The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942) is the twenty-fifth novel in the Ludovic Travers series and concluded a wartime trilogy, anteceded by The Case of the Murdered Major (1941) and The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942), which places Travers on the staff of a new Home Guard school in Derbyshire – resulting in a war-themed scholastic mystery. So this may very well be the only detective novel to combine a school setting with a strong war-theme sewn through the plot.

Reprinted by Dean Street Press

An urgent postal telegram summons Major Travers to the War Office, Room 299, where he learns that the Home Guard is in need of skilled instructors. The Home Guard came into being after Dunkirk to meet "the imminent threat of invasion," but, now that they were fully armed and equipped, what they needed is "an enormous number of trained instructors" to turn the paper tiger of the Home Guard into a regular fighting force – who know how to use the weapons and are skilled in "the very latest methods of attack and defense." However, the task allotted to Travers at Peakridge is not as exciting as training the Home Guard in explosives and guerrilla tactics.

Travers is to lecture on administration, because a lot of men simply don't seem to get the hang of the administrative side. Something that's becoming very important.

No. 5 School for Instructors of Home Guard at rugged Peakridge in Derbyshire has a staff drawn from professional, full-time soldiers ("Regulars") and "Not-So-Regular" members of the army. The Home Guard was formed to defend the islands in case of invasion and, when they can no longer hold a defensive position, they become guerrillas to "harry the Hun," which is why the irregulars were attracted as instructors – who gained valuable experience in anti-tank warfare and guerrilla tactics in such scraps as the Spanish Civil War. After only a week, or so, the staff was split into two camps with Travers acting as "as a kind of liaison officer."

The Case of the Fighting Soldier is narrated by Travers and he tells the reader that he has disguised the names of the characters, because he "cannot even hint at the real names." All of the name describe the man or his duties at the school. For example, Colonel Topman is the top man of the lot and Flick is in charge of the school cinema.

So this is probably nothing more than to give the story a (fictional) whiff of authenticity, but you have to wonder whether the characters, or their personalities, were based on people Bush had met during his time in the army. It could be a sly way of telling the reader that, yes, these characters really do exist. According to our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, Bush probably pulled a similar stunt in The Case of the Monday Murders (1936) with a character who could have been modeled on Anthony Berkeley.

One of the school instructors is Captain Mortar, a very brash, self-styled fighting soldier, who fought in The Great War, The Spanish Civil War, Mexico and Bolivia – reputedly "cursed like hell because he couldn't be in South America and Abyssinia at the same time." Mortar has brought along his own batman, Feeder, which is very irregular and not entitled to wear a uniform, but Feeder had been fighting with Mortar all over the world. Together with a man by the name of Ferris, who fought in Spain, they represent the faction of irregulars. Unpopular with their fellow staff members, but immensely popular with the Home Guard students.

However, Mortar has a genius for making enemies and there are several near "accidents." During a demonstration with the Blacker Bombard, a winged, twenty-pound bomb with nine pounds of high-explosives inside is fired, but it was aimed low and didn't explode. There are traces of chewing-gum found inside the barrel of the bomb launcher, but even more worrying is that they're unable to locate and destroy the unexploded bomb.

A second incident occurs on the bombing ground where the students are instructed how the throw grenades with dummy bombs. Ferris is conducting this class from the middle of the ground, into which the dummy bombs would be thrown, but, all of a sudden, there was a crashing roar of an explosion and Ferris had a narrow escape, which turns out to have been a live grenade – attached to a length of a twine and a peg. A good, old-fashioned booby-trap! The culmination of these incidents is a huge explosion blowing Captain Mortar to Kingdom Come in his bedroom and the booby-trap employed here is worthy of John Rhode.

 

A nifty diagram of a grenade from Fighting Soldier

Superintendent George "The General" Wharton was an Intelligence officer in the previous war and is summoned to the school to investigate the death of Mortar, but this task is done under the guise of a special lecturer on security. This means that he's back in uniform and turned his huge walrus mustache into a first-class buffalo, which made him nearly unrecognizable to Travers. And speaking of Travers. The Case of the Fighting Soldier is the third time in a row that he's upstaged by Wharton. So this wartime trilogy should really be considered the Superintendent Wharton mini-series with Travers as a supporting character.

Anyway, the first half of the story is arguably the best part of the book. The background of the Home Guard school is fascinating and the setup of the plot, alongside the initial stages of the investigation, were very well done, but interest began to flack a little bit in the second half as the story slowly morphed in a regular whodunit. A whodunit that was not all that difficult to solve. I immediately spotted the motive of the murder and the identity of the culprit can easily be worked out from there, which makes this book, plot-wise, the lesser entry in this trilogy – which is not to say that this is a bad mystery. Just not the best in the series.

There is, however, an interesting scene in the second half demonstrating to the reader how Travers' brain work. Travers has often alluded in previous novels that his mind is of "the crossword kind" and his contribution to the solution came when he solved a crossword puzzle in an illustrated magazine. There's even a diagram of the crossword puzzle he was working on when a remark from Mortar came flooding back to him, but it was his policeman friend who followed this evidence to its logical conclusion. Nevertheless, I still think Travers is the best example of how the create a fallible detective without crushing their conscience with guilt over a failure. I'm looking at you, Ellery Queen!

So, all in all, The Case of the Fighting Soldier is a good, but not the best, entry in both this series and trilogy of wartime detective novels. I'm glad this trio of war stories ceded the spotlight of detective to Superintendent Wharton. A normally secondary character who's more than deserving to upstage the series-character and you can easily see how Wharton could have helmed his own series. So this was a nice side-track in the series, but hope to see Travers get the best of his policeman friend again in my next read.

The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush's The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) is the twenty-fourth novel in the lengthy Ludovic Travers series and the second of three mysteries, book ended by The Case of the Murdered Major (1941) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942), that together form a trilogy of war-themed detective stories – branded by Curt Evans as "the most notable series of wartime detective fiction." I think the first of these three wartime mysteries definitely lived up to praise, but what about its second one? Let's find out, shall we?

Reprinted by Dean Street Press

Previously, Captain Travers was assigned to an internment camp as its Adjutant Quartermaster and became, yet again, embroiled in a murder case. However, this time he was upstaged by his policeman friend, Superintendent George "The General" Wharton of Scotland Yard.

The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel is the first book in the series to be narrated by Travers, promoted to the rank of Major, who's transferred to Camp 55 near the city of Dalebrink in Derbyshire. Major Travers is placed in charge of the camp and the place is tasked with guarding two factories, tunnels, a bridge and "a certain hush-hush establishment."

Wharton happens to be in Derbyshire on "special hush-hush work" and Travers begins to suspect Wharton is the reason why he was transferred to Camp 55, which involves vitally important research work for the defense department and a leftist group of pacifists, New Era Group (N.E.G.) – locally known as "Neggers." A wily lot of "cranks and intellectuals" planning a New Order and there are people who want to see "the whole collection of Neggers" under lock and key.

Dalebrink Hall is the home of Colonel Brende, a gunnery expert, who uses the place as a facility to research a method to detect night-flying aircraft. Colonel Brende is assisted in his work by three experts: Heinrich Wissler, formerly Professor of Physics at the University of Prague, who resembles Albert Einstein as a young man. Francis Newton, Professor of Physics, and a research student, George Riddle. The well-born and alluring Hon. Penelope Craye, a distant cousin of Colonel and Mrs. Brende, fulfills the duties of private secretary, but before the war, there were whispers that "she was one of the set of Hitler's apologists." So there you have some of the important pieces of the plot, but, before they can be moved into action, we get to see some of the effects of the war on the local community.

The town is bombed during a nighttime air-raid and the bombing demolishes a number of houses, killed twelve people and left some forty injured.

Rev. Lancelot Benison, an Anglican minister, is the moving spirit behind the Neggers and published a fiery letter in the Clarion holding the authorities responsible for those twelve souls as "surely as if they had cut their throats" – coldly countered by Travers that you can't have an omelet without breaking an egg. He also has his duties as Commandant of Camp 55 and one of his jobs is having to deal with Howard Craye, "a lounge lizard in uniform," who's Mrs. Brende's nephew. And he can't even be bothered to salute properly. Than there's a mysterious background character, Major Passenden, who turned up in Lisbon and had hinted at "incredible adventures in France," but the fat hits the pan when Colonel Brende is inexplicably taken from his home.

Once again, Bush created here a quasi-impossible situation. There was a cordon of sentries around the house and "they were all keyed up to the highest pitch of alertness," because the Home Guard had setup an exercise with the aim of entering certain spots the camp was guarding as mock German para-troopers. This placed the guards on high-alert. So how did the kidnappers passed through this cordon? Not once, but twice! I think the solution strips this locked house mystery of its status as an impossible crime, you'll know why when you read it, but this is why I have become so fond of this series.

Up to this point, the story appeared to be dominated by the intrigues of the spy genre, but the traditional detective elements slowly overtake the plot when Penelope Craye's champagne is doctored with "a strong solution of veronal" – which will furnish the book with an ending befitting a mystery novel of this vintage. I needed some time to penetrate through the fog of far and piece together (most) of the puzzle, but eventually, with only a quarter left to go, I had a good, nearly complete picture of what had been happening.

There is, however, one thing I need to mention about the identity of the murderer (no spoilers). Bush was not the first one to use this specific solution and only came across it once before, but the plot was handled very poorly in that novel. Resulting in one of the most transparent mysteries ever written. I think it's a testament to Bush's talent as a plotter that he only could make this trick work, but even fool a reader who has seen it before! Honestly, the comparison didn't occur to me until I had figured parts of the solution out. Well played, Mr. Bush. Well played.

You know what else I really like about this series? You'll never know who's going to provide the solution. More often than not, the unraveling of the plot is collaborative effort between Travers and Wharton. As each of them find the various pieces of the puzzle. Sometimes, one manages to completely upstage the other. This is the second time in row Travers is reduced to the rank of supporting character by Wharton. This is an interesting and original way to humanize your series-detective without having to resort to the fallible detective trope. Travers and Wharton are simply ordinary human beings who pool to talent and knowledge to solve a problem.

By the way, if Wharton goes 3-0 in The Case of the Fighting Soldier, I'm going to refer to this wartime trilogy as the Superintendent George Wharton series. He deserves it.

So, yes, this was definitely one of the better Bush's, regardless of period, and comes highly recommended to fans of the series and mystery readers who love detective stories with WWII as a backdrop. Or if you simply enjoy a good detective yarn.

The Case of the Murdered Major (1941) by Christopher Bush

Earlier this month, Dean Street Press released the third batch of ten titles in Christopher Bush's outstanding Ludovic Travers series, originally published between 1939 and 1946, covering the entire period of World War II.

During these years, Bush penned a trilogy of wartime detective novels, "drawing directly on his own recent experience in British military service," described by our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, as arguably "the most notable series of wartime detective fiction" published in Britain during WWII – seeming more informed by "martial experience" than other, more well-known, wartime mysteries (e.g. Christianna Brand's Green for Danger, 1944).

The Case of the Murdered Major (1941), The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel (1942) and The Case of the Fighting Soldier (1942) form this thematic trilogy and decided to read all three of them back-to-back. So let's get started!

Bush served in an administrative capacity during the Great War and briefly returned to active duty in 1939 when he helped administer prisoner of war and alien internment camps, which earned him a promotion from 2nd Lieutenant to Captain, before being granted indefinite release from service on medical grounds – retiring with the rank of Major in August, 1940. This allowed him to return full-time to writing detective fiction and drew on his personal experience of running internment camps for the first of his three lauded wartime mysteries.

The Case of the Murdered Major is the twenty-third novel in the Ludovic Travers series and broke with the previous novels by dispensing with the third person narration.

The story is related by "an anonymous individual serving in the British Army," who resembles the author, after which all of the books are narrated in the first person and Travers begins his conversion from an inquisitive amateur to a genteel private-investigator in the mold of American hardboiled detective (e.g. The Case of the Amateur Actor, 1955). However, here we see Travers in a position that differs very much from his past and future incarnations.

Captain Travers has been appointed Adjutant Quartermaster of No. 54 Prisoner of War Camp in the city of Shoreleigh, "a grim sort of place," where a huge, out-of-date Victorian hospital has been turned into a POW camp with huts, movable barriers and piles of sandbags – surrounded by "a double apron of barbed wire." There are a couple of helpful diagrams and floor plans of the camp to help the reader get a good mental image of the place.

The senior official placed in charge of this POW camp is the unlikable, woolly-minded and short-tempered Major Stirrop.

Major Stirrop leadership, or lack thereof, was like sand in what would otherwise have been a well-oiled, efficient machine and never took any personal responsibility. Consequently, Major Stirrop had not only lost the respect of his own man, who called him "a twerp of the first water," but was dangerously close to losing their loyalty. Travers way of dealing with his superior is composing "a queer sort of document," entitled The Case of the Murdered Major, in which he worked out a way to murder Major Stirrop and crafted a perfect alibi. A piece of paper that would come back to haunt him later on in the story. However, it goes to show how much of a pain Major Stirrop really is when even the series-character took great pleasure in imagining his murder.

The problems really begin to stir at the camp when the first group of German prisoners arrive, "a mixed collection of planters, Nazi agents and wandering Gestapo men," who were aboard a captured ship on the West Coast of Africa and number seventy-three in total – only problem is that there appears to be a phantom prisoner among them. Every day, there's a headcount of the prisoners and on several occasions there appeared to be one additional prisoner. When they recounted the prisoners, the number was back to normal. Someone is moving around the camp unseen and unimpeded.

I mentioned in my review of Dead Man Twice (1930) how Bush's plots often include borderline or quasi-impossibilities and the way the problem of the spare prisoner is presented is another example of this. After all, the problem is not just the inexplicable appearance and disappearance of an unaccounted prisoner, but that this person managed to "lay doggo somewhere during the day" without being detected. Only to appear when the prisoners were being counted, which is sheer madness.

A second quasi-impossibility occurs when the body of Major Stirrop is found in the snow outside of the main building, beyond the body was deep depression, but the snow surrounding both the body and depression lacked the expected footprints. This is, however, not seen as an impossibility or treated as an obstacle the murderer had to overcome to get to the victim, but it goes to show how closely related Bush was to the locked room sub-genre. Bush could have been remembered as a notable contributor to the impossible crime story had he retooled all of his borderline impossibilities into full-blown miracle crimes, but, even just as plot-driven howdunits, they're a treat to read – especially if your personal taste runs in the direction of plot-driven, jigsaw puzzle detective stories.

The story takes an interesting turn when Superintendent George "The General" Wharton appears on the scene and has his "finest hour" as he slowly, but surely, eclipses Travers.

A reader who's introduced to this series through The Case of the Murdered Major might mistake Wharton as the series-detective, because he not only ferreted the murderer from the closed circle of suspects, but also knocked down this person's carefully staged alibi. An alibi directly linked to the murder method. Meanwhile, Travers emerges from this story as a Dr. Watson or Captain Hastings rather than an Albert Campion or Lord Wimsey.

There is, however, no shame in playing second fiddle to the General of Scotland Yard and Travers had a lot on his plate here. He had to readjust to army life, after being out of the game for more than twenty years, after which he had to take over the camp when Major Stirrop was murdered. I also think that's part of the charm of this wartime detective story. Travers had his duty to fulfill and this prevented him from fully playing amateur detective, which is an approach I have never seen from detective novels or short stories from this period. The upside of Travers being too occupied to properly play detective is that I finally got my Superintendent Wharton novel!

On a whole, The Case of the Murdered Major is a well-written, tightly plotted detective novel with an intriguing backdrop, inspired by Bush's own experiences, which only had one real drawback – namely its shorter than usual length. The story impressed me as a good deal shorter than the previous entries in the series and can probably be blamed on paper rationing. This is also the reason why this review has been rather summary when it comes to plot-details and characters, because one half of the short novel looked at how the camp is run and sets up the plot. And the second half has the murder and solution. So you can't really go into the finer details without giving away vital information. Nevertheless, the end result is a clever and compact mystery novel that comes highly recommended. Particularly to readers interested in (crime) fiction from the Second World War.

My next stop in this trio of wartime detective novels is going to be The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel and from what I gleaned the plot pays homage to the first spy movie/play of the war (Cottage to Let, 1941). So stay tuned!

The Argosy Library: Four Corners, vol. 1 (2015) by Theodore Roscoe

Last year, Bold Venture Press reissued a pair of obscure, long-forgotten and out-of-print locked room mysteries by Theodore Roscoe, Murder on the Way! (1935) and I'll Grind Their Bones (1936), which were specifically mentioned and praised by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991) – who lauded the books for their pace, plots and "diabolically clever" impossible crimes. Originally, these locked room novels were published as serials in a now long-defunct pulp magazine, Argosy, who regularly printed short stories, novelettes and serials by Roscoe. Some of those stories and series are now being reprinted by Altus Press in their Argosy Library series.

One of the series Roscoe penned for Argosy was about Four Corners, a small town about a 100 miles from New York, which may have inspired Ellery Queen's Wrightsville (Calamity Town, 1942) and Shinn Corners (The Glass Village, 1954). There's one story in particular that reminded me of The Glass Village, but more on that later.

Altus Press collected the first five novelettes in this series as Four Corners, vol. 1 (2015), originally published between June 5, 1937 and January 8, 1938, including a very alluring story, titled "I Was the Kid With the Drum," which Adey listed in Locked Room Murders and described the story as having two impossibilities – a drum beating on its own accord and a disappearance from a watched house.

Yes, it was this story that lured me to this volume, but all of the stories turned out to be really good. Roscoe was an excellent story-teller and here he spun a couple of fascinating yarns about small-town life in America spliced with crime material.

This makes Four Corners difficult to pigeon-hole, because it has everything, hardboiled gangsters, small-town intrigue and even impossible crimes, which also makes them a little hard to review. Regardless of the genre they belong to, they're fantastic reads and I'll definitely pick up the second volume when it gets published. But let's take a look at these five stories first.

The first story is "He Took Richmond" and the protagonist is a ninety-year-old man, Anecdote Jones, who prattles endlessly about a particular incident during the American Civil War when General Grant had personally commanded to take piney hilltop and "hang onter it like a bulldog to a rott" – boasting how he single handedly held the piney knoll when encircled by a platoon of Johnny Rebs. Whenever he's asked how he was able to hold the piney knoll in the face of overwhelming odds, Old Anecdote can only answer with a puzzled expression on his face as he mutters to himself, "how did I hold the hill?"

A question Old Anecdote is finally able to answer when Joe Gravatti, a notorious and wanted kidnapper, comes to Four Corner when most of the town is in Brockton for the Armistice Day celebration. Gravatti has brought his gang along. They capture Old Anecdote and a garage mechanic, but the old man escapes and reappears as "the ghost of a Civil War veteran in tarnished brass buttons and moth-eaten blue." A portrait of one of the Boys in Blue "painted in moonbeams and cobweb" or "a mirage from the dust blown off a history book." There's definitely a touch of John Dickson Carr in Roscoe's writing. 

Theodore Roscoe

Anyway, Old Anecdote takes on the gangsters, single handedly, which shows how he could have held the piney knoll and the explanation turned out to have been lovely foreshadowed in the early part of the story – giving this pulp story a fun little historical sub-plot. An excellent, well-written story with a satisfying conclusion.

The second story, "Frivolous Sal," is the story that reminded of The Glass Village and concerns the spotted history of "a woman hermit," Clariselle "Sal" Alders, who had come to age in the Gay Nineties (i.e. 1890s) "when people were humming waltzes, looking at Gibson Girls and whispering of suffragettes." So she become an modern, independent-minded woman, but this came with a price and she was held (morally) responsible for the suicide of her father when she refused to marry. This was followed by a string of scandals and even deaths. One of these deaths was that of her business partner in a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Sal is now an elderly woman who has withdrawn from the world in a shanty, rundown shack in the woods, but certain members of the community are anguish to get hold of her diary and they're prepared to pay good money for it – only to be turned down. However, a little girl dies of scarlet fever and people begin to talk about witchcraft.

So the sheriff has to face down his own neighbors to prevent a lynching in Four Corners, but the whole situation is turned on its head when they break down the door. They find something behind the locked door they did not expect. I genuinely want to know if Dannay and Lee were aware of this story when they wrote The Glass Village.

The next story, "Barber, Barber, Shave a Pig," takes place in the barbershop of a Dutch immigrant, Anton Grunner, which he had took over from a failing and ever-frightened local, Willie Updyke, but kept him around as a barber. A day before the story opened, Updyke witnessed the murder of a personal friend, Henry Applegate, at the hands of a bank robber, but lacked the courage to intervene and the murderer got away – much to the disapproval of the community. They even refuse his services as a barber. So the story really is about Updyke rehabilitating himself by ousting the (obvious) murderer and this results in a bloodbath in the barbershop.

This was not a bad story at all, but was slightly annoyed by Grunner's thick, German accent. Why can't Americans differentiate between Dutch and German? We were there when the United States was being settled and your first American-born president, Martin van Buren, was a Dutchman whose first language was Dutch! The difference should have been obvious by 1937. I did smile, though, when Grunner purred "like a tomcat." 

The penultimate novelette, "I Was the Kid With the Drum," is the gem of this collection and the story is narrated by the twelve-year-old son of the sheriff, Bud Whittier, which is why I tagged this blog-post with the "juvenile mysteries" label.

The house of Joe Sleeper is a dark, rambling place with weed-grown side yards where a spiritualist circle held seances in the parlor and listened to the voices of the departed, which is irresistible to a boy, but Sheriff Whittier had received complaints from Mrs. Sleeper about certain boys climbing on the woodshed at the back of the house to get a better look at what's happening inside – instructing his son to stop it. An order that was destined to be ignored. 

One dark, clammy evening in August, Bud climbs the woodshed to peer into a window of an upstairs bedroom and sees Joe Sleeper's bass drum standing in the corner. The drum, unattended, was booming in its corner and there was no sign in the room of Joe or his "masterful drumstick." The bass drum was beating by itself! On the following morning, Mrs. Sleeper disappears from the house. Not once. But twice. The second time a ghostly face is seen behind one of the windows of the somber mansion, but when people go inside to investigate nobody is found.

Back in May, I reviewed a multi-part episode from the Detective Conan animated series, entitled The Case of the Seance's Double Locked Room, which has a beautiful synergy between the two impossibilities of the plot and you can say the same, although to a lesser extent, of "I Was the Kid With the Drum." The ghostly drummer and the disappearance of Mrs. Sleeper are tightly intertwined. You can't have one without the other, but also appreciated how the actions of the culprit are dictated by circumstances. Or how Bud essentially acts as the unknown quantity in the plans of this person.

The result is a beautiful, logical and coherent plot that combines elements of the inverted detective story, juvenile fiction and the locked room mystery. And it worked! I think this story should be included in one of the future impossible crime anthologies.

On a semi-related side note, another detective story with great synergy between two impossible situations is Agatha Christie's 1937 short story "The Dream" (collected in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, 1960).

Finally, we arrive at the fifth and final story of this collection, "Daisies Won't Tell," which is a hoist-on-their-own petard yarn and it brings a wolf to Four Corners in black sheep's clothing. The story largely takes place in the past, 1903, which makes this somewhat of a historical mystery and concerns a black sheep of the community, Andy Curlew, who was disowned by his grandfather after robbing the village tavern and fled to Australia, but his grandmother grew lonely after her husband passed away and notices began to appear in newspapers asking him to return to Four Corners – only someone else turned up. The result is thievery, murder and a thirty year stretch in prison. However, the murderer gets a nasty surprise when he returns to Four Corners with the intention to retrieve his long-buried nest egg. A very proper punishment for this individual and perfect closer to great collection of stories.

So, on a whole, Four Corners is as close as you can possibly get to a perfectly balanced selection of short stories and I'm very tempted to say that there isn't a dud among them, but that's a personal value judgment that may vary from reader to reader. I only picked this volume on the strength of one specific story and did not really know what to expect from the rest of the collection, but this made it a pleasant and welcome surprise to discover that they all had something to offer. And I have always loved these slices of small-town Americana. Highly recommended!

The 8 Mansion Murders (1989) by Takemaru Abiko

Takemaru Abiko is a founding member of the shin honkaku movement in Japan and one of the mystery writers who emerged from the ranks of the Kyoto University Mystery Club.

During the 1980s, members of the Mystery Club would gather in the living room of the man who would later launch the neo-orthodox movement in Japan with Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), Yukito Ayatsuji, to discuss plot-ideas for honkaku-style detective stories and have "lively discussions about the mystery genre in general" – one of the members who almost always there was Abiko. So it was only a matter of time before John Pugmire of Locked Room International peddled one of his impossible crime novels across the language barrier.

Shinsoban 8 no satsujin (The 8 Mansion Murders, 1989) marked Akibo's debut and the book was, as usually, translated by our very own Ho-Ling Wong and introduced by the doyen of shin honkaku, Soji Shimada. Shimada noted in his introduction that, if you listened to them back in the days, you could have mistaken the bantering members of the Mystery Club for aspiring comedy writers, but "comedy is a trademark of Abiko" and debuted with a humorous, lighthearted homage to John Dickson Carr that even comes with the obligatory locked room lecture concentrating on quasi-locked rooms – which is "a space which might not be physically sealed." Such as rooms under observation or an unbroken field of snow.

The 8 Mansion Murders takes place in the home of Kikuo Hachisuka, President of Hachisuka Construction, which is a three-story mansion with an inner courtyard on the ground floor. The first and second floor have covered galleries connecting the east and west hallways. When viewed from the sky, the mansion looks exactly like the number eight and this is why the place is commonly referred to as the 8 Mansion.

This bizarre mansion was "designed without any consideration for efficient use of space or ease of living," but "the layout of this very mansion" provided the murderer with a fully prepared stage for a deadly magic trick. We see the unknown murderer pouring over the diagram of 8 Mansion in the prologue.

The 8 Mansion Murders begins one early, sleepless morning in the room of Hachisuka's granddaughter, Yukie Hachisuka, who has company from her sign language teacher, Mitsuka Kawamura, when they hear someone in the gallery and looking out of the window they're surprised to see Yukie's father, Kikuichirō Hachisuka – who's the Vice-President of Hachisuka Construction. Suddenly, an arrow cuts through the air and strikes Kikuichirō down. Yukie and Mitsuka are knocked unconscious when they run out to help Kikuichirō. When they regained consciousness, Yukie and Mitsuka discover that the body has been moved.

A baffling and dastardly murder, but where, you ask, is the impossibility? Well, Yukie and Mitsuka saw the room from which the murderer loosened the deadly arrow, but the problem is that the room in question belongs to the son of the family caretaker, Yūsaku Yano, who claims to have been asleep at the time of the murder with the door locked on the inside – immediately making him the number one suspect. Yūsaku's situation does not improve when the police learns he owns a crossbow that has gone missing.

Enter Inspector Hayami Kyōzō of the Metropolitan Police Department, Criminal Investigation Division 1 (Homicide), accompanied by his subordinate, Kinoshita, who provide some of the comedy in this story. Sometimes their comedic bits bordered on old-fashioned slapstick. Hayami takes pleasure in placing his subordinate in harm's way and Kinoshita emerges from this whole ordeal resembling a battered, battle-scarred warhorse ("obviously immortal"), but Hayami does not escape unscathed himself. Hayami has a younger brother and sister, Shinji and Ichio, who love detective stories and teasing their older brother. Ho-Ling said in his 2012 review of The 8 Mansion Murders that "Abiko really likes teasing his characters" and placing them in "awkward situations" to "see them suffer." This is definitely true when it comes to poor Kinoshita. He had his human rights violated here. I still smiled though.

However, it's not Hayami who solves the crossbow murders at the 8 Mansion, but his younger brother, Shinji, who normally runs a coffee shop and even delivers a solid locked room lecture, but not before one of the witnesses is murdered under seemingly impossible circumstances – nailed to a locked door with an arrow. There's an open window in the room. Only problem with this scenario is that the window could only serve as an entrance, or exit, if the murderer has the ability to "fly around freely anywhere in the house." I actually liked this second impossibility, minor as it is, much more than the central murder. A simple, believable and original play on the Merrivalean cussedness of things in general. As if "John Dickson Carr’s ghost himself had been behind it all." I do think this locked room trick would have been better suited for a short story, but appreciated its inclusion here nonetheless.

On the other hand, the central puzzle of the impossible murder in the gallery and the arrow shot from a locked and occupied room was a mixed bag of tricks.

I immediately understood how the locked room trick was worked, but only because the principle behind the illusion is as old as Rome. I have come across countless variations on this trick. So the impossibility itself can hardly be called original, but this age-old trick was very well handled by Abiko. I found it very inventive that the problem here is not how a man could have vanished from a locked room, but how two witnesses could have seen "a person inside a room he couldn't have entered" or why the murderer had to move the body around in the gallery – showing a young mystery novelist full of promise. Abiko also has an impeccable taste in detective stories going by the references to other mystery writers and detective characters. Particularly Carr!

I think The 8 Mansion Murders goes hand-in-glove with the impossible crime novels of other admirers and followers of the master of the locked room problem, such as John Russell Fearn, Paul Halter, Derek Smith and David Renwick, but you have to be a little familiar with Carr's work to fully appreciate Abiko's homage. Just like Jean-Paul Török's tribute to Carr, L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007), which has also been translated and published by Pugmire. Nevertheless, in spite of these obvious ties to Carr's work, I thought The 8 Mansion Murders was much closer, in spirit, to Leo Bruce's locked room parody Case for Three Detectives (1936). The 8 Mansion Murders is not a parody of Carr, but the humorous tone of the story and the interaction between the detectives struck me as closer to Bruce than anything Carr wrote. Yes, Carr wrote mysteries with slapstick comedy (e.g. The Skeleton in the Clock, 1948), but even they felt very different from what Abiko did here. But that's only an observation.

So, in closing, The 8 Mansion Murders is a fast, fun read with two impossible crimes and an amusing cast of detectives, which comes especially recommended to locked room enthusiasts and fans of Carr. They'll get the most enjoyment out of the plot and story.

Oh, just one more thing. I hope you don't have any personal plans this summer, Ho-Ling. The Hungry Goblins demand more of this! :)