On Thin Ice

"A crime has been committed by an unknown assassin, within a short distance of the principal streets of this great city, and is surrounded by an impenetrable mystery. Indeed, from the nature of the crime itself, the place where it was committed, and the fact that the assassin has escaped without leaving a trace behind him, it would seem as though the case itself had been taken bodily from one of Gaboreau's novels, and that his famous detective Lecoq alone would be able to unravel it."

- The Argus Newspaper (Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, 1886) 

Octavus Roy Cohen was a fiction writer who began in the editorial departments of several newspapers, such as the Birmingham Ledger, Newark Morning Star and The Bayonne Times, followed by opening his own law practice when he was admitted to the bar in 1913 – which he closed after only two years to become a full-time writer. Over the next five decades, Cohen would make a name for himself as an author of detective stories and comedic fiction, but also turned his pen to radio, television and movie plays. It was a long and extensive career. 

Jon Breen wrote a short piece about his crime-fiction, "A Note on Octavus Roy Cohen," which briefly touched upon one of his most controversial characters, Florian Slappey, who is now regarded as politically incorrect, but the article is chiefly concerned with Cohen's earliest series-character. 

David Carroll is a boyish-faced man in his late thirties and an amateur criminologist of some renown, which is a talent he often places at the disposal of his friend, Police Chief Eric Leverage. Between 1919 and 1922, Carroll appeared in four novels and one of them was once recommended as a locked room novel that was overlooked by Robert Adey when he compiled Locked Room Murders (1991). I can see why some would regard the book as a neglected impossible crime story, but I can also understand why others would contest their claim. But more on that later. 

The book in question is simply titled Midnight (1922) and takes place during the December reign of King Winter, which had come with freezing blasts that had turned the sidewalks into sheets of ice and forced the people to seek refuge "under mountains of blankets" – except for one taxi-driver, Spike Walters. Spike has to brave the mind numbing cold and navigate the frozen thoroughfares, but even on a wintry night he's able to pick up a fare from the steps of Union Station. A veiled woman, snugly wrapped in a long fur coat, carrying a purse and a large suitcase. 

Surprisingly, the handsomely dressed woman asks to be driven to an address in a poor, rundown neighborhood and Spike, chilled to the marrow, has a miserable journey, but suffering through the December gale is only the beginning of his night – as there's a surprise waiting for him in the backseat. Upon arrival, Spike says "here y'are, miss—No. 981," but she does not respond or opens the backdoor of the taxicab. She has disappeared, but someone else has taken her place: the body of a man, huddled on the floor, with a bullet wound in the chest! The situations seems like an impossible one. 

I think these first two chapters constitute the best parts of the story, which excellently set the mood and wonderfully depicted a city paralyzed by winter. One that has automobile-owners pouring alcohol into their radiators and cars skidding dangerously across the icy roads, but also shows its effect on Spike and how the biting cold even made the scalding, coffee-flavored liquid from the White Star Café seem like a comfort. 

You can almost feel the coldness blasting from the pages, but, once the police are called in, the plot eases into a regular, 1920s American-style whodunit and the title of the book can easily be changed into the Van Dinean The Warren Murder Case. It was even referred to as such by one of the characters! Anyhow...

Chief Leverage recognizes the dead man as Roland Warren, a moneyed man about town, but the professional bachelor recently got engaged to Miss Hazel Gresham – who's the "kid sister" of his best friend, Garry Gresham. However, the evidence shows Warren may’ve been planning to elope, but not with his young fiancé and this makes it even more pertinent that they find the veiled lady. There are, however, some additional obstacles: the suitcase yields no clues as to her identity and the victim’s ex-valet, William Barker, is obviously sitting on important information. 

So Leverage threatens bodily harm if Carroll refuses to butt in on "the taxicab tragedy," but "the circumstances smacked of the impossible" and "made an almost irresistible appeal to his love for the bizarre in crime." Carroll eventually manages to ferret out an explanation from the facts and suspects, which provides an answer to the seemingly impossible questions haunting the case. However, these answers will disqualify the story to some as an impossible crime story, because hardly anything remains of the concept of a locked room mystery once the murder is seen from the perspective of the perpetrator. It was never the intent of the murderer to create a baffling and inexplicable crime. But the characters and reader stumbled across the aftermath of this crime and its remnants gave off the impression of a locked room on wheels. 

Since the double-pronged impossibility from the opening chapter was provided with a rational and logical answer, I decided to tag it as a locked room and impossible crime, but some of you will probably disagree. 

So, all in all, a nice and fairly competently plotted detective story, which had a couple of well-written and memorable opening chapters, but the remainder of the book never managed to catch-up with the quality of those chapters. Overall, it was a nice read and I'll probably return to the David Carroll series, because I read some good and interesting comments about Six Seconds of Darkness (1918).

Thus far this short, lukewarm review. No idea what I'll pick up next, but I'll make an attempt not to overdose on impossible crime stories (like last month) and spread them out a bit.

Opening Night

"I've never before seen anything on the stage that impressed me so deeply."

- Chief-Inspector Roderick Alleyn (Ngaio Marsh's Enter a Murderer, 1935)

Alan Melville was a consummate entertainer with a varied and wide-ranging résumé: playwright, lyricist, actor, producer and raconteur, but gained name recognition as one of Britain's first television personalities, which he did as host of A to Z and as a panelist on a host of popular programs – such as The Brains Trust and What's My Line? Sadly, these accomplishments overshadowed his short-lived career as a mystery novelist.

During "a short burst of energy when he was in his twenties," Melville produced a number of light-hearted and humorous detective novels, but they were soon forgotten about and passed into literary oblivion. Fortunately, the British Library noticed them and reprinted two of them: Quick Curtain (1934) and Death of Anton (1936). I reviewed the latter several months ago and the very amusing, circus-set detective story recalled the works of Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. I was also reminded of Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon's satirical A Bullet in the Ballet (1937) and the equally fun Casino for Sale (1938). 

So I ushered the other reprint on to the short-list of detective novels to be relieved from the Mount-to-be-Read and my previous read, Come to Paddington Fair (1997) by Derek Smith, provided me with an excuse to pick up Quick Curtain – as both are theatrical mysteries about the on-stage shooting of a thespian. But they both take a vastly different approach in storytelling and resolving what is, essentially, the same problem.

Quick Curtain opens, fittingly, with a playbill of Blue Music, a musical comedy operetta, which is billed as a Douglas B. Douglas production. Douglas is "a master of publicity," of the subtle variety, who had London rumoring about the show before it had even been written. There were even a number of women, members of the Brandon Baker Gallery Club, who had parked themselves, two days before the opening, outside the entrance of the Grosvenor Theatre. What they got as a reward for their dedication, besides stiff necks and sore backs, was being present for the unexpected swan song of their idol.

Brandon Baker's character, "Jack," is shot in Act Two by "Phillipo," played by Hilary Foster, but when the trigger is squeezed the lead actress, Miss Eve Turner ("Coletta"), responds in a way that reminds one of the attending critics of "the famous tragediennes" of the stage – not without reason. The weapon seems to have been loaded with a live round and the man who discharged the fatal shot immediately disappears from the stage, but is soon found in his dressing-room "hanging by the neck." It looks like an open-and-shut case.

There is, however, one person in attendance who sees the hand of an unknown murderer at work: Inspector Wilson of Scotland Yard. He was in the audience with his son, Derek, who is a reporter on the Gazette and they immediately take charge of the case, which is done without much regard for proper police procedure, but they are a fun and memorable pair of characters – with a large depository of banter between them. I also have to add them to the short list of father-and-son detective teams mentioned in blog-post about Clifford Orr's The Dartmouth Murders (1929).

Inspector Wilson and Derek make an actual attempt at reconstructing and explaining the crime, but the comedic tone and some sparks of insanity prevail. However, these make for some fun scenes and sequences. I particularly loved the funeral scene! Several members of the Gallery Club obtained admission to the church and they "stormed the pews like a mass attack going over the top in the trenches," which had its objective the securing of a number of mementos and resulted in them ripping "the church bare of its lilies, carnations and lilac inside a couple of minutes." They even removed chunks from the prayer-books and hymnals strewn on the pews. I think the Brandon Baker Gallery Club is one of the earliest depictions in pop-culture of the creature known as the rabid fangirl.

Derek also contributes some fun to the case by following a potential lead to Crailes, a village in Buckinghamshire, which he does under an alias, "J. Hopkinson," but this will land him a spot of trouble after dispatching a chain of cryptically worded telegrams to his father – eventually arousing suspicion in the local postmistress, Miss Ethel Prune. After the body of a woman is found in Craile Woods, Derek is taken into custody when the local constable learns of the odd telegrams and alias.

So, as a comedic spoof of the detective story, the book is a roaring success, but, purely as a mystery, the plot got the short end of the stick.

Sure, the false solution by Inspector Wilson was not exactly a jaw-dropper, but perfectly acceptable, which even had a fairly clever, if simple, use for the stage in relation to the supposed direction of the shot. But then the letters were delivered. Letters that poked the detective story in the eye, punched it in the nose and buried a knee in its groin. Dorothy L. Sayers was correct when she said Melville blasted "the solemn structure of the detective novel sky-high" and this approach did not exactly do any miracles for the concept of fair-play either.

Quick Curtain is really a light-comedy that uses the detective story as a vehicle, but the book is still a very fun and amusing read. So, if you don't mind the author poking a finger between your ribs, the book comes very much recommended to even the staunchest purist. However, if you want to read something amusing with a more traditional plot-structure by Melville, I recommend you pick up Death of Anton.

Gun Play

"Murder isn’t like love, it doesn't happen at first sight."

- Jeff Troy (Kelley Roos' Made Up to Kill, 1940)

Several years ago, I reviewed Whistle Up the Devil (1954) by Derek "Howe-Dun-It" Smith, a beloved book collector and crime-fiction enthusiast, who wrote a handful of detective novels in the vein of John Dickson Carr – which were consigned to obscurity for over half a century. As obscure as the book may be, Whistle Up the Devil has always enjoyed a solid reputation among the connoisseurs of the impossible crime stories and could be obtained on the secondhand book market. But its sequel became one of the scarcest collectibles in the genre.

Smith failed to secure a publisher for his second Algy Lawrence mystery, Come to Paddington Fair (1997), but a Japanese collector, Mori Hideo (?), took the manuscript home and financed a limited print-run of less than one hundred copies – published by Murder by the Press in English. So you could, technically, get hold of a copy, but I assume the book was not widely read upon its initial publication. Still, I bet collectors had an easier time acquiring one of these limited editions than finding copies of Ayresome Johns' Pattern of Terror (1987) and A Spectre-Room of Fancy (1989). 

John Pugmire of Locked Room International rescued Smith from the dreaded fate of biblioblivion and published The Derek Smith Omnibus (2014), which consisted of three novels and one short story. As well as an introduction by one of the genre's most noted locked room experts, Robert Adey, who knew Smith personally. A year later, Pugmire published Whistle Up the Devil and Come to Paddington Fair separately. However, the third novel from the omnibus edition, Model for Murder (1952), was branded by reviewers as mediocre and was not reissued by itself. 

But all of Smith's impossible crime fiction is finally available and the twosome of Algy Lawrence mysteries are a feast for everyone who loves traditional detective stories. 

Come to Paddington Fair is dedicated to the memory of John Dickson Carr, "Lord of the Sorcerers," but the structure of the plot resembles the work of another Golden Ager, namely Ngaio Marsh, who was the undisputed Queen of the Theatrical Mystery and wrote a score of detective stories set in the spotlight of the stage – such as Enter a Murderer (1935), Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) and Off with His Head (1957). However, the book (IMHO) still qualifies as an impossible crime story, but Algy and Chief Inspector Castle do not realize, until right before the end, they were trying to solve "the mystery of yet another crime which couldn't possible have been committed." 

So we have an impossible crime novel posing as a Marsh-style theatrical mystery, but the opening of the book tore a page from the hardboiled playbook.

Chinese edition

Richard Mervan is a low-grade bank clerk and one who briefly became a hero when he fought off a street mugger, which left him with a blood-stained shirt and a sore neck. His assailant attempted to snatch his briefcase, belonging to the bank, but Mervan never felt his employers appreciated what he did and this planted the seed for an audacious crime – which ended with a stretch in prison for looting the bank's strong-room. And his capture and imprisonment was the result of a double-cross by his partner in crime and love interest, Miss Lesley Barre. This made Mervan very, very resentful and a bit murderous. 

Chief Inspector Steve Castle pays a visit to Mervan in his prison cell and offers him a final opportunity to come clean, because he likes "to tie up all the loose ends neatly." Castle knew he had an accomplice, who betrayed him and took the money, but Mervan refused to take a reduced sentence in exchange for the whole story and this worried the inspector. He knows the prisoner is a broken man with an obsession and that makes him very dangerous. However, Mervan remains stalwart in his silence and only the readers hears him muttering an oath that he'll find and kill Lesley.

Skip ahead several years and Castle received and Castle received, anonymously send, "tickets for the matinee at the Janus," which are for a mystery play, entitled The Final Trophy, but the theatre tickets came with "a curious message" printed on a piece of pasteboard: "COME TO PADDINGTON FAIR." So he consults Algy Lawrence, a bright young man with "lazy blue eyes," who gained a reputation as an amateur detective and they decide to attend the play. However, the play was given a slightly different ending by the hand of an unknown murderer and this person effectively gave them a front row seat to the on-stage murder of the lead actress, Lesley Christopher. 

During the third act, the character played by Lesley, "Marilyn," is shot by "Regan," played by Philip Trent, but this time a real bullet struck her in the chest and laughter is heard coming from one of the theatre boxes – as "the lights faded in a complete black-out." 

Luckily, Algy immediately sprang to action and helped apprehend Mervan. He was the one who laughed and found to be in possession of the proverbial smoking gun, but the case is not as easily solved as all that. The fatal bullet was not fired with Mervan's gun and this forces the detectives to poke around behind the stage-set, because it seems that someone had tempered with the stage revolver. Someone, "an unknown hand," had taken out the blank cartridges and had "filled it with six shiny messengers of death." 

A Packed House!

So one of the main questions is who was in a position to switch the blanks for live rounds, but they also have to wade through the undercurrents and cut a pathway through the dense web of cross-relationships dominating the world behind the stage – which keeps them both occupied for the better part of the book. Once they removed all of the extraneous matter, they're confronted witness who turns this fairly strange shooting into "a dark miracle." It was an impossible crime all along! Several pages later, the reader is confronted with an Ellery Queen-style "Challenge to the Reader," which is a request to the reader to "PAUSE FOR REFLECTION" and "play the great game of WHODUNIT? and HOW?"

The final twist, that turned this into an impossible murder, is very clever and tricky, which showed Smith's talent for crafting multi-layered plots, but I was able to (roughly) work out how the shooting was pulled off – because the shooting resembled an impossibility from one of Carr's stage-plays from the early 1940s (c.f. 13 to the Gallows, 2008). Whereas Carr's trick is simple and elegant, Smith opted for pure intricacy and got a lot of mileage out of it. 

Granted, the impossible angle should probably have been introduced earlier on in the story, but regardless, the book is an excellent specimen of the theatrical mystery and the impossibility should be seen as the cherry on top. Only thing that can be really said against Come to Paddington Fair is that it doesn't bat in the same league as its predecessor, Whistle Up the Devil, but both novels make you mourn the fact that Smith was never allowed to expand the series pass those two superb mystery novels. 

Finally, if you, like me, enjoyed Come to Paddington Fair, you might find the following theatrical mysteries equally appealing, because they also happen to feature a locked room problem:  Christianna Brand's Death of Jezebel (1948), Ngaio Marsh's Off with His Head, Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Deadline (1984), The Gold Curse (1986) and The Gold Gamble (1989).
 

By the way, the title of this blog-post is a reference to another theatrical mystery. Can you guess which novel I'm referencing? 

So far this blog-post and I'll try to pick a non-impossible crime story for the next one.

The Oldest Trick in the Book

"Now, brought to this conclusion in so unequivocal a manner as we are, it is not our part, as reasoners, to reject it on account of apparent impossibilities. It is only left for us to prove that these apparent 'impossibilities' are, in reality, not such.”

- C. Auguste Dupin (Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgues," originally published in Graham's Magazine in 1841)

Back in late July, a scathing blog-post appeared on The Invisible Event, "The Lazy Waste of Time That is Classic Locked Room Mysteries (Ed. David Stuart Davies 2016)," in which JJ berated the editor of a recently published anthology of impossible crime stories for the shameful laziness that yawns at you from behind its table of content – as nearly all of the stories were previously published in either The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) or The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014).

There were two further entries: one of them a non-impossible crime story (!) plucked from the Sherlock Holmes canon and the other a locked room tale by Davis himself, which he had previously added to the lineup of Vintage Mystery and Detective Stories (2006). So you can understand the disappointment upon discovering that this brand new collection, promisingly entitled Classic Locked Room Mysteries (2016), turned out to be one of the laziest and cheapest anthologies in existence.

As a response to JJ, I compiled a blog-post, "The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist," in which I assumed the role of armchair anthologist and imagined a hypothetical collection of locked room and impossible crime stories – all of them out-of-copyright. I had only read half of the short stories I listed and selected the other half with the help Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991), but both columns had one thing in common: they were rarely, if ever, included in any of the well-known locked room anthologies.

I compiled the list to demonstrate how easy it was to create a brand new and appealing collection of short stories by simply culling "fresh" material from the public domain, but JJ, with the zeal of a true believer, immediately set out to work and turned the book into reality – which is now available to everyone free-of-charge. The book is called Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums (2016) and you can download it in various formats here.

I'm well aware that you can't review something you had a hand in yourself. Well, obviously, you can do that, but we mockingly refer to that in my country as een slager die zijn eigen vlees keurt (a butcher judging the quality of his own meat). However, the book is only a collection of short stories from the 1800-and early 1900s. So why can't read and talk about the ones I had not read before? Besides, you know I can only be stopped obsessing over impossible crime stories by being beaten in a messy knife fight on top of a speeding train.

Well, that should give me a ghost of an excuse for the questionable ethics behind this review...

So I'll be giving the following entries a pass, not because they're bad (far from it), but I had either already read them or even reviewed them, which consists of the following short stories: "Rhampsinitus and the Thief" (c. 440 BC; reviewed here) by Heredotus, "The Suicide of Kiaros" (1887) by L. Frank Baum, "The Story of the Lost Special" (1898) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Mystery of the Circular Chamber" (1898) by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, "The Mystery of the Flaming Phantom" (1907; reviewed here) by Jacques Futrelle and "Flashlight" (1918; reviewed here) by Laurance Clarke.

Anne and Annabella Plumptre's "The Spectre of Presburg: A Hungarian Tale" is a 198-year-old novella from Tales of Wonder (1818) and an early incarnation of both the locked room mystery and the more widely defined stories of impossible crimes – as the plot concerns a ghostly apparition vanishing from a room under observation. The story is set during the first half of the eighteenth century and "the troubles which agitated the continent of Europe on the death of Charles the Sixth," which "afforded ample matter for the pen of the historian to expatiate upon." One of these events happened in the small town of Presburg.

A large number of troops were assembled in the town, who occupied nearly every public house, but the backdrop of this story is one particular inn where the soldiers had turned the largest space into a mess-room – passing their evenings round a crackling fire, drinking and discussing "that awful histories of specters." So one evening, after the stroke of twelve, the door of the mess-room opened and an officer in an Austrian uniform entered. Someone recognized him as Count Molziewitz, but the solemn figure walked silently across the room, head down, entering a second room and "was seen no more." They later learn that the Count was killed in battle prior to his ghost being seen at the inn and he makes a second appearance only a week later. However, the ghost of Count Molziewitz is not the only entity roaming the demon-haunted region of Presburg: a figure of a giant man has been seen wandering along the misty mountain passes a stone's throw away from the town.

The explanations for these supernatural phenomena are fairly straightforward and almost what you'd expect from a story this old, but certain aspects of the plot foreshadows the locked room mysteries that would appear over the next one-hundred years. I assume this story was too obscure to have had any serious influence over the development of the genre, but, when framed as a detective story, it was somewhat ahead of its time. But to do this story justice, it should be read as a ghost story with a logical and natural conclusion.

Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens" originally appeared in an 1858 issue of The Atlantic Monthly and collected in The Diamond Lens and Other Stories (1887), but the story is a bit of an odd duck in this collection. The story basically consists of three components: the first part is a prologue in which the narrator, a Mr. Linley, tells about his childhood fascination with microscopes and how it allowed him to look pass "the dull veil of ordinary existence" – which became an all-consuming obsession during his adult life. In the second part, Linley consults a medium, Mrs. Vulpes, who brings him into contact with the spirit of my compatriot and the Father of Microbiology, Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek.

The spirit tells him to create a lens from "a diamond of one hundred and forty carats" and expose it to electro-magnetic currents, which would rearrange its atoms and form a stone that's, essentially, a universal lens. But to get his hands on such a precious stone, Linley has to bloody them first and engineers the "suicide" of the owner of such a diamond. Of course, the body was left in a room that appeared to have been locked from the inside. Finally, the last part of the story tells of the wondrous world Linley discovered with the titular lens and this portion can be described as one of those scientific romances from the era of Jules Verne. A very strange story, but a well-written one that tells an intriguing story.

Two observations about the locked room situation: how could the servant "peeped through the keyhole" and saw the body when only few paragraphs before it was mentioned that the key was inside the lock? Secondly, the whole murder plot bears a striking resemblance to the one on from L. Frank Baum's "The Suicide of Kiaros," but Baum (IMHO) delivered the better locked room mystery.

Victorien Sardou's "The Black Pearl" came from the pages of Three Romances (1888) and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the story takes place in the Netherlands. The story is set during a period when the Province of Flevoland was still below the troubled waters of an inland sea, De Zuiderzee, which blew a cold, harsh wind across the landscape and canals of North-Holland – accompanied by heavy rain and thunder. And it's in this hondenweer (bad weather), that the two principle characters are introduced: Balthazar van der Lys and Cornelius Pump. A couple of friends who happened to bump into each other, but the former drags the latter back to his home where they exchanged some good news about their personal lives. Both men have the intention of getting married, but the celebratory mood sours when Balthazar discovers that his study has been ransacked.

The window was closed and the study was fitted with a massive door, "which was provided with an old-fashioned brass lock," a type that's only used "in the Netherlands at present time," but this did not prevent a thief from taking all of the ducats, florins and jewels – without leaving a trace behind. The police suspects Pump's fiancée, Christina, but he comes up with an entirely different explanation for the miraculous theft. As Adey observed, the explanation is inventive enough, but hardly a credible one.

H. Greenbough Smith's "The Case of Roger Carboyne" was published in the September 1892 edition of The Strand Magazine and is one of the shorter stories from this collection, which takes place during an inquest on the body of Roger Carboyne in North Wales. Carboyne was spending his Easter holiday on a riding tour when, one day, his friend heard a scream, "uttered as if in extremity of agony or terror," but he had completely vanished – only leaving behind evidence of a struggle in the snow. However, there were no footprints in the snow. A similar problem arises when his body is found on a plateau and "the snow was absolutely undisturbed." A last-minute witness, who acts as a deus ex machina, gives the explanation but you can probably work out what happened from the given evidence. A fairly simple, but fun, short story.

Tom Gallon's "The Mystery of the Locked Room" was lifted from the June 3, 1905 issue of The Pictorial Magazine and prompted the following post by JJ, "Some Reflections on Editing," which kind of spoiled the story for me, because I had to see the illustration from its publication in the Chicago Daily Tribune – which did a thoroughly good job at giving the whole game away. The problem concerns the theft of a diamond necklace from a locked hotel room and the only clues were the peculiar behavior of the burglar: a cardboard box of chocolates had been half emptied and a jewel box that was not even locked was left untouched. Even if you've seen the illustration, you might instinctively guess the correct solution, because in 1905 this trick was already old hat and the person behind the theft was rather obvious.

Granddaddy Poe!

So it's a rather unchallenging mystery owning some debt to a pair of rather famous short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle, but not an unpleasant one to read.

Rafael Sabatini made his name as an author of romance and adventure novels, such as The Sea Hawk (1915) and Scaramouche (1921), which is reflected in one of his short stories, "Plague of Ghosts," originally published in a 1907 issue of The Storyteller and has a reformed criminal, Capoulade, as its protagonist – who is send on a mission to Château de la Blanchette. A mission involving an infestation of ghosts and a ring of counterfeiters.

The impossible situation presented in this story is interesting and shows some imagination: out of a luminous cloud emerged in an immensely tall figure, "swathed in a winding sheet," surmounted by "a hideously grinning skull" with "eyeballs of glowing fire." A character takes a shot at the ghost with a brace of horse-pistols, but the ghost responded with a burst of laughter and a skeleton hand dropped the two bullets on the ground. Sabatine gave a logical explanation for the phantom's bullet-catch trick, but now how the ghostly effects were accomplished. Jacques Futrelle's "The Mystery of the Flaming Phantom," published around the same time, handled a similar plot and impossibility with far more skill and ingenuity. That being said, I loved the moment when the ghost laughed and dropped the bullets. 

M. McDonnell Bodkin's "The Unseen Hand" comes from The Quests of Paul Beck (1908) and can be categorized as a railway mystery, in which a ticket collector stumbles across the body of the sole occupant of a carriage – a violent blow had "cracked the skull like an egg-shell." Mr. Paul Beck is summoned to take complete control of the case and constructs a particular ingenious, but very risky, method from such clues as the foul smell of asafetida, the strength of the blow and a missing item from the victim’s home. As I said, the trick is very risky and probably impossible to pull off on the first attempt, but Bodkin obviously gave the idea some thought.

Half a year ago, I reviewed another short story by Bodkin, "The Murder on the Golf Links," which was collected by Martin Edwards in Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015).

A. Demain Grange's "The Round Room Horror" is an obscure tale from a long-defunct publication, Everybody's Story Magazine, which published this particular story in March 1911. JJ dedicated an entire blog-post to the work he had done on tracking down and editing this particular story, which is well-worth a read in itself and the work was more than worth it – because this long-forgotten sealed room mystery is an interesting item for the period. The 1910s was not a decade known for its impossible crime fiction.

The round chamber of the story-title is a fortified tower room in Tor Hall, "a roomy, Jacobean mansion" situated "in one of the loneliest spots in England," which became the home of John Morden. A older man in his late sixties and reputedly possesses a great wealth, but his character had several marked peculiarities and one of them was "a morbid dread to be assassinated in his sleep." So he picked as his bedroom the impenetrable and windowless tower room, "used in former times as a muniment-room," but the heavy iron door proved insufficient to guarantee his safety. However, it took an entire party of workmen and several hours to remove "the ponderous mass of metal."

What they found inside the round tower room was the body of its owner, lying in his bed, with a deep, bloody wound in his forehead. A wound that was inflicted by a long, sharp instrument that was triangular in shape. It appears to be an insoluble problem and this attracts the attention of Montague Steele, who has some "brilliant achievements in the detection of crime," but even he struggled at first with the problem of the sealed nature of the room. Eventually, Steele reconstructs the complex and involved method of the murderer, based on the dimensions of the room and the murder weapon, which showed the genre as a whole was definitely moving away from the clichés of the previous century – which consisted of hidden passages, murderous animals and unknown poisons.

On the other hand, we have the murderer's identity... I mean... really, Grange? You picked that character to be the killer of this noteworthy locked room story from the early parts of the previous century? Well, you can’t have everything, I suppose.

Finally, the end of this overlong review comes on a lighter note with Herbert Beerbohm Tree's "The Mystery of Howard Romaine," from Nothing Matters and Other Stories (1917), which is the literary companion to MacKinlay Kantor's humorous "The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz" – collected in It's About Crime (1960). A large, heavy object disappears under seemingly impossible circumstances in both short stories: Kantor made a baby grand piano vanish from an upstairs room, while Tree pulled off a similar trick with a pine-wood coffin containing the body of a washed-up actor who had previously committed suicide. The presentations of both impossibilities and the slightly sardonic sense of humor were very similar, but the given explanations and respective resolutions were very different. Regardless, the professional anthologist should keep these two short stories in mind for any future locked room anthology, because they ought to be published as companion pieces.

So, far another one of my seemingly never-ending blog-posts about a handful of short stories. I can never keep this kind of reviews very short, but I hope you found my commentary fair and keep in mind there are six additional tales in Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums. I can particular recommend the ones written by Baum, Doyle and Meade.

Well, I'll try to keep it short for my next review. Whatever it may be.  

Down the Garden Path

"Yes, yes, murder is never very pleasant, is it?"

- Midsomer Murders (Garden of Death, 2000)

Over the past fifteen years, a whole flock of once obscure and long-forgotten mystery writers found their way back into print, which introduced a score of names to my list of favorite crime-fiction authors – such as Clyde B. Clason, Stuart Palmer and Kelley Roos. A recent addition to that list is E.R. Punshon. 

Punshon has nearly fifty novels to his name and thirty-five of them are detective novels about his series character, Bobby Owen, who walked on the scene as a young police constable (Information Received, 1933) and retired as a Commander of Scotland Yard (Six Were Present, 1956). However, one should not assume Punshon was merely an early pioneer of our modern-day police procedural. Punshon had a fertile imagination and possessed the ornamental writing-style of the early twentieth century, which some condemned as wasted verbiage, but I love how he was able to bring a room to life by pointing out a candlelit duel had once been fought in it – c.f. Ten Star Clues (1941).

I can appreciate a well conceived sense of time and place as much as a clever and solidly constructed plot, which is another one of Punshon's talent as a mystery novelist. Punshon justly received praise for his labyrinthine-like plots and ability to manipulate multiple plot-threads, like a practiced puppeteer, without his yarns becoming a tangled mess. A veritable artisan of webwork plotting!

So this resulted in over thirty well written, atmospheric and often excellently plotted detective novels that helped "kindly Mr. Punshon," as Anthony Gilbert called him, secure a spot on my list of favorite mystery novelists. A lot of these talents are reflected in the subject of this blog-post.

The Dark Garden (1941) is the sixteenth entry in the Bobby Owen series and one of the earlier books from the Wychshire period, which began (unofficially) in Murder Abroad (1939) and comprises of nine novels in total – constituting his body of wartime crime-fiction. Officially, Owen simply has to double "the parts of head of the not very extensive Wychshire C.I.D." with "that of private secretary to the chief constable," but Colonel Glynne always seemed to be sidelined in these novels. In this case, the chief constable is "recovering from a severe attack of pleurisy." So this leaves Owen in charge of all the big investigations, which occur often enough in this countryside district that it makes you suspect Wychshire County borders Midsomer County. Anyhow...

The story begins with a visit to the office of Bobby Owen by a local farmer, Mr. Osman Ford, who is a grim, dour man with angry eyes and a dark expression. Ford has enthusiastic plans to expand his farm, called Roman Ends, but these plans require funds and there's a sum of five-thousand pounds available, but the money belongs to his wife – which is held in trust on her behalf by a solicitors firm. Mr. Nathaniel Anderson is one of the senior partners in the firm and refuses to discuss the matter with Ford, because the money belongs to his wife, which angered the short-tempered farmer and he's convinced the money has been embezzled. However, Owen advices him to consult a lawyer, but this only angered Ford even more.

Not long after this confrontation, Owen hears that Ford has been airing threats against the lawyer and this is potentially a problem, because there have been persisted rumors that Ford has killed before – a young rival to his wife affection was found dead in an icy canal. Officially, there was "not an atom of proof" for murder and the affair was dismissed as an unfortunate accident, but there was still "lots of talk and gossip."

So Owen decided to give an unofficial warning to the farmer and determined to visit Anderson for further information, but what he finds there resembles a psychiatrist’s waiting room rather than a solicitor's office. Everyone who works there seems to be either obsessed or suffer from some sort of neurosis.

Anderson lives separate from his estranged wife, but has a relationship with one of the office secretaries, Miss Anne Earle, who was a foundling and only recently she was contacted by a long-lost aunt, Mrs. Augusta Jordan. However, Miss Earle's background as an orphan left their marks on her character and these markings drive most of her actions. She also has a much younger admirer among the office employees: a fair-haired, long-legged youth named Billy Dwight. The young man probably saw his employer as an elderly seducer and probably was the person who seen fleeing from Miss Earle's cottage (after being shot at). Arthur Castles is an office clerk, but also the son and grandson of the founders of the office, which the family lost after financial problem and Anderson made sure the boy got an education and a position in the office – which resulted in conflicted feelings within him. On the one hand, Castles is grateful for the opportunities given to him by Anderson, but he always wondered what part he played in the downfall of his father. Finally, there's the second senior partner, George Blythe, who shuns woman and is very passionate about his charity work for Hopewell House, which provides a home for homeless boys who might otherwise have drifted into mischief.

So there you have a glimpse of the intricate web of character-relationships and potential motives, which Owen have to give serious consideration after Anderson goes missing and turns up again halfway through the book – floating in a canal with a bullet hole in his back!

At one point, Owen visits the sickbed of Colonel Glynne to give his report and remarks that whole case "seems to have its roots in the past," because his investigation is littered with references to past happenings: a baby left on a doorstep a quarter of a century ago and bankruptcy from the same period. A wife leaving her husband several years ago. A drowning of a young man who would have been middle-aged today, etc. But there are also several tangible clues: such as an expensive, fur-lined glove that was dumped in the canal and the sum of five-thousand pounds that turns up in several accounts.

All of this can be read as a slow, meticulous crescendo that builds towards a memorable chase scene in the titular garden, in which someone takes shots at Owen with a gun that has a silencer. So he only hears soft pops as bullets whiz past his head. Evidently, Punshon also knew how to write suspense and this becomes even more apparent with the final dénouement over a freshly dug grave. Arguably one of the greatest denouncements of a murderer in all of detective-fiction. A fantastic and atmospheric scene that's only marred by the murderer's identity, which was a bit obvious and anti-climactic, but very forgivable in this instance – since I found the story as whole very good, interesting and somewhat unusual.

It's another example that Golden Age mysteries were not primarily about restoring order. Sure, the case can be shelved as solved, but the final tally is as dark as it depressing. There really are no winners in this book.

So The Dark Garden is not as great as some of Punshon's best work, such as Death Comes to Cambers (1935), Diabolic Candelabra (1942) and There's a Reason for Everything (1945), but still an excellent showcase of his talents as a mystery novelist.

On a final, unrelated note: JJ published the short story collection, Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums (2016), I conceptualized in this blog-post and the book is a free-of-charge. My next blog-post will (most likely) be about this locked room collection.

So... why are you still here? Why aren't you downloading and reading all of those free locked room stories? Go! Shoo-shoo!

A Pathway Through Time

"But suppose a whole street disappeared, a whole thoroughfare blotted from London. What could be more fantastic?"

- Henri Bencolin (John Dickson Carr's The Lost Gallows, 1931)

Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005) is his tenth novel to be carried across the language barrier by John Pugmire, founder of Locked Room International, which is the fourth entry in the Frenchman's series about Owen Burns and Achilles Stock – both of whom previously appeared in Le roi du désordre (The Lord of Misrule, 1996) and Les sept merveilles du crime (The Seven Wonders of Crime, 1997). They also appeared in a couple of short stories, "The Flower Girl" and "The Cleaver," collected in La nuit du loup (Night of the Wolf, 2000).

Owen Burns is reportedly modeled on Oscar Wilde, "a dandy aesthete who appreciates murder as a fine art," but the opening chapter of The Phantom Passage finds Burns as bored as Sherlock Holmes in the first pages of "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" (His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, 1917). Burns condemns the city of London as a town "born out of boredom and desolation" and a place where all "the phantoms of the planet" come to retire. However, his friend and personal chronicler, Achilles Stock, remembered him stating the exact opposite and something was actually happening on the fog-bound streets of Edwardian-era London: a convicted murderer, Jack Radcliffe, escaped from prison and the police is out in full force – most of their activity taking place practically underneath their windowsill.

But the problems that are about to be visited upon them are only slightly connected to the manhunt for the escaped convict.  

Ralph Tierney is an American diplomat and an old acquaintance of Burns, whom he met during his stay at the University of Chicago, but the Tierney had the rotten luck to bear a striking resemblance to Radcliffe. As a result, he has been hounded by the police through "a labyrinth of dark alleys and passageways," but what he witnessed in one of these streets made him decide to fetch the help of his old friend. When Tierney wandered into a dark, obscure passageway, called Kraken Street, a madman wearing a large coat and a battered top hat approached him.

The man guided Tierney pass the bend of the street, to a hovel, where two equally peculiar characters were sitting on the porch: a woman in red, "Vivian the fairy," and a blind fruit seller, but since he was completely worn and tired he accepted the offer of a room and bed – which is where he found "a strange room" with a view. Tierney saw a peculiar light in the window, but what he saw through it was even stranger: a violent scene from what appeared to be the past. Something that appears to have taken place decades ago.

So after the vision began to blur and merge with the blackness of the night, Tierney did what most people would've done in his place: he turned around and left cartoon smoke. However, when he was just outside of the passage he wanted to light a cigarette, but discovered he probably lost his lighter at the hovel, but Kraken Street had disappeared! The passageway from which he had just emerged was now "a high brick wall without any openings." As if "the shadows had swallowed it."

They soon uncover Tierney was not the first person to wander into the passage and witnessed its visionary power in the upstairs room, which even caught the attention of both the newspaper and the police. One newspaper reporter described the phantom passage as "a monstrous serpent" coiled "between houses and only appearing when it was in search of a victim." 

This is a nice piece of Carrian imagery on Halter's part and the plot-thread that concerns this haunted passage represents the strongest part of the plot, because Halter provided an explanation that did not traverse the expected route for this kind of impossibility.

As we know from such large-scale impossible crime stories as Ellery Queen's "The Lamp of God," collected in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (1940), and Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop (1945) there's a definite limit to the variety of explanations one can propose to the explain the miraculously disappearance of a large, stationary house – which is why so few mystery writers tried their hands at it. And probably why there are less than a handful about entire streets being blotted from existence.

So Halter should be commended for not only venturing out in this infrequently traversed side street of the impossible crime story, but also for dreaming up a clever and satisfying explanation that was very different from the other solutions I've seen for disappearing houses and streets. Halter's explanation also made me feel slightly embarrassed over my initial suspicion of the brick wall. I suspected the alley might have been privately owned property (used for nefarious activities) and the entrance had a drawbridge-like "door," which looked like a blind wall when raised and resembled pavement when lowered. It sounds idiotic, I know, but how many ways can you think of to remove an entire street from the map? Luckily, Halter found a different method to accomplish this feat.  

Anyway, there are several murders, suicides and disappearances connected to the phantom passage, which were often brought to light or predicted by the lighted window of the dingy hovel. I appreciated what Halter tried to do with these plot-threads and they did make for some pleasing patterns in the overarching plot, but this aspect of the book was marred by the slender clueing – making it very difficult to arrive at exactly the same conclusion as Burns. I can look pass that in this instance, because Halter already gave the reader a wondrous and original impossible situation.

However, I was not so charmed about the explanation for visions from the past and future. I guess it was to be expected, but I think Halter went a bit far when suggesting that some of the effects could be achieved with cigar smoke. So, no, I was not impressed with this part of the plot and Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of the Crystal Gazer," from Best Thinking Machine Detective Stories (1973), is a better example of this kind of impossibility – as far-fetched as the story may be.

So these three aspects of The Phantom Passage demonstrate why so many of us have a love-hate relationship with Halter, but, overall, I enjoyed this one. If only for the wonderful and excellent treatment of the vanishing street.

On a side note, I want to point out there's one aspect of the solution that was anticipated in a series of episode from Tantei Gakuen Q (Detective Academy Q), namely The Kamikakushi Village Murders, which begins with a prologue (ep. 16) and takes up the next five episode. I won't say what it is, but you should recognize a very interesting idea that was used for something completely different in those episodes.

Finally, you might want to take a peek at my previous blog-post, which is a review of an episode from Blacke's Magic and also deals with the problem of a vanishing street. So that's all for now. My next review or blog-post will probably not be that of a locked room mystery, but no promises there.