The Phantom Enemy

"It seems impossible, but Sherlock Holmes once said that when you have ruled out all other answers, what remains must be true."

- Jupiter Jones (Robert Arthur's The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, 1965)

Earlier this month, "JJ" of The Invisible Event wrote a great blog-post, titled "Trifecta Perfecta – A Trio of Locked Room Riddles for Younger Readers," which coincided with a serendipitous discovery I made around the same time – once again demonstrating that these detective blogs are a hotbed for cosmic synchronicity. What I found was a practically unknown locked room novel in the juvenile, or young adult, category. And the publishing date places the book on the tail-end of the genre's Golden Age!

The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy (1959) is the fourteenth book in the Ken Holt series by Sam and Beryl Epstein, written under the joined pseudonym of "Bruce Campbell," consisting of eighteen books in total. This series is purportedly "one of the very best boys' series" and the stories were praised for their "logic and great attention to detail."

Ken Holt is the protagonist of the series and the son of a well-known foreign correspondent, Richard Holt of Global News, but lives with the family of his best friend and aspiring photographer, Sandy Allan – who runs a small-town newspaper called the Brentwood Advance. An arrangement stemming from the first book in the series, The Secret of Skeleton Island (1949), when the Allen family helped "a terrified Ken Holt" locate his missing, or kidnapped, father. In the end, the motherless Ken was invited to come live with the Allens, which suited his foreign-correspondent father, because the alternative would have made him the loneliest latchkey kid in the United States.

I should also point out that this series was obviously geared at a slightly older readership than, let's say, The Three Investigators by Robert Arthur and William Arden. One of them is that Ken and Sandy are in their late teens, probably sixteen or seventeen years old, who drive a red convertible, but more notably are the severity of the crimes. There are no less than three, very serious, attempts at murdering or severely wounding people. But more on that later.

The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy begins very benignly: Ken and Sandy, acting in the capacity of cub reporters, are tasked with reporting on the annual Halloween party for the employees of the Brentwood Foundry and Casting Company – who are about the celebrate their tenth anniversary. Only eleven years ago, the plant was owned by the Alborn Iron and Steel Corporation, but they deemed the Brentwood location obsolete and abandoned the plant. A decision that was an "absolute tragedy" for more than a hundred families in Brentwood. Luckily, a former plant manager, Lew Collins, gathered a group of local investors and breathed new life into the company. It was "a tough pull," but Lew's management saw the company grow and expand. And they were even able to sell shares in the company.

However, dark clouds were gathering above the company as its tenth anniversary looms on the horizon.

Alborn was offering to buy the company back, after it made profitable again, which is supported by a local real-estate magnate, Bob Jennings, who had bought himself into the company and now wanted to see a return on his investment – resulting in "a knockdown, drag-out fight." Collins barely held on to his company, but Alborn was underbidding the Brentwood plant. And that's not the only problem facings Collins. Ken and Sandy learn during the Halloween party that Collins is in the grip of a ruthless, devious and clever extortionist.

Collins has been diligently working an "an entirely new type of casting machine," one that casts molten metals quicker and more efficiently, but one day, an anonymous letter arrived with an enclosed photograph of a section of the blue prints of the automatic casting machine. The letter writer threatens to mail the full plans to all of their competitors, but gives Collins the opportunity to buy back the plans and negatives for the "reasonable price" of $100,000! Only problem is how the letter writer had been able to photograph the plans.

The casting machine was designed, constructed and perfected inside a practically hermetically sealed laboratory. A room with the only entrance, and exit, being a door that opened on the private-office of Collins and the only windows were steel-shuttered with locks that were "crusted with a layer of dirty grease" that took many months to accumulate. There were no scratches around the lock of the door to indicate that somebody attempted to pick it.

Ken Holt, Reporter-Detective

This is where the plot shows its first signs of the series reputed cleverness, because the locked room puzzle poses a double-edges problem for the boys.

Logically, the only person who could be the extortionist is one of the three people who are in possession of a key to the laboratory, which Collins and two of his engineers, Bruce Winters and Will Caton, but Collins refuses to believe he has been betrayed by the boys he helped get through college – something that, at first, appears to be the case. However, Ken and Sandy pursuing this angle shows them to be the type of fallible detectives in the Berkeley-Queen tradition.

I found this to be interesting take, particular in a juvenile mystery series, on a character who had been described as having a brain that could work "faster than a calculating machine."

So back to the drawing board for Ken and Sandy. What they're left with is a genuine locked room problem, which brings them to the darkest, most secretive, recesses of the company, but discovering the secret of the locked laboratory nearly cast them their lives. They're overtaken by the extortionist, tightly bound and gagged, and left to face certain death in one of the dangerous fanning-houses of the plant.

This is not your typical, dime-a-dozen, spot of danger usually found in these kind of juvenile novels, but an honest-to-god attempt at murdering the boys. The writers make it abundantly clear that the extortionist wants them out of the way and their predicament is positively harrowing. Ken and Sandy are stuck their for many hours and several attempts to find a way to escape their bonds fail miserably. Once again, this is a part of the story where series reputation manifest itself. The boys are gagged, but Ken came up with a clever way to communicate with Sandy by humming the tunes of popular songs. And how did Ken communicate to Sandy this is how they could talk to one another? Ken simply hummed the tune of "Say It With Music." A brilliant piece of reasoning and writing on the part of Ken and his creators. Easily my favorite part of the book.

Of course, this assault and attempted murder of Ken and Sandy proves to be the downfall of the extortionist, which came on top of the assault and attempted murder of a plant employee who was pushed off a ladder. On a side note, the assault that left that employee in the hospital functioned as a clue to the extortionist's schemes at the company and he had to put that person out of the way. The only reason this character lived to see the end of the book is that the target audience were teenagers, but otherwise, the plot was only a couple of steps removed from being adult (detective) fiction.

Finally, I should give some attention to the problem of the locked laboratory. I've seen variations of this locked room trick before, but, again, the writers did something really clever with this trick. Ken and Sandy realize that the locked room trick only gave the intruder limited access to the room, which leaves them with the question how the extortionist was able to gather a full set of photographs.

My only complaint is that Ken almost immediately figured out this angle to the locked room, but then again, they would find themselves in a life-threatening predicament only moments later – which made it necessary to get this plot-thread out of the way.

All in all, The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy was a pleasant and surprising discovery with a plot and story that was as good, and in some regards even better, as the best titles from the iconic series about The Three Investigators. So you can expect my return to this series to take a closer look at such titles as The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) and The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician (1956). I'm not sure whether, or not, they are actually impossible crime stories, but the plot descriptions are very promising.

Deadly Reunion

"One should not give a small child a sword under any circumstances."

- Judge Ooka (Bertus Aafjes' Een lampion voor een blinde, 1973; A Lantern for the Blind)

The Foxfire-Floating Murders is the closer of the second and currently last season of Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo R (The File of Young Kindaichi R), which comprises of four episodes and is a surprisingly human detective story drawing on Hajime Kindaichi's past as a boy scout cub – placing him in the conflicting position of having to ferret out a murderer among his childhood friends.

The first of the four episodes opens with Kindaichi receiving a telegram ("that's rare these days") and the slip of paper is the bearer of bad news. One of his childhood friends, Tsukie Marika, has suddenly passed away. Kindaichi and Marika were cub scouts and part of the group that went missing for two days during a camping trip in the woods, but their ordeal turned out to be nothing more than an exciting adventure for the group. Even the snake that bit one of the girl scouts, Akari, proved to be non-poisonous.

Kindaichi remembers them having plenty of fun back in those days, but the group grew apart as they got older and only kept exchanging New Years' cards over the post. So their reunion in the small village of Byakko is a joyous occasion until they learn Marika has been dead for the past two months. And she was murdered.

Two months ago, the body of Marika was found in a storehouse, "naked and wrapped in a white cloth," with "a Byakko white fox mask covering her face," which is an imagery that evoked the Japanese folktale of "the Marriage of the Fox" – something that would play a role in one of the later murders. So the local villagers fear the murder might been the result of the curse of the white fox, Byakko-sama.

Furthermore, nobody knows who sent out the invitations to the funeral or why this person waited several months with sending them out.

There is, however, one peculiarity about this early part of the story that bugged me a little bit: the characters, initially, don't appear to be really bothered by the revelation that Marika had been killed. Or that her killer has not yet been found. Shortly after they learn about the murder, they cheerfully suggest a game of cards and play soccer the following morning. Even Kindaichi, who's a detective and murder-magnet, is out-of-character by appearing less than interested in the case and even reprimands himself when something occurs to him – saying to himself that he's over thinking the matter and that "not everything is a crime." When, in fact, it is a murder case! So that struck a slightly false tone in the narrative.

However, that might just have been the tranquil effect of the village, which, admittedly, is a beautifully drawn place with a scenic tradition called Foxfire-Floating.

Every year, a young girl from the village becomes the bride of the fox and has to sit all night, dressed in a kimono and mask, on the veranda of the Byakko Inari Shrine. You can't approach or talk to the bride while she's sitting in front of the shrine. At the same moment, villagers gather at the riverbank and "float lanterns downstream in memory of the souls of the dead," which makes for a charming image. But this is also the night that Kindaichi loses two more of his old cub scout friends.

One of them, Koutarou, is found floating in an inflatable boat between the lanterns on the river with his face covered by a white fox mask. He also has been stabbed to death. The second person to die that night is Rin, who plays the role of fox bride, but the murderer propped up her body against the shrine and made it look as if she had been sitting there all the time.

The traditional foxfire-floating lanterns of Byakko Village

The setup of the story and the discovery of the two additional murders covers the first two episodes, which also involve a pair of alibi-tricks, but these tricks are relatively simple to figure out. If you paid any attention to the lay of the land, you can (roughly) work out how the boat-trick was accomplished. Particularly in combination with the clue of the soccer ball. The alibi-trick at the shrine was as plain as day and you should be able to work out the solution based solely on the tear in the rice paper of the shrine's sliding door.

Normally, these easy tricks, in combination with a very transparent murderer, would be slightly unusual for a detective-series that has always heavily relied on complicated locked room illusions, tricky alibis and melodramatic murderers, but the gimmicks were appropriately toned down here – as not to reduce the impact of the human and personal elements of the story. And it worked!

The solution, as to be expected, played on the well-worn motif of the series, "the-avenger-from-the-past," but what keeps the viewer guessing is what, or who, had to be avenged. Obviously, the murders are linked to the camping trip of the cub scouts, but that was over seven years ago and everyone involved was an elementary school student. Several flashbacks of the trip showed nothing really happened that would warrant the death of three people years later. Or so it appeared.

Granted, not every single detail about the murderer's motive is fairly shared, but, eventually, you can make an educated guess and the truth is genuinely tragic. A string of unfortunate events that began with the maliciousness of a bunch of innocent children who had no conception of long-term consequences. The episode ends, strongly, with a teary-eyed Kindaichi wondering about the many "what-ifs" of the case that could have prevented the destruction of half a dozen lives, which includes some of his own actions.

Plot-wise, The Foxfire-Floating Murders is perhaps not the strongest, or cleverest, story in the series, but the personal and emotional ties Kindaichi has to the victims and suspects more than made up for this, but some praise should also be bestowed upon the beautifully evoked backdrop of the village with its folkloric traditions – which proved to be perfect stage for this very personal case.

So, yeah, there you have it. Once again, I fully enjoyed a story from the Kindaichi case files. I guess the age of miracles has not yet passed into the history books!

I previously reviewed the following episodes in this series:

The Alchemy Murder Case

The Prison Prep School Murder Case

The Death March of Young Kindaichi

The Blood Pool Hall Murder

The Rosenkrauz Mansion Murders

The Legendary Snow Demon Murders

All the Fun of the Fair

"This whole affair... will prove to have a perfectly simple explanation if you don't get into a fever about it. The main thing is to get rid of these cobwebs of suspicion, these ugly clinging strands that wind into the brain and nerves until you feel the spider stir at the end of every one of them."

- Dick Markham (John Dickson Carr's Till Death Do Us Part, 1944)

John V. Turner was a British novelist of detective-and thriller fiction, published under his pennames of "Nicholas Brady" and "David Hume," who churned out nearly fifty novels during a brief period between the early 1930s and the end of World War II in 1945 – passing away before the peace was signed. I've been unable to determine how, or where, Turner exactly died, but I suspect he might have been a casualty of war during the final months of fighting on the European continent.

This lack of detailed information is endemic. All I can tell about this long-since forgotten mystery writer is that he wrote, prolifically, during a period of fifteen years, died in his mid-forties and that John Norris of Pretty Sinister Books praised his short-lived detective series about Rev. Ebenezer Buckle. A series comprising of only five novels that were published as by "Nicholas Brady."

Norris wrote three enticing reviews on his blog and described Rev. Ebenezer Buckle as "one of the more interesting least known detectives in the genre."

Rev. Buckle is "a lively amateur sleuth" and botanist, who reminds the reader of Dr. Gideon Fell and Father Brown, but equally alluring are the plots of the cases he investigates, which tend to be bizarre and even nightmarish – occasionally including an impossible crime. 

One of the titles that attracted my attention was The Fair Murder (1933), alternatively published as The Carnival Murder, which Norris called "the most outlandish and gruesome" of the Brady novels and concerns the apparent impossible stabbing of the Fat Lady at the fair. So what's not to like?

My only reservation about The Fair Murder is the comparison Norris drew with Alexander Laing's The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (1934), which did not exactly impress me. Even so, the plot of the story sounded to good to pass on and can already tell you that it lived up to its promising premise.

Twice a year, the fair came to the village of Mudford and the story opens as the August Bank Holiday Fair drew to a close, which the local inhabitants were determined to enjoy in spite of the rain, hail and lightening – plodding, ankles deep in mud, from stall to stall. A carnival barker, Ernie Clarke, tries to draw a crowd to the tent of Sandra, "The Fattest Woman the World Has Ever Known," but the special attraction awaiting the handful of people is the biggest corpse about to be deposited on the police pathologist's slab.

Sandra's hulking remains lies on a coach, behind a curtained enclosure, with a dagger embedded in "the folds of flesh that encircled her throat."

The official side of the murder investigation is in the hands of an eternally skeptical policeman, Inspector Doby, who has always "experienced a curious difficulty of believing anything." Fortunately, Doby's ingrained skepticism proves useful in keeping a level head when he begins to uncover the more peculiar aspects of the murder. One of these curiosities is that it appears unlikely that anyone, who wanted "to stick that woman in the gullet," would have entered the tent from the front, but the back entry looks out on a plot of muddy ground void of any footprints. There is, however, a "perfectly normal, entirely ordinary bucket" standing nearby. And this only the starting point of the twisty, maze-like puzzle Doby has to plot a course through. Luckily, help is on the way.

A quarter into the story, Doby is honored with a visit from the Home Office pathologist, Sir Percy Forbes, who brought along a clergyman, Reverend Ebenezer Buckle.

Rev. Buckle is the brother of the Assistant Commissionaire of New Scotland Yard and, whenever he isn't "preaching inferior sermons, maltreating flowers" or "collecting quotations," he's known "to render signal service to police" – becoming "a hell of a nuisance" once "he gets his nose down on the grindstone of crime." But he has become so successful, as an amateur criminologist, that he no longer has to lean on his brother's position to be called in on cases. However, this is only the case in the city of London. Rev. Buckle needed Sir Percy to be introduced with the policeman in charge of the delectable murder case on the fairground in the village of Mudford.

There's a splendid scene between Rev. Buckle and the antagonistic Chief Constable, Edward Melton, lampshading the fact that "the police don't allow strangers unconnected with the Force to assist in any case at all." Chief Constable pretty much showed him the door of the police station, but how the Reverend manipulated him into changing his mind reads like a parody of John Dickson Carr. You know how Dr. Fell and H.M. have a habit of driving Superintendent Hadley and Chief Inspector Masters out of their minds by speaking in a cryptic manner? Rev. Buckle takes a similar route and tells the Chief Constable that he'll never find out who killed the fat lady unless "the mystery of the bucket, the beer bottle and the boiled beef" is solved.

The final chapter, in which Rev. Buckle explains the reasoning behind his deductions, shows that the bucket, the bottle and boiled beef were key ingredients of the murderer's plan. I think that alone demonstrates what kind of detective story The Fair Murder is at heart and who would probably like it.

However, the reader should be warned not to expect a weird, quirky, but lighthearted, detective story when arriving at the (black) heart of the plot, because The Fair Murder is hands down the darkest and most grisly of all Golden Age detective stories – even Philip MacDonald's gruesome Murder Gone Mad (1931) is a mere cozy in comparison. One of these dark aspects of the plot is the truth behind Sandra's metamorphosis from a good looking, shapely woman to a monstrously-sized attraction for the freak show, but the coup de grâce is the truth behind the adaptation papers found in a locked tin box in the victim's caravan. A truth that will make you root for the murderer and boo Rev. Buckle.

I think this is where Rev. Buckle differs from Carr's series-detectives, because Dr. Fell and H.M. would never, under any circumstances, have handed this murderer over to the authorities. Dr. Fell would have burned down the fairground before he would allow that to that happen (e.g. The Man Who Could Not Shudder, 1940), while H.M. would simply keep his mouth shut and withdraw from the case (e.g. She Died a Lady, 1943). Anyhow...

Italian edition

So, purely as a detective story, The Fair Murder is a solid and very memorable mystery novel, but what about the impossible crime element, you ask? Someone did manage to cover the muddy ground without leaving any footprints, but how this apparent impossibility tied in with the murder is very different from what the premise suggested and only served to help Rev. Buckle understand the sequence of events at the time of the murder. I can only really call this book a nominally locked room mystery that should be read for the who-and why instead of the how. Or else you might end up disappointed.

There is, however, a false solution for the impossibility that came to mind when reading the opening chapters and is based on the empty bucket found at the scene.

I envisioned the murderer tip-toeing, backwards, to the back entry and obliterating the toe-imprints in the mud with splashes of water from the bucket. Remember, it had rained heavily right before the murder and the mud had no time to dry. Once inside, the murderer planted a dagger in the neck of the fat woman and hid near the entrance of the tent. When the murder was discovered, the murderer simply mingled with the people who had entered the tent or slipped out when everyone's attention was fixed on the body. Sadly, I had to abandon my pet theory almost as soon as it had occurred to me, because nothing in the story tallied with it.

In closing, The Fair Murder is a very different animal from your usual, classically-styled, detective story. From the carnival background and assorted cast of characters, including an armless-and-legless wonder, to the dark, gruesome motive that lies at the heart of the case. The result is a detective story that will probably stick in your mind for years, or even decades, to come and can understand why Norris holds this series in such high regard. And you can expect me to return to this series before too long. I'm already being tempted by The House of Strange Guests (1932), which is, reportedly, a full-fledged locked room mystery.

Yes, I know, I know. But if you think that's predictable, you should see what I have planned for my next book review. I say book review because I might squeeze in a review of Case Closed or Kindaichi. So you better not touch that dial.

In the Line of Duty

"Ideals come to torment us all at some stage, or at least they should do."

- Chief Inspector Morse (Inspector Morse Series 5, Episode 1: Second Time Around, 1991)

Major Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th baronet, served in both World Wars with the Grenadier Guards and was Lord-Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire from 1954 to 1961, but the common plebs, like ourselves, probably know him best for his detective stories – all of them published under his penname of "Henry Wade." The detective novels and short stories, published under that byline, are held in high regard by pretty much everyone.

Until now, my only exposure to Wade had been one of his standalone mystery novels, Heir Presumptive (1935), but I kept coming across enticing reviews and readers of this blog have recommended his work to me in the past. I had planned to resume my reading with Wade's penultimate novel, A Dying Fall (1955), but Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, beat me to it (read her review here). So I decided to track down one of his promising-sounding titles and I can tell you that the subject of this blog-post will make an appearance on my best-reads of 2017 list!

Constable, Guard Thyself (1934) is the fourth book about Wade's series-character, Detective-Inspector John Poole of Scotland Yard, and is an early predecessor of the modern-day police procedural. However, the plot of the story consists purely of Golden Age material and can even be considered as a locked room mystery! Granted, the apparent impossibility was the unfortunate byproduct of the murderer's attempt to engineer "an unshakable alibi," but the fact remains that the book ought to be acknowledged as a locked room novel.

So I took the liberty to initiate the book in this beloved sub-genre or ours and labeled it as an impossible crime story. Anyhow...

Constable, Guard Thyself has a fascinating background, a police station, situated in a fictional town, Brodbury, where the policemen who are stationed there become implicated in a murder investigation when their very own Chief Constable is murdered – shot to death, in his own office, inside the police station!

Twenty years previously, the town was suffering from "a severe epidemic of poaching" and Captain Anthony Scole had been appointed to the Chief Constableship in order to "smash the poaching gangs." Captain Scole had earned a fearless reputation during a five-year stint as a policeman in an unruly corner of India, but his efficient reorganization of the local game keepers had only reduced poaching. Not stopped it. What he needed was to make an example out of someone and this opportunity came when an ambush of three poachers ended with the accidental killing of a game keeper.

Nevertheless, Captain Scole insisted during the trial that the shooter, Albert Hinde, deliberately pulled the trigger and the accused was subsequently sentenced to death. Hinde's brother, a mere youngster, and a friend received five years as accessories. When they were released from prison, they enlisted in the army and were killed during the Spring Offensive of 1918 in Northern France. Ironically, Hinde, who was supposed to hang, had his sentence commuted by the Home Secretary on "possible grounds for doubting premeditation" and was kept safely behind bars. Hinde was released from prison twenty years later and he had not forgotten about the Chief Constable of Brodbury.

Scene of the Crime

A much older and wiser Captain Scole did not feel "quite as happy as he had at the time" about the conviction he had secured, which effectively ended the poaching epidemic in his district.

But regret over his past, somewhat misguided, idealism does nothing to quell Hinde's resentment or prevent him from being harassed by the ex-convict. One evening, while traveling homeward, Captain Scole has a brief encounter with Hinde and on the following day he receives a threatening letter, which promises that the next time "the judge puts on the black cap" it will be for something he has actually done – suggesting he might take a crack at the Chief Constable. Alas, the fact that the Chief Constable was surrounded by policeman proved to be insufficient protection against an assassin's bullet and his body was found slumped over his desk with a bullet in his head.

A nation-wide police alert goes out for Albert Hinde and the situation appears as if his capture would bring the case to a close, but the acting-Chief Constable, Superintendent Venning, is prodded into asking the Yard for assistance. And that brings Detective-Inspector John Poole into the fray. Poole methodically begins to separate the facts from the red herrings, which makes for a well-written, pleasantly paced and clever police procedural with classical detective plot.

One of the complicating factors requiring Poole's attention is an anonymous letter hinting at a streak of corruption, and even blackmail, running through the Brodshire Constabulary. A "dirty piece of scandal" pertaining to a clothing manufacturing firm bribing an official, at the Brodbury police station, to give them "the figures tendered by competing firms" and place a sealed bit of their own – which is slightly lower then the bits by their competitors. So they always landed the "profitable contracts" to dress His Majesty's constables.

This opens the possibility that the murder was an inside job. Only problem is that the circumstances of the murder demonstrate that the shooting was very difficult to pull off, whether the murderer came from within or from the outside, which is where the impossible angle comes into play. However, it only becomes apparent how much of a locked room problem Captain Scole's murder really was until Poole explains how it was done. As noted at the start of this review, the impossibility is a side-effect of the murderer's main objective, creating "a cast-iron alibi," but the trick is not bad at all and shows some ingenuity. Such as the significance of the clue of "a piece of powder-scorched leather." Even if that particular clue was given (too) late into the story. Still, why the murderer needed a piece of leather in a gun murder was very clever and practical. Not something I have seen before. So there's that.

But what I really admired about Constable, Guard Thyself is how Wade, early on the story, gave the reader pretty much the raw, unprocessed truth behind the impending murder of Captain Scole, but how everything stuck together proved to be a different story altogether. And putting together a coherent picture of the crime required some genuine detective work on the part of Poole. So, yes, you can probably spot the murderer in the early stages of the story and that could have easily been a fatal flaw in the plot (c.f. J.C. Lenehan's transparent The Mansfield Mystery, 1932), but Wade kept this reader interested throughout the story with reconstructions, developments, diligent detective work and a cast of varied and engaging characters. I would rank Poole among those engaging characters. He might have been somewhat of a colorless personality, but he pleasantly reminded me of Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French.

And then there's the most fascinating aspect of the story: the emerging importance of the Great War of 1914-1919 and how the events on the battlefield proved to be of great importance to the murder of Captain Scole. I have often professed my love for detective stories, with plots, that lean heavily on the World Wars, but there only precious few that incorporate the First World War. There's a Harriette Ashbrook A Most Immoral Murder (1935), originally titled He Killed a Thousand Men, and a short story, Laurance Clarke's "Flashlight," which was actually published in 1918, but there's not much else in this category.

So I welcome Constable, Guard Thyself as an excellent addition to this lamentably short list of WWI-themed detective stories and it has convinced me that there's no excuse to not further explore Wade's output. He evidently knew how to handle a twisty, complicated plot and have been told in the past that the First World War hangs like a ghost over a number of his detective novels, which now has really caught my attention. I might return to Wade sooner rather than later. Any and all recommendations are welcome.

Well, thus far this hastily written, banged-out review. Not sure what's next on the list, but there's another (promising) impossible crime novel on the big pile. On the other hand, I also want to return to Case Closed and the animated Kindaichi series. So we'll see what turns up on this blog next. So don't touch that dial!

Escape from the Tower

"In fact the way this was worked was so sublimely simple, when I tell you, you'll wonder why you didn't get it in five seconds flat."

- Jonathan Creek (Jonathan Creek Series 2, Episode 2: The Scented Room, 1998)

Several months ago, I reviewed an impossible crime novel, The Weight of Evidence (1978), written by the late Roger Ormerod and noted in my post that he had two other books listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991), but an inspection of his bibliography revealed two overlooked locked room titles - namely More Dead Than Alive (1980) and And Hope to Die (1995). The synopsis of the former immediately caught my attention, because the description of the plot struck me as a prototype of Jonathan Creek. I turned out to be correct.

More Dead Than Alive is the penultimate novel about David Mallin and George Coe, a pair of private investigators, who started out as separate series-characters, but formed a partnership after crossing paths in Too Late for the Funeral (1977). The Weight of Evidence was the inaugural case of their partnership and they would appear in that capacity in half a dozen books.

More Dead Than Alive is narrated by the wife of David Mallin, Elsa, who has been staying at a crumbling, drafty medieval stronghold, Kilvennan Castle, which is owned by the husband of an old school friend, Konrad Klein, known as "the greatest escapologist" since Harry Houdini – even celebrated as "one of the world's leading illusionists." But that was a long time ago. The modern world doesn't flock in droves to the theaters to see illusions anymore and magic on television lacks the prestige of the stage, because you can always assume it's "a trick of the camera." So the magician has been laboring diligently, up in his tower room, on dangerous new trick by combining elements of the Sword Box Illusion with the Bullet Catch Trick.

Konrad had constructed a special trick-cabinet, a heavy, carved wooden box on castors, in which his lovely assistant, Amaryllis Moore, had to take place and mere seconds after closing the door he would "fire a bullet through the cabinet at chest height" – from side to side! A very dangerous trick that could possibility revitalize his failing career, but the illusion refused to work and Amaryllis had begun to loose her nerve. The dummies that are being used to the test the cabinet are riddled with bullet holes and she simply refuses to enter the deadly contraption.

So it was not unusual to hear gunshots emanating from the work room, but, one day, a loud crash echoed down from the tower and when they went to investigate they found that the unlocked door would not butch as much as an inch. And the reason? It was blocked by the heavy trick-cabinet. When they finally wormed passed the blocked door, the only thing they found was an open window overlooking "the sea-slicked cliffs” and “the piled waves crashing into the cliff over peaks of rock." A sheer death-drop of several hundreds of feet!

Mrs. Clarice Klein asks Elsa to call in her husband, David Mallin, to advice her what to do about her missing, and now presumed dead, husband, because his life had been insured at the tune of 100,000 pounds. Konrad used to joke he was "worth more dead than alive," but the insurance policy came with a suicide-clause and is non-payable in case the magician took his own life. A fact that places a big question mark behind his disappearance act in the tower as suicide appears to be the only logical answer.

David Malling arrives with George Coe at the ancient castle and they begin to poke away at both the case and the trick-cabinet, which places them at odds with an agent of the insurance company, Martin Fisher – who can expect "a percentage commission" in case of suicide. This is, however, not the case. Once the two private-eyes learn the secret of the cabinet, they come up with a delightful (false) solution explaining how the mysterious disappearance could have been an unfortunate accident. And in that case, the double-indemnity clause is triggered and the insurance company has to cough up 200,000 pounds to the family.

Arguably the best aspect of More Dead Than Alive is all the theorizing and testing of potential solutions to the problem of the tower room, which is largely done by Coe, who emerges her as an enthusiastic, if crude, detective in the Roger Sheringham mold. Coe even credited Edgar Allan Poe's famous 1844 short story, "The Purloined Letter," with helping him find Konrad's hidden drawings and papers about all of his illusions. So there's a definite link with the great detective stories of the past in this 1980s mystery novel. Something that becomes even more pronounced when Konrad's body washes ashore with a bullet wound.

The fact that Konrad was shot to death makes his disappearance from the tower room a full-fledged impossible crime. One way or another, either he had left the room and was murdered elsewhere or his was killed there and his murdered had left the room, but either way they had to pass through a door that was blocked from the inside by a heavy cabinet – which proved to be practically impossible to move, or manipulate, from the outside. Something that was painfully demonstrated when Coe's hand got stuck in between the doorpost and blocked door during one of his tests.

Nevertheless, Coe comes up with a number of possible explanation for the blocked door problem.

One of them is rather practical and shows a method that could be used to leave the room blocked from the inside, while another false solution, based on sound and misdirection, was obviously based on Clayton Rawson's masterly "From Another World" (collected in The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective, 1979). However, while Coe was experimenting with various possibilities, Mallin was silently contemplating the case in the background and noticed the significance of the clues provided by the fatal bullet and a test dummy that was found lying beneath the window.

These clues yield an entirely different kind of solution that's not as easy to accept as the other proposed explanations, but, admittedly, it had been wonderfully foreshadowed in the early part of the book. And much simpler in nature than the other explanations. You just have to accept that nobody would notice what was going on right under their very own noses.

That being said, More Dead Than Alive is an imaginative locked room novel that reads like a predecessor of the Jonathan Creek TV-series. I can easily imagine how a slight rewrite, and replacing the detective-characters, could turn this book into a full-fledged Jonathan Creek TV-special. David Renwick would probably have some fun rewriting the final page of dialogue, between David and Elsa, which lends itself to his style of comedy.

So this probably piqued the interest of locked room readers and fans of the Jonathan Creek series, but the book also shares some of the weaknesses of the latter which may turn off some readers. The book is purely concerned with the how of the crime, which the who-and why hinges upon, while the characters populating the plot are (even by my standards) paper thin. You really have to take More Dead Than Alive purely as an impossible crime story, because, as a mystery novel, it's only a very minor work in the overall pantheon of detective-fiction. 

Still, as a locked room novel, it deserves to be better known for its multiple (original) solutions and somewhat daring final explanation to the central impossibility.