Uncage the Black Lizard, Part I

"If magic and locked room mysteries don't intrigue you... well, sorry, no offense, but you're one of those hopeless, world-weary cynics. You don't deserve magic, mind-bending stories, or fireworks."
- Otto Penzler

At the stroke of midnight that ended, December 31st, 2014, the book was closed on another year and handed over to the history books of tomorrow. Who knows what 2015 may've in store, but, hopefully, it'll include some finely written and masterly plotted mysteries for the readers of this blog – which is all we can really hope for, right?

This will be my fifth year of enthusiastically rambling (i.e. blogging) about detective stories and it seems appropriate to mark the start of 2015 with a long, multi-part review of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014). "Big," in "Big Book," isn't an exaggeration. It's a behemoth of an anthology with a page count clocking in at 940 pages! Roughly.

He's dreaming of a sequel to this anthology.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries was compiled by an award-winning editor, Otto Penzler, who, judging by the content page, took great care in avoiding the pitfalls of such previous anthologies as The Locked Room Reader (1968) and Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries (1982) – covering too many over anthologized stories. There are some of those familiar stories collected here, but they're, by and large, contained in the first portion of the book.

Familiar As the Rose In Spring deals with "the most popular and frequently reprinted impossible-stories of all-time" and serves as a 1920s-era drawing room to gather all of the usual suspects in: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," Wilkie Collins' "A Terribly Strange Bed," Melville Davisson Post's "The Doomdorf Mystery" and G.K. Chesterton's "The Invisible Man." I have skipped these stories, but there was one I hadn’t read before.

"The Two Bottles of Relish" by Lord Dunsany was first published in the November 12, 1932, issue if Time & Tide and is an old-fashioned, armchair detective story with a remarkable modern twist-ending. Smithers is a salesman of relish, for meat and savories, who asks his college educated roommate, Linley, to put his mind to the problem of how a murderer could've made his victim disappear from a cottage under constant police observation. As well as why the vegetarian suspect would've bought two bottles of relish and was seen furiously chopping wood in the garden. A good story and I would recommend Robert Arthur's classic "The Glass Bridge," collected in Mystery and More Mystery (1966), to readers who would love to read a less gut wrenching explanation to a very similar impossible problem.

This Was the Unkindest Cut of All declares "stabbing in a completely sealed environment appears to be the most common murder method" and gives twelve examples of varying degrees of success. I had to skip a few stories here, as well, because I was already more than familiar with them.

William Hope Hodgson's "The Thing Invisible" was first published in The New Magazine in 1912 and collected in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913), which are stories exploring the boundaries between the supernatural of the horror genre and the skullduggery found in impossible crime stories. The stories are formulaic in structure and begin with Carnacki summoning his friends to give them a first-hand account of his latest paranormal investigation, which sometimes are revealed to have a human origin – such as this one and that qualified it as a bone-fide locked room mystery. Carnacki was called to a family castle where an old-family legend has come alive in the chapel and an invisible entity stabbed the butler in full view of several witnesses. An atmospherically described, night-time vigil at the spot of the haunting is another familiar element of the series, usually showing Carnacki as everything but a fearless ghost buster, but this time the ghost turns out to be nothing more than human ingenuity. The solution is a bit dated, perhaps, but that's to be expected from a story from this vintage and not all that bad for a series partially immersed in a different, rule-breaking genre.

"Department of Impossible Crimes" by a 16-year-old James Yaffe was first published in the July 1943 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I reviewed "The Problem of the Emperor's Mushroom," from All But Impossible! (1981), back in 2011 and enjoyed its double-layered structure, but Douglas Greene (from Crippen & Landru) mentioned it was "far and away the best of the lot" and didn't think "the series as a whole is worthy of being bookformed." I hold Greene's opinion in high regard, but, after this story, I would still love to read a complete collection of this series. What can I say? I love locked room mysteries.

Paul Dawn is the sole member of the titular department and he is called upon to solve the death of an old, rich stockbroker, George Seabrook, who was seen entering the elevator on the fifth floor and push the button for the first floor. The elevator didn't stop between the fifth and first floor, but the doors revealed Seabrook's body on the floor – a knife sticking out of his back. I'll admit that a seasoned armchair detective won't have too many difficulties with dismantling the illusion of the sealed elevator, but I enjoyed reading it nonetheless. Interestingly, the April 1965 edition of EQMM published "The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus" by 18-year-old William Krohn, which also concerned a miraculous stabbing in a moving elevator – except that it was much more elaborately plotted and executed. 

"The Crewel Needle" by Gerald Kersh was first published in Lilliput in 1953 and was reprinted, under the title "Open Verdict," in the October 1959 issue of EQMM. The narrator is an ex-policeman, who was booted out of the force for trying to solve a case. Miss Pantile was found dead in her hermetically sealed house, inside a locked bedroom, with a needle driven forcefully through her skull and the only other occupant of the house was her niece of eight. I wouldn't qualify this necessarily as an impossible crime story, but more of a how-was-it-done (e.g. Dorothy L. Sayers' Unnatural Death, 1927).

“The Doctor's Case” was an original story for The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1987) and was penned by the modern master of horror, Stephen King, in which Sherlock Holmes has been dead for forty years and Dr. Watson is approaching his centennial – which is enough time passed to reveal the truth behind one of those many untold cases. But not any mere case. A case Sherlock Holmes wanted to solve, but had to see how Watson beat him to it. Lord Hull was a family tyrant with a tight fist on the purse strings and in the face of his wife, while using his ill health and the prospect of an inheritance as leverage to get free reign. When he changed his will, even the locked door and the fastened windows of his study offered little protection from the standard knife in the back. However, Lord Hull was fond of cats, but they give Holmes the sniffles and Watson the opportunity the spot the clue to solve the case with the assistance of a battle scarred tomcat. The crux of the locked room trick isn't new, but points have to be awarded for the creative refurbishing of it and it was about time Watson won one.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate their best miracle problem in "The Adventure of the Sealed Room," collected in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), written by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr.

"A Knife Between Brothers," by Manly Wade Wellman, was originally published in the February 1947 issue of EQMM and places the common, garden-variety locked room mystery in an unusual setting. The detective is a Native American policeman, David Return, descendent of the warrior-chiefs of the Tsichah, assigned by Tough Feather, his grandsire and senior agency policeman, to resolve a dispute between two brothers – named Stone Wolf and Yellow Bird. What Return has to solve instead is the death of one of the brother, one of who was found with knife planted between the shoulders, but is the remaining brother also the murderer? Return finds a simple method for a third party to penetrate the secure cabin. The motive could've been clued better. I also reviewed a hardboiled private-eye novel by Wellman, Find My Killer (1947), which had a locked room subplot.

“The Glass Gravestone” by Joseph Commings was first published in the October 1966 issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine and Penzler's introduction mentioned, "this is its first appearance in book form." If I recall correctly, it was a part of a France and (maybe) Japanese collection of Commings' short stories. This story is set at the U.N. secretariat and the impossible situation involves the inexplicable throat-cutting of Sir Quiller Selwyn, while standing alone on a moving escalator and being watched by two witnesses – yet the assailant remained invisible to the naked eye. Senator Brooks U. Banner is America's answer to England's Sir Henry Merrivale and he makes short work of this case, but the story was a cut below most of the ones gathered in Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004). A good, fun story, but I have always a problem with solutions employing this particular item. I have seen it pop up in stories by John Dickson Carr and Baynard Kendick, but still find it a tad bit unbelievable. 

Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustace collaborated on a short story, "The Tea Leaf," published in the October 1925 issue of The Strand Magazine, which I have always read about, but never read. Somehow, I kept coming across spoilers and that spoiled some of the fun, but I can see why historians and enthusiasts love to blabber about its solution – one of the earliest examples of what's now considered a flogged horse. A man is stabbed to death in a Turkish bath and there's clear suspect, but a successful prosecution hinges on locating the vanished murder weapon. I normally hate this type of explanations, but you can hardly blame one of the originators and the solution was surprisingly well foreshadowed.

"The Flung-Back Lid" by Peter Godfrey was first published in John Creasey's Crime Collection (1979) and is one of those stories as familiar as the rose in spring, because I have several versions of this story, in just as many anthologies, but I can't help but love it! The spots of Dutch peppering the lines of English and Afrikaans speaking characters, an impossible stabbing in a suspended cable-car with Table Mountain as a backdrop and a solution as classic as the problem its sets out. Seriously, the explanation of this story doesn't differ all that much from another story in this book, but Godfrey's obviously the superior effort.

"The Crooked Picture" by John Lutz first appeared in the November 1967 issue of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine and has in spite of its shortness a story-within-story structure. Louise Bratten is a drunk, washed up policeman with shades of Anthony Boucher's Nick Noble and helps locating a compromising photograph hidden by a dead blackmailer. Bratten does so by recounting the details of a previous assignment, a stabbing in a locked room (of course!), which had a very familiar solution. I found that the mystery novel, I remembered the explanation from, was published a year prior to this story. It's still a pretty good trick and the best treatment I found of it was in a novel from 1978. There's a puzzle for the real locked room enthusiast to pore over.

The stories I have skipped in this section are: John Dickson Carr's "The Wrong Problem," R. Austin Freeman's "The Aluminium Dagger," and Carter Dickson's "Blind Man’s Hood." Yes, skipping two JDC stories, what's the world coming to! I have already read them. This review has gone on long enough. And it's really time for me to get off my hobbyhorse. If I started talking about Carr... well... we'll be here until the New Year.

To be continued... 

The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction

"One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."

 - Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Hammer of God," from The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

Martin Edwards is a British crime writer and author of an upcoming book, The Golden Age of Murder (2015), discussing the London Detection Club and examining "the mystery of the writers who invented the modern detective story."

Do You Write Under Your Own Name is Edwards' personal blog, represented here on the blog-roll of Insightful Informants, and two interesting posts appeared on there recently – concerning a resurgent interest in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The first post, "And the latest runaway bestseller is," considers the unexpected success harvest by the British Library Crime Classics with the republication of Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (1937) by J.J. Farjeon. We'll leave it to the scholars to debate who was more obscure, the book or its author, but the reprint of this long-forgotten mystery novel sold over 60.000 copies! The second post, "Golden Age reflections," asks the opinion of the blog-readers of why a rival of the classic crime novel is happening now.

Well, I believe it's been happening, slowly but surely, for a while now and began when the internet offered a free and open market place to small, independent publishing houses. Rue Morgue Press, House of Stratus and Crippen & Landru began in the early 2000s with reintroducing then forgotten mystery writers such as Glyn Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Torrey Chanslor, Craig Rice, Joseph Commings, Kelley Roos and Freeman Wills Crofts. It steadily expanded the available material to readers of Golden Age fiction beyond the shelves of secondhand bookshops and rummage stores.

A notable success story of these reprints is Gladys Mitchell, whose output was largely forgotten and next to impossible to find. That was until the Rue Morgue Press began reprinting some of her work, such as Death at the Opera (1934) and When Last I Died (1941), while Crippen & Landru collected all of Mitchell's short stories under the title Sleuth's Alchemy: Cases of Mrs. Bradley and Others (2005). Minnow Press reproduced a handful of expensive, hardcover edition of some of the harder to find titles in the Mrs. Bradley series. That was a decade ago and since then multiple publishers, big and small, republished nearly every mystery novel the prolific Mitchell wrote in her lifetime – and most of them were expensive collector items only a decade ago!

60.000 copies sold! The ride never ends.

The secondhand book hawkers of the internet market place also did their part in putting little known, long out-of-print detective stories back in the hands of readers, which made collecting vintage mysteries look really easy. However, I'll grudgingly admit that the growing popularity of e-readers and a growing catalogue of public-domain titles may've drawn a serious crowd of new readers to our genre. The names in the public domain are monuments of the transitional period between Sherlock Holmes with his Rivals and the Golden Age: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), G.K. Chesterton (Father Brown), Maurice Leblanc (Arsène Lupin), Jacques Futrelle (The Thinking Machine) and R. Austin Freeman (Dr. John Thorndyke). To name just a few. And their books are free or offered in bundles for pennies on the dollars.

Now juxtapose all of that to the stale, rigidly state of the contemporary crime novels topping the "Crime Bestseller Lists" for the past 20-30 years. The crime novel with cover art besieging you to consider it proper literature, exploring the criminal nature of mankind in a series of mini-biographies of the characters, guaranteeing a book bound with more substance than its plot. What about the character-driven series of police procedurals with a troubled cop or the literary thrillers in the hardboiled vein with a jaded protagonist. It's the same old, same old, come-and go realism critics have been raving about for decades and chugging awards at for "Transcending the Genre," character exploration and prose that's probably "stone-cold" or "ultra-modern."

A personal favorite reprinted by RMP

I believe the entrenchment of the contemporary crime novel, together with its tropes and clichés, while pretending to be the only game in town, is what kept drawing a bigger audience of readers to the detective stories of yore – offering even a wider variety of crime stories than its modern counterpart. Whodunits, howdunits, locked room and impossible crime stories, thrillers of all stripes, rogue stories, forensic mysteries, suspense, gothic romances, socially aware detectives, comedy of manners, spy intrigues, "Had-I-But-Known," historical mysteries, parodies and pastiches, hardboiled, softboiled, adventure-hybrids, SciFi-hybrids, early police procedurals, juvenile mysteries, etc. I think the abundance of short stories produced during the Golden years are being appreciated all over again by modern readers, because you can easily read one or two stories on the train or bus to kill the time.

From a consumer's perspective, it's completely understandable why these stories have become interesting again. They offer the reader a genuine choice and a majority can be downloaded with a swipe of a finger on your e-reader, of which a significant portion is in the public domain – completely free-of-charge. How can those stale, dime-a-dozen "Literary Thrillers" and "Crime Novels" compete with that?

Personally, I hope this expanding interest in the classics is a response to the postmodern deconstructivism, which is at the root of the contemporary crime movement, because I believe we're leaving that period behind us. What's left to deconstruct? Even the major prizes are given out to writers only marginally associated with the genre. So why would readers put up with the same themes being crammed down theirs throats how the world can be a dark, violent and unfair place swamped in corruption and deceit. That message has been duly noted over the past 15 years.

Maybe that's really why readers are turning to books enthusiastically shouting, "c'mon, what are you waiting for? The game's afoot!," instead of the ones depressingly asking "what's the point." Times and attitudes have changed. The meme "born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe" won’t be an epitaph for the 21st century, but a challenge that was met. We'll colonize the hell out of the Moon and Mars like the descend of Imperial Europe on the New World! 

Debugging a Ghost

"Dead people are in heaven, or in hell, and I've never yet seen a murderer come from either direction." 

- Inspector DeKok (A.C. Baantjer's DeKok and Murder in Seance, 1981)

The 48th volume in the seemingly inexhaustible Detective Conan series, published as Case Closed in North America, kicks off with a mountain hike for the kids of the Junior Detective League – under the familiar guidance of Doc Agasa.

Junior Detective League is there to hunt for beetles, but Doc Agasa and Anita have set out a treasure hunt for them instead. However, the code they've written, as a stand-in for a treasure map, proves to be challenge even for Conan. In between, Conan has to be Jimmy to Rachel over the phone when a guest is bludgeoned to death at her hotel and Serene claims to have seen the victim's "dying message" – erased by the murderer by smashing the window it was scrawled on. Of course, the solution to the code and dying message run along similar lines, but Western readers can forgot about solving these Japanese word puzzles themselves. It probably came off better in the original.

The hotel-murder/dying message seems to have taken its cue from "The Name on the Window," collected in Beware of the Trains (1953), by Edmund Crispin.

The middle section of this volume is entirely gobbled up by The Problem of the Fifth Soul, which would make a great title for a mystery novel. Anyway, Atsuhiro Kunitomo engages Richard Moore, not as a private investigator, but as a ghost hunter – convinced a malevolent spirit is haunting him. A series of strange accidents have happened, on particular dates, post-scripted with the delivery of printed notes signed, "The Fifth Soul." The mansion of Kunitomo is well protected and the entrance to the third floor has a door protected with fingerprint recognition, which only recognizes fingerprints in its system. If an unregistered person touches the pad, it'll be logged as an intruder and the alarms will go off.

Well, you guessed it. Someone is murdered on the third floor and hung from the balcony, but all of the potential suspects with access suffer from a phobia exonerating them from suspicion. I was immediately reminded of Charlotte Armstrong's The Case of the Weird Sisters (1943), but Aoyama wrangled out a different kind of solution that blatantly defied a written rule of the genre – while being completely fair in doing so. The only inexplicable part of the story is that even I don't know whether or not to qualify it as an impossible crime story.

The final two chapters are interconnecting, stand-alone stories introducing a new character, Rena Mizunashi, a TV-News anchor, who brings a small problem to Moore and Conan. Someone keeps ringing her doorbell, but when she opens the door, nobody is there. It's an easy, sickening adorable problem to solve, but a listening device, planted by Conan (just in case), yields unsuspected results in another, ongoing investigation – revealing another member of the mysterious Black Organization. And what he learns is that they're planning to assassinate a person they refer to as "DJ." That story will be concluded in the following volume, which is on the top of the pile.

So, all in all, volume 48 was a decent collection of cases, but none of them particular outstanding (compared to the best in the series) and (probably) the best story will be concluded in the next volume. Luckily, that one is on the top of the pile!

By the way, I felt like channeling the ghost of Frederic Dannay when I came up with the post-title, "Debugging a Ghost," because it covers all of the stories. The bugs from the beetle hunt, debunking of a ghost and the bugging device exposing an agent of a phantom-like organization.

Finally, if this happens to be the last post of 2014, I wish you all the best for the next year and I’ll be seeing you all back in 2015.

Murder in Retrospect: The Best and Worst of 2014

"Things must be done decently and in order." 

- Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of the Retired Colourman," from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927)

"A cold, precise but admirably balanced mind."

First of all, before anything else, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas day stuffed with the diabetic inducing joy and sweetness of the holiday season. If you didn't celebrate Christmas, bah-humbug on you, but hope you had a great day nonetheless.

Now that we got that out of the way, it's that time of the year again to face that annual, dreaded chore: sifting through your own reviews, as if they're cold case files, in order to compile the traditional list of favorite mystery novels read over the past twelve months. As I've pointed out ad nausea, 2014 wasn't a productive year for reading or writing about detective fiction, which is why the list isn't as comprehensive as in previous years.

Looking back at my twenty-fourteen list, I understand why this year felt like such a slum: I haven't come across a single, genuine classic from the Golden Age and the list is dominated this year by post-Golden Age titles – even the locked room mysteries are shockingly underrepresented! So much for scratching the stains of time in 2014.

Well, here's without further ado, the List of Best Mystery Novels Read in 2014:    

The Dream Walker (1955) by Charlotte Armstrong

A rarity among a rare kind of impossible problem, the doppelgänger, presented as an inverted mystery and thus the "astral projection" trick could be played up to full effects for story telling purposes. The aim is to assassinate the character of a highly respected man and it just made for a great suspense novel.

Cruise Control (2014) by M.P.O. Books

A review of this police thriller with detective interruptions has been on the top of this page for more than week a now. So you' ve probably read familiar with my opinion on the story by now. 

Case With No Conclusion (1939) by Leo Bruce

Leo Bruce was, in my humble opinion, one of the best humorists writing detective novels and the satirical Case for Three Detectives (1936) is a testament to that claim. In this case, Bruce is gently jabbing the 1920s body-in-the-library kind of mystery in the ribs, but it's a clever piece of work in its own right.

The Third Bullet and Other Stories (1954) by John Dickson Carr

A modest collection of short stories by the Master of the Locked Room Mystery, which includes the titular novella and the superb "The House in Goblin Wood." 

The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001) by Max Allan Collins

One of my favorites from Collins' now defunct "Disaster Series" and usually places a (once) famous mystery author, such as Jacques Futrelle (The Titanic Murders, 1999) and Agatha Christie (The London Blitz Murders, 2004), in a historic blip on the radar to solve a murder. However, in The Pearl Harbor Murder it's Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame) who has to keep an eye out for German spies and figure out who murdered a sensational band singer, while only the reader knows what's about to hit them within 48 hours.

The Balcony (1940) by Dorothy Cameron Disney

This may not have been one of the knotty, twisted affairs I have encountered in previous novels by Disney, but it was still a solid detective story with well-rounded characters and historical awareness – often carrying the weaker elements of the plot.

The Nightingale Gallery (1991) by Paul Doherty

The first in "The Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan" series, set in the 13th century during the reign of Richard II of England, and involves the seemingly impossible poisoning of Sir Thomas Springall in his bedroom, which was protected by a medieval burglar alarm – floorboards in the hallway to the bedroom "sing" when you walk over them. A well crafted historical mystery, even if I figured out how it was done.

Le brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988) by Paul Halter

John Pugmire has been doing his part in bringing about a second Golden Age of Detective Fiction by translating the works of the French craftsman of impossible crime stories, Paul Halter, of which The Crimson Fog was the seventh – and more have been published since. The plot doesn't allow for much commentary. So read it for yourselves.

Akui (Malice, 1996) by Keigo Higashino

Higashino was introduced in the West with a 2011 translation of Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005) and Malice is the third novel released in English, which revolves around the brutal strangling of a best selling author. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse game between the detective and the murderer. I'm not a fan of whydunits, but I had to make an exception for Malice.

Hangman's Hill (1946) by Franklyn Pell

Granted, this isn't the best mystery novel on the list, but Hangman's Hill strength is mainly derived from its interesting depiction of news correspondents on the battlefield in a partially liberated France.

Dead Cold (2007) by Louise Penny

The first novel from the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series I sampled and the plot deals with the seemingly impossible electrocution of an unlikable, self-proclaimed guru in the small, snow-covered town of Three Pines – during a game of curling. I'll be returning to this series in 2015.

The Spook Lights Affair (2013) by Bil Pronzini and Marcia Muller

John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter deliver the best detectives services money can buy, in the San Francisco of the 1890s, which puts them on the trail of an armed robber, a vanished corpse of a suicide victim and an array of apparently supernatural lights haunting an abandoned lot of horse-tractions cars at the beach.

To Catch a Thief (1943) by Daphne Sanders

"Daphne Sanders" was better known under a different penname, that of "Craig Rice," and the punch-drunk style of the John J. Malone mysteries, but this standalone is quite different in style – in which the main characters, John Moon, doubles as protagonist and antagonist. Even helping a hand in the investigation he's a suspected of. Rice seldom disappoints and this time was no different.

The Worst of 2014:

Well, the worst of 2014 was undoubtedly the excruciating death-throws of a returning Jonathan Creek, stretched painfully over three episodes, which probably left fans of the series with a kinder feeling towards the third and fourth season. And that's not a good thing.

The worst mystery novel, or attempt at writing one, has an undisputed winner this year: De onzichtbare doder (The Invisible Slayer, 1963) by Edward Multon. That's all you need to know about this book. The title and name of the author. Never bother getting this one translated.

This probably won't be the last post of the year, I'll probably squeeze in a review of Case Closed, but all that's left for me now is to wish every one of you all the best for the New Year.

Driven to Destruction

"We meet people on the worst day of their lives."

- Gil Grissom (CSI) 

M.P.O. Books' Cruise Control (2014) is the eighth in a series of police procedurals, blending the characterization of the contemporary crime-and thriller novels with the plot-awareness of a classic whodunit, which began with the publication of Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia, 2004). And that was than a decade ago.

District Heuvelrug series has evolved quite a lot over that time period. The first couple of books had Bram Petersen, a veteran police inspector, and his younger assistant, Ronald Bloem, as the main protagonists, but Bloem transferred to another district in De laatse kans (The Last Chance, 2011) due to personal issues and Petersen resided into the background after his wife suffered a stroke in De dood van Callista de Vries (The Death of Callista de Vries, 2012) – giving room for other characters to shine and develop.

There was a hiatus of four years between the publications of Gedragen haat (Hatred Borne, 2006) and De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010), during which Books was shopping around for a new publisher and (obviously) improving his craft. The plots from 2010 onwards are delightfully complex, interlaced with clues, and graciously unraveled by a team of professional police men-and women in the spirit of Ed McBain 87th Precinct series. The Eye-Catcher and Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) were sporting impossible crimes, but The Last Chance, even without a locked room mystery, remains a personal favorite – which says something about the quality of the story and plot!

Cruise Control can be characterized as a third shift in direction for the series and this might explain one of two things: the length of the story, almost twice as long as normal, and why the opening chapters felt as an introduction to a completely new series.

Gisella Markus is introduced to the reader as a police woman in her early forties, who found herself, surprisingly, ascending to the rank of Chief-Inspector, with an invalid, embittered and nagging husband at home – who insists on being a drag on her life. Niels Hanse is the one who usually assists Markus on cases and a column of support for her to lean against, but their present assignment impacts Hanse, who's gay, personally.

The body of a half naked man was found in the vicinity of a recreational area, De Treekerpunt, known as a rendezvous spot for cruising gays and was shot, execution style, between the eyes. Hanse is sure the shooting was the work of someone with a grudge against homosexuals, but Markus thinks the murderer could very well have been one of the cruising men. After all, Felix van Leeuwen dealt in narcotics and had caused trouble before. Van Leeuwen's behavior gave even the forest ranger a motive and this provided the first leads for the assembled task force to sift through, which includes Inge Veenstra from District Heuvelrug and her former colleage, Ronald Bloem.

A vile-worded bloedtekst (blood text), written in chicken blood, fuels Hanse's theory, but colliding opinion and personal circumstances continue to bug the investigation. Than, exactly six weeks later, the shooter strikes again and, before long, another blood text is found: "IK PROBEER EEN PROBLEEM OP TE LOSSEN” (“I'M TRYING TO SOLVE A PROBLEM"). The team recognizes this as a possible indicator that they might be dealing with a serial killer, who's warming up, and they receive more manpower. Actually, A Sealed House ended with John van Keeken, who replaced Bloem, hearing the news of the second murder and was to go there to strengthen the team.

Eventually, they even drag Bram Petersen from special leave to give his opinion on the case, but mounting media attention and internal division plague the investigation relentlessly. There's an anonymous "whistleblower" that accuses the conservative-minded, but always respectable, Petersen of homophobia, while the murderer delivers a personal blow to the investigators in the next hail of bullets. As well as blowing my already fragmented theories to a thousand tiny little pieces.

M.P.O. Books with Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013)

I found it interesting how Books rendered an otherwise well-oiled and experienced team of professional police investigators useless by pouring gallons of raw emotions into the machine, which made me overlook a majority of the clues and the identity of the well-hidden murderer caught me by surprise. I openly admit that. But I loved how Petersen functioned from the sideline, as an old-fashioned armchair detective, connecting the dots based on footprints, gun knowledge and Jack the Ripper-lore to reveal the killer.

However, the ending clearly shows Books has one foot as firmly planted in the modern school of crime fiction as in the one honoring the traditional art of murder, because, character-wise, his novels have the penchant to end on a dark note. I even felt sympathy for Bloem and I was glad when Van Keeken took his place, but now I would welcome him back into the fold out of sheer pity. Poor guy.

Nevertheless, I'm quite proud of our homegrown, neo-orthodox crime/mystery author and his methods has its desired effect: I'm very curious about the aftermath of Cruise Control, but I have a suspicion the answer won't be given in the next book. I suspect that the following book will be about the, briefly mentioned, investigation of the kidnapped-and murdered shop owner in Utrecht that Bloem was a part of and probably involved Inspector Arthur van der Camp – which would explain Bloem's behavior in this story. Well, hopefully, the shop owner was conscientious enough to have allowed himself to be snuffed out under impossible circumstances inside a sealed or guarded room.

To summarize: Cruise Control is a high strung, character-driven police thriller with detective interruptions and the story is packaged in a deluxe paperback edition with diagrams of the crime scenes. What's there not to like, if you enjoy crime fiction in general?

Bits and Pieces

"So, with that display of general incompetence, we reach the end of recorded history. All that remains to see is who has learned its lessons, and who's condemned to repeat their mistakes endlessly…" 

- Stephen Fry (QI)

It has become a pattern of expectation for this blog to promise a resurgence in activity, during a rambling post or stuck at the end of a review, only to be followed up by another prolonged radio silence. And, this being December, I would be foolish to renew that promise for this month, but I do foresee a hike in blog activity for the holiday season.

Cameo appearance by John Dickson Carr

Firstly, I'll be composing the annual list of best-and worst mystery novels read in 2014, however, they probably won't be as comprehensive as in previous years – 'cause it was a slow year. You know the excuses by now.

Secondly, Dutch crime-and detective writer extraordinaire, M.P.O. Books, published his latest entry in the District Heuvelrug series, Cruise Control (2014), which I want to have read and reviewed before Christmas rolls around. It's not an impossible crime story such as the previous one, Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), but a hunt for a possible serial killer and I have spotted a map of the crime scene! Books has consistently written splendid crime fiction since his return, after a four year hiatus, with De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010) and De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011) remains a high note in the series – deserving of a wider audience nationally and internationally. So you can expect a review of Cruise Control before 2015.

I'm afraid reviews of newer works and recent publication will be dominating the blog for the next month or two. There are five or six volumes of Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) on the itinerary and want to knock at least two of the list before the New Year.

Meanwhile, translator and publisher John Pugmire, from Locked Room International, never took a break from ferrying impossible crime stories from across the globe to a very appreciative, English-speaking reading audience – like a true purveyor of spirits! And, yes, I have some serious catching up to do in 2015 with the Locked Room Int. publications. Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Body Snatchers Affair (2015) will be published in January and still have a few mysteries by Keigo Higashino and Louise Penny to go through.

And, no, I have not forgotten about Otto Penzler's 900-page juggernaut, The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014), which I don't find intimidating at all. It's what I have trained and prepared for all my life under the mentorship of John Dickson Carr's ghost. Hey, I got halfway through the unabridged, four-volumes of five hundred and odd pages each epic known as Journey to the West (c. 1592) by Wu Cheng'en. I use the boxed set now as a book end.

So, yeah, 2015 is basically going to be more of the same: enthusiastically babbling about locked room mysteries, reviewing the classics, traversing the trail of obscurity and looking down contemptuously at the contemporary school of crime novels and their champions. 

The reader has been warned.