They Never Checked Out

"You're all too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking about for things to complain about, aren't you? Well let me tell you something - this is exactly how Nazi Germany started!"

- Basil (Fawlty Towers, Episode: Waldorf Salad, 1979)

One year ago, I posted a review of Anita Blackmon's There is No Return (1938), who wrote over a thousand short stories for such publications as Love Story Magazine, Detective Tales and Weird Tales, but only published two full-length mystery novels during her lifetime – which were highly regarded by the eminent crime-fiction critic, Howard Haycraft. Nevertheless, they swiftly faded from popular memory and were completely forgotten about once their author passed away in 1943.

Back in 2010, Curt Evans began to blog about Blackmon's long-forgotten mystery novels and have since then reappeared in print as both paperback editions and e-books.

Murder à la Richelieu (1937) was the first of only two novels about Blackmon's short-lived series-character, Miss Adelaide Adams, who has a "crusty disposition" and has been referred to as "a nosy old maid," but she has a good and even generous heart – snappy as she may be at times. Miss Adams also has a traceable sense of humor and this makes her narrative a dark, grim and bloody parody of the "Had-I-But-Known" crime stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart and Dorothy Cameron Disney.

A good example of the nature of the book is this, often quoted, line from the opening page of the book: "had I suspected the orgy of bloodshed upon which we were about to embark, I should then and there, in spite of my bulk and an arthritic knee, have taken shrieking to my heels." So she immediately sets the tone and the old-fashioned battle-ax is actually a pleasant narrator of the dark events unfolding at the Hotel Richelieu.

The Richelieu is a quiet, respectable residential hotel in a southern town in the United States (Curt suggested Little Rock, Arkansan) and has its own social hierarchy consisting of several layers. One of them are the resident guests, or "the old guard," who make up the inner circle of hotel-life and rarely allow outsiders (i.e. temporary guests) to be admitted to their closed group – prompting the observation that it was easier "to enter the Kingdom of Heaven" than "to be admitted among the elect at the Richelieu Hotel." A third layer consists of the people working at the hotel, such as the waitresses and the droopy-eyed night clerk, but they're not socially involved with either group of guests.

So pretty much what you would expect from a place where human beings congregate for an extended period of time. It's like a pass-through village.

Recently, Miss Adams, who is described herself as "a close student of the human comedy," began to notice slight disturbances in the regular interactions between the people at the hotel. Even though she failed to foresee the significance of her mislaid spectacle case.

Anyway, she did noticed the hostile attitude of Kathleen Adair towards James Reid, of New Orleans, when he happened to step inside an elevator with her clumsy, scatter-brained mother. She also noticed how the niece of respectable widow and hotel guest, Polly Lawson, who, "practically overnight," began to behave in the most reckless manner – which came at the cost of her budding relationship with a promising young man, Howard Warren. So now Polly is flirting with a carefree, traveling salesman, Stephen Lansing, who loves to tease Miss Adams. Lansing also took a young wife, Lottie Mosby, on a whirlwind ride. She has a husband who has taken to drinking and she gambles away their money on the race track in the hope of hitting it big.

Finally, there's a professional gold-digger, Hilda Anthony, who had come to the town to make use of their new state law to procure a legal separation from her fourth husband. But why did she stick around in the small, quiet conservative town once she secured the divorce. After all, the town is not exactly rich in "gilded playboys."

Once again, you should probably expect entangled relationships, emotions and problems even in a small community such as a residential hotel, but when that community becomes the backdrop of a string of gruesome murders they might harbor a potential motive for a killer.

The first victim is found when Miss Adams entered her darkened suite and discovers the body of one of her fellow guests, namely James Reid, who is hanging by his suspenders from the cross-arm of a chandelier. Someone had slit his throat from ear to ear!

One observation that has to be made is that all of the murders are particular grisly and graphic in nature, which you would expect to see in a slasher movie from the 1980s. But here you have a murderer who choked the second victim to death and tossed her body out of a top-floor window to an ugly mess on the pavement below, while the third victim had her neck violently broken and biting acid poured over her face! A fourth murder by throat-cutting is revealed during the killer's feverish confession in the penultimate chapter of the book.

However, the grisly killings are not the only dark and disturbing aspects of Murder à la Richelieu, because the plot slowly reveals that the hotel was used for a particular kind of crime rarely, if ever, associated with detective novels of this vintage – making the book somewhat of an original and standout title within the genre. On top of that, the plot is serviceable enough and managed to be complex without becoming a horribly mangled mess of plot-threads. Blackmon nicely tied every plot-thread together to form a logical pattern and only the murderer's identity proved to be a slight letdown. You can say the hints to this person's guilt were present in the background, but they were a trifle weak and the revelation of this person, as the deranged killer, was a little underwhelming.

But then again, I just might have been disappointed because my murderer turned out to be pretty dead. After the acid-murder, it was revealed a minor side-character had gone missing from the hotel and immediately assumed I had solved the entire case there and then. As it turned out, I definitely had not solved the case there and then.

In any case, Murder à la Richelieu is a splendid compound of grisly murders, dark motives and rampant blackmail, which is told from the perspective of a delightful narrator who you can't help but like in spite of her crusty personality and imperfections. Miss Adams alone makes you wish Blackmon had continued the series pass the two titles she left behind, but she also knew how to write and was not entirely inept when it came to handling an intricate, multi-layered plot.

So, in closing, I would rank the book only slightly below the two best hotel-set detective stories ever written: Harriet Rutland's Bleeding Hooks (1940) and Cornell Woolrich's novella "The Room With Something Wrong" (collected in Death Locked In, 1994).

A Twenty Second Miracle

"As a general rule, in order to find the author of a crime or a theft, it is necessary to determine how that crime or theft was committed, or, at least, how it could have been committed."

- Chevalier Floriani (Maurice Leblanc's "The Queen's Necklace," collected in The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, 1907)

The 61th entry in Gosho Aoyama's voluminous series, known as either Case Closed or Detective Conan, opens with a first-rate Kaito KID story, showing the brightest pupil of the modern-day Rogue School at work, which offers a very cunning and original impossible problem – namely a teleportation trick!

In an earlier volume (44), Aoyama introduced an elderly relative of Serena Sebastian, Uncle Jirokichi.

During his first appearance, Jirokichi attempted to capture the dashing, white-clad thief by baiting a trap with a priceless artifact of history, but KID simply used this opportunity to showcase one of his most daring illusions: a miraculous mid-air walk. So the billionaire learned from his previous mistake and devised a new scheme to ensnare "the infamous thief known as the moonlight magician."

Jirokichi is in possession of "the legendary shoes worn by Maria Theresa," the Holy Roman Empress, which has a two large amethysts embedded in the toes. Something that should attract the attention of KID, because he always appeared to have "a thing for large jewels," but to be sure an open challenge was published in the newspaper.

However, the slippers weren't securely placed in a heavily guarded, inaccessible room on the top-floor of a closely observed building, but were simply put on display in the middle of the Ginza shopping district and surrounded by only four security guards – reasoning that KID is vulnerable when operating at ground level. After all, the street level display eliminated the possibility of KID fleeing the scene with the assistance of his beloved hang-glider. So, when he swooped down from the sky, Jirokichi gave the order to raise several large, tight nets that blocked every avenue of escape on the Ginza Crossing and it appeared as if the elusive thief had finally been captured. Or so everyone assumed.

KID simply turned to the rolling cameras and announces his impending escape from the enclosure by crossing dimensions, which is followed by a puff of smoke and twenty seconds later reappeared on the rooftop of an adjacent building – a stunning trick accomplished without the assistance of a body-double. Something that is confirmed when the TV footage is closely scrutinized. And the great magician promises a repeat performance the following day, because one of the slippers he snatched from the display proved to be a fake.

So this gives Conan, who had been watching in the crowd, one shot to stop his adversary from completing his criminal masterpiece, which also results in some nice interaction between Conan and KID when the latter becomes aware of the former's presence. The trick itself was also pretty nifty and more workable than the levitation/mid-air walk illusion from the previously mentioned 44th volume. I (roughly) worked out how the teleportation stunt was pulled off, but only because I remember a story that used the same principles for an entirely different kind of trick.

Nevertheless, this was a nice, well put-together impossible crime story with some great (visual) clues and Jirokichi is proving himself to be a better foil to KID than Conan. Sure, Conan has the brains and deductive abilities to shatter KID's illusions, but Jirokichi has the resources needed to pose a genuine challenge for the modern-day Arsène Lupin. I really hope these three characters cross paths again in the future.

The second story in this volume involves the Junior Detective League and takes place during one of their many camping trips, but this time they're stranded on a lonely stretch of mountain road – because Doc Agasa forgot to put enough gas in the car. Luckily, the spot a classic Rolls Royce heading their way, but the driver is incredible rude and leaves them without helping them. What's even more discouraging is that the car is headed to the only habitable place in sight: a large, sprawling and luxurious summerhouse at the top of the mountain. However, an explosion occurs at the place shortly after the car must have arrived at the top.

When they arrived at the summerhouse, they find that a fiery explosion had occurred in the garage and the driver has been burned to a cinder. The police is of the opinion that the death was an unfortunate accident: a tipped over gas can had filled the garage with vaporized gasoline and a burning cigarette ignited the gasoline that engulfed the car – causing the explosion. However, the police only found a cigarette butt, but not the remains of a pack of cigarettes. And this suggested murder to Conan.

This story is purely a howdunit, as the murderer's identity is pretty obvious, which instead concentrates on how this person created the fire that blew the victim sky-high. A clever method that's believable enough, because it was revealed that it had failed several times before and had to be tweaked. Some of the tweaks served as a clue. Only the motive was poorly handled.

The third story is one of those code crackers, but the problem mainly serves as a vehicle for a story-line that was introduced in the previous volume.

Someone has been littering the streets with paper airplanes, all with patterns on them, which is blamed on a prankster, but Conan recognizes an SOS in the patterns. However, he's stuck at school and can only communicate with Rachel over the phone, as Jimmy Kudo, while Subaru Okiya (who stays at the Kudo home) also tries to crack the code at their end of the phone. The case primarily shows that Okiya is not who he says he is and it is suggested that he may be the Black Organization agent known as "Bourbon," but, based on the Sherlock Holmes comments from the previous volume, I very much doubt that is the case.

Finally, the last chapter opens a story that will be concluded in the next installment in this series and concerns the missing brother of the waitress of Coffee Poirot, Azusa, who is suspected by the police of having shot and killed his employer with a hunting rifle – ending on a note implying that Azusa may be in grave danger. But more about that the next volume.

So, all in all, a pretty solid volume with some excellent plot-and character-driven content and the Kaito KID story served as a perfect headliner. Once again, I really loved this series and might pick up the next volume sooner rather than later.

Vanished from Their Midst

"No law-breaker... is shrewd enough to see all contingencies. Even the most trivial event has so many intimately related and serrated points of contact with other events which precede and follow, that it is a known fact that every criminal—however long and carefully he may plan—leaves some loose end to his preparations, which in the end betrays him."

- Dist. Atty. John F.X. Markham (S.S. van Dine's The Benson Murder Case, 1926)

Joan Sanger is one of those unsung, long-forgotten souls who's too obscure to have her own page on the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, but her ghost can lay claim to something most of the equally obscure names that are listed on that website cannot: she currently has her only known detective novel in print!

Back in 2014, Rowman & Littlefield reprinted Sanger's little-known mystery novel, The Case of the Missing Corpse (1936), complete with a replication of the original dust-jacket. I don't know what prompted them to reissue this specific, virtually unknown detective story, but the plot has several distinguishing features that makes it an item of interest for readers of this blog.

As the book-title suggests, The Case of the Missing Corpse concerns a search for a missing person, instead of a murder investigation, which largely takes place in pre-revolutionary Cuba and contains floor-plans, diagrams and the occasional footnote – punctuated by a genuine surprise twist in the tail of the story. A pleasant jolt of surprise that briefly transported me back in time to my first brush with Agatha Christie.

The missing person, or corpse, of the book-title is a sports icon, Stephen P. Wyndham, whose sudden disappearance made his "the days of his brilliant polo at Meadowbrook" and "yachting glory at Newport" the stuff of legend. But the circumstances surrounding his disappearance are equally legendary. During a high-stake poker game with a group of friends in his Havana hotel suite, the hotel experienced a blackout of several minutes and when the lights came back on Wyndham's seat was vacant!

Wyndham had "vanished as completely as though the earth had yawned open" and "engulfed him."

Back in the States, every club-room in New York was rife with gossip and reporters spread the latest developments in the case all over their front pages, which dragged on for nearly a full year and the public was still "panting for Wyndham news" - except that the police suddenly "clamped the lid down." They're instructed to stop giving out information to the media and it's suspected that the elder sister of the missing sportsman has a hand in this. So two reporters of the New York Globe decide to take a whack at cracking the case for themselves.

John Ellis is one of these reporters, who lends his voice to the narrative of the story, but his role is primarily that of playing the incredulous Dr. Watson to Peter Alcott's Sherlock Holmes.

Alcott writes a daily sports column in the Globe and is known for his unvarying nonchalance, since nothing ever seemed to phase him, but rarely does anything escape his Argus-eyed attention. During their investigation, Alcott revealed himself to be common-sense man with the instinct and bluffing ability of a professional poker player. Something that would prove to come in handy when they needed access to certain people who would otherwise not talk with representatives of the press. So I think you can place Alcott, as a detective-character, alongside Craig Rice's John J. Malone and Stuart Palmer's Miss Hildegarde Withers.

Where everyone sat at the poker table

The reader is given an early demonstration of Alcott's questionable methods when he uses an old python-skin cigarette case, which used to belong to Wyndham, to get access to the private residence of the sportsman older sister, Miss Isabella Wyndham – who had initially hoped to put "a stop to this public pillorying." She also told them to print what they liked, but then Alcott played, what Ellis called, one of his "damn fool hunches." However, the shot in the dark hit home and the reporters gained access to the family attorney, Mr. Elihu Stone. And this sets them on the trail of the family lawyers nephew, Charlie Stone, who is revealed to be one of people who was present in the hotel suit at the time of Wyndham's disappearance.

So, slowly, but surely, Alcott and Ellis snake towards a solution by "locating Wyndham's slippery friends," which brings the two newspaper reporters to the Havana hotel in pre-Castro Cuba. There they eventually track down the people who were present in the hotel suite on the night of the disappearance, which was a mixed crowd to say the least. Several of Wyndham's personal, long-time friends, but the other poker players were a judge, a movie director, a backstage politician and a Cuban planter. One of them played for stakes much higher than the pile of cash on the center of the poker table!

Alcott and Ellis gathered most of the poker crowd in the same suite and threw all of the cards on the table, but this resulted in a different, more chaotic, denouement than expected and the surprise waiting for the reader once the dust has settled on this scene is an authentic, old-fashioned rug-puller – one that caught me completely by surprise. Up to that revelation, The Case of the Missing Corpse had shaped up to be fairly regular detective story with a slightly different approach to the plot (a missing person instead of murder). And then, when you least expect it, Sanger knocks the ball right out of the park!

There is, however, one minor smudge on the overall quality of the solution that has to be mentioned. During those final, chaotic scenes, someone is found dead in a storeroom that was locked from the inside. The police assumed it was a simple suicide, but Sanger hints that it may have been a murder. Once you know the solution, you know who the potential murderer is and this persons motive, but it is never clarified whether this death really was a suicide or murder. Or how a murderer was able to escape from the locked storeroom. So I assume the death was indeed a suicide.

Otherwise, The Case of the Missing Corpse was a pleasant surprise in the truest sense of the word.

The Last Roman Standing

"These murders are not native to this place. They have been planted here by the devil, or some of his agents."

- Mrs. Bradley (Gladys Mitchell's Death and the Maiden, 1947)

Ruby Ferguson was a British writer of romance fiction and children's book, whose romantic novel Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary (1937) was reportedly a personal favorite of the Queen Mother and her books for girls have remained in print longer than any other pony series, but she also produced several obscure, long-forgotten detective stories – published under her maiden name of R.C. Ashby. Several of them received glowing reviews by John Norris and Nick Fuller.

Unfortunately, Ashby's detective novels are little-known rarities on the secondhand book market and the 2009 reprint of Death on Tiptoe (1931) blinked out-of-print almost immediately upon its release. So most of her detective stories are hard to find and probably come with a hefty prize-tag, but an independent publisher of ghost and horror novels reissued one of her supernatural-tinged mysteries in 2013. And this edition is still in print!

He Arrived at Dusk (1933) has been described as a head-on collision between Agatha Christie and Gladys Mitchell, which then, dazed and groggy, stumbled onto the pages of an M.R. Jamesian ghost story before finding its way back – since the story, unlike some comments suggests, is not a hybrid mystery. Personally, the book reminded me of Virgil Markham's Death in the Dusk (1929) as perceived by E.R. Punshon.

The narrative of the book is divided in three sections, all with a different narrator, which begins with "the inclusion of Mr. Mertoun's romance."

William Mertoun is an antiquarian who is commissioned by the reclusive Colonel Barr to value the content of his lonely house on the dark, wild moors of Northumberland in the North East of England. A desolate place where the very soil exhales its ancient history and the distant past is an integral part of the plot.

When the antiquarian arrives at his employers home, Mertoun discovers that his Colonel Barr is bedridden and the nurse, Miss Winifred Goff, has barred everyone from the Colonel's bedroom. Not even his nephew, Charlie, is allowed to see his uncle. Colonel Barr's health began to falter after his brother, Ian, fell over a cliff, which was ruled to be death by misadventure at the Coroner's Inquest, but the presence of sandal-prints at the scene has everyone whispering about a local legend, Vitellius Gracchus – a centurion's ghost who has wandered the region for over sixteen-hundred years!

A ghost with a historic tie to the grounds around the ancestral home of the Barr clan: a stone was uncovered in the cellar of the house and it showed "the traces of an inscription," which were "quite illegible," but over the years the words "ROMA" and "VITELLIUS GRACCHUS" began to form. According to the legend, the Roman soldier carved those words in a rock as he was dying from wounds sustained in his last battle with the Ottadeni. So does this restless spirit of the Roman soldier is out to kill the people who took possession of the place where he took his last breath as a living human being? Well, Mertoun slowly becomes convinced something malevolent is making its presence felt.

A painting is slashed to ribbons one night and a short, broad-bladed sword, "dark and corroded with age," materialized after a séance and was found driven into the wall of the library like King Arthur's sword. Only one of them managed to retrieve the sword from the wall with ease! However, the subsequent events is what pushed the poor antiquarian over the edge and explained his wrecked nerves at the opening of the book. One dark evening, when out on the moors, Mertoun gets a glimpse of the ghost when the beam of the distant lighthouse briefly illuminates the edge of the cliff. And, for a short moment, "the old, savage England raised its head" in the twentieth century.

On the following day, the body of a young shepherd, named James Blaik, was found by a two farm laborers on the moor with a Roman sword in his back. The shepherd had defied, "what he considered superstition," by sheltering his flock at night in the ruined and haunted tower on the hill. And all of these apparently supernatural phenomena and bloody murder culminates with the disappearance of Colonel Barr.

The second section of the book consists of diary entries written by Miss Goff's brother, Hamleth, who is one of the lighthouse keepers and his story is a departure from the ghost-ridden narrative by the antiquarian, which casts an entirely new and sobering light on the events that happened on the mainland – such as the role his sister plays in the Barr household. However, that all I can say about this part of the book without giving anything of vital importance away.

I can't tell too much about the last section, either, which is told from the perspective of a Scotland Yard detective and explains everything that had happened up to that point. This character does a fine and pleasant job in tying all of the plot-threads together and pointing out all of the foreshadowing that nodded in the direction of the eventual solution.

John Norris called He Arrived at Dusk "a little masterpiece of a book" and the material used by Ashby to construct the plot were absolutely first-rate, but the book (as a whole) failed (IMO) to reach the status of masterpiece, because there are anorexic ghosts less transparent than the final explanation. Don't get me wrong. The atmospheric and evocative writing was brilliant. The Northumbrian backdrop and suggestions of its haunted past stirring back to life were superbly conveyed to the reader. And some of the schemes, and counter schemes, were great. However, the identity of the murderer and the motive were pretty obvious from very early on. And that lessened the impact of the ending as it only confirmed what I suspected all along.

Still, He Arrived at Dusk is a pleasant, shuddery read that, not entirely unsuccessful, attempted to marry the ghost yarn to the detective story, which should also appeal to my fellow aficionados of John Dickson Carr. As matter of the fact, the book can be read as an interesting companion piece to the recently reviewed He Who Whispers (1946). Just keep in mind that Ashby, as a plotter, was not in the same league as Carr, but she sure knew how to write like him. So if you go into the book with that in mind, you'll probably walk away from it with an opinion that's probably closer to Norris' than mine.

Although, I should stress here that I really enjoyed the book. My complaint is merely a plot-technical one. Anyway, that my somewhat lukewarm report on this once extremely scarce mystery novel and probably have something equally rare for my next blog-post, but I might post something before that. I still have some things on my to-watch list and there several volumes of Case Closed on the pile. So we'll see what's next.

The Fatal Bullet

"Lawyers can be pests and often are."

- Archie Goodwin (Rex Stout's A Right to Die, 1964)

Erle Stanley Gardner was a prolific and consistent mystery writers, who churned out books and short stories faster than a Gatling machine gun can spit out bullets, which included over eighty (!) novels about his most famous creation, Perry Mason – a courtroom wizard who often took gross liberties with the law. However, Mason was not the only the character Gardner created.

Gardner penned three, novel-length mystery series with a relatively long and not entirely unsuccessful run. One of these series was published under a pseudonym, namely "A.A. Fair," which covered thirty books about the Nero Wolfean Bertha Cool and her legman, Donald Lam. A third series counted only nine titles and were originally serialized in slick magazines, such as The Country Gentleman and The Saturday Evening Post, before they were published as books. And this particular series has long held my interest as they seemed to offer a delicious slice of small town Americana.

The series in question is set in the fictional county of Madison City, California, which had been under the control of a political organization for fifteen years, but the then district attorney got careless and "the sheriff was crooked" - giving rise to a populist uprising against the political establishment of Madison City. Doug Selby and Rex Brandon "furnished the spearhead of a political ticket" that "swept the machine aside."

So Selby was sworn in as the new district attorney of the county and Brandon became the newly elected sheriff, but both men still have to content with the remnants of the old political structure. A structure that stills seems to work as a opposition power in the third book of the series. There is, however, another problem slinking into Selby's district.

The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939) introduces a dangerous and cunning antagonist for the district attorney, Alphonse Baker Carr, who is a well-known, unscrupulous criminal lawyer with notorious underworld figures as clients – which does not sit well with his new neighbors of the swanky neighborhood of Orange Heights. Mrs. Rita Artrim believes Carr has nothing to contribute to the community that's "either desirable or healthy," but Selby can't stop the lawyer from buying property in the county.

Nevertheless, the moment "old A.B.C." sets foot in his district the problems begin for the newly elected D.A. and sheriff: a bail-jumper from Los Angeles, Peter C. Ribber, is picked up by a patrol car and accidentally released again. A dry cleaner finds a brown suit in his truck, on which a "sinister red stain had encrusted into stiffness," with a powder-burned hole in the center. A resident of Orange Heights called the police to report a naked man, who was seen running around, which is followed by the report of a gunshot.

On the following morning, the body of a naked man is discovered with a fatal gunshot wound. However, the single gunshot wound has two bullets in them and "the second bullet almost paralleled the course of the first bullet." So the question is not only who fired the fatal shot, but also why anyone would toss a slug into a dead body.

The victim is identified as Morton Taleman, a criminal associate of Ribber, who is a client of A.B. Carr. As to be expected, Ribber immediately engages Carr upon his arrest, but Selby and Brandon have another problem on their plate. One of the previously mentioned characters, Mrs. Altrim, became a widow when she lost her husband in a roadside accident, which left her elderly father-in-law a cripple with amnesia. However, Selby learns from their live-in nurse, Miss Anne Saxe, that employer and patient may have designs on one another, because she believes Mrs. Altrim had a hand in the accident – which tosses a double-edged motive for murder into the household.

On the one hand, you have to old man who is slowly regaining his memory, as well as his mobility, while on the other you have someone afraid of being found out. This problems comes to a head when one of them goes missing and only leaves a blood-covered liquor closet behind. And this is also the plot-thread that gives the book its title, because Selby, based on the mileage on a speedometer, draws a circle on a map of the vicinity in which the body must have been hidden. On the last pages, the book-title gets an additional and delightful meaning.

So, that makes for a pretty bundle of trouble, but The D.A. Draws a Circle is not really about who did what and why, but how Selby navigates a treacherous maze of petty power politics and deceit. You can label the book as a strategic detective and the approach recalls that of an inverted mystery (e.g. Columbo), in which the primary question is how the detective will checkmate his opponents and in this instance it's a two-on-one match. The (interlocking) solutions to the aforementioned problems are merely the cherry on top.

I mentioned earlier how the political landscape of Madison City contains remnants of the previous regime, which are actively working against Selby and Brandon. You get a front-row seat to their scheming in the sixth chapter when the editor of the Blade, Frank Grierson, has a closed-door meeting with the dull-witted Chief of Police, Otto Larking. Grierson cooks up a plan ensuring Selby loses both face and political capital, which is done by making sure the man arrested by Larking is exonerated by Carr in court. Before the trail, the Blade is going to publish editorials minimizing the difficulties of the case and suggesting to the public that getting a conviction is a mere formality.

So that would make Selby look very bad, if he fails to secure a conviction, while the Blade and Larking come out of it smelling like a rose garden. There are only two routes that could upset this plan: beat the famous criminal lawyer in court or find a complete solution to the problems, which are both easier said than done.

In my (far from humble) opinion, the way in which Selby outwitted his reluctant prisoner and "a big-time, crooked shyster," simultaneously circumventing the schemes of his political opposition, is what made The D.A. Draws a Circle a tremendous read reminiscent of the best inverted detectives with a cleverly worked out, double-pronged (murder) plot on top of that.

So, I really should return to Gardner's work more often, because they always deliver in one way or another. Maybe I should try one of his Gramps Wiggins novels next. You know, for, uhm, obvious reasons. ;)

Killer Kindaichi

"Moral wounds have this peculiarity—they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart."

- Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo, 1845-46)

The Death March of Young Kindaichi is a four-part (episode) story-arc in the recent Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi R) anime series, but the story originally appeared as a series finale for the original comic-book run in the early 2000s – only to be resurrected in 2004. Obviously, the plot betrays that the story was initially intended to be a curtain closer.

The first episode opens with arrival in Hong Kong of Yoichi Takato, "The Puppeteer from Hell," who designs perfect crimes for people with an insatiable hunger for revenge. Takato learned of the existence of someone who's absolutely famished!

Upon his arrival, Takato travels to the remnants of an abandoned hotel and blasts a hole in a wall leading to a warren of underground passages stocked with long-forgotten, World War II-era supplies of the Imperial Japanese Army, but someone had been sealed inside those dark tunnels – surviving on canned food and rodents. Hell's Puppeteer christens this person "The Count of Monte Cristo" and promises to help extract revenge on the people who locked him inside, robbing him of sunlight for the past 18 years, by writing "the scenario for the perfect crime." A perfectly diabolical scenario casting his nemesis and high-school detective, Hajime Kindaichi, in a very special and precarious role.

Kindaichi, Miyuki and Inspector Kenmochi are en route to Hong Kong in order to attend a magic show by an illusionist known as Maskman, which is stage-name once used by Takato. The show is hosted by the King Dragon Hotel, a replica of the ruined one, but, when they arrive, there's already a police presence, because the person who rebuild the hotel has been kidnapped. However, this is only a minor plot-thread that mainly serves the story by making sure the police is on hand when the body starts hitting the floor.

On a brief side note, Police-Detective Li of the Hong Kong police previously appeared in The Hong Kong Kowloon Treasure Murder Case, which now might be the next set of episodes on my watch-list.

Anyway, Kindaichi attends the magic show and Maskman asks him to climb on the stage to be hypnotized, but the hypnotic spell only appears to take effect when he returns to his hotel room. One that threw him in a foggy trance.

Later that night, Kindaichi is found staggering across the second-floor hallway of an unoccupied part of the hotel, groggy-eyed and confused, without any recollection of how he got there, which becomes a problem when he learns a woman has been murdered on that floor and all of the exits sealed – which means that nobody but him could have murdered the woman. Luckily, Detective Li holds him in high regard and gives him the benefit of the doubt, but this changes when there are several eyewitnesses to an attempted murder and everyone (including the viewer) saw it was Kindaichi who wielded the knife. Even more shocking is that the victim is Kindaichi's friend and rival, Superintendent Akechi.

Maskman claims his hypnotic spells "awakens desires deep within the human heart" and murder must have been in the heart of Kindaichi, because it has always been on his mind. Takato even taunts him over the phone by saying that, somewhere in his heart, he "longed to be rid" of his rival. So Kindaichi decides to break out of the hotel and find the real murderer, which he does with a surprising alley at his side: a 10-year-old boy, Chao Longtao, who works at the hotel as a bell-boy.  

Hajime Kindaichi, Fugitive from Justice

However, the part about proving his innocence is harder than expected, because they keep stumbling across bodies and Kindaichi is always the last person to have handled the murder weapon – whether it's a blood-stained knife or a smoking gun.

So, as you can gather from my plot-overview, the episodes is very much what you'd expect from a story (originally) meant as a series finale. You have the protagonist in serious trouble and a number of familiar faces turning up again to take their curtain call, but how does the plot measure up. Was it a worthy closer to the original series? Well, yes and no.

First of all, there's are the (quasi) impossible situations, which are basically stage illusions ("murder magic"), but appreciated their clever intricacy. However, it should be pointed out that their execution required impeccable timing, steely nerves and a good portion of luck, because everything had to go exactly as envisioned in an uncontrolled environment. Something could have easily gone wrong under such circumstances. For example, if one of the policeman was quicker than anticipated and reached the elevator, before the door closed, the sealed floor murder would not have worked. Similarly, Kindaichi staggered in the wrong direction nobody would have seen him planting a knife in Akechi.

So using the props and principles of a stage illusion to create a seemingly impossible murder, or two, can be a tricky business.

However, the impossible situations, despite the risk, were better handled than the identity of the Count of Monte Cristo. I fully appreciate the Agatha Christie-like attempt at playing an unusual card from the least-likely-suspect deck, but the problem is that this person was obviously involved in the Puppeteer's scheme. I even guessed (sinful, I know) how the apparent impossibility of this person being the actual killer could be explained, which was confirmed when the photographic clue was introduced in the third episode. That clinched it for me.

There is, however, the question how believable the murderer is. I know you can get away with more in comic-books and animation, but even with that in mind it felt like they were taking some liberties with their artistic license.

In closing, The Death March of Young Kindaichi is not one of the best sets of episodes in this series, but not particulary bad either and should primarily be watched as a detective-in-peril story, like Patrick Quentin's Black Widow (1952), while the impossibilities and the unusual murderer should be seen as plot-extras – which should help making some of those weaknesses more forgivable.

I previously reviewed the following episodes: The Alchemy Murder Case, The Prison Prep School Murder Case, The Blood Pool Hall Murder, The Rosenkreuz Mansion Murders and The Legendary Snow Demon Murders.