What Lies Beneath the Surface

"Exactly! It is absurd — improbable — it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! one cannot escape from the facts."

- Hercule Poirot (Murder on the Orient Express, 1934).

If there's one thing we have enough of here, it's water. We have so much of the stuff that we could drown in it. Literarily! To prevent this from happening, a campaign was waged against the rising water by engineering and building dikes to provide a sturdy resistance against the pounding waves of a brimming ocean, but our arsenal also includes levees, canals, estuaries and nature reserves – giving the water the space it needs to flow and drain away without washing away half of the country. One of these spots is De Blauwe Kamer (The Blue Room), a riverside reserve, affixed to the Utrechtse Heuvelrug (Utrecht Hill Ridge), which also happens to be the natural habitat and hunting ground of the furrowed-faced Inspector Petersen, where he, and his colleagues, have to roam the slopes and hills after a scavenger of a different breed left a body in the waters of the reserve. 

De dood van Callista de Vries (The Death of Callista de Vries, 2012) is the sixth full-length novel in the District Heuvelrug series and begins when a diving team probe the waters of The Blue Room for unexploded ammunition from World War II, but what they drag up is a ripped sack containing the bloated and gnawed body of a woman – weighted down with heavy boulders. Murder, plain and simple, which is not something that can be said of the circumstances in which the crime was discovered as it conflicts with the statements given by the silent witnesses. The body was wrapped up and weighted down, indicating that the murderer wanted to delay the discovery as long as possible, allowing the murky waters and animals to erode the evidence, but, why then, dump the body in a place where it was bound to be discovered? It was widely publicized that the area would be cleared for leftover ammunition from the war and the path to the scene of the crime took the murderer pass a house and three house boats! A considerable and unnecessary risk when you consider that the region was fertile with watery graves where a body could sink into Leth. 

Usually, these cases are solved once the police learns the name their John or Jane Doe listened to in their daily lives, but this is a detective story and the victim turns out to have been somewhat of a cherchez la femme named Callista de Vries – a beautiful young woman from Utrecht who was reported missing two days previously. Callista openly broke off her relationship with Iwan van Schijndel, who declares that they were back together, but he had to promise her to keep everything under wraps for a while and this secrecy may overlap with her having moved around in the criminal layers of society. Even more baffling is that Iwan van Schijndel was one of the divers who found the body! There you have it, just a few of the winding pathways leading through the maze that Petersen has to navigate his team through.

Last year, I wrote a laudatory review of Marco Books' De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011), which I praises as a "lavishly plotted detective story" and the clueing and misdirection was straight out of a classic detective story. One clue in particular was an absolute gem! Ever since finding a home at his new publisher, De Leeskamer (The Reading Room), he has been improving leaps and bounds as a writer, finding a better balance between plot and character with each passing book, and has become  much more comfortable with the form.

In a recent YouTube video, Books explained the difference between "lazy police novels" and whodunits. You can read one without having to burden your brain, sit back and let the words of the author lead you to solution, while the latter gives you a fair shot at beating the detective to the solution. That is, if you are clever and observant enough.

Books gave this format a modern interpretation similar to a number of post-GAD writers discussed on the blog. Over the course of these books, the reader has learned almost as much about the policemen who investigate crimes as the crimes they investigate and snippets of their personal lives show them to be more than a mere collection of theatrical puppets, dressed up as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, waiting in the wings to thwart the killer in the final act. And this without dumbing down the plot. 

The plot of De dood van Callista de Vries is also scattered with clues, but they were a trifle weaker and missed the brilliant radiance of the ones that were tucked away between the covers of the previous book, however, they were still there and that made for stimulating read. Books has pulled off a hat trick with this book, delivering three engagingly written, well-paced and deftly plotted detective stories in the same number of years, and the well of ideas he draws from seems to be far from being dried up. 

Last, but not least, I have to compliment Books' publisher, Hans van den Boom, who said that Books "shows that he's a grand master of the whodunit.” What? A publisher who openly admits that one of his writers does something as vulgar as writing whodunits? Well, I guess I was right when I thought I saw a Silver Age of Detection dawning at the horizon the other day. :)

Destrict Heuvelrug series: 

Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia, 2004)

De bloedzuiger (The Bloodsucker, 2005)

Gedragen haat (Hatred Borne, 2006)

De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010)

De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011)

De dood van Callista de Vries (The Death of Callista de Vries, 2012)

Strategy Above the Depths

"I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge."

- Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton")

I value the opinion of my fellow brethrens exploring the detective story more than any other and hang onto their recommendations, observations and conclusions like a pile of freshly mined, rough diamonds – before giving them a sharp appraising look myself. That's why you regularly see books emerge here that were mentioned or discuss elsewhere, but even with a positive impression from a fellow devotee and a personal self-control that only exists as a spark of perpetual enthusiasm you have no signed guarantee that the opaque pieces of drift-glass will actually yield a sparkling gem. But what to do when opinions differ?

The internet has not been kind in its appraisal of Rufus King's The Case of the Constant God (1938), not as a detective story anyway, noting that it was "unusual downbeat" and "moderately amusing" but also "not quite fair play" and "not much fun to read," while Robert Adey deigned the book worthy of extra praise in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible crimes (1991) – saying that King appears here as "a writer of the first rank" and expresses his surprise "that he is so comparatively little known." Needless to say, this propelled the book to the upper echelons of my Most Wanted list and I have to admit that having identified the book as a locked room mystery helped in shelling out the bounty for its capture. Besides, would a book with the title Locked Room Murders tell a lie to me? (said he, with the conviction of a raving lunatic).

But enough of this palaver, let's get this show on the road and that's where this unusual case begins for King's series detective, Lieutenant Valcour, where a Mr. Blodgett witnesses a corpse being driven around the city by two men. A routine check on the vehicle, combined with the description of the suspects, identifies them as Artemus Todd and Jonathan Alder, crumbs of the upper crust of the Long Island society, which makes it also an unlikely story. After all, people like that are not in the habit of picking up hitchhikers, let alone ones that need to be dropped off at the morgue, and that's when King puts the plot in reverse and backs up into a flashback.

We learn that the name of the stiff in the backseat was Sigurd Repellen, a nasty blackmailer who dipped his pen in the same venomous inkwell as Charles Augustus Milverton and James Chigwell, morally responsible for the tragic suicide of Jenny Alder – Jonathan’s loving wife and Todd's darling daughter. They accidentally killed him when they threw him against a bust of Emperor Nero and slumped down to the floor. Justifiably homicide? Morally, perhaps, but the family had made plans, conspired and that gives a prosecutor an opening to argue that the outcome would’ve been the same. Ergo, a murder charge. They decide to expunge the evidence, dump the body and lay down until the trails grows cold, but, as we learned from the opening chapter, it's a bust from almost the get go. The first half of the story can be summed up as an inverted mystery, in which we follow both Valcour and the Alder-Todd household as each is taking their measures against one another, but this was the least interesting portion of the book.

The pace was picked up when Repellen's remains were discovered and the medical examiner extracted not only a bullet from the blackguard's heart but also a completely different story. As a final act in this drama we see Alder and Todd taking flight to sea aboard their yacht, while Valcour soared above them in a seaplane before coming down from the sky like a bird of prey. This is my favorite part of the book and offers a nifty, fairly clued impossible problem of a stowaway, whom Valcour believes to be the murderer, but is not found when the boat was turned inside out. As a matter of fact, it was this impossible disappearance from an ocean-bound yacht that saved me from having to put this book away with a lingering sense of disappointment. Plot wise, it was the only part that was done right. The murderer could've been a nice surprise, which, admittedly, was a clever play on the least-likely-suspect gambit, but not enough clues were stowawayed on its pages to pull it off in a satisfactory manner.

All in all, The Case of the Constant God is a readable, offbeat crime novel, but not one that's particular memorable, challenging or engaging.

This was only my second Lieutenant Valcour book, the first being the unconventional Murder by the Clock (1929), but from these I have gotten the impression that Rufus King was sort of a poor man's Ellery Queen – which may explain his neglect. I know there are mystery fans who have an high opinion of King, but I don't see in those two titles. 

Note: the post title is a reference to one of the Detective Conan movies, Strategy Above the Depths (2005). 

The Labyrinthine-Shaped Enigma

"What we need is some fearless iconoclast who will come out boldly against this damnable tyranny, saying ‘Fiction is stranger than truth.’"

- Henri Bencolin (The Lost Gallows, 1931)

When the 20th century dawned, there was hope that science and reason would usher in an age of reason. It was to be an era in which logic and education would expel the hobgoblins from the dark nooks and crannies of our minds, like a nightmare after turning on a bedside lamp, but humans are a stubborn breed and dragging them from a hansom cab to shove them into a space shuttle was not enough to make them stop believing in ghosts and miracles.

An example of such a miracle in modern times can be found in the belly of Monte Verita (Hill of Truth), situated in the Swiss town Ascona, where a mystic proclaiming to be the reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz, the founder of the Rosicrucian Order, settled down in the mountain during the early 1900s, however, the locals were anything but hospitable towards them and their leader decided to lock himself up in a grotto – in order to reflect, meditate and pray. The entrance of the grotto was sealed with rocks, nobody was able to get in or out, but when they returned, after four days, to release their leader from his self-imposed imprisonment, all they found was an empty cavern! His disappearance was left unexplained, but even greater mysteries lay ahead when the town, in 1938, hosted a worldwide convention on the detective story and thus begins Jean-Paul Török's L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007) – a well-written homage to John Dickson Carr with a plot that twists and turns like an insomniac snake.

Török is a French movie historian, critic, scenarist, director and apparently has a professorship in narratology and wrote this gem with malice aforethought as a traditional whodunit – drawing heavily on the works of the grandmaster of the locked room mystery. In fact, Török skillfully weaved the plot in such a way that it finished with the same sentence as (the French translation of) The Burning Court (1937), but you could also find vestiges of other Carr novels in the plot.

Solange is a woman who could've easily substituted for Fey Seton or Lesley Grant, who, at the opening of this book, accompanies her newly wed husband, Pierre Garnier, to the mystery conference in Ascona – where she becomes the heroine in something that eerily resembles one of the novels that her Uncle Arthur pens for a living. Pierre is a man who has done his homework on the detective story and is looking forward to spending time among kindred spirits, but even the crisp, clean air of the Swiss countryside is eventually polluted with the toxic fumes emanating from Nazi Germany. A German psychiatrist, police consultant and card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, Dr. Hoenig, turns up and challenges one of the lectures, who claims that impossible crimes are only perpetrated by fictional criminals, stating that he will prove him wrong in a lecture, of his own, that will expose a secret –  and makes his sinister purpose clear beforehand in a conversation with Pierre. Dr. Hoenig claims that he has, in his capacity as a police consultant, knowledge of the fact that his wife has buried three husbands, which were most likely murders disguised as suicides and a natural death, two of them discovered inside a locked room, but can Pierre believe that his wife is multiple murderess – even though he has to admit that he knows very little about her past.

Naturally, Dr. Hoenig never had a ghost of a chance to deliver on his promise as a woman, wearing a headscarf, stabs him in front of two policemen and seals up the house from within before disappearing as if in a puff of smoke. The body of Dr. Hoenig also disappears from the locked premise after it was discovered and was even seen walking the streets with a knife sticking in his back, before he ended up in the grotto with the solid bars, covering the only entrance, still in tact. The efficient Brenner of the Swiss police is put on the case, but the expertise of the mystery writer and impossible crime expert, Sir Arthur Carter Gilbert, is needed to successfully fiddle with the lock of this sealed room and he goes about it in a way that immediately recalls H.M. and Dr. Gideon Fell.

The patterns that emerge from this plot are pleasant to watch and fans of John Dickson Carr will recognize a lot of similarities between this book and the work of the master himself, some of them are pointed out in the back of the book, but I also have to admit that the locked room scenarios weren't very original. I immediately spotted and worked out the false solution, which was nonetheless an admirably done reworking of a trick that I have seen more than once, and the correct one was literarily a redressing of one of the oldest tricks in the book. It was done well and fitted the story, but it plays too much like the original and this familiarity tends to make this a predicable story for readers who know their classics.

But rest assured, this took, for me anyway, nothing away from the book, not only because it was written by someone who knew what he was writing about, but also enjoyed writing it, and for a "mere" pastiche this is an absolute first rate effort! Predictability aside, The Riddle of Monte Verita wonderfully captures and evokes the glory days of the detective story, when plots were allowed to roam unshackled and free to explore even the ridiculous. However, we will vehemently deny to our last breath that Harry Stephen Keeler is part of the mystery genre. See? His name doesn't even link to a GADwiki profile page. I told you, not one of our writers.

And last but not least, I have to commend John Pugmire for delivering another fine translation and you can support him to continue investing his time in translating these wonderful books by simply buying them. Hey, if you're going to buy detectives, anyway, why not pick this one up as well, right?

Go Gadget Go

"Nothing's impossible, Hadj. There are only possibilities waiting to be discovered."

- Jonny Quest (Assault on Questworld)

The primary purpose of this nook is to provide me with an outlet for my observations, musings and conjecture on the detective story, after having rooted around in its murky past, but today's review is composed from notes dating back nearly two years.

In my last post, I referred to a collection of short stories, Arthur Porges' The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), which I read and reviewed on the John Dickson Carr forum in my pre-blogging days. It was one of my first, tentative steps to become the Fredric Dannay of the 21st century (Patrick has dibs on Anthony Boucher's mantle) and while it's not a terribly good review, it isn't a bad one either – and decided to revise rewrite it a bit and repost it here. Please remember that I wrote this two years ago, and it's therefore very summary.

The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey is a collection of (mostly) short-short stories, in which a paralyzed research scientist, whose wheelchair is studded with neat little gadgets, lends his analytical mind to one of his former pupils, Lt. Trask, when a case is starting to become an impossible one. Grey's 14-year-old son Edgar, a child prodigy who possesses an IQ of 180, playing the Archie Goodwin to his father's Nero Wolfe, rounds out the team. He's also very fond of Trask and this usually results in some fun, lighthearted banter between the police lieutenant and the pint-sized genius. Yes, it's basically Rex Stout, Detective Conan, Ellery Queen and a dash of the impossible meshed together and poured into one slender volume. 

The stories themselves are very readable, fun and well written, but also very uneven in quality, although, there were only two real duds in this book – which is not a bad ratio for a collection of fourteen stories. It should be mentioned, however, that half of the stories have solutions that are variations on two basic ideas. You can read them (if you're curious) in my original post where they are hidden behind proper spoiler tags. But now, on to the stories!

The Scientist and the Bagful of Water

The book opens with a monumental dud and one that can almost be heard when a bag of water, plunging from a multi-story building, becomes a deadly projectile and squashes a man's skull. Grey's evidence to hang the murderer has a glimmer of cleverness, but the only real impossibility in this story is being able to anticipate the solution.

The Scientist and the Wife Killer

The stand-out story of this collection, in which a man, under grave suspicion of having buried his previous wives a tad bit prematurely, electrocutes his latest spouse inside a locked bathroom, which was bare of any electric appliances, and her husband was miles away at the time of her sudden demise! A good example of how to retain the puzzle element in an inverted mystery.

The Scientist and the Vanished Weapon

A minor tale in which a delinquent teenager kills a cop, and than miraculously makes the gun disappear. A competent story with an unusual premise, but that's about it.

The Scientist and the Obscene Crime 

Grey finds a clever method to trace an apparent untraceable pervert who terrorizes a young woman with lewd phone calls. A mildly amusing, but not very memorable, story.

The Scientist and the Multiple Murders

This entry in the casebook of the wheelchair bound detective is the longest in the collection, running for fourteen pages, and concerns a congregation of eight directors who are found floating in a pool on the top of an office building – electrocuted without apparent means or a way the murderer could've gained access to the roof. The method to kill an entire group of people in one stroke, on top of an inaccessible building, managed to be both inventive and deadly simple, and thus very satisfying.

The Scientist and the Invisible Safe

The police suspects a notorious jewel thief of having stashed the spoils of his nefarious activities, a precious stone, in his hotel room, but they turn up empty handed after thoroughly going over the room and ask Grey to help them locate the thief's invisible cubbyhole. A fun little story similar to Queen's "Diamonds in Paradise" and Dickson's "Hot Money."

The Scientist and the Two Thieves

Once again, a jewel thief performs a vanishing trick with a valuable gem as a stage prop and Grey has to find it, which he does, only to discover that another thief beat him to it. 

The Scientist and the Time Bomb

This utterly bizarre story opens with a threatening letter from a dead man, in which the dearly departed reveals that he has placed an untraceable time bomb in his former ancestral home with a fifteen year fuse (!) – and that was well over fourteen years ago. The solution is one like you've never seen before and I'm still not entirely sure what to think of it. It's original; I'll give him that!

The Scientist and the Platinum Chain

Grey has to figure out what happened to a platinum chain after it disappeared from a crime scene. Not very interesting.

The Scientist and the Exterminator

A notorious and vicious man is killed when a whiff of cyanide gas drifts into his securely locked and guarded apartment that even has its windows covered with chicken wire. It has a fairly interesting method to introduce a cloud of noxious fumes into a tightly secured, top floor apartment. However, it should be mentioned that's also a bit farfetched and we've seen the general idea behind this trick before in this collection.

The Scientist and the Stolen Rembrandt

This story also follows the formula of the previous story with Trask asking Grey's help in locating another hidden object. This time a top fence made a newly discovered sketch by Rembrandt disappear from a ship moments before he was apprehended. It's a new wrinkle on the concept of Poe's "The Purloined Letter."

The Scientist and the Poisoner

A man is poisoned in a restaurant and only the waiter was near enough to add an extra, poisonous ingredient to the meal, but, naturally, this person is innocent – which gives Trask, Grey and the reader another impossible situation to digest. One of the better stories in this collection, but, again, we've seen this type of solution before.

The Scientist and the Heavenly Alibi

Grey rips what appeared to be a perfect photographic alibi to shreds. Not as interesting as it could've been.

The Scientist and the One-Word Clue

This collection opened and ended with a dud, and this story can only be described as an unnecessarily afterthought to the series, in which Trask asks Grey's assistance in making sense out of the final scribbles of a murdered man.

The stories in this collection were culled from the pages of The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, where they appeared from 1965 through 1975, and three more were dug from the authors personal archives and were published in this volume for the very first time. The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey is still in print and recommend it not only to the enthusiasts of the locked room mystery, but also to everyone who reads detective stories for the same reason as they were read during the Golden Age... because they are fun!

The Man Who Explained Miracles

"Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- The White Queen (Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, 1871)

A furnished room, alongside with the corpus delictis, vanishes from an apartment building, a burglar traverses a stretch of snow without leaving footprints and a man witnesses how a floating glove snatches up a gun and shoots a man point blank in the chest. These are only a few examples of problems brought to Colonel March's attention, who, as the head of Department D-3 of Scotland Yard, has to decide whether these implausible stories are either gross exaggerations, elaborate hoaxes or perhaps cleverly disguised crimes.

If such a department would exist in our everyday world, its sole task would be to keep the confused souls, who occasionally feel the urge to confess that it was them who surreptitiously stole the Crown Jewels when nobody was looking, from bothering the regular police, however, this is John Dickson Carr's mad, mad, mad universe – and not everyone raving feverishly about disappearing rooms and invisible men is a head case. The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), published under the byline "Carter Dickson," collects seven of the nine-recorded cases that passed through the office of Colonel March. 

The New Invisible Man

Colonel March finds a confused man, named Horace Rodman, sitting on the other side of his desk, relating a bizarre story of a disembodied glove who shot a man in the apartment across the street, which had an even more unlikely follow-up when he stormed the apartment with a policeman in tow – only to discover an empty room and a broken window "magically" restored. March never leaves his desk to the make the invisible marksman emerge from our blind spot and it did not disappoint. It's perhaps a tad-bit over elaborate, but that's smoothed over once you learn of the motive. Great ending that was very much in the Carrian spirit.

Part of the plot of this story was used for the radio play "Man Without a Body," which also recycled the impossible crime from the stage-play "Thirteen to the Gallows."

The Footprints in the Sky

Dorothy Brant loathed Mrs. Topham and the fact that her footprints where the only traces in the snow, leading to and from the doorstep of Mrs. Topham, makes her the only suspect when the hated woman was brutally beaten and robbed on the evening when Brant visited her. Luckily, Colonel March noticed the footprints in the sky. The solution is something Clayton Rawson might have come up with (e.g. The Footprints on the Ceiling, 1939) and the circumstances of the crime recalled Paul Halter's The Lord of Misrule (1994), which isn't necessary a good thing (in this case it's kind of corny), but overall, it was a fun story and loved the idea of the metaphorical footprints left on the night sky.

The Crime in Nobody's Room

An entire room, harboring the body of a dead man, vanishes from an apartment building, but it's not a very good or clever story – I'm afraid. The solution to the disappearing room was blindingly obvious and the overall plot only so-so. Oh well, every short story collection has its duds.

Carr rewrote this story as the radio play, "Five Canaries in a Room."

Hot Money

Unusually, for Carr, this story opens with a messy bank robbery, more reminiscent of the hardboiled writers who described the seamier side of life than a cerebral puzzle, but one is eventually deposited on the desk of Colonel March – and involves locating an invisible piece of furniture. The bank robbers were caught, but the money was probably dropped off at a fence, who specializes in laundering dirty money, and the police have a pretty good idea who this guy is, however, the only proof (i.e. the stolen money) vanished from a locked room. The room was strip-searched without finding as much as a snippet of cash, but Colonel March believes they might have overlooked a big piece of furniture that nobody ever seems to notice. 

A big, chunky piece of furniture that everyone has in his home, but never notices, resonated the "Judas Window," which every room has but only murderers could look through, and "The Silver Curtain," from which they can cut a figuritive invisibility cloak. Carr loved to create domestic horrors! The only weakness in thia story arises if you reject the launderers hiding hole as a piece of furniture.

"Hot Money" was also rewritten as a radio play and broadcasted under the title "Nothing Up My Sleeve." Arthur Porges' collection of locked room mysteries, The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), has a lot of impossible situations like this one – c.f. "The Scientist and the Invisible Safe."

Death in the Dressing Room

A pick-pocket has been looting the wallets of the patrons of The Orient Club and one the dancers is stabbed to death in her dressing room, but Colonel March is on the scene (originally to look into the unusual pick-pocket case) to take charge of the case and turns a cast-iron alibi into scrap metal. A well-written and deftly plotted story.

This story was rewritten for Murder Clinic, instead of Suspense, and, IIRC, March was replaced with H.M.

The Silver Curtain

A young man looses everything, except his ticket to return home, in a French casino and is approached by a shady characters who offers him a wad of money in exchange for a favor: he has to sneak a bottle of pills pass custom services. However, the entire plan collapses like a house of cards when he witnesses how an invisible assailant stabs his new employer in an empty cul-de-sac. Upon re-reading this story, first read in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room and Impossible Crimes (2000), I have to come to the conclusion that this is perhaps one of my favorite tricks for this kind of impossible crime. So simple and effective.

Error at Daybreak

The final case for Colonel March in this collection offers a similar problem as in his previous outing: a man is stabbed to death while standing alone on a remote, rocky spot of the beach, under observation of three witnesses, who see him waving at one of them before he collapses – stabbed in the back with something like a thin, old-fashioned hairpin. It's a decent enough story that did nice job of leading me up the garden path. I was convinced that the victim was stabbed (without noticing it because of the nature of the weapon) before he had reached that desolate spot and had either a) succumbed at that place from internal bleeding or b) waving had ruptured the wound. This would have been a neat method for the murderer to (accidentally?) finish off the victim after he didn't die instantly from the stab wound. Just imagine, murdering someone by waving at him or her. I think I would've let Colonel Race wave at the victim and accidentally create the impossible situation.

All in all, this was a solid collection showing Carr as one of the most versatile and inspired writers of his generation, who was not satisfied with merely explaining who dented the skull of Sir Ivan Pale in his windowless séance room with a crystal sphere, but also finding a way for the murderer to aparantly phase through a solid oaken door that was locked and bolted from the inside. Carr purposely placed hurdles in front of him to make things more interesting and fun, and that he tripped once or twice did nothing to lessen that effect. Carr simply was one of the best and most enthusiastic players of the Grandest Game in the World and that rubs off on the reader. 

Cards on the Table

"Cards are war, in the disguise of a sport" 

- Charles Lamb

Anthony Boucher (rhymes with voucher) tends to linger on in our collective memories as a critic, whose compendium of newspaper reviews, published under the title The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentaries (1942-1947), has become an important reference guide for contemporary mystery fans excavating the genre's lost history, but aside from penning critical commentary, science fiction stories, radio plays or compiling anthologies he also has seven detective novels to his credit – including a triad of books in which he confronts his private shamus, Fergus O'Breen, with a few very familiar tropes.

The Case of the Solid Key (1941) has him jimmying the door of a locked room problem and The Case of the Seven Sneezes (1942) drops him off on an isolated, cut-off islet with a murderer and an entire cast of suspects. Boucher's second endeavor as a mystery novelist, The Case of the Crumpled Knave (1939), takes a stab at the Queenian motif of the dying message.

Humphrey Garnett was a former research scientist, attached to the military, who has contented himself with doing private research from his private laboratory, collecting vintage playing cards, playing four-handed chess and worked on a five-pack solitaire, but he was not granted the time to complete these projects. Someone spiked his drink with poison and the only clue the police have to go on is a crumpled playing card they pried loose from Gernett's cold dead hand. Luckily for them, Colonel Rand arrives from New York City at the home of his old friend and he has a telegram that could refer the entire case to dusty, cobweb strewn archives where the police store their solved cases.

Before he faced his would-be-killer, Garnett dispatched a telegram to his old friend, Colonel Rand, asking him to come to Los Angeles because he might be an important witness at the inquest of his body. It turns out to be a pretty accurate prediction. Colonel Rand identifies Richard Vinton, engaged to Kay Garnett, Humphrey's daughter, as a cardsharp who used to work aboard ocean-liners and the one to whom the crushed knave of diamonds must refer to, however, his fiancé is not convinced and engages the services of her old childhood friend, Fergus O’Breen, who has just opened up shop as a private investigator. Now that trouble is his business and daily bread, he decided to take on the case.  

O'Breen goes over the Garnett household with a fine toothcomb and examines Kay herself and her ineffectual uncle, Arthur Willowe, the lab-assistant and Vinton's rival, Will Harding, the mysteries Camilla Sallice and few outsiders, but it's one of the attendees of the classic drawing room scenes who sees the truth after O'Breen delivered a clever, but wrong, solution and both of them have a specific problem. The false solution appears to be lifted from a Nicholas Blake novel and has nothing new to offer to a seasoned mystery reader. The correct solution is not bad, but, as it is explained, you realize that you already knew basically everything that is being told except that everything is now in its proper place and context. I can see and appreciate what Boucher was trying to do with this novel, but I can also understand readers who say "Oh, is that all" after reading the final chapter.

Still, the final part of the book might not deliver the punch promised in the set-up, but it's still better than some detective stories I have read that were actually a mess. I also enjoyed the characterization (especially of the amiable Colonel Rand and the pathetic and longsuffering Arthur Willowe) and the entertaining writing, which included some self-referential humor and even a bit of lamp shading ("It's against all rules,” Fergus groaned in desperation. “A new character at this hour!”). However, it was not all laughs and giggles as there were also a few interesting tidbits on playing cards and an interesting discussion (read: condemnation) of modern warfare and all of its horrors – especially against unarmed citizens. It's a bit discomforting to read knowning what the world had to look forward to in 1939.

Anyway, not a perfect detective story, but good enough to warrant a read if you're a fan of either Boucher or the Queen-Van Dine style detective novels.

"There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact"

"Sometimes the most illogical answer turns out to be the correct one. Reality is often stranger than anything we can imagine ourselves, but I'm not the first one who has said that. It probably was Sherlock Holmes, who always had something clever to say."

- Peter van Opperdoes (Een mes in de rug, 2012)

The book I alluded to in my previous post, read on a sultry and lazy afternoon in the cool shades beneath the trees, was Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012), published under the names De Waal & Baantjer, but the series has been a solo-project of Simon de Waal ever since Appie Baantjer passed away in late August, 2010. It's the sixth installment of a series that began after Baantjer retired the successful DeKok-series that ran for nearly five decades, sold millions of copies and spawned a television series that kept millions of viewers glued to their televisions. A decision as unpopular as Conan Doyle's resolution to wash himself from Sherlock Holmes in the churning waters of Reichenbach Falls, but it was also an understandable one coming from a writer in his eighties, penning two or more books a year, who had just lost his wife – and I thought that with the publication of Dood in gebed (Death in Prayer, 2008) we had reached the end of an era.  

But the writing bug reared its ugly head and the itch began, and before long, he was working on a new series with his ex-police colleague and fellow crime-writer Simon de Waal as a writing buddy. The main characters are the old-school veteran Peter van Opperdoes and his younger partner Jacob, who are basically thinly disguised versions of themselves. You can find traces of them all over the characters. Peter van Opperdoes has also lost his wife, but in the books he still talks with her and the first part makes it clear that he's not imagining things, however, she's only there to speak words of encouragement to her husband and not to whisper the name of the murderer into his ear. It's very unusual to have such a non-intrusive, supernatural entity hovering in the background of a straight-up police procedural. Anyway, Simon de Waal worked as a rookie-cop with Baantjer and this joint-project must have seemed like things coming full circle for them. Writing the first few books must have been fun as Baantjer loved to leave impossible plot-twists for De Waal to sort out. But she didn't have a sister indeed. Good luck with that, Simon! De Waal described Baantjer as someone with the mindset of a charming young man and acted as such, which makes me think of Baantjer as Archie Goodwin in his eighties.

So I settled down with A Knife in the Back (yes, yes) and expected nothing more than a charming, uncomplicated roman policier because the first three books were kind of disappointing – with a last-minute introduction of a culprit and a lack of fair play. They were as fun to read as the DeKok novels, but, plot-wise, insufficient to satisfy this spoiled brat. But A Knife in the Back was a marked improvement on its predecessors.

The problems for Van Opperdoes and Jacob begin when they have to go to a hotel where a guest has failed to emerge from his room, but the foul smell of murder does not stink up the place despite the presence of a body and the medical examiner seems to agree. Cause of death: heart failure. However, the manager made sure that the detectives did not leave the building without a problem and notified them that the body and the man who had rented the room were not one and the same person. With suspicion on his mind, Van Opperdoes goes over the body again and finds evidence suggesting murder – albeit an accidental one. The old detective showed that an old fox may lose his hair but not his cunning and prevented a murder from being filed away as a natural death. The rest of the plot unfolds through follow-ups on witness testimonies, credit card information and everything else that comes to the surface over the course of a police investigation, but in the end this was more a story about detectives than a proper detective story. Not a bad one, but still not a genuine detective story. Still, that should take nothing away from the book for the average reader because it’s not that kind of story and this will only bother individuals hooked on GAD. 

Baantjer & De Waal signing their second book

De Waal is a fictioneer who dabbles in variety of styles (police procedurals, thrillers and historical mysteries), but has yet to write a classically styled mystery (the historical ones echoed Doyle and his contemporaries) filled with locked rooms, clues and baffling crimes! I know it's an unreasonable expectation, but it would be awesome if one of our top-tier crime writers would pen an old-fashioned whodunit. Because we have to reduce the monoculture of modern thrillers dominating the shelves of our bookstores before it kills millions of people to keep the genre fresh, inventive and more importantly it would make me happy.

Bibliography:

De Waal & Baantjer series:

Een Rus in de Jordaan (A Russian in the Jordaan, 2009) [De Jordaan = neighborhood in Amsterdam]

Een lijk in de kast (A Skeleton in the Closet, 2010)

Een dief in de nacht (Like a Thief in the Night, 2010)

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bull's-eye, 2011)

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011)

Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012)

The Historical C.J. van Ledden-Hulsebosch series:

Moord in Tuschinski (Murder in Tuschinski, 2002)

De wraak van de keizer (The Emperor's Revenge, 2003)

Spelen met vuur (Playing with Fire, 2004)

De Rembrandt code (The Rembrandt Code, 2006)

The Boks series:

Boks en de lege kamer (Boks and the Empty Room, 2005)

Boks en het verkeerde lijk (Boks and the Wrong Corpse, 2006)

Boks en de spoorloze getuige (Boks and the Vanished Witness; never published)

Thrillers:

Cop vs. Killer (2005)

Pentito (2007)

De vijf families: Duivelspact (The Five Families: Devil’s Pact, 2011)

Wie een kuil graft... (Whoever Digs a Pit, 2011) [a twiller = twitter novel]

The next post will be a return to our beloved Golden Age.

A Smattering of Crime

"Small crimes always precede great ones."

- J.P. Racine

 

Yesterday, I was condemned to kill a few hours and the gentle breeze rustling through the leaves of the trees in a sun soaked park seemed to beckon me, which would have been a perfect spot to crack open a detective story, were it not for the fact that I forgot to take one with me. Well, I remembered taking a book with me, however, I had accidentally stuffed a few magazines with me. Hey! Absentmindedness is a sure sign of genius, I think. After all, unconsciously, I had the brilliant foresight to take few random issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine with me instead, part of a pile that I wanted to read for eons, so I settled down with an iced coffee, a bottle of iced water and a croissant and read the following stories.

Oh, and no. I did not spend hours reading only this handful of stories, but, after a while, there was nothing left in them I wanted to read and decided to snoop around in a nearby bookstore. But more on that in the next post and now on to the stories:  

The first of this batch of stories comes from one of today's champions of the locked room mystery, Paul Halter, whose "The Man with the Face of Clay" combines a curse, imported from the Middle East, with a miraculous murder offered up as proof. It begins when Archilles Stock tries to chalk up a lost on the record of his friend, Owen Burns, by inviting Miss White to their rooms to tell the tale of her late employer – the archeology enthusiast, Sir Jeremy Cavendish. On one of his latest digs, Sir Jeremy is cursed by one of the locals and upon his return to England he's visited by a creature, whose face resembles a grotesque mask molded from clay, after which he apparently commits suicide. The door was bolted from the inside and the French window, which was ajar, opened up on a sea of unbroken mud and freshly raked and undisturbed flowerbeds. Unfortunately, the solution is of a variety that never fails to disappoint me – no matter how well it was brought or motivated. But I have to say that Halter's strengths dominate his weaknesses when he's writing short stories. And having a good translator helps!

Keith McCarthy's "The Invisible Gunman" has another impossible crime for the reader to work their brains over: a master clock maker is shot to death in his shop and the murderer must have been his brother, they hated each other, but witnesses can place him inside his shop (across the street of his brother) at the time of the murder. Dr. Lance Elliot, his girlfriend Max and his eccentric father try to sort out this snafu. It has some clever misdirection and the solution gives us a neat twist on an otherwise hackneyed plot device. 

Norwegian author Richard Macker also penned a locked room story, "The Intell Club," in which Detective Inspector Rolf Owre takes a closer look at a suspicious suicide at a club for the intellectually gifted. The host of that night's meeting, Roger Aspvik, apparently locked himself up in the den and tasted cyanide before shooting himself. The story and setting are interesting, recalling the Columbo episode The Bye-Bye Sky-High IQ Murder Case (1977), but the solution was of exactly the same variety as the Paul Halter story.

One of the magazines also contained a re-print of Ellery Queen's "The Uncle from Australia." EQ is approached by the quintessential Australian uncle, who made a small fortune Down Under and returned to unload his wealth on either one of his two nephews or his niece. The only girl also turns out to be only one who will inherit, but her beneficiary is beginning to have second thoughts, afraid that the prospects of all that money might proof to be too tempting, and the brassy-looking Oriental paperknife in his back confirms his fears. The ending is a nod to a very famous whodunit and has the added bonus of a believable dying message.

Shamus Award winner Mike Wiecek, writing under the penname of "Mike Cooper," probed the problem of a murder committed in a hermitically sealed room, while the victim was alone, in "Whiz Bang" – which is the name of the complex where a retired billionaire was shot in a locked and moving elevator. A simple, but good, locked room mystery.

Yes, I picked the first cover for the sole reason that it has a portrait of all of the Armchair Reviewers on the front (including Carr and Boucher). The second cover is of the issue that has the Ellery Queen and Richard Macker stories.

Heavy Rain

"But when I was there it was strange – I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It was like I could see the whole thing; one long chain of events... It was like a perfect pattern laid out in front of me and I realized that we were all part of it, and all trapped by it."

- Eric Finch (V for Vendetta, 2006)

According to the summary biography on the back cover of his detective novel Good Night, Sheriff (1941), Harrison R. Steeves was a professor of English at Columbia College who moonlighted as a literary-legal consultant and appeared in a number of settlements over literary property in that capacity. He wrote his sole detective story after he had recuperated from an unspecified illness and the book was published on his sixtieth birthday. The inspiration for the book came when he was on the road to recovery, which was paved with dozens of mystery novels, leaving him convinced that he could pull a better trick and I'm glad to report that it wasn’t half bad – making me somewhat curious as to whom Steeves had been reading when his sickness bound him to his bed and books.

Good Night, Sheriff sets about several weeks after the unfortunate passing of Mrs. Agnes Earlie, wife of Dr. Thomas Earlie, who was found dead in an open clearing alongside the road soaked from the torrents of rain that followed in the wake of an unseasonably sultry day in early November – felled by a bullet to the head. The general consensus is that Mrs. Earlie was accidentally hit by a "lost bullet" from a hunter's rifle, after all, it had happened before many years ago, but the insurance company who has to cough up twenty grand to Agnes Earlie's dying sister, Olivia, have their doubts and send Dr. Patterson to Mercer to look into the matter.

Dr. Patterson is also the story's narrator and interestingly enough, he was nameless for the first quarter (or so) of the book and this raises an interesting question: was he meant to be a nameless detective? Steeves dedicated the book to everyone who provided him with criticism and this effectually "knocked about, chopped, kneaded and hackled" the plot until it was in its present form, which, once again, according to Steeves himself, differed quite a bit from the first fair copy of the book. I can easily imagine one of his proofreaders suggesting that an anonymous narrator puts a distance between the character and the reader. The name Patterson is mentioned only a dozen or so times over the course of two-hundred-and-fifty pages and it sometimes struck me as if the name was wedged in between the text as an afterthought.

Nevertheless, Patterson proves himself to be an excellent, semi-official investigator as he sifts through the evidence, building up theories and talks with the people who are involved (like a local woodsman and the victims brother-in-law) – making this a very slow-moving and mostly sedentary detective story. No car chases and shoot-outs between the pages of this crime novel. Heck, the final seventy pages basically consist of one long conversation between Patterson and the person he tagged as the murderer. It's a fascinating accumulation of chapters, in which clues (both physical and psychological) are analyzed and form a "Prison of Logic" around the suspect. This even yields an unusual, but satisfying, motive for murder and this would've ended the book on a high note, but Steeves made an amateurish mistake when he attempted to spin a final twist that would turn the case up-side down.

In a final conversation with the Sheriff of Mercer, Patterson and the reader suddenly learns that everything they know of the murder also fits another, more inconspicuous, character and that's just a flat-out cheat! Was I surprised? Yes. Was I pleased? Not really. A cheap "surprise" like that felt unworthy of such a cerebral detective story. Still, if you can look past the final ten pages and you enjoy this kind of slow moving unraveling of a plot than it might be a book that could interest you. But be warned, this is not a book you are likely to finish over the coarse of a day or two. Somehow, I began to read slower and slower as I left one chapter after another behind me. It took me nearly a week to reach the final quarter.