Goodnight Irene (2018) by James Scott Byrnside

Back in 2015, "JJ" of The Invisible Event began a semi-regular blog-series, "Adventures in Self-Publishing," in which he examines independently published detective novels and with the exception of a few clunkers, like The Message in a Bottle (2017) by Merapi Omnut, the quality has been above average from what you'd normally expect from self-published works – most notably Lee Sheldon's Impossible Bliss (2001). Recently, he discussed a novel this series of blog-posts that sounded too good to ignore.

JJ opened 2019 with a review of James Scott Byrnside's Goodnight Irene (2018), a self-published locked room mystery, which he described as "an absolute belter" with "increasingly bizarre and unfathomable crimes" in an isolated house reminiscent of "the pell-mell craziness" of Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way! (1935). That alone was enough to get my attention, but then Byrnside turned up in the comments to say he wasn't "interested in writing anything except impossible crime." So that got him fast-tracked to the snow-capped peak of Mt. To-be-Read. Sorry Robert Innes and Adam Roberts. I'll get around to you two eventually.

Goodnight Irene is an ambitiously written, intricately plotted detective novel, certainly for a debut, which generally means the opening chapters are easier to discuss than the later. Here, it's the other way around.

The story opens with a prologue set in Chicago, 1907, giving the reader a glimpse of an appalling crime before moving twenty years ahead, to 1927, when a private-detective, Rowan Manory, made "a terrible error in judgment"  that has caused "irreparable harm" – effectively putting him out of commission for months. Five months later, Manory receives a letter from Robert Lasciva from Vicksburg, Mississippi, who received a death threat in the mail. A threat promising Lasciva will be murdered during the weekend of his fifty-fifth birthday and the murderer will be a guest at his party.

Lasciva has organized "a small, tight-knit celebration" at his remote estate, high upon a ridge, between the Bayou Pierre Mounds and Fort Hill with only one read leading up to the place. There are only three guests, a business associate and staff besides the two detectives of the story.

The guests are an elderly aunt, Bernice Lasciva, and a long-lost English nephew, Charles Lasciva, who brought along his wife, Margaret. Jack Tellum is Robert Lasciva's bodyguard, while Ruth Martice and Willie Aikes respectively fulfill the duties of private-secretary and butler/driver. The party is rounded out by his lawyer, Paul Daniels. Manory decides to take the case, not only for the much-needed three-thousand dollar fee, but the link his client has with the long-forgotten crime from the 1907 prologue and the untimely death of his mother – which probably gives you the impression that the book is a dark, grim and brooding historical crime novel. Goodnight Irene is definitely written in the traditional of the nicotine-stained, booze-fueled American pulp story, but the two main characters have a sense of humor and their comments often lighten the mood.

Coming next...

Manory has an assistant and friend, Walter Williams, who banter back and forth like a couple of married detectives from the comedic mystery novels of Kelley Roos and Herbert Resnicow. And this never strikes a false, jarring note with the pitch-black plot-strands. I believe Byrnside's talent as a writer is in straddling the various forms and tropes of the genre without turning the story and plot in a Frankenstein monstrosity.

Goodnight Irene begins to resemble a classically-situated, traditionally-styled detective story when Jack Tellum is poisoned and mumbles, what proves to be, a dying message, "choke, choke," which is funny coming from a character named Tellum (Tell 'Em). Very subtle, Byrnside. Very subtle. A note is found on Tellem saying "two are now dead" and promising two more "shall perish" before dawn. That second body belongs to the host, Robert Lasciva, whose decapitated body is found clad in a heavy, ancient and costly suit of armor in his office – three feet away sat the helmet propped up with a battle-ax by its side. There are no windows in the office and the door was locked with the key sticking in the lock on the inside.

Lasciva had been in the room with his aunt, Bernice, but the elderly lady could not have committed the murder, because she was physically unable to swing the big battle-ax and there's another problem. When the door was broken down, Bernice had disappeared from the locked, windowless room! What a brilliantly posed, double-edged impossible situation. A third, quasi-impossibility is thrown in for good measure when body parts are found, but the dismembered victim was not a member of the party and the house became inaccessible to outsiders when a flood washed away the only bridge to the mainland.

On a side note, Goodnight Irene is set during the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States, known as The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left over 700,000 people homeless, approximately 500 people dead and caused $1 billion in damages. The town of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was one of the places that was flooded in 1927 and is depicted in the story as being drowned in twenty-five feet of water, covering "any signs of civilization," except for a roof or tree here and there. The deluge had even "unearthed the contents of Beulah Cemetery" and forced "the coffins to travel through the town like some unholy pastiche of a funeral procession." These scenes reminded me of the devastating flood in Zelda Popkin's criminally underrated Dead Man's Gift (1941).

Byrnside dedicated Goodnight Irene to one of the uncrowned Queen's of Crime, Christianna Brand, stating that she may not have been "the most prolific or celebrated mystery writer," but "she was the best" and the plot slyly winks to Brand – draping another layer over this peculiarly structured detective story. A detective story that could have been penned by Bill Pronzini and plotted by Paul Halter, but paying homage to a mystery writer whose only flaw is that she didn't write enough detective stories.

The plot has some minor imperfections, such as a rushed ending and words ("pixilated") or phrases ("Five more minutes, Mom") that are or feel out-of-place in 1927, but overall, the quality of this self-published debut novel that I can easily dismiss those flaws as growing pains of a promising mystery writer. If there's anything to complain about, it's the routine solution to the locked office. The dying message of the bodyguard, the reason why the body in the locked room was clad in an armor suit, the disappearance of Bernice, the dismembered remains and the link to the crime from 1907 are all superbly handled, but have seen this locked room-trick more than once – one of the clues made it blatantly obvious this trick was being used. So that was a little bit disappointing.

Byrnside took an ambitious first stab at the detective story with Goodnight Irene and the result is an unconventional historical mystery novel, steeped in the offbeat style of the American pulps, but written around the skeletal frame of the traditional detective story and everything fitted together perfectly. Most promisingly, the solution to the dismembered remains is something you expect to find in a Japanese shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) detective novel. So, hopefully, Goodnight Irene is not only the auspicious beginning of the next John Dickson Carr or Paul Halter, but also the beginning of the end of the current Renaissance Period with the dawn of a Second Golden Age looming on the horizon. No pressure, Byrnside.

Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2018) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch was "a legendary figure in the history of contemporary crime fiction," debuting in 1955 in Famous Detective Stories with "The Village of the Dead," who died in 2008 with "almost a thousand short stories" to his name and appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) from May, 1976 until his death – a literal Giant of the Short Detective Story. John Dickson Carr said of Hoch that "Satan himself would be proud of his ingenuity" and this may have something to do with his propensity for locked room and impossible crime fiction.

During his five decades as a writer, Hoch created "a village of unforgettable series characters," such as Simon Ark, Ben Snow and Nick Velvet, who have all come across one or two crimes of the impossible variety. Only one of his series-detectives exclusively dealt with locked room murders, impossible disappearances and other miraculous mysteries, Dr. Sam Hawthorne.

Dr. Hawthorne is a country physician in Northmont, a small, fictitious town in New England, during the first half of the twentieth century and the series follows the chronology of history. The series began in March, 1922 and ended two decades later in 1944. Ordinarily, long-running series and characters tend to get frozen in time, but here nobody is exempt from the ravages of time. Not even Dr. Hawthorne!

Last year, Crippen & Landru published Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2018), which completed their collection of Dr. Hawthorne stories comprising of Diagnosis: Impossible (1996), More Things Impossible (2006), Nothing is Impossible (2014) and All But Impossible (2017). Five volumes packed with locked room and impossible crime stories! Sadly, this is the last time Dr. Hawthorne will pour the reader "a bit of libation" to go with his stories.

The stories collected in Challenge the Impossible take place during the Second World War, between 1940 and 1944, and the shadow of war looms ominously over the town of Northmont. And greatly impact the plots. So this volume had the added bonus of being one of those rare, WWII-themed collection of short stories. Let's see what's inside!

"The Problem of Annabel's Ark" was originally published in the March, 2000, issue of EQMM and introduces a new character, Annabel Lee Christie, who's a veterinarian with her own animal hospital "halfway between Northmont and Shinn Corners." Sabbath is a Siamese cat and the first patient of Annabel's Ark, but the poor animal has been strangled in its cage when the place was closed and locked up for the night. So she turns to "the local Sherlock Holmes," Dr. Sam Hawthorne, to help her expunge this blemish from her animal hospital.

A pretty decent opening story with an unusual, but good, impossible crime scenario with a perfectly acceptable explanation, which is only marred by the clumsy handling of the central clue – immediately giving away half of the locked room-trick. Still liked the story as a whole and love it Shinn Corners is only a short car drive from Northmont (see Ellery Queen's The Glass Village, 1954). It makes me wish there was a Dr. Hawthorne story in which he visited Theodore Roscoe's Four Corners.

EQMM, July, 2000

"The Problem of the Potting Shed" was originally published in the July, 2000, issue of EQMM and is possibly, plot-wise, one of the most perfect detective stories Hoch has written during his storied career. Sheriff Lens telephones Dr. Hawthorne to tell him he has something that's right up his alley: Douglas Oberman had been found "dead inside a locked potting shed," padlocked from the inside, with a bullet-wound in his right temple. Clues are liberally strewn across the pages that spell out the truth and I figured out "the how and the who and the why" exactly at the same time as Dr. Hawthorne. An original, rock solid impossible crime story with clever plot that inexplicably never turned up in any of the locked room anthologies from the past nineteen years.

"The Problem of the Yellow Wallpaper" comes from the March, 2001, issue of EQMM and is an homage to the Victorian-era Sensational novel. Dr. Hawthorne has a Dutchman as patient, Peter Haas, whose wife, Katherine, appears to have gone crazy and has to keep her locked in an attic room – a room with faded yellow wallpaper ripped away in places. Katherine has nightmares of "a prisoner in these walls," inside the wallpaper, "trying to claw her way out." Something quite the opposite happens when Katherine disappears from the attic room when she talking through the locked door with Dr. Hawthorne. And she left behind portrait of her own face staring out from her torn, wallpaper prison.

Admittedly, the scheme behind the plot is hardly original, especially the motive, but liked how the premise of a Victorian-era melodrama was used as a premise for a vanishing-act from a locked, barred and watched room with a very simple trick. So a fairly minor, but pleasant enough, short detective story.

"The Problem of the Haunted Hospital" was originally published in the August, 2001, issue of EQMM and begins when Dr. Hawthorne is consulted by Dr. Lincoln Jones on a patient of his, Sandra Bright, who claims her private, one-bed room in Pilgrim Memorial Hospital is haunted – swearing she saw "a hooded figure" outlined against "the moonlit window." On the following day, another patient is found smothered to death in the haunted hospital room where a year previously a wounded police suspect had been killed by a deputy during a botched escape.

So the reasons behind the ghostly presence and murder were pretty obvious, but they were nicely tied to the identity of the murderer and the vanishing-trick, which had a simple and elegant solution played to great effect. Another minor, but good, locked room story. This is story in which Dr. Hawthorne and Annabel get engaged.

"The Problem of the Traveler's Tale" was originally published in the June, 2002, issue of EQMM and brings a seasonal hiker, Graham Partridge, to Northmont with an interesting story for the police. Last year, Partridge had came across an abandoned, two-storied house boarded-up, but this year the house appeared to have people living in it. There was a middle-aged couple and he recognized the man as Clifford Fascox, "a Chicago swindler," who had worked "a Ponzi scheme on thousands of small investors," but after posting bail he disappeared along with five million dollars – everyone assumed he had fled the country. Two years later, he appears to have turned up in a secluded, out-of-the-way house.

Dr. Hawthorne accompanies Sheriff Lens to the house, but they find it locked up tight and through one of the windows they spot a body sprawled on a carpet. What they find inside looks like a murder-suicide had it not been for the absence of scorch-marks around the bullet-wound in Fascox's right temple. Unfortunately, the solution to the locked house is an old one, but the reason why the murderer had to take a stupendous risk was a clever touch to an otherwise average detective story.

EQMM, December, 2002

"The Problem of Bailey's Buzzard" originally appeared in the December, 2002, issue of EQMM and the story begins on the day before infamy, December 6, 1941, when Dr. Hawthorne and Annabel Christie exchanged their wedding vows. There was much kidding about the wedding day being "interrupted by a locked-room murder," but it was a party without any bloodletting and the following day they began to pack when the news broke “Japanese planes were attacking Pearl Harbor” in Hawaii! The nation was at war. And they have to postpone their honeymoon in Washington.

So they get invited by a friend, Bernice Rosen, to come to her horse farm and this drops two problems in Dr. Hawthorne's lap. One is a historical mystery pertaining to the missing remains of a Civil War hero, General Moore, whose casket held "the remains of a very large bird" and the murder of Bernice – who appears to have been snatched from her horse surrounded by snow only marked by hoof prints. As if she had been picked up by a large bird of prey. I very much enjoyed the historical sub-plot, but the idea behind the impossibility has been used before and much better by John Dickson Carr and Baynard Kendrick.

"The Problem of the Interrupted Séance" was originally published in the September/October, 2003, issue of EQMM and the murder in this story is a direct consequence of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

One of the boys of Northmont, Ronald Hale, had aboard "the ill-fated battleship Arizona" and his mother, Kate, is a patient of Dr. Hawthorne and this is how he learns she's has fallen in the hands of a spiritual medium, Sandra Gleam. Dr. Hawthorne warns her mediums are known to prey on the grieving, but Gleam has convinced her to conduct a private séance at her home together with her husband, Art. Dr. Hawthorne and Sheriff Lens are present as outside observers, who stand outside of the room, but, when the door is opened, they find the Hales unconscious and Gleam with her throat slit. There's no weapon found inside the room.

This is a pretty decent story, as far as these "debunked séances" goes, but not anywhere near as good as Clayton Rawson's classic "From Another World" (collected in The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective, 1979).

"The Problem of the Candidate's Cabin" was originally published in the December, 2004, issue of EQMM and has an interesting backdrop, but plot-wise, easily the weakest, most disappointing and unimpressive story of this collection. Sheriff Lens is running for his seventh and final term in office, which he usually does unopposed, but this time the election is heating up as a young candidate, Ray Anders, is vying for his spot – calling for younger men and new blood in the county sheriff's department. The election is thrown in disarray when the campaign manager of Anders is murdered and Sheriff Lens is the only person who could have pulled the trigger.

A story that began strong, but the plot was mediocre and didn't care at all about the lame locked room-trick.

The following story is "The Problem of the Black Cloister" and have read the story before in Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Murders (2006), but disliked the story and didn't want to reread it. So moving on.

EQMM, July, 2005

Fortunately, "The Problem of the Secret Passage," originally published in the July, 2005, issue of EQMM was incredibly fun to read with an inventive and imaginative locked room setup. Meg Woolitzer is the editor of the Northmonth Advertizer, a weekly newspaper, who wants to organize a scrap-metal drive to support the war effort. She wants to run a weekly feature with someone dressed like Sherlock Holmes, complete with deerstalker, cape and magnifying glass, who goes around town looking for scrap metal to be donated to the war effort and he even has a great moniker – namely Unlock Homes! Absolutely brilliant! Dr. Hawthorne's reputation as an amateur detective and even his initials makes him "a perfect scrap-metal Sherlock." So he reluctantly accepts the role on behalf of Uncle Sam and the men fighting over seas.

Meg Woolitzer has arranged their first photo-shoot in the home of the elderly Aaron Cartwright, who has a barn-house full of junk, but offers them to show them his secret passage. One of the bookcases in the library is a hidden door, opening on a dark staircase, leading to "a plain metal door" without knob that can only be opened from the other side with a combination-lock and only Cartwright knows the combination. Well, the following day Cartwright is murdered in the library and the door was bolted from the inside, while the metal door in the secret passage was securely closed. So how did the murderer enter and leave this hermetically sealed room? Hoch has found the best use for a secret passage in an impossible crime story and has a simple, but elegant, solution to the confounding locked room situation. So, yeah, I enjoyed this one.

The following story is "The Problem of the Devil's Orchard," but have already reviewed it separately here.

"The Problem of the Shepherd's Ring" was originally published in the September/October, 2006, issue of EQMM and has a plot that reminded me strongly of Paul Halter's L'Homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999). Julias Finesaw broke his leg when his tractor rolled over and has been ranting and raving from his sickbed how he's going "to kill Ralph Cedric for selling him that defective tractor," saying nobody can't stop him, because "he can make himself invisible" and "walk down the road" to kill Cedric – or so he says. Apparently, Finesaw made good on his promise and all of the evidence indicates he has killed Cedric, but this is a physical impossibility.

A good, imaginative detective story ending with the news that Dr. Hawthorne and Annabel are expecting a child.

"The Problem of Suicide Cottage" was first printed in the July, 2007, issue of EQMM and the Hawthornes decided to wait out the final month of Annabel's pregnancy at a cottage on Chesterlake. Unfortunately, their cottage has an history of suicides and not long after their arrival a woman appears to have hung herself in their cottage, which was locked up at the time, but this locked room-trick was disappointingly simple. Something that only served to give the story an exciting climax. The only notable point about this story is that it revealed this series is narrated by an eighty-year-old Dr. Sam Hawthorne in the 1970s and the identity of his listener.

EQMM, November, 2007

"The Problem of the Summer Snowman" originally appeared in the November, 2007, issue of EQMM and had an unexpectedly dark back-story and motive, which strikes an unnerving note with the problem of a snowman that was seen entering a house right before a children's birthday body – leaving behind a puddle of water and a dead body inside a locked house. A routine, time-worn explanation is given to the problem of the locked house, but the answer to the snowman was genuinely clever. So not a perfect story, but certainly a memorable one. Particularly in this series.

Finally, "The Problem of the Secret Patient," originally published in the May, 2008, issue of EQMM and shares the same strength and weaknesses as the previous story. A weak story with a memorable elements dabbling in alternative history. Dr. Hawthorne is visited by Special Agent Barnovich, of the FBI, who tells him Pilgrim Memorial Hospital has been chosen to bring in a secret patient, whose head had been bandaged to conceal his identity, to have a medical checkup. Presumably, the patient is a well-known, high-ranking defector from Germany and rumor has it he's being fixed up to meet President Roosevelt. However, the patient is poisoned under seemingly impossible circumstances before he can be moved again. Sadly, the murderer was rather obvious and the poisoning method is another golden oldie, but the identity of the secret patient gives this series the sendoff it deserves. No. It's not Hitler.

Quality-wise, Challenge the Impossible is an above average collection of short stories with mostly good stories ("Haunted Hospital," "Traveler's Tale" and "Secret Passage"), one classic locked room story ("Potting Shed") and only a few I disliked ("Candidate's Cabin" and "Black Cloister"). So not a bad score at all and comes warmly recommended to locked room enthusiasts, readers of historical detective stories and long-time fans of Hoch.

I'm afraid my next read is going to be another contemporary impossible crime novel, which came recommended by JJ. So stay tuned.

Death Behind the Door (1933) by Victor MacClure

Thom MacWalter was a Scotsman who had studied architecture, painted and supposedly had an amateur interest in acting, but the onset of the First World War likely put his artistic ambitions on hold and worked for the British Intelligence – reportedly was badly wounded in the Gallipoli Campaign. After the war, MacWalter began to write fiction under the name of "Victor MacClure."

The most well-known, best remembered work under the MacClure name appears to be a science-fiction novel, The Ark of the Covenant (1924), but, more importantly, MacClure wrote a quartet of detective novels during the early 1930s. Detective-Inspector Archie Burford of the Criminal Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, stands at the helm of this short-lived series.

A series that began with the intriguingly titled The Crying Pig Murder (1930), but the one that predictably caught my eye was Death Behind the Door (1933). The plot is briefly described in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) as a murder in a cloakroom, which reminded me of the impossible situation from John Rhode's Invisible Weapons (1938), but never expected to find a detective story that could have actually been written by Rhode. A story with a plot firmly rooted in the traditions of the great triumvirate of the "humdrum" school, J.J. Connington, Freeman Wills Crofts and Rhode.

Detective-Inspector Archie Burford is on a well deserved holiday in the English countryside and has gotten permission from Colonel Selburn, Chief Constable of the county, to fish the "carefully preserved waters" of the region, but when he was pitting his wits against "a salmon of mettle" a uniformed man appeared on the river bank – a village policeman with an important message. Burford responds by asking his ghillie to maim or murder the policeman in various ways, because there's nothing "more important than a twenty-pound salmon." Only flash of genuine humor in this deliberate, methodical and leisurely-paced detective story.

The village policeman brought the news to Burford and Colonel Selburn that a well-known art critic, Graeme Wakeling, was killed at his home in a shooting incident.

Wakeling lives in a reconstructed farmhouse, The Ford, which is up river and had been found shot by his friend, Rupert Kyle, in the cloakroom with a sporting gun belonging to another friend and house-guest, Mrs. Edna Cayne. Burford accompanies Colonel Selburn to The Ford and, together with Superintendent Groves, begin to methodically examine every crumb of evidence and inch of the cloakroom. They learn who handled or cleaned the gun, and when, scrutinize fingerprints and question the small pool of potential suspects. A painstaking examination that allows them to eliminate the possibility of a tragic accident or an unfortunate suicide.

As an aside, I loath and detest it when a murder turns out to be a suicide, particularly in a locked room story, but I have to give props here to Superintendent Groves for his elegant, properly motivated (false) solution suggesting that Wakeling had committed suicide after all – Kyle had removed evidence from the scene to ensure "his friend 'll have a Christian burial." Normally, a victim disguises his suicide as a murder or suspicious looking accident to either make trouble for someone or the circumvent the suicide clause of their insurance policy. I have never seen a suicide turned into a murder, by a friend or relative, for this very human and understandable reason. Anyway...

So the shooting incident in the cloakroom is murder and the challenge staring the police in the face is how the deed was done. However, this is not an impossible crime! Wakeling was alone in the cloakroom when the shot was fired, but not only was the cloakroom unlocked, "the door was standing open a little" when Kyle found the body and this makes the book a how-was-it-done very much like Christopher Bush's Dead Man Twice (1930). A status cemented when one of only two suspects, Cayne and Kyle, emerged as the murderer halfway through the story with the remainder spent on building a case against this person.

The case Burford and Colonel Selburn are building forces them to thoroughly reexamine the suspicious death of "the wickedly vicious, spiteful and indecent" ex-wife of the victim, Mrs. Wakeling, who died unexpectedly eighteen months previously of aspirin poisoning – taking a headache powder that inexplicably contained acetylsalicylic acid. Mrs. Wakeling had received a sample packet in the mail and how it ended up in a machine-packed dose of headache powder is another how-was-it-done rather than a pure impossible problem. Still, this was a interesting side-track to the investigation.

Up to this point, Death Behind the Door only had a pair of good murder methods and some clever, old-fashioned police work in the "humdrum" tradition, but the murderer's personality, attitudes and motivation makes the book stand out.

Firstly, the murderer turns out to stand on equal footing with the detective and the ending is best described as a stalemate between the two. You have to read for yourself how this transpires and is resolved. Secondly, the motivational drive of the murderer is something out of the ordinary. And there's something tacked to the motive at the end that was very not-done at the time.

So, all things considered, Death Behind the Door is a methodically plotted detective story with the focus on the mechanics of the crimes, instead of figuring out who-has-done-it, which will be most appreciated by fans of Crofts, Connington and Rhode.

The Tattoo Murders (1949) by John Russell Fearn

Philip Harbottle is the editor, writer and literary agent who has written extensively on an amazingly productive, pulp-era mystery and science-fiction writer, John Russell Fearn, whose voluminous bibliography has a complicated, maze-like publication history – strewn across numerous genres, publishers and an infantry of nom de plumes. Harbottle has learned how to navigate this maze over many decades and told me the story of an unpublished, presumably lost manuscript. A presumably lost detective story that may be in print today!

In 1947, Fearn wrote to a writer friend "to say that he had completed a detective novel," entitled Partners in Crime, on which nothing is known beyond that the manuscript was "promptly sold" to an Indian publishing house. Harbottle has spent years trying to find if it had ever been published in India, but was never able "to make contact with any Indian biblio buff" to verify or dispel this possibility.

So it looked as if the manuscript was either lost or had an extremely obscure existence in India. And than he stumbled across a copy of one of Fearn's many little-known detective novels.

While reading Murder's a Must (1949), Harbottle noted that the book-title didn't fit the story and had probably been altered by the publisher ("a common practice at the time"), but Partners in Crime actually "fits the storyline perfectly" – deciding they were the same story and gave up on trying to find it in India. Some time later, Harbottle arranged to have Murder's a Must/Partners in Crime reprinted by Wildside, but they insisted the title to be changed to The Tattoo Murders. Last year, it was reprinted a second time, as an ebook, by Endeavour Media.

The Tattoo Murders opens on a similar note as Except for One Thing (1947) with Derek Cantrill attempting to break his engagement with Vera Bradmore, who's known to the customers of her Gown Salon as Madame Luchaire, but hardly everone knew she came from "the London gutter" of the East End. Cantrill has met a charming, educated and refined society woman, Mary Hilliard. However, Bradmore has no intention to get rid of her big diamond engagement ring and threatens to drag him into a courtroom for breach of promise. A second plot-thread introduced in this is chapter concerns the head saleswoman of Gown Salon, Claire Wilton, who was unceremoniously dismissed by Bradmore. Wilton warned her that she hasn't heard the last of this.

When Bradmore arrives at her home, a dark shadow comes into the apartment through the window and asks her about the whereabouts of her two sisters, who are triplets, after which she's smothered to death with a pillow and has her pajama ripped apart – revealing the name "MARY" tattooed on her back. A medical examination showed that "the tattoo was put on Vera's back in her childhood." It's an intriguing premise, to be sure!

Divisional Inspector Davidson grapples with the case for a while, but eventually has to hand it over to "a queer sort of chap" from Scotland Yard.

Chief Inspector Hancock is a gimmicky policeman very much like the brick-red complexioned Chief Inspector Douglas Gossage from The Crimson Rambler (1947). Hancock is an easy going man who likes "to talk more about gardening than anything else," but by the time he had gone, suspects or witnesses had told him "everything he wanted to know." Some criminals had assumed he was a fool, misled by his easy going geniality, but they were doing years in the cooler for "underestimating the enemy." Hancock is a pretty bland character and only there to play the role of detective, however, he plays that role decently enough. And even deduces the gender of the murderer long before identifying this person.

So, The Tattoo Murders is not really limited by its flat characterization, a common weakness in Fearn's detective stories, but that this time he was unable to deliver on any of the good or promising ideas he introduced – from the coded tattoos to teasing an impossible crime. I'm being very kind by referring to the three tattoos as a code. The triplets were tattooed as little girls by their father, but you have to be pretty close to a single digit IQ to tattoo such as simple and general reminder on your own children. Why? Now if there had been tattooed lines, along with the names, forming a map when overlaid or placed next to each other that would have made all the difference.

Unfortunately, this was not the case, but I did liked the final lines of the book that resolved this plot-thread.

A second, unfulfilled promise was the murder of the second sister, Elsie Jackson, who was found drowned on the beach without any footprints around the body, but Hancock almost immediately destroyed my hopes for an impossible crime. A good, well thought out no-footprints-in-the-sand puzzle, wedged in the middle of the book, would have probably elevated this otherwise average, second-string detective novel into at least a title-of-interest for fanatical locked room readers. Fearn's clumsily handling of one of the primarily clues was adorable, but telegraphed the murderer's identity the moment it was introduced, because the reader has seen the murderer at work – making this a rather unsuccessful detective story.

And on a slightly unrelated note, how is it possible that the husbands of two of the sisters either had only glimpsed their tattoo by accident when swimming or completely unaware of it? Did they still have bed sheets with holes in them in the late 1940s?

Still, I enjoyed my time with this relatively short, briskly written crime story, which stands closer to Lonely Road Murder (1954) than any of Fearn's purer detective fiction. I suppose you have to be fond of Fearn to enjoy his lesser work like The Tattoo Murders. So a fairly minor novel recommended to readers of Fearn or pulp mysteries.

But wait, there's more! I'm sure a very specific segment of my readers have impatiently waited for me to finally bring up Shisei satsujin jiken (The Tattoo Murder Case, 1948) by Akimitsu Takagi. There's more to this comparison than just a passing resemblance between the book-titles, but it's impossible that one could have influenced the other. That being said, it surely is interesting that two mystery writers, one in England and one in Japan, wrote novels around the same time about a father who tattooed their three daughters. But that's where the similarities end. Most notably, the books display very different attitudes towards tattoos. The Tattoo Murder Case is deeply entrenched in the Japanese world of tattoos, which are deeply ingrained in the cultural and historical backdrop of the story. It's a world were tattooed skin of dead people are collector items. And on the other hand, the tattoos in The Tattoo Murders are merely a feature of the plot. Hancock even remarks "no woman would ever allow her back to be disfigured with a tattoo."

So there you have it. Two books, written around the same time and idea, but worlds apart. This is why even an average, second-string mystery can turn out to be a rewarding read.

Final Destination: "The Bus That Went Into the Fog" (2018) by Anne van Doorn

My obsessive, unhealthy love affair with the impossible crime story has been well documented on this blog and one of the high spots was unearthing a dozen, or so, locked room novels and short stories in my own language – something that still surprises me to this day. This country has produced detective fiction since the late 1800s, but the traditional, plot-oriented strain of the genre has been consistently dismissed as merely lectuur (popular fiction).

Consequently, an ever-growing list of our earliest detective novels are becoming lost to either history or collectors, because copies tend to be scarce and nobody is reprinting them.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I began to find locked room novels among the more easily available titles. Willy Corsari's De voetstappen op de trap (The Footsteps on the Stairs, 1937) has its imperfections, but reading an authentic, Dutch impossible crime novel from the Golden Age made me overlook those minor flaws – such as a vital clue that was withheld from both the reader and detective. Cor Docter's Koude vrouw in Kralingen (Cold Woman in Kralingen, 1970) is a politieroman (police novel) with an entirely original locked room-trick and has a superb, John Dickson Carr-like scene when the murder is discovered that gave me goosebumps! M.P.O. Books' Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) is a modern take on the age-old trope with a brutal murder in a fortified villa protected with steel shutters, cameras and overhead lights activated by motion-and pressure sensors.

Unfortunately, these Dutch locked room mysteries, especially the older ones, are few and far between. Fortunately, M.P.O. Books is still producing impossible crime fiction at a regular, steady pace.

Books debuted in the early 2000s with Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia, 2004), introducing the men and women of District Heuvelrug, who appear in an additional seven novels, published over a ten year period, such as the outstanding De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011) – one of the finest Dutch detective stories ever written. After the publication of Cruise Control (2014; no translation needed), Books abandoned District Heuvelrug and adopted, what's now, the open penname of "Anne van Doorn" and began working on a brand new series.

Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong are particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators) specialized in dormant murder cases, finding missing persons and impossible crimes. There have been quite a few in this series so far.

The series began in 2017 with the publication of "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In," in which a reclusive poet is found murdered behind the locked door and window of a log cabin. Back in December, I reviewed "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck") that has a house plagued by an elusive, seemingly invisible plaaggeest (a tormenting spirit) knocking on the front door before vanishing like a ghost. There are two further stories in the two short story collections: "De arts die de weg kwijt was" ("The Doctor Who Got Lost On the Way") has a locked car problem and the miraculous disappearance of an entire top-floor, while "De bergen die geen vergetelheid kennen" ("The Mountains That Do Not Forget") has an impossible shooting committed in 1933 in a locked tower room – situated in an isolated valley in Northern Albania. On the last day of 2018, "De bus die de mist inging" ("The Bus That Went Into the Fog," 2018) was published and answers the question how a man could have been strangled on a bus without the driver or passengers noticing it.

But before we get to the good stuff, you have to know that, while every novel or short story concentrates on a single case, the investigations can stretch over many months or even years. Corbijn and De Jong have a dozen cases open at all time. De Jong narrates the series and she regularly refers to the files they working on when their current investigation has come to another dead-end. She opens here with an enticing description of a case that had been allured to in a previous short story.

The description roughly translates as follow: "another cold case concerns the remarkable history of a murder in a Belgian coalmine, hundreds of meters underground, while the victim had been alone. As if he had been killed by an invisible person." This story better be ready for publication later this year, because I don't intend to wait until 2020! But back to the story at hand.

"The Bus That Went Into the Fog" tells the story of a murder that has stumped the police for over two decades and began on "a cold, windless winter day" in January, 1996. A "persistent fog" was causing problems throughout the country, but the fog was less dense on the Veluwe and a normally deserted bus platform, in the middle of the woods, becomes the stage of a crafty murderer when a man is killed aboard a small regiobus (regional bus) – connecting the various villages in the region. Every way you looked at the murder, it appeared to be a completely impossible and hopeless case.

The victim is identified as an American from New York, Jason Hunter, but this turned out to be an assumed identity and the autopsy showed he had undergone plastic surgery to alter his face. According to the bus driver, Hunter had been carrying, what appeared to be, a doctor's bag and that bag was not found until the following day in a ditch. The bag was filled with cotton-wool! Even more baffling than the mysteries enshrouding the victim are the circumstances of his death. Hunter had been strangled with a necktie without resisting, but how could this have happened without, in a small bus, without anyone seeing the murder or hearing the murder happen?

Plan of the bus

Only solution that makes sense if they were all in on it, but consider this unlikely collection of conspirators.

Corporal Paul Overvest occupied the best seat to have committed the murder, but the case against him fell apart. Arnold van Eijs is a factory worker on his back home. Adriana Villerius is an elderly dame (lady) who spend the bus ride knitting and provided an alibi to the last passenger, Martin Goensse, a high-school student whose stamped strippenkaart (zone pass) was found underneath the victim's seat – see the diagram (right) for their exact positions on the bus. So how could the murder have been committed under these circumstances?

The murderer's trick here is "een duivels waagstuk" ("a devilish venture") and delightfully elaborate without becoming incomprehensible, but the impossibility and solution has a weakness I always associate with Jonathan Creek. Thankfully, this weakness isn't used as a last minute twist, sprung on an unsuspected reader, but is uncovered during the investigation. So the focus remains mostly on the how of the murder. A good decision, I think.

The murder of the American, who had been buried as Jason Hunter, remained unsolved for more than twenty years, but then the news reaches Corbijn that the bus driver, Hans Zwartkruis, has passed away. Zwartkruis had been marked as a person of interest by the police, because they were convinced he either knew or had seen something, but he vehemently denied any knowledge or involvement. So now Corbijn wants to talk to his widow in the hope that she wants to talk. Slowly, but surely, Corbijn and De Jong begin to uncover previously unknown information, leads and even a second murder that had been filed away as a solved case of manslaughter.

This part of the story has a color reproduction of two stamped strips from two zone passes, which is one of the main clues to the murder method. An elaborate, deadly stage illusion played out on a mist-enshrouded, regional bus in the middle of nowhere. I think the who was not as impressive as the how, but absolutely necessary to get to the victim and something I can easily forgive, because I really appreciate a well plotted and original impossible problem – which is what "The Bus That Went Into the Fog" gave me. A new take on a classic locked room technique reminiscent of Miles Burton's Death in the Tunnel (1936).

To sum everything up, "The Bus That Went Into the Fog" has a shrewdly plotted impossible murder, but the how of the crime leaned heavily on the who, which failed to give the reader a thoroughly satisfying answer. So the story is best read as a pure, old-fashioned howdunit in a more modern setting and comes very much recommended to fans of the series or locked room enthusiasts.

Finally, I have some good news for the people who have expressed their wish to see this series get translated. One of the (locked room) stories is going to be published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine either later this year or in 2020. I'll post an update when I know more.