Hell's Gate

"In this world, there's no such thing as the perfect crime!"

- Hajime Kindaichi

Last week, on the recommendation of our guide in the world of shin honkaku, Ho-Ling, I decided to take one last crack at the Kindaichi franchise with a recent animated series, Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi R), which was originally aired in Japan between 2014 and 2016. The third time proved to be the charm!

Hajime Kindaichi

I watched a two-part episode, The Blood Pool Hall Murder, which revolved around a very tricky murder committed during an annual Go tournament between two rivaling school teams. A short, clever and pleasantly put together detective story that made excellent use of its background and even had some Go-themed sleight-of-hand – such as the killer's alibi-trick and the victim's dying message. So I wanted to try a longer, multiple episode story next and one of them was recommended to me twice.

The Prison Prep School Murder Case consists of five twenty-minute episodes and offers an intricate, multi-layered plot with one hell of an alibi-trick. A trick that turns a string of gruesome murders into a large-scale impossible crime! So let's dig in, shall we?

As noted in my brief introduction of The Blood Pool Hall Murder, the protagonist of the series, Hajime Kindaichi, has an astonishing IQ of 180, but has earned himself a name as a lazy underachiever and his grades have finally caught up with his reputation – placing him in danger of having to repeat a year. Luckily, his long-time friend, Nanase Miyuki, knows of a good prep school and generously offers to come along on a cram course. There is, however, one problem: the prep school in question resembles and operates like prison.

Gokumon Prep School is a study retreat, known among its students as "Hell's Gate," where the first body is discovered as soon as Kindaichi and Miyuke stepped inside the school building.

One of the former students, Moroi Ren, who revisited the school to do a test is fatally poisoned in the counseling room and pressed the alarm bell in his death struggle. The poison was introduced with several needle pricks to his hand and the local police assumes the murder is a random act done by another student, who cracked under the pressure, but Kindaichi believes the murderer had singled out Moroi as a target and knows it was done – a trick known as "Magician's Select." Regardless, this doesn't bring them any closer to the person responsible for the poisoning and only established that something dark is bubbling beneath the surface of Gokumon Prep School.

During the final half of the opening episode, Kindaichi and Miyuke bump into two of their policemen friends, Police-Inspector Kenmochi and Superintendent Akechi. The former has been in charge of the school poisoning case, while the latter confirms Kindaichi suspicions that his old nemesis has a hand in the murder. A magician and criminal genius, known as the Puppeteer from Hell, who made his first on-stage appearance in The Magical Express, but eluded capture after being revealed by Kindaichi.

Now he "manipulates people like puppets" and "writes perfect criminal scenarios for people who bear grudges." So the young detective has quite a challenge ahead of him! 

Hell's Puppeteer appears in the crowd

The next episode moves the large cast of characters, including Kindaichi and Miyuke, to the secondary buildings of the school, called Moonlight and Sunlight, which are situated in a dark, sprawling forest with an hour's walking distance between them – something that becomes relevant when the impossible alibi-trick comes into play. But more on that presently.

Kindaichi and Miyuke are split up and assigned to two different groups. A science-and a humanities-oriented group, but this is also the point in the plot where the school demonstrates it's deserving of its nickname and reputation. The students are stripped of their personal belongings and clothes, which are replaced with prison-style jumpsuits. Some students with poor grades can even be locked up in solitary confinement to help them completely focus on their studies.

So you can say that the administration of Gokumon Prep went out of their way to conform to the nightmarish image we have in the West of juku (cram schools).

Anyway, the harsh, closely watched environment does provide safety to the students from the unknown murderer and even Akechi is present in the (undercover) role of instructor, but students still manage to go missing from the premise. One after another, students from both groups began to disappear after walking out of a full classroom. One was ordered to fetch a fresh piece of chalk from the hall closet, while another finished a test and was excused. The viewer is aware that they were murdered, but the bodies are nowhere to be found and everyone simply assumes they wandered into the woods – after cracking under all of the pressure. Something that's apparently not all that uncommon at Gokumon.

All of this takes up two-and-a-half episodes and this was, perhaps, too slow, but the pace picks up when all of the bodies, one after another, turn up in thematic fashion that alluded to the material they had been studying. So that was an interesting and unexpected twist in the plot. However, what really saved the episode is the unfurling of the complicated and involved explanation for the apparent impossibilities surrounding the murders over the next two episodes.

Initially, I feared my review of The Prison Prep School Murder Case was going to be lukewarm, because I erroneously thought I had figured out the who, why and how of the case, but it turned out my explanation had only touched upon the most elementary parts of the solution. And was completely wrong about the ingenious alibi-trick.

In my first review about this series, I mentioned a blog-post by The Reader is Warned, "But is it a Locked Room Mystery? The case of the impossible alibi," on which I commented what kind of alibi qualifies as an impossible problem and the episodes that make up this case tick all of the boxes – since every potential suspect were together, in the same room, when the murders happened. So none of them appeared to be, physically, capable of being the killer. I really thought I had stumbled to the truth, early on in the story, when one of the episodes showed a birds-eye view of the grounds surrounding both buildings. It's what gave me an idea how murder could be committed in each building while everyone was alibied. But my solution was childishly simple compared to what was revealed.

Sure, you can argue that the magnificent alibi-trick is too complex and involved, but my only real complaint about it is that the entire story was obviously written around this idea. The trick came first and the story second, which explains the shoddy pacing in the first two episodes and the extreme rules of the prison-like prep school. As the strength of the whole story hinges on the trick, the writer had not much to work with in the setup of the story and the tight regime was needed to make the plot work.

However, if you want pure, undiluted ingenuity, you will appreciate the overall plot of The Prison Prep School Murder Case. Arguably, it's one of the better examples of how an elaborate alibi can turn a detective story into a full-bloom locked room mystery. I really wish I could tell more about the nature of the trick, but that would be spoiling the surprise and that's a capital offense around these parts.

Finally, I need to point out that, at times, the story tried too hard to touch a dramatic note, but regularly failed at it. And the final, over-the-top showdown with Hell's Puppeteer was preposterous! With his hell-fire magic, flower darts and high-school drama-class dialogue. Nevertheless, I did chuckle when the Puppeteer told Kindaichi he wanted to meet him again "on the stage of another atrocity." Oh, no, I thought, does that mean Yozaburo Kanari is going to write their next case?

Alright, alright! I promise that's the last swipe I'll take at Kanari in this series of reviews, I swear!

Wired for Destruction

"Knowledge is progress. We gain knowledge through observation and logic—inevitable logic. And logic tells us that two and two make four—not sometimes but all the time."

- Prof. Augustus S.F.X. van Dusen (Jacques Futrelle's "The Leak," collected in The Jacques Futrelle Megapack: Tales of the Thinking Machine and Others, 2013)

Henry Leverage's name is little-known today and even the GAD Wiki doesn't have him listed among their legion of obscure mystery writers. However, he filled the popular slick and pulp magazines of his day, such as Cosmopolitan, Black Mask, Argosy All-Story and Detective Story Magazine, but what set Leverage apart is that his career, as a writer, really began when he was an inmate of Sing-Sing Prison – where he fulfilled the duty of editor of the prison magazine, The Star of Hope.

The scant crumbs of information on the web does not mention the reason for Leverage's incarceration, as you don't "interrogate a prisoner concerning his past," but he was released in 1919 and used his personal experience to write "crook fiction." In 1925, he created a unique-sounding series-character, Big Scar Guffman, who is a prisoner serving "a life sentence plus fifteen years" and struck me as a hardboiled counterpart to the usual assortment of charming thieves, conmen and swindlers found in rogue fiction.

Despite his proclivity for stories that center around criminals and prison inmates, Leverage wrote (at least) one cerebral detective novel in the tradition of the American mystery writers who valued ratiocination.

Whispering Wires (1918) was published almost a century ago and must have been written when Leverage was still behind bars, but the plot of the story is genuine interesting and stands on the border dividing two distinct periods in the history of the genre – namely the Doylean Era of crime-fiction and the coming Golden Age. Good news is that the Golden Age-like elements have the upper hand here. The story plays entirely fair with the reader and one of the main focal points of the plot is an apparently impossible murder.

A locked room mystery boosting a solution that must have been very impressive and novel for the period, but I am getting ahead of myself here.

Triggy Drew is a private-investigator who operates "the greatest city of the modern world," New York City, who did not "overrate his own powers" and built a reputation on hard, solid work. He wasn't always perfect at the job, but good enough to net him a wealthy client who always called on him when he needed a detective.

Montgomery Stockbridge is a Munitions Magnate and the first time he had hired Drew was to track down an absconder, which he did to the full satisfaction of his employer. So when Stockbridge went up against Mortimer Morphy, "the Wolf of the Ticker," Drew was tasked with gathering evidence proving "the gentleman bank-wrecker" had appropriated large amounts of money and wrecked a score of homes – culminating with a conviction at the end of a long, drawn-out court battle. When he was sentenced to ten to twenty years in state prison, Morphy swore he would get back at Stockbridge "if it took the longest day of his life." And a bizarre death-threat brings Drew back into the employ of Stockbridge.

Someone used the name of Stockbridge's physician to order the superintendent of Ridgwood Cemetery to have a grave dug in the family plot, because "a death was about to occur in the Stockbridge family." A threat punctuated by a whispering voice over the telephone promising that they would go after his daughter, Loris, as soon as they were finished with him. So Drew takes the case and leaves his client behind inside a sealed room, a "double-locked and triple-watched library," but, at the end of the day, they're forced to take an ax to the sturdy library door.

The telephone in the library was engaged, but Stockbridge remained unresponsive and when the ax had done its work they discover why: Stockbridge lay crumpled on the floor with a gunshot wound to the side of the head and the only living presence in the library was his pet magpie – screaming, "Ah, Sing," over and over again. So how did the murderer entered, or exited, a sealed room? A room with thick walls, a hardwood floor and a smoothly plastered ceiling. One with all the windows and doors securely locked from the inside and closely watched from the outside.

As one of the characters observed, the shooting of the Munitions Magnate appears to be a complete and utter impossibility!

I mentioned earlier on this review how the book fits within the tradition of the American detective story of the ratiocinative variety. Leverage makes several allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, as he refers to the impossible murder as "a second Rue Morgue" and described the magpie "as stately as a raven" who seemed to crow "Nevermore," but there are also, what I believe to be, several subtle nods to Jacques Futrelle – who's known as the creator of the Thinking Machine.

The Thinking Machine is known to snap at everyone who dares to suggest a problem appears to be an impossible one, because "nothing is impossible." Drew gave a similar response by stating that there's no such word and invoking it is "a fool's excuse." You can add to that a character who's plotting behind bars (c.f. "The Problem of Cell 13," 1905) and the technical nature of the solution, which is reminiscent of Futrelle's scientific-and technological based detective stories.

So I found it intriguing to see the (possible) influences of these two early, pre-GAD writers on a detective story is, essentially, a Golden Age mystery. Well, for the most part anyway.

Another element that makes Whispering Wires a Golden Age-style tale of ratiocination is the presence of several clues that, when spotted, reveal the whole truth behind the murder. You should be able to the deduce the who-and how of the murder based on the clues hidden in the story. Once you grasp the truth behind the locked room trick, you should be able to deduce the well-hidden murderer, because the nature of the trick and motive leaves only one possible suspect. Admittedly, the identity of the murderer is less interesting than how this person to shoot someone in a sealed and watched room, but they nicely tied together by the clues. So you really have no excuse to not get it right with this one.

Some of you might dismiss the book, based on my review, as being too transparent, but keep in mind that the passage of time has dulled the originality of the plot. The technical side of the story, such as the crossed wires and smooth bullets, is not as exciting to us jaded, modern-day readers as it probably was to the average reader of 1918 – when telephones had just experienced its first commercial growth and the cleverest detective stories were still ahead of them. I can imagine readers at the time being impressed by the plot and the innovations it contained. After all, a "threat-by-wire" was a new and novel way of telling someone they were going to enjoy the unwelcome comforts of an early grave. We take instant death-threats for granted today! ;)

Additionally, the readers were given a very real shot at solving the problem of the locked room and identifying the shooter themselves. Sure, the clues are easier spotted today than they were back then, but even then they were planted in the text for the observant reader to find and interpret. And that's pretty nifty for a mystery published in 1918.

Long story short, I liked this simple, straightforward and well-clued detective novel with a locked room murder that slammed the door on all hoary, moth-eaten bag of tricks from the previous century. No secret passages of trained, gun-wielding monkey within the pages of this yarn!

So, if this overlong, semi-coherent babbling managed to produce a spark of curiosity, you can pull Leverage's Whispering Wires from Gutenberg and read the story for yourself.

Oh, a final note of warning: try to avoid looking at the original book cover. It spoils an important part of the solution. The reader has been warned!

End Game

"Just like there's no perfect tactic in Go, there's no perfect trick for a criminal."

- Hajime Kindaichi

In the tail of comments on my previous review, the subject of (Japanese) anime was brought up and Ho-Ling suggested Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi Return), which can be streamed (for free) on Crunchyroll.

Some of you long-time readers might remember my rants about one of the writers, Yozaburo Kanari, who has all the creativity of an echoing well and his copy-paste plots prevented me from fully enjoying the original run of the series, but other parts of the series was written by Seimaru Amagi – who wrote the excellent Tantei Gakuen Kyu (Detective Academy Q). According to Ho-Ling, the plotting of this new Kindaichi series is "generally much closer to one of those longer Detective Academy Q stories." So why not give the series a third shot now that Kanari is out of the picture?

Ho-Ling recommended several episodes with enticing sounding titles, such as The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Death March of Young Kindaichi, but settled for a short, two-part episode: The Blood Pool Hall Murder. I figured a shorter story would be a nice way to get into the series and the background of the story captured my interest.

First of all, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the series, the protagonist is a high school student, Hajime Kindaichi, who comes across as a lazy goof and an underachiever, but he's a genius with a staggering IQ of 180 – which he probably inherited from his famous grandfather, Kosuke Kindaichi. Some of you might recognize that name as the detective from Seichi Yokomizo's celebrated Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) and you would be right. Kindaichi used to evoke his name, early on in the series, but this resulted in some copyright issues and now only refers to a famous grandfather (i.e. "I swear it on my grandfather's name").

Kindaichi is also one of the biggest murder magnets in all of detective-fiction, rivaling Jessica Fletcher, Conan Edogawa and the English county of Midsomer for the number one spot, which is perfectly demonstrated in The Blood Pool Hall Murder. After all, who would have thought a competitive game of Go between two rivaling school teams would end with the death of one of the players?

Once a year, the rivaling Go Clubs of Fudou High and Kaiou Academy hold a multi-day tournament with the three best players from each club, but the former has seen its membership dwindling and are short one players – bringing the high school detective into the picture. Kindaichi was taught to play Go by his grandfather and is added to the team consisting of the only two remaining members of the club, Kosumi Yukari and Kaihou Manabu. And their opponents are serious and tense bunch of students.

Mitsuishi Isao is the slightly arrogant, serious-minded captain of Kaiou Go Club, but his hopes to train as a professional player were dashed when he beaten at the Insei exam by the second member of his team. Amamoto Kaori is already well-known as a female player and has the skill-set required to become a professional player. The final member is a shy, withdrawn young man, Hoshi Keima, who was the former junior champion of Reversi.

So, on the surface, the tense atmosphere appears to be nothing more than the byproduct of the usual rivalries dominating the world of Go and the first part of the story is, somewhat, reminiscent of a regular episode from Hikaru no Go. However, that all changes in the final ten minutes when one of the players, Hoshi, briefly disappears. Hoshi is nowhere to be found. Until someone notices a sinister message, spelled out with black and white Go stones, in the garden pond: "Hoshi is dead in the Blood Pool Room." And that's where they found his body, flung over an upturned game board, with marks around his throat.

 

"Hoshi is dead in the Blood Pool Room"

There is, however, one problem: the murder room was checked several minutes before the message in the pond was found, which means the body was placed there within a five-minute window and that makes the murder a quasi-impossible crime – since everyone had an alibi for that period. I really had some internal arguing with myself whether or not this episode qualified as an impossible crime story.

Back in March, I responded to a blog-post by The Reader is Warned, titled "But is it a Locked Room Mystery? The case of the impossible alibi," in which I said that an alibi story can only be considered an impossibility under one very strenuous condition: the alibi should not merely rely on witnesses (who can be misled) or items (such as theater or movie tickets), but the murderer should appear to have been physically incapable of having carried out the crime. I gave a rather famous Agatha Christie novel as an example and referred to an episode from Monk in which the culprit was in a coma at the time of the crime, but David Renwick also wrote several interesting variations on the impossible alibi for Jonathan Creek – e.g. Time Waits for Norman (1998) and Miracle in Crooked Lane (1999).

I believe the alibi-trick tiptoed the line between a regular alibi-trick and an impossible crime, but tilted a bit too much to the former to be considered an impossibility (as it relies on the item bit). However, the trick is clever piece of misdirection. Sure, the killer played a dangerous game by relying too much on everyone's assumptions and predicting their movements, but, purely as a plot-driven detective, it's pretty clever and satisfying.

One other thing that should be mentioned is the Go-themed dying message: Hoshi's body was found with his hands tied behind his back and he had been stuffed away somewhere before he was murdered. Somehow, he was able to stuff his pocket with a certain amount of black and white Go stones. Usually, Japanese dying messages and codes are hard to translate, but the color-coded dying clue here is pretty much universal and works in every language. I really wanted to kick myself for having missed the obvious message those stones tried to convey.

I had a good idea who the murderer was, but not exactly how the alibi-trick was done or how the victim's dying message confirmed my suspicion.

So, all in all, The Blood Pool Hall Murder was a nice way to get back into this series and looking forward now to the larger, four-part episodes with some proper locked room mysteries. You can expect me to return to this series before too long. 

But, for now, I want to end this review with an important question directly related to the Kindaichi series: when will Ho-Ling finally renounce Kanari and all his hackiness?  

Tragedy of Errors

"It can only be attributable to human error."

- HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968)

Kate Wilhelm has a long service record as a fiction writer, debuting with a short story in a 1956 issue of Fantastic, who contributed to such a wide variety of publications as Cosmopolitan, Asimov's Science Fiction, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – a variation of genres that can also be found in her novels. Over a period of half a century, she penned an impressive stack of detective and science-fiction novels.

Well, I recently stumbled across one of her many detective stories and found the book in, what could be considered, an obvious place, but had not expected to it there: namely my own TBR-pile. I had completely forgotten about its existence until recently.

Last week, one of my fellow bloggers, "JJ," attempted to help me find a modern-day locked room mystery and hinted, before the blog-post went live, that the book he had been reading was originally published in the late 1980s – which activated my fanboyish curiosity and began to check my backlog. After all, there couldn't be that many impossible crime novels published on the tail-end of the eighties, right?

Apparently, there were enough of the infernal things to prevent me from correctly identifying the book, but did come across a peculiar looking locked room title, on the big pile, promising a manor house mystery covered with the fingerprints of the science-fiction genre.

Smart House (1989) tells the story of the brainchild of a computer prodigy, Gary Elringer, who founded the Bellringer Company, but the hard-and software business stopped being profitable once the boy genius began to work on his most ambitious project - "a computerized, automated house." A project that has become a deep, dark financial rabbit hole and not every one of the the nine shareholders are thrilled with Smart House. Gary's furious older brother, Bruce, is even attempting to organize "a palace coup." However, the computer genius is spoiled to the core and expects things to go his way, which is how things usually turn out.

So when Gary invites the shareholders to his futuristic home, situated on the Oregon coast, everyone turns up. And they all go along with the ridiculous demonstration he has planned for them.

A "stupid game of murder," called Assassins, in which players are assigned a designated victim by the computerized house and they have to eliminate their target "in front of a single witness" and log the kill into the computer – after which the house assigns a new victim to the successful killer. Each kill earns them one vote and the last one standing takes all. The "weapons" (i.e. toys) are kept in a showroom, inside a case with "a computer lock," which allows players to pick only one weapon for every kill. 

 

It's "a game for children," one of them complains, "grown-up people don't play such childish games," but they all go along with Gary's wishes. And that makes for some nicely imagined scenes.

The group of shareholders, and players, consists of professional, intelligent and respectable people, but Gary puts them in such a position that they find themselves sneaking around an intelligent house, logging every step they take, while being armed with children's toy – such as squirt guns, ribbons and balloons. It's reminiscent of the surrealistic quality often found in the work of Ellery Queen. A feeling strengthened when, shortly after each other, two people die under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Rich Schoen is the architect who helped design the house and his body turns up in a closed elevator, which had the air sucked out of it by the automatic vacuum system. A short while later Gary's body is found inside a sealed-off Jacuzzi. The computer logs proved nobody was near them at the time they died and the police decided there were glitches in the computer program, but an computerized, semi-sentient house that can kill its occupants would prevent the company from recuperating as much as a dime that went into its creation.

So they engage a couple of private-investigators to prove a human murderer was responsible for both deaths. Unfortunately, at this point in the book, the story experienced a slump.

Charles Meiklejohn and Constance Leidl were obviously meant to be a modern-day equivalent of Frances and Richard Lockridge, as they, too, are a childless couple with a bunch of cats, but the former misses the joie de vivre of the latter. They did, however, do some proper detective work by going over everyone's movements, and such, but these chapters were bare of any interest and the snail pace of the story-telling did not exactly help either.

What about the impossible angle, you ask? Well, I should have half expected this from a hybrid mystery, but the answer to how anyone could wander around the house without being logged is the science-fiction equivalent of a murderer using a skeleton key in a locked room mystery – which is a letdown to say least. Particularly when its given around the halfway mark. It's a real buzzkill on the rest of the story.

Smart House slightly redeemed itself in the end with a somewhat decent explanation, but it showed that the book should have been written as a novella-length story.

Well, as you can judge by my comments on the opening chapters, I really wanted to like the book, as a whole, which prevented me from skimming to the end or giving up altogether. However, the story becomes tedious drag between the discovery of the bodies and the explanation. A real shame as the ideas present in the story had real potential and some of the science-fiction elements are now reality (e.g. handheld computers and A.I. surveillance). So, sadly, I can only recommend Smart House as a curiosity of both the detective-and science-fiction genres.

No idea what I'll dig up next, but, hopefully, something good again and might pull another impossible crime story from the bookshelf, because I just noticed this is my 299th blog-post tagged as a locked room mystery!

The Locked Room Reader VII: Miracles in Dutch

"There are, however, many more novels and short stories of impossible crimes that were published in other languages and that have never been translated into English."

- Robert Adey

Recently, I discussed three Dutch locked room mysteries, one novel and a pair of short stories, which reminded me there was a particular filler-post patiently waiting on the back-burner for my attention. There are a number of such posts that need to be written or updated, such as my lists of favorite locked room novels and short stories, but always wanted to redo the rundown of Dutch-language impossible crime stories I posted, years ago, on the GAD Wiki – which could now be augmented with additional material. I know most of you will probably grumble and growl at a catalog of mostly untranslated mysteries, but this blog-post is more of a personal note to myself.

You might have noticed my deep, burning and undying love for the impossible crime story. So, naturally, I have always been on the lookout for some homespun miracles of the criminal kind, but result was discouraging to say the least. For years, I was stuck at five titles, divided between two writers, which left me with practically no hope of adding anything worthwhile to that small stack of books. Until recently, that is, when they slowly began to accumulate in front of me out of nowhere. And they seemed to come crawling out of every nook and cranny of the genre: the Golden Decade (1930s), the post-WWII period and even the 21st century!

So now those five titles have grown into a modest stack of more than twenty Dutch-language locked room tales, which makes me want to wave the national driekleur (tricolor) and putting the band back together. Yes, that last part is a euphemism for reassembling the Dutch Empire and the recolonization of Southeast Asia. Who wants to be the Governor-General of the New Dutch East Indies?

But enough padding for one badly written filler-post. Let's take a crack at this list!

The Novels:

A.C. Baantjer's Een strop voor Bobby (A Noose for Bobby, 1963)

Appie Baantjer was a homicide detective with 40 years of service on the Amsterdam police-force, but during the early 1960s he made his first, tentative steps in becoming one of the most successful crime novelists of the Netherlands – selling close to eight million copies during his lifetime. A Noose for Bobby is where it all began. The first three-quarters of the plot is a study of character, pitting a police-inspector against a ruthless pimp, but the last quarter turns into a technical impossible crime story when the villain of the piece is found swinging from a rope in the proverbial locked room. A very old and worn trick is used to lock the door from the inside, but the clue of the electric wiring is something one would expect from John Rhode.

M.P.O. Books' De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010)

Marco Books is a grossly underrated writer of police-detective and thrillers, who occasionally takes a stab at the locked room problem, which began with this 2010 novel. The plot is primarily concerned with the murder of a doctor and the numerous attempts on the life of a local alderman, but towards the end there's an impossible poisoning behind multiple locked doors. A minor side-puzzle with a simplistic answer, but good enough to complement the overall plot.

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

A figure head of the Dutch criminal underworld, Fred Duijster, is found gutted in his tightly secured, fortress-like home. The windows were covered with steel shutters and the ground around the house is monitored with motion sensors that trigger over head lights, back and front, and activate the CCTV cameras – which captured only one person entering and leaving the premise at the time of the murder. But is he guilty? It's a locked room conundrum in the same vein (and quality) as Marcia Muller's The Tree of Death (1983) and Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Solution (1983), but with an even better explanation. As a matter of fact, I believe this to be one of the best titles on this list.

Willy Corsari's De misdaad zonder fouten (The Crime Without Mistakes or The Faultless Crime, 1927)

Once upon a time, the Belgian-born Willy Corsari was the Grand Dame of the Dutch-language detective story, but her work always struck me as extremely uneven and her lowest point can be found in her debut novel – which has a horribly misleading book-title. The impossibility concerned a man with a broken neck found in a house completely locked from the inside, but dissolved in an anti-detective story with twins and sleepwalkers. The final "twist" was excruciatingly bad. Luckily, Corsari would go on to write at least one decent impossible crime novel.

Willy Corsari's De onbekende medespeler (The Unknown Co-Player, 1931)

An early, standalone novel with a German movie-and television company as a backdrop and the opening sequence of the story shows dashes of imaginative writing – rewinding and fast-forwarding between scenes like a movie. Unfortunately, the impossible stabbing of an actress in front of a rolling camera is underplayed and has a dull, routine solution. However, it's a mountainous improvement on her first attempt at penning a locked room novel.

Willy Corsari's De voetstappen op de trap (The Footsteps on the Stairs, 1937)

A legitimate and not entirely unsuccessful treatment of the locked room trope! The book concerns the complications surrounding the murder of Sir John Judge, born as Jan Rechter, who left his native country to amass a fortune on the British Isles, but the past has patiently awaited his return home – ending with a deadly shooting inside a locked study. One important piece of information is withheld from the reader, but the policeman was unaware of it as well. So, at the time, I was willing to show some leniency on that point, because I had finally found a Dutch-language locked room mystery from the Golden Age.

Cor Docter's Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970)

Cor Docter was a prolific pulp-writer, known as "The Prince of the Lending Libraries," but during the early 1970s he wrote three traditionally-styled detective novels and one of them was a first-class locked room story. Cold Woman in Kralingen is a topographical roman policier, situated in a neighborhood of Rotterdam, where the stabbing of a gardener leads Commissioner Daan Vissering to a shadowy society known as Kostbaar Kralingen (Precious Kralingen). During one of their regular meetings, one of their members is murdered inside a sealed bedroom and the murderer appears to have been trapped inside. The key was tossed, underneath the crack of the door, into the hallway where everyone had gathered, but when they battered down the door all they found was a murdered woman!

The solution is proof of Docter's credentials as a writer of pulp-fiction, but it's a good and original answer. One that makes this book one of the better titles on this list.

Robert van Gulik's Labyrint in Lan-fang (translated as The Chinese Maze Murders, 1956)

Robert van Gulik was a diplomat, sinologist and an author of a series of detective novels, short stories and novellas about a Chinese magistrate from the 7th century, Judge Dee – which played an vital role in popularizing historical mysteries. This is one of the first books in the series and dispatches Judge Dee to far-flung district on the Northwestern border of the Chinese empire, Lan-fang, which is plagued by barbarians, corruption and murder. One of the victims, General Ding, was stabbed in the throat with a small, peculiar looking dagger with a poisoned blade, but the General was holed up in a hermetically sealed mansion when the murderer struck. The impossible crime angle is not as strong as in other locked room novels in this series, but the book, as a whole, is great!

Robert van Gulik's Fantoom in Foe-lai (translated as The Chinese Gold Murders, 1959)

Chronologically, The Chinese Gold Murders is the first book in the series and tells the story of Judge Dee's first post as a magistrate of a somber, mournful place, called Peng-lai, where tales are abound of the restless dead. One of them is the previous magistrate of the district who died under mysterious circumstances in his locked library. This is easily one of the best entries in the series!

Robert van Gulik's Het rode paviljoen (The Red Pavilion, 1961)

Judge Dee and Ma Joong are on a return journey home, to the district of Poo-yang, which brings them to Paradise Island. Upon their arrival, the island is busy with the celebration surrounding the Festival of the Dead and the only room is the cursed pavilion of the book-title. A place where people have died under unsavory and inexplicable circumstances, which Judge Dee get to witness first hand as he has to explain three seemingly impossible deaths that has occurred in the room – one of them discovered by the judge himself. I remember it as one of the best and most solidly plotted Judge Dee novels, but really should re-read the book to see if it holds up.

Ivans' De bosgeest (The Forest Spirit, 1926)

Under the single-name pseudonym of "Ivans," Jakob van Schevichaven had the honor of becoming the first commercially successful crime writer of the Netherlands. The Forest Spirit is a strange, early example of the serial killer novel: a number of forest rangers were beaten to death in a dark, sprawling wood in Germany. Someone had caved in the back of their heads and in one particular case the murderer left no footprints in the soft soil surrounding the body. However, this impossibility is mentioned only briefly and the revelation of the murderer immediately tells you have the no-footprints trick was done. Not the most impressive entry on this list.

Edward Multon's De onzichtbare doder (The Invisible Slayer, 1963)

A thoroughly bad "detective" story streaked with second-rate thriller material and only a token locked room murder. I recommend you read the review if you want to know more about the content of the story.

Frans and Tineke Steenmeijer's Moord in het provinciehuis (Murder at Provincial House, 1999)

Only the first two chapters deal with the impossible murder of a provincial politician, shot to death during a weekly round-table meeting of the College of Deputies of the Province of Friesland, which is too short to make this really a noteworthy as a locked room mystery. However, the locked room angle, as short as it is, made for one of the better parts of the book.

Berts Wiersema's De ongeloofelijke ontsnapping van Tengere Tinus (The Unbelievable Escape of Tengere Tinus, 2010)

I've not read this book myself, but know of its existence and will pick it up if I ever stumble across a copy. The story is geared to primary school children and is about a couple of aspiring detectives, Iris and Ko, who help the police figure out how a criminal pulled of an escape from a warehouse – which he had barricaded from the inside and was surrounded by the police on the outside.

Short Stories:

Bertus Aafjes' "De zaak van de bronzen waterreservoirs" ("The Case of the Bronze Water Reservoirs," collected in De vertrapte pioenroos, 1973; The Trampled Peony)

Bertus Aafjes was a world traveler, poet and writer whose oeuvre included several volumes of short stories and a single novella-length mystery about a venerable Japanese magistrate, Judge Ooka – an 18th century judge who presided over the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo). The impossibility in this story falls in the same category as the Egg of Columbus and the Gordian knot. A dishonest bronze caster has been overcharging the prize of the titular water reservoirs, claiming he has used more bronze than he probably did, but, at the time, they had no means to weigh the huge reservoirs. So how could they proof the dishonesty of the bronze caster? Judge Ooka's scheme is as clever as it's simple and is arguably the most original story on this list.

Willy Corsari's "Sporen in de sneeuw" ("Tracks in the Snow," collected in De weddenschap van Inspecteur Lund, 1941; Inspector Lund Makes a Bet)

A broken leg and the story of a long-forgotten, unsolved and impossible, murder turns Lund into an armchair detective, but the solution was pedestrian and uninspired.

Anna van Doorn's "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In," collected in De geliefde die in het veen verdween en andere mysteries, 2017; The Lover Who Disappeared in the Bog and Other Mysteries)

Corbijn and De Jong are particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators) who specialize in cold cases and their first recorded investigation concerns the apparent suicide of an obscure and reclusive poet in a log cabin in the woods – where he withdrew from the world to slave over a line of poetry in solitude. There he was found, shot in the face, with traces of gunshot residue on his hand and a double-barreled shotgun next to the body. The door was latched from the inside and the only window could not be opened. So if it's not suicide than how could a murderer have entered and left the log cabin?

One of the better locked room tricks on this list!

Robert van Gulik's "Moord en ambtelijke haarkloverij" ("The Red Tape Murder," collected in Zes zaken voor Rechter Tie, 1961; Judge Dee at Work)

Judge Dee investigates the murder of Commander Soo at a military fortress, shot with an arrow loosened from a room on the other side of the complex, where only one person was present who could have pulled the bowstring. However, this person is proven innocent by Judge Dee and the solution turned this straightforward murder case into a locked room mystery.

Robert van Gulik's "De twee bedelaars" ("The Two Beggars," collected in Zes zaken voor Rechter Tie, 1961; Judge Dee at Work)

A very minor locked room tale in which Judge Dee witnesses a ghostly apparition escape from a watched, moonlit, garden with a gate that's securely locked and barred from the inside.

Havank's "De gegrendelde kamer" ("The Bolted Room," collected De Schaduw & Co, 1957; The Shadow & Co)

Charles C.M. Carlier, a.k.a. De Schaduw (The Shadow), is called on to investigate the alleged suicide of a company director, who apparently shot himself inside his private office, which is nicely resolved in a handful of pages.

Ashe Stil's "De dode kamer" ("The Dead Room," collected in De dode kamer, 1996; The Dead Room)

Ashe Stil is a historian and the author of a series of historical mystery novels and short stories about Willem Lootsman, a waterschout (water bailiff) in the Amsterdam harbor of the Dutch Golden Age, which may be the Dutch counterpart to the historical detective stories by Paul Doherty – as at least two short stories are locked room mysteries. This story is about a greedy merchant found dead inside a hermetically sealed vault.

Ashe Stil's "Het zilveren pistool" ("The Silver Pistol," collected in Het zilveren pistool, 2005; The Silver Pistol)

A rich merchant is found murdered inside an upstairs room, locked from the inside, but there was an open window. However, the plot-description noted that the window offered no means of escape to the murderer. So you can expect me to explore this series in the hopefully not so distant future.

That's the last one for now, but, surely, this blog-post will be updated in the future and compiling this list gave me an idea for another post, because most of the solutions have something in common – a preferred technique, or approach, to the locked room problem. Something that shows a clear difference in the mindset of Angelo and Germanic mystery writers, but hey, that's subject for another time.