Two Shooter

"Locked rooms and mysterious disappearances smack of deliberate subterfuge."

- Sabina Carpenter (Bill Pronzini's "Gunpowder Alley," a 2012 uncollected short story)

Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Dangerous Ladies Affair (2017) is the fifth in their recent series of historical locked room mysteries about a pair of private-investigators, namely John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, who operate in the San Francisco of the late 1890s, but their first recorded case dates back more than thirty years – beginning with the eponymously titled Quincannon (1985). The characters would go on to appear in the splendid Beyond the Grave (1986) and a whole slew of short stories. Some of them were collected (e.g. Quincannon's Game, 2005), but the most recent ones are, as of now, uncollected.

Several years ago, the stories about Carpenter and Quincannon were, sort of, rebooted as a series of full-length detective novels and sometimes materials from the short stories were expanded upon. Such as "The Bughouse Caper," from Quincannon's Game, which was taken apart and used as the basis for ongoing story-line about a scattered-brain figure, who claimed to be Sherlock Holmes, that began with The Bughouse Affair (2013) – finally concluding two novels later in The Body Snatchers Affair (2015). That last title was also an expansion of a short story, "The Highbinders," which was originally published in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998).

I bring this up because The Dangerous Ladies Affair consists of two separate, non-overlapping investigations and Quincannon's case is an expansive rewrite of two short stories, but still managed to be my favorite part of the book.

Quincannon is engaged by the President of the Woolworth National Bank, Titus Wrixton, concerning "a matter of some delicacy that demands considerable discretion." Someone is trying to extort money from the bank president and the blackmail material is related to a personal indiscretion. And he already coughed up five thousand dollars! As to be expected, there's another demand for money and now Wrixton wants Quincannon to retrieve the indiscreet letters he wrote, which gave the latter an idea.

Wrixton handed over the money to "an emissary" of his blackmailer, a short, hooked nose person, who'll probably be at the bar of the Hotel Grant to receive the second payment and Quincannon is determined to follow him back to the person behind the blackmail scheme – except that what he finds is of those "seemingly impossible conundrums." The name of the emissary turns out to be Raymond Sonderberg and he owns a small cigar store in Gunpowder Alley, but when Quincannon arrives shots ring out from the locked store.

After two doors are broken down, Quincannon and a passing patrolman find the body of Sonderberg with two bullet holes in the chest, but how did the murderer manage to vanish from what is, essentially, a double locked room? Sonderberg's body was found in a bolted room with the only window latched from the inside and the front door of the shop was also locked from the inside. So how did the murderer enter and leave the premise?

The locked room part of Quincannon's case had an earlier life as "Gunpowder Alley," originally published in a 2012 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which made the explanation not as big a surprise as it could have been. However, this is still a nice little section that focuses on the how of the crime, because the murderer never makes an appearance in the first half of this case, but the observant reader can probably make an educated guess out of which direction the wind is blowing – as well as working out the locked room trick based on a thud and a description of something at the crime-scene.

Where it all began

Second half is basically a chase tale in which Quincannon is trying to bring the cheeky murderer to earth and the source material of this part is "Burgade's Crossing," which came from the pages of a 1993 issue Louis L'Amour Western Magazine and was collected in the aforementioned 1998 short story collection. So lot's of old material was reused for this case, but, as said above, it's still my favorite part of this novel.

Meanwhile, Sabina Carpenter is consumed by an entirely different kind of problem: she has been participating member of the Golden Gate Ladies' Bicycle Club for several weeks and she did so at the encouragement of her new friend, Amity Wellman – who's the head of an organization dedicated to getting women the right to vote in California. Lately, she has been getting religiously tinged letters that could be perceived as a threat and she has a fair share of potential enemies. Such as the leader of the anti-progressive Solidarity Party, named Nathaniel Dobbs, but there's also a man with whom she briefly had an extramarital affair, Fenton Egan. A married man with a very jealous wife, Prudence.

So there was more than enough plot-material for an interesting case, especially after an attempt on Wellman's life, but practically the entire story consists of Sabina poking a stick in Wellman's opposition. A murder is committed towards the end of this story-line, but one that's solved almost as quickly as it was presented and only seemed to be introduced to give the story a morally ambiguous ending when Sabine covers up the murderer's guilt.

I found it increasingly difficult to get into this part of the book and even became annoyed at times by Sabina's partisan behavior. Such as when she decided to play apologetics on behalf of her friend at the home of the Egans. Sure, Prudence is a vengeful woman with her own dirty linen, but saying that Wellman's work as a woman's activist makes her especially "entitled to understanding and forgiveness" is not an argument. She was basically asking Prudence why she was such a sour puss about Wellman sleeping with her husband when she was doing such a good job as suffragette. Hey, I borrowed your car for a week or two without you knowing, but don't be mad, I also feed the needy and homeless at the soup kitchen.

So, plot-and storywise, I feel very divided about The Dangerous Ladies Affair and would not rank it as high as, say, the first two entries in this series, but still very much enjoyed the case and chase handled by Quincannon. I always liked him as a character and consider him to be one of the great detective-characters who emerged in the modern era. So the ending of this novel is a much deserved one. And also showed that, perhaps, the series is winding down and drawing to a close.

Well, that was my rambling for this blog-post and not sure what will be next, but it might be a re-read. Because, you know, that TBR-pile does not really need any continued and sustained trimming or anything. ;)

Sting of Dead

"Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which digs for another."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892)

Henry Cauvin's L'Auguille qui tue (The Killing Needle, 1871), originally entitled Maxmilien Heller, appeared sixteen years before Sherlock Holmes took his first bow in Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) and began to elevate the detective story as one of the most popular genres of literature, but in France it's claimed that the iconic detective was modeled after Maxmilien Heller – who shares some similarities with Holmes. However, I found the similarities between both characters to be somewhat superficial.

They also cheapened Cauvin's notable accomplishment of having created a genuine detective character during the decades that separated Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 famous short story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and the birth of Sherlock Holmes. And such well-defined characters were pretty rare during that window of time.

Xavier Lechard, who used to blog At the Villa Rose, noted in his review of Charles Barbara's L'Assassinat du Pont-Rouge (The Assassin of Pont-Rouge, 1855) that a problem with most French genre-historians is that they're "less informative and rigorous" than their counterparts across the pond. I suppose their claim that Heller was a prototype for Holmes has something to do with their rather one-sided argument with the Anglo-Saxon world, in which they appear to take as much credit as possible for any innovation found in the genre post-1841 and sometimes they were right – such as Émile Gaboriau being "the father of the detective novel." But the claim that Heller was basically the original Sherlock Holmes is reaching.

On a side note, Poe's status as the Father of the Detective Story is disputed, but the claimants aren't French: Adolph Müllner's "Der kaliber" ("The Caliber," 1828), William E. Burton's "The Secret Cell," published in a 1837 issue of Gentleman's Magazine, and Otto Ludwig's novella "Der todte von St. Annas Kapelle" ("The Dead Man of St. Anne's Chapel," 1839). You can also make a case that Anne and Annabella Plumptre's "The Spectre of Presburg: A Hungarian Tale," collected in Tales of Wonder (1818) and Ye Old Book of Locked Room Conundrums (2016), is an early precursor of the detective-and impossible crime story.

So there's something to argue about, but that argument is between the Americans, English and Germans. Sorry France! Anyhow, I'm getting horribly off-topic here.

Back in 2014, John Pugmire of Locked Room International published an English translation of Cauvin's The Killing Needle, which finally gave readers outside of the Francophone world an opportunity to read and judge the merits of this 146 year old mystery novel for themselves. I think the book is particularly of value to readers with a special interest in the history of the genre. 

 

The Killing Needle opens with a visit by the unnamed narrator, a member of the Faculty of Medicine, to the room of Maximilien Heller, where the skeleton figure lived in isolation for the past two years and devoted those lonely days to study various subjects – writing treatises on politics, economics and philosophy. Heller refers to himself throughout the story as a philosopher, but "the hundreds of manuscripts" that filled his attic room failed to sooth his suffering mind.

It makes the narrator wonder if "the invisible cords" that tied him to his fellow human beings had been "irreparably damaged" and whether he could cure "the painful moral illness" consuming Heller's body and soul. Well, the cure came in the form of a policeman and the prime suspect in a poisoning case. Jean-Louis Guérin used to occupy the room next to Heller's room, but, for the last week, he had been in the employ of M. Bréhat-Lenoir. But his employed had been found poisoned in his locked bedroom, money had been taken and traces of arsenic were found in a cup, which is why the police dragged him back to his old lodgings and searched the place. They also hoped that his old neighbor, Heller, might give them a condemning statement about the suspect's character.

However, the incident inspires Heller to save Guérin from the scaffold and wants to see the daylight again, but, from here on out, the plot becomes a bit difficult to properly review, because the story is not really that of traditional detective story. It's still a very early incarnation. Pugmire said in his introduction that the English translation "is based on the 1930 Librarie Hachette edition L'Aiguille qui tue," which differs from the original Maximilien Heller "only in chapter structure." So I imagine the original incarnation of the book read even less as a straightforward, flowing narrative.

Let me give it a shot by, first, pointing out why the Holmesian comparisons are so very tempting to make: Heller has a talent for disguises and one scene has him fooling his narrator, which is something that happened to Watson. Heller also spends a large swath of the story under an alias, and in disguise, in the employ of the victim's brother, Bréhat-Kerguen, who whisks him away to his residence in Brittany – an ancient construction, dilapidated construction with "walls blackened by the centuries." There's also a dangerous, man-eating bear, named Jacquot, roaming the place. Heller is forbidden the leave the place by his suspicious employer, but manages to get his letters to his friend through a 12-year-old boy, Jean-Marie, who acts as his Wiggins of the Baker Street Irregulars. I can see why some people are so eager to draw comparisons with Holmes, but, as said before, I found them to be superficial at best.

One of my fellow bloggers, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, accurately observed in his review of The Killing Needle that Cauvin's writing "brings to mind that of Maurice Leblanc." I couldn't agree more. The tone of the story is very reminiscent of the slightly more detective-orientated adventures of Arsène Lupin and you can almost imagine Heller being one of his many pseudonyms/disguises adopted after one of his disappearances from the public stage. JJ also points out that the book would work remarkably well as "a tonal companion piece" to Les huit coups de l'horloge (The Eight Strokes of the Clock, 1923). Once again, I have to agree with this observation. 

 

But all these comparisons distract from Cauvin's accomplishment as somewhat of an originator, which came here in the form of the impossible crime elements of the story. They're very minor aspects of the plot, but, historically, far from unimportant. Basically, there are two (semi) impossible situations: one of them concerns the second medical examination of the victim. The first one failed to find any traces of arsenic in the body, but the second one, carried out by the villainous Dr. Wickson, did reveal an abundance of arsenic in the corpse. Secondly, the locked room angle of the bedroom where the murder took place.

These situations are either immediately solved or glossed over. However, the postscript, entitled "Clayton Rawson on Carr's Locked Room Lecture," noted how the solution behind the locked bedroom was mentioned by Rawson in his own lecture on impossible crimes in Death from a Top Hat (1938) – making Cauvin's novel "almost certainly the very first in the history of detective fiction" to use such kind of explanation for a locked room murder. It makes The Killing Needle an important entry in the annals of crime-fiction, because it's one of the first examples of the detective story exchanging the hoary plot-devices of secret passages and unknown poisons for real ingenuity.

Something that would become more prominent in such landmark works as Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1892) and Gaston Leroux's Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907), which was further developed by such early authors as Jacques Futrelle, G.K. Chesterton, Max Rittenberg and The Hanshews. Eventually, it would blossom during the Golden Age, but the germ, or one of the seedling, of that long, decades-long process can be found here. The trick behind the poisoning of the corpse also showed some cleverness, but the method was almost immediately explained instead of being played up to full effect.

So, historically, The Killing Needle comes recommended to everyone who's interested in the history and development of the genre. I'm very glad this one was finally peddled across the language barrier by Pugmire and sincerely hope many more of these obscure, but important, interesting or simply well plotted, mystery novels will follow in the hopefully not so distant future.

Vanishing Act

"You've solved murders by your shrewd observation of tricks. You're keen to catch an error."

- The Great Xanthe (Jospeh Commings' "Death by Black Magic," from Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner, 2004)

Recently, I reviewed One Remained Seated (1946) and Death in Silhouette (1950), which are part of the Maria Black series by John Russell Fearn, but the series consist of only five titles and knocking those two of my list left me with, reputedly, the least appealing book of the fivesome – namely Maria Marches On (1945) that has been republished as The Murdered Schoolgirl. Luckily, John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books, who wrote "Neglected Detectives: Maria Black, MA," recommended me to move on to the Dr. Hiram Carruthers series.

Dr. Hiram Carruthers is a well-known physicist and "ex back-room expert of the war department," who strongly resembles the popular bust of Beethoven, but also garnered a reputation as a "scientific specialist to Scotland Yard." And his specialism as a consulting scientist-detective are crimes that appear to be (scientifically) impossible. So you can call Dr. Carruthers a cross between John Rhode's Dr. Lancelot Priestley and Arthur Porges' Cyriack Skinner Grey.

The Silvered Cage (1955) appears to have been the last book in the series, originally published as by "Hugo Blayn," one of Fearn's numerous pennames, which is really more of a novella than a full-fledged novel – counting roughly a hundred pages of fairly large-print. However, the plot of the story sports two impossible situations: an onstage disappearance during a magic show and an inexplicable death inside a locked room.

Robert Adey said in Locked Room Murders (1991) that The Silvered Cage was "not a bad little book" with a couple of impossibilities of "a highly technical nature" that still sound as if they might work. Even if they stretch credulity just a little bit. I think the book, as a locked room mystery, has some points of interest, but, as a detective story, it's not a very impressive piece of work. Somewhat flawed even. But more on that later.

Dr. Carruthers only appears very late in the story and basically fulfills the role of deus ex machina by descending from the heavens above to solve the problems that plague us mere mortals. The mortals are represented here by Detective-Sergeant Whittaker and Chief-Inspector Garth of the Yard. And their problems are brought to them by the daughter of a very wealthy business tycoon.

The young lady with a pretty face, innocent blue eyes and a gold tooth is Vera de Maine-Kestrel and she wants police protection, because she fears for her life. On the details she remains sketchy, alluding to her fiancé, certain monetary deals and "an incident in the past," but she knows when the attack upon her will be made, which will be at her home on the following day during "a big magical display" that's part of a dinner party – where she'll be playing the part of "vanishing lady."

 

Admittedly, the performance of this amazing vanishing act is easily the best part of the plot. A truly grand performance! What's even more amazing is the secret behind the illusion. One that might be hard to swallow, but it is a true original.

The illusion revolves around "a giant edition of normal birdcage," around six feet high, suspended two feet above the floor by a strong, brightly glittering chain and the silver-looking bars are about six inches apart. Everyone in the audience could see through it, under it and around it. No mirrors. No trapdoors. No switcheroo in the gloom of a half-darkened room. The Great Crafto works in bright lights, covered the cage with a cloth, and upon its removal Vera had appeared inside the cage, but the cover is not used for the disappearance part of the trick.

Vera spoke a few words to the audience and then proceeded to gradually fade away into nothingness! She "smeared mysteriously" and "vanished in dim vapours," but when the moment came to reappear the cage remained empty. So, of course, this causes some commotion, because she couldn't really have vanished, but the magician refuses to divulge the secret of his illusion to the police. And this is were the first flaw of the plot becomes apparent.

When she requested police protection, Vera told Whittaker that Crafto had to tell her how the trick worked, in order to make it effective, but she blabbed about it and told several people – including her own fiancé, Sidney Laycock. He's even a potential suspect, but it never occurred to the police to ask him how the trick was pulled off. Or track down any of Vera's friend who might have been told about the trick. Not even when the magician dies under suspicious circumstances.

That brings us to the second impossibility of the book: Douglas Ward, a.k.a. The Great Crafto, lived at a boarding house that caters to stage performers and his landlady was awakened one early morning by a "devil of a row" coming from his room. He was shouting for help and sounded as if he was tumbling around on the floor. However, the room was entirely locked from the inside and they had to break down the door. What they found was a dead magician and a peculiar smell lingered in the room. It appeared as he had been gassed, but what kind of gas and how it could have been introduced into the room is a complete mystery.

The locked room murder of Crafto is less technically complicated and easier to understand than the vanishing trick, but part of the method cozied up the science-fiction genre. However, the idea behind the trick is definitely possible and Fearn played around with a more elegant and workable idea in Black Maria, M.A. (1944). One of his characters used this trick in a stage-play to polish off a crystal gazer and version sounded a lot more plausible.

I should also point out that there are two Jonathan Creek episodes with impossibilities that are very similar in nature to the locked room situations from The Silvered Cage. There's a special that basically uses the same method employed here to kill the magician, but what's more interesting is that there's an episode that helped me get an idea how the vanishing of Vera was accomplished. The disappearance trick from the Creek episode was quite different, but that episode and this book basically used the same tools to create the effect that someone, or something, had vanished into thin air. I thought it was very interesting how both locked room situations were very similar to two different Creek episodes.

Well, that's about all that can be said about the impossible crimes from The Silvered Cage. So what about the plot as whole? It's not exactly a classic of its kind and the scheme behind the crimes felt a bit uninspired, which also tended to be sloppy where the details were concerned. For example, there's an unsolved murder case hovering in the background and it is mentioned that the victim was shot, but later it was said the victim had struck his head on the firestand – making it all of a sudden an accidental death!

I think this goes to show how much of a difference in quality there's between Fearn's Miss Maria Black series and his other detective stories. Fearn really appears to have put a great deal of time, effort and love in writing the former, while the latter were obviously written with less care and attention. Something I also noticed in The Crimson Rambler (1948), which was not bad and also showed some ingenuity, but does not come anywhere near any of the Maria Black novels. Fearn really wanted to write proper detective novels when using her as the protagonist. I wonder if there was a reason why he cared so much about that series.

Anyhow, The Silvered Cage has some points of interest as a locked room novel, but, as a detective story, comes up short and remains undistinguished. So I can only really recommend it to readers who are either interested in locked room stories or simply fans of Fearn's writing.

Well, I rambled on long enough. So let me close this blog-post by pointing your attention to my previous review of Capwell Wyckoff's The Mercer Boys in the Ghost Patrol (1929) and I'll probably be back with something really old.

The Ghost of Rustling Ridge

"I don't believe in ghosts, anyway."

- Holmes Hamilton (Manly Wade Wellman's The Sleuth Patrol, 1947)

Capwell Wyckoff was an American lay minister in the Presbyterian Church and an author of children's fiction, known primarily for a series of juvenile mysteries about the Mercer Boys, but he also wrote short stories for Boys' Life and Open Road for Boys – using the royalties to bankroll his missionary work. One source even claims Wyckoff "sold his Mercer Boys manuscripts for a flat rate of two hundred dollars without royalties." In any case, the money went towards missionary work.

I came across Wyckoff when scouring the web for a series, or standalone, similar to The Three Investigators books by Robert Arthur and William Arden. The Mercer Boys appeared to fit the bill. Although the title I picked turned out to be a whole lot closer to the boy scout mystery that provided the opening quote for this blog-post.

The Mercer Boys in the Ghost Patrol (1929) originally appeared under a more mundane book-title, The Mercer Boys in Summer Camp, which was the sixth book about Jim Mercer, Don Mercer and their close friend, Terry Mackson – who made their first appearance in The Mercer Boys' Cruise on the Lassie (1929). Yes, most of the books in this series was published in that years with a handful of additional novels appearing over the next couple of years.

During their second adventure (related in The Mercer Boys at Woodcrest, 1929), Jim, Don and Terry enrolled into Woodcrest Military Institute and became cadets. So this makes them slightly older than the protagonists from the other juvenile detective-and adventure stories I've read. I suspect they're somewhere in their late teens, around sixteen or seventeen, because a character mentioned the uniformed cadets were "too young-looking for regular soldiers," but they were allowed to carry side arms with permission – which happened towards the end of the story.

Otherwise, the plot is very similar to other juvenile mysteries, such as The Sleuth Patrol, which also has a story-line that's almost pure Scooby Doo. But the book-title probably gave that part away.

The Mercer Boys in the Ghost Patrol begins in early July and "the summer encampment was at hand," but opening of the book takes place in the school supply room where everyone was getting their camping uniform. Terry also picked up a feud there that would come to dominate the first half of the story. Cadet Dick Rowen gets into a tussle with the good-humored Terry, but ends up getting publicly humiliated and, spiteful as he is, tries to extract revenge on the three friends – such as messing with their bayonets, attempting to hurt one of their horses and placing several charges against one of the Mercer boys. A true pain in the ass for the three cadets.

However, this story-line slowly recedes into the background as the plot-thread about "the mystery of the ghost of Rustling Ridge" began to emerge from the shadows of the camp ground.

Colonel Morrell found a new camping ground, called Rustling Ridge, because the old camp spot was being encroached upon by the modern world and the colonel wanted "to get as far away from civilization" as possible. And the new ground certainly serves this purpose.

The fire rises!

However, the place is not entirely bare of human settlements. The arrival of the cadets is definitely welcomes by one of the local farmers, Carson, because "business is mighty poor" and having to feed an entire regiment of hungry, young cadets is a much needed financial boost – which has been suffering under the frightful reputation of the local legend. A ghost prowls the ridge and has been chasing people away for several years. Soon enough, this spectral inhabitant of the ridge pays a visit to the camp.

The first brush with the ghost was a secondhand encounter: a number of nighttime sentries around the camp saw a wagon, with a man and a young boy in it, race past them like a bat out of hell. They later learn they were a father and son who saw the ghost. On the following night, the sentries have an encounter with "a white shape," but the apparition gets a more solid form when it eventually enters the camp ground.

Jim has a brief brush with "a tall white shape" in the woods where the horses are corralled, but the figure manages to escape by causing a stampede and this lands Jim in hot water. The figure is also held responsible for an arson case and the brief disappearance of the small daughter of the farmer. So the colonel decided to form a ghost patrol to put a stop to the specter's reign of terror over the scarce population of the ridge.

As said earlier in this blog-post, the story-line about the ghost is firmly planted in Scooby Doo territory and one of the villains is even overheard saying "those meddlesome cadets again." So you really shouldn't expect a ratiocinative detective story. For example, I strongly suspected the unpleasant, blustering sheriff of being the ghost, which I based on what I assumed was a genuine clue. The sheriff used a turn of phrase ("keep your nose out of the affairs on this ridge") that was similar to a warning left by the ghost on a piece of cardboard at the camp ("KEEP YOURE NOSE OUTN THE GHOST BUSINESS").

However, there's a short scene in which they attempt to follow a trail of footprints and the identity of the ghost is deduced based on perspiration and wet socks on a least-likely-suspect after the ghost was seen running away, but that was a minor and late element in the story. The Mercer Boys in the Ghost Patrol should primarily be read as a fun, mild-mannered adventure/mystery story that can (plot-wise) be classified as an ancestor of Scooby Doo. So that's definitely a point of interest for a juvenile mystery novel. Personally, I loved the backdrop of a summer camp of a military academy. A background that would also lend itself perfectly for a straightforward murder mystery. I wonder if there are any...

Anyway, I might try one or two more books from this series in the future. They seem like good material to intersperse with the ones about the previously mentioned Three Investigators and Case Closed. Speaking of the latter, I posted a review of vol. 59 a few days ago, but it got a bit snowed under since then. So you might want to take a look at that post.

That's it for now, but the next review will probably be of good, old-fashioned Golden Age detective story. So stay tuned!

Wages of Sin

"Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil."

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

E.R. Punshon's It Might Lead Anywhere (1946) is the twenty-second entry in the outstanding Bobby Owen series, currently the Acting Chief Constable of the Wychshire County Police, which enmeshes him in a religious rivalry and a brutal murder in an otherwise peaceful place – one that actually falls outside of his jurisdiction. But when has that ever stopped one of our beloved detective characters from poking their nose where it doesn't belong? Exactly!

The backdrop of the book is an ancient borough, Oldfordham, with "a charter granted by one of the early Plantagenet kings" and "the mayor's chain of office dated from Saxon times," but has since shrunken in size and importance. However, it still boosts a practically non-existent crime rate and the last person who died there by a murderer's hand was nearly a century ago.

Well, that changed shortly after Owen had to intervene in a neighboring village, Chipping Up, where he managed to quell a near riot between the locals and an ex-boxer turned revivalist preacher, Duke Dell – who constantly preaches about what he calls "The Vision." Dell's preaching had an effect on one person, Alfred Brown, who was a quiet, inoffensive recluse, but recently he has began disturbing church services. A sustained protest against what he called "popish practices." The former prizefighter also had been annoying everyone "by a general and sweeping denunciation" of the villagers and their ways.

So, when Owen first lays eyes on the preacher he stands on the banks of a stream, "roaring defiance," as a hostile crowd surrounds him. Dell promises he would cast anyone in the water who would approach him and Brown had already been flung into the stream, but that was accidental. Regardless, the miser nearly lost his life in the fall and his face is bruised and bloodied.

Owen succeeds in defusing the situation and prevents an old-fashioned free-for-all, but the incident is brought back to his attention on the following day when he reads in the Midwych Courier about the discovery of Brown's body at his home in Oldfordham – brutally beaten to death with a heavy kitchen poker. Oldfordham has its own, small police force and the investigation is in the hands of Chief Constable Spencer. However, the case has piqued the interest of Owen and craftily wormed his way into the investigation, which he eventually completely takes over after Spencer gets sidelined with a splitting headache (i.e. attempt on his life). But the case is far from a cakewalk.

Despite the sudden unset of religious mania, Brown was a lonely recluse and everyone seemed surprise when the police found a stash of gold sovereigns underneath the floorboards of his cottage. So nobody really seemed to have had a motive and the clues were severely lacking. And that's one of the admitted short comings of the book.

More than halfway through the book, Owen acknowledges "that he had not been able to find a single material clue" and all he had to show was "psychological stuff." The role of the various characters played and their hidden, interlocking relationships.

Obviously, the near fatal incident at Chipping Up makes Dell one of the suspects, who may have been guided by his vision, but Brown's railing against Roman practices also placed Rev. Alexander Childs, Anglo-Catholic vicar of St. Barnabas Church, among the suspects – since an attempt of the vicar to make peace ended with a teapot thrown in his direction. Brown also appears to have past ties with a local solicitor, Maurice Goodman, who has a new secretary, Miss Theresa Foote. A pretty, flirtatious young woman who's acquainted with one Mr. Langley Long. Long "bore an odd family resemblance" to a Flight-Lieutenant or the Royal Australian Air Force, Denis Kayes, who was present at the skirmish that opened the book. And he was very reluctant to give his name to Owen.

The plot largely hinges on these relationships and how they could have lead to the barbaric bludgeoning of Brown, however, one or two genuine clues eventually turn up. One of them has to do with the radio broadcast Brown was listening to on his expensive wireless, but completely missed the significant hint Punshon attached to this. So the plot offers an actual detective problem to the reader, but the problems requires experience and intuition as much as deductive reasoning.

Anthony Boucher praised the characterization, gentle humor and the logical working out of the murder, but noted that the story seemed ponderous. I think this has to do with Punshon concentrating on simply one story-line: the reasons for murdering such a harmless old miser as Brown. Usually, Punshon prefers to manipulate multiple plot-threads with the nimble fingers of a master puppeteer, but here the plot is very slender and focused on just one problem. A problem that comes with a number of complications, such as a hoard of gold and the religious angle, but a single problem nonetheless and Punshon has a rather verbose, ornamental writing style – which can easily make a story with a trimmed down plot look ponderous in comparison with previous entries in the series.

That being said, I still very much enjoyed It Might Lead Anywhere. But than again, I've become a great admirer of both Punshon and Owen. I think some of the minor shortcomings of this particular title won't deter other fans from enjoying it either, but I would recommend new readers to begin somewhere else in the series. Such as Information Received (1933), Death Comes to Cambers (1935), Ten Star Clues (1941) and There's a Reason for Everything (1945). Or do what I should have done and read them in order, but that's entirely up to you. But you should give the series a shot, because it's one of the great detective series from the Golden Age.

Family Feud

"It's the people close to your heart that can give you the most piercing wound."
- Kenshin Himura (Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Swordman Romantic Story, 1994-99)

The 59th volume of Gosho Aoyama's long-running series, Case Closed a.k.a. Detective Conan, opens with a chapter that the closes the book on the thrill-filled, novel-length story from the previous installment, which was rife with character development and revelations – as well as being one big confrontation between our heroes and the men in black. So that was quite a fun and eventful volume for long-time readers.

You can say the opening chapter of this volume is, somewhat, of an aftershock, but we all know that, what was depicted, didn't really happen. No doubt an explanation will be given in one of the (much) later volumes. All I'll say for those unfamiliar with the series (shame!) is that one of the characters appeared to have pulled a Reichenbach. Except that here the all engulfing waters of the fall were replaced by an all consuming fire of a fiery car wreck.

What follows are two stories, one short and one that's longer, but they're both excellent detective stories and this volume ends with the first chapter from a case that will be concluded in the next one.

So the first of these two stories is an inverted mystery, a la Columbo, but one that leaves the reader in the dark on how the murderer's alibi was created, which makes it a borderline impossible crime.

The murderer is a hairdresser, Minayo Hasaka, who has decided to murder her former high-school sweetheart, Shiro Nasaka, but he's a 200-hundred pound martial artist and she's a small, slender woman – which makes her an unlikely suspect when his body is found beneath a guardrail. His throat had been cut. Hasaka further cemented her claim to innocence by a having a famous lawyer as her alibi, but the lawyer in question, Eva Kaden, happens to be Richard Moore's wife. Of course, Moore, Rachel and Conan happen to be ones who discovered the body. Regardless, the alibi is rock solid and takes some thinking to break down.

Hasaka was physically unable to lug the body around and during a window of ten minutes, when she absent from the salon, she was at a corner-store. This was confirmed by the shop-owner, the receipt and footage from the security camera. So how did she managed to do it? Well, the solution managed to be simultaneously complex and very easy. I managed to get a general idea behind the trick based on the sounds Conan heard, "crash," "thud" and "klak, klak," in combination with the old scooter, a certain object behind the salon and the map of the neighborhood.

Granted, the method is both convoluted and very, very risky, but I appreciate Aoyama's ingenuity that showed how to create a watertight alibi and get rid of the body at the same time – even if the answer only really works in Conan's universe.

The second story is double the size of the first, covering six chapters, which has a plot that reminded me of a bit of Seichi Yokomizo's Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) and Yasuo Uchida's Togakushi densetsu satsujin jiken (The Togakushi Legend Murders, 1994?). One of the highlights of this delightful tale is that the plot is modeled around a Fuurinkazan motive, which is basically the Japanese equivalent of the nursery rhyme murders from Western detective stories (e.g. S.S. van Dine's The Bishop Murder Case, 1928).

A long-standing family feud between the Torada and Tatsuo clan is at the heart of the plot, which begins when the former engages the services of Richard Moore to investigate the curious circumstances surrounding the death of the patriarch's son, Yoshiro – who was "yanked into the sky" by a tornado and "dropped onto rocky ground." However, evidence suggests Yoshiro survived his landing, even if he was dying, but the initial person who found him left the wounded man to die. This personal also left a macabre calling-card: a dead centipede! But they're not the only ones who've asked the assistance of an independent detective with an outstanding reputation.

At the home of the Tatsuo family, we find a fresh-faced, but familiar, high-school detective, Harley Hartwell!

The head of the family, Tamefumi, has heard from Inspector Otaki about Hartwell's track record as "an amazing sleuth," which he sorely needs now that his son, Koji, has been murdered. Koji was found buried up to his neck in the earth, bludgeoned to death, but his killer had also left a dead centipede at the crime scene. Several additional bodies and dead centipedes would follow. A gush of murders that have apparent connections with an accidental death in the several years in the past, a village festival, yabusame (horseback archery), a treasure hunter and the wisdom of Sun Tsu.

I also have to point out here that one of the bodies is found hanging in the woods, but there were no footprints or marks in the soft ground surrounding the tree. However, this impossibility is an insignificant aspect of the overall plot. I only bring it up because the premise and explanation were reminiscent of the apparent miraculous hangings from Paul Doherty's The Song of a Dark Angel (1994), which is why I actually managed to figure out how it was done and guided my eye towards an interesting character – namely the murderer. Once they said the murder was an impossible one, I thumbed back several pages for a good overview of the crime scene, and suspects, and went, "aha!"

As good as the story is as a detective story, it's also important for introduction a brand new character, Kansuke Yamato of the Nagano Prefectural Police, who's a one-eyed police detective. And his back-story is tied directly to the background of this story. So that makes it quite the standout story in the series!

Finally, there's the first chapter of a new story that will be resolved in the next volume, but I can say that, reputedly, it will be the final appearance of Eisuke Hondo. But more about that in my review of volume 60. I'll try to get off the big pile faster than normal, because with this review out of the way I'm still two or three volumes behind on the releases. I suck when it comes to normally following series.

Well, the next blog-post is going to be a review of one of my favorite mystery writers not named John Dickson Carr. Not sure when exactly I'll be able to post it, but it won't be all that long. So don't touch that dial!