Sealed Rooms and Ghoulish Laughter: Tributes to John Dickson Carr

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

The man who explained miracles...

After perusing the article "C is for... John Dickson Carr," an unabashed piece of hero worship from fellow blogger Sergio, a germ of an idea began to fester and grow in my mind, but with it came a knock on the door and found a problem on my doorstep. The instrument I exert to trumpet his praise broke after beating a dead horse with it and more than enough people are already of the opinion that I should get a room for me and the ghost of John Dickson Carr. So I decided to adjust my focus for this post and take a look at some of the stories that he inspired others to write.

Well, I guess I have to start with the late William Brittain, a novelist and school teacher, who scattered the pages of The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine with an abundance of short stories – including "The Man Who Read" series. It's a series of stand-alone mysteries centering on readers of detective fiction that are put in a position where they have to apply the knowledge culled from the stories of their favorite mystery writer to solve a problem of their own... or to create one.

William Brittain (1930-2011)

"The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" is a young orphan, named Edgar Gault, who discovered the undisputed master of the locked room mystery at the impressionable age of fourteen, imbuing him with the conviction that, one day, he will bring his stories to life – preferably with his unpleasant uncle as the victim. The trick of the locked door is almost as good as the final sentence of the story, which is a real kicker, and it's just overall an amusing and a very rich story. It places the inverted mystery in the convinces of the locked room and even gives you, somewhat, of a character study of the protagonist, but, above all, it's just fun story to read. I wish the entire series, all ten of them, were gathered in one easily accessible volume. Messrs Crippen and Landru, are you taking notes? Until then, you can find this story in Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998).

Norma Schier was another mystery writer who had her tongue firmly planted in her cheek when she began to pen a series of short stories for The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, in which she harlequinade her most famous predecessors – from Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh to Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr. Most of her stories perfectly captured the heart and soul of the originals and have the added bonus of being anagram puzzles. You can figure out whodunit and who's being spoofed by simply decoding the anagrams.

"Hocus-Pocus at Drumis Tree" (published under the byline Handon C. Jorricks) was her nod to John Dickson Carr, which takes place in a reputable restaurant where it's not the custom to spike a glass of champagne with poison and then pass it around, but that's exactly what happened. Enter Sir Marvin Rhyerlee! Who's miffed that he can't enjoy a quiet lunch without someone dying under impossible circumstances. Schier admitted that her little pastiche does little justice to Carr's plotting technique and knack for coming up with impossible situations, but the attempt that was made here is definitely being appreciated. You can find this story in the collection The Anagram Detectives (1979).

Alex Atkinson wrote another parody, "Chapter the Last: Merriman Explains," which is more a spoof on Carr's detectives than his plotting technique and someone on the JDCarr forum noted that the more Carr you've read the more you'll appreciate it. I agree. It's a brief, but fun, distraction and can be read in the anthology Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals (1990). 

Another humorous excerpt, lampooning Dr. Gideon Fell, comes from the word processor of one of our very own, Barry Ergang, who was inspired to write "Dr. Gideon Fell, Hardboiled Sawbones" after a comment from Nick Fuller berating the atrocity that was The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries – a TV series that butchered a number of Gladys Mitchell's most enjoyable novels. Here is Nick's full-comment that can double as a synopsis for Barry's story: "It is like adapting Carr, and making Dr. Fell a cantankerous hard-drinking medico on the sleazy streets of London's East End who deals with professional crime of the hard-boiled variety and with an awful number of demented blondes, without an impossible crime in sight." The story can still be read by clicking here (GAD archive).

William Krohn's "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" was written in a more serious and darker vein, when the author was only 18-years-old, and almost reads like a love letter to John Dickson Carr and the locked room mystery. Krohn's introduction to the genre came a few years previously, when he read The Three Coffins (1935) and the Cult of Carr welcomed another member in their midst. The story itself dribs with Carrian influences, involving the stabbing of a magician in closed and moving elevator, with a solution that does not rely on gizmos like a certain other story I could mention – and I can only imagine that Carr himself must have beamed with pride after finishing the story (it was published during his lifetime). Krohn penned a second story for the EQMM, but it was rejected as too complex and eventually moved away from detective fiction to become a film critic and expert on Alfred Hitchcock. I wonder if a copy of that story survived. Anyway, as Darrell from The Study Lamp remarked, the story has been deservedly reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2007).

By the same token, I should also mention Paul Halter's The Fourth Door (1987), whose Dr. Alan Twist is a "thinly" disguised version of Dr. Gideon Fell, and Jean-Paul Török's The Riddle of Monte Verita (2007), but I already discussed them in depth on this blog. However, Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1997) should be mentioned, even if it's more of a general wink at the genre than one specifically meant for Carr. The bloodhounds of the title are a group of fanatical mystery fans, ranging from locked room enthusiasts to hardboiled fanatics, who meet once a week to discuss detective stories – until one of them is murdered aboard a locked houseboat. A very clever, fun and eerily recognizable book that should belong on the shelves of everyone who's permanently under the weather with the sleuth flu. It's about us!

I probably missed a few and could probably find more, but I think this was more than enough hero worship for this Sunday. My next sermon will be on how Carr has fed our hungry brains and banished mediocrity from our bookshelves. Thank you Carr for unlocking doors and forgiving our sins, like you did with the murderers in so many of your books, past, present and future. In name of the Father (Edgar Allan Poe), the Son (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and the Holy Spirit (G.K. Chesterton). Amen.  

Still Life

"When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scattered by a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a single tear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanity of such wealth as this dead man had piled up—without making one loyal friend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory to the least honor."

- E.C. Bentley (Trent's Last Case, 1913).

Max Murray (1901-1956) was an Australian mystery novelist, who began as a bush boy

and did odd jobs in American lumber camps and on freight yards, before he began to work his way up in the world of journalism – holding positions as a foreign correspondent for News Chronicle and during WWII he was the writer/editor of Radio Newsreel for the BBC. When the war ended, Marruy devoted most of his time to writing fiction and cranked out a dozen detective novels, all but one of them hoisted in a uniform title, but they have individual personalities as they lacked a series detective. As Xavier Lechard remarked on the GADgroup last week in reference to Pat McGerr, "not having a series character may often be a good thing artistically but it never does wonders in terms of sales and recognition," which is why Murray is referred to nowadays as Max Who.

The Sunshine Corpse (1954) is Murray's eight stand-alone mystery and opens with Arnold Emeny, a traveling marine biologist, wandering into a fruit stall in Florida, the Sunshine State, to buy a oranges – only to find a corpse sprawled in a chair, amidst souvenirs and fruit, and a man, the artist Bignal Hycer, busy sketching the body. This is probably the best part of the book, soaked in juicy, imaginary scenes and touches of humor (e.g. Arnold's staring match with the corpse, which he lost). 

Lattimer Kell was the name that went with the body and was regarded as an outsider, who did very little to make himself agreeable or blend in with the community. On the contrary, as even his son, Bill, and the woman he wishes to marry, Lili, turn out to be in possession of some very good motives, but then again, everyone seems to have wanted him dead. Like Sarah Jo Chansey and her brother, John, two members of one of the regions oldest family and the preacher Sherman Jones, whose rifle was used to shoot Kell, and his two charges: two young boys named Palmer and Willie.

Normally, I wince when children are introduced into a mystery, because, most of the time, they are portrayed as either miniature adults or as a character from Children of the Corn (i.e. unhinged), which, luckily, was not the case here and Murray appears to have had the same knack as Gladys Mitchell when it came to characterizing children – making it less of trial when they regularly appeared after the sheriff began printing wanted bills with Sherman's face on it. The direct result of a second murder of one of the locals, who was found floating face-up and staring at the sun.

Sherman's escape from town shows that Murray could plot, but this never carried over into the solution, which was a bit muddled and a lot of things were withhold from the reader (and the clues were already thin on the ground to begin with). Signs that a new era was dawning and characterization was beginning to take president over plotting. So I can't really recommend The Sunshine Corpse to Golden Age aficionados, unless they want something different for a change. But don't expect too much from it as a proper detective story.

A year or two ago, I read The Neat Little Corpse (1951) and that one I can recommend, even if it's not exactly a paradigm of Golden Age plotting either, however, it's a cracking good yarn involving a sunken pirate ship, off the coast of Jamaica, stuffed with treasure, local superstition and dark secrets as unfathomable as the depths of the sea itself. I really enjoyed it and was tempted to put it in my list of favorite mysteries, but it just wasn't good enough no matter how enjoyable the story itself actually was. But decide for yourself if you ever happen to stumble across a copy. 

Well, I hope this one was obscure enough.

Max Murray bibliography:

The Voice of the Corpse (1948)

The King and the Corpse (1949)

No Duty on a Corpse (1950; a.k.a. The Queen and the Corpse)

The Neat Little Corpse (1951)

The Right Honourable Corpse (1952)

Good Luck to the Corpse (1953)

The Doctor and the Corpse (1953)

The Sunshine Corpse (1954)

Royal Bed for a Corpse (1955)

Breakfast with a Corpse (1956; A Corpse for Breakfast)

Twilight at Dawn (1957)

Wait for a Corpse (1957)

Until Death Tore Them Apart

"Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition--and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do--clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth--the naked shining truth."

- Hercule Poirot (Death on the Nile, 1937)

The primary focus of this blog is to judge mysteries of a particular vintage, uncovered from the dust-covered shelves of the endangered, second-hand bookstores or plucked from the catalogue of an online book dealer, occasionally venturing out of the obscure to discuss one of the modern guises of the traditional detective story, but, notably, I have mostly left the familiar brand names alone. This has a practical reason: I already covered most of them before I began blogging, from G.K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle and Ellery Queen to Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Edmund Crispin, forcing this Sommelier of Crime to descend into the dark and mouldy cellar of the genre to hunt among the cobwebs and dust bunnies for more, but after patching up my list of favorites I wanted to revisit some of these old favorite – already resulting in a review of a novel that I'm particular fond of. It also dawned on me that it had been ages since I read Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937), or any story from her hand for that matter, which is an oversight that needed to be corrected ASAP.

Death on the Nile has a plot as classic and well-known as two other of Christie's most famous novels, The Murder on the Orient (1934) and And Then There Were None (1939), and writing a synopsis is almost superfluous, but hey, it would be a very short review otherwise – so here we go anyway. 

Death on the Nile is, for me, the quintessential Agatha Christie novel and her most successful treatment of The Internal Triangle, which in turn produced a set of her best and most convincingly drawn characters. The rich and glamorous Linnet Ridgeway, the girl who had everything and wanted Simon Doyle, the man of her friend, Jacqueline de Bellefort, as well and snatches him away from her like Arsène Lupin relieves a cantankerous Duchess of her pearl necklace. Betrayed and broken-hearted, the hot-blooded Jacqueline begins to stalk the newly wed couple during their honeymoon in a particular nasty, but effective, way, eventually cumulating in a shooting incident in the saloon of the S.S. Karnak – gliding over the waters of the ancient Nile.

During a heated and emotional scene, Jacqueline whipped out a small pistol and bored a bullet through Simon’s leg bone, practically leaving him an invalid, after which she immediately wanted to kill herself and needed to be sedated with a nurse standing guard over here the entire night. However, when everything began to quiet down, someone seized the moment and purloined to gun, sneaked into Linnet's cabin and squeezed the trigger with the muzzle pressed almost against her head. With Simon and Jacqueline scratched off as suspects, Poirot and Colonel Race have to look among the cast of gargoyles that make up the remainder of the passengers for an assassin and they are remembered of a remark from Linnet how she was surrounded by enemies. As Milward Kennedy remarked, "a peach of a case for Poirot." 

Having not touched any of Christie's books for several years, it had slipped my mind how good she actually was and how the title of the Queen of Crime is no exaggeration in any way – even after all these decades and with the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) looming at the horizon. It also surprised me how still remembering the solution enhanced my enjoyment of the book instead of deterring it. I simply marveled at recognizing all the carefully planted clues, both physical and psychological ones, and it's almost inconceivable that anyone could miss them when you know how obvious they actually are, but that's the craft of the mystery novelist for you – and Christie was at the very top of the game. I always thought of Death on the Nile as one of the grand whodunits, but I think I appreciate it now more than I did back then when I read it for the very first time. There's also something else I appreciated, but I can't tell without running the risk of giving too much away to the clever and observant reader.

All in all, Death on the Nile comes fairly close to being a perfect detective story, with a plot and characters that balance each other out to a tee, and may very well be one of the Seven Wonders of the Golden Age.

Yes, I will (probably) dust-off one of the Christie's forgotten, attention-starved contemporaries for my next post. Maybe.  

"Shine on this life that's burnin' out"

Kurt: "You gotta learn not to awaken the dragon, alright."

Mondo: "That's when I'll be breathing fire."

- Generation X: The Movie (1996)

The last time I left The Nameless Detective, he was coming from one of the worst weeks in his life. Professionally, he had to deal with a very dissatisfied and mentally unstable client, who accused him of bungling up a case she had given him, and begins a media campaign to get his private investigators license revoked – as well as picking the lock of three baffling and, to all appearances, impossible crimes. A backlash of these problems is felt in his personal life when his relationship with Kerry Wade begins to unravel and things are about to get worse. Much, much worse.

Dragonfire (1982) takes place not long after the events in Scattershot (1982) and Nameless is no longer a private investigator or in a relationship, which is something his friend Lieutenant Eberhardt can sympathize with. His wife has walked out on him. So the sad dopes sit in the backyard, gulping down beers and throwing strips of meat on the barbecue, feeling miserable when the doorbell rang. On the doorstep they find an Asian-looking man who immediately opens fire: sending Eberhardt into a deep coma and Nameless to the hospital with a metal slug in his arm, but within a week he's back on the street – as pissed off as a fire breathing dragon with the morning blues.

The two books preceding this one, Hoodwink (1981) and Scattershot, were unapologetically classical in tone, stringing together no less than five locked room mysteries in total, while Dragonfire is outspokenly hardboiled. But do not assume that, after being released from the hospital, that Nameless goes full Mike Hammer on the inhabitants of Chinatown. It's hardboiled in the way that it leads you away from the safe tourist strip of that neighborhood to a seamier part of town, filled with gambling holes and gang members, where prying strangers aren't always the recipient of Chinese hospitality. Oh, and in case anyone is getting the wrong idea here, Dragonfire is not an updated Yellow Peril story. On the contrary, Pronzini depicts the Chinese characters in this book respectfully, honest, but respectfully and without a trace of racism.

Anyhow, in defiance of another attempt on his life, and Eberhardt still fighting for his, Nameless deals with the problems in front of him in a surprisingly rational manner – acting as a detective should by following up leads and connecting the spaces between the dots. The ending and the character of the murderer were also very well handled and probably my favorite part of the book. The plot was a bit simpler than in the previous books, mentioned here above, but that it had a plot to begin with, when it could have easily been a full-out thriller filled with gun smoke and the dull cracking of shattered bones, shows why I am rarely disappointed when I pull a Nameless novel from my shelves. 

It's also why I have been rather summary in my description of this book. A lot more happens as Nameless gauges for the truth and the theme's in it (making choices and how you are sometimes forced to be able to differentiate between bad and Bad) makes for a good read, if you're familiar with the characters, and therefore I think that Dragonfire is unable to disappoint any true fan of this series.

Last but not least: Pronzini and Muller's The Bughouse Affair will be released on January 9, 2013.

*rubs hands in gleeful anticipation*

All the books I reviewd by Bill Pronzini: 
 

Twospot (1978; with Collin Wilcox)

Hoodwink (1981)
Scattershot (1982) 

Dragonfire (1982)
Casefile (1983)
Double (1984; with Marcia Muller)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)
Carpenter and Quincannon (1998) - an addendum

Nightcrawlers (2005)

Savages (2006) - co-reviewed with Patrick

Life of the Party

"For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away..."

- Agatha Christie's After the Funeral (1953)

On February 19, 2011, I published a summary review of Pat McGerr's Pick Your Victim (1946) on this blog. It was the first serious review I wrote and have been babbling incessantly on here ever since. So after I was done remodeling and re-branding this place, I thought it would be a nice, symbolic touch to return to this criminally neglected mystery writer and dug one of her books out of my pile of unread books – and she did not disappoint! Without further ado, here’s the first new review on this new and (hopefully) improved blog:

"Oh my, Rocky has a few screws loose!"

Follow As the Night (1951; also published as Your Loving Victim) plunges straight into the story with its prologue, which, retrospectively, could also function as an epilogue – depicting the shape of a human silhouette falling from a balcony clinging to the exterior of one of the expensive, top-floor penthouse suits. The tenant is one Lawrence "Larry" Rock, a syndicated newspaper columnist and writer, who clawed a way from his roots, extending all the way down to the lowest strata of society, up to the nectar-filled blossoms of the upper class. But one of the women in his life has the power to undo all of his hard work and that put him in the mood for a killer party.

A poorly looked after, raggedly balcony provides Rock with a cover for murder and summons his four tormentors, women he used to get on in life, to come over for a party and this assemblage include his first and second wives, the red-head Shannon Moore and the gorgeous Claire Forrest, as well as his domineering mistress, the illustrator Maggie Lang, and his young and pregnant mistress Dee Inglesby – who also happens to be the daughter of his boss. There is, however, one snag: the reader is kept in the dark on whom of these four women is the intended victim until the final chapter, or, if you're observant enough, figure it out before you arrive there.

The pages between the prologue and solution are taken up, for the most part anyway, with flashbacks and memories that tell the story of Larry Rock and the four who were a part of an important period of that life – showing that McGerr's grasp on characterization had not weakened. However, Follow As the Night is not just another variation on her "who-will-be-done-in" gambit, which was her favorite ploy, but mixes a bit of suspense and turns this in a bit of a cat-and-mouse game when his ex-wife, Shannon, stumbles to his plans and stands guard over the other three women.

It's almost like a bizarre, inverted, game of clue, in which you possess the winning combination of cards that spell out the solution ("It was Larry Red Rock, on the balcony, with a loose guard rail...") without getting any nearer to the conclusion. You really have to reason from the given information to find that final piece of the puzzle before it's being given to you in the final chapter, which is what keeps her name ascending on my list of favorites. McGerr's take on the genre made the books I read not only a pleasure for a classicist like me, who appreciate a clever plot and fair-play clueing, but also to a contemporary audience whose preference goes to crime novels and thrillers.

Follow As the Night would also lend itself perfectly for a television drama. You could even set the story in modern times, and it would still work. That is, if such an adaptation would stay true to its source material, but that should go without saying. One last interesting thing I noticed about this book is that it sort of borrowed the backdrops of the previous two books I read. Pick Your Victim took place on the work floor, while The Seven Deadly Sisters (1948) was strictly a domestic affair. Follow As the Night combines the two as the four women in this book came into Rock's life through his work at the newspaper. 

But to sum it all up: Pat McGerr, simply the best at what she did!

Having a Wonderful Crime

"And time began seriously to pass."

- Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 1987)

I've always considered the phrase "beach-chair literature" to be a misnomer, not only because it insinuates that a book has no value whatsoever, except to kill a few insipid hours on a beach or in a garden during a warm summer day, but also because it has been used way too much as a curse word to denote genre fiction – i.e. the literary equivalent of schoolyard name calling (Eew! detective, science-fiction and romance novels have icky cooties!). However, I have to admit that the mystery genre, as a whole, does resemble a holiday resort, of sorts, where you can participate in the Grandest Game in the World. It's an attraction more alluring than the Lorelei and drew such visitors as the children's book author A.A. Milne, the humorist Damon Runyon and the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist MacKinlay Kantor to its shores and that last name happens to be subject of today's talk.

MacKinlay Kantor was a prolific novelist, screenwriter and journalist whose 1955 historical novel, Andersonville, set at a Confederate prison camp, landed him the prestigious Pulitzer Prize the following year, but his prose also smattered the pages of pulp magazines (Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, etc.) and "slicks" like Collier's – and two fist full of criminally inclined stories, originally published during the late 1920s and 30s, were collected thirty years later in a volume garnished with the punning title It's About Crime (1960). A book title Craig Rice would've approved.

It should be noted, however, that this collection of short stories wasn't my first run-in with Kantor. The anthology Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries (1982), edited by SF-legend Isaac Asimov, collected one of his stories, "The Light at Three 'O Clock," which turned out to be one of only two stories in that collection really worth reading. Robert Adey described it as “pure John Dickson Carr” and not entirely without reason! The opening of the story, concerning the spook phone calls from a locked apartment received by a switchboard operator, does suggest Carrian influences, but the solution belonged on the pages of a detective story from a previous era. Still, it was a marvelous read and when I read that a few of his stories were collected, including several focusing on impossible crimes, I simply had to have it sooner or later – and the latter happened to be last week.

Before I take the stories down from the top, I have to point out something that I noticed while reading these morsels of crime: Kantor was a mystery writer who was closer to the hardboiled school than to the ratiocinative detective stories and they're not always paradigms of fair-play, either. On the other hand, the quality of the writing is excellent and the text scattered with fascinating ideas or imaginative scenes.

Rogues' Gallery

A short-short story, in which a bum, who's also a gifted sand sculptor, has a run-in with a gang while working on a depiction of the crucifixion. The gang quickly takes care of the poor man, but they forget that silent witnesses often have more to tell to the police than any stool pigeon, which, in this case, happened to be the sand sculpture itself. A very competent crime story with an original dying message. 

Nobody Saw Him Fall

A Christmas tale that almost put Santa Claus behind bars. Well, not exactly like that, but the janitor of the Farmers National Bank, who plays Santa each year, was looking at the possibility of a long term prison sentence (or worse) when someone murdered his boss, Lewis Hermans, and the only person who could've done it and carried off the murder weapon was him! Not exactly fair play, but the solution really makes this a holiday themed mystery.

The Shadow Points

One of those "A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard" stories, in which a poor landscaper shoots one of the burglars who looted his employers safe and keeps the stolen goods for himself. It's a fun and amusing read, but you can see the twist coming from a mile away when he buries part of the stolen goods, marking the spot with the stand of the shadow from the flagpole at a specific time and date, and then runs for foreign soil – before he returns a decade later.

Robert Arthur wrote a similar, but much better, story, entitled "Mr. Manning's Money Tree," collected in Mystery and More Mystery (1966).

Sparrow Cop

A rookie policeman wants to prove himself to his elder brother, who's a decorated policeman himself, and does so in a shoot-out with a bunch of gangsters. It's not a bad story, but nor is it particular good or memorable.

The Grave Grass Quivers

One of the two stand-out stories of this collection, in which a small-town doctor, comfortably leaning against his pension, tells his successor of his father and brother – both of whom disappeared over 60 years ago. It's one of those unsolved mysteries from which rumors and ghost stories can be tapped for generations on end, but recent events in town eventually dredged up the truth and this provided a memorable scene as well as a satisfying conclusion.

The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz

Maxwell Grame is a poor-man's Sherlock Holmes, specialized in tracing lost pets and determining the authorship of anonymous letters, but then he's finally presented with a case worth his mettle: a baby grand piano is whisked away under impossible circumstances from a second floor apartment. I immediately figured out the method, but that did nothing to diminish the fun and the ending was simply perfect!

Something Like Salmon

A very, very weak entry in this collection, in which the owner of a lunch shop and sole witness of a bloody bank robbery helps the police in identifying one of them based on how this person behaved when he was in his shop prior to the robbery – which I didn't buy for a moment. Nobody behaves like that, especially if you're planning to rob the bank opposite of the shop and trying to keep a low profile. The salmon part, OK, but the numbers part? Get out of here!

Blue-Jay Takes the Trail

The proceeds of a charity event, a small-town fair, are, once again, violently taken by a bunch of desperados and they are taken care of by the man who ran a gaming stand – drawing on his past as a conman and carny to take care of these gangsters. Not bad for a crime story.

The Light at Three 'O Clock

A good story that begins as a nicely done, atmospheric ghost story when a switchboard operator begins to receive midnight calls from an empty and locked apartment from which the tenant disappeared the day before – presumed dead. The only weak spot is a routine solution you expect from a detective story written before the 1920s, but if you can banish the locked room ploy from your mind, it's an excellent read from start to finish.

Wolf! Wolf!

A string of threatening letters, signed by "Wolf," announcing the impending death of a prominent citizen, sows confusion with the local police – until they receive an unsigned letter and the person mentioned in it is shot to death in his library. The murderer appeares to have been standing on the balcony, but the rust and soot of years argued against this theory and left the police with a bone-fide locked room mystery. Again, it lacks fair play clueing, but it has Kantor's cleverest solution for an impossible situation. So a victory for Kantor on technical points?

The Watchman

A short-short story, in which the passing of time wreaks havoc on an ex-convict plans of revenge. Meh. I would've ended this collection with one of the two previous stories.

All in all, not a bad collection of stories from someone who was not seen as a mystery writer, but than again, that may also be biggest weakness for some of these stories – as they clearly lacked the experienced hand of a Carr or Queen. But, as I noted above, the excellent and often imaginative writing compensates a lot of their shortcomings.   

On a final note, I extended my list of favorite mysteries from 100 to 150. :P

Death Notes

"Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home."

- Sherlock Holmes.

Over the past week, I made several attempts at sprinting to the concluding chapters of Willy Corsari's De weddenschap van Inspecteur Lund (Inspector Lund Makes a Bet, 1941), in which the titular policeman has to tell several stories from his own experience that are as interesting as a detective story, but I kept stumbling before finally deciding to abandon it altogether – which is as rare a occasion as a solar eclipse. It was not a bad book as a poor book, which is arguably worst because a bad book can still be readable (hey, we all have our guilty pleasures in this genre) while a poor book has nothing to offer except dull mediocrity.

Though the book was obviously meant as a send-up of her British and American contemporaries, it completely failed to capture their spirit, plotting technique or ingenuity. Take, for example, the second story, "Sporen in de sneeuw" ("Tracks in the Snow"), in which a broken leg and the story of an elderly woman of a long forgotten, unsolved and impossible murder turns Lund into an armchair detective, but the solution was pedestrian and listless. This left me, of course, with the problem of what I was going to do once I decided to put this book aside. I had a deficiency of time to read to begin with and this place hadn't seen an update for nearly a week, so I needed a nimble read in order to put something up here before the end of the weekend and that sounded like a perfect excuse to revisit the man who introduced me to the detective story: the late Appie Baantjer. The fact that this is also my 200th blog post is nothing more than a lucky timed coincidence.

A Deadly Threat, 1988

The book I excavated from my congested shelves was Een dodelijke dreiging (1988; translated as DeKok and the Deadly Warning), which also happened to be one of the first detective novels I touched and vividly remember that delightful feeling of surprise when I learned its solution, but, in my defense, I was new to the game back then. So how did the book stand-up to being read after all these years? Well, it's definitely a worthwhile read in spite of one notable flaw.

Een dodelijke dreiging takes place between the darksome, cold, but often cozy, days between Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas) and Christmas, and DeKok cynically asks himself if the peaceful holiday ahead of them has any influence on the influx of baffling crimes in December. DeKok's ruminations appear to be answered in the affirmative when the body of a man, clad in shirtsleeves and a vest, is found slumped against the bark of a tree on the Keizersgracht (Emperor's Canal). His head is turned towards the water and three bullet holes tore holes in his chest. The name that belongs to the stiff is Emile van den Aerdenburg, a designer, who, earlier in the day, came to Vledder with a threatening letter – asking in an almost illegible handwriting how much his life was worth to him and to place an ad with that amount in the newspaper mentioned in the note.

A journalist, attached to that newspaper, has been receiving similar scribbles and narrowly survived an attempt on his life as ex-wives, silent partners, estranged wives, white-collar crime, newly-wed wives and blackmail bob up and down in this case without taking the old veteran bloodhound off his game. Throughout the book, DeKok's reasoning is logical and sound as is the characterization of the man himself and the murderer is a perfect foil to the good inspector. A very memorable and even a sympathetic character, who was exposed to the reader in a very unconventional manner. Well, for this series anyway. No theatrical denouements or a cleverly set-up trap, but DeKok reading a poem by Guido Gezelle – encapsulating the basic truth of the case. Deliberately understated and very effective. Also the aftermath of this murder case was done very well and you can't help but feel that the murderer should've gotten away with it, where it not for a third and unnecessary murder, clumsily disguised as a suicide, which was the only thing that weighed on the murderer's concience and provides the book with a tragic ending.

Unfortunately, there's one blemish concerning the motive, which was not fairly clued at all and made it impossible to anticipate the full solution – and that's what robbed this book of its status as a minor classic. Even the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia could not turn that into an easily ignored blind spot, but, aside from that one complaint, this is still one of my favorite entries in the DeKok and Vledder series and definitely worth picking up if you can get your hands on the translation.

On a side note, I'm compiling a new list of favorite mysteries because the last one I posted left me dissatisfied (i.e. too many glaring omissions).

Carnival of Corpses

"It doesn't matter whether this world is crazy or not. It doesn’t matter if this absurdity is real. It doesn't matter how messed up this place may be… I want to survive!"

- Ganta Igarashi (Deadman Wonderland).

Fredric Brown's The Dead Ringer (1948) is the second chapter in the casebook of the nephew-and-uncle detective team of Ed and Ambrose Hunter, which followed in the wake of the Edgar Award winning novel The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947). I have, unfortunately, not read that particular book, but I know it has an 18-year-old Ed Hunter roaming the mean streets of Chicago for the man who mugged and killed his father. It was very well received at the time and Bill Pronzini labeled it as "unquestionable more than just another hard-boiled detective tale," but that’s a book for another day and the only reason I bring it up is to provide myself with a springboard into this review.

When his father was slugged and rolled into a grubby alley, Ed also brings his father's only other living relative back into the picture, a carnival barker and one-time private investigator named Ambrose "Am" Hunter, eventually becoming business partners when they set themselves up as licensed investigators, but at the opening of The Dead Ringer they run a ball game stand together – as part of a traveling carnival. The carnival life appears to agree with Ed Hunter, even though Brown's depiction of backstage gambling and drinking blew the stardust of the place, but hey, when a gorgeous woman from the posing show is making eyes at the now 19-year-old man romanticism has pretty much become a moot thing. Well, the fun has to stop at some point – even at the carnival! 

A body of a naked midget becomes, briefly, the unwanted star attraction of the fair, but it's not their own midget, who's in a terrible funk and eventually flees for his life, followed up by the drowning and resurrection of a terminally ill monkey. This provides the story with two excellent and evocative scenes, in which the earth-caked face of an undead monkey stares with glassy eyes through a window at Ed and the exhumation of its grave in a dark forest at the dead of night. Excellent stuff! The last murder is that of a kid who tap-danced under the stage name "Jigaboo" and was found naked at the side of a road. Run over by a car. Yeah. Brown was not a mystery writer who attended classes at The Realist School of Detective Fiction.

It's admirable how Brown turned this patchwork of unusual incidents and bizarre murders into a logical, coherent sequence of events and it could've been a minor masterpiece if it had been written more as a detective story. There was only one real clue (and an obscure one at that) that could give you an inkling of the truth, if you're lucky enough to catch it, but, other wise, you're groping around in the dark until the final chapter – and that bothered me to no end with this book because the solution was both original and imaginative. If this had been better handled, it would've easily conquered a spot on my list of favorite detective stories, but, as things are as they are, I could only really recommend The Dead Ringer for it's "wonderful 'carnie' atmosphere" – as the late "Grobius Shortling" described it.

I have to bring one more thing up about this book and that's its reverse take-on the meddling of amateur detectives in murder cases. After the third murder, Ed and Am have an argument over whether or not they should've acted sooner as they may've prevented more murders from happening. Uncle Am gives a few arguments in favor of the letting the police handle the case themselves, while a slightly guilty Ed prefers to take matters into his own hand. I found this interesting because (additional) deaths are usually caused by the amateurs interference and not by them sitting on their hands (e.g. Ellery Queen's guilt-trip in Cat of Many Tails, 1949).

Oh, just one more thing! Fellow locked room aficionado Mousoukyoku, who blogs On the Threshold of Chaos, has reviewed two Herbert Resnicow novels, The Gold Solution (1983) and The Gold Deadline (1984), and our opinions align and I feel confident that I have made a convert! You can read all my scribbles on Resnicow by clicking here. He also posted a favorable review of Paul Halter's The Fourth Door (1987). You can read all my scribbles on Halter by clicking here. 

Martians, Go Home!

“We have your satellite if you want it back send 20 billion in Martian money. No funny business or you will never see it again.”

- Reportedly seen on a wall in a hall at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, after losing contact with the Mars Polar Lander, 1999.

Malevolent ghosts emerging from their molding mausoleums, rooms which kills those left alone in them, vampires who dead awaken from their day-time slumber and vindictive curses hacking away at the branches of an ancient family tree had their respective turns as stage props for the locked room mystery in order to provide a backdrop harking back to the ink induced nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. James. Some of them have since become tropes, but in the hands of a skillful writer they are still effective embellishments for the impossible crime story. Not so familiar are the, unfortunately, rare occasions when a visitor from the outer regions (read: SF-genre) wrote a locked room story festooned with the unknown horrors from the uncharted regions of outer space. Well, that's not quite true. The ones I have read were light-hearted and almost playful. 

Mack Reynold's The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) is an oddball private eye novel, in which an even odder group of SF-fans hire a run-down, failed detective to investigate the presence of alien life forms on Earth, who are taking shots at them with ray guns or throwing them from their flying saucers – one of them taking a hit while at a costumed science-fiction and fantasy convention. I thought this was far more engaging, funnier and better plotted than Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942), which had one of the most disappointing locked room tricks and it's only redeeming quality as a novel was its depiction of the 1940s SF-community, and even that was done better by Reynolds. All the same, I did grin at one of the characters take on the genre, stating that the fourth dimension takes the problem out of a locked room for science fiction writers, but, as a detective story, it never really left the launching pad. Yes, The Case of the Little Green Men should be added to my list of favorite impossible crime stories.

The American science-fiction writer Fredric Brown, who regularly descended back into the atmosphere for his second profession as a mystery novelist, gave us another specimen in Death Has Many Doors (1951) – in which his nephew-uncle team of private detectives, Ed and Ambrose Hunter, attempt to help a weak-hearted woman who's being menaced by Martians!

It's an unlikely story, to say the least, but Ed is determined to restore Sally Doerr's disturbed peace of mind, convincing her to spend the money she had scrapped together to hire a detective on a psychiatrist instead and plants himself on her couch for the night to stand guard against any threats – terrestrial, extraterrestrial or imagined. Unfortunately, being a good detective does not necessarily mean that you are a reliable bodyguard or an alert watch dog (c.f. Martin Méroy) and at the dawning of a new day he finds Sally dead in her bed. Her heart had simply stopped beating. 

Everything indicates a natural death: a medical history and the fact nobody could've gotten to her. The apartment door was locked from the inside, the windows were fastened and the dust of the day lay undisturbed on the windowsill, Ed was flat on the couch standing guard and the roof was recently tarred – leaving it soft and unmarked by any footprints. But an unknown voice on the phone, claiming to be a Martian, retains the services of the Hunters to investigate her death and spirits a crisp $1000 note into their office as a retainer. Sally's sister, Dorothy, also turns up with premonitions of her own impending doom and Ed decides to take her out town and sticks to her like a shadow, but is unable to prevent another death. You could consider this second murder an impossible one, but the solution is a flat-out cheat and Ed's moronic behavior only made it worst.

Death Has Many Doors has a lot of the elements in common with the marvelous Night of the Jabberwock (1951), in which a small town newspaper editor tumbles down the rabbit's hole, and the short locked mortuary story "The Spherical Ghoul," combining the intelligence of the ratiocinative detective school with the exterior of the hardboiled private eyes – except not as good. Sally's idée fixe isn’t developed into anything more than the delusions of a confused young woman and that their source of her fancies is obviously from fairly early on they hold no horrors whatsoever. If this book had been written by John Dickson Carr, we would’ve at least got a terrifying account of an encounter with these Martians and their possible involvement in the death of Sally would’ve been played up a lot more.

The idea of the first locked room trick was not bad, but it's not terrific, either, as you can easily guess the raw method of the solution (have seem them too many times) and the finer details require a bit of technical knowledge. Death Has Many Doors comes up a bit short as a detective story, but I would lie if I said I did not enjoy the ride in spite of its imperfections. Still, I would not recommend this book to readers who are new to Fredric Brown and advice to start out with Night of the Jabberwock.

Isn't funny that my biggest exposure to science-fiction comes from detective stories?

One of Those Weeks

"But what you see isn't always what's happening."

- Jonathan Creek (The Problem at Gallows Gate, 1998)

After posting the review of Marco Books' De dood van Callista de Vries (The Death of Callista de Vries, 2012), I exchanged emails and swapped opinions with Books on, inter alia, the deviations in clueing and the incorrect solution I came up with while reading the book, which was, nonetheless, endorsed and imprinted with the authors rubber stamp of approval. Of course, the one time I come across scholarly and make a few astute observations, it’s only read by one other person. But, yes, there's a point to this palaver. The conversation gave me an insatiable appetite for another slice of neo-orthodox detective fiction, but the next installment in Books' series is still in the works and thus I turned to one of his contemporaries, Bill Pronzini, whose work is well represented on my bookshelves and to-be-read pile, and the latter had one of his books that embellishes its plot with no less than three impossible scenarios – so it was easy pickings.

Scattershot (1982) follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, Hoodwink (1981), in which The Nameless Detective solves a pair of murders, perpetrated under seemingly impossible circumstances, tied to a group of pulp writers who were all the rage back in the 1940s. He also meets Kerry Wade, who becomes his love interest. You'd think that solving a baffling murder case and getting the girl would turn over a new leaf in the life of this lonely wolf, but Scattershot offers up a picture of one of the worst weeks in his life and only Tsutomu Yamaguchi could’ve claimed to have had a worst week.

The problems opposing Nameless in this novel can be categorized into two kinds: personal problems and professional problems. The personal ones come mainly from the uncertainties of the status of his relationship with Kerry and the interference from her father, who's not a fan that his daughter is seeing an older man with an unsavory, low-paying job. Professionally, the problems may acquire a personal note when an unsatisfied and somewhat unbalanced client starts a media campaign to get his license revoked and take away his livelihood.

I have to note beforehand that the three impossible situations in this book had previous lives as short stories and they were sewn together with bridging material. Just an FYI.

Edna Hornback hires Nameless to shadow her husband, Lewis, and gather evidence of his infidelity and find the money he pilfered from their company, which is a routine job for a private detective. Nameless follows Lewis around like a cat chasing its own tail, but the man actually manages to shake off his own shadow when he vanishes from his locked car, which Nameless was constantly watching from his own car, leaving only a smears of blood on the front seat as a reminder that there was actually someone in the car. Nameless does a good job at figuring out how the stunt was pulled off, but not before his reputation takes a beating it might not recover from when his client decides to file a suit for criminal negligence and riles up the media against him. It's also one of Pronzini's cleverest and most satisfying ploys involving an impossible disappearance (an honorable mention to the (overly?) ingenious "The Arrowmont Prison Riddle," collected in All But Impossible!, 1981, edited by Edward D. Hoch) and I wonder if this plot strand was a conscious nod to John Dickson Carr's (writing as Carter Dickson) She Died a Lady (1943). The solutions have a few points in common and the setting of the crime-scenes (cliff/slope) were also a bit similar.

Anyway, Nameless is advised to stop frequenting his usual spot of trouble, at least, until this blows over and he has another assignment waiting, which consists of tracking down a reckless socialite and serve her with a subpoena. What can possibly go wrong? It's not like she too is going dissipate into thin air, however, he does find her in a locked cabin in the company of her secretary, shot to death, and she seems to have been the only person who could’ve pulled the trigger. This was sort of a short story within a novel, covering two chapters, but it's nonetheless admirable how many clues were crammed into this short intermezzo.

I loved how this book played on theme of the story book detective (read: murder magnate) who always happens to be mooning around when the criminal elements are abound, and this, uhm, talent is at the root of his more pressing problems and it's not something you can turn off like a light switch. Take, for example, the last assignment of his disastrous week: guarding wedding gifts that are locked away in a secured room and he has to plant his ass in front of the door with a pulp magazine. What can possibly go wrong this time? Well, the sound of broken glass and stumbling in the room drags Nameless away from his fictional colleagues, and kicks down the door to discover that a valuable ring has been stolen, however, the broken pieces of glass were found outside – indicating that thief somehow materialized out of nowhere in a locked room and that completely threw me off. I identified the thief before it happened and even spotted the method before the room was locked-up, but I began to second guess my deductions when the theft appeared to be far more complex than I anticipated. Well played, well played.

Scattershot shows Bill Pronzini in one of his unapologetic moods, balancing a cunningly plotted and fairly clued narrative with excellent character development, which, admittedly, was not a big focus of this review, but it was done well enough that I couldn't help feel sorry for that poor gumshoe – and that made the depressing ending perhaps the only downside of this book. A very complex, but satisfying, detective story and one that I recommend unreservedly, but you might want to take a look at Hoodwink first.

On a final, somewhat related, note: Robert van Gulik once made the following challenge, "I think it might be an interesting experiment if one of our modern writers of detective stories would try his hand at composing an ancient Chinese detective story himself." Scattershot is not set in ancient China, but the three separate cases with an overlapping theme definitely follows the structure of an ancient Chinese detective story. Just something my brain pricked upon. 

All the books I reviewd by Bill Pronzini: 

Twospot (1978; with Collin Wilcox)

Hoodwink (1981)
Scattershot (1982)
Casefile (1983)
Double (1984; with Marcia Muller)

Bones (1985)

Shackles (1988)
Carpenter and Quincannon (1998) - an addendum

Nightcrawlers (2005)

Savages (2006) - co-reviewed with Patrick