The Casebook of Miss Victoria Lincoln

"I notice while all people are agreed as to the variety of motives that instigate crime, very few allow sufficient margin for variety of character in the criminal. We are apt to imagine that he stalks about the world with a bundle of deadly motives under his arm, and cannot picture him at his work with a twinkle in his eye and a keen sense of fun, such as honest folk have sometimes when at work at their calling."

- Loveday Brooke (C.L. Pirkis' "The Black Bag Left on the Doorstep," collected in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, 1894)

John Russell Fearn has been discussed on this blog before and noted in those previous posts how incredible prolific he was as a writer of science-fiction, westerns and detective stories, published under a small army of pen names, but surprisingly, he also penned a series of adolescent detective stories for teenage girls – using the byline of "Diana Kenyon." The stories originally appeared in a monthly magazine, titled Girls' Fun, during the late 1940s.

The protagonist is Miss Victoria Lincoln, "a lady detective," who's introduced to the reader as a perfectly precious thing. A young college graduate who excelled at almost everything in school and you could find her name "on practically every plaque in the school hall." After she graduated, her rich parents helped her pursue a career as a private investigator and opened a office for her in Regent Street, in London, which came with a big paragraph in the newspaper to announce she was open for business.

So you can say Miss Victoria Lincoln is pretty much a Mary Sue at heart. Thankfully, she's not one of those insufferable, overbearing characters and keeps to her role as investigator without displaying any pesky habits or annoying character-traits – which ensured the stories were readable and fun. Something I feared would not be the case after reading the first pages of the opening story.

There are, as far as I can tell, sixteen short stories in this series that were written by Fearn. However, the character of Miss Lincoln looks to have been the property of the magazine, because I also came across a series-listing that catalogs a clump of additional stories written mostly by Hilary Ashton and Vera Painter. But only a small selection of stories that were penned by Fearn appear to have been collected after their original magazine publication.

The Haunted Gallery: The Adventures of Miss Victoria Lincoln, Private Detective (2011) collects six of the sixteen short stories that Fearn wrote and they were written in the tradition of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries. Some of the stories, like the first one, definitely shows they were written with the Great Detective in mind.

I'll try to run through them as fast as possible and attempt not to bloat this blog-post to the same monstrous size as most of my reviews of short story collections. But no promises.

The first story gave this collection its book-title, "The Haunted Gallery," which takes place at a "lovely and historic old pile of Bartley Towers" that had "a cloak of gloom," sorrow and mystery draped over it ever since its owner, Professor Marchant, passed away, but ever since his passing someone has been paying nightly visits to the locked gallery – which housed the late professor's collection of antiques and curios. Every night, this intruder would smash a valuable antique to smithereens on the floor. And then there's "a ghostly female form in white draperies" who's been witnessed gliding around the place.

So the niece of the professor, Caroline Gerrard, and his former secretary, Dorothy Mannall, who felt "responsible for the safety of the collection" decide to call in outside help to put a stop to the intruder. Gerrard and Mannall have both attended Shelburne College and they recall a particular talented student, Miss Victoria Lincoln, who became a private detective. She came up with an interesting, two-pronged solution to the problem: one pertained to the person who opened the gallery door at night and how that related to the ghostly figure, while the other half revealed who smashed the precious antiques and why.

This double-layered solution struck me as an amalgamation of the plots from Sax Rohmer's "The Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room," recently reprinted in Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017), and a well-known story from Conan Doyle's The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904). No idea whether Fearn had those stories in mind when he wrote this "The Haunted Gallery," but the result is a decent enough story of this sort and a good introduction to the main-characters.

Note for the curious: Miss Lincoln recruits one of the characters, Caroline Gerrard, to become her personal assistance, once she finishes her final term at college, which she does in the third story.

The second story, "The Clue of the Blue Powder," is a mild dame-in-danger tale and begins when Lincoln meets a young woman, named Anne Seymour, standing forlornly at the little train station of Denbury. Seymour ask Lincoln where she can get a taxi, or "a pony and trap," so she can get to Riverdale Hall, but Lincoln offers her a ride and even decided to stay the night at the country house when discovering a message chalked on her suitcase – warning her to "keep away from the green room." This green room is Seymour's old nursery and the persistent threats makes Lincoln suspect there's something about the room that's very important to someone in the house.

So not a bad read at all, but the plot is nothing special and will probably prove itself to be quite a forgettable yarn.

The third story in this collection, "The Thief of Claygate Farm," is a personal favorite and marks the arrival of Caroline Gerrard to take her position as Victoria Lincoln's assistance, which had been offered to her in the opening story. Gerrard immediately has to accompany her new employer to a farm in Esher, Surrey, where Professor Lynch rented Claygate Farm as a place where he could safely store his collection of antiques and curios. Several attempts had been made to break into his London home, but the burglar is a persistent one and looks to have been more successful getting in, and out, of the farmhouse, because rings and pendants keep disappearing as if by magic – taken from "a locked room one by one."

However, what endeared this story to me was not a clever or original impossible situation. On the contrary. The problem of the locked barn house is explained with one of the oldest tricks of the trade. What made me like this story is how the false solution was used. The only opening in the locked room was "a small fanlight" set high in the far wall and this immediately made me suspicious of the pet jackdaw, Kim, that belonged to a farm boy, Tom Derry, who were both introduced at the start of the story. Only problem is that the possibility of the bird being the thief was eliminated halfway through the story and this meant they had to clear the bird's good name by finding the actual thief.

A very good and amusing short story that's actually a better introduction to the main characters than the opening story. Only drawback is the mundane explanation for the locked barn house, but that can easily be forgiven by everything that was written around it.

The fourth story of the lot, "No Shred of Evidence," can best be described as a Sherlockian tale with a classical, Golden Age-style plot and is easily the best item in this collection. I suspect this story will prove to be favorite with many of the more seasoned mystery readers.

Lincoln and Gerrard are traveling to St. Hilda's College for Girls, in Somerset, where the music teacher, Edsel B. Baxter, has gone missing and left behind a disturbing note telling that he had decided to end his own life – intending to do it in such way that his "body never will be found." But when the question his housekeeper, Lincoln and Gerrard learn that there were many suspicious anomalies in the life of the missing music teacher. One of them is that he looked remarkably slimmer when he wore his pajamas, while another concerned a pronounced limp that disappeared when he was (heard) pacing around his room.

So this makes for a typical Holmesian problem that enters Golden Age territory when the body of a man is found dangling from a tree branch in the leafiest corner of a small forest, but the victim is not the missing music teacher! As noted, this story will probably be best appreciated by seasoned armchair detectives, because the plot is a traditional one and surprisingly mature (see motive) compared to the earlier stories in this collection. Plot-wise, this is easily the best one of the lot.

The penultimate story, "The Visitors Who Vanished," can only be taken seriously when read as a spoof of the genre, because the story is borderline ridiculous with an explanation that plays on an exaggerated cliché outsiders have of classic detective stories. A cliché that never fails to make me cringe whenever it actually turns up in a detective story.

Lincoln and Gerrard are engaged by Mr. Graham West, a well-known art dealer, who had a silver statuette of a horseman stolen under seemingly impossible circumstances. One evening, someone who was pretending to be Professor Garston, a famous sculptor, called on West and was alone for less than a minute, but when West returned the study was deserted and one of his statuettes had vanished – only problem is that the entire house was either locked from the inside or had people mooning about the place. A stranger simply could not have left the house, in less than a minute, without being seen.

Obviously, the explanation hinges on a disguise and this makes it very apparent how the vanishing act was done. Something that would have been slightly more acceptable had Fearn picked a different kind of culprit. So not exactly the gemstone of this volume.

Finally, we have the story that closes this collection, titled "From Beyond the Grave," which has perhaps the most original plot of all six stories and only the second one that deals with a murder.

Lincoln and Gerrard are asked by Miss Mary Reid to prevent the murder of her beloved sister, Margaret, who's engaged to Sir Robert Carson, but Miss Reid suspects Sir Robert is only interested in Margaret's money. She's even convinced he murdered his previous wife, Lady Enid, who supposedly fell overboard from a Channel steamer and her body was never recovered. Miss Reid did some detective work of her own and believes the poor woman never set foot aboard the steamer, but was murdered "at some point en route" and the body had been hidden somewhere along the road, which makes it crystal clear how the case can be solved – namely by finding the place where the body had been stowed away.

A very well-written, good and, above all, a fun story to read. The highlight of the story is without doubt the trap that was laid for the murderer, which saw the murder victim stir from her makeshift grave and disturb her murderer's peace of mind. I might be remembering this wrong, but certain aspects of the plot appeared to be anticipating Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington (1957) by nearly two decades.

However, my memory might be playing tricks on me, because it has been eons since I read 4.50 from Paddington. In any case, "From Beyond the Grave" perfectly served its role as a memorable closing act to the overall collection.

All in all, The Haunted Gallery is an attractive collection of short stories that are either playfully innocent or deadly serious. Only the second story attempted to do a bit of both. But whether the stories are playful or serious, the plots clearly showed they were written for a younger audience, because all of them come with training wheels on. So they only pose a challenge to young neophytes, but the bright-eyed innocence of some of these stories might warm the hearts of the more jaded readers of crime-and detective fiction. Personally, I was warmed by the third one, which is a wonderful yarn in every sense of the word. I did not even care by the standard locked room trick that was used. The rest of the story was too good to disqualify it on a technicality. 

 

So my love-affair with Fearn continues! And I have, what looks to be, a first-rate village mystery novel for my next review. So stay tuned! 

The Room With Something Wrong

"There's no bogey in that room. But there was—and may still be—death in it."

- Lord Mantling (Carter Dickson's The Red Widow Murders, 1935)

Paul Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990) is the fourth recorded case of his primary series-characters, Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst, which has recently been translated and published by the proprietor of Locked Room International, John Pugmire – who recently also edited and published a massive locked room anthology entitled The Realm of the Impossible (2017). But I'll get to that One Thousand and One Nights of miraculous crimes and impossible problems later this month.

So, for now, let's take a gander at The Madman's Room, which is Halter's take on the "room that kills" variety of the (semi) impossible crime. However, I should note here that the book has been tagged by everyone as a locked room mystery, but the plot is actually a how-was-it-done centered around a cursed room (c.f. John Dickson Carr's "The Devil's Saint" from The Dead Sleep Lightly, 1983). I decided not to tag this blog-post as a locked room or impossible crime.

The cursed room here is part of "a well-proportioned XVIIth century stone construction," named Hatton Manor, of which the oldest part had been built by "a knight who fought in the Hundreds' Years War" and witnessed Joan of Arc being burned at the stake – a horrifying spectacle that continued to haunt him upon his return to England ("we burnt a saint"). Some believe that the guilt-ridden knight went mad and burned down the original structure, but he would not be the last person to lose his mind on that premise.

At the end of the 19th century, Hatton Manor was the home of Stephan Thorne and his family, which included a brother, Harvey, who had the promise of "a future literary genius." Harvey had been given his own room on the upper floor where night after night, year after year, he filled "ream after ream of paper." After two years, Harvey had completed a bulky, handwritten manuscript, but when his father read the manuscript a change came over him, grew ill and passed away. Everyone else who read the manuscript was left in a state of shock and Harvey was ordered to never take his accursed writing out of his room ever again.

Needless to say, Harvey was not pleased by the response his masterpiece received and, in turn, his relatives began to shield him from the outside world, because his mind was clearly unbalanced and he became a recluse in his private room – everyone who crossed the threshold was seized by "a curious and indefinable sense of unease." One day, cries were heard coming from the room and they discovered Harvey angrily convulsing on the ground. He died only a few minutes later, but left them with the chilling words they "will perish in fire" for their sins. Curiously, there was a wet patch on the carpet in front of the fireplace.

And not long after his passing, nearly the entire family perished in a fire and Stephan's pregnant wife, Rosemary, ordered Harvey's room to be permanently sealed.

The room remained sealed for decades. Until one of the two grandsons of Stephan and Rosemary, Harris Thorne, relocated his (extended) family to the manor house, which includes his wife, Sarah, and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Hilton. But also his brother-in-law, Francis Hilton, and his wife, Paula. Up to that point, the only residents of Hatton Manor had been Harris' brother, Brian, who lives there as a reclusive clairvoyant with a couple of servants.

Over the course of this story, Brain makes several astonishingly accurate predictions about love, money and misfortune. And the later pertains to his brother's decision to reopen the sealed room and use it as a private study. Shortly after the room is reopened, Harris is found beneath the open window of his study, in the rock garden below, with a fatal wound to his head. Even more eerily, there's a wet patch on the carpet. Just like what happened when his great-uncle Harvey died around the turn of the century!

First Floor Floorplan of Hatton Manor

So, there you have it. The premise of a classical, baroque-style detective story that could have been imagined during the genre's golden days and have to highlight two particular aspects of the plot I found to be absolutely endearing.

When Dr. Twist and Hurst discuss the peculiar circumstances surrounding Harris Thorne's apparent suicide, the later mentions that a secret passage had been found in the room. A passage that lead to the adjacent storeroom. However, the thick layer of dust on the storeroom floor demonstrated that nobody had entered it in many years. 

Usually, these kind of secret passages are mentioned, but turn out not to exist, or offered as a completely underwhelming and disappointing answer to a locked room mystery, but never are they actually found and then eliminated – which is something I always wanted to happen for a change. Just have someone come across a hidden passage, or small cubbyhole, at the crime-scene only to have it eliminated as an entrance and exist (like it being bricked up or something).

So kudos to Halter for using the hidden passageway without incorporating it into the solution of the madman's room!

Secondly, I found the attempt on Halter's part to write a more character-driven detective novel to be adorable. Halter is not a mystery writer known for creating believable, three-dimensional characters and this book is no different in that regard, but the characters, or their actions, are given more consideration here. A good example of this is the prologue, which showed Paula had an intimate friendship with detective by the name of Patrick Nolan. A character who would later turn up in the story again to play a vital role in the unraveling of the mysteries that have plagued Hatton Manor for generations.

Nevertheless, Halter is not exactly a Christianna Brand in the character-department and, consequently, his cast-of-characters were only the proverbial cogs in the engine of the plot – who all played their part in "a chain reaction of events." Luckily, those events formed a pretty good, if somewhat imperfect, detective story.

You can compare The Madman's Room to La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005), which had an excellent central problem and solution about a vanishing street, but was completely unconvincing when it came to explaining the visions from the past and future. The Madman's Room has similar strengths and weaknesses.

As a strength, you can point to the delightful back-story of the titular room and the maddening problem posed by the wet patches that appear on the carpet after each incident. The answer Halter provided for these wet patches was very clever indeed and represents the strongest strand in the twisted coil of plot-threads, which I was unable to figure out for myself (I did figure out who-and why). 

On the weaker side, we have a shaky alibi that was created from "scratch in mere minutes" and someone has called, what made this alibi possible, ridiculously convenient. And I have to agree with that observation. I was also slightly underwhelmed by the answers that explained the divination's of Brian Thorne.

So, while the plot was a mixed bag of tricks, I still tremendously enjoyed my time with the book as a whole, which offered a fun, tricky and solvable detective story. To give you an exact idea where I stand on The Madman's Room, I can point to two other reviews of the book. My fellow locked room enthusiast, "JJ," awarded the book a full five-stars, while Sergio of Tipping My Fedora only gave the book two-and-a-half tips. If I used a similar rating-system, I would give The Madman's Room a solid three-and-a-half points. And that's not too shabby, I think.

Anyway, I better cut this already overlong, rambling review here and tell you that the next post will be about a small, little-known short story collection by a mystery writer who has been mentioned quite often on this blog. Oh, and this collection might contain one or two impossible crime stories. What a surprise!

Behind Closed Doors

"People who can be very good can be very bad, too."

- Carrie Louise (Agatha Christie's They Do It With Mirrors, 1952)

W. Lacey Amy was a Canadian-born journalist and fiction writer, who published his work under the penname of "Luke Allan," of which the most recognized works belong to a string of Canadian Westerns about the Mounties and "a half-breed" cattle rustler, Blue Pete – who could be a long-lost literary relative of Arthur W. Upfield's Detective-Inspector Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte. Interestingly, he also scribbled a stack of detective novels with an eclectic collection of uncommon detective-characters.

The series in question has a policeman, Detective Gordon "Gordy" Muldrew, as the headline character, but the inspector is always beset by a pesky newspaper reporter from The Evening Star, "Tiger" Lillie, who's usually accompanied by a coterie of accomplices. A group who refer to themselves as The Gang and consists of "five light-hearted, loyal young friends" who "obtrude themselves into the story and everything else." Together, they appeared in eight novels that were published between 1930 and 1938.

Beyond the Locked Door (1938) is the last book in the series and has recently been dredged from the bowels of obscurity by an independent publisher, Stillwoods Editions, which is solely dedicated to getting the works of Luke Allan back into print – similar to how Richard Simms Publications only reissues the short stories by Arthur Porges. So collectors, genre-historians or regular readers interested in the books written by this obscure (mystery) author might want to take notice, because a good portion of his output is now back in print. Anyway, let's get back to the subject at hand.

Beyond the Locked Door begins with Gordon Muldrew relaying a warning to that pestering reporter, Tiger, who has been publicly chasing the tail of a shadowy mob of racketeers.

The warning letter told Muldrew to rein in his friend at the newspaper, or the town will become too hot for the both of them, ending with the lovely message "to hell with the reformers" and how they'll do their best "to send them there." Their conversation ends when Muldrew is informed that one of the city's most well-known and beloved reformers, Jack Warburton, has been found death at his home. And it had been Warburton who had supplied information to Tiger about the racketeers!

Warburton was a mining engineer, investor and a popular philanthropist whose most well-known charity is providing a second chance to "young men who had gone astray." Reforming these juvenile delinquents had been such a success story that the program had the backing of both the citizenry and the police.

However, Warburton now lay dead behind the locked room and barred windows of an extraordinary untidy, but secure, room crammed with "a clutter of unwieldy things" that range from walls lined with bookshelves to heavy statuary – perched on bulky pedestals. Besides a table, Warburton's body lay crumpled on the floor with an ugly wound in his right temple and a smear of blood on the corner of the table. A smell of whiskey clung to the dead man's mouth. On the surface, it appears to have been a drunken accident inside a locked room, but Muldrew notices a number of peculiar aspects about the case. Such as the bars on the window, an armored car parked in the garage and the fact that the bed appeared to have been slept in, but an undented pillow lay at the head end.

Unfortunately, my interest slowly began to deteriorate once the story passed the halfway mark of the book and was primarily occupied with trying to figure out whether the story took place in Canada and United Stated.

I actually found the answer in the synopsis of the third entry in this series, The Jungle Crime (1931), which mentioned "a metropolitan American city," but there were a couple of peculiarities that would suggest otherwise. One peculiarity is the blatant censorship of the press. Muldrew places a muzzle on Tiger and actually prevents him from carrying out his work as a journalist, because his initial report on the murder had to be approved, and censored, by the authorities – before it was allowed to be printed and circulated. And even the characters themselves refer to this as censorship.

I can't remember, or imagine, a similar situation occurring in a full-blooded American detective novel, of this vintage, in which reporters allowed themselves to be suppressed in their work without even mentioning the First Amendment. It's simply inconceivable.

Another examples happens when Tiger has assumed the role of chauffeur in the Warburton household, halfway through the story, and his friends from The Gang find him sitting behind the wheels of a '37 Packard. One of them, "Beef"  Halladay, calls Tiger "a blinkin' toff." A toff? Now I ask you, when have you ever heard an American character in a detective story use British slang like that? Let alone a fat, fussy butt of every joke, like Beef, but here he was briefly bantering like an Oxford graduate.

I know these are minor anomalies in the overall narrative of the story, but, when you notice them, they strike a false, jarring note that break immersion. I found it increasingly hard to believe these characters were big city Americans who came out of the Prohibition Era of the United States.

So the plot failed to hold my attention and the story was populated with largely unconvincing characters, but still had hopes that the solution would place the book in the average, but not too bad, column.

You see, I was very enthusiastic when I learned this obscure impossible crime novel had been republished and hoped to report back that I had uncovered a gemstone. Sadly, that turned out not to be case. The revelation of the murderer's identity and motive were prosaic at best. And the explanation for the apparent impossibility was merely a slight redressing of one of the oldest locked room tricks in the book.

Beyond the Locked Door didn't turn out to be a long-lost gem and the overall story can even be called poor. Something that becomes slowly apparent once the plot passed through the turnstiles of the opening chapters. Nevertheless, I'll give Allan an opportunity to redeem himself with one of his earlier books from this series, which means I'll not be striking The End of the Trail (1931) or The Fourth Dagger (1932) from my massive wish list. But this one will win nobody over.

So my sincere apologies for this piss-poor review and have pulled a highly praised detective novel from my TBR-pile in the hopes of making up for this monumental dud. Coincidentally, the book is also about a peculiar room that becomes the scene of a crime. Hopefully, this one will deliver on its intriguing-sounding premise, but that's for the next post. In the meantime, I'll refer you to my previous review of Bruce Campbell's excellent The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953).

Chasing Phantoms

"Well, to tell you the truth... there is a growing belief that this particular automobile has wings."

- Prof. Augustus S.F.X. van Dusen (Jacques Futrelle's Best Thinking Machine Detective Stories, 1973)

Last month, I posted a review of The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy (1959) by "Bruce Campbell," a shared pseudonym of Sam and Beryl Epstein, who wrote eighteen juvenile mystery novels about their series-character, Ken Holt – who lives with the family of his best friend, Sandy Allen. The series was published over a fourteen year period, between 1949 and 1963, and were praised for their detailed, logical plots.

The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy turned out to be a really good example of the early "Young Adult" detective novel and the plot even incorporated a (minor) locked room problem, which is what originally attracted my attention to this series. There were several other, interestingly sounding, titles that also appeared to qualify as impossible crime tales.

Predictably, I wanted to return to this series before too long and since "JJ" has started covering The Three Investigators, I had an excuse to take a break from Jupe, Pete and Bob to go after some of the titles in the Ken Holt series. And that brings me to the subject of today's blog-post.

The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) is the eighth book in the series and finds the protagonists, Ken and Sandy, working as cub reporters for the Brentwood Advance, which is a local, family-run, newspaper – owned by Sandy's father, Pop Allen. Ken and Sandy are reporting on the dedication of the new lakeside children's playground by the Mayor of Brentwood, but nothing particular newsworthy happens until they journey back home.

They decide to "take the old road" home and this route takes them through a narrow, one-mile land that climbed Sugarload Hill and as their red convertible climbed the hill they witnessed "a sudden flash of light" near "the crest of the hill." A "burst of red flame" and flared as if "the whole wooded crown were ablaze." When they arrive at the spot, they discover a trailer track had gone off the road and lay wrecked in a gully fifty feet below. And the driver was trapped inside.

Ralph Conner of the Conner Brothers Trucking Company is dragged from the wreck and they probably saved his life, but they soon learn this was only the latest accident in a series of dangerous, costly incidents that placed them in danger of losing their insurance cover – because the company is starting them to view as a liability. This latest accident comes with a story suffering from a severe lack of credibility. Ralph later tells to the police that he encountered a car that came right at him and attempted to avoid it, which forced him off the road, but the car must have passed Ken and Sandy as it raced down the hill along the narrow lane.

However, Ken and Sandy swear to the police that nothing passed them "all on the way up to the hill." The car couldn't have turned around and driven off in the opposite direction, because they would have seen the taillights. Nobody in their right mind would drive down that narrow hill road without lights.

So either the car that forced Ralph off the road "sprouted wings and flown away" or he made up a story that lay blame elsewhere to hold on to their insurance. As expected, Mort and Ralph have their policy canceled and this means they have to sell their trucking company. Mort and Ralph are beloved members of the Brentwood community and Ken and Sandy want to help them to keep the company, which they decide to do by trying to find evidence that the phantom car was not merely a figment of the imagination.

Dutch edition, "Spook Lights"

In my celebrated opinion (humility? Pfui!), the investigation into this seemingly impossible disappearance, and the explanation, could be condensed into short story form and presented as adult detective-fiction. A short story along the lines of the short (locked room) stories by Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges.

The authors do not simply, or dumb down, the plot to accommodate their young readership or the two boy-detectives. They even come up with a completely wrong answer on their attempt to crack the case, but the result is a false solution that is as clever as it original. It showed the boys playing around with ideas and looking into the various possibilities, which also distracts from the ultimate simple answer to the problem. One that Ken stumbles to during a homely scene and this incident suddenly makes a clue given by Ralph during the second time he was asked about the accident by Ken very clear.

So, as an impossible crime story, the first half of the book offers a pleasant read to the apostles of the miracle problem, but there's another side to the case.

The question of who could be behind the accidents, or sabotage, is not a big mystery, but who they exactly are is. And, more importantly, why. You can argue that the book is almost more of whydunit than anything else. Obviously, someone wanted to buy the small-town trucking company on the cheap, but what possible profits could be gained by buying uninsurable company?

I assumed something valuable had been hidden inside one of the trucks, or somewhere in the garage, and can only be retrieved by having unrestricted access. So Mort and Ralph had to be forced to sell their company. However, the actual explanation lacked the originality of the phantom car plot-thread and veered into cartoon villain territory. Not that it was bad and the authors wrote several exciting scenes around this stock-situation, which was actually a nice change of page compared to the first half. And the authors really loved placing their 17-year-old detectives in seriously dangerous, life-threatening situations. Anyway, it might for a well-written, exciting ending.

Something else that has to be mentioned is that Robert Arthur must have been influenced by Ken Holt when he created The Three Investigators. I have noticed a couple of interesting commonalities exist between both series. 

 

JJ has commented on the unusual family situation of Jupiter "Jupe" Jones, who lives with his aunt and uncle at their junkyard, which is a home situation that can be compared to Ken Holt's backstory. Holt is a motherless, teenage boy with a foreign correspondent as a father who is always traveling across the globe. So he lives as an adopted son with Sandy's family and works at the newspaper of Pop Allen. I suppose you also view the other Allens as fullfilling the same role, for example, the two Bavarian brothers who work at the junkyard of the Jones family.

Interestingly, the relationship between Kent and the Allens are introduced The Secret of Skeleton Island (1949) and that's the same book-title as the sixth entry in The Three Investigator series. Even more interestingly, the main plot-line of The Clue of the Phantom Car is practically the same as the plot of The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure (1966), which also has a sub-plot about an impossible disappearance/theft.

I suppose Arthur could have been aware, or even read, this series and drew inspiration from it when he began to write The Three Investigator books. So that would make Ken Holt and Sandy Allen the literary ancestors of Jupe, Pete and Bob. And that would make my discovery of this series even better!

So, all in all, The Clue of the Phantom Car is a pleasant combination of the cerebral detective story with danger-pact ending with the high-light being the impossible problem and the false solution. Definitely a title I can recommend to readers of both juvenile mysteries and impossible crime fiction.

Identity Crisis

"Always approach a case with an absolutely blank mind..."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1893-94)

The 62nd volume of Case Closed, originally titled Detective Conan, begins with the conclusion to a short, elementary story that began in the previous volume and concerned the missing brother of the waitress of Coffee Poirot – who's suspected by the police of having murdered his employer. There's not much that can be said about this story except that the murderer is an idiot who should have accepted the frame had failed and kept quiet.

The next three chapters make up a semi-inverted detective story with a Crofts-Bush style alibi-trick at the heart of the plot.

Rachel Moore's mother is a well-known attorney, Eva Kaden, who has a former judoka as a client, named Yuko Arasawa, and she recently consulted Kaden regarding a problem pertaining to her troubled husband, Shiro. Arasawa confided in Kaden that Shiro is "haunted by the conviction that someone is out to get him," but she believes this elusive stalker is merely a figment of his imagination. So Kaden promised to personally search their home and prove to him that "there's no sign of surveillance."

But when they give him a call, he tells them that he was called away to attend a funeral and asks them to move their appointment to later that evening. Kaden and Arasawa, alongside Conan and Rachel, decide to kill some time by getting a bite to eat at the hotel down the street, but Arasawa has begun to act slightly suspicious – such as inexplicably placing Shiro's phone call on speaker. When they arrive at the home of the client, they have to poke around the premise for Shiro and his lifeless body is eventually found inside a small storage room.

Conan and Kaden have their suspicions against the judo expert, but she possesses "a nearly perfect alibi" with an incredibly tight, ten-minute window when she took a bathroom break. And that's hardly enough time to drive to her home, strangle her husband and go back to the hotel's restaurant again. So how did she do it?

The alibi-trick is not too complicated and you should be able to (roughly) work out how it was done, but what I liked about it is how Arasawa created the alibi by using, an acting upon, the actions and movement of her husband – cleverly putting half of the works in the unwitting hands of the victim. A good and solid story that also takes a peek at the strained relationship between Kaden and her estranged husband, Richard Moore, who gives her huge clue over the telephone about the alibi.

The second story is a long one, covering six chapters, which may prove to be an important link in the ongoing story-line, because something tells me that one particular character will come to play an important role during the end game of the series. This person has an asset that can be used as the proverbial ace up the sleeve when the inevitable confrontation with the Black Organization happens.

In any case, the story begins with Harley Hartwell and Kazuha taking Conan, Rachel and Richard Moore to East Okuho Village, nestled on the outskirts of Tokyo, where a year ago a murder case had been solved by that famous high-school detective, Jimmy Kudo. At the time, Kudo was assisted by a local teenager, Makoto Okuda, who now claims to have spotted a glitch in his deductions. And he wants Kudo to come down to the village in order to rectify his mistake.

Only problem is that Kudo has disappeared from public view ever since the events in the first volume and his current whereabouts are unknown, which is why Okuda contacted Hartwell. But, upon arrival, they learn Okuda has been missing for the past six months and the villagers snarl at them for mentioning Kudo's name. They vehemently disagree with his conclusion that the previously mentioned case was a murder/suicide that casted their beloved, late-lamented Mayor Hinohara as the murderer.

This situation becomes even more entangled when Conan vanishes from the scene and Kudo reappears on the bank of a lake, "butt-naked," but his memory appears to have been completely wiped clean as he has no idea who or where he is – even failing to recognize his friends. So this places Hartwell in a precarious situation, because he is the only of the group who's aware of the Conan/Kudo situation. And that's only the beginning of his problems!

A dense forest surrounds the village and is reputedly haunted by a Shiragami, "a guardian who punishes those who harm the land," whose presence has been felt ever since a girl died in the woods five years ago. Locally, it is believed the girl had angered the spirit by entering his domain after dark and only the reader knows for sure that someone is out there, because this Shiragami is seen lurking in the background of several panels. And to complete this cocktail of problems, Kudo is found standing over the body of a severely wounded reporter, dazed and confused, with a knife in his hand and bloodstains on his clothes. The reporter had alluded earlier to Kudo that she knew all about "the unspeakable truth" he's "trying to hide" and that gave him a rock-solid motive to attempt to silence this person. Or so it appears.

Plot-wise, this short story-arc is a mixed bag of tricks. First of all, I admired how Aoyama handled the amnesia angle of the plot, which could have turned out to be very hacky, but turned out to have a clever explanation and perfectly tied-in to real identity of the Shiragami – which did not disappoint even though I saw it coming. I was not as impressed by the explanations for the attempted murder (a mere bluff) and the past mistake in Kudo's deductions, but understand these answers were necessary in order to explain the culprit's motivation. And that is why I think we'll see this character return towards the end of the series, because the whole story feels like it was written for the sole purpose of introducing and storing away this character for later use.

Finally, the last chapter sets up a new story, which immediately follows on the events of the previous one, and stars when our troupe of detective are driving home and witness a speeding car scrapping against the guardrail. Eventually, it comes to a stop and when they check on the driver, they find a dead man behind the wheels with ligature marks across his throat. Somehow, the driver had been strangled to death, while driving, but only the victim was inside! It's an impossible crime reminiscent of Edward D. Hoch's "Captain Leopold and The Impossible Murder" (Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza or Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies and Incredible Criminals, 1990).

So I'm very curious to see what kind of explanation Aoyama has found to explain how someone could have been murdered inside a moving locked room on wheels, but that revelation will have to wait until next month.