Pursue the Target!

"How hard I tried to live a normal life. Yet those thoughts would always return. I thought of all the strange adventures... I had been through, of the worlds they had revealed, worlds of murder that lay below the surface of our supposedly calm and ordered society. Could I ever capture them... for the moment I failed... What I could not yet know, was that some of the most horrifying rooms, were still to be revealed."

- Arthur Conan Doyle (Murder Rooms: The White Knight Stratagem, 2001) 

The 49th volume of Case Closed, better known as Detective Conan outside of North America, opens as a chase tale hidden within a pursuit story, which began in the previous volume when Conan's bugging device revealed a member of the Black Organization – and they're getting ready to bump-off a person referred to as "DJ."

Who's immediately identified: Yasuteru Domon. Domon is a military officer and aspiring politician, with a tough-on-crime attitude and a personal feud with the Japanese mafia, but it's Domon's aspirations for the national politics that puts him the crosshairs of the Men in Black.

Conan has to thwart several assassination attempts, moving from location to location, solving mini-puzzles in order to get there, which gives the plot almost the structure of a videogame. But then "Gin" finds Conan's bugging device and the visor of the B.O. moves from Domon to Richard Moore. Two of the four chapters in this story are titled "Men in Black vs. The FBI," because they were heavily involved in the thwarting business and blew the dust from the old dues ex machina to end the story with pinpoint precision. Overall, a couple of good chapters with some interesting progress in the series' ongoing storyline.  

In the second story, Conan has to retrace the steps of a girl from his school, who approached the Junior Detective League with a prospective case, but didn't show up for school the next day. Her parents are away to attend a funeral and they learn from a shopkeeper she bought a bottle of juice, carton of milk and a utility knife – which confirmed my suspicion of the direction the story would take. A simple, but nice, filler story.

The final story is a combination of an inverted mystery and an impossible crime story, in which a murderer tries to use Richard Moore as the perfect, cast-iron alibi. No. It didn't work.

Atsushi Misumi wants the great "Sleeping Moore" to find his missing girlfriend, but that turns out to be the easy part of the case. Ami is found. Quickly. However, what they find is a corpse in a snow-covered car, doors sealed shut from the inside with tape and a charcoal stove on the passenger seat. What surprised me is that Conan didn't figure out the trick by simply remembering one of his previous cases. Conan solved a similar murder, situated in a tape-sealed bathroom, in volume 20 and the explanation, here, is only a slight variation on that previous story – hence why I rejected it out of hand. The story also introduces Eisuke Hondo, a transfer student and new classmate of Rachel, who's a huge fan of Richard Moore and who may be smarter than the unlucky clutch he appears to be, but I can see how he can be annoying to reader. So, in terms of the developing, overarching storyline, this was an interesting volume, but, plot-wise, I have seen better from Gosho Aoyama.

My (crude) theory for the sealed car: Misumi was clobbering away with a baseball bat on the windshield and that made me very, very suspicious. I suspected the windshield may've been removed to provide an exit, once Ami, the tape and stove were put in place, and then simply replaced. The strange expression on Misumi's face, during the battering of the windshield, strengthened this suspicion, because I reasoned the cold had perfected his job – and he was surprise and slightly confused to see how many blows it took to destroy his own handy work. I admit that discounting emotions in favor of reason is often the weak link in my deductions. I mean, emotions... are they really necessary?

Finally, the reason this review appeared two days late, is because I got stuffed nose, blurry eyes and a head full of cotton over the past few days, which wasn't the best state of mind to read detective stories in. So no repeating patterns from last year.

The Locked Room Reader

"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

-  Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891)

This isn't going to be a third review in as many days, I'm not that fast, but an update with some vague, weekend musings thrown in.

First of all, I finally put the finishing touch to the update of the largest post on this blog, "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries, Part I: The Novels," which is an 8-page counting list of what I consider to be some of the finest impossible crime novels in existence. This post will undoubtedly continue to expand further, but this thorough rewrite of the list will buy me a year or two of neglect – before another rigorous update is in order. Now it looks neat, tidy and ordered again.

I'll be redrafting, rewriting and updating the sequel to that list, "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries, Part II: Short Stories and Novellas," when I have reached the ending of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014). The first two reviews from that monster anthology can be found here and here. I'll probably squeeze in a review of Case Closed, before returning to the Black Lizard book. There will also be reviews of regular mystery novels interspersed with the ones tackling Otto Penzler's anthology.

The blog for crime-fiction reviews and news, Past Offenses, fills us in on the third series of the BBC's Father Brown and a rundown of the upcoming episodes reminded me why I passed on the previous seasons. Well, the post warns to expect "the occasional squeal of anguish from the G.K. Chesterton purists," but the original stories were set in the early decades of the previous century and their author died in 1936 – yet the series is (apparently) steeped in 1950s nostalgia!

I hear you say, "Oh, that’s just a change in setting," but a glance at the episode description proves the snooty purist correct. "The Invisible Man," from The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), is one of those over anthologized, but landmark, stories in the impossible crime genre and this is what they made of it,"the circus brings death to Kembleford when a clown is murdered." What? This is going to be The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries adaptation of The Rising of the Moon (1945) all over again, isn't it? Oh, well, there's at least one detective fanboy who'll be glad to see another clown dead, if only a fictional one.

On the death bed of 2014, I posted "The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction," which was a response to crime writer and fellow mystery enthusiast, Martin Edwards, asking an important question on his blog – why are contemporary readers taking note of Golden Age detective stories again? I compiled a rather long, rambling answer, but something occurred to me later that should have been part of the post. Surely, I haven't been the only one who left a bookstore, within a minute of entering, because of the usual stock of contemporary crime novels – which gave since the early 2000s an expanding group of customers to independent publishers, secondhand book dealers and a growing interest for public domain work. We're now as far removed from the year 2000 as from 2030 and the clock is ticking on the expiration date of a lot of copyrighted works from the Golden Age. So why not, from a publishers point of view, make some bucks out of the best works and writers from the Golden Age, before Gutenberg starts making them available in the decades ahead.

Finally, I deleted the badly written, overlong introduction to the updated list of favorite locked room mysteries and will probably rewrite it as a filler post entitled, "Why I Love Impossible Crime Stories." Hey, I promised activity would (eventually) resume, which, by the way, has been going on since September, 2014, showing an ascending line in blog activity – one post at a time. Well, hopefully, I'll have a quick review up tomorrow.

To be continued...

Uncage the Black Lizard, Part II: A Foot in the Door

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."

- Arthur C. Clarke.

Yesterday, I posted the first of a multi-part review of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014), edited by Otto Penzler, going over the stories collected under the headers "Familiar As the Rose in Spring" and "This Was the Unkindest Cut of All." It was a nice, carefully selected jumble of established and familiar mystery writers as well as stories with a far less impressive print run than "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe.

The second part of this review will cover the six stories gathered under the third portion of this anthology, Footprints in the Sands of Time, which rightfully states "is there a more baffling scenario than to find a body in smooth sand or snow with no footprints leading to or from the victim?" – 'cause the no-footprints situation seems to be as difficult to plot as they are to solve. I'm afraid the greater number of stories in this category made a case for that statement.

Follow that invisible man!

Luckily, you can always (always!) count on the late Edward D. Hoch to have a good story even in the worst of short story collections. "The Man from Nowhere" was originally printed in the June 1956 issue of Famous Detective Stories and has one of Hoch's earlies series-characters, Simon Ark, as the detective. However, Ark isn't any ordinary sleuthhound, but a 2000 year old Coptic priest who spent centuries tailing Satan to do battle with him – or so he claims.

Douglas Zadig is the man who came from nowhere, as he turned up one day without any recollection of his past life, but began to attract the attention of Simon Ark when Zadig began to preach a new philosophy. The teachings of Zadig philosophy were lifted from the works of a religious leader who lived in the 7th century BC. Of course, Zadig is knifed in front of several witnesses, including Ark, but the murderer refused to materialize before them – which is the same story with the killer's footprints in the snow. It's a good, simple story that's only marred by the fact that the solution is build around a trick that has many variations, of which I have already found two examples of in this anthology.

"The Laughing Butcher" by Fredric Brown was first published in the Fall 1948 issue of Mystery Book and snatches the prize for the most original solution to the "no-footprints" premise in this selection. Well, no footprints... There were two tracks of footprints leading to the body in an open field of snow, but they both stopped there. As if the second person simply ceased to exist where they both stood. The butcher of Corbyville, Illinois, was a known rival of the victim, a former circus illusionist and practitioner of the Dark Arts, which is why the townsmen dragged him out of his shop and strung him up to the lamppost outside – in what was the first lynching in a long time for the town. The explanation for the footprints tip-toed on a fine, thin tightrope that the other stories in this category slipped on. So well done, Mr. Brown!

I previously reviewed one of Brown's locked room mysteries, Death Has Many Doors (1951). I would also recommend "Little Apple Hard to Peel," collected in Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998), which is a modern crime story I surprisingly enjoyed reading. Lastly, I find Brown's Sci-Fi comedy, Martians, Go Home (1954), a pleasant diversion from my mystery reading. I should make it a point to read some more of Fredric Brown in 2015.

"The Sands of Thyme" by Michael Innes originally appeared in a short story collection, Appleby Talking (1954), which begins when Appleby tells a story of how he found the remains of a supposed suicide victim on the beach of Thyme Bay – a single track of footprints showing the way to the scene like breadcrumbs. It was a nice, short-short story up to the point of the explanation. The whole design of the story is to give Appleby an opportunity to eruditely chirp, "a simple story about the footprints on the sands of Thyme." It doesn't make the way in which the murderer escaped from the crime-scene any less of a copout.

The worst offender of this is Phoebe Atwood Taylor with The Criminal C.O.D. (1940). Don't spend any time in figuring out who the killer is, but to guess what the pun at the end will be. An entire novel for a bad pun and you lot dare to cringe at my word jokes!

Samuel Hopkins Adams' "The Flying Death" was first published in the January and February 1903 issues of McClure's, which I would mark as interesting reading material for connoisseurs of the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Spiritual Father of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger. Adams and Doyle wrote casebook-style mysteries, popular around the late 1800s/early 1900s, and this story has elements of The Lost World (1912) creeping into the investigation. A man has been fatally assaulted on the beach, but there aren't any footprints near the body except for claw-like track that could belong to a prehistoric bird. This makes for a charming, old-fashioned story, but the explanation was way too carny for my taste.

I think I would've preferred it, if the strange, gash-like wound in the neck of the victim was caused when it was badly grazed by a projectile fired from a spear gun, because someone actually tried to save him from a prehistoric creature and kept quiet. Who would believe him and the spear/harpoon was still in the creature, which took off into the sky. Anyway, I'll probably toss Adams' much lauded collection of short stories, Average Jones (1911), on this years pile. I'd like to see what Adams could do with straight-up locked room scenario. John Norris from Pretty Sinister Books reviewed the novel-length treatment of this story.

"The Flying Corpse" by A.E. Martin was first published in the September 1947 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and has one of those charming, mystery solving husband-and-wife teams, Mona and Rodney, tackling the problem of how a nude man could've ended up in field without any indentations in the ground – and a close-range bullet wound in the head. I've seen this solution before in a campy parody of the locked room/detective story and it worked there, because it was played for laughs and giggles. But here, well... never mind.

"The Flying Hat" was first published in the May 1929 issue of The Storyteller and deals with a murderous, but unsuccessful, attempt on a man life and as to be expected, there aren't any footprints. It's the worst story of this section and I would advice to skip it.

So, yeah, that's not a very positive, second round of reviews of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries, but the "no-footprints" or "stopped tracks" are the most difficult of all the impossible situations to pull off. John Dickson Carr himself only delivered one classic novel in this category, She Died a Lady (1943), under the Carter Dickson byline. One of the best examples (IMHO) is still Arthur Porges' "No Killer Has Wings," which can be found in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2006) and sports one of the all-time great solutions for this predicament. The Jonathan Creek TV Christmas special, The Black Canary (1998), attractively translates this problem to small screen and masterly wrangles out a completely new ending to this scenario. The Footprints of Satan (1950) by Norman Berrow deserves a mention for not just tackling the problem, but plotting an entire obstacle course with it.

I'll probably review something else for the next post and than continue slaying this giant. That final page shall be reached and (hey!) I managed to keep this post shorter than previous one! I'm on the right track again with this blog!

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.