The Private Eyes' Requiem

"The captain, to see me? It's not about my wife, is it? I mean... she likes to have a good time, sometimes she gets carried away..."

- Lt. Columbo (Troubled Waters)

It's a common misconception among layman and even some adepts that the toughies and cozies were domestic products, stories that were typical of either American or British pop-culture, but the alcohol-guzzling, wise-cracking mystery solving husband-and-wife teams, who attract stiffs like they run a funeral parlor, are almost exclusively an American speciality – and not just the case-hardened ones that Dashiell Hammett introduced. The ones I have read were well written, often tightly plotted and whimsical in tone, which could be offered to explain why they're all but forgotten in this day and age: they're fun and don't fit a preconceived notion.

Undeterred by its hardboiled sounding title, Voyage into Violence (1956), a team effort from the spousal tandem of Frances and Richard Lockridge, has everything you expect from a sophisticated British drawing room mystery, from a pair of upper class sleuths, Mr. and Mrs. North, to the closed-circle of suspects, except that two Americans wrote this book.

Pam and Jerry North, alongside police Capt. Bill Weigand and his wife, Dorian, take a well deserved holiday aboard the S.S. Carib Queen, plotting a course for Havana, and their fellow passengers are a motley collection of holidaymakers and soon picture frames hanging in their gallery of suspects. 

There's the Ancient and Respectable Riflemen, founded during the War of 1812 (and Patrick perks up), led by respectable Captain Folsom, the frumpy Hilda Macklin and her bullyrag of a mother, Olivia, a professional dancer named Jules Barron, among others, but the most important one is perhaps J. Orville Marsh – a retired private-eye, or so he says. However, when Marsh is run through with a ceremonial sword, belonging to the Ancient and Respectable Riflemen, evidence pulled from his luggage, like correspondence and photographs of expensive looking jewelry, indicates that he was on a case and may have come too close to closing it. Bill Weigand is put in charge, who, in turn, drags in his socialite buddies, to begin a covert investigation, but soon rumors, like a discrete waiter quietly enquiring if Sir or Madam wants a refill, are whispered from deck chair to deck chair, and before long, they sweep the deck like a tidal wave.

Voyage into Violence is a fine example of the pleasure you can derive from a Busman's Holiday-mystery, when you have writers who can weave patterns with multiple plot threads without getting tied up in it themselves, demonstrating that an extra set of hands at the typewriter can come in handy has its advantages when writing a mystery novel, as well as vividly describing the setting that gives the reader the idea that they are there with them as the Van Dine to Pam and Jerry's Philo Vance. I do fear I might have over praised this book and admit that it's not in the same league as, oh let's say, Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) or Christianna Brand's Tour de Force (1955), but making a distinction that one is merely “clever” while the others are absolutely "brilliant" is simply arguing semantics. Voyage into Violence is a vividly written mystery with a busy, logical plot and interesting characters, but, more importantly, it was a nice, leisurely summer read.

I want to leave you with this excerpt, from chapter IV, page 59, which I thought was interesting from a modern point of view. I could not imagine a problem like that in this day and age:

"If the Carib Queen were equipped for the dispatch of radio photographs-but that was absurd. (...) It was absurd. The Carib Queen was equipped for many things, some rather more complex than picture transmission. She could look through the darkness, farther than the eye could reach. Electronically, when near the coast-as she was now-the Carib Queen could tell precisely where she was. But she could not dispatch the convoluted signature on note and check to Worcester, Massachusetts, where it would mean something."

Oh, one more thing, I have to make obligatory recommendations when discussing husband-and-wife detective teams: read Kelley Roos' The Frightened Stiff (1942; reprinted by the Rue Morgue Press) and Herbert Resnicow's Alexander and Norma Gold series.

Why So Serious, Inspector Ghote?

"Clean up your act, Joker."

- Batman: The Animated Series (The Last Laugh)

I'm familiar with the term "hobby deformation" and the symptoms that escort this twist of the mind that makes us, devoted mystery enthusiasts, associate Gaston Leroux and A.A. Milne with Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907) and The Red House Mystery (1922) instead of La Fantôme de l'opéra (The Phantom of the Opera, 1910) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), but never expected that a simple news item about a zoo, who're expecting their first baby flamingos in over a decade, would direct me to my shelves to pull out my unread copy of H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker (1969).

Not at all how I imagine Ghote!

The much-plagued inspector of the Bombay police, Ganesh Ghote, is summoned to his superiors and asked to play the fool in an almost impossible task: protect the last remaining flamingo left in the Bombay Zoological Gardens. The birds were a gift from the American Consulate and a sniper has been picking them off, one by one, and, sure enough, Ghote arrives just in time for his assignments swan song. But worst of all, the epitome of incompetence, Sergeant Desai, will lend him an "assisting" hand in his inquiries, however, it's this same incompetent fool who puts Ghote on the trail of the joker. Desai knows that three months previously a popular racing horse was substituted for a donkey and uncover that a malicious prankster is picking on the proud and prominent members of society.

Among the victims who involuntarily played the fool are a scientist and the owner of the racehorse, Anil Bedekar, all of whom prefer to forget their embarrassments, but with his superiors breathing down his neck for results, Ghote pushes through and finds an unexpected ally in the Rajah of Bhedwar, known to his friends as "Bunny" Baindur, who fancies himself an amateur detective. He drags Ghote along to watch the yogi Lal Dass perform a miracle in public, walking across the surface of a brimful water reservoir, exactly the kind of place where the joker would strike, which he does, and Dass is saved thanks to the rapid intervention from Ghote. I have to point out that, before this happened, Dass walked on water and Keating provides the most simple and logical explanation for this miracle and thus qualifies as an impossible crime novel – even if it’s only a tiny fraction of the plot and immediately supplies a solution.

The joker is pulled from the pack halfway through the game, but most of the readers will have picked up on that punch-line before its delivered, because this person is exactly the kind of opponent Keating likes to pit against Ghote: affluent, influential, powerful, smart and charismatic. Pretty much the exact opposite of the timid detective and this series is at its best when Ghote is barking like an underdog at a towering tidal wave. It seems futile, but, somehow, he manages to come out on top and prefer the cat-and-mouse games of Inspector Ghote Goes by Train (1971) and Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (1979) to the "solved-by-inspection" novels like Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade (1966) and Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote (1976). I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Keating was at his best, as a mystery writer, when he wasn't writing mysteries. As Wakko Warner once famously observed, "the mind boggles."

Anyway, back to the review, where the book, incomprehensibly, contorts itself into a regular police procedural when Ghote's opponent is murdered just when an interesting development had presented itself: how can he stop the prankster now that he knows this persons identity? They even had a confrontation, in which the joker wondered out loud how Ghote was planning to put a stop to all the tom foolery. It would've made for a classic Keating novel! This book is a good demonstration of Keating's strength and weaknesses (a wonderful and promising first half vs. duller second half), but I prefer to watch Ghote overcome seemingly insurmountable odds when he takes on influential town bosses, stubborn ex-judges and cunning master criminals. They tend to be more fun, but walking the beat of Bombay alongside Ghote never feels like a chore.   

One more thing that should be mentioned, is that I suspect Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker of being secretively being an homage to Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is referenced and the business of the stolen racehorse calls to mind the affair of "Silver Blaze" and the dead flamingos of the work of Moriarty's henchman in "The Empty House."

Rural Legends

"You must believe me. It was a horseman, a dead one. Head less!"

- Ichabod Crane (Sleepy Hollow, 1999)

The dog days of summer are not renowned for creating an atmosphere ideal for reading a Christmas mystery, even if the canicule has its off-days, but the humidity, outbursts of summer rains and lack of snow did nothing to diminish Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris (1936), a tale of Yuletide, folk lore, Morris dancing and ghostly murder, set in the rustic countryside of rural Oxfordshire. 

Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, whose ophidian features insinuates a kinship with the swarm of fossils wrenched from the numerous layers of the Earth strata, descends on Oxfordshire to spend the holiday at the pig farm of her nephew, Carey Lestrange, and we're forthwith served with a plethora of characters and events that testify to her gift as a novelist and born storyteller. But this is, after all, a detective story and Mitchell assigned the role of the inaugural corpse to Edmund Fossder, a country-lawyer with masynogistic tendencies and a feeble heart, who, according to village gossip, received a note challenging him to keep a tryst with one of the local ghosts, a headless horseman known as the Sandford Ghost, which becomes more than a rumor when Fossder is found dead on a towpath next to a river.

Evidence picked up at the scene indicates a pursuer was on Fossder's heels, before sinking to the ground with a stopped heart in his chest, but the police has no interest in cordoning off the area and turning it into a crime scene. They're satisfied that it may have been a prank gone awry. An incredulous Mrs. Bradley begins her own investigation, sort of assisted by Carey, and disentangles one of Mitchell's knottiest problems – eventually leading up to a second murder, that of the curmudgeonly Simith, who was gored to death by a savage boar with the legend of the Shotover Boar roaming in the background. As I said, it's a very a tricky and knotty problem with lots of shenanigans and restless suspects abound, and that makes it even trickier to properly describe the plot without giving anything away.

The plot buzzes like a beehive with characters constantly sneaking about the place, theories being expounded and snooping around for clues without becoming a mere puzzle. Mitchell's sketches characters with the eye of an artist and this amusing lot, populating the Oxfordshire countryside, definitely compliments the landscape, which, I always felt in her stories, have the descriptive quality of a fairy-tale. Then again, how else can you define the mental image that Mitchell conjured up of Mrs. Bradley, the benevolent witch from children's fables turned detective, covered only by her underwear, taking-off cross-country like Roadrunner in order to get help for her nephew, who's holed up in a secret passage, or a line suggesting that "out there, in the quiet and the dark, a ghost seemed germane to the landscape, not alien—a possibility, not an old wives' tale"... Mitchell had a touch similar to John Dickson Carr to naturally blend a seemingly peaceful environment with the presence of local legends and ghosts, except that Carr's a nightmarish while Mitchell's are fairytales in which the Grim Reaper as he goes about his daily business, but the presence of Mrs. Bradley always gives them a benevolent touch. I think this is why Mitchell couldn’t read any of Carr's books.   

But where Mitchell really excelled here was in plotting, which can be an Achilles' heel that acts up from time to time in her books, and the busy and cluttered plot had me worried for a while, but a few sweeps with a witches' broom neatly cleaned it up – and that makes reading Mitchell even more enjoyable than it already is. Like a stronger than usually plotted Rex Stout novel. In short, I enjoyed this book, but advise readers who are new to the series to begin somewhere else like the imaginative Come Away, Death (1937) or the excellent St. Peter's Finger (1938). 

Other books I have reviewed by Gladys Mitchell:

St. Peter's Finger (1938)

Merlin's Furlong (1953)

Ask a Policeman (1933; together with the Detection Club)

Oh, there was a short scene in the Detection Club and Mrs. Bradley is an honorary member! :)

When We Dead Awaken

"And now for something completely different."

- John Cleese (Monty Python's Flying Circus)

The disadvantages of maintaining a bustling blog dedicated to fostering an environment in which a Silver Age of Detection can blossom have been few and far between, but one that has been bugging me, as a direct result of becoming a blogger, is that the detective story has usurped every inch of my reading list. I have been longing to return to Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl-series for over a year now. So I decided to make this place prone for occasional side distractions and took a dib in the few, unread, manga books stacked up on my to-be-read pile and came up with the 12th volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service – a sort of humanistic horror series covered with dark touches of humor and touching stories. 

As pointed out previously, I'm not a devoted or active participant in the anime and manga community, however, I do consider myself as a casual fan who picked up one or two series after immersing myself in Detective Conan and have come to admire the gift of Japanese story telling – especially when they tell it through a visual medium like a comic book. Whether it's about an ancient board game or a bored Shinigami, if they are from the hand one of their top-notch writers, they are almost impossible to put down or turn-off. Readers of this blog might want to consider giving the animated series Death Note a try. It's a supernatural thriller bound to rules in the spirit of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the plot twists and turns like smoke in a curl, in which everyone is constantly plotting and scheming. A very intense and intelligent thriller with a daring and dramatic twist halfway through. 

The "skeleton staff" of the KCDS.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a company specialized in locating discarded and forgotten bodies, in order to fulfill their last wish, usually assisting them in taking care of unfinished business, and consists of five graduate students from a Buddhist university – all of whom possess a special gift or talent. Kuro Karatsu is a student Buddhist monk and the psychic of the group who communicates with the corpses they find and can even (temporarily) reanimate them. He also has a spirit, Yaichi, lingering near him. Ao Sasaki is the brain of the outfit, as well as a computer expert/hacker, who takes care of the practical side of business. Makoto Numata is a dowser who can detect dead bodies instead of water and it’s up to him to find clients. Yuji Yata is a bit on the introversive side and wears a grotesque hand puppet, which he uses to the channel the conscience of a bad mannered, wisecracking alien intelligence. Keiko Makino looks like a sweet and innocent girl, but she studied in America to become a fully licensed embalmer and as a result has become somewhat of an outcast in Japanese society. Embalming is seen as an unclean profession over there.

"I ain't afraid o' no ghost"

In the earlier volumes, most of the stories were short-short stories, covering a single chapter, but they expanded over the course of the series and now span for several chapters, however, they can still be read as individual stories – making it easy to sample the series before you decide to read on. After all, it's a series with "explicit content" and you have to take that quite literal. The portrayal of corpses in various stages of decomposition, nudity and violence show that Housui Yamazaki has quite a skill with the pencil, but, personally, it never felt that they were just included to gross out the reader or to service its fans (see: fan service). Because gutted bodies and sex isn't this series selling point... it's the wonderful, varied stories and its cast of gargoyles. The best things I remember from the earlier volumes aren't the gruesome depictions of dead bodies, except, perhaps, for the alien, but the stories that were either moving or funny (this series is the first one to poke fun at itself) or even borderline detective stories or full-blown supernatural thrillers. The second volume is basically a novel-length story in which the Kurosagi-crew uncovers a cruel exploitation of the dead.

The 12th volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service begins where it all began: Jukaiyama. It's an immense forest and a popular haunt of the lost souls of society to watch the sun rise or set one last time before taking their own lives – because business, as usual, was not booming and they need a client. Unfortunately, Numata’s pendulum only turns up a napping woman, Yuka Suzuki, who's attached to a credit agency and looking for an ex-debtor. Mr. Kawai paid his debts and moved to Jakaiyama Village, a secret settlement somewhere in the woods where people who have grown tired of life and contemplated suicide find sanctuary, except that he’s still around and the crew even speaks with him, but Suzuki insists that he’s an imposter! It's a twisty and gloomy story that brutally molests satirized a part of 21st century life and ends on a note as wonderfully cynical as MacKinlay Kantor's "The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz."

Shakuya nailed it!

My favorite story from this volume is the second one and puts the spotlight on two young people: Nene and Shakuya. Nene is a nightclub hostess who can separate her spirit from her body at will and uses this nifty trick to lure in customers. One evening, while gazing at the city lights, her eyes fall on Shakuya, an aspiring actor/comedian who lives in houses, where the previous tenants were murdered or committed suicide, for a living (so the landlord can present a clean record of the previous tenant to the next one), and decides to beckon him in. A bond is a swiftly forged between the two as it cruelly broken when Shakuya is murdered in the apartment they had just moved into. The Kurosagi-crew are basically there to mend two souls torn asunder and the resolution had a nice decorative touch of lampshade hanging.

In the last story, the guys find an old man pushing a wheelchair along the river with a life-size doll of a woman in it. The doll is a replica of what his sister might have looked like if she hadn't died as a child during the great air raid on Tokyo. The man is also involved with a gang of foreign agents, who kidnap them, and the spirit of his dead sister, through the doll, asks the Kurosagi-crew for help and the solution involves a dictator, more dolls and guardian spirit. The story also briefly looks at Yata's past again, who was the sole survivor when his parents tried to take their kids with them in a suicide pact, but I have no idea if this was brought up because there are parallels between his and the old man's story or to suggest that his hand puppet might have a different origin.

All in all, an excellent collection of stories that were well worth the wait, but I hope the next release will be within a 12-month period. Anyway, I hope this was not too much of intrusion and a regular review will be up as soon as possible.

Incredible How You Can, See Right Through Me!

"The devil's agent may be of flesh and blood, may they not?"

- Sherlock Holmes (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902)

I have to 'fess up that I dreaded reading Paul Halter's Le Diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993) after a laudatory review, left by armchair critic Patrick At the Scene of the Crime, praising it's impossible crime element as "simple" and "dazzling effective," was followed up with a sobering notice posted on the GADWiki by Barry Ergang – saying that the solutions to a couple of the murders struck him "as a bit of a stretch" although "they weren't entirely implausible." I carefully began to tread the pages, afraid that Patrick had overenthusiastically cheered on one of his pet mystery writers, but I ended up leaning more to his opinion. However, I share Barry's reserve regarding the explanation for the invisible entity responsible for flinging a number of people from a rocky protrusion and out of an open window.

The backdrop of this book is the same as Conan Doyle used for one of the most celebrated stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Dartmoor, England, where a ghostly hound lurks on the moors before snatching one of the local gentry's down to Hell, and The Demon of Dartmoor was apparently written after Halter went down to England to soak up the atmosphere for himself. Whether it was the trip or not, but there was one visible improvement in one of his greatest weaknesses: creating a sense of time and place that I felt was lacking in the previous books. He made me believe this time that Stapleford was a small village instead of a clutter of three or four houses where the suspects live (e.g. The Fourth Door, 1987). The outdoors scenes were also very well done.

Stapleford is one of those sleepy and homely hamlets dotting the countryside that imbued Sherlock Holmes with untold horrors, "the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside," with more than enough dirty linen spilling over the laundry basket to fill one of Dr. Watson's notebooks with untold cases. In one of Sherlock Holmes' Dartmoor cases, "The Adventure of the Winged Menace," he teamed-up with Dr. John Thorndyke to investigate a series of impossible disappearances from the Moor. Evidence points to a pterodactyl as the culprit and they meet a strange bearded man, looking like a caveman in modern clothing, who threatens them bodily harm if they hurt his pterodactyl. But let's return to Halter's flight of fancies.

The Demon of Dartmoor takes off with a retrospective look at the tragic deaths of a few of Stapleford's inhabitants, three innocent teenage girls, who were flung from the top of Wish Tor, a granite spur frequently haunted by lovers, into the rushing stream below. One of the murders was witnessed and they described how the girl thrust out her arms, as if she were pushed in the back, before plummeting to her death, however, they saw nobody near the girl. Basil Hawkins even claims he saw a headless horseman riding into the sky on the day one of the girls disappeared. Skip forward a few sunsets and Stapleford welcomes actor and playwright Nigel Manson as the new owner of Trerice Manor, where a pair of invisible hands pushed a woman down a flight of stairs fifty years previously, inspiring the playwright for the inspiration for a successful stageplay entitled The Invisible Man. An impossible murder that lurks in the past is a staple of Halter's mystery fiction. 

As the be expected, the unseen murderer strikes again, this time in full view of a number of people who witness Nigel Manson being shoved out of a window by an invisible force. The local police call-in Scotland Yard, who send Inspector Archibald Hurst with Dr. Alan Twist in tow and they do an admirable job at making sense out of this nightmarish sequence of events.

The method for murdering three girls unseen after they made the climb to the top of the precipice were disappointing disenchanting, but was nonetheless thrown off the scent here like I was balancing on the edge of a cliff myself. When I learned that the victims were heard talking to an invisible companion minutes before their fatal plunge and that one of the suspects is a two-bit promoter who loves young aspiring actresses, I simply assumed that the girls were overheard rehearsing the lines he had fed them. Luring the hopeful girls to that desolate spot for a very private audition and while they took their pose on the top to begin, they got a rock flung to their heads with a slingshot (or something) and thus you have an explanation for the invisible push. Needless to say, I was wrong and didn't like any of the solutions for this portion of the story.

Nigel Manson's impossible tumble from one of the top-floor windows was a lot better explained and the solution, risky and no-success guaranteed, may impress some readers as implausible and impractical, but Halter convinced me with its deadly simplicity and even provides the murderer with a backup plan in case anything goes wrong. I had to go with Halter on this one.

On a whole, Halter did a craftsman's job of forging an engaging plot from links that rattled like a good yarn and that chain of baffling events, stretching back years, made for a satisfactory read regardless of a few weak links. I think Patrick over praised the impossible crime element of the book, but otherwise I agree with his overall opinion. Paul Halter is a problematic writer, but he was better here, as a writer, than in the previous books I have read and his commitment to the keep the cerebral detective story alive is something I really admire.

An inordinate amount of praise should also be bestowed on his translator, John Pugmire, who set-up shop for himself under the name Locked Room International and has been delivering a steady stream of content never before published on this side of the language barrier. A fifth translation, Le Cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996), is planed for late 2012 and the plot is "Halter's And Then There Were None, with a very clever impossible crime thrown in." Henri Cauvin's The Killing Needle (????) is also planned for a late 2012 release and features the French precursor to Sherlock Holmes. You can support John Pugmire to continue doing this by simply buying the books, as ebooks or paperback, and enjoy reading them. That's all.  

Oh, and my review of Jean-Paul Török's L'enigma du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007) provided a blurb for that book on the back cover of The Demon of Dartmoor. Neat!

At Night the Moonbeam Kisses the Flower Petals

"To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat."

- Beverley Nichols.

Beverley Nichols was one of those versatile centipedes, filling his waking hours with writing plays and composing music or clamber on stage as an actor or appear as an public speaker, who's best remembered, if he's remembered at all, for a series of books he wrote on gardening that are still in print today. The same, alas, can't be said for his five detective novels, written and published during the waning years of the Golden Age, about his mild-mannered and sometimes playful (botanic) detective Horatio Green – who possesses a sensitive nose and a proven track-record as a successful criminologist.

The Moonflower (1955; a.k.a. The Moonflower Murder) was my first brush with Nichols and it left me more intrigued than floored as the plot was, uhm, interesting to say the least. I can only describe it as a flawed gem. It focuses on the murder of the unpopular Mrs. Faversham, whose sudden exclusion from the house to the cemetery is merely viewed as a financial windfall by her selfish, live-in relatives, but slowly the case morphs from a common garden variety murder into an ingeniously contrived impossible crime – complete with hidden relationships, motive juggling and a nifty turn on that trite plot-device of changed wills on the eve of a murder. That's the main strength of this book: a solution that not only lives up to its premise but blows it out of the water. When Green began to explain, I stopped caring about any of the tiny imperfections, cracks or internal flaws that mar this little gem. Sometimes the story that goes with a piece of antique is of more value than the piece itself. So... now that we got the conclusion of this review out of the way, I can actually start writing it.

At opening pages of this story, Horatio Green's professional interest in Candle Court, Mrs. Faversham's estate, restricts itself to her plant room, where a rare moonflower from Uruguay is on the brink of blossoming, and as an amateur gardener he’s there merely as a privileged witness. But the classic, storybook signs of an imminent assassination are all there. Mrs. Faversham makes herself everything but agreeable, turning Beryl, her son's wife, out of there favorite room the provide a bed and roof to one of her guests. Subtle little things like that would drive a lot of people to murder, except for the fact that Beryl is more than deserving of a personal tormentor and I would not have blamed Nichols one bit if he had "spiced-up" the plot with her being pushed down a flight of stairs or into the swirling river that provides a permanent background noise at Candle Court. Unfortunately, the body count begins and ends with Mrs. Faversham, with a pair of hands clasped tightly around her throat, and the illustrious moonflower is found to have blossomed prematurely!

The plot is pleasantly busy, regularly throwing new developments and revelations at the reader and investigators, enwrapping both of them as tightly as in an insect in a spider's web. Green is also a fun detective who reminded another reviewer of Clyde Clason's T.L. Westborough, and, while I do not entirely disagree, he impressed me as a cross between a slightly more intelligent, but equally enthusiastic, Roger Sharingham and a toned-down Dr. Gideon Fell who only clung to his penchant for muttering cryptic remarks. He's also prone to staging little experiments to observe people's responses to it. It is, therefore, a pity he was unable to straighten out and streamline the plot better and deliver a genuine classic. Some clues were shared, others were not and some unnecessary plot threads could've easily been cutout without losing anything. I mean, what was the whole point of the convict's escape, when he was almost immediately eliminated as a suspect, or even bringing up that incident in Uruguay?

One more thing that's worth mentioning is that the book has a social conscience. Green is reprimanded by Beryl for talking to one of the servants as if he was a gentleman, but the reader knows what Green thinks of her opinion, which, as good form dictates, he does not utter out loud, and part of the solution raises an issue that would become an important one in the following decade – giving this fantastic story a surprisingly human touch. But it's not surprising that Nichols felt the need to point out the unfair treatment of people based on how or where they were born. You see, Nichols was so inconsiderate to be gay in a time when it was not done. 

Tsk, tsk, Mr. Nichols. I thought you and Leo Bruce were plotting a mystery novel. No wonder we never got that crossover meeting between Horatio Green and Sgt. Beef. Oh, come on! You know it must have happened. They were contemporaries who wrote detective stories and you know how these things go. Bruce comes over see to the garden, they share a beer or two and before you know it there are two ties, a shirt and three socks drapped over a branch. Love... it's a beautiful thing. :)

All in all, I can recommend this book to readers prepared to take its flaws as well and to fellow aficionados of the locked room mystery. It’s not exactly a one-of-a-kind locked room, but it's close enough to being one and a good one at that. 

Afterthought: the only thing I really disliked about The Moonflower is that it didn't provide me with an opportunity to work in a reference to The Thing in Mrs. Faversham's Attic without using a giant shoehorn. 

Beverley Nichols (1898-1983)

"Most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked about the house with a saintly expression."

The Horatio Green series:

No Man's Street (1954)

The Moonflower (1955; a.k.a. The Moonflower Murder)

Death to Slow Music (1956)

The Rich Die Hard (1957)

Murder by Request (1960)

It's All in the Game

"With a keen eye for details, only one truth prevails!"

- Kudo Shinichi.

Liberating a brand new volume from the ongoing Case Closed/Detective Conan series from its cardboard packaging, before even glancing at the other mail, is, for me, an experience similar as to when I used to make a traditional grab for the latest Appie Baantjer novel from the shelves of one of the local bookstores – usually on the day the book came out. Yeah, yeah. There was a period in my life when a normal bookstore had everything in stock to keep me complacent, as opposed to now, when I prefer to take out a digital shop cart instead. Anyway, I guess I love this series because it has replaced Baantjer as a fixed habit and the pages of each new collection is like an unbrowsed meadow folding out in front of me like a playing board, dotted with places named Coffee Poirot, Restaurant Colombo and Books Baker Street, on which a kid-sized game piece moves around like a dark horse – translating dying messages, deciphering codes and unlocking sealed rooms. The clues are many and suspect abound!

(note: I penned this review in a hurry and traces of sloppiness are bound to turn up. Please be so kind as to ignore them until they go away).

The Game's Afoot!

A fiend referred to as "The Slasher" rips through the opening of the 43rd volume of this series, but the police looses the knife-wielding madman in a crowd of people, however, he has left them a tangible clue: a strange and bloody imprint of a symbol that turns out to be the logo of a car. Everyone in the vicinity driving such a car is brought in and Conan observes, behind the protective reflection of a one-way looking glass, how one of them slips up. It's not one of the best stories, weakly motivated and you have to accept the premise that all of the suspects lost the master key of their car, but it's another fine example of Aoyama taking full advantage of the visual element of his stories and hides clues in characters behavior, sticks them on their clothes or scatters them across their rooms. This dovetailing of clues, plot-threads and red herrings is very satisfying and a particular good example can be found in the main story of this collection.

But first we drop by Coffee Poirot, where we find Richard Moore, known around the world as the famous "Sleeping Moore," taking his morning coffee and Aoyama must have been in an unusual whimsical mood when he wrote this story. Aoyama is not a dark writer in any sense of the word, usually giving his stories a light-hearted touch in the end (if they are dark to begin with), but seldom genuinely funny. Well, he got a smile out of me with the opening lines of this story – narrated by Moore himself.

"I'm Richard Moore... Private Eye. Missing persons and cheating spouses are my bread and butter, but every now and them I get tangled up in something a little bloodier. Crimes of revenge, money, passion. This is one sick world I live in. And when ever the rough life of a detective starts to wear me down... I come to Poirot. A cup of Joe soothes my wounded soul and... YEOWW!"

That last part is not a typo. Moore burned himself when he took a swig from his scolding hot coffee. Fortunately, the waitress hands him a case that rapidly develops into one of the biggest of his careers: a customer has left a phone and Moore has to tack him down. Routine stuff. A list of numbers on the phone complicated the case and turns into a deduction story in which Conan has to deduce the suspect from a small group of people and one of the clues, or "indicators," as they are apparently called in contemporary crime fiction, is almost as endearing as the opening scene of this story.

The third story is the main course of this volume and opens with Conan picking up a detective novel from a bookstore, Kaori Shinmei's The Wicked Will, a reference going all the way back to the 19th installment, and plans to greedily read his way to the solution. Sounds familiar? Than you might guess what happens next: back home he finds two of his friends, Kazuha and Harley, on his doorstep who want to drag him (and Rachel and Richard Moore) off to Osaka for some fun – except they disagree on where to go. So what easier way to decide than a duel in deduction? Yes. Flipping a coin would suffice, but where's the fun in that? The problem they tackle is that of the unsolved murder of a toy manufacturer, who was tied-up in his office before being murdered, but was able to leave a cryptic message spelled out in ink-smeared blocks of wood. I have to admit that deciphering the dying message is a Herculean task for Western readers, but the (visual) clues that were strewn all over the place compensated for this. You don't have to understand Japanese to figure what about scene of the crime felt off to Conan. The motive is interesting but underdeveloped.

This chapter in the lives of Conan (Shinichi) and Rachel has convinced me that their problem is eventually going to be resolved with a cop-out like "I-Knew-It-All-Along" explanation, which will probably also be offered to account for her stubbornly sticking to Shinichi's side – in spite of being separated for nearly two years. This is the only plot strand that began to bother me more and more as the series went on. The final chapters set-up a story that will be concluded in the next volume and therefore won't discuss it here.

On a whole, this was another good bundle of stories, from one of the most prolific writers of neo-orthodox detective fiction alive today, whose imagination has all the qualities of an inexhaustible well – continuously pulling up buckets of these stories from its depths. Although, considering the ongoing success of the series, it’s more a roaring wall of water coming your way. If only more readers over here would allow themselves to be swept away by it.

Other volumes I have reviewed in this series: 

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 38

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 39

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 40

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 41 
Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 42

Colonel March of Scotland Yard: Miraculous Shades of Black and White

"My work in the Department of Queer Complaints is concerned only with the improbable and, well, frankly, the unbelievable."

- Colonel March (The Sorcerer).

John Dickson Carr's Mephistophelean cunning and his incurable romantic disposition proved to be a fruitful union that gave birth to a number of memorable detectives, like the Chestertonian Dr. Gideon Fell and the curmudgeonly Sir Henry Merrivale, but it was his official policeman, Colonel March of Department 3-D of Scotland Yard, who became a regular on the small screen between 1956 and 1957 – finding an explanation for more than twenty cases of the bizarre and impossible.

Col. March has an eye for details

The thirty-minute episodes were (loosely) based on the stories in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), in which Colonel March is called upon to investigate implausible stories in order to determine whether they are exaggerations, hoaxes or cleverly disguised crimes. Colonel March of Scotland Yard follows the pattern of the short stories, but the inescapable modifications are present as well and the most "eye-catching" one is Boris Karloff as March – who doesn't fit the description of a speckled man with bland eyes and a short pipe projecting from under a cropped moustache (which may be sandy or gray). Inexplicably, March was given an eye-patch, which occasionally causes a collision with one of the sets that wobbled in the background, but Karloff played the amiable detective convincingly and actually gave March more of a personality than he had in the original stories.

I finally decided to watch a few episodes and in spite of the dated production values, retooled stories or forgetting to drop a clue here and there it was a blast to watch. It’s basically a direct ancestor of Jonathan Creek with its locked rooms, bizarre occurrences and light-hearted undertone.

The framework of The New Invisible Man is the same as its eponymous story and has March looking into the unbelievable story of Major Henry Rodman, who witnessed a shooting in the apartment of his neighbors and the only description he was able to give of the murderer is that of a pair of floating, disembodied gloves – filled with invisible hands. However, this amusing yarn Carr spun was merely a subplot in the episode and a layer saturated with criminal intent was added to the story, which, IMO, was a mistake. The story from the collection perfectly demonstrated what kind of unusual problems March's department handles and tossing a common garden variety of crime cheapened the plot. But it was fun to see with my own eyes how the trick looks like in real-life. 

"Piltdown Man" hoax inspired the following episode.

An ancient skull called "Damascus Man," known as The Missing Link, which's also the title that was slapped on this episode and opens with an attempted theft of the skull by two museum employees, Tom Grafton and Evelyn Innes, in order to expose Sir Henry Danier as a fraud – except that the skull does end being stolen but by whom and why? This is more a story of crime and archeological skullduggery than of detection, but an enjoyable one at that.

Over the course of the next episode, The Sorcerer, John Cusby suspect his wife's psycho-analyst, Dr. James Patten, of plotting her demise and fumes with malicious intent, but it's his wife who ends up as a suspect when Dr. Patten is stabbed to death with one of her hatpins inside his, locked and windowless, treatment room – with Mrs. Cusby as its only other occupant. I was afraid the entire episode that the plot would hinge on hypnosis with Mrs. Cusby as a remote-controlled assassin, but the trick used to enter the sealed room was surprisingly good. Simple but effective. 

Death in Inner Space is Carter Dickson as conceived by Clayton Rawson or Fredric Brown, opening with March giving a speech for the Society of Interplanetary Communication, where’s invited by Dr. Hodek to spend a few days at his home – where's working on experiments with suspended animation. He’s convinced that he has been receiving radio signals from Mars and that, one day, we will be able to visit our Martian neighbors and his work is the first step. Unfortunately, one of his experiments goes horribly wrong and his volunteer dies due to a lack of oxygen in spite of a perfectly working alarm system that should've warned Hodek in case anything went wrong. Not all that bad, but the premise was more interesting than the solution and the ending was ambiguous.

The Invisible Knife has an unusual take on the multiple spouse-killers: a man who regularly has to bury business partners. Basil Pennacott had them all over the world, from Bombay to Tangier, and he profited from all of them – especially after they died. Four of them appeared to have died of natural causes, but the fifth, Edmund Hays, was stabbed in the proverbial locked room while attempting to summon demons. Pennacott was there with him, but was never charged because the police was unable to find the murder weapon. But now that Basil has come back to England, he finds himself being threatened by the Hays' brother, who mailed him a dead parrot with a poisoned beak, and asks March to protect his life. This gives the story a nice dual conflict of having to protect an unscrupulous murderer on one hand and trying to prevent an innocent man from becoming one on the other. The trick for the vanishing murder weapon was culled from "The Dragon in the Pool," which was a radio play Carr penned for Appointment with Fear.

You can expect more posts on this series in the not-so distant future, but you can also discover them for yourselves on YouTube. 

Where the Devil Slumbered

"The candle flame flutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."

- Carl Sagan. 

Ghosts, goblins and other grotesque imaginations that pried themselves loose from the human mind have proven themselves prone to sudden bursts of stage fright, whenever they are expected to perform under controlled conditions and the cold discerning eye of reason, but what if you have a reputedly haunted room with a malevolent ghost as a permanent tenant... who's not shy at all?

Well, that's the plot of Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954), an ingenious locked room novel that has been on my wish list for years but got top-priority when Patrick posted a mouthwatering review of the book and spiced it up with lots of background information on the author of this little gem. I won't reproduce it here, but from it a picture emerged of a man we all would've loved unconditionally. Derek Smith was apparently a kind and generous man who was above all a mystery fan, and a clever one as that. Patrick began his review with his concluding opinion of the book and it's one I would like to echo before I begin to look for the words to shape mine: Whistle Up the Devil is one of the most ingeniously concocted and worked out impossible crimes that I have read and you almost wonder if Satan himself sat down with Smith to plot the story.

The story opens with an early phone call from Chief Inspector Castle to his friend and dilettante sleuth, Algy Lawrence, with a request to go to home of personal friend, Roger Querrin, who's determined to keep an appointment with the family ghost in a locked and haunted room – giving a perfect cover for an assassin to strike and unburden the guilt on a ghostly murderer who can't be cuffed or hanged for it. Everyone in his household is trying to keep Roger from spending the evening with a long dead relative, like his fiancé and his brother, who's worrying himself into a straightjacket, but he stands firm and guards are posted outside the room to stand guard. (including a policeman outside who keeps a hawk's eye on the window). But naturally a piercing scream shatters the peaceful night. And as the door is taken down, they're only just in time to see Roger taking his last breath as he collapses. A dagger that was in a sheath on the wall was sticking out of his back like a well-fed parasite.

Unfortunately, the supernatural elements are not played up as one would expect from a premise like the one I just sketched and this was perhaps most notable in the Querrin family legend, which gets a brief and a guess of an explanation towards the end, however, this is merely a stylistic flaw and one that's more than compensated with an intricate plot that is woven like a mesh of hex netting. There is, for example, the obligatory "Locked Room Lecture," nearly all these novels with a grand status seems to have one, but here's its not just to show-off the authors knowledge of the genre but to drive the reader (and Castle) up the wall by demonstrating just how impossible this murder really is – simply by eliminating every known trick in the book.

Whistle Up the Devil is also scattered with references to other detective stories and they're not the usual bunch of suspects, like The Hanshews The Man of the Forty Faces (1910), Rupert Penny's Sealed Room Murder (1951), which had a good trick but was tedious to read, and Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat (1938), showing the individual taste of Smith.

As one of those celebrated, but obscure, monuments of the locked room sub-genre, there's also the second obligatory murder that mimics the maddening impossibilities of the first one and this time the backdrop is between the walls of a room supposedly a stronghold of safety: a prison cell in an occupied police station. A man named Simon Turner was deposited in one of their jails after assaulting Algy and sergeant Hardinge during a nightly prowl on the Querrin premise, but prying any information from him on what he may have seen is another impossibility dropped in the lap of our investigators – followed by another one when the murderer made sure he stays as quiet as humanly possible. The lock of the cell door was picked and Turner had been expertly strangled and according to the medical evidence the murder took place when Algy and Hardinge were talking in the Charge Room, which you have to pass if you want to go the cells. Guess what... they didn't saw a soul! Not a visible one, anyway.

The murders are pulled off with the routine a stage magician saws a woman in half, but, surprisingly, it did not lack any believability because Smith dovetails every snippet of plot together to form a coherent sequence of events that you can’t help but believe it could be pulled-off like that. I also loved how he continuously made me switch between two suspects only to show me what a fool I have been in the end. This makes it very heart to care for a few not so well drawn characters, ghosts who prefer to keep snoring in their graves or tip-toeing poltergeists. Whistle Up the Devil simply is a collaborative labor of love between the enthusiastic heart and sharp brain of a very big mystery fan. So much is obvious from reading this book.

Smith did wrote a follow-up novel, Come to Paddington Fair (1997), but he was unable to find a publisher until a fan published it in a limited release of 100 copies in Japan (published in English) and is impossible to find. If you want to know about Smith, I urge you to read Patrick's in-depth post of this book and the man who penned it. Oh, and Patrick... Damn you! You were not suppose to tempt me with our tempting reviews. Aim for the unenlightened masses!

The Locked Room: A Little-Known John Sladek Story

"I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read."

- John Sladek.

In 1972, the Times of London organized a short story competition for detective stories and after the jury, comprising of Lord Butler, Tom Stoppard and the Queen of Crime Agatha Christie, had ploughed through a 1000 stories – it was John Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand" who let his fellow competitors biting the dust of defeat. His award: the story was published in The Times Anthology of Detective Stories (1972) and a contract to pen one of my all-time favorite locked room novels, Black Aura (1974), and he wrote a follow up a few years later entitled Invisible Green (1977).

These stories are very well-known among locked room enthusiasts, like yours truly, but a let less familiar are the (non-impossible) short-short story "It Takes Your Breath Away," featuring Sladek's series detective Thackeray Phin, and a body of inverted mysteries with a twist, collected in Maps (2002), which I recommend without hesitation. But Sladek also wrote a parody on the impossible crime genre, aptly titled "The Locked Room," which is virtually unknown because it's inexplicably buried in a volume of science-fiction stories – Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978). It you've always wondered what would happen if you tossed Douglas Adams or Monty Python into the blender with John Dickson Carr's "The Locked Lecture," a chapter from The Hollow Man (1935), than you have to read this story.

The protagonists of this yarn are Fenton Worth, a lauded private investigator, and his valet, Bozo, but instead of taking on a case that's probably on their doorstep waiting to be let in he locks himself up in his library to read a mystery novel with The Locked Room (????) as its tantalizing title. As he reads through the pages, he begins to reflect on the miracles he has explained himself and goes over a lot of the familiar (and often trite) methods mentioned in Dr. Fell's lecture and has a good laugh at their expense. He also a few, uhm, interruptions from prospective clients.

Sladek also wrote a mini-short story into this already short, short story and has Worth reflecting back on "The Case of the Parched Adjutant," in which "a retired military gentleman of sober and regular habits" and "an ardent anti-vivisectionist" is murdered in his locked study on the day the circus was in town. It's campy and absurd, but futile to suppress a grin while reading it. 

One more thing worth mentioning, is that Worth had to cut open the pages of the book he was reading. I was aware you had to do this back in the days with (some) hard covers, but I think this is the first time I have seen it being described in a story. 

John Sladek (1937-2000): another man who did not believe in miracles

Yes! I have broken the dry spell of not reading any mysteries since posting my review of Max Murray's The Sunshine Corpse (1954)! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to tackle a monument of a locked room story. As much as Carr hated the modern era, I think/want to believe he would have liked this galore of busted doors and broken locks that is my blog.

And in case you've missed it, take a peek at my second installment of favorite locked room mysteries: short stories and novellas.