The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018) by Gigi Pandian

Gigi Pandian is the award-winning author of the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt books, a series of archaeological mysteries, which have been in my peripheral for years, because Pandian is an admirer of John Dickson Carr and has been penning quite a few locked room stories – all with a historical or archaeological background. I love locked room and archaeological mysteries! So why did it take me so long to finally get around to Pandian?

The series has a cozy, girly vibe that was a little off-putting and add the seemingly never ending flood of reprints, translations and classics that kept coming my way, you have the reason why Pandian never got past my wish list. Not until last year, that is.

The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories (2018) is billed as "a treasure trove of nine locked room mysteries" and Douglas G. Greene, of Crippen & Landru, wrote a foreword for this collection. Well, that was more than enough to lure this locked room fanboy in. However, my advise is to skip Greene's foreword until you've read the stories, because he reveals a red-thread that runs through them that will probably ruin part of the fun if you're a fanatical locked room – as well as laying bare a general weakness of the collection. Greene's foreword really should have been an afterword. So, with that out of the way, let's get to the stories.

The opening story is a novella original to this collection, "The Cambodian Curse," in which a former con man turned security expert, Henry North, asks Jaya Jones to help him find a statue that was stolen from a museum under seemingly impossible circumstances. A statue from Cambodian, known as The Churning Women, was the museum's centerpiece with curse resting on it. A string of anonymous letters warned the owners to return the statue to Cambodia, but the only precaution they took was moving it to a secure office on the second floor – a room without windows and security cameras outside. This office room is the scene of a seemingly impossible murder and theft.

Jaya Jones spends most of the story looking for the "missing pieces of history" and reconstructing the family history of both the victim and her museum. Unfortunately, the locked room angle is not really examined until very late into the story and the solution is a complete letdown. A type of solution I utterly despise as an explanation for an impossible crime. I hate it even more than the timeworn secreted panels, hidden passages, unknown poisons and pieces of strings or pliers. So not exactly an auspicious beginning of this collection.

The second story, entitled "The Hindi Houdini," was originally published in Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology (2013) and the detective here is not Jaya Jones, but her best friend and stage magician, Sanjay Rai – who's known as The Hindi Houdini and briefly appeared in "The Cambodian Curse." Rai is preparing for a magic show in California's Napa Valley when the theater manager, "a crass womanizer," is murdered in his locked office. Suspicion falls on a former mistress, but Rai clears her name by finding an answer as to how the murderer managed to get pass the locked door. The trick, or rather the principle behind the trick, has a long, storied history in the genre, but was competently handled here. A routine affair as far as locked room stories goes.

Luckily, the third story is easily the best one of the lot and my personal favorite. "The Haunted Room" was originally published in Murder on the Beach (2014), in which Jaya Jones listens to the peculiar history of the titular room in a house dating back to "the post-Gold Rush boom in the late 1800s." The room is not so much haunted as it suffers from a serious case of kleptomania. A nifty twist on the room that kills (e.g. Carter Dickson's The Red Widow Murders, 1935). Over the decades, all kinds of items have inexplicably disappeared from the room, such as children's toys and a ring, but, during the early 1900s, "a valuable scroll" of historical importance disappeared from the room – only problem is that the room had been locked at the time. And the occupant of the room, a scholar, had placed a chair under the door handle.

I know of only one other impossible crime story that uses a hungry (locked) room that gobbles up its content, which can be found in Case Closed, vol. 66, but Pandian had the better solution of the two, because it was more elegant, original and thoroughly clued. If I had to pick a story from this collection for a locked room anthology, it would probably be "The Haunted Room." Really enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, I didn't like the next novella at all. "The Library Ghost of Tanglewood Inn" was published in 2017 as an ebook and even won the Agatha Award for Best Short Story, but every idea from the plot was borrowed from other detective stories or series – running from Conan Doyle to Jonathan Creek. The past murder inside the inaccessible library, blocked by a table, gives away that Pandian has seen Jonathan Creek. It's practically identical to one of the episodes!

Granted, the use of a hardcover edition of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) was a clever touch, but even that gimmick came from a rather well-known historical mystery. So, no, I didn't like this story at all.

The next story, "The Curse of Cloud Castle," originally appeared in Asian Pulp (2015) and returns to the exploits of the Hindi Houdini, Sanjay Rai, who finds himself stuck on an artificial island with "a storybook castle." An island that was created only ten years before by a tech billionaire who made his fortune in cloud computing and the cast of characters mostly consist of Silicon Valley people. A good way to replant the classic trope of a closed circle of people in modern times. Naturally, someone is murdered under impossible circumstances, but, once again, the solution turned out to be one of the easiest, most simplistic locked room-tricks in the book.

"Tempest in a Teapot" was first printed in LAdies Night (2015) and the story introduces yet another one of Pandian's detective-characters, Tempest Raj Mendez, who's a magician friend of Sanjay Rai and has an interesting impossible situation – a botched stage trick. A man stepped into a barrel-size wicker basket, situated in the middle of a stage, while an assistant plunged a plastic sword into the basket followed by a scream. When they opened the basket, they found the man curled up inside with "a pool of blood spreading across his stomach." The impossible situation recalls Carter Dickson's Seeing is Believing (1941), but the solution is a play on Edward D. Hoch's favorite technique. And think his fans will most appreciate this story.

"A Dark and Stormy Light" was originally published in Malice Domestic: Murder Most Conventional (2016) and can hardly be described as an impossible crime story, but is, together with "The Haunted Room," the best story of the collection with one of the freshest take on the "gentleman thief" in the West – which should please fans of Maurice Leblanc and rogue fiction in general. Jones tells Rai the story of the second conference of historians as a grad student.

The history conference was sharing the hotel with a mystery writers' conference, "a friendly bunch," who turned out to be even "bigger drinkers than historians" and their guest of honor is a famously reclusive mystery writer, Ursula Light. She takes a firm hand in the investigation of the he disappearance of a keynote speaker of the history conference, Milton York. York claimed to have discovered a diary that would change "some widely held assumptions about why the Dutch lost their stronghold in India," but has not been seen since the pre-conference meetings. The only quasi-impossibility, at a stretch, is a discrepancy in time. However, this is hardly to the detriment of the plot and has a fun explanation for the missing speaker. And revealed a great villain who should be brought back in future stories.

The next story, "The Shadow of the River," originally appeared in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology (2011) and is the shortest story in the lineup. The story begins with Jones being on scene when the body of Dr. Omar Khan, a professor of history, is found behind the locked bolted door of his university office – beaten to death with "a thick wooden figure" of a smiling Buddha. Recently, Dr. Khan had discovered "an ancient map depicting three sacred rivers in India," which was now missing except for a small, torn piece that was found on the edge of the desk. The solution is another golden oldie, but was nicely put to use here and this should probably have been the opening story. If only because it appears to be Pandian's earliest published short story.

Personally, I believe it's better to open a collection, like this one, with a writer's earliest work, because, if the stories are good, shows the reader the author progressed and improved over time. Sticking it at the end show the opposite.

Finally, The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories closes with a novella, "Fool's Gold," which was first published in Other People's Baggage: Three Interconnected Novellas (2012) and has interesting gimmick. Each of the novellas are standalone stories, but are finked together by having the characters from the three different writers ending up with each other's baggage. Admittedly, this is certainly a novel way to link all these characters together without having them actually meet. Hey, I love crossovers almost as much as a good locked room puzzle. Anyway, the lost baggage here is only a minor inconvenience to Jones. The real problem is the theft of a golden and silver chess pieces, which were taken from a hotel safe by blowing it open, but the thief never emerged from the room after the explosion. Jones is accompanied by her magician friend on this investigation. A fun, amusing and good story to close out the collection, but not particularly challenging as far as the impossibility is concerned.

My review has been rather lukewarm and this has to do with the problem that was inadvertently highlighted by Greene in his foreword. These stories, without giving too much away, hardly break any new ground with the exception of two stories, "The Haunted Room" and "A Dark and Stormy Light" – standouts of the collections. So you shouldn't go into it expecting a shin honkaku-style locked room puzzles that employ elaborate architecture or severed body parts to craft intricate and original impossible crimes. This is mostly written as a tribute to everyone's favorite mystery trope.

In the end, I think The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories will be more appreciated by fans of the series and modern cozies than the fanatical locked room reader looking for another La nuit du loup (The Night of the Wolf, 2000; Paul Halter), Keikichi Osaka's The Ginza Ghost (2017) or Arthur Porges' These Daisies Told (2018).

Well, so far my tepid review, but good news, I found something promising from the late Golden Age that, thematically, has something in common with this collection. And not just because it's an impossible crime novel with a murder taking place in a locked museum.

Murder in the Crooked House (1982) by Soji Shimada

Last month, I posted a review of Soji Shimada's bloody tour-de-force, Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981), which I decided to reread in eager anticipation of the long-awaited release of the English translation of Shimada's second locked room mystery novel, Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982) – courtesy of Pushkin Vertigo. An imprint of Vertigo Press specialized in crime classics from around the world, written between the 1920s and 1970s, by "international masters of the genre." So who better to represent the Japanese shin honkaku movement in their catalog than one of its founders, the "God of Mystery," Soji Shimada!

I'm glad I decided to refresh my memory and reread The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, because there's a vast difference between Shimada first and second novel.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has a plot composed of three separate cases, only linked by the family ties of the victims, which stretches across four decades and covers the entirety of the Japanese islands – capturing the imagination of the public until Kiyoshi Mitarai finally solved it. Murder in the Crooked House, on the other hand, takes place in a single location, Ice Floe Mansion, where a group of people have gathered to celebrate Christmas. So this is more of an intimate yakata-mono (mansion story) than a grisly jigsaw thriller.

Ho-Ling Wong described yakata-mono as "distinctly darker" than the Western country house mystery. A pile of brick and mortar that almost takes on a personality all its own. This can be achieved by either "strange architecture" or by "acting as a distinctly evil vibe." Some good (Western) examples are S.S. van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928), Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Y (1932) and Roger Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells (1932), but Shimada's Murder in the Crooked House is a great example of the pure Japanese yakata-mono detective story with its bizarre architecture, a sinister collector's room and no less than three impossible murders!

To be honest, Murder in the Crooked House read like someone smashed Scarlett's Murder Among the Angells and the Detective Conan 2000 TV-special The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly. Needlessly to say, I loved it.

On a cliff at the top of Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, sits "a peculiar-looking structure" that looks like Elizabethan mansion with its three-storey building and to the east of the house stands a cylindrical tower of glass that's "the spitting image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa" – which can only be entered by "a staircase in the form of a drawbridge." A glass tower with a Western-style building next to, on a snowbound cliff, somewhat gives the impression of "some kind of fairy-tale castle."

However, the most eccentric feature of the mansion is that it was erected on a slant and leans to the south.

Ice Floe Mansion has perfectly normal windows on the north and south side, but the ones on the east and west sides have been constructed "to run parallel with the ground outside." This makes people feel like "a hard-boiled egg that has been dropped on the floor" and "is trying to roll uphill," which is something the owner of the house had a lot of fun with whenever he was entertaining guests. Kozaburo Hamamoto, President of Hama Diesel, certainly was planning to have some fun when he invited a group of people to stay with him during the Christmas holidays.

Hamamoto has invited a business associate, Eikichi Kikuoka, who's the president of Kikuoka Bearings. Kikuoka has brought along his retinue. There's a private-secretary and mistress, Kumi Aikura, a personal chauffeur, Kazuya Ueda, and an executive of Kikuoka Bearings, Michio Kanai – who's accompanied by his wife, Hatsue. There are also three university students, Shun Sasaki, Masaki Togai and Yoshihiko Hamamoto, who are presented with an opportunity to procure his blessing to marry his daughter, Eiko. Only thing they have to do is solve the meaning of the design of the fan-shaped flowerbed around the tower.

So there you have relatively normal opening of the classically-styled detective story, but this all changes when they retire to their bedrooms.

Kumi is awakened in the middle of the night by a noise and gets the scare of a lifetime when she sees a horrendous, frostbitten face with a scraggly mustache and beard peering through her parted bedroom curtains. But she was sleeping in a room on the top floor. There was "no kind of balcony" or "overhang of any kind" under the window. Just a flat wall. On the following morning, pieces of a doll are found outside the mansion without any footprints around it in the snow.

Hamamoto has made a hobby out of "studying and collecting mechanical toys and dolls," especially Western automata, which are kept in the "Tengu Room" where the walls are entirely covered with "masks of that famous long-nosed demon of Japanese folklore" and the doll that was taken from this room is named Golem – a two-hundred year old, life-sized doll from former Czechoslovakia. Folklore has it that, "on a stormy night," this doll comes alive. This unsettling event is rather innocent compares to what they discover next.

They're unable to rouse Ueda, who sleeps on a folding bed in a storeroom, which is securely latched from the inside. And when they break down the door, they find him at the foot of the bed with a hunting knife in his chest. The body was twisted in a strange position and the right wrist was tied to the foot of the metal bed frame. Detective Inspector Okuma is struggling to get a grip on the case and fails to prevent the murderer from striking a second time right under his nose. This time the murderer is looks to have been even more impossible than the first one, which was committed in a bedroom with sturdy door of solid oak and equipped with triple-locks.

So his superiors decided that this kind of "monstrous crime" requires "the right kind of detective" and they decide to consult Kiyoshi Mitarai, astrologer and fortune teller, whose appearance on the scene would have made Dr. Gideon Fell beam with pride – making Okuma groan with cryptic remarks and saying the doll committed the murders. However, not even Mitarai can prevent the murderer from fatally wounding yet another guest and the room, once again, was completely locked from the inside.

These impossibilities are the meat packing the bare-bone structure of the plot, because the murderer is fairly obvious and the only person who could have carried out these murders. And even Mitarai was unable to deduce, or even guess, the motive. So were these three impossibilities able to carry the story? Well, two of them certainly did, but let's take them one by one.

The locked room-trick used in the storeroom was good, but fairly simple, of which I have seen numerous variations and was not solved by either Okuma or Mitarai, but by one of the students. So this locked room problem is only a minor piece of the puzzle, but how the murderer was able to kill the combat trained ex-soldier was clever. And the hidden dying message was a nice touch. However, the third locked room stabbing was, technically, a complete and utter cheat, but it served a purpose.

What makes Murder in the Crooked House is good and memorable locked room novel are the shenanigans with the doll and the awesome solution to the second murder in the bedroom with the triple-locked door. A locked room-trick with such wonderful clues as iron staircases, pieces of string, the architectural eccentricities of the mansion and its location, but my explanation was not even close to the brilliant trick Shimada imagined here. My vague idea is that the whole place was a giant mechanical contraption that used the glass tower as a rotating cylinder, to wind and unwind, the mechanical parts of the house that opened the ceilings in the locked rooms to drop a knife from – which would explain why the bed was bolted down. Shimada imagined a much more satisfying and entirely original solution to the locked room.

So, while Murder in the Crooked House has its imperfections and lacked the macabre grandiosity of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, Shimada crafted a modern detective story that feels like a genuine Golden Age mystery and the originality of one of the impossible crimes lifts it to the status of a classic locked room novel. A handful of diagrams, illustrations and a challenge to the reader were the icing on the cake. This was well worth the long wait. Hopefully, we don't have to wait another decade for the next translation to come around. I need my traditional Japanese mystery fix.

On a final, semi-related note: I'm convinced Shimada has greatly influenced Seimaru Amagi, who's the talented writer of the Kindaichi series, because their plotting-style are very similar and they both have an affinity for elaborate, architectural trickery to create seemingly impossible situations or cast-iron alibi – such as in The Prison Prep School Murder Case and The Rosenkrauz Mansion Murders. I have read two of Shimada's novels and one short story, but he has very distinctive style of plotting, especially his locked rooms, which seems to have rubbed off on Amagi. Maybe someone in the comments can answer that.

Something Wrong at Chillery (1931) by R. Francis Foster

Before the unrelenting deluge of reprints and translations of classical, conventionally-structured detective novels and short stories, I took regular trips down the trail of obscurity. During these excursions, I unearthed such little-known, but surprisingly good, titles as Lynton Blow's The Moth Murders (1931), Joseph B. Carr's The Man With Bated Breath (1934) and Franklyn Pell's Hangman's Hill (1946).

So I wanted to return to these earlier days and present you with a truly obscure, long-forgotten mystery novel by a writer who's not even mentioned on the Golden Age of Detection Wiki – a veritable who's who of who the hell are these guys. Oh, boy, did I exhumed one that fits the bill to a tee.

R. Francis Foster was a journalist and an author of books on the countryside, how-to-write manuals and penned a number of detective novels, short stories and serializations. His serialized novels and short stories appeared in such publications as The Strand Magazine, Detective Fiction Weekly and Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine. Predictably, I would probably have remained unaware of Foster had it not been for the late Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), which listed one of his mystery novels.

Something Wrong at Chillery (1931) constitutes the last recorded case of Foster's series-detective, Anthony Ravenhill, who's the "notorious crime reporter" of The Planet and has been published, during the 1930s, under two alternative titles – namely The Mystery at Chillery and The Chillery Court Mystery. Somehow, in spite of these alternative book-titles, my brain assumed the titular chillery referred to the cold storage of a distillery. No idea why. But you're allowed to point and laugh at me.

The story begins with a restless Captain Trevor Hawkesbridge, late of his Majesty's Indian Army, who's time Indian has sharpened his "sense of danger." Captain Hawkesbridge has come to the conclusion that "anyone with half an eye can see there's something wrong" at Chillery Court.

Chillery Court is the home of Hawkesbridge's old Commanding Officer in India, Colonel Merrow, who invited Hawkesbridge to come and stay with his family, but he has the distinct impression he had been summoned to help them on a very delicate matter. Hawkesbridge overheard a conversation in which Mrs. Merrow told her husband to "trust him" and "tell him the first thing in the morning." However, this is not the only reason for Hawkesbridge's apprehension. The daughter of Colonel Merrow, Osyth, had slipped out of the house and left a trail of footprints on the glistening, moonlit lawn. And, from his bedroom window, Hawkesbridge noticed "a second trail" across the lawn. Someone had been following Osyth!

On the following morning, Hawkesbridge discovers a third trail with "the toemarks towards the house." There were two people about the previous night, but "only one returned." Hawkesbridge traced the trail of footprints to a hut and evidence suggests Osyth has stayed there for several hours, but refuses to believe she had a secret assignation with the unknown man. The problem takes a sinister turn when he return to Chillery Court.

The North Sussex Argus has a "STOP PRESS" that "the body of a well-dressed young woman was found in a third-class compartment of the 10.35 train from Horsham to Brighton at Shoreham" and the unidentified victim had been strangled – which mortified Osyth when she read it. Hawkesbridge is convinced that the murder on the night-train is connected with the affairs at Chillery Court. And this murder brings Anthony Ravenhill to Chillery Village, because "a train murder's always good copy."

In my opinion, the encounter and mental sparring match between Hawkesbridge and Ravenhill, as they compare their deductions on the footprints, is easily the best part of the book. This alone makes the book worth a read to everyone who dislike Hercule Poirot's dimwitted sidekick, Captain Arthur Hastings. Hawkesbridge is not a slow-witted dunce and can be pretty sharp, but he's bound by old-school conventions, breeding and loyalty to the Colonel. This is why he clashed with Ravenhill when they met.

After a while, the story becomes complicated because the people involved either refuse to tell the whole story or are physically unable to do so. Somewhat of a problem when you're working with only a handful of characters. They're either murdered, attacked, physically collapse or lose their memory. A very convenient plot-device and you can put that down to the story being a tribute-act to the 1920s-style detective novels, which is most notable in the Indian material of the plot – such as Thuggi, dark yogi and the goddess of death, Kali. Nonetheless, there are some interesting bits and pieces of detection here. For example, this is only Golden Age mystery novel that actually uses "death spots" on the body to prove that the second victim had been murdered somewhere else. And later moved to the hut.

Where the book becomes truly noteworthy, as a second-tier mystery novel, is the locked room murder, which is committed in one of the final chapters of the book. The house is tightly locked up with all of the windows securely shuttered and the doors locked and bolted. A precaution against the murderer. However, an unexpected and surprising victim is found murdered inside a locked bedroom and the solution is mindbogglingly simple, but where it draws it strength is that the explanation is also the final sentence of the book! A gimmick that Christianna Brand would use sixteen years later in one of her own impossible crime novels (Suddenly at His Residence, 1947).

Only thing robbing this otherwise original ending of its surprise is that the murderer's identity had been obvious for a while. You can chalk that down to a lack of suspects.

Something Wrong at Chillery is not a bad detective story at all, for a second-tier mystery, which even had some good and original ideas, but Foster missed the master's touch to make it fully work and he struck me as a poor man's Francis Vivian (i.e. a small cast of characters). On the upside, Adey considered this to be only "an average Foster novel." So, hopefully, this means The Lift Murder (1925), The Music Gallery Murder (1927) and Murder from Beyond (1931) are detective novels worth the trouble of tracking down.

The Further Side of Fear (1967) by Helen McCloy

Early last year, I dispensed with the oh-so clever, but confusing, blog-post titles and faintly related opening quotes, which I shamelessly copies from Ho-Ling Wong – whose blog was a model for my own back in 2011. Hey, you know the old classroom rule: if you're going to copy your homework, copy it off an Asian.

So my first, normal-looking review was Helen McCloy's The Man in the Moonlight (1940) and ended with the promise to look at her other work in 2018. As to be expected, this didn't pan out as planned. Nonetheless, there was one particular title that had been on my mind the entire year and have referred to this book in a number of reviews (e.g. Donald E. Westlake's Murder Among Children, 1967).

The Further Side of Fear (1967) is one of McCloy's lesser-known detective novels and the only person who appears to have discussed it is Mike Grost, of A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection, who described it as a combination of suspense, mystery and espionage with an impossible crime plot – noting that the late sixties was "an atypical era in mystery history" for a writer "to develop an interest in locked room puzzles." Surprisingly, The Further Side of Fear was McCloy's first formal, traditionally-styled locked room mystery novel.

The impossibility from her earlier and much lauded mystery novel, Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), concerned the inexplicable appearances of a döppelganger. The Further Side of Fear offers an authentic locked room conundrum in the spirit of MacKinlay Kantor's "The Light at Three O'Clock" (collected in It's About Crime, 1960), but with a better explanation for the impossible problem.

Lydia Grey is an American who has come to London to write a series of magazine articles on British furniture and has taken a small flat in Belfast Square.

Lydia is a very light sleeper and the story begins when she's awakened in the middle of the night by footsteps, muffled by the carpet, around the corner of the L-shape room of the flat. She pretends to be asleep, while intruder silently moves around the dark flat like "a stealthy animal," but catches a glimpse of this person as the silhouette drew a curtain to look out on "the lamplit London square" – which is an odd thing to do for an intruder. However, this presence vanishes as mysteriously from the pitch-black apartment as it has appeared and this is where the impossibility comes into play.

There's only one door, locked and bolted from the inside, "the windows were eight floors above the ground," sliding panels of glass, which were tightly locked against "the winter night." So how did the uninvited, night-time visitor enter and leave the dark flat? The second chapter is a treat for the overly enthusiastic locked room reader.

Lydia immediately called the police and the responding officers eliminate every possible point of entry and exit. The intruder could have wormed a forearm through the letter slot in the door and turned "the knob that releases the snap lock," but the bolt was "too far from the slot." And the door with its lock is a modern one, which makes it impossible to use one of those old-fashioned thread-and wire tricks that manipulate the keys and bolts from the outside. Lastly, there's a rubbish hatch with a powerful compressed air spring designed to hold it tightly shut once it's closed. A brief experiment shows the flat could not have been entered through the rubbish hatch.

So they establish it's "physically impossible" for anyone to get in, or out, of the flat when the hall door was locked and bolted from the inside! Nevertheless, you don't have to be Dr. Gideon Fell or Jonathan Creek to figure out how the trick was worked. The trick is a relatively simple one, but notable because it's set in a modern, post-WWII building with doors, locks and bolt that appeared to preclude any of the old, time-worn tricks or gadgets. And this gave it a glimmer or originality.

Although some would probably argue McCloy reversed a time-honored principle of locked room trickery and applied it to a modern setting, but that would be taking a sledgehammer to a butterfly. It's a good, acceptable, if simple, locked room-trick.

The seemingly impossible entering of a tightly locked and secured flat is only one facet of the plot and the book, as mentioned previously, is primarily a novel of suspense with a dash of espionage, which McCloy neatly linked to the locked room problem – not forgetting to plant a clue or two in the narrative. I also liked how the setting was used. A lion's share of The Further Side of Fear takes place in the flat and not only gives you the idea that you're reading a novelization of a stage-play, but it drives home the fact Lydia is a very isolated woman. A woman far away from home with really nobody around her who she can trust.

There's the house steward, John Erskine, who had been making his nightly round of the premise at the time the intruder was in Lydia's flat. She had a shipboard acquaintance, Gerald Denbigh, over as a guest that evening and her only friend in England is Alan MacAlan of the Foreign Office. The only ones she can trust are her two teenage daughters, but they dragged along two young boys, Jimmy Gregg and Tony Ffolliott, who have a talent for getting into trouble.

Needless to say, there are a number of complications in the case, such as an unexpected murder, anonymous telephone calls and a kidnapping, which finds its climax on the European continent – bringing Lydia to France and Italy.

On a whole, The Further Side of Fear is a fairly minor and short novel, but the plot pleasantly blends dark, nightmarish suspense with espionage and framed it as a locked room story with an unusual impossibility. And deserves much more attention than it has gotten until now. Especially from us locked room readers.

Death Came Softly (1943) by E.C.R. Lorac

Edit Rivett was an astonishingly productive writer of detective fiction and churned out more than seventy novels under two different pennames, "Carol Carnac" and "E.C.R. Lorac," but regardless of productivity, she had been largely forgotten even by readers of the traditional detective story – until the British Library began to reprint her work. Just last year, they reissued Bats in the Belfry (1937), Murder by Matchlight (1945) and Fire in the Thatch (1946). Murder in the Mill Race (1952) will be released in May of this year.

So I decided to reacquaint myself with Lorac and her Chief Inspector Robert MacDonald, because my last read was Rope's End, Rogue's End (1942) and dates back to 2014. I first wanted to go with Bats in the Belfry, but went with Death Came Softly (1943) instead. A decision I have come to regret.

Death Came Softly opened strongly when a recently widowed and comparatively wealthy woman, Mrs. Eve Merrion, rents a empty, lavish mansion in Devonshire in order to get away from wartime London. Valehead House lays "miles away from anywhere," in a remote, wooded valley, with a large, colorful garden full of beauty and neglect. The forty-some room mansion was erected in Georgian times, but this secluded back wood is smudged with the fingerprints of "men of the stone age, Romans, early Britons and medieval charcoal burners" – all of whom have inhabited the valley in previous times. A notable landmark is "an airy, commodious and generally desirable" cavern known locally as the Hermit's Cave.

Mrs. Merrion manages to pack this large mansion with family, staff and guests. There's her elderly father, Professor Crewdon, who's an anthropologist interested in archaeology and had been "simply aching" to find a quiet spot to write his magnum opus. He would bring along his studious, owl-faced secretary, Roland Keston, and his two servants, Mr. and Mrs. Brady. Emmeline "Emma" Stamford is Mrs. Merrion envious sister, who had married an officer in the Indian Army, but barely has any money and has to count her threepence's for a taxi ride. Something that's bound to cause resentment ("it's simply not fair").

The household is rounded out by two live-in servants, Mr. and Mrs. Carter, but Mrs. Merrion is also entertaining two house-guests. A world traveler, Bruce Rhodian, who wrote a book about his "journey over the Andes" and a modern poet, David Lockersley.

These opening chapters are easily the best, most vividly written parts of the story and the secluded valley with its wild, natural splendor and lonely mansion becomes a place you would like to take peaceful stroll, but slowly grinds to a halt when a murder occurs – a rather ingeniously imagined murder. Professor Crewdon has developed the habit of sleeping on the stone bed in the Hermit's Cave, but is found dead one morning without a mark on his body. A medical examination revealed that the professor had died of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by glowing charcoal.

A brazier was found in the cave and there was plenty of charcoal, but Chief Inspector MacDonald is faced two problems: the cave was naturally ventilated and, if it was accident, how was the charcoal ignited when the professor only had a matchbox on him. This makes him think the professor was murdered.

Admittedly, the gimmick used to commit the murder was clever and something you would expect to find in a Detective Conan story or perhaps even in a John Rhode novel. Although Rhode would probably have improved and elaborated on the gimmick tremendously. The identity of the murderer and motive were competently handled, but everything between the vivid opening chapters and solution became increasingly dull, lacked inspiration and even the setting had lost their shine – making it a trudge to read. Hell, even the characterization became as thin as paper in the second half.

This stark difference between the opening chapters and the bogged down, post-murder section reminded me of Ngaio Marsh. Something referred to in these parts as "Dragging-the-Marsh." A good portion of Marsh's detective novels consists of two sections: a lively written, properly characterized novel of manners often with sophisticated, cultural backgrounds and flat, humdrum second half. This part usually consists of a series of unexciting interviews and lumbering around the scene. So I have not much else to say about Death Came Softly, because the book is guilty as hell of dragging-the-marsh.

So, in summation, Death Came Softly opened promising with a solid premise set against a beautifully painted background, but the plot was unable to sustain itself in the second half and the characters, as well as the setting, lost all its color. Chief Inspector MacDonald was even more colorless than I remembered! The plot was decent and the murder-gimmick was clever, but hardly enough to recommend the book as a whole. 

Well, this was turned out to be rather disappointing, but don't despair, I'll give Lorac another shot one of these days with Bats in the Belfry or Murder in the Mill Race. However, my next read is going to be a long overdue return to the detective fiction of Helen McCloy.