Day of Infamy

"Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God."

- President Franklin D. Roosevelt (December 8, 1941) 

There was a period when variation was a part of my reading habit and nuzzled at other genres, such as the "Lost World" yarns from The Complete Land That Time Forgot (Edgar Rice Burroughs; collected in 2007), before I shackled myself to the mystery genre with this blog. I really should pick up a non-mystery novel again and Max Allan Collins' The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001) helped me remind there's actually more to read as well as providing a terrific example as to why I'm hooked on detective fiction.

The events from The Pearl Harbor Murders begin on December 5, 1941, when there are less than forty-eight hours between the unprecedented attack on the Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the Second World War, but Edgar Rice Burroughs does not believe Oahu is a target for an invasion – and neither does General Short. Besides, there's a trouble brewing on the island. Burroughs is requested to keep an eye on his German neighbor, Otto and Elfrieda Kuhn, alleged Nazis with family ties to Heinrich Himmler.

Meanwhile, "Hully" Burroughs (son of) is requested by a sensational band singer, Pearl Harada, for her father to fix an appointment with Col. Fielder. Pearl and Bill Fielder (son of) have plans, but her mixed blood and war looming at the horizon makes marriage a problematic issue in 1941. She simply wants to plead her case to the colonel.

"Disaster Series" distinguishes itself from other (mystery) novels featuring historical figures, because they were, mostly, present at the time of the titular catastrophes and hard facts are seamlessly integrated with the fictional aspects of the story. Collins' endnotes referring back to the texts consulted are reflected in the story, not just by finding a satisfying balance between fact and fiction, but in conjuring up images of Hawaii on the brink of war that felt alive – from the white beaches of Waikiki to the markets of China Town. Of course, there were more direct references to the racial tensions and hierarchy (e.g. issei and nisei), but I think Earl Derr Biggers (Charlie Chan Carries On, 1930) and Juanita Sheridan (The Waikiki Widow, 1953) would recognize Collins' Hawaii as theirs.

I'm not overly familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs' work, having only read The Land That Time Forgot trilogy and name, maybe, two of his characters, but enjoyed how Collins sketched in Burroughs personal life from the man's own point of view and loved the anecdote about the controversy surrounding a World War I Tarzan novel. Tarzan in the trenches of the Great War? My interest is piqued! I was also interested in the relationship between father and son, which, in a detective story, immediately begs for a comparison with Ellery and Inspector Richard Queen, but there relationship was never explored in-depth and was more of an excuse to get Ellery on the crime-scene without pesky questions being asked. I was more reminded of Herbert Resnicow's Ed and Warren Baer, making the first of two appearances in The Dead Room (1987), who, despite tragedy close at home, have a good relationship and are drawn into a murder investigation out of necessity instead of finding it stimulating mental exercise.

Still, Burroughs doesn’t do too bad on his outing as an amateur snoop of fiction, awaking from a bizarre nightmare, which he jotted down for future reference, capturing Pearl’s murderer, Harry Kamana, red-handed on the moonlit beach – after glimpsing him standing over the body from the bedroom window. Kamana claims to be innocent and the Burroughs launce an investigation of their own, but are they looking for one of her scorned admirers or one of the spies looming ominous in the background like the approaching attack. The solution is well put together and a play on the least-likely-suspect gambit, even though Collins would probably have been accused breaking a cardinal rule of detective fiction if The Pearl Harbor Murders had been published in the 1940s. But then again, those rules were written in Britain and Collins is American. So go figure (I kid, I kid!). This plot is set against the backdrop of an impending war, but only the reader is aware of what’s about to hit them and, coupled with the history of Pearl Harbor, adds an usual tension to the story.

The War of the Worlds (2005) has been my favorite up to this point, in which a murderer turned the table on Orson Welles during the infamous Panic Broadcast and was just fun to read, but now has to share that place with The Pearl Harbor Murders. I really hope this series returns one day. Luckily, I still got two more to go.

Note for the curious: I previously reviewed The Titanic Murders (1999).

A Three-Part Trick

"One man's magic is another man's engineering. Supernatural is a null word."

- Robert A. Heinlein

Yes, I'm way behind on reading the marvelous, long-running Case Closed series and Gosho Aoyama wasn’t the only contemporary queuing on the slopes of Mt.-to-be-Read, which is why there has been an influx of posts on more recently published detective stories this year. So here is, without further ado, the long overdue review of the forty-seventh volume of Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan).

Traditionally, the story opening the book began in the final chapter of the previous volume and involved a woman, Tomoko Kariya, enlisting Richard Moore to find her missing cell phone, but the seemingly innocent request has tragic repercussions for his client – who's found murdered inside her car parked near a bridge. The three main suspects all claim to have been home at the time of the murder and a pair of housekeepers affirm their statements, however, they all relay on three senses: sound, sight and sense. Suspects were immersed in their respective occupations and were either heard speaking, seen moving or being smelled smoking a pipe from behind a sliding door.

Interestingly, Conan is repelled in playing the manipulative detective on the sideline, guiding everyone to the clues and their correct interpretation like a puppeteer, by a suspicious-minded Rachel – slowly beginning to believe Edogawa Conan and Jimmy Kudo may be one and the same person. There's a short chapter, functioning as an addendum for this storyline, in which Conan goes through some comic book-style shenanigans to drag a red herring across the trail. One of the few flaws (IMHO) in this series is Conan's insistency to keep Rachel in the dark when, logically speaking, she would be his most reliable ally in every difficulty thrown in his path over the course of the series. But this one pet peeve of mine should reflect poorly on this excellently plotted, well clued mystery and some of hints involving literature and the changes in society were splendid.

The next story is possibly my favorite from this collection and, as unsurprisingly as pulling a quarter from thin air, the plot revolves around a frame job that could only be pulled off by jumping through time and space – which makes this an impossible crime story!

Conan, and his friends, finds Detective Takagi gazing dreamingly at a brooch coveted by Sato (i.e. A Metropolitan Police Love Story), but a man wearing a motorcycle helmet and brandishing a pistol shatters the trance. Takagi identifies himself as a plainclothes policeman, but the robber only laughs and sprints off – only to be cornered on top of a building. Rooftops of high buildings in Japan are apparently fitted with fences for safety, but it wouldn't deter a jumper and the robber takes the leap in front of their eyes. When they look over the edge, mere seconds later, they see the body of the robber on top of a truck.

Gosho Aoyama: Artist in Crime

Slowly, but surely, the plot begins to morph in an inverted mystery, which poses more questions than answers, because they saw a man go over the fence and not a dummy being dragged over it with a wire. If the death of the jewelry store robber was an elaborate murder disguised as suicide, they now have to explain how his killer miraculously disappeared mid-fall. And while Aoyama draws somewhat on his artistic license as a comic book artist for the explanation (nobody would attempt this trick in real-life), it demonstrates, once again, how you can play around with a three-dimensional crime scene within a visual medium and I think stands comparison with other impossible tricks of its kind. Not as simple (as it's clever) as Edward D. Hoch's "The Long Way Down," but definitely better than the two-part Jonathan Creek episode The Problem at Gallows Gate (1998) – which has almost a similar set-up of plot and reportedly got rehashed in Sherlock. I was also reminded of the second, seemingly impossible murder from Richard Purtill's Murdercon (1982) and, reading back my review, and I commented then on how that part of the plot reminded me of Case Closed and Jonathan Creek.   

Finally, Conan and Rachel are on a "double-date" with Harley and Kazuha, but lugging a pair of young, bright sleuth hounds to an otherwise spectacular magic show is bound to create a bored, armchair detective version of Statler & Waldorf – laconically showing the plain woodwork and mechanics behind the magic of stage illusions. Nonetheless, they manage to befriend the magician, alongside his illusionist circle of friends, who are on their way to the home of their teacher, a once famous magician himself, who has been missing for the past ten years.

Not long after Conan and Harley passed the threshold of the “Magician’s Castle,” a murderer strikes under the cover of a blackout in one of the hallways and the victim, curiously enough, revealed earlier to perform “The Resurrection of the Witch” as a throw at the mantle of their teacher. The main trick is one I expected to be used for a locked room mystery and, in a way, it was sort of an impossible trick, but Aoyama turned it to a different angle with a good result. However, Aoyama obviously came up with the trick first and plotted a story around it, which he began by retracing the premise of a much earlier story and retouching it. Plot-thread about the missing teacher is not resolved and the secret notes only exist to provide someone with a motive. It’s still good and clever little detective story, but even I think kowtowing to proper plotting has its limits. Still loved the opening part the most.

In closing: an excellent collection of mysteries and every volume has (at least) one ace of a story, sometimes more than one, which makes opening a Case Closed book always a rewarding read. The entire series is a compendium of the genre and chucks everything at the reader, from traditional whodunits and locked room murders to thriller-based story arcs and inverted mysteries, and while the ongoing storyline moves slowly, the series has yet to draw a single yawn from me – even after nearly fifty installments. If you're a mystery fan and aren't reading Case Closed, I look with a deep sense of pity upon the barren wasteland that is your intellectual life.  

My other Case Closed/Detective Conan reviews: 

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

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 43

Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 44
Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 45
Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan), vol. 46

Not Everything is Ancient History

"The cleverest lies... are those we're already inclined to believe."

- DCI Tom Barnaby (Midsomer Murders) 

The Friends of Cattesmoor are jubilant over their victory in court on the right-of-way and restoration of the Possel Way, a medieval pilgrim's footpath carving a route from west of Stoneham to the seaside resort of Biddle Bay, which partly runs through the grounds of Starbarrow Farm – reconditioned by the current owner, Jeffrey Ling, who bought the place for its remoteness.

Suddenly While Gardening (1978) was published midway Elizabeth Lemarchand's career as a mystery novelist, taking the plunge with Death of An Old Girl (1967) and bowing out after The Glade Manor Murder (1988), but is virtually unknown today. Some scraps of information, here and there, qualify Lemarchand as a tradition, British writer of unchallenging, but nonetheless competent, cozies. Not my usual cup of tea, however, I was intrigued by reported use of archeology and history in her plots and the description also made me suspect Lemarchand may be an acquired taste like Gladys Mitchell. What I found could very well have been Caroline Graham's original Midsomer Murder novels, of which The Killings at Badger's Drift (1987) was the first. A year before Lemarchand published her final mystery. Interestingly, Lemarchand's series character, DSI Tom Pollard, has a DI named Gregory Toye and Graham's DCI Tom Barnaby has DS Gavin Troy.

The plot of Suddenly While Gardening would be easily translated to an episode of Midsomer Murders, in which Tom Pollard takes the family for a holiday in the countryside to visit his aunt, Isabel Dennis, who’s a member of the Friends of Cattesmoor – and from whom he learns about the Possel Way. Being a good tourist, Pollard takes the hike himself, but is stopped when he sees a group of walkers gathered around a Bronze Age grave (kistvaen) containing the skeletal remains of a human being. Pollard hands the case over to the local authorities, but is called back after returning home from holiday when a post-mortem revealed the bones belonged to a young man dead for no longer than fourteen months.

I found the idea of a police investigation focusing on the question of how and when the remains were disposed at the gravesite an interesting change, because Pollard and Toye were unable to concern themselves with possible motives. A lack of identity and cause of death made this mainly a case of opportunity for the body dump. Unfortunately, this never went further than tracking people's movements and the pace of the story made it feel as if Pollard was still enjoying his holiday. Pleasantly written? Yes. But it lacked a pinch of urgency. And the book is basically a novella-length short story (143 pages)! Anyhow, Pollard and Toye uncover another crime buried in the town, but the main trick was even when the book was published way behind its time.

Suddenly While Gardening is pleasantly written, leisurely paced, and, on a whole, not terrible as a (modern) detective story, but, if I ever return to Pollard and Toye, it'll be on account of their possible (literary) kinship to Barnaby and Troy from the Midsomer Murders. Yes. The title of the book is a bit of a misnomer.

To end this post on a positive note... BBC has released an episode title, The Letters of Septimus Noone, and synopsis for the new Jonathan Creek episode. The plot sure's enticing: an impossible murder during a West End musical production of Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room in the locked dressing room of the theatre. It also sounds like the idea of David Cargill's currently working with for his third locked room mystery. Oh, ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler, will you ever grow tired of these pranks?

Circling the Ring

"Fear isn't in our vocabulary..."

- Jonny Quest

Professor Giles Dawson is a historian in the art of illusionism and the great magicians, as well as a member of both the Magic and Ghost Club, who applied his theoretical knowledge in practice after a cabinet maker and designer of stage props died under peculiar circumstances inside a sealed room. David Cargill recorded the case under the title The Statue of Three Lies (2011) and Dawson's successful interference fueled the plot of it's follow-up, Gauntlet of Fear (2012), in which the owner of Circus Tropicana hires the professor to put a stop to a mounting series of mysterious accidents in the Big Tent.

Gauntlet of Fear comes second in a Locked Room Trilogy in progress and I began in the middle of this three-part series after a simple mistake on my side between the numbers one and two, but, to the authors credit, Cargill never revealed anything of vital importance from The Statue of Three Lies – even if the profusion of references tethered on the brink of vulgar product placement. Believe me... a correct combination of the words "room," "mystery" and "locked" are more than enough to make a story appear on my wish list as if by magic.

The setting of the book, mid-1960s, places Gauntlet of Fear in the category of modern-historical mystery novels and begins with Professor Dawson and his one-time RAF buddy, Freddie Oldsworth, traveling down to the winter quarters of Ramon Mordomo's Circus Tropicana – an abandoned RAF airfield at Winkleigh in Devon. It's a secret base Whitehall never admitted even existed and now is reputedly haunted, which takes the guise of the sound of ghostly airplanes and men scrambling to get airborne. However, the lingering presences of Allied forces are the least of Mordomo's troubles. There's a perpetual mood of impending doom hanging over the circus ground and Mordomo's convinced there's a saboteur abound, trying to make him forfeit the circus he loves by forcing him "to run the Gauntlet of Fear."  

You can compare the first part of Dawson's investigation with Sgt. Beef's task in Leo Bruce's Case with Four Clowns (1940), in which the retired investigator joins his nephew at the circus to prevent a murder from happening. Dawson meets a diverse, colorful troupe of athletes and performers who pride themselves on performing in the Grandest Show on Earth. Hank Findley is an American funambulist, "Wirewalker," who served at Winkleigh during World War II and who nearly fell after his wire began to vibrate. Michael Wagner is the magician responsible for the big disappearance act of show, "The Lady Vanishes," in which he makes his assistance, Allison Somerfield, disappear from the middle of the circus ring by stacking tires upon her until she's covered from head to toe – and when they dismantle the pile, tire-by-tire, Allison has vanished. Ingrid Dahlberg is a blond, slim knife-thrower and not the person you'd expect to master the Wheel of Death. Rodrigo Gomez is in charge of the Royal Bengal Tiger, Khan, and Chuck Marstow is the head clown, but Eva Zigana the Fortune Teller deserved a more prominent role in the story – if only to see another attempt at cold reading Dawson.

Anyhow, the accidents continue to happen, someone unlocks the tiger cage, a fire was started, a magic trick is botched and Leonardo, a sword balancer, is nearly impaled when his Staircase of Swords is tempered with, but the saboteur is also taunting the professor. Notes with clues and a coded message are dispatched to the professor, but even more remarkable is an actual gauntlet being thrown down at his feet. Unfortunately, the professor is unable to prevent the dangerous shenanigans from turning deadly. During a performance of the vanishing trick, Allison is found unresponsive at the bottom of the remaining pair of tires and soon becomes clear she was poked with a hypodermic, in the middle of the ring in front of hundreds of eyewitnesses – yet nobody saw a thing. Not long after a session of questioning, appropriately done at the disused control tower of the airfield, there's another murder committed under baffling, seemingly impossible circumstances inside one of the locked circus wagons.

Regrettably, here's where Gauntlet of Fear begins to unravel, which is a pity, because there where moments when I was convinced I found a companion writer for the great Herbert Resnicow, but the explanation was uninspired and muddled. And to be honest, I found that quite surprising. The book obviously suffered from some of the flaws of self-publishing and was definitely over written in parts, but not in a horrifically, bad manner. The characters weren't multi-faceted, but neither were they indistinguishable from one another. The text was also covered with patches of historical nods that placed the story within its time with clever, little references to John Dickson Carr and P.G. Wodehouse.

However, once the whole scheme was revealed, I have to say Cargill gave more attention to the writing than plotting, because the murderer's scheme seems needlessly complex, risky (etc.) and weakly motivated. I expected so much more from the intriguing and intricate set-up of the locked wagon instead of simply doing difficult for the sake of doing difficult. I'm still not entirely sure about the locked-door business. The murder during the vanishing act is hardly impossible, once you know the solution, and oddly resembles the answer to the impossible stabbing from Willy Corsari's (untranslated) De onbekende medespeler (The Unknown Co-Player, 1931) – which was also hardly a noteworthy method. By the way, the solution for "The Vanishing Lady"-trick is never given, but it's obvious Allison was supposed to hide inside one of the bottom tires. I think a better solution would've been if the murderer, dressed as one of the helpers handling the tires, wearing one of the blue overalls, cap and dust mask, and shoved a thin blade between two tires after putting one of the final tires on top obscuring the view of the audience in front. Granted, the timing has to be perfect and other helpers obscuring the audience vision on the left and right at the moment.

So, yes, slightly disappointed over the solution, but I'll have another go at Cargill and Dawson in, hopefully, the not so distant future. Hey, the concept of a Locked Room Trilogy has piqued my interest and even the best writers have their off day, right?

Notes for the curious: David Cargill was born in Dumfries, Scotland and "a lifelong interest in stage magic and the writings of John Dickson Carr kindled his interest in writing." Currently, Cargill is a member of the Society of American Magicians and working on The Cinderella Murders (2014/5?), which is foreshadowed in Gauntlet of Fear. The book, by the way, ends with "Notes for Curious Minds." I think we might be reading the same kind of detective stories. :)

Finally, here's a link to every post tagged on this blog as "Locked Room Mysteries" and "Impossible Crimes." 

The Problem of the Ivory Tower

"Pfui. Are you a dunce, or do you take me for one?"

 - Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang, 1965)

A noticeable gap in my reading are the tomes of essays, biographies and papers on detective fiction, which has a valid reason and the foremost one is their penchant for spoiling the endings of the stories being dissected. I prefer to discover them for myself with such works as Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) and The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-1947 (2009) as a compass, but the insightful comments on P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) and Books to Die For (2012) were also everything but appetizing.

The focus of secondary literary discussing crime fiction seems to be mainly on nurturing pet theories and enforcing a straight narrative, which I can understand to some extent. History has always traveled along two different lines. The first is the one of popular history with the silhouette of the deerstalker and under slung pipe, the murderous countryside villages from Agatha Christie's crafty whodunits and the mean streets of America as the hunting ground for the streetwise, hardboiled private eyes. The second one is basically an enormously sized cable braided from countless, individual threads and too complex to explain in even a multi-voluminous overview of the genre – and you only have to glance at the list of authors on the GADWiki to realize how impossible such a job would be.

However, I assume you would still make an effort to do the research in order to (at the very least) get your basic facts straight, but Curt Evans, a Mystery Scholar worthy of the name, shattered that illusion in his review of The Eames-Erskine Case (1924) by A. Fielding. If you haven't read Curt's post here is what was said: "I recall one academic writer stating that Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn, who debuted in 1934, was the first English Golden Age police detective protagonist, which is not even close" and when I commented with disbelief, "it illustrates the problem when a critic's mental world of Golden Age English detection consists only of the Crime Queens and maybe Innes and Blake."

I don't consider myself to be a genuine scholar or student of the genre, more of a knowledgeable enthusiast of the game, but there was a day I had yet to pick up a mystery novel and start from scratch. In the beginning I had only references to other writers from A.C. Baantjer and Agatha Christie, until the internet made collecting vintage mysteries look almost too easy. I didn't inundate myself in this subject to earn stripes in academia, but for the simple and vulgar fact that I enjoy reading them.

Gotta Solve 'Em All!

Now, let's assume for the sake of argument that search engines are pipe dreams of a far-flung future and research is something you mainly do inside your head, you're still left with the works of the Crime Queens, Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake – which gave me food for thought. Did these dummies think Freeman Wills Crofts and John Dickson Carr were fictional mystery writers, because Hercule Poirot discussed them alongside Ariadne Oliver in The Clocks (1963)? Who did they think Tommy and Tuppence were imitating in Partners in Crime (1929)? How do they explain The Detection Club and the round-robin novels the Crime Queens participated on? Perusing the work of the various club members would've given a pretty good start to get a more complete picture of the (British) detective story.

You cannot not be aware of these mystery writers, once you start skimming the surface of the genre, even if you limit your reading to a handful of writers. I understand the need to condense huge chunks of information, however, should someone like me appear to have a better grasp and understanding of the genre's history than an actual academic writer – as the Roderick Alleyn comment seems to point out? What kind of academic standard is that?

The only solace we can take from this is that murmurings coming from the various Ivory Towers now has to share the stage with a plethora of diverse views and opinions on detective fiction, which, from my point of view, shows how incredible superficial those murmurings can be at times. And how sad, how very, very sad, that a bunch of blogs by mere readers have more credibility as a source of reference than whatever made that luminous observation about Alleyn and on (one of) its chosen subjects in general. How embarrasing.

Well, there really wasn't a point to this post except to point out an annoying piece of idiocy, which has been bugging me since I read it and, hopefully, it'll bug you enough, next time one of these specimens opens their trap in your presence, you'll tell them what would've happened if you carried a squirt gun and flu-spit. Or just point out their mistakes, if you want to be nice about it.    

I hope to be back with a regular review before the end of this week.

A Fling With a Ghostly Thing

"This world is far more mysterious than we give it credit for."

- Victoria Coren (Q.I.: J Series, "Jargon")

Back in late November of 2011, I was handed the scoop on a new, collaborative series of mystery novels, concocted between Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, starring their 1890s San Francisco-based gumshoes from Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998) – among other uncollected short stories and some earlier, full-length adventures (e.g. Beyond the Grave, 1986).

Despite being the one who broke the news, I was fairly late with actually reading The Bughouse Affair (2013) and I didn't do much better with The Spook Lights Affair (2013). In my defense, however, the book wasn't supposed to be published until this year. But enough of this palaver and lets see if I can add anything of substance to the pile of reviews of this still recent release.

The Spook Lights Affair has John Quincannon, formerly attached to the U.S. Secret Service, and Sabina Carpenter, an ex-Pinkerton detective, assigned (once again) to separate cases, but you can't complain in what are still economic rough times – especially if your clients can afford to squander money on a private-eye. Sabina finds herself in the role of matron and has to "baby-sit" Virginia St. Ives, who's being watched by her family to prevent her sneaking off with Lucas Whiffing. The family does not approve of the young family, but the surveillance of Virginia cumulates in a confrontation at a fancy dress party and storms outside with Sabina in hot pursuit. Unfortunately, the only thing Sabina can do for Virginia is getting help after watching her jump to her death from a fog-enwrapped parapet, however, a search beneath the spot only turns up a handbag containing a suicide note and a piece of cloth. The body is nowhere to be found!

Somewhere, around the same time, the ghosts of Quincannon's forebears, who left the Old World for the New One, must've been living vicariously through their descendent as Quincannon goes above and beyond to get his hands on a ten percent reward in the case of the Wells, Fargo Express heist. A daring and masked robber relieved the company of $35,000 and Quincannon is determined to get his $3,500 cut for giving it back to them. Regrettably, a tip from a squeamish gambling addict, Bob Cantwell, leads the detective straight to a days old crime-scene and the traditional scuffles with suspects. I sometimes get the impression detectives related to the Hardboiled School take more bumps than a pro-wrestler on a Pay-Per-View night. All of the (semi)-hardboiled detectives I remember reading ended up trading blows or gunfire with one character or another in pretty much every single story I have read, which sometimes makes them come across as overconfident, street-level Batman's – all they need is alcohol, prospect of a fee, two fists and an ugly mug to land them on. I understand it’s tradition, but, writers, do you have to aim for the head every single time? Can't a guy get a door slammed in his face or his tires slashed every once in a while to get shaken off by his quarry? I'm just suggesting it doesn't always has to be an assault or attempted murder.

A third case is introduced when Mr. Barnaby L. Meekers, from the Western Investment Corporation, wants to engage on a "matter of bizarre nature," which turn out to be spook lights haunting a scattering of abandoned horse-traction cars nearby a beach at a place named Carvill-by-the-Sea (a.k.a. Spook Central). Meeker chased the apparition twice and described as a humanoid shaped, white glow and "the dune crests were unmarked along the thing's path of flight." There weren't impressions of any sort with exception of claw marks on the walls and roofs of the cars "as if the thing had the talons of a beast." 

The explanation for the mysterious disappearance of Virginia’s body and the appearances of the Carville Ghost takes a page from the type of impossible crime stories dating from roughly the same period (in mystery terms) in which The Spook Lights Affair is set such as L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898) and The Thinking Machine's dismissals of the supernatural. However, even though Pronzini and Muller weren’t able to fool me with their seemingly impossible trickery this time (nice try though), they were able to herd every part of the plot into a coherent narrative and The Spook Lights Affair simply works as a well put together mystery novel brimming with fascinating characters, exciting scenes and places from a by-gone time now forever altered by time. The brief interruption from the bughouse Holmes, which annoy Quincannon to no end, were also more than welcome and it's still funny picturing him as Jeremy Brett – playing the part of the "Scattered-brain" Holmes with the same conviction as that of the original. I hope he'll be back in the next novel.

I couldn't fit this in anywhere else, but if you've read Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services, you'll notice that a scene towards the end of The Spook Lights Affair was borrowed from one the stories from that collection. I also posted in December on an actual (solved) spook lights case in my, ahum, popular series of real-life locked room mysteries and you can find that post here.

Well, in closing, I think it was the previous novel with a blurb saying Pronzini and Muller make beautiful music together, but Carpenter and Quincannon, like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, must be wonderful instruments to play on.

Lifting a Tip of the Veil: Jonathan Creek vs. "Sherlock Holmes"

"All will be revealed in due course."

- People who plot and scheme

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) with Joey Ross (Sheridan Smith)

While the BBC hasn't released any official air dates or synopses for the upcoming Jonathan Creek episodes, Radio Times announces yet another incarnation of the immortal Sherlock Holmes as an enticing plot-thread and rival detective for Creek in the opener of the fifth season.

In a third season episode, Miracle in Crooked Lane (1999), Jonathan Creek's investigation of a possible case of astral projection is hampered by a growing legion of fans, who follow him around like a flock of mimicking lovebirds. This new character, Ridley, is studying criminology and also admirers Creek as a detective, however, Ridley takes his cue from another, even more famous sleuth.

Ridley wears "a black coat, has a thick crop of dark hair and an eye for observing details" and the actor playing the part, Kieran Hodgson, studied Benedict Cumberbatch's recent interpretation of Sherlock for inspiration. Unfortunately, for the fans of Holmes' modern day reinvention, series-creator David Renwick reportedly wrote the episode as a spoof. I suspect from the article Ridley will be somewhere along the lines of the oddball Sherlock from Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Bughouse Affair (2013), which also happens to be a locked room mystery. Radio Times further reports Jonathan Creek is due to air on BBC1 in February.

Well, to pad out this notification, and in anticipation of the upcoming season, I'll post a short list of my favorite episodes as an excuse to babble about impossible crimes. Also known as the part where you can stop reading without the fear of missing anything of importance. 

Jack in the Box (1997)

The standout episode of the first season with an original, satisfying answer for the problem of the retired comedian found dead in the disused nuclear shelter, heavy door locked from the inside, underneath his home. Creek reasons the truth from a toilet basin and a light bulb. 

Danse Macabre (1998)

A well-known and controversial author of sensational horror stories is shot dead on All Hollows' Eve, and her murderer was dressed for the part, clad in a tight skeleton suit, but during the escape from the house the shooter kidnaps the daughter of the victim and they're eventually trapped in the garage. The place is surrounded, but when the door is opened the shooter has disappeared from a locked, windowless room that was constantly guarded. Even if the police should've solved this one immediately, it's still a good trick and overall a very good episode.

Time Waits for Norman (1998)

Read my full review of this episode here. 

Black Canary (1998) 

A once famous illusionist, known as the "Black Canary," apparently took her own life after chasing away a limping man dressed in rags from the snow covered garden, which was witnessed by her wheelchair-bound husband, but a post-mortem reveals his wife died hours before her committing suicide. The man in rags he saw limping away from his wife must have been lighter than air, because the blanket of snow was bare of any footprints! I still think this the series' masterpiece. 

Satan's Chimney (2001) 

The seemingly impossible murder of an actress during a movie shoot, struck by a bullet fired through a window without breaking the glass, leads Jonathan Creek to an ancient castle with a room where the devil consumed the souls blasphemers. I did not think much of the first plot-thread, but the miraculous disappearance from the dungeon room and the whodunit-aspect were very well put together.

The Tailor's Dummy (2003) 

A truly great episode from the last, regular season until the irregular, seasonal specials took over and begins when a bad review leads a designer to commit suicide, which sets a delightfully piece of a Carrian revenge in motion – in which a man changes his physical appearance in matter of seconds.

Well, I hope to be back before long with a regular review, but a few orders began to arrive around the same time (I was behind on a few series) and now I’m going through something of an existential crisis. I'll sort it out though.

I Want to Play a Game

"Dear reader, you now have all the clues you need."

- Ellery Queen (a challenge to the reader)

How Good a Detective Are You? (1934) is a compilation of one-page detective stories, numbering sixty in total, challenging the reader to figure out how Professor Fordney logically reached his conclusions and were gathered in a slim volume by H.A. Ripley – described in the introduction as "that genial compounder of criminal prescriptions." The solution to each story is printed, upside down, on the backside of the page.

H.A. Ripley is presented as "a police enforcing officer of the most crime ridden city in America" and collaborated with Professor Fordney across the globe on headline making cases and condensed the most interesting ones in "the world’s shortest detective problems." In reality, Austin Ripley was a mystery writer with a national syndicated newspaper column, Minute Mysteries, in which readers were challenged to Solve-It-Yourself and founded the Guest House. 

Professor Fordney, I suspect, is completely fictional, but Fordney and Ripley still agree on one thing, "crime is simple!"

However, not every singe one of these Quick Draw mysteries deal with criminals and a handful of stories, simply titled "Class Day," has Fordney chucking mathematical riddles at his criminology students. These stories stand close to Ellery Queen's Puzzle Club from Queen's Experiments in Detection (1968) and The Tragedy of Errors (1999), but they weren't my favorites and one of them cheated, because there wasn't an answer for the question posed.

There were also non-criminal problems taking place outside of the classroom and one of my favorites is "A Fisherman’s Tale," in which the reader has to catch the professor in a lie about having had breakfast with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and observe him signing his first official document. "An Old Spanish Custom" was undoubtedly the best and cleverest of the lot and tells of double-cross in the throne room of the Spanish Monarch, who gave a commoner a change at winning the hand of the royal princess – in a completely rigged game! If there's one entry from this collection worthy of being saved and anthologized, it's "An Old Spanish Custom" on account of being an excellent example of the quick-witted underdog overcoming a seemingly insurmountable odd thrown in his way by a powerful adversary. I would file this short-short story away as an unwitting ancestor of Bertus Aafjes' Judge Ooka stories.

The remainder of the puzzles deal with a variety of crimes, from clumsily disguised "suicides" and mob hits to thefts and embezzlement, but solving the matter can be as simple, or frustrating, as spotting a discrepancy in someone's statement or a flaw in the set-up of the crime – which can hinge on very obscure, minute details or (outdated) trivia about cheap clocks. You're not always asked the Who, How-and Why question, but how Fordney it was murder or saw through a lie. Plot-wise, these stories can be compared to the puzzles examined by the Black Widowers from Isaac Asimov's work, but with a body count as opposed to the gentler, common day mysteries the dinner club tries to solve.

Nevertheless, there were a few stories of moderate interest and they came in pairs. "The Clown Dies" and "Murder Behind the Big Top" investigate, firstly, the apparent suicide by shooting of Pipo in his circus tent and the latter the strangling/stabbing of Fofo – both better than average stories for this volume. I think the set-up of both puzzles would've made a great starting premise for a mystery novel. Something along the lines of, oh, I don't know, The Last Laugh by H.A. Ripley... (ah boo!). "Murder on Board" and "Murder During a Storm" are short, simple, but nicely done, shipboard mysteries, in which the professor notices how facts and statements given to him don’t match up. In "At the Cross Road," a taxi-driver finds his passenger with a knife sticking out of him in the backseat of his car, however, they hadn't stopped driving until they reached their destination and their was no way for anyone to enter the taxi while being driven. It's an impossible crime! Unfortunately, the solution kind-of robs it of that label and the same goes for "Fordney Climbs for a Clew," in which a man is poisoned in a locked room, but, again, it's not really a locked room mystery at all.

Finally, "Fordney Investigates a Fire" deserves a special mention for its keen and original solution for an insurance fraud by a manufacturing company, and I predict "Murder at the Cotton Mill" will probably be excluded from any possible future reprints until the full text is released into the public domain.  

So, altogether, not that bad of a collection of brainteasers, but you probably shouldn't read them in one (very short) sitting like I did. Turning the book upside down to read the solution also becomes tiring after the first ten or so stories.

A Penny for Your Thoughts

"It is an historical fact. Sharing has never been humanity's defining attribute."

- Professor Charles Xavier (X2: X-Men United, 2003).  

I first learned of Timothy Zahn's "Red Thoughts at Morning" in a web article titled Locked Room Mysteries and Other Improbable Crimes on Steve Lewis' now torpid Mystery File Online, which preceded the (current) blog of the same name, compiling eight columns of stories not catalogued by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991) – praising Zahn's hybrid concoction for its fair play and working as "a mystery as well as a better than average science fiction story."

There was a straightforward reason for seeking out this particular, futuristic tale of the impossible, beside the compelling premise and promise of a fairly constructed plot. The brief synopsis and commentary put a possible solution in my head and simply wanted to see if I was correct. Hey, it wouldn’t be the first time I solved a locked room story by merely reading a description or the back cover of a book! I found there were two sources available for "Red Thoughts at Morning," the original publication in a 1981 Analog Science Fact/Fiction magazine and the collection Distant Friends and Others (1992), but a cheap copy of Analog was also easily available.

Amos Potter of Euraka, California, was a renowned telepath who'd won his small community tolerance from a world eyeing them with suspicion, because telepaths can't help in this universe reading the thoughts of people in close proximity of them. The death of Amos Potter therefore comes as a shock to telepaths such as Dale Ravenhall, who read in the newspaper the commuter plane Amos was on got hijacked and instructed to fly to Cuba. They were overrun during a stopover in Las Vegas to refuel, but the body of the telepath was discovered in the unlocked lavatory of the plane – stabbed in the chest with one of the galley's steak knives. Dale is currently a witness in a robbery case and the court is debating over whether or not his testimony as a telepath could be admitted as evidence, which shows the hassle and abuse telepaths still have to go through. In a way, the world of the Distant Friends reflects the Marvel universe (if every mutant was a telepath) and Amos even invented a telepath-finder. But it's during the next day in court that Dale asks himself the one-million dollar question: "how the hell do you unexpectedly stab a telepath?" 

The rules of Zahn's Distant Friends universe on telepaths state that they can't come into close contact with each other with disastrous effects and Dale constantly communicates with his Distant Friends by telepathy, but ordinary humans are unable to shield their thoughts and intentions from a telepath – leaving open the question why Amos didn’t lock himself in. It's an impossible crime witin a reverse locked room mystery! Zahn's explanation adheres to these rules, however, it grounds the story firmly in SF/Fantasy territory and it's the complete opposite of the solution I had in mind. My solution would depend on the murdered telepath to have an assistant, because I suspected having such kind of powers would be a hassle on account of the skyjacked airplane. I envisioned the assistant (or maybe a wife) was the actual telepath, but resented the public perception and created a public avatar. The telepath receded in the background as the "assistant" and worked the public "telepath" as a puppet through telepathy, but the "assistant" panicked when they came after the "telepath" and killed him to keep everyone from finding out. Little did he know the matter would be resolved in Las Vegas. Anyhow, that's how I would've played it.

But wait, I have one more short story to review!

The English humorist and playwright P.G. Wodehouse, of Jeeves and Wooster fame, has a single locked room mystery to his credit, "The Education of Detective Oakes," published in Pearson's Magazine, December 1914 and as "Death at the Excelsior" in The Uncollected Wodehouse (1976) – rounded out by an abbreviated version set in the United States in the 1976 Argosy Special Commemorative Issue under the title "The Harmonica Mystery."

Mr. Paul Snyder of a reputable detective agency in New Oxford Street has a peculiar case on his desk: Captain Gunner was found dead in his room in a Southampton waterfront boarding-house of snake poison, however, the door was locked and the open, but bared, window too high to offer an escape for a snake. The search for the tricky serpent is as fruitless as the one for a tangible motive and the problem is deemed insoluble. Snyder sees the case as a perfect lesson in patience and humiliaty for Elliot Oakes, who recently joined the staff and has been far too conceited and self-absorbed with his own skills for his liking. Needless to say, I rather liked Oakes.

The plan to lower Oakes' self-esteem appears to work, at first, until Snyder receives a telegram announcing the case has been solved and the young detective delivers a solution from the Poe-Doyle School of Impossible Crimes. Unfortunately, for Oakes, a rival detective appears: the proprietress of the Excelsior-boardinghouse, Mrs. Pickett, who impressed Oakes as "having very little intelligence." Mrs. Pickett basically plays the Mr. Chitterwick to Oakes' Roger Sheringham (c.f. The Poisoned Chocolates Case, 1929) and I can imagine Wodehouse gave Anthony Berkeley an idea or two with this story. However, in defense of Oakes, it's not much of a victory if the actual solution is even more preposterous than the false one.

All in all, still a fun read and I finally know where this rather silly idea for an impossible poisoning came from.