Not as Impossible as You Might Think

"My curiosity is roused by your locked-room. If you can find a new way of doing it, many congratulations." 

- John Dickson Carr (excerpt from a letter to Anthony Boucher)

I had originally planned to post another review of a Christmas-themed country house mystery, supposedly written in the same vein as C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934) and Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941), but the story proved to be surprisingly dull and lacking in spirit – which caused me to become bogged down around the halfway mark. Obviously, I needed a break.

Incidentally, a fellow mystery blogger and locked room aficionado, known as "Double J," posted a review of Owl of Darkness (1942) by Max Afford, which gave me an idea. I would take a brief detour and return to the pages of that Christmas mystery with renewed vigor and energy!

A slender volume containing several of pieces of Afford's shorter fiction, entitled Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn (2008), seemed to lend itself perfectly for that purpose.

Max Afford was an Australian news reporter who turned to fiction in the late 1920s and edged out a name as an author of more than sixty radio-and stage plays, but readers appreciative of Golden Age mysteries will associate his name with the Jeffrey Blackburn novels – a handful of them are even listed in the late Robert Adey's Locked Room Mysteries and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). Somewhat surprisingly, however, is that Adey only listed the full-length locked room novels and not the short stories collected in the volume under review. Because they were (IMHO) excellent examples of the genre.

The first story is "Poison Can Be Puzzling" and was originally published in a 1944 issue of The Australian Women's Weekly, which has Jeffrey and Elizabeth Blackburn being plucked away from the cinema by Inspector Read. Some trouble is brewing and Read figured Blackburn "might like to be on any fun that's offering."

Ferdinand Cass is a "financier of sorts" and "so crooked he could hide behind a circular staircase," which made it advisable to turn his home in a fortified stronghold: a flat "eight floors from the ground" and "six from the ground" with covered windows and a steel floor-and ceiling. A single door, giving entrance to the apartment, is double locked and chained. There's only one problem: all of those securities offer protection against mortal beings, but not from a vengeful ghost from beyond the grave and the reason why he "demanded police protection until after midnight." 

The disgruntled ghost in question is that of Cass' late-wife, who got "mixed up in some black magic hocus-pocus" and threw herself out of a window, but her spirit appeared during a trip in the South American jungles and prophesized his death. Even her perfume can be smelled inside the home!

Unfortunately, all of the precautions and presence of a couple of detectives were in vain, because Cass is mysteriously poisoned "while dressing alone in a hermitically-sealed room" with "four witnesses standing not a dozen yards away." 

The choice of victim, the locked room set-up and a seemingly impossible poisoning was very reminiscent of Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Exterminator," collected in The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), and The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep (1976) from the Ellery Queen TV-series, but with a completely different and original solution – one that is distantly related to a John Dickson Carr novel from the 1930s.

The next story is "The Vanishing Trick," first published in 1948 in Detective Fiction, which has Jeffrey and Elizabeth Blackburn visiting friends at their historical home.

Max Afford (c. 1930s)

Kettering Old Home is one of the oldest houses in England and has "a kinda haunted room." The room lacks a proper, old-fashioned English ghost, but people tend to "just vanish into thin air" when left alone in the room, which began in the 1700s: a local parson was accused of witchcraft and held prisoner in the haunted room, but when the room was opened the man had simply vanished. But it's not all ancient history.

Three years before, the previous owners asked one of the servants to clean out the room, but "the door slammed shut on the poor devil" and "when they opened it again" they made an unsettling discovery – the room had swallowed and digested another victim. However, the guests of Jim and Sally Rutland are skeptical, because they have a penchant for practical jokes.

A suspicion confirmed to the reader when Sally convinces Elizabeth to become complicit in a prank: Sally wants to be sealed inside the room, while dressed as a servant, in order to give the "doubting Thomases" a scare when they come down to investigate the supposedly haunted room. Sally is locked up in the room by Elizabeth, but as soon as the bolts were shot and walked down the passage there was a call for help ("Elizabeth... help! Come back!"). The room had lived up to its reputation and swallowed up another human being.

As Jeffrey Blackburn remarks, "the trouble with practical jokes is that they have damndest way of kicking back," which occurs when a second person vanishes from the room and Sally refuses to resurface.

I'm surprised "The Vanishing Trick" never founds its way into one of the many locked room anthologies, because it's a wonderfully charming example of the impossible disappearance and a wonderful clue is slipped in during Sally's disappearance. A clue that reveals the entire trick, if you're observant enough. In short: I loved this one.

The final story is "The Gland Men of the Island," originally published in 1931 in Wonder Stories, which is not a detective story. A small group of men make a momentous discovery on "one of the numerous islands that stud the Polynesia," which they made when following a well-worn path to a thick island-forest and discover a race of Asiatic giants. I initially assumed this was one of those lost civilization stories, but it soon revealed itself as one of those genre-bending, pulpy tales of Yellow Peril and featured a sinister Chinese scientist – who wanted to "restore China to rightful position as Mistress of the World."

I'm not really a fan of sensationalist pulp stories, but this one answered a question I never dreamed of asking: what would be the result if Sax Rohmer had written Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). So there's that.

Well, I enjoyed this collection as a whole and reminded me why I love locked room mysteries. I'm curious now to see what Afford is able to do when he writes full-length impossible crime novels. And, now, back to that dreadful Christmas mystery!

Murmurings from the Past

"Had I been, as you say, dead... it is more than probable that dead I should still be; for I perceive you are yet in the infancy of Galvanism, and cannot accomplish with it what was a common thing among us in the old days."

- Allamistakeo (Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words With a Mummy," 1845)

Last month, I posted a review of The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966) by Robert Arthur, which is the sixth entry in a series of juvenile mysteries that ran from 1964 to 1987 and starred a group of meddling teenagers – who refer to themselves as The Three Investigators.

I enjoyed the book more than I anticipated and thought it merited a prompt follow-up, but felt insistent on picking another one of Arthur's contributions. Since his involvement kindled my initial interest in the series. The synopses of The Secret of Terror Castle (1964) and The Mystery of the Green Ghost (1965) piqued my interest, but eventually settled for The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965).

The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy opens with a brief introduction by Alfred Hitchcock, who's a minor character in the series, in which he introduces the characters and gives some background information for "the benefit of those of you who have come in late." I already went over the introductions of Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, Peter Crenshaw and Bob Andrews in my previous review, but something that was completely omitted in The Secret of Skeleton Island was any mention of their headquarters – which consists of a converted mobile home trailer hidden in The Jones Salvage Yard. Guess that really wasn't pertinent information for an outdoors adventure story.

Anyway, the trailer has a small office space, a lab, a darkroom and a smattering of equipment, such a surveillance periscope, which the boys rebuilt from junk that came into the salvage yard.

It's at their headquarters where they receive two letters: one of them is from a wealthy, middle-aged lady who has heard about their success in one of their previous investigators (i.e. The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, 1964) and wants to engage their services to help find her missing cat. Pete and Bob practice their deduction skills on the letter before reading it, which makes for a fun Holmesian scene.

However, it's the content of the second envelope that'll provide the trio of investigators with a bizarre problem that could've been plucked from the pages of a John Dickson Carr or Edward Hoch story. There's even a particular situation that arguably qualifies as a locked room problem and that comes on top of an apparently supernatural phenomena.

The name engraved on the top of the expensive-looking bond stationary is that of Alfred Hitchcock, celebrated film-director, who has a friend with a peculiar problem that they might find interesting: a 3000-year-old mummy has been heard whispering in a long-dead language!

Professor Robert Yarborough, "a noted Egyptologist," has converted a wing of his Spanish-style mansion into a private museum, strewn with "relics taken from the tombs of ancient Egypt," which has become the temporary home for the miraculous mummy – which the professor discovered twenty-five years before inside a well-hidden tomb in a rocky cliff. The professor is a man of science and is of the opinion that it's not natural "for a mummy dead for three thousand years to talk," or "even to whisper," but that's what appears to happen every time he’s alone with the remains of Ra-Orkon.

The problem is that Yarborough can't consult a professional colleague, because they would pity him or spread rumors about him getting old and senile. A private investigator would assume the professor had bats in the belfry, but "three imaginative boys" with "no preconceived notion" just might do the trick.

Jupe has a trick up his sleeve to make the mummy whisper in his presence, but finds himself confronted with somewhat of a locked room problem when the ruse succeeds: mummy begins to murmur when "he was totally alone" and "the door into the room where the professor and Bob waited was shut." Nobody was near the mummy case to "throw" his voice and the possibility of a radio transmitter had already been eliminated. I was a bit skeptical about the actual explanation for this locked room mystery, because it seemed out-of-time, but consulting the all-knowing Internet revealed this was technically possible since the early 1960s. So the trick was technically possible.

I think Arthur should be commended for thinking enough of his young readers to avoid the obvious (radio transmitter) and hackneyed (ventriloquism) and came up with something slightly more complex and original.  

Anyway, the points between the initial investigation and the final explanation is fraught with danger and side-distractions, which include a frightened butler who's deadly afraid of the mummy's curse. There's a colleague of the professor, an expert in Middle-Eastern languages, whose father was part of the original expedition, but "was murdered in a Cairo bazaar" a week after the mummy's discovery. A slender, foreign-looking boy is discovered lurking in the garden and he'll be in tight spot with one of the investigators when coming across a couple of burglars. Even Anubis, "the dreaded jackal god of Ancient Egypt," makes an appearance in our plain of existence.

This compound of danger and mystery makes The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy a very happening kind of adventure/mystery, but not entirely in the same league as The Secret of Skeleton Island – which I loved and adored. However, I still very much-appreciated Arthur's dedication here to create a solid plot with clues, mystification, Sherlockian references and something that amounts to a locked room mystery. Robert Arthur was basically mystery genre's version of the Paid Piper of Hamelin, who lured many children to our beloved detective stories.  

On a final note, allow me direct your attention to the review I posted only yesterday, which is Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941) and has a locked room murder in an old-fashioned manor house during a Christmas holiday. What's not to like there? 

A Knife in the Back

"I've been a fool about this. Locked rooms, as you said, on the brain."

- Detective-Inspector Humbleby (Edmund Crispin's "The Name on the Window," collected in Beware of the Trains, 1953)

Georgette Heyer was a British novelist well-versed in several genres, consisting mainly of Regency romances, historical fiction and mystery novels, which were largely republished over the past fifteen years – including the books chronicling the cases of Superintendent Hannasyde and Inspector Hemingway.

Reportedly, Heyer garnered most of her literary fame in the field of historical romance novels. She wrote many novels that were set in the Regency period or the Georgian era, which made Heyer "legendary for her research" and "historical accuracy," but her mystery novels seem to have failed to scale the reputational heights of her historical fiction.

However, I've read some interesting, if varying, opinions from my fellow and highly respected connoisseurs in murder about her work.

The opinions seem to be divided where some of her most recognizable mystery novels are concerned, such as Why Shoot a Butler? (1933), Death in the Stocks (1935) and The Blunt Instrument (1938), but are overall consistent and positive about Envious Casca (1941), which is a conventional country-house mystery in the spirit of Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) by Agatha Christie – and even has a locked room mystery at the heart of its plot. So, guess which Heyer mystery this predictable hack picked?

Envious Casca takes place at the manor house of a wealthy curmudgeon, Nathaniel Herriard, where his much more cheerful brother, Joseph, has taken charge of preparing a Christmas party and invited a small band of people. Unfortunately, it's a collection of highly incompatible personalities, which leads to irritation and murder!

There are, first of all, the Herriard brothers: Nathaniel is a rich, semi-retired businessman who became somewhat of an old humbug, who believed Christmas to be "a series of quarrels between inimical persons bound to one another only be the accident of relationship" and "thrown together by a worn-out convention which degreed that at Christmas families should forgather" – which is simply begging to have several spirits haunting up your bedroom a day before Christmas. Joseph is a much more pleasantly person, overly nice even, who spend most of years as a traveling actor and has since two years returned, but is financially completely depended upon his brother. Joseph brought along his wife, named Maud, who spend most of the story irritating the people around her by sharing tidbits of information from the biography she's reading about an Austrian-Hungarian empress.

A dead brother of Nathaniel and Joseph left two children behind: a "rough-tongued young man with no manners," named Stephan, who's the prospected heir of Nathaniel's fortune and a sister, Paula, who equals her brother in all his unpleasant characteristics.

Stephen has brought along Valerie Dean: his pretty, but childishly naïve, finance whose personal motives makes her a common gold-digger in the eyes of Nathaniel. Paula is a stage-actress and is accompanied by Willoughby Roydon, a postmodern playwright of "grimly realistic plays," which is why Nathaniel refuses to cough up several thousands of pounds to finance his play – much to the chagrin of Paula who wanted the main part in the play. The party is rounded out by Mathilda Clare, a cousin, and Nathaniel business partner, Edgar Mottisfont.

In such company, you can almost understand why an old grouch like Nathaniel refuses to answer the knocks on his bedroom door. As Inspector Hemingway remarked, he would in his place have locked himself in his room and "very likely shove a heavy piece of furniture" against the door, but there was a far more serious reason why no answer emanated from behind the locked bedroom door. A murderer had poked Nathaniel in the back with a knife and "then dematerialized himself like the spooks you read about."

The locked room aspect of the murder has Inspector Hemingway and Sergeant Ware pleasantly baffled, which leads to minor, but interesting, discussion how the murder could've escaped from the room – which includes "the old pencil-and-string trick" and the possibility that "the key was turned with a pair of eyebrow-pluckers."

Something of historical interest about the tool consisting of "a pair of forceps shaped a bit like eyebrow-pluckers to open locked doors," because it’s a burglary-tool called an "oustiti." I was unable to find a picture of those forceps, but I came across a reference describing it as "an essential item of a burglar’s tool kit" and it even quoted this book! The tool was also mentioned in Modern Police Work (1939), which you can find and read here.

Anyhow, the eventual explanation for the locked room is as simple as it's risky and the only weakness is the luck of the murderer that everything panned out the way it did, but loved how the solution took its cue from history – instead of being pulled from the burglar's tool kit. I also appreciated how the murderer and Hemingway basically stumbled to the idea for the locked room trick by discovering the same thing, which was the only part of the puzzle that had baffled Hemingway up to the near end. However, it's not a classic of the impossible crime genre. But it was nice enough.

Hemingway saw through the murderer's ruse and hardly believed anything that was thrown at his way, which included a cigarette case, a missing book, a bloodstained handkerchief, some rude behavior and even a link to the Sino-Japanese War. The good inspector knew how to separate the clues from the red herrings and did not belong to the "lot of half-baked people" that murderer banked on believing an apparent innocent person to be actually innocent. Only problem is that most of readers probably belong to the same category as Hemingway. I read a very apt comment how Heyer here obviously tried to out-Christie Christie in the least-likely-suspect department, which made the murderer stand-out more and more with each passing chapter – making the revelation of this person’s identity a couple of chapters before the ending a good move.

Regardless of these minor trivialities, I genuinely enjoyed Envious Casca as a whole. It's an extremely conventional mystery novel with a conservative plot-and cast of characters, which can hardly be labeled original, but the story moves around gracefully within the confines of the conventional manor house mystery. Like a swan elegantly paddling around in a fountain.

I guess Heyer is the kind of mystery writer you go for when you're in the mood for something classy and classic, which means I'll definitely return to her work in the not so-distant future.

Heir Presumptive

"...we are a truthful family, only the things that happen to us are so peculiar that nobody ever believes in them. Still, I expect you've got a sort of winnowing ear for people's testimonies and will know in a flash if we try any hanky-panky."

- Henry Lamprey (Ngaio Marsh's Death of a Peer, 1941)

Ten Star Clues (1941) is the fifteenth novel with the emblem "A Bobby Owen Mystery" plastered on its cover, but the writing and plot is as elaborate, darkly humorous and fantastical as E.R. Punshon's earlier work in this series – which consists here of one long riff on the Victorian-era case of the Tichborne claimant.

It's also one of the most scrupulously plotted stories from the series and has a carefully constructed, decidedly linear narrative.

In the first quarter of book, Punshon introduces a cast of old-fashioned characters populating the historical Castle Wych, which is situated near the village of Brimsbury Wych.

The elderly Earl and Countess Wych stand at the head of the old Hoyle dynasty, who "for some hundreds of years had lived and flourished at Castle Wych," and own most, but "less now than formerly," of the surrounding land. However, since the days of robber barons and lucrative placeholder, running a centuries-old estate has become an unprofitable occupation. Ralph Hoyle is the heir to his great-uncle and had decided to dispose of the estate once he inherits the title, but a problem presents itself when a long-lost grandson of the Earl turns up on their doorstep.

Bertram Hoyle was presumed to have passed away a decade ago in the United States, but Earl and Countess Wych recognize and accept him as their grandson – securely placing him in the position of heir apparent. However, the Earl and Countess seem to be only family members who buy the story. But nobody appears willing to challenge the claim. Well, nobody except Ralph, who blatantly opposes the claim and calls his so-called cousin a fraud, which makes for an increasingly tense situation.

It makes for an uncomfortable and tense situation. A situation that becomes tense enough for someone to unload several cartridges from an automatic pistol in the library (where else?), but the identity of the victim is not as obvious you might expect.

Enter Inspector Bobby Owen and Chief Constable Glynne: who conduct a series of laborious interviews with the family, servants and several interested parties from the outside – such as one of the family lawyers and the local vicar. I have to mention here that the structure of the plot reminded me of a Ngaio Marsh's method of plotting, which often had a lead-up to the murder followed by a series of interviews by Inspector Roderick Alleyn. That's pretty much where the relevant comparisons ends, but I always associated this particular sequence with Marsh's mystery novels.

Anyhow, the interviews of the "people concerned were themselves all so striking and unusual in their different ways" and uncovers "a complicated interplay of characters and interests" – which allows Owen to compile two very important lists.

The first is a tabulation of "the Possibles," which consists of a nice and ordered list of suspects, motives and several pertinent questions, but it's the second list that'll be of main interest to most readers. A list of ten clues that Owen dubbed "star" clues and should help the reader with identifying the murderer. However, I should mention here that seasoned, experienced mystery readers and addicts will probably identify the murderer early on and work out the main lines of the plot long before coming across the list of clues. I immediately thought "what's this person up to" and "did this person just..." when the shots were fired, but that's hardly something that can be held against Punshon and shouldn't take anything away from this beautifully plotted Golden Age mystery.

Well, I know this review has been rather summary, but it's a difficult book to review in depth. I did not want to give away too much about the lead-up to the murder investigation and the second half consisted of a series of interviews, which do not lend themselves to the writing of descriptive, enticing reviews. That's why this review is both poor in details and writing.

So, I'll end this review by pointing out one of the aspects that attracts me to Punshon's work, which is what some view as a weakness in his work: namely his verbiage. Punshon was a very wordy writer, but it never annoyed me because expertly constructed plots and well-rounded characters accompanied it. It also gave the stories a strong sense of time-and place that stretched across the centuries. I simply appreciate it when there's a short, throwaway sentence that explained that a certain room in the castle had not witnessed a high-strung scene "since the early eighteenth century when a duel had been fought in it by candlelight." Or a character noting how his "remote, skin-clad ancestors would have felt so much more at home" in the surrounding, out-stretched forest than "he could ever be." That comes on top of the references World War I and the coming World War, which is in this book in the stages known as the Phony War.

As I said before, it gives the book a strong sense of time-and place, which I appreciate as much as a well constructed plot or a clever locked room mystery. Punshon never seems to disappoint in combining the first two (no locked rooms though) and that's why is becoming a personal favorite mine. 

Well, I'll try to pick a mystery for my next read that'll allow me to drawl on with a bit more substance. 

Previous reviews of Punshon's mysteries:

Crossword Mystery (1934)
Death Comes to Cambers (1935)
Comes a Stranger (1938) 

Ten Star Clues (1941) 

The League of Detectives

"I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life."

-  Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur C. Doyle's "The Red-Headed League," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892)

The 54th volume of Case Closed, known in a large chunk of the world as Detective Conan, continues where the previous book ended, which is with the concluding chapters of a peculiar story that began on a similar note as the Sherlock Holmes tale that provided the opening quote for this review.

In the final chapter of the previous volume, Eisuke Hondo directed the attention of Edogawa Conan and Richard Moore to a man who's grossly overpaid for simply picking up trash and bringing it to a parking lot – a whopping 50,000 yen per trip!

Something is rotten on the island of Japan! Of course, they soon stumble across a murder connected to the garbage collecting business: a woman was shot and killed in her home during what appears to have been botched burglary. The explanation for the shooting was simple enough, but everything became too involved and entangled where the missing jewelry was concerned – which dragged down a simple and lightweight story. However, the explanation for the bullet's trajectory remains a noteworthy aspect of the plot.

The second story in this volume finds Conan, Doc Agasa and members of the Junior Detective League on a snowboarding trip in the mountains. It's there where they meet a group of art college students. They're working on a prototype for their senior project, a snow sculpture, but something is deeply amiss within the group and, before long, one of them is discovered dead – drowned in a hot spring-fed lake beneath a cliff.

It's assumed it was a tragic accident, but Conan suspects foul play and starts to reconstruct what happened based on such clues as the taste of salt and a decapitated snowman. The solution was clever, if somewhat predictable. I think it would've worked better if it was expended upon and retooled as an impossible crime, in which it's suggested the murderer had the ability to be in two places at the same time, i.e. at the top of the cliff and by the lake beneath it. It really would've made for a better story.

The two subsequent stories are known in Japan as "Three Days with Hattori Heiji," who is called Harley Hartwell in the English editions, which are the main course of this and the next volume.

In the first story, a young Buddhist monk discovered the bloodied remains of a woman in an annex building of the monastery: the woman lying on the floor with "a knife in her gut," but when the police arrived the body had vanished without a trace – which include the blood that must have stained the tatami mats. The body reappears shortly after, but vanishes under the same, nearly impossible circumstances from the annex building. It's a minor, but fairly clever, story that could only occur in Japan. Well, under these particular conditions anyway.

The second part of the "Three Days" story-arc has Conan tagging along with Harley Hartwell to a deserted and isolated island. It’s the location for a TV-special about Japan's so-called "Teen Detectives," which include Natsuki Koshimizu ("Teen Detective of the South") and Yunya Tokitsu ("Teen Detective of the North"). Hartwell represents the West and Jimmy Kudo the East, but, in his "absence," his place was given to Saguru Hakuba who appeared in a similar case in volume 30 – but ends up surrendering his place to Conan. The game begins when a member of the TV-crew is found bound-and gagged in a locked room, but things soon become serious when one of the detectives is brutally murdered in just such a locked room.

Of course, this major case will be continued in the next volume, but, some years ago, I watched the TV-special based on this story and still remember its solution. So I can keep myself from immediately rushing to the next volume. However, I still found myself enjoying reading the original source material and Aoyama noted in his after word that he "spent a lot of time creating the idea for this locked room mystery," which I remember to be excellent. Once again, if you're not reading this series, you're simply robbing yourself.

By the way, despite that praise, I breezed disrespectfully through this review, but that’s because I'm trying to have a second review up tomorrow. Stay tuned. 

Booktaker

"Yes, a damned locked room."

- Lt. Eberhardt (Bill Pronzini's "The Pulp Connection," collected in Casefile, 1983)

After my previous review of Max Allan Collins' The Lusitania Murders (2002), I was dithering about what to read next: sample another one of Robert Arthur's contributions to The Three Investigators, pick up a holiday-themed mystery novel or return to the pile of unread E.R. Punshon mysteries? So, of course, I ended up picking something completely different.

Schemers (2009) numbers thirty-sixth in Bill Pronzini's ongoing series about the "Nameless Detective," which can be categorized as a "bibliomystery" with two seemingly impossible situations at the core of plot – both of them perpetrated in a private-library housing one of the finest collections of detective stories imaginable!

Crossing the threshold of Pollexfen's library is described as something akin to entering Aladdin's Cave: an interior light glints off the Mylar protectors wrapped around the bright, colorful spines and gives the impression of being hemmed in by mountains of precious stones. I think it's safe to say that most mystery aficionados would consider such a library to be a collection of gems. The place holds "upwards to fifteen thousand volumes" of detective fiction from the late nineteenth century and early 1900s, but also has "a fair representation of post-1950 authors and titles" – many of them signed and inscribed. It's some of those rarities that have gone missing. 

The missing items from the collection are Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance (1934), James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934),  Ellery Queen's The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) and Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929) and The Maltese Falcon (1930). Some of them are, what are known as, associating copies, which are books inscribed to fellow writers or famous people. Giving them considerable more value. There are, however, some anomalies making this everything but a routine case of theft or fraud, which is why the insurance company asked "Nameless" to investigate the claim.

First of all, nobody except Pollexfen had free, unlimited access to the library: the only key to the room was in his possession and there are double locks on all the (barred) windows and the door. Secondly, Pollexfen lacked the motivation to swindle his insurance company and obsessed over his collection like Captain Ahab, which comes on top of the obvious lack of traces of a burglary – which are a must if you want to swindle an insurance company. But there are more suspects in the home that houses "one big unhappy family."

Pollexfen has a wife, Angeline, and brother-in-law, Jeremy Cullrane, who are "money-grubbing alcoholics" and they would love to have gotten their greedy hands on half-a-million worth of books, but lacked opportunity and missed the knowledge to pick assemble a list of the most valuable titles. It is, however, determined by "Nameless" that a duplicate key could've been made, but that’s not how the books were spirited from the library. That answer turned a new page on a classic trick.

The second impossibility concerns "a sick new way of killing somebody" within the confines of a locked room and happens when two of the people mentioned above are found in the library: one of them unconscious and the other with his head blown-off by a shotgun blast. It's not difficult to figure out who's responsible for the murder, but the mystery lies in how it was done and the explanation requires an answer to the Chestertonian question of "how can a homicide not be a homicide" – and that answer is completely fair, plausible and original. I would also label it extremely risky and somewhat crazy, but I guess those are prerequisites for planning and committing a murder. 

I want to point out here that Schemers isn't the only bibliomystery in this hardboiled series: "The Pulp Connection" and "Booktaker," collected in Casefile (1983), which feature respectively a murdered pulp collector in his locked library and books and maps being stolen from a tightly secured store.

Interestingly, one of Pronzini's colleagues-in-crime, Lawrence Block, has two similar type of detective/rogue stories to his name that happened to feature some of the books that figured in Schemers. In "The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke," collected in both The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) and The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014), a book collector is murdered in his locked and private library and a first edition of Stout's Fer-de-Lance figures in the plot – which was inscribed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Burglar in the Library (1997) revolves around a rumored associating copy of The Big Sleep by Chandler, which according to legend has a written dedication to Dashiell Hammett. They're excellent and come recommended, if you like these types of mysteries.

Well, I was planning to end my review here, but I really just noticed I had completely ignored the second plot-thread from Schemers. No joke. I was too distracted by my personal obsession over locked room mysteries.

Schemers is one of the more recent novels and Nameless has shed his lone-wolf persona from the earlier books, which lead him to become more of a family man and began to share his workload – namely with Tamara Corbin and Jack Runyon. Runyon is the lone wolf of this new pack and he has been doing his best to crawl out of "his own personal hell."

The case Runyon has been assigned to is to find the titular schemer, who has been harassing members of the Henderson family, two adult brother in particular, and the book opened with this figure desecrating the grave of their father. This person poured acid over the urn and headstone. Spits several times on the grave and leaves a threatening message that things have only just begun. A promise that is being kept when one of the brothers is assaulted in his garage with a tire-iron and it quickly becomes clear to Runyon the actions of this person is rapidly escalating, which may end with him pouring acid on a living person.

This plot-thread is meant to add some tension to compliment to the more cerebral investigation Nameless is conducting, but the why-dun-it aspect of the case was genuinely interesting – even to a classicist like yours truly. After a while, you simply want to know where all that pure, unadulterated hate oozed from. The only part I found annoying was Tamara's contribution to both cases, which consists of walking around with "a big cat-ate-the-canary smile" and talks insistently how a certain Lucas Zeller gave her sex-life a much needed protein injection with his meat needle. She also looks up some stuff on the internet for the guys, but I found her mostly annoying in this outing.

Fortunately, that only covers a tiny portion of the book and the majority covers the chapters detailing a couple of well written, intricately plotted stories populated with believable, rounded characters. Basically, everything one has come to expect from one of the grandmasters of the genre.

Seven Days to Disaster

"Espionage, my son, is far from being a joke in these days. It's wide and it’s deep and it sinks under your feet—like that water out there. It runs much deeper than it ever did twenty-five years ago."

- Sir Henry Merrivale (Carter Dickson's Nine-and Death Makes Ten a.k.a. Murder in the Submarine Zone, 1940)

The Lusitania Murders (2002) is the fourth entry in Max Allan Collins' remarkable, but sadly discontinued, "Disaster Series" that "combined the factual with the fanciful" by hurling celebrated writers of popular fiction in disastrous, world-altering events and have them solve a range of problems – just before tragedy strikes!

Jacques Futrelle was the spiritual father of one of the immortal detectives of the printed page, "The Thinking Machine," who perished on the R.M.S. Titanic in 1912, but The Titanic Murders (1999) gave him a proper sendoff. The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001) gave Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzan fame a murder to investigate on the island of Hawaii mere days before the devastating attack that pulled the United States into World War II. The London Blitz Murders (2004) pits Agatha Christie against a depraved serial-killer, known as the "The Blackout Ripper," when the city was being pounded by the Luftwaffe, but The War of the Worlds Murder (2005) remains my personal favorite – in which Walter B. Gibson comes to the rescue of Orson Welles during the infamous Panic Broadcast.

Willard Huntington Wright was a "trailblazing art critic" and an important avant-garde figure in pre-World War I New York City. Wright was a "caustic critic of popular fiction," but would gain everlasting fame in that realm of the literary world as the man who brought the British-style, puzzle-oriented mystery novel to the Americas and created one of the most irritating, know-it-all snobs in the genre – the wisenheimer known as Philo Vance.

However, that chapter of his career began in the mid-1920s with the publication of The Benson Murder Case (1926), but The Lusitania Murder is set during the first week of May, 1915, when the titular ship left New York for Liverpool, England on what would be her final voyage. During those days, Wright was still somewhat of an acid-tongued critic and a professional journalist.

Collins exercised his artistic license to place Wright aboard the Lusitania, under the guise of a reporter seeking interviews with some of the famous guests, which is an operation done under the familiar pseudonym of "S.S. van Dine." However, there's an ulterior motive for his presence aboard.

The Lusitania was a luxury liner that could be easily converted into a battleship and there are persistent rumors that, in its capacity as a passenger liner, the ship is used to transport "ammunition, weapons and perhaps even high explosives" into a war zone – effectively blurring the lines "between commerce and combat." It makes "Big Lucy" a potential target for U-boats and saboteurs. So, as "S.S. van Dine," Wright has to gauge the veracity of those rumors for an article, but he also has a slight personal interest in the matter as a public germanophile with a pro-German stance.

In reality, Wright was blacklisted from journalism for his German sympathies, which happened after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917. There were also accusations of Wright being a spy for Germany. The picture Collins painted of him had a bit more nuance, which stated that although his "tastes run to Wagner, Goethe and Schopenhauer" it shouldn't be assumed he wears "a photo of the Kaiser in a locket" near his heart – which nudged him slightly into the neutral corner.

Anyhow, there's not just a possible secret, unlisted cargo of war supplies that requires Wright's attention, but there's also a small group of German stowaways found after departing from New York. Are they spies, saboteurs or merely part of a ring of thieves targeting the valuables of the first-class passengers? Whatever the answer is, someone wants to them out of the way and soon they're being targeted by a brutal, devious murderer.

Luckily, Wright receives help from the ship's detective, Philomina Vance, who's a Pinkerton operative with the deductive-skill of storybook detective and plays the Sabina Carpenter to Wright's John Quincannon. It's up to them to figure out whether the murders are connected to the possible war-connection the ship has with the Allied war effort or to the mysterious telegrams that some of the more prominent passengers received before departure. Or simply a fallout among thieves.

Collins used some of the actual passengers for this part of the plot, because they included a who's-who of the rich and famous from the early 1900s. They include multi-millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt. Philosopher and writer Elbert Hubbard. A well-known American theatrical producer with German-Jewish roots named Charles Frohman. The Belgian fund-raiser Marie DePage. Which are just a few of the notable names.

This makes The Lusitania Murders a well-written and researched novel, which pleasantly blurred the lines between fact and fiction without becoming too implausible. It must be, however, noted that this entry paid more attention to the characters and the ambient setting that other books in the series, which may have something to do with the time-period in which the story was written – as it was written in the aftermath of the terrorist-attacks on September 11, 2001. Collins mentioned in his after word that "for a number of days" he "did not feel like playing the role of entertaining," which was particular troubling to "a writer in the process of creating a confection based around another tragedy of war."

So this probably gave characters, setting and the looming disaster a bit of a precedent over an Agatha Christie-style drawing room mystery. More than is usual in this series. However, that doesn't mean the story is bare of clues or a decent plot, which it has, and I feel confident in stating that both readers of detective-and historical fiction will find enough between the pages of The Lusitania Murders to loose the track of time for a couple of hours.

Finally, I want to point out that the foreword imagines Van Dine would titled this book The Lusitania Murder Case, which is an appealing title, but he preferred a six-letter word preceding the murder case-bit. I know he wrote The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1938), but that was an exception (and a bit of a sell-out). I think something along the lines of The Cunard Murder Case or The Kaiser Murder Case would've been closer to a Van Dine approved title for this book.

I guess this is as good to end yet another long, rambling and shabbily written review and urge you to read this series for yourself. I'd recommend The War of the Worlds Murder in particular, which is simply wonderful. And has Orson Welles as one of the main characters!