose and sulky visage of the clock has not been too liberally, as of late, with providing me with the amount of minutes needed to arrive at the final chapter of Darwin Teilhet's The Ticking Terror Murders (1935) and write about it with a feigned air of intelligence. So I decided to exorcise a ghost that has been haunting my thoughts for the better part of a month now and hastily scribble these lines to prevent this place from reaching a standstill, however, the enquiry below isn't just an accumulation of throwaway lines to get things moving again – since I think it's an genuinely interesting question that we can have some fun with.

Detective stories have always been one of the most popular and engaging personalities in the class room of genre fiction, alongside its buddies science-fiction and horror, which almost naturally attracted an array of individuals from outside the field – who wanted to participate in what we affectionately refer to as the Grandest Game in the World. The Queen of Burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee, indited two comical mystery novels, The G-String Murders (1941) and Mother Finds a Body (1942), and novelist Isreal Zangwill penned the novella "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891), which was aptly dubbed as the flagship of the modern locked room story, but the most successful visitor was perhaps science-fiction legend, Isaac Asimov. The Caves of Steel (1953) is the exempli gratia of the hybrid mystery novel done right. And let us not forget that the detective story was created by someone who qualifies as a visitor, Edgar Allan Poe, who's still primarily known for his tales of terror and hauntingly beautiful poems.

But as I ramble on here, you are probably starting to wonder where I want to go with this. It's really simple and I could've limited this to a simple, one-paragraph post: if you could send in an invite to someone outside of the field to write a detective story, who would it be and why?

If you'd ask me to whom I would dispatch a note of invitation, I would not have to think for even a second and promptly blurt out the names of the Las Vegas magicians, Penn & Teller. 

Penn & Teller

This idea began to take shape when I was listening to a very funny interview with Penn, in which he told how Teller has one of the best minds in magic today and can look at a complex stage illusion and tell how it was pulled off – which sort of became the premise of their television show, Fool Us.

Look, no strings!

I don't think it will come as a surprise to most of you when I say that I saw opportunities for at least one stunning impossible crime novel, but preferably a series, in which Teller provides a clever, multi-layered plot while Penn comes up with the lines to dress up the story – exactly like in their on-stage act and television shows. Plot-wise, these two stage magicians possess the knowledge and experience needed to possibly outdo a masterpiece such as John Sladek's Black Aura (1974), in which a member of a spiritualist circle is murdered while apparently levitating in mid-air, or even teach the master himself, John Dickson Carr, a trick or two on how to create a locked room or new ways to make stuff disappear. The only thing I am iffy about is whether they would understand the concept and necessity of fair-play clueing.

For these same reasons, I would also love to see James Randi try his hands at a locked room mystery. James Randi is a magician who dedicated his life to explaining miracles and seems therefore almost a shoo-in to pick up the plot threads that were left behind by John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot, Joseph Commings, Edward Hoch and Clayton Rawson. After all, this is the man who was confronted with someone who could apparently leaf through the pages of a phone book with the power of his mind and was not in the least impressed. Naturally, this warlock was exposed as the fraud he really was by this real-life counterpart of Sir Henry Merrivale and Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

So... let me know whom you would like to see firing up his or her computer and write a detective story. Oh, and they don't have to be necessarily alive. You could, for example, say how great it would've been if Michael Ende had written a mystery. Drop a comment here or compose a blog post of your own. I'm looking forward to hear from you!

Corpse de Ballet

"We watched the ghostly dancers spin

To sound of horn and violin,

Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.

Like wire-pulled automatons,

Slim silhouetted skeletons

Went sidling through the slow quadrille."

- Oscar Wilde (The Harlot's House, 1885)

The sometimes absently-minded proprietor of Pretty Sinister Books, John Norris, dropped a comment on another blog, in which he was clearly amused at how hopelessly stuck me and Patrick are in the post-GAD era – and how we'll probably never find the yellow brick road back to the past if we continue to look the other way when Paul Doherty, Bill Pronzini and Paul Halter mischievously lock up the ghosts of John Dickson Carr, Kelley Roos and Ellery Queen in the cupboard. But in our defense, we infelicitously picked the phrase post-GAD to label the books we discuss on here that were published after the 1940s, when Neo-GAD would've been a far more accurate description.

And none of these contemporary writers, emerging during the last four decades, radiated with a brighter afterglow than the late Herbert Resnicow – who was a living and breathing fossil in his day. Not only did he keep the form alive with elaborate plotting and fair-play clueing, but his stories read and feel like genuine GAD mysteries resettled in the 1980s. The fact that every single one of them copes with a murder committed under apparently impossible circumstances is the coup de grâce!

The Gold Deadline (1984) opens with Alexander and Norma Gold receiving an invitation from billionaire Max Baron to attend a performance of the Boguslav Ballet, which has to serve as a cover that dresses up business talk as a social engagement – since he doesn't want the world to know that he's consulting a private detective. But halfway through the performance, the curtain separating them from the adjoining box-seat parted, and like an apparition at the bedside of Ebenezer Scrooge, the paling countenance of Max's son, Jeffrey, appears to inform them that his employer has been stabbed while he was alone with him in the box – and guess who cops want to tag for that murder?

Max Baron takes on Alexander and Norma Gold to exonerate Jeffrey from the murder charge that is suspended over his head like the Sword of Damocles, but they have a deadline of less than three days to do so and collect the biggest paycheck in their lives.

If you never had an opportunity to meet and watch the bantering behemoths at work, than you've been missing out on a few good chuckles. Alexander and Norma could've been the result of splicing and stitching together the genetic materials of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin with those of Jeff and Haila Troy, but don't presume that they are merely theatrical puppets with clowns make-up on who solve a murder in-between bouncing risible comments off each other. They are well-characterized personages, however, their literary father wasn't laboring under the misapprehension that he was writing fiction that addressed the disintegration of society but simply 200-pages of intelligent escapism – and therefore allowed his characters to have a bit fun besides dealing with lives problems. As a result (and I have to warn the literary thriller fans here), Alexander and Norma are allowed to play detectives to their hearts content and spend a considerable amount of time on working out how the murder was executed and who was responsible.

The murder of the detestable impresario, Viktor Boguslav, is a doozy. Not only do the wedded gumshoes have to figure out a way to enter a theatre box, when the only door is latched from the inside, stab Boguslav without disturbing a snoozing Jeffrew or being witnessed by anyone of the hundreds of spectators and sneak out again undetected – not to mention the baffling fact that the impresario didn't struggle with his assailant or called out for help.

In a previous review, I pointed out that Resnicow's closed environment diverged from the traditional sealed rooms and guarded spaces. The locked rooms in his novels are wide-open spaces, from an entire top-floor apartment to a multi-level archaic chamber, but still manage to lock them as tightly shut as the typical locked study or bedroom. A theatre box seems therefore a little bit claustrophobic in comparison with previous stories, but the way in which practically employs the entire building through out the story not only reflects the experience of civil engineer with a lifelong working experience in construction work, but also that of a bona fide talent in constructing complex plots.

The solution, perhaps, stretches credulity, but you have to give Resnicow props here for coming up with yet another original take on the locked room and adroitly avoiding one of the most dangerous pitfalls of all by logically explaining why anyone would go to such insane and risky lengths to create the illusion of an impossible murder.

All in all, this is an immensely amusing and interesting detective novel, which does not only spin an enigmatic problem for the reader, but also allows you to catch a glimpse of what goes on behind the curtains of a ballet company and the characters that prance around there. Resnicow openly confessed his love and respect for ballet at the opening of the book and this is reflected in the story, especially when Norma lovely describes her favorite piece, Petrouchka, in which a rag-doll comes to life, falls in love and is killed for his humanity.

Resnicow shows here that entertainment can be both lighthearted as well as intellectually satisfying. Why he's all but forgotten today is beyond me.

The Alexander and Norma Gold series:

The Gold Solution (1983)

The Gold Deadline (1984)

The Gold Frame (1986)

The Gold Curse (1986)

The Gold Gamble (1989)

The Ed and Warren Bear series:

The Dead Room (1987)

The Hot Place (1990)

What's Up in the Attic?

"Enjoy the fantasy, the fun, the stories... but make sure there is a clear sharp line drawn on the floor, so you can step back behind that mark and re-embrace reality... to do otherwise is to embrace madness."

- James Randi, the magician who explains miracles.

Paul Halter

When I first learned of the detective stories penned by Paul Halter, it was the name of John Dickson Carr that captured the attention of this locked room enthusiast. Halter naturally found, what can be described as, divine inspiration in the myriad of books left to us mere mortals by the Greatest Player who ever participated in the Grandest Game in the World – and his most ardent followers were ready to tear his mantle from Edward Hoch's back and drape it across Halter's shoulder. That piqued my interest, to say the least, and the collection of short stories, The Night of the Wolf (2006), entailed a lot of promise and contains one or two gems, like "The Abominable Snowman" and "The Flower Girl," that will most likely became staples of future locked room anthologies.

This probably explains why I ended up disillusioned with Paul Halter, after reading The Lord of Misrule (1994) earlier this year. I expected to witness first hand the second advent of the greatest mystery writer who had ever lived, but instead was treated to a fairly standard and flawed detective story. In spite of its fantastical premise, it lacked the atmospheric touches and clueing you'd expect from John Dickson Carr's heir. But worst of all, there was no sense of time and place, which is not an unimportant element if you decide to set a story at the turn of the previous century, and the ghost-like presence of the masked figure, cloaked in black, who's accompanied by the tinkling of sleigh-bells never became the terrifying hobgoblin like any of the nightmares dreamed up by Carr and Talbot.

So evidently, I concluded that this Gallic scribe has a heart that beats in the right place and valorously tries to continue a tradition that's truly worthy of being preserved, but that he was only a second-stringer at best – at least as far as novel length narratives are concerned. Well, last night I blazed through his second roman fleuve, The Fourth Door (1987), and I was wrong. Stylistically, it has the same flaws as The Lord of Misrule, but plot-wise, it has nearly everything you hope to find in a locked room story – and the patterns that emerge from the plot will both fascinate and please the most demanding mystery readers.

The Fourth Door is set in a small, undesignated hamlet during the early 1950s where three befriended households, the Whites, the Stevenses and the Darnleys, are torn asunder by supernatural events and several, seemingly impossible, murders with most of the otherworldly activity coming from the attic room in the home of Mr. Darnley – where his wife killed herself years previously. At least, it was presumed to be a suicide since the door and windows were locked and fastened on the inside. Lodgers reported footsteps emanating from the room and neighbors witnessed a glowing light passing the attic windows. Needless to say, none of these lodgers roomed very long with Mr. Darnley.

That is, until Patrick and Alice Latimer arrive in town, one of them apparently endowed with the mediumistic gift to communicate with the spirit realm, who promptly take up their residence at the reputedly haunted house – and from there on out the fabric of reality begins to slowly disintegrate. The events that followed include a séance, during which Alice Latimer is able to answer a question written down and sealed away in an envelope, and someone who's seen at two different location, at exactly the same moment, before disappearing for the stretch of three years are only a prelude to an even more baffling occurance – a murder in a sealed attic room!

As an experiment, in the hopes of establishing a better line of communication with the ghost of Mrs. Darnley to find out who murdered her, the spiritualist Patrick Latimer will hold an all-night vigil in the haunted room, which is not only locked but also sealed with wax and stamped with an imprint of a rare and unique coin – picked at the last moment from a collection of 600 of such specimens and never left the hands of the witness after the room was sealed up. But when they break open the door, Patrick Latimer has evanesced and in his place, sprawled on the floor, lies body of another man with the handle of a knife protruding from his back!

The construction of the sealed room illusion is quite simply brilliant and I feel very smug for having stumbled on the main gist of the trick before it was even put up for performance. When the corridor and lay-out of the attic was described, I immediately knew how the trick would be pulled off and only missed out on the finer, more subtle details. The part I got wrong was actually embarrassing clumsy compared to what actually happened. I also have to commend Halter here for motivating this elaborate set-up and why anyone should go to all that trouble to create a supernatural crime.

There's also a second murder, committed in a house whose immediate surrounding is carpeted in an expanse of un-trodden snow, which has a delightfully simple, as well as shocking, solution – and even better motivated than the first one. As noted in the story, it's quite possibly unique in the genre. No mean feat!

Plot-wise, this is as good as they come and the cleverly constructed, multi-layered solutions are the impetus that drives our undying love for these stories. Nevertheless, I have to state here, empathically, that in spite of these triumphs I still wouldn't rank Paul Halter alongside John Dickson Carr. The fact that he writes detective stories in which people are bumped off in sealed environments at the hands of apparent supernatural agencies are not the main reason why we read the tales from the grandmaster of this particular sub-genre, but for the gripping narrative that gradually tightens its iron-glad grip around your throat and impresses you with the dread that every shadowy nook harbors unimaginable horrors.

I never had even as much as an inkling of this feeling with this book nor was there any genuine sense of time and place. There were several references to the mounting terror in the village, but merely stating that the atmosphere was threatening does very little to convey that feeling to the reader. The only time he came close was the part with "the cold hands," but that arose from the plot that had become so complex and turned upside down at that point in the story that you couldn't help but feel bewildered. Another problem was the village setting. Which village? Throughout the story you get the idea the entire village consists of only three houses and is only inhabited by the characters that live in them.

So I would have to disagree with those who stated that Paul Halter did everything right in The Fourth Door, but I will concede that he more than delivered on the parts that really mattered. It's one of the most intricately constructed detective stories I have read this year, with a plot that twists and coils like a boa-constrictor in an epileptic fit, and I was enthralled with the patterns that emerged from the plot. I said it best in my review of Marco Books' De laatste kans (2011), "It's not entirely unlike watching someone emanating perfect circles of smoke that seem to playfully interact with one another."

To sum it up, this is nothing short of a tour-de-force of plotting and restored the faith I had lost after the previous novel – and the mystery community owes John Pugmire one for his untiringly efforts to bring his stories to an international audience. You can help him with this by simply picking up a copy of The Fourth Door and enjoying the story, and, if possibly, share your thoughts with the rest of us.

The Slaying of the Slayers

"Total slaughter, total slaughter.

I won't leave a single a man alive.

La de da de dai, genocide.

La de da de duh, an ocean of blood.

Let's begin the killing time."

- Genocide Song (Trigun)

Before I pull the next tome from its drawer and cart its stiffened pages into the autopsy room to provide you with an in-depth, post-mortem examination of its plot and writing, I have to nudge you in the direction of another review of mine that was co-written with a fellow Connoisseur of Crime and put up on his blog. Over At the Scene of the Crime, Patrick is marking the occasion of his 100th post with a series of collaborative reviews and for our joint effort we looked at Paul Doherty's first Judge Amerotke novel – The Mask of Ra (1998), in which Pharaoh Tuthmosis II succumbs to the noxious effects of an apparently impossible snakebite. I recommend going over that crime-scene after you're done here.

Today's tale of intrigue and murder also happens to be a volume from the set of books chronicling the storied career of the Chief Judge of Thebes, The Slayers of Seth (2001), which is Lord Amerotke's fourth recorded outing – and turned out to be quite a different story than the one I was expecting to find. It was tipped to me as a locked room mystery, but unlike its predecessors, there were no impossibilities and it was more of a thriller than a proper detective story. Granted, it's an excellent, blood-curdling yarn, however, I was hoping to find a plot that could match, or even out do, The Anubis Slayings (2000).

The characters who have a central role in this story are the titular slayers of the red-haired god of death, a small band of veteran soldiers who brought the grandfather of the reigning Pharaoh-Queen, Hatusu, a decisive victory over the invading armies of the Hyksos by courageously infiltrating an enemy campside and chopping-off the head of their mascot witch – who proclaimed to be the earthly reincarnation of the snake goddess Meretseger. This broke the heart and soul of their enemy and they were easily trampled in the succeeding battle.

When they returned home, the brave soldiers were treated to a hero's homecoming and the spoils of conquest consisted of a severed head, sacred Scorpion Cups and a glorious victory over a sworn enemy. Individually, they were bestowed with enermous riches, awarded honorable titles and their exploits on the battlefield became the stuff of legends, but the curse of the witch, spoken mere second before losing her head completely, looms over them like the blood-tinged shadow of their patron saint – and after the sands of time covered three decades a cloaked and masked figure appears out of nothing and begins picking them off one after another. And somehow, this deluge of bloodshed is closely connected with the poisoning of a young, ambitious scribe whose ambition was to become the betrothed of the daughter of one of the slayers and this youthful girl is now on trial in The Hall of Two Truths for his murder. But Amerotke believes there's more beneath the exterior of this case then meets the eye and more than once he nearly paid with his life for venturing too close to the truth.

As a tale of blood-soaked vengeance, adrenaline fuelled thrills and antediluvian perils wrapped up as a suspenseful serial killer story it's first rate, no argument there, but I think Doherty cheated himself out of creating a minor masterpiece with not even hiding a single clue – which would've made the excellent dénouement also a satisfying one. 

This self-appointed slayer of the slayers, whose presence is that like of a shadow, is the best culprit I encountered in this series thus far and when this person finally sheds the stained cloak and mask you find someone who's both remorseless as well as very human – with a very powerful and understandable motive. But the lack of clueing makes it impossible to anticipate or feel pleasantly surprised and there was definitely a missed opportunity with the murder of one of the generals by not securely locking the door and windows of The Red Chapel from the inside. Clues and a locked room killing could've easily turned this story in a thriller-cum-detective story rivaling John Dickson Carr's Captain Cut-Throat (1955), in which an apparently invisible assailant roams one of Napoleon's military camps and stabs his sentries under seemingly impossible circumstances. It remains one of my favorite historical detective stories.

But I have to be fair here and not be tempted into decrying this book merely because it's not what I wanted it to be. The plot is still a good example of craftsmanship and populated with interestingly drawn characters, especially the general's daughter who's accused of poisoning her lover and the militaristic heroes who give credence to the old adage "how the mighty have fallen," thrusted into dangerous and exciting situations. My favorite scenes are the prologue, in which the enemy's camp is being infiltrated and when they return thirty years later, alongside Amerotke, to investigate the makeshift tomb of Meretseger – only to discover it empty and trapped in a ambush. Great stuff!

In summation, this wasn't exactly what I was looking for when I picked up this book, but not once did I had to stifle a yawn and overall it's an engrossing, fast-paced read which will not fail to entertain the fans of this series. But I hope the next entry is a return to the previous books with a puzzling locked room mystery and at least one or two clues to mull over while traveling from one chapter to another.

Speaking of locked room stories, the next mystery on the list will definitely be one. I have more than enough of them in cold storage, but picking one will proof to be the real challenge. 

All the books I have reviewed in this series:

The Mask of Ra (1998)

The Horus Killings (1999)

The Anubis Slayings (2000)

The Slayers of Seth (2001)

The Assassins of Isis (2004)

The Poisoner of Ptah (2007)

The Spies of Sobeck (2008)