Trouble in Triplicate

"It is desirable that you should earn your fees, but it is essential that you feel you have earned them, and that depends partly on your ego."

- Nero Wolfe (The Golden Spider, 1953)

Off the bat, I have to confess that I've never watched a single episode of the 50s private-eye flick 77 Sunset Strip, starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Stuart "Stu" Bailey, a character that originated in the work of the series creator, Roy Huggins, from the late 1940s – resulting in a tie-in novel with stories predating the television series.

77 Sunset Strip (1959) is a compilation of three short stories, "Appointment with Fear" and "Now You See It," published in The Saturday Evening Post, and "Death and the Skylark" from Esquire, fastened together with bridging material. And they're all listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991)! But what really slingshotted Huggin's 77 Sunset Strip to the top of my wish list is the comparison in make-up the book has with one of my favorite Bill Pronzini's novels, Scattershot (1981), in which three short impossible crime stories were strung together into a coherent narrative. Add that all up and you'll understand why I had to give in to temptation.

Stuart Bailey's first client is a wealthy one, Glen Callister, harboring suspicious that his wife, Eilene, or the first mate of his schooner the Skylark, Owen Madden, wants to do away with him during their trip to Honolulu and Bailey to accompany them – under the guise of an old business associate. The retainer is five hundred dollars.

Aboard the schooner Bailey has to deal with the advances of Eilene, Madden dropping him after stumbling in on him making out with Eilene and Betty Callister who's excited at the prospect at having a bachelor like Bailey attending her father's yacht party. All this tension accumulates with the prophesized murder of Glen Callister and as they're three days removed from Honolulu in a simmering climate, they’re forced to bury Callister at sea – destroying important evidence. Their actions and almost uniform statements put them in jail for more than a week before Bailey returns to the schooner to reconstruct the murder. I personally would not qualify this as a locked room or impossible crime story, but the method could've definitely been used to create one. This is more a story about a crime, and its effect, than about solving it.

Back in the office, Bailey finds a telegram pleading to meet D.C. Halloran at the Desert Inn, Tucson, Arizona, with a money-order draft for seven hundred dollars attached to it. Halloran turns out to be a frightened woman on the run for "They" and Bailey returns to her dingy, one-room apartment to crash on the couch as a guard dog. There's a wall bed that, when unfolded, reached across the room all the way to the door and nobody, even if you have a key, can enter or leave the apartment when the wall bed is down. Well, you guessed it. When Bailey wakes up the next morning he finds his client sprawled on the floor, strangled, and everything was securely locked from within and the bed was still down! Bailey becomes, not unexpectedly, a suspect on the run after assaulting a police officer and has to find out what happened the night before they catch him again. Oh, and the body also disappears from the locked apartment. Just to make things a little bit more complicated. 

The only disappointing part from this portion of the book were all the possibly solutions that shot through my head that went unused. You also have to wonder if Fredric Brown was aware of this story, because the premise of Death Has Many Doors (1951) is very similar. Maybe Brown thought (correctly) that he could improve upon it.

Finally, a phone call summons Bailey to a home in Westwood, where a denial and a sudden exchange of money pulls him in the middle of a murder case. Bailey is introduced as a Mr. Tate to the household and when tea is served the room is plunged into darkness, and when the lights come on, he has yet again lost a client – stabbed with a knife that dissolved into thin air. There were six people in the room, place all shut up, and during a brief moment of darkness a man was stabbed and nobody left the room until the police arrived. But the weapon did not turn up in any of their searches.

The search for an apparent unfindable object is usually associated with Ellery Queen, but I would place Huggings, as a hardboiled writer, alongside Arthur Porges because two of the three locked rooms were firmly grounded in the scientific school – and the problem and solution of the vanishing knife is something straight of a Cyriack Skinner Grey's casebook. This was also the most original one of the three, because Huggings gave for the first two his own particular spin or twist to a well-known trick in the book. Very well done though.

77 Sunset Strip is a fast-paced montage of three cases pitting a street-wise, smart mouthed private detective not just against the dangers that come with the job, but chucking a few brain teasers at him as he's running from situation to situation.

Stuart Bailey also appeared in The Double Take (1946) and another short story, "Aunt Willie's Ghost," listed in Adey.

Last Chance to See

"Thieves find entrances, but grifters... we make them." 

-  Sophie Devereaux (The Inside Job)

Keith R.A. DeCandido's The Zoo Job (2013) is the second tie-in novel to the Leverage TV-show, a resumption of the series in book form after TNT pulled the plug after its fifth season, and continuity is the (unofficial) theme of the story.

The Zoo Job takes place during the fourth season of the television series, somewhere between The Queen's Gambit Job and The Radio Job, and centers on Brillinger Zoo that has been in the hands of the same family since the 1800s, but the place is off the tourist track and falling on hard times. Marney Billinger wants to shake up business with the exhibit of two black rhinos, which she managed to secure through a Malani priest, but the animals never arrive and are now obliged to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the priest – who needs the money to run a struggling medical clinic in a poor country under a dictatorial regime.

One of Brillinger Zoo's younger, but regular, attendees, Zoë Kerrigan, who appeared in The Beantown Bailout Job, nudges her in the direction of the men who helped save the lives of her father and herself, Nathan Ford ("The Mastermind") and his crew.

The only problem is that they're not exactly sure who their mark is. So they do what Fred would've done, if this had been a Scooby Doo episode, and split up the gang. While Parker ("The Thief") and Alec Hardison ("The Hacker") bore themselves with surveillance work of the zoo's board members, Sophie Devereaux ("The Grifter") and Elliot Spencer ("The Hitter") infiltrate the Malani clinic. Malani was a former Portuguese colony and an independent West African kingdom, under King Lionel's rule, until he was over thrown by General Polonia – and third season ties with his corrupt minister of finance sort of makes this book an aftermath of the Damien Moreau-arc.

DeCandido covers nearly every major event from the show, ties-in background stories and name dropped pretty much all of the side characters, which sometimes made the story feel like a companion guide to the TV-series. But is a respect-and artful treatment of the source material really a draw back in a tie-in novel? Not for me, but if you're unfamiliar with the original incarnation of Leverage, you might want to sit through a few episodes before digging into this book. But one thing's for sure, The Zoo Job has more continuity than Burke's Peerage.

If there was one drawback, it was the lack of a clear and proper villain for the crew to target, and as a result, we were deprived of a long con full of fun, but dangerous, pitfalls – which were represented here by Interpol's James Sterling ("The Antagonist") and Malani's finance minister, Aloysius Mbenga, with his armed goons. They've to figure out whom to zoom in on and what the game of their opponent is, before they can put a stop it. And that full picture doesn't emerge until quite late into the book. Leverage was known for trying different approaches of telling the story, but there was always a mark or goal (e.g. beating an unbeatable security system) and it felt a little bit like watching Columbo stumbling around without knowing himself who he's suppose to be hounding.

But that's a minor, fan boyish complaint on an excellent job at translating the characters and atmosphere of the show to paper and weaving a good story around it. I hope these novels do well enough that they commission more of them and perhaps open a new avenue to re-launch the TV series. Here's hoping! 

My review of Matt Forbeck's The Con Job (2012). 

Note of interest for this blog: one of the characters was reading Rex Stout's Murder by the Book (1951).

Out of Time's Abyss

"Everybody was wrong... The judge was wrong. The jury were wrong. The prosecution was wrong. The defense was wrong."

- Dr. Gideon Fell ("The Hangman Won’t Wait," collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections, 1980)

Before taking a stab at reviewing an impossible crime novel from the heyday of the detective story, I want to direct your attention to a post I compiled last year, "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries I: The Novels," which I updated a few days ago. I've added and replaced numerous titles that made list bulkier than it was before. So if you’re looking for suggestions for your TBR-pile, you might want to take a peek at the new list.

David Duncan's The Shade of Time (1946) was favorably commented upon by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), "more than just an excellent essay on the locked-room theme" and "first-rate detective novel from a writer better known in the science-fiction field," and I agree, if you single out the impossible material in the book – which is there in abundance. But in my opinion, I think Adey over praised Duncan's overall contribution to the locked room sub-genre. However, that's not to say that The Shade of Time is not without merit and personally liked the theme of the past rising up to obscure the present.

The premise and opening shares some similarities to the last mystery I reviewed on here, The Case of the Drowning Duck (1942) by Erle Stanley Gardner, in which a murder that was shelved as solved with the conviction of the murderer is reinvestigated – except that the wrongfully accused man in this story lived to conduct his own investigation upon his release from prison.

Sebastian Sand was convicted for murdering John Harth, a promising physicist laboring on the atomic displacement theory, with an arrow to the chest in his sun-porch converted laboratory on the strength that Sand was the only other person in Harth House at the time of the murder – arguing that the arrow could not have been loosened from the outside because there were no broken windowpanes. A windowpane next to the door had to be smashed to unlatch the door, but it's a spring-lock (of sorts) that snaps into position after you close the door behind you and everyone else was accounted for at the time of the murder outside of the house. The influential Harth family also did their part in helping Sand to be convicted in order to keep him away from John's sister Constance.

A decade later Sand is pardoned and conspires with two of his friends, Ray and Alice Kingsley, in arranging a reunion party at Harth House to find the person responsible for the murder of John Harth by playing mind games and staging a reconstruction of the crime – in an attempt to prove the displacement theory that would allow an arrow to pass through a pane of glass without shattering it. Unsurprisingly, something goes horribly wrong when Sand fires an arrow at the supposedly empty and somewhat overgrown laboratory, as dim and ghost figure looms up in the window, taking the projectile full in the chest! The theory of atomic displacement and how it was entertained for a while was a nice a substitute for ghosts and curses that commonly haunt these tales.

What looks at first glance as a foolish, but genuine, accident slowly, but surely, begins to look more and more impossible as the official investigators gather more facts and what happened to create this second locked room killing is more worthy of that label than the first one – which was more a question of alibis than trickery. Even if the overall effect of this second locked room is a patchwork of ideas most readers are bound to recognize. Still, I can understand Adey's praise because the most fun part of the book was the discussions of the seemingly impossible elements in the case including a bunch of false solutions.

By the way, the official investigators I referred to are Jim Quigley, a highly educated chief of police, and a Dr. Cook, who are introduced in the opening chapters of the book discussing the Harth case and meet a few more times before they officially become involved in the second shooting incident and Quigley handed me the idea of quoting Dr. Gideon Fell for this post.

I'm sure that Duncan was familiar with John Dickson Carr, and other mystery writers who dabbled in the miraculous, and Quigley seems to have been attempt at a cast-off of the Great Detectives and he has his own ideas on crime, like a disease it should be prevented instead of solved, but does nothing himself but sit around waiting for something to happen at Harth House. Why test your theory when an opportunity presents itself and safe a life in process? Anyway, in the second chapter Quigley said, "if it was a classic case, it was classic in the sense that the police couldn't possibly go wrong,” appending, “and in spite of it all, the police possibly did go wrong,” which is something that would've no doubt infuriated someone if Dr. Fell or H.M. had uttered it. And it reminded me of that quote from that radio play that now only exist in it entirely as a typescript.

But Duncan was far from the writer that Carr was, and while the locked room elements and discussions were good reading, the writing and characters were not and closer to Anthony Wynne – another locked room specialist scuttled for his embarrassing and unrealistic melodrama and often bad writing but still had some good plots. I'll probably get some flack for bringing up Paul Halter, an impossible crime from the past parroted in the present is a hallmark of his fiction and his characters have a tendency to feel out of their time, but for all his faults, Halter is leagues better as a mystery writer than Duncan was. Now that I think of it, I wonder what Halter would've done with this plot since Quigley and Dr. Cook could easily be swapped for Owen Burns and Archilles Stock.

To sum this lengthy, rambling review up is that David Duncan's The Shade of Time has points of interest as a locked room/detective problem, even if bits and pieces of the plot became muddled and confusing towards the end, but otherwise, it falls short of the mark and the interesting points aren't strong or original enough to make it eligible for my list of favorite impossible mysteries.

Hm, a very uneven conclusion to a very uneven story.

A Duck's Tale

"When you once get the correct master pattern, every single event fits into that pattern. It dovetails with every other event which impinges upon it. When you get a master pattern which seems to accommodate all of the events except one, and you can't make that event fit in, it's pretty apt to mean that your master pattern is wrong."

- Perry Mason 

The infamous courtroom conjurer, Perry Mason, has an admitted lack of interest in routine cases, but suspects that the problem that's bugging John L. Witherspoon has some points of interest – revolving around a murder presumed to have been solved and the murderer was hanged by the neck twenty years previously. And that's the premise of Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Drowning Duck (1942).

John Witherspoon is a wealthy patrician who prefers that the ancestry of his future son-in-law can be traced back to the passengers aboard the Mayflower, which becomes a problem when Marvin Adams, the love interest of his daughter Lois, turns out to the be son of a convicted murderer. Marvin's mother always kept this a secret and Witherspoon wants Mason to pore over the transcript of the trial to see if there's any room for rehabilitation, if not, he's adamant to break up the engagement. Even if he has to put Marvin in a position that brings his inherit, homicidal tendencies to the surface. 

As to be expected from a Perry Mason novel, the plot buzzes with activity and quivers along multiple lines, which includes an extortion racket, a Hollywood scandal sheet and a shady private investigation firm – alongside the imagery of a drowning duck. There's no mystery how a duck can loose the ability to float on the water in this book, it's a new chemical known as a detergent, that affects the oily substance that helps them water proofing their feathers. Marvin is a keen young man interested in chemistry and psychics, who performed the experiment with the detergent and a duckling. And that forced Mason to adjust the evidence when stumbling upon a present-day crime scene.

Leslie L. Milter was one of the private detectives who worked for the firm Witherspoon hired to dig around in Adams' past, but when Mason and Officer Haggerty entered Milter's apartment they find his body sprawled on the kitchen floor – dead after apparently inhaling a whiff of deadly gas. But even more noteworthy is the aquarium, in which a duck was so far submerged that only part of its head and beak was sticking out of the surface while struggling not to drown.

A huge chunk of the fun in these stories is derived from Perry Mason manipulating and scheming his way through a murder case, from altering evidence at the scene to bending witnesses to his hand, which is arguably even more fun to read than his court room shenanigans. At least, I think so, because every action Mason undertakes usually has an opposite reaction, giving you the idea of a mental chess game. Perry Mason’s job is not just to provide an answer at the end of a story, but to move the entire plot to that destination. If that makes any sense.

There's a second murder that follows a pattern that has been rather prevalent on this blog: accidently finding (minor/borderline) locked room mysteries that were never recognized as impossible crimes. A second man is poisoned with gas in a room that was not locked, but the personal situation of the victim ruled out suicide and the trained police dogs patrolling the ground eliminated any outsiders – leaving John Witherspoon as the sole suspect and soon finds himself in the same circumstances as Marvin's father all those years ago.

Unfortunately, the solution to this second murder was under whelming to a locked room enthusiast like myself, however, it was only a cog in the wheel of a bigger story that, if not the best Mason novel I have read to date, was still a good read. Plot-wise, it was in search for a better second-half, but overall, not a bad read.  

Other Perry Mason novels I have reviewed:

The Case of the Empty Tin (1941)
The Case of the Drowning Duck (1942)
The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito (1943) 

A Cosmos of Crime

"Of much I am not sure. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we search for truth than we would have been if we had indulged in idle fancy that there was not knowing and no use in seeking to know – that is a theme on which I am ready to fight in word and deed, to the utmost of my power."

- Socrates 

Richard Purtill is the Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Western Washington University who dabbled in science fiction, fantasy and non-fiction, and elements from these genres were poured in Purtill's sole mystery novel, Murdercon (1982).

The layman detective of Murdercon is a professor of philosophy, Athena Pierce, who published a science-fiction novel and enters, for her, uncharted territory by attending a SF/Fantasy convention at the Aztec Hotel – which mirrors the premise of another mystery set at a convention, Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987). But the set-up is where the resemblances part ways. Murdercon is more focused on the plot as opposed to fan-lore/pop-culture references, which were still an integral part of the story and that made this book one of the better convention-mysteries that I've read to date.

This will also be the umpteenth review of an impossible crime novel that slipped under Robert Adey's radar and was not listed in his bibliography of the locked room mystery – I can't seem to escape from them!

Anyhow, at the convention, Professor Pierce soon bumps into another key player, Dorothy Dodd, a member of the con committee and a dangerous woman who loves to play games with people, and recently forked over nine hundred bucks for a surviving copy of the first and only issue of a failed SF-magazine from the 1930s, Kosmos Tales. The plot thickens! But before plunging into a murder investigation, Professor Pierce has time to visit some panels and observe her new audience, and some of the observations on the SF genre were interesting from a mystery reader's perspective and this (snarky) remark from Dodd would be met with "hear, hear!" on here, if you replace SF/science fiction with mysteries:

"A bunch of academics who think that they're experts on science fiction because they teach courses on it and write papers about the SF writers they approve of."

A panel discussion is also the décor for the first murder when a toy gun toting figure, costumed as Darth Vader from Star Wars, disrupts the discussion and vanishes after producing a flash from his toy and one of the panel members, a certain Dorothy Dodd, lays sprawled across the table. The question is how she died, when it's out of the question that the toy gun was capable of delivering a shock that could've killed Dodd, let alone at a distance of ten feet, and no other obvious methods for electrocution are found. It's unlikely that Dodd was scared to dead by a goofy stunt by a disruptive fan. They were play-acting Logan's Run all over the hotel, but the second murder, staged and disguised as a suicide, is even cleverer and its presentation was very Jonathan Creek-ish while the plotting reminded me Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan).

Over the course of Pierce's private investigation, she receives a phone call from a suspected wanted for questioning and this leads her, alongside a hotel bellman, to the room of yet another suspect – where they witness the person in question falling from an open window upon breaching the threshold. What is interesting is that the police almost immediately suspects trickery and the murders are never treated as impossibilities, by either the police or Pierce, but as another piece of the puzzle that requires further investigation, which was an approach favored by early American mystery writers like Jacques Futrelle and S.S. van Dine. The terms locked room mystery and impossible crimes are never dropped, but that doesn't make them any less relevant to the genre – if only for their presentation. I think a genre savvy reader will stumble to the answers, or the main gist behind the trickery, very early on, however, Purtill never insults the intelligence of his readers by mystifying what's suppose to be obvious to everyone and the investigation is never far behind on the reader. That being said, I liked the trick behind the second impossibility more than the first one. It was more original and the explanation of the Darth Vader murder felt indebted to Fredric Brown's Death Has Many Doors (1951; another SF-themed mystery).

Before the end of the case, Professor Pierce has to face that staple of Silver Age mysteries, starring down the barrel of a loaded gun, among several other hostage/hostile situations – while moving between the convention and such locations as the historic Coronado Hotel and the San Diego Zoo. I should also mention a plot thread involving a "lost story" by Stanley Weinbaum, and while this trope is not unfamiliar in mysteries, Edmund Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding (1948) revolves around a lost Shakespeare play and John Dickson Carr wrote a teasing excerpt of a fourth C. Auguste Dupin short story in The Mad Hatter Mystery (1933), they do tend to end on a predictable note, but that's not a trap Purtrill fell into. But then again, adjusting history, it's like a stroke of the brush for a SF writer.

Murdercon was a fun read and discovering no less than two, fairly well done, impossible crimes was the icing on the cake, and while it's not perfect, I really enjoyed it and did not felt like wandering through a strange land. My only knowledge of science-fiction comes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, SeaQuest DSV, no more than two or three actual SF novels and a handful of hybrid mysteries, but the plot of Murdercon had the same balance between the bizarre world of SF and a straight-up detective story as Mack Reynolds' classic The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) – another one that sneaked under Adey’s radar like an advanced spacecraft.

Well worth a shot.

Café Noir

"The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world."

- Georges Simenon

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, 2013) is the eight in a series that began when Appie Baantjer and Simon de Waal, once colleagues as (homicide) detectives of the Amsterdam police force, partnered up to append another series of police stories to their writing credentials – under the banner Baantjer & De Waal.

After Baantjer passed away in 2010, De Waal continued the series as De Waal & Baantjer, and I have to say, after Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012) that fully warmed me to the characters, it's starting to feel like the good ol' days of the biannual Baantjer releases. Unfortunately, you also burn through them about as fast.

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothes begins when the persistent nagging of the doorbell drags Peter van Opperdoes, a veteran police detective attached to Bureau Raampoort, from his bed to the canal belt where the body of a John Doe is floating face up in the Prinsengracht (Princes' Canal). The cause of death is drowning, but whether it was an accident or murder requires further investigation on his and Jacob's part, which leads them to a barmaid named Rafiqa. Forensics was able to retrieve her number from the victims phone and the place where she works is Café Lowietje! The same café where the bar scenes for the TV-series Baantjer were shot and the place adopted the name of the series.

But the part were Peter van Opperdoes and Jacob seated themselves on the stools of DeKok and Vledder, while Rafiqu conjures a bottle of cognac from underneath the bar, was a wonderful homage to Baantjer – even more so by using some of his own writing to construct that particular scene. I also liked that Baantjer and Piet Römer, who portrayed DeKok, were mentioned and some anecdotes were shared. To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed that Van Opperdoes did not complain to Jacob about Simon de Waal bothering him with questions if he could use his name for the main character in a series of politieromans he's planning to write – similar in vein to DeKok complaining about Baantjer's fertile imagination. It will also confuse readers who picture Van Opperdoes and Jacob as Baantjer and De Waal. 

Anyhow, Jan Willem van Deventer is the name that belongs to the victim and he was student from a family that broke into peaces: the mother would not be surprised if her was son was murdered, while the father is convinced that he's to blame for his son's suicide. The girl in the café Jan Willem was interested in took his gifts, but was seeing someone else and a teacher from the university and his roommates refuse to tell the whole or a straight story – with an unfortunate suicide as a consequence. Meanwhile, Van Opperdoes and Jacob move between cafés, some for breakfast or a cup of coffee and other for work, and in one of them, they come across a polite-mannered, but cut-throat, criminal known as "De Regulaar" ("The Fixer"), who paid students for certain jobs. And here we have another café scene I very much appreciated: Van Opperdoes deducing whom the fixer is in the café and immediately plotting his capture. The guy never stood a chance.

The eventual solution of the death of the young student is a rather bleak one, because the answers they've found resolve nothing for the better for any of the people involved and the court will probably show some leniency on the guilty party. This is definitely not a cozy, but there were some clues in place that made this a (light) mystery as well as a police procedural and the ghost of Van Opperdoes' late wife (see previous reviews) even pointed out a clue of sorts that he had missed, which ended the book on a high note for me. Hey, a non-intrusive spirit entity pointing out something that her husband, The Great Detective, had missed is something I have absolutely no problem with.

De Waal has moved on with this series now that his late partner in crime can't tease him anymore with implausible plot twists, but the style and warm spirit that was so characteristic of Baantjer is what makes his memory and indelible presence in these books.

De Waal & Baantjer series:

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

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

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

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bull's-eye, 2011) [still have not read this one]

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011) [still have not read this one]

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

Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012)

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, 2013)

The title for later this year has not yet been announced, but I guess it probably will be something like Een geluk bij een ongeluk (A Blessing in Disguise) or Een adder onder het gras (A Snake in the Grass).

By the way, I use the English name of DeKok on this blog because this is an English-language blog. It also amused me to no end that from all the variations on the name that the translator could've decided on, he picked the one variation that makes him look silly every time he spells out his name when he's introducing himself. DeKok (with Kay-Oh-Kay) is the conventional spelling of the name DeKok or Kok. Why not settle for De Kock (with Cee-Kay), if you insist on changing the name?

Closing the Gates of Hell

"The perfect murder, sir? Oh, I'm sorry. There's no such thing as a perfect murder. That's just an illusion."

- Lt. Columbo (Now You See Him, 1976) 

The name of Evan Hunter's alter ego, "Ed McBain," has become more noticeable, while perusing reviews and other related blog material, after having read Killer's Wedge (1957) – a story that warranted a follow up. One of the later novels in the 87th Precinct series, Tricks (1987), lured me with an appetizing synopsis of a Hellish shift on All Hallows' Eve.

"Halloween ain't what it used to be," reflects Andy Parker in a police squad room that has not been that quiet probably since the construction of the building, and bored policemen with too much time on their hands begin to nurture work distorted fantasies of becoming (crime) writers. Before the dawn of the next day, those peaceful moments of them reminiscing in the squad room has become as distant a memory as the old cases they were talking about.

The first problem that's plaguing them is the disappearance of The Great Sebastian, who was reported missing by his wife, Marie Sebastiani, after discovering that her husband's van was gone and their stage props discarded on the sidewalk. And their apprentice/jack-of-all-trades, Jimmy Brayne, has vanished alongside the great magician himself. A fitting case for Halloween, but far more ghoulish is the murderer who's cruising the streets for spots to dump body parts, even posing a waist with a pair of trouser clad legs in an elevator, and these two plot treads represent the classics and weaved a traditional pattern that I very much appreciated – even if I caught on almost immediately to the tricks that were being played. Granted, McBain did not exactly made a secret out of the solution, especially if you know your classics, but I nonetheless enjoyed this part of the story and loved the Columbo-like pouncing at the end. But there's more!

A gang of costumed children are wreaking havoc on the streets, sticking up liquor stores and they shoot before dipping into the cash registry, which leaves a trail of bodies that lead the police to a blonde woman, who drives the kids around, and puts Carella and his men in the line of fire – wounding two of them. Obviously, not as traditional a crime story as the other threads, but hats off to McBain, he had me fooled on one aspect until they did something peculiar during the second (or was that third?) robbery. It's something you easily miss on an evening like Halloween. 

Hunter & McBain: two men who could laugh at themselves

Character-wise, the main protagonist of Trick was Eileen Burke, who's the bait in an undercover operation at Larry's sleazy bar at the Canal Zone, but on a previous assignment Burke was raped and the guy they’re after now is about as dangerous – and the question is if she can face her demons and not lose her head on this job. But the scenes between the murderer, a self-styled comedian, with first Sheryl, a regular of the district who may've been the next victim of The Ripper in Stitches (*rib poke* get it?), and than Eileen laughing at his jokes, while buying them drinks, gave this storyline an unusual angle. But, oh, how annoyed I was at foreseeing that there would be moment were Eileen was doubting that his intentions, even after feeling a knife in his pocket.

All in all, Tricks is a nice bag of treats with enough different flavors to satisfy a good portion of the readers huddling under the umbrella of crime/mystery fiction, from traditional puzzles to a character invested thriller story, and I think McBain is a great example of a writer who updated the detective story to modern standards without shrieking and repelling at the thought of having to plot as well.

In short: McBain is a keeper! 

The Case-Book of the Black Monk

"The real secret of magic lies in the performance."

- David Copperfield 

The 1933 September issue of Pearson's Magazine printed a story by Vincent Cornier, entitled "The Stone Ear," which interposed Barnabas Hildreth (a.k.a. "The Black Monk") of the British Secret Services into the Grandest Game in the world, where they would've languished in literary obscurity – until a certain editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine began to republish the series in 1946.

One half of the Ellery Queen penname, Frederic Dannay, called Barnabas Hildreth "one of the great series of modern detective stories," and while I don't agree entirely, I can understand where Dannay was coming from and there's definitely appeal in the feral imagination of the author. Cornier's elaborate, almost baroque, writing style in itself adds a layer of mystique to plots that were cloaked in an air of mystery to begin with. The Black Monk's case-book is filled with astonishing problems reminiscent of those faced by John Bell (L.T. Meade and R. Eustace's A Master of Mysteries, 1898), but the scientific approach to clear up some of the impossibilities also called Arthur Porges' The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009) to mind and Cornier may have influenced Porges.

However, Cornier's explanations are often steeped in arcane knowledge of (pseudo) science or strand in a twilight area between mystery and science-fiction, which is where I disagree with Dannay. You have to be a polymath in order to solve the stories that are actually solvable! That being said, if you want something out of the ordinary in your crime fiction, you can hardly go wrong with The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth (2011) – another "Lost Classic" from Crippen and Landru.

The opening story, "The Stone Ear," was a nice introductory to the characters as Ingram relates his first brush with murder alongside Barnabas Hildreth, who looks into the sudden death of a relative, Sir Roger Amistead. After his retirement from the bench, Sir Roger wrote his unpublished memoirs and there's a chilling tale for a final chapter when dies of an apparent heart attack at the exact moment that precious goblet of glass vanished from his hand. A well-written story with an intriguing premise, but with the kind of explanation that leaves fans like me very dissatisfied.

"The Brother of Heaven" is a member of the Chinese tong, who turns up dead inside an abandoned warehouse at the Thames, stabbed to death, with an unsettling lack of guilty footprints surrounding the body. The only clues are a peaceful expression on the victims face and orchids. One of the more conventional stories in this collection and not all that bad with exception for the no-footprints situation, which is an answer that usually laughed away in other stories when it’s suggested.

A Doylean treasure hunt is at the heart of "The Silver Quarrel," in which Pagan imagery carved in an elephantine-sized table in a priory room holds the key to finding the hiding place of a family treasure that belonged to a now extinct noble bloodline. Hildreth helps a physician locating the treasure and I tended to like this one. The next story, "The Throat of Green Jasper," also deals with treasures, looted this time from an Egyptian burial chamber that lay undisturbed in the sands for ages, until it was plundered and a curse swept the continents – purging everyone from the Anglo-American expedition that violated the tomb. This could've easily been the best of the Egyptian curse mysteries from the 1930s, if it had not wandered from that terrain.

"The Duel of Shadows" is a pure scientific detective story with a wonderfully imaginative premise: a man settles down in an easy chair, in front of a cozy and crackling fire place, when he's struck by a bullet that was discharged once before and that was more than 200 years ago in a duel – making it slowest bullet on record. But the most rewarding part of this story, is that you don't need Hildreth's arcane knowledge to figure the general idea behind the shooting. "The Catastrophe in Clay" opened equally promising, reporting the discovery of a what appeared to be the body of a gold encrusted creature that some mistook for the remains of a God, but degenerated into a story with an authentic super villain and a secret weapon.

In "The Mantle That Laughed," an old sea captain is trying to sell an item he procured during an expedition of the uncharted regions of Mexico, a golden cloak that’s a thousand years old and has the power to laugh, but does it also has the power to kill? A similar problem faces Hildreth in "The Tabasheeran Pearls," which are the deadly inheritance of a Japanese pearl merchant who westernized hara kiri when he shot himself, however, neither of them left a lasting impression on me despite their interesting subject matter. I guess I missed the game element that are usually present in these type of impossible mysteries and that the explanations often feel dated and/or hokey doesn’t help either. "The Gilt Lily," first published in 1938, is a great example of this. There's a leakage of information at Whitehall and relays on the same device used in C.N. and A.M. Williamson's "The Adventure of the Jacobean House," a short story from 1907!

Luckily, there was improvement in the final two from this collection. "The Monster" is tale of two twins, a small village, animal mutilations and something the law can't touch – even if it maims and kills. It even has a twist on a twist that you were expecting and one that was reworked by Ellery Queen in one of their novels.

"Oh Time, In Your Flight" is the shortest of the lot, but also one of the better stories, plot-wise, in which Hildreth has to break an alibi to solve the murder of a friend and it has been suggested that Frederic Dannay, who collected volumes of poetry, gave this story its title – because Cornier was known for his affinity with the great poets of yore. The personal connection between the victim and Hildreth, like was the case in the opening story, also makes it nice story to round out this volume.

Verdict: I liked most of them as stories, but not as detective stories. So, for me, The Duel of Shadows was a mixed bag of tricks.

When Oddities of Fiction Encroach on Fact

"Houdini walked through a wall two bricklayers had built onstage: People swore he had the power to dematerialize. You find out he used a trapdoor under a carpet, it's too mundane: you feel cheated. That's all magic is, an illusion."

- Jonathan Creek (The Wrestler's Tomb) 

At the moment, I'm still working my way through a collection of short stories of the mysterious kind (of course!), which leaves me with a poor excuse to whip out a folder, labeled "Oddities," for my third installment (first and second post) of examples of fictional impossibilities encroaching on reality. So this is, in fact, a filler post.

I'll begin clearing this pile with an example that’s conventional in appearance for an oddity, but it's the solution that put the case on this list and the fact that it's seen as a model for a thousand murders – real and imagined. 

In May, 1835, a swift and silent assassin descended on the people of Paris and plunged a knife in the heart of the widowed Monsieur Loubet. The scene of the crime is a box of riddles, locked doors and an open window fronting on a canal, baffling the Parisian police until they examine the final hours of Loubet's life and hear a witness who saw "a flash in the sun" at the time of the murder. It’s to the credit of the Prefect of Police for drawing a coherent pictures between a handful of dots and giving orders to drag the canal, which revealed a Javanese dagger with a cord and weight tied to it. But those muddy waters also revealed the motive of a grieving man whose only wish in life was to be buried alongside his wife.

Unfortunately, "The Loubet Sacrifice," which is definitely not as exciting, as a move on a chessboard of wits, as "The Birlstone Gambit," ruined a few promising impossible crime stories for me, because there's nothing as destructive to a locked room mystery than taking the ingenuity out of the explanation. The difference between a magic show and a locked room is that a magician only has to concern himself with satisfying the audience with the effect of an illusion, while mystery writers have the additional burden of pleasing their readers with a clever solution – and trapdoors, hidden passageways, murderous animals and suicides disguised as murders aren't going to do it after 1894. You can read a full account here.

The following case is one of those examples were the scissors snip a rounded pattern to bring a pair of unusual detectives together to offer a rational explanation for a truly amazing example of a ghost caught on video. 

Captain Disillusion is a YouTube character promoting rational thought and skepticism, his catchphrase is "love with your heart and use your head for everything else," by debunking hoaxes with the illuminating help of Mr. Flare, but the disquieting problem of the Pantry Door Ghost has him at his wit ends and it takes the appearance of dues ex machina to remind him that not every trick hinges on digital manipulation – producing a solution based on a secret room and wind from closing the hidden panel caused the pantry door the open as if by ghostly hands. Naturally, this explanation is far from satisfying (even if it's the most likely answer), but than Captain Disillusion uploaded an addendum with an exposition of the Pantry Door Ghost conundrum worthy of Jonathan Creek and other magician detectives. You can only pull this off with a camera and audience who are in on it, but it's still a great trick! I recommend you dig around in his video archive for more, like explaining how Derren Brown predicts lottery results. Great stuff!

 I found this oddity on a message board dedicated to a fantasy game and a member reports that, upon his arrival at the air temple and opening the secret door to Yulgash's Room, all he found was an orb – indicating that his opponent had passed on, which is apparently odd. I know, I know, I would not have included this one in the list, if another member had not suggested that the game automatically generates items in that area and a "nasty potion" may've appeared in the room and that's about the only part I could follow from that conversation, but the idea of a game generating locked room mysteries amuses me – and found another example of this happening here. And I think this video might explain how these impossible situations happened ("They say the user lives outside the net and puts in games for pleasure...").

 

Well, that was the last one I had and perhaps the last one in this series, for now, but to not leave you completely under whelmed, I'll refer you to this post from April, 7, on the GAD Group, in which I pretend to be Thackeray Phin and give a highly fictionalized account of the how murderer of Isidore Fink managed to escape from a room that was locked-up from the inside.