Ghosts of Christmas Past: "The House That Brought Bad Luck" (2018) by Anne van Doorn

"Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck") is a recently published short story by "Anne van Doorn," a pseudonym of Dutch crime writer M.P.O. Books, which takes place during those long, dark and snowy days of Christmas. An old-fashioned detective story about a haunted house and an elusive figure "who can travel through the air like Santa Claus."

Lucrezia Izelaar is the former wife of a Turkish criminal, Murad Uysal, who used to own a coffee shop, but "the sale of cannabis was his legal activity" and supplemented his income with rip-deals and robbing weed growers – leading to an inevitable spell in prison. Naturally, she divorced him and remarried the director of an export company, Menno Izelaar. Murad had threatened her that he would never allow her to leave him or take their children with him.

This was not a problem, as long as he was locked up, but, as his impending release date drew nearer, the trouble began. So they quietly moved to a villa in Oosterbeek, named De Alpenroos (The Alpine Rose), which has a yard enclosed by a high, thick and "impenetrable hedge." There's a main gate with "an intercom and a security camera directed at the entrance." The garden gate was kept securely locked at all times. A fairly save and secure home, but the place has a dark and tragic history.

De Alpenroos is merely a stone's throw away from the place where the Allied Forces had battled intensely with the Nazis during Operation Market Garden in 1944.

During this period, the Nazis had billeted four soldiers in the villa and three of them died fighting in the surrounding forests, but one of them returned, Günther, who was mortally wounded and collapsed at the front door – banging and screaming to be let in. Only problem is that the then owners of the villa had also been hiding Jews in the attic. So they couldn't let him inside and left him to die outside. Günther cursed them with the last breath in his lungs.

If you know your history, you'll know that Operation Market Garden was the proverbial bridge too far. So the then owners of the villa were summarily executed and "de onderduikers" (people in hiding) were transported to Germany.

Well, the ghost of Günther has stirred from eternal slumber to haunt and torment Lucrezia's family. However, she believes the person responsible for all of the devilry around her house is her ex-husband. Not the ghost of a German soldier from the Second World War. Unfortunately, the police has no interest or the time to tackle a ghost, real or fake, which is why she engaged two particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators), Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong – who are presented with "an impossible case." Corbijn even becomes an eyewitness to one of the ghostly manifestation in the villa on Christmas Eve.

Late in the evening, someone or something began to loudly knock on the front door, as if a clenched fist was repeatedly hammering on the woodwork, but, when they pulled the curtains aside, nobody was standing there. And the knocking continued!

Late in the evening, someone began to loudly knock on the front door, as if a clenched fist was repeatedly hammering the woodwork, but, when they parted the curtains, nobody was standing there. The knocking continued! Corbijn sprinted to the door and there were, at most, two seconds between the last knock and the opening door, but nobody was there. So how did this elusive figure manage to get pass the electronically locked gate and the thick, thorny and impenetrable hedge?

A second, very similar impossibility happened the following night: repeated knocking on the door and this time they heard a disembodied voice screaming and cursing in German, but nobody was standing there when Menno opened the door. However, this time Corbijn had installed a camera-trap and the incident was captured on video. What the camera captured was "a luminescent shadow."

Floor plan of the first floor of De Alpenroos

There's a third impossible situation when Lucrezia's youngest daughter becomes hysterical when she saw a bearded man ticking against her bedroom window, but the wall has no support to cling on to, such as a drainpipe, nor were there any "footprints or impressions of the legs of a ladder" found in the grass below. This is only the beginning. A bearded man visits the villa and leaves behind a dead body in a locked room, which is quickly and easily explained, but this late murder is a only minor side-puzzle in overall plot and murderer's revelation is a type of solution I generally dislike enormously – although the trick was convincingly and properly motivated. So there's that.

The main attraction of the story remains the inexplicable, ghostly activity around a tightly locked and secure house, all of them were clued or foreshadowed, but as pleasantly clever and old-fashioned as the plot was the presentation and structure of the story. There's a floor plan and the policeman in charge even comes up with a false solution. Every aspect of the story, plot, characters and clues stick and work together like the innards of a Swiss watch. I particularly liked how beautifully the method for the impossibilities dovetailed with the identity of the ghost and the motive.

This places "The House That Brought Bad Luck" on par with other more recent Christmas-themed locked room short stories such as Paul Halter's "La marchande de fleurs" ("The Flower Girl") and Szu-Yen Lin's "The Miracle on Christmas Eve" (collected in Realm of the Impossible, 2017). Not a bad company to be in.

"The House That Brought Bad Luck" is a short story with a snowfall of impossible crime material, clues and even an unaccountable murder, which all helped making this story my favorite entry in the series. As you all know, I don't like locked room mysteries. I love them like a deranged stalker with serious boundary issues. So the fact that this one was written by one of my compatriots made it all the more enjoyable

The previews of the upcoming releases promises even more locked room-like short stories! So you haven't seen the last of Corbijn and De Jong on this blog.

One Way Out (2012) by John Russell Fearn and Philip Harbottle

John Russell Fearn is my favorite second-stringer who tragically passed away in 1960 at age 52 and left behind an unfinished manuscript of a detective novel, entitled One Way Out (2012), which had "a very brief cryptic scribble" on the final page "setting out his thoughts on how it finished" – except that the scribble was too obscure to envision his intended ending. Philip Harbottle was unable to make heads nor tails of it and the manuscript was shelved for decades.

One day, Harbottle woke up with "an interpretation of what the notes could have meant" and completed the novel within days, which has since been published by Thorpe and Wildside Press.

What surprised me the most about One Way Out is that it read like an unpolished, first or second draft of a Richard Hull novel. The plot had been largely worked out and it toyed with the inverted detective, which is what reminded me of Hull, but One Way Out lacked the satirical touch of The Murder of My Aunt (1934) and Murder Isn't Easy (1936). And sorely missed a clever twist or gut-punch at the end of the story.

One Way Out begins with three passengers aboard the Scots Express bound for Glasgow: a well-known London financier, Morgan Dale, who's accompanied by his chief clerk of twenty years, Martin Lee. The third person is Dale's "no-good ex-secretary," Janice Elton. Dale had dismissed Elton a fortnight ago on account of her "misplaced romanticism" and having "made love to him on several occasions," which had become "the talk of the staff" – something that could tarnish his reputation. And he has a wife and children to think about. However, Elton refuses to let it go.

Elton confronts Dale in his train compartment and tells him she has been diagnosed with leukemia. She only has a little more than a year left to live, but is determined to leave Dale something remember her by. Something that will knock him from that high perch he's sitting on. 

When Lee returned, Dale bundled him into the compartment and told him Elton had committed suicide by emptying a whole bottle of strychnine. Dale wants to pull the communication cord to immediately warn the proper authorities, but Lee urges him to think their next move through, because her death could be interpreted by the police as murder. Lee finds an incriminating letter in her purse accusing her former employer of murder. So they decide to dispose of the body and destroy all of the potential evidence.

However, Lee is "a deep schemer" who has "an insatiable longing" to turn the tables on his employer and the death of Elton handed him that opportunity, because he didn't destroy the purse or its contents – using it as a lever to begin extracting money from Dale. The first four or five chapters are good and somewhat original treatment of the phrase, "what tangled webs we weave." Unfortunately, the story is derailed when one of these two characters is killed in random, unconnected traffic accident. This effectively deflated the strong opening and intriguing premise of the story.

The place of this character was taken by a tireless policeman, Chief-Inspector Royden of Scotland Yard, who's a police-detective in the tradition of Freeman Wills Croft's Inspector French.

A competent, hardworking policeman who diligently collects fingerprints, assiduously pokes around in ash-heaps and toys with his primary suspect like a cat with a captured mouse. However, I think it would have been more beneficial, in terms of story-telling, had this been a three-way between Dale, Lee and Royden – building counterplot upon counterplot. This was now missing and killed any possible excitement the plot could have generated. It didn't help either that the character who was left behind was completely out of his league against the experienced Chief-Inspector Royden.

One Way Out has a solid premise with an interesting take on the inverted detective story format: the unsurprising consequences of turning a suicide into a suspicious-looking death, but these ideas were never fully developed and you can blame part of that on the premature death of one of the main-characters – who should not have died. At least, not that early in the story. Secondly, there's the bland, all's well that ends well ending bare of any twist or surprise, which made the plot feel even more thread-bare than it already did. As said above, Hull came to mind when I read the opening chapters and kept expecting a similar kind of ending, which made me even suspect the suspiciously innocent-looking Mrs. Dale. But the plot was really as simple as it was presented to the reader.

So this was a very short and very minor crime novel that I can only really recommended to loyal readers of John Russell Fearn. Others might be a little more than underwhelmed by it.

Asteroid Blues: "Time Wants a Skeleton" (1941) by Ross Rocklynne

Back in 2015, I reviewed a full-blown science-fiction novel, James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), which was brought to my attention by a 2013 blog-post by Ho-Ling Wong, who was surprised to discover a science-fiction title had procured a high-ranking spot on the Japanese Tozai Mystery Best 100 list – beating such classics as Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) and William L. DeAndrea's The HOG Murders (1979). And not without reason!

Inherit the Stars is pure science-fiction with the plot of a scientific detective story and has an ending as memorable as its fantastic premise.

A mummified body of a normal sized, anatomically modern man in a spacesuit is found on the Moon in the far-flung year of 2027, but carbon dating says the body and equipment are over 50.000 years old! During this period in history, mankind was a primitive hunter-gatherer. So how did a body from the Upper Paleolithic in a highly advanced, nuclear powered space suit end up on the surface of the Moon in 2027?

Ho-Ling ended his own review with saying that the astonishing answer to this conundrum "makes quite the impression" and he wasn't wrong, which is why we have shamelessly appropriated it from the science-fiction genre and we're not giving it back – it's ours now! Well, I always wanted to read another science-fiction-style mystery novel with a similar kind of premise and I serendipitously found one. It even counts as a Christmas tale!

Ross Louis Rocklin was an American science-fiction writer, under the name of "Ross Rocklynne," who was a regular contributor to such science-fiction magazines as Astounding Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction and Planet Stories. Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton" is a novella originally published in the June, 1941, issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is a who-will-be-done-in-type of detective story reminiscent of Pat McGerr (e.g. Pick Your Victim, 1946).

The story begins with Lieutenant Tony Crow of the IPF chasing a couple of outlaws, Johnny Braker and Harry "Jawbone" Yates, across the asteroid belt when his ship crash landed on the base of a mountain on Asteroid 1007 – a shootout ensues and the outlaws are apprehended. During the shooting, Crow found a cave in the base of the mountain and inside was a human skeleton! The remains of a human being who had existed in "the dim, unutterably distant past" before the asteroid and "the human race had come into existence." An old ring or gold, inset with an emerald, gleams on "the long, tapering finger" of the skeleton. And one of his prisoners is wearing an identical ring with exactly the same, very distinctive flaw in the stone!

Crow, Braker and Jawbone are picked up by the ship of Professor Overland and his daughter, Laurette, who were in the asteroid belt to trace faults, strata and striations on one asteroid and link them up with others. They are investigating a theory claiming that "the asteroids used to be a planet." So, when Professor Overland hears of the skeleton, he turns around the ship to return to Asteroid 1007, but the revolutionary new H-H drive in the ship fling them millions of years back into the past. A time before the asteroid belt. A time when it was still a planet, but not for very long.

A crescent-looking planet is visible as a small moon in the sky, but this is an "invading planet" and grows steadily larger with each passing day. And as this moon-like planet grows in the sky, tidal winds increase savagely. So they have roughly nineteen days to patch up their ship and escape being obliterated when these doomed planets collide – except there are some problems. Such as two attempted murders. Another problem is that the entire crew is gripped by the conviction that one of them has to die, in order to provide the skeleton in the cave of the future asteroid, but who's going to be left behind? A conviction strengthened when it proves to be impossible to get rid of the ring.

The problem of the skeleton on Asteroid 1007 is the detective hook of the story and the solution was a truly surprising, but the clues require an imaginative leap of logic to put two and two together. So not every mystery reader is going to be blown away by it or may even regard as a cheat. I simply wanted another relatively good or passable take on an impossibly ancient human remains found on a celestial body and "Time Wants a Skeleton" gave me exactly what I wanted. Only reason why I didn't tagged this review as a "locked room mystery" or "impossible crime" is because time travel was involved, but the identity of the skeleton is what makes it qualify as a genuine hybrid mystery. And a good one at that!

So the story, as a whole, is more science-fiction than mystery, but I thought the time-paradox was very well handled and made for one of the better science-fiction detective stories I have read to date.

Granted, my reading of classic science-fiction has been limited almost entirely to hybrid mysteries and one thing that has always bugged me is that many of them had problems with envisioning a far-flung future beyond the basics – like rocket ships, space suits, robots and laser guns. Not everyone had the world-building abilities of Isaac Asimov (e.g. The Caves of Steel, 1954). Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) takes place on Mars a thousand years in the future, but is littered with 20th century references and clunky technology. Giving you the idea culture and technological has stagnated, before it collapsed, during those thousand years. David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944) concerns a planetoid in the asteroid belt settled by miners with advanced spaceships, but courtroom photographers still used old-school flashbulbs.

This certainly was not the case with "Time Wants a Skeleton." You can really believe the story takes place in the far-flung future. Or, as is the case here, the dim, distant past.

You're probably wondering how a science-fiction story about a time-paradox, a haunting ring and a doomed planet can be considered a Christmas tale. Well, the story takes place between early December and Christmas. Christmas plays a part in the resolution of the time-tied skeleton in the cave on the asteroid that used to be a planet millions of years ago. You have to read the story yourself to find out how that plays out. The good news is that you can find the Astounding Science Fiction issue, which contains this novella, on the Internet Archive by clicking here. Enjoy!

Rocklynne's "Time Wants a Skeleton" was, as far as I can judge, a good time travel yarn with a detective hook and a solution for the skeleton on the asteroid that's very different from Hogan's Inherit the Stars. So mystery readers who were impressed by Hogan should definitely read Rocklynne's novella.

By the way, I like to believe Lt. Tony Crow is one my distant descendants. :)

The Murder of Father Christmas (1934) by Pierre Véry

Last week, I reviewed Paul Halter's L'Homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999). An enchanting detective story with a dreamy, fairy tale-like quality that reminded me of another French mystery novelist, Pierre Véry, who once said that "what counts for an author," and a person, "is to save what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were" – of that person "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadows and mystery." Véry would probably have defined The Man Who Loved Clouds as "a fairy tale for grown-ups" and of his few mysteries to be translated into English can described exactly like that.

L'Assassinat du Père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934) was translated by Alan Grimes and published in 2008 by Troubadour Publications, which came with a brief, but insightful, introduction by Roger Giron.

Véry was "a bookseller in rue Monsieur-le-Prince" and this period in his life inspired him to write Léonard ou les délices du bouquiniste (Léonard or the Delights of the Second-Hand Bookseller, 1946), "a charming novella," which made him a visitor to the genre from mainstream fiction. A literary visitor who, according to Xavier Lechard, brought "whimsy and gentle surrealism" to our genre and his first foray was "a pastiche of the English detective novel," entitled Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930), but also penned a couple of locked room mysteries – Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934) is one of them. Hopefully, The Four Vipers will eventually be translated into English (are you reading this, Pugmire?).

Until that day comes, we have to help ourselves with what we have and that is a mildly surrealistic, Christmas-themed mystery novel that reads like a fairy tale for grown-ups.

The Murder of Father Christmas takes place in Mortefont, a large town in the county of Meurthe-et-Moselle, where the parish priest, Father Jérôme Fuchs, becomes the victim of an attempted burglary in early December. Father Fuchs had just locked away the reliquary of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of the region, when the incident happened, but the intruder miraculously got away from his pursuer.

Somehow, the burglar escaped from "the room on the first floor of the sacristy" without "going back by the staircase" or by "leaving footprints on the muddy earth in the garden" underneath the open window. And this attempt is complemented by an anonymous letter warning the priest "a gang of burglars is preparing to plunder the churches of our region." So they decide to enlist the help of discreet, private-investigator. Enter Prosper Lepicq, Barrister at the Paris Law Court.

Lepicq holds office in modest apartment overlooking the courtyard on the ground floor of a building in rue de Valois in Paris. The office has a room with three large armchairs, a large table stacked with papers and filing cabinets, labeled A to Z, line the wall, but this is only a facade – because "the files were stuffed with blank paper" and "the filing cabinets were full of old newspapers." Lepicq is two months behind on his rent and has a secretary who feverishly began to write gibberish to simulate hard work when their client came to visit them. So pretty much a low-rent Arthur Crook, but this was undoubtedly the most memorable scene of the whole story.

Lepicq immediately disappears from the stage and his place is taken by a Portuguese nobleman, the Marquis de Santa Claus. The children of Mortefont begin to believe he has come to their town to search for an ancient, long-lost relic, the Golden Arm of King René of Anjou, which is rumored to be buried somewhere in the ruined abbey of Gondrange or a nearby castle. One legend says that if "you ask the evening star, you will find the hidden Golden Arm," but this hidden treasure is only a minor plot-thread to give a magical or romantic touch to the story.

Meanwhile, there are two gems stolen from the relic of Saint Nicholas under seemingly impossible circumstances from the locked vault and a German-looking stranger is found murdered near the entrance of an underground passage close to the castle – clad in a Santa Claus custom! So who was the victim and who had been the second Santa Claus? I first read The Murder of Father Christmas nearly a decade ago and was surprised upon my second read to discover the plot was far more consistent than I remember it.

My recollection was that the story was written as one of Gladys Mitchell's imaginative flights of fancies, such as The Rising of the Moon (1945), but the plot here provided answers. And there's logic to all of the madness. Even if it's "the logic of tales of the fantastic." So it was more in line with G.K. Chesterton's "The Flying Stars" (collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911).

The explanation to the impossible escape from the sacristy was silly, at best, but was nicely tied to the inexplicable theft of the gem-stones, which showed a glimmer of ingenuity in its simplicity. This brace of impossibilities are also very minor aspects of the plot with most of the plotting work being put into the murders. I suppose this was, combined with the fairy tale atmosphere of the story, why Halter's The Man Who Loved Clouds reminded me so much of Véry's The Murder of Father Christmas. Two very different detective stories cut from the same magical cloth.

So, in closing, The Murder of Father Christmas is a charming, spiritedly written mystery novel and perfect as a holiday read during those long, dark, but cozy, days of December. As long as you don't expect a stone-cold classic. But highly recommended, if you like to read Christmas-themed (detective) fiction during this time of year.

Lastly, I want to warn readers who want to read The Murder of Father Christmas to hurry with procuring a copy, because the book has been out-of-print for years and secondhand copies appear to be scarce, which are already being offered at exorbitant prices – going all the way up to several hundred dollars or pounds. There are, however, still a few affordable copies floating around. So you better be quick about it.

Creepy Crawlers: "Tarantula Bait" (1932) by Paul Chadwick

Paul Chadwick was a pulp writer of many pennames and created the Secret Agent X series, but from 1931 to 1936 he wrote close to forty short stories about an unusual detective-character, Wade Hammond – which appeared in Dragnet-Detective Magazine and Ten Detective Aces. Hammond is a newspaper writer and amateur detective specialized in strange, out-of-this-world criminal cases. A category known in the pulps as weird menace, which has close, familial ties to the impossible crime story.

Chadwick is not listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but, on his website, Mike Grost briefly discussed one of Chadwick's short stories, "Tarantula Bait," which he described as an "example of a true impossible crime tale" with "numerous impossibilities." As you can probably guess, my interest was piqued by this obscure, long-overlooked impossible crime story.

"Tarantula Bait" was originally published in the September, 1932, issue of Dragnet-Detective Magazine, but the story can more easily be found in Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames (1993) and The Weird Detective Adventures of Hammond Wade (2006). The plot frames the impossible crime tale as a weird menace story and is (somewhat) comparable to Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way (1935), Fredric Brown's "The Spherical Ghoul" (collected in Death Locked In, 1987) and John Russell Fearn's Within That Room (1946) – basically a Scooby Doo for grown-ups kind of story. And this one comes even with its very own monster-of-the-week!

An unnamed city, which could be New York, is gripped by sightings of an abnormally large spider.

The first sighting of the "Tarantula" occurred a couple of nights before the opening of the story, when a man crossing Hamilton Square claimed to have seen "a great, black, eight-legged creature," which was seven feet in diameter – moved like "the spirit of death" itself. Faith Tashman is the latest to have a close encounter with the giant spider, but the beast has followed her back to her home. And attacks her in the bedroom, while there were policemen in the house!

Faith Tashman is found on the sidewalk, beneath her bedroom window, with two "terrible wounds" in her neck. Holes where "gigantic fangs" seemed to have penetrated!

Wade Hammond is tasked with putting a stop to this creature, whatever it may be, but, before he can do that, has a close brush, or two, with the Tarantula. Hammond is an eye-witness to the two second, seemingly impossible murder by the spider when its shadowy body ambushes a man. The spider had struck for its victim's jugular veins, but, before Hammond can raise his gun, the black, "ghastly shadow" had disappeared as mysteriously as it had come – as if it had blended with the larger shadows of the trees. A second, too close for comfort confrontation happened during a warm night when a huge, black "something with hairy legs" attempted to attack Hammond in his bedroom. But "the black bulk" vanishes as miraculously as before.

This attack on Hammond reminded me of one of the many impossibilities from Lou Cameron's Behind the Scarlet Door (1971), in which the detective is attacked by an invisible, cat-like creature when he entered his locked, darkened apartment. Funnily enough, "Tarantula Bait" and Behind the Scarlet Door are both weird menace/impossible crime stories with a locked room idea that ran along similar lines. Only difference is that Hammond took that idea to a whole new level. And on a much larger scale.

Hammond has only two clues to work with: a white powdery substance and "a strange whisper of sound" that "seemed to fill the air" when the spider vanished from his bedroom. These clues nicely fit with one of the suspects from a small group of characters, who could have been plucked from the pages of a Clayton Rawson detective story. So the story worked as a fair play detective story, because there were essential clues to the who-and how.

However, I'm afraid Grost has slightly oversold the story, as an impossible crime tale, by calling it "a gem." The story was a fun read and (sort of) works as a fair play detective story, but the solution to the impossibilities, original as the trick may be, is hard to take seriously – pure Scooby Doo with a dash of Wile E. Coyote. And grotesquely humorous when presented with a straight face.

So, "Tarantula Bait" is a good, pure pulp detective story with an entertaining take on the impossible crime problem and deserves to be considered for inclusion in a future locked room anthology, but hardly a gem of the locked room and impossible crime genre. You can put that down to the silly, cartoon-like explanation for the spider-like killer. Still, if you like weird, carny and pulp detective stories, like Brown or Rawson, you can't go wrong with Chadwick's "Tarantula Bait."

The Man Who Loved Clouds (1999) by Paul Halter

Paul Halter's L'Homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) is his fifteenth mystery novel to be translated by the inestimable John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, which is a magical, dreamy and fairy tale-like detective story with several impossible crimes – something of a cross between Gladys Mitchell (e.g. Death and the Maiden, 1947) and Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood" (1947). An uncommon combination that worked better than expected!

Mark Reeder is an absent-minded journalist with the habit of forgetting his car-keys, papers or "who-knows-what else" and his editor calls him a man with his head in the clouds. This is the literal truth. Reeder loves clouds and "could spend hours watching them."

So when he lost an article that was due to go to the printers, his editors told him to take his annual leave and he packed his bags, jumped in his car and followed the clouds – which brought him to the village of Pickering. Upon his arrival, Reeder laid eyes on "the most exquisite creature" he has ever seen, Stella, who's the daughter of the late lamented John Deverell. A local artist who committed suicide two years ago.

Reeder is told by one of the villages that Stella "a bit special" and appears to possesses the magical abilities of a real-life fairy!

Stella was born in "a house haunted by moaning winds," which was build on top of a hill overlooking "the sea-lashed reefs" below, where the never-ending winds play like "the mournful screeching of a demented violin." The wind blows there all the time and has taken many lives over the centuries. However, Stella emerged from that haunted, wind-blown place with the ability to become invisible, as is she was carried away by the wind – something that often happens when she enters a small copse called the Fairy Wood. At first, the villagers assumed there was hiding place in the copse, but nobody has been able to find it.

The village policemen even set a trap for her by staking out the copse and she managed to completely disappear from "inside a guarded perimeter," but these are not the only miracles she performed. Stella can turn stones into gold simply rubbing them and predict the future. She predicted the deaths of three villagers.

So, having heard all of these stories, Reeder decides to enlist the help of Dr. Alan Twist and Inspector Archibald Hurst, who witness first-hand how Stella turns ordinary stones into cold and accurately predicts the death of three men. One of these men died in front of Reeder under baffling, seemingly impossible circumstances. Reeder saw with his own eyes how this man began to fight with the wind, which was blowing furiously, when he was suddenly plucked from the ground by "a violent gust" – simply disappeared into the darkness. As enticing as all these miraculous events are, they do not represent the best aspects of the plot. And they have very simplistic answers. You might be surprised to learn that I didn't care about that at all here.

The Man Who Loved Clouds is a superbly imagined and wonderfully executed detective story, in which the splendid who-and why of the plot were marvelously intertwined with the more wondrous plot-threads of the story. Plot-wise, this is easily one of Halter's best mystery novels on par with La septième hypothèse (The Seventh Hypothesis, 1991), Le diable de Dartmoor (The Demon of Dartmoor, 1993) and La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005). But the dreamy, fairy tale-like story-telling is what turned this book into something truly great and memorable.

One of Halter's compatriots and fellow mystery writer, Pierre Véry, once commented that "what counts for an author (and for a person) is to save what has been able to remain in us as the child that we were." A child "full of flaws, of changes of heart, of shadows and mystery," but "so pure, so pure." Halter did exactly that and The Man Who Loved Clouds is, what Véry would call, "a fairy tale for grown-ups."

I believe Véry would have liked The Man Who Loved Clouds and Halter's story-telling here is, in spirit, very close to the only detective novel I have read from Véry's own hands, namely L'assassinat du Père Noël (The Murder of Father Christmas, 1934), which is also a (minor) impossible crime story with that wondrous, fairy tale-like atmosphere. Now I want to re-read it more than ever before. And, hey, just look at the time of the year! ;)

My sole complaint, which is a very minor one, is that the book-title is a bit of a misnomer and a better title was suggested in the story. Reeder described Stella as "the daughter of the wind" and that would been a more fitting book-title, but, other than that, this was an excellent, imaginative and memorable detective story. I have struggled with Halter in the past, but it's detective stories like these that makes it perfectly understandable why JJ feverishly rants and raves about his work. 

The Man Who Loved Clouds is recommended without reservations.

Holiday Hang-Ups: "Beef for Christmas" (1957) by Leo Bruce

Rupert Croft-Cooke is best remembered as the mystery novelist "Leo Bruce" and signed that name to one of my favorite series of detective stories about "an engaging vulgarian," Sgt. Beef, who loves to drink beer, playing darts and embarrassing his long-suffering chronicler, Lionel Townsend – who's more of a stickler for conventions than the boorish Beef. Townsend often wondered how anyone "as ingenuous as Beef" could "match his wits against the subtle brains of clever criminals" and "defeat them." But this is the inevitable result of his involvement in any case he decides to take on.

The series only has six novels and a smattering of short stories, which are mostly collected in Murder in Miniature and Other Stories (1992), but there were two short stories that remained uncollected until very recently.

"Beef for Christmas" was originally published in the November 8, 1957, issue of The Tatler and Bystander and was rediscovered by one of the obvious suspects, Curt Evans, who observed that the story would "grace any anthology of British detective stories" – a comment Martin Edwards, a writer and anthologist, took to heart. Edwards used the story to close out his anthology Silent Night: Christmas Mysteries (2015).

The story is fairly typical for a Christmas-themed mystery: Sgt. Beef is hired by "one of the richest men in the country," Merton Watlow, who's determined to spend all of his money before the grave calls him. Watlow has poured "a couple of Prime Ministers' salaries" into the upkeep of his opulent, fully staffed houses and overly expensive trinkets. Naturally enough, the family doesn't like it one bit. They're of the opinion that Watlow has to live on his interest for their benefit, which is a very vocal opinion within the family, but this only made him worse – turning his spending spree in "a sort of race." Recently, Watlow has been getting anonymous letters urging him to stop spending money or else!

Watlow decided to invite Sgt. Beef to come down to Natchett Grange to spend the Christmas holiday together with his family. I should mention here that Watlow gets a kick out of letting his relatives see him spend hundreds of pounds on a Christmas party. So what could go possibly wrong?

The kindred of their host consists of his nephew, Major Alec Watlow, along with his wife and daughter, Prudence and Mollie. There's his late sister's daughter and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Siddley. And their feeble-minded son, Egbert.

As usually, Townsend is slightly discomfort by Beef's lack of manners, apparent alertness or showing "appreciation of the privilege" of being chosen by such an important man to clear up a problem in his household – even becoming embarrassed when he produced a bulky notebook and a stump pencil to take down names. However, the real shock comes after an evening of entertainment, complete with a stage, when they find one of the members of the household hanging from a rope in his room. But the victim is not who you expect it to be!

So this is a case of murder disguised as a suicide and the crux of the plot is a clever alibi-trick worthy of Christopher Bush and Detective Conan, which both have used variations on this particular idea to create cast-iron alibis for their murderers. The trick here is equally well-handled with some good hints, rather than out-right clues, how it was done. However, I can't help but feel that Bruce's take on this trick might have worked better had the plot been tooled as an inverted detective story.

Nonetheless, the plotted fitted nicely together and Beef was amusing as ever, which made this a good, fun and Christmas-themed detective story that can be used to kill half an hour with during those dark, cold days of December.