The 3-13 Murders (1946) by Thomas B. Black

Thomas B. Black was an American writer who began his career as a jack-of-all-trades, working in a refinery, a credit institution, a bakery and a munitions factory, but he also tried his hands at writing crime-fiction and his first novel was The Whitebird Murders (1946) – which was rapidly followed by two more novels in 1946 and 1947. His fourth and final novel, Four Dead Mice (1954), was published seven years later.

Black has been pretty much forgotten today, but during his short-lived career he had no less a figure than the lauded mystery critic and writer Anthony Boucher in his corner.

In his short, but snappy, reviews for The San Francisco Chronicle, Boucher praised The Whitebird Murders as "one of the better recent hardboiled debuts" and marked The 3-13 Murders (1946) as "a far above average hardboiled novel" with "good dialogue, credible toughness, solid plotting" and "plentiful excitement." I'm an aficionado of, as Boucher calls it, the simon-pure jigsaw-puzzle detective story, but Rex Stout and Bill Pronzini have given me an appreciation for that stylish, incorruptible voice of the hardboiled gumshoe – who prowl those mean streets in fedoras and trench-coats. I remember someone describing them as a modern-day knight's quest or realistic superhero stories about capeless crusaders, but I believe this genre is at its best when there are plots to go with the stories.

So, needless to say, Boucher's review, short as it was, caught my eye and he didn't overstate the merits of the book. The 3-13 Murders proved to be one of the best, if not the best, hardboiled detective novels I have read.

Al Delaney is a private-detective for the Redman Detective Agency in the fictitious Chancellor City, but when his boss, Giles Redman, was murdered he took over the agency. However, Delaney had refused to remove his name from the frosted glass door and honored his memory with "a wall-hung Indian head" and a large photograph of Redman. The picture and wooden head are flanked by "photostatic copies" which explained "the fate of the persons responsible for his death." And this unfortunately spoiled the name of his murderer.

Delaney has the looks of a streetwise, hardboiled gumshoe, whose nose had been beaten crooked with a blackjack and "one cheekbone was scarred" where "a hopped-up knife artist" had tried "to carve his initials," but behind this face is a brain. And there's even a decidedly Sherlockian element present in this series. Delaney has his very own Wiggins. A newsboy, Bill Smith, who helps him here with proving an alibi. Delaney tells to the reader that, if ever had a kid, he hoped the child would have "a full measure of Bill's quickness, loyalty, born-in-the-bone courage and honesty."

The 3-13 Murders begins when Ray Vance, a news hawk, phones Delaney from the brownstone of a prominent member of Chancellor City's upper-crust society, Fred Tolsi, who has a dead dame in his home with her throat cut – only problem is that nobody has any idea who she is. Tolsi claims to have been at the theater at the time of murder and gives Delaney a two-thousand dollar retainer to get him out of this jam. So he begins by trying to prove his alibi, but also follows various leads that bringing him from a low-end, crime-ridden neighborhood, simply known as the Row, to the thickly wooded hills of the city limits. Delaney always takes a Yellow Cab.

One of the leads brings him to a Yogi-ish cult, headed by "The Great I-Give," who promotes flexibility as a mean to salvation, because Delaney found a copy of their newspaper, The Prophet, in the brownstone. There was also a drab-looking woman walking up and down the street to peddle the newspaper at the time of the murder. Or what about the fat, yellow-faced man in a long green coat who Delaney bumped into when he arrived at the home?

However, this merely the beginning of his problems. Fred Tolsi's elderly neighbor, Mrs. Brant, is brutally murdered with a shotgun blast to the face and Delaney gets another client, Helen van Nesst, who hires him to retrieve a diamond her husband, Sheridan, lost when a card game erupted in a brawl – most of these leads are directly tied to the criminal activities in the Row. Fascinatingly, the story is set during a period when there was a stigma on illegal narcotics even among the common criminals of the Row. They are terrified of what could happen to the Row, if the Fed ever gets wind of it.

Naturally, they hardly allow this possibility to hamper their activities, but Delaney has become a liability and eventually has to deal with a hired gun from out of town. A girly-faced hit-man, "The Boston Kid," who has a final confrontation with the gumshoe that could have been a scene in a Western.

The 3-13 Murders is, until the ending, an expertly paced, well-written and characterized, but fairly regular, hardboiled detective novel. And then Black begins to unravel the solution to the whole case, layer by layer, which turned out to be more complex than it appeared on the surface. When I was trawling the web for background information on Black, I came across a review of The 3-13 Murders that ended with the advice to "take a deep breath." Oh, boy, he was not wrong.

The identity of the murderer took me by complete surprise and one of the murders was revealed to have been a gimmicky, quasi-impossible crime reminiscent of John Rhode. You can even make a case that the first murder was somewhat of a locked room mystery. There were more clues here than I have ever seen in a hardboiled novel and that included Pronzini!

So, all things considered, The 3-13 Murders is one of the finest and cleverest hardboiled detective novels ever written, which I recommend, unreservedly, to all. Whether you like the simon-pure jigsaw-puzzle detective story or the hardboiled narrative of the lone crusader. You'll get both for the prize of one! So expect it to make an appearance on my best-of list at the end of the year.

A Melee of Miraculous Mysteries

Years ago, I compiled a list, entitled "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries II: Short Stories and Novellas," which covered, as one of the comments pointed out, impossible crime tales from the well-known locked room anthologies amalgamated with a handful of more obscure stories – such as Robert Arthur's unsung classic "The Glass Bridge" (collected in Mystery and More Mystery, 1966). I wanted to update this list for years, but simply had not enough material at my disposal to expend on it.

So I have been discussing more short story collections and single short stories on this blog, which has brought some gems or interesting curiosities to light. I'll be drawing on these reviews when I have read enough to finally update the list. This blog-post is meant to reduce the glut of single short stories clogging my pile of unread detective stories. I'll be going through them in the order I have read them.

Craig Rice's "...And Be Merry" is a short-short story of three pages, originally published in the January, 1954, issue of Manhunt and confronts John J. Malone with the impossible poisoning of Alma Madison. She was found dead in a locked dinette, but Captain von Flanagan, of Homicide, told Malone they had been unable to find even "a trace of cyanide in that whole apartment." The victim was under treatment of a psychiatrist and the explanation hinges on her eccentric behavior. An unusual short-short impossible crime story, but, sadly, also a very forgettable one.

Charles Larson's "Mail Me My Tombstone" appears to have been only published in the April, 1943, issue of Ten Detective Aces and is not listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

Jim is a happily married writer of detective stories, but "the mad jangling" of the telephone briefly turns his life upside down. An old flame, named Rita Manning, has been arrested for the murder of her husband, Steven Loring, who was "a big-time gambler," but Rita tells him she was with her mother when three witnesses heard gun shots from inside the house – she wants Jim to solve the murder by posing as her lawyer. A complicating factor is that the house was securely locked and bolted from the inside with the sooth in chimney undisturbed. A minor, but pleasant, story with a solution obviously derived from a famous short story and the locked room-trick is a slight modification of an age-old trick.

Ed Bryant's "The Lurker in the Locked Bedroom" was originally published in the June, 1971, issue of Fantastic and blends fantasy, horror and contemporary crime fiction with a psychic detective and a classic locked room scenario – which was somewhat reminiscent of Edogawa Rampo (e.g. "The Human Chair" and "The Stalker in the Attic"). Aleister Houghman is called to the Swithit Hotel for Young Ladies where three young women have been assaulted and raped in Room 491, but the door of the room has "a latch, a safety chain and two bolt-type locks." So how did the perpetrator managed to get to the women? The solution is a pure, undiluted fantasy with a great and darkly humorous take on a classic trope of the horror genre, which kind of disqualifies it as a locked room mystery. However, it certainly is a memorable treatment of the impossible crime story.

E.C.R. Lorac's "Remember to Ring Twice" is one of the few short stories she produced, originally published in 1950 in the Evening Standard, which was finally reprinted in the anthology The Long Arm of the Law (2017).

Police Constable Tom Brandon overhears a conversation in the bar of The Jolly Sailor about five hundred pounds, an elderly aunt and being "fed up lookin' after the old lady." A week later, P.C. Brandon is walking his beat when this conversation comes floating back to him when, behind the locked front door of a house, he hears "a faint scream and a series of heavy thuds." The front door is unlocked and they find the elderly aunt at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck. Unfortunately, the story was way too short to play and the solution too technical to be completely fair with the reader, but it certainly was a good police story. I liked it.

The next story I read was Harry Kemelman's "The Man on the Ladder," collected The Nine Mile Walk and Other Stories (1968), which everyone appears to like, but I didn't care for it at all. The quasi-impossible situation is a man falling to his death from a roof and the murderer has an iron-clad alibi, but the solution was infuriatingly obvious. And this made the second half a drag to read.

Finally, Eric Ambler's "The Case of the Overheated Service Flat," originally published in the July 24, 1940, issue of The Sketch and is one of only half-a-dozen short stories about the refugee Czech detective, Dr. Jan Czissar – who's a thorn in the side of Assistant-Commissioner Mercer. In this story, the police is trying to hook a notorious wife-killer, Thomas Jones, who prematurely buried three wives after they tragically died from carbon-monoxide poisoning. These deaths have left him a man of independent means, but the first two deaths have been shelved as unfortunate accidents. And the police really want to nail him for the murder of his third wife. Only problem is how to proof it.

The premise of the story is very similar to Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Wife Killer," collected The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), which even has a clever, science-based solution that you would expect from Porges! I really liked this tale and you can expect me to return to this series at some point in the future.

So, all in all, this medley of impossible crime stories was the expected mixed bag of tricks, but I'm glad I can now cross them off my locked room column of my to-be-read list. I'll try to pick a non-impossible crime novel for my next read.

The Bloody Moonlight (1949) by Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown was an American pulp writer who "crossed genres like a demon, plotted like a madman" and "continually stretched the boundaries of any given genre," such as in the phantasmagorical Night of the Jobberwock (1951) and the tongue-in-cheek Martians, Go Home (1955), which are mostly standalone works. However, Brown also created a popular pair of private-detectives, Ed and Am Hunter, who are an uncle-and-nephew team appearing in seven novels and two short stories.

Ambrose "Am" Hunter is a former carnival barker turned private-eye, working for the Starlock Detective Agency, who became a mentor to his young, inexperienced nephew, Ed Hunter, when his father was murdered on his way home from work – which is a story Brown told in the often praised The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947). So that's quite an origin story for a detective-character!

I've only read two Am and Ed Hunter novels, The Dead Ringer (1948) and Death Has Many Doors (1951), but they were good enough to keep the remaining titles on the big pile. Not to the mention the delightfully bizarre short impossible crime story "The Spherical Ghoul" (collected in Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories, 1987).

The Bloody Moonlight (1949) is their third outing and John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, recommended it as "an innovative blending of science-fiction, horror and detective novel plot devices" with a "subtle twist." I agree!

The story begins when a wealthy client of Ben Starlock, Justine Haberman, engages his agency to figure out whether or not "a new gadget" is worth a five-thousand dollar investment and he puts the Hunters on the case – telling them to keep expenses at a tidy twenty-five bucks. But this assignment has a peculiar angle from the start that rapidly begin to multiply involving "strange signals" and werewolves!

Stephen Amory is Justine Haberman's half uncle and an inventor with a steady income from things he has invented and patented. Lately, he has been tinkering with a new device that can receive signals, which has been picking inexplicable clicks. A repeated series of four clicks. So could these signals be coming from the fourth planet, Mars? Amory has said the signals probably aren't coming from one of our neighboring planets, but then why has he been trying to buy a star globe and borrowing books from the library on astronomy?

I know of two mystery writers who used a radio to make their characters believe they were listening to voices from beyond the grave (i.e. EVP). John Rhode's The House on Tollard Ridge (1929) and Agatha Christie's short story "Wireless" (collected in The Hound of Death and Other Stories, 1933), but an "interplanetary radio" receiving possible signals from Mars is a new one to me, which is why I loved it when they come down from the stars to visit the detective story – because they often bring something unusual or innovative to the table. Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) is a classic example of this.

Anyway, Am and Ed Hunter travel down to the small town of Tremont, where Amory lives, but Am immediately recedes into the background of the story as Ed takes the lead. You can say that The Bloody Moonlight is a hardboiled coming-of-age, or a baptism by fire, for the twenty-one year old detective who has been on the job for less than three days. And, before too long, he's finds himself neck deep in a murder case.

On his way to Amory's home, Ed is stopped dead in his tracks by the growl of an animal, "a bestial, vicious, murderous sound," which came from the edge of a thick underbush to his right and caught a glimpse of a white, oval face – standing man-high and growling like an animal. Something that "straight out of a horror program on the radio." 

So he hightailed it out of there, but when he got to a bend in the road he saw a man lying in a ditch between the road and an orchard. His throat had been torn out. But this is still only the beginning of his troubles in Tremont.

Sheriff Jack Kingman hates Chicago hoodlums and the only thing he hates even more is "a Chicago private dick."

So he's not exactly enamored with Ed Hunter when he reported the murder only to discover that the body has disappeared without a trace. Not even a drop of blood is found in the ditch! Sheriff Kingman is not amused and works over the rookie detective in the privacy of his own office, which results in cracked ribs and Ed left the police station a changed man. To use his own words, "the first time you're ever beaten up, especially when it's unjustly and through no fault of your own, does something to you. It's like when your parents die; it's like the first time you ever sleep with a woman. It does something to you; you aren't quite the same after that." Ed is determined to settle this business with the sheriff before leaving the town or part of him would be left lying on the floor of the police station.

A second distraction comes in the form of a beautiful librarian, Molly, who makes Ed feel a little weak in the knees, but this plot-thread comes to unexpected and slightly embarrassing end. I told you this was a hardboiled coming-of-age story of a young detective. Justine Haberman even commented that he appeared to have matured a good three years since the last time they talked, because Haberman had the idea she had been talking with an eighteen year old that time.

Ed still has to determine the veracity of the interplanetary radio and Amory's opinion on the radio signals he has been receiving is even more fascinating than the rumors that he's been listening in on a Martian civilization. Not to mention the werewolf murder.

John noted in his previously mentioned review that this story is one of those rare detective novels that treats lycanthropy "as a mental illness," rather than "relying on the usual mythology and legends found in werewolf movies that threat the phenomenon as real," which is actually more terrifying – because the criminally insane exist outside of the printed page. Unfortunately, the answer to the werewolf is not exactly, what you call, a rug-puller. However, every single plot-thread is dovetailed so beautifully that you can't possibly be left disappointed when you turn over the final page.

If there's anything to complain about, it's that Brown completely overlooked the possibility to blow his readers away with a tragic and devastating epilogue.

It's not a spoiler to say that the signals didn't emanate from Mars, or any other celestial body, but what if an epilogue had been added taking place on that planet. A scene depicting an elderly Martian overlooking his devastated and dying planet, which used to be the home of a great civilization, but a disaster has reduced them to a small, dwindling nomadic tribe traveling from one shallow watering hole to another. Just trying to survive in this extremely hostile environment. This elderly Martian looks up to the stars and wonders if they could have been saved, if they had the means to send out a distress signal to that blue planet where an advanced species had slowly began to emerge when a comet had ended theirs. Admit it. This would have been a great note to end the book on.

So, all of that being said, The Bloody Moonlight is still a pretty good, hardboiled detective story with a stacked plot, chuck-full of eerie and blood-curdling murders, which doubled as a tough coming-of-age story. I recommend it!

Stray Dog Strut: "Mystery At the Dog Pound" (1942) by Robert W. Cochran

Robert W. Cochran appears to have been an obscure, little-known pulp writer who seems to have exclusively penned short stories for numerous periodicals, such as Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, G-Men Detective and 10 Story Mystery Magazine, but that's all the internet could tell me – making him one of the more obscurer names discussed on this blog. I'm not sure from who, or where, I heard of Cochran, but had jotted down the title of one of his short stories as a possible item of interest. My hunch was not entirely wrong.

"Mystery At the Dog Pound" was published in the May, 1942, issue of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine and has not been reprinted since.

The story takes place in Clarkesville, "a town of only eight thousand," which is less than a month removed from an important election and the incumbent sheriff, Tom Russell, is gloomily trying "to device some method" to succeed himself as county sheriff – only to be disrupted by a telephone call. Charlotte Trent is on the other end of the line and tells Russell that her husband, Jonathan Trent, took her Great Dane to the pound "to have it destroyed." And she wants Russell to save her dog.

So, together with the narrator of the story, Ray, they go down to the pound, but when they arrive the gas-chamber has already done its work. However, when they peer through the small glass panel of the metal door, what they see is not the foot of a dog, but that of a man. One of the most prominent citizens of Clarkesville, Jonathan Trent, has been gassed to death. Everything seems to point to murder.

"Mystery At the Dog Pound" has a solid premise and an original setting, which has to my knowledge never been used before or since, but lacked detection and proper clueing. This could have easily sunk the whole story. However, I really liked the explanation as to how Jonathan Trent, instead of his dog, ended up behind the metal door of the gas-chamber and died – a well-done play on the blinkin' cussedness of things. A competent plotter could have spun gold out of this wonderful idea, but has sadly gone to waste in Cochran's hands.

That being said, I think "Mystery At the Dog Pound" is still worth a read, if only for having an original thought, but don't expect anything more from the end product than a curiosity excavated from the bottom of a long-forgotten trunk in the dusty attic of the genre. You can read this short story in the issue of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine on the Internet Archive.

Sorry for the short review, but this all that can be said about the story and I'll be back with a regular review before too long. So stay tuned.

Death Has No Tongue (1938) by Joan A. Cowdroy

Joan A. Cowdroy was a mainstream novelist from the 1920s, but, towards the end of the decade, she turned to the detective story and introduced, what is, "presumably the first Asian detective" created by a British mystery writer in Mr. Li Moh – an enthusiastic gardener who made his first appearance in Watch Mr. Moh! (1931). A book published in the U.S. under the more alluring title of The Flying Dagger Murders. Very Carter Dickson-like!

Li Moh appeared in six novels together with Cowdroy's original series-detective, Chief-Inspector Gorham of Scotland Yard, who debuted in The Mystery of Sett (1930) and "performed solo" again in her last mystery novels. Unfortunately, these novels have been out-of-print for eons and hadn't even heard of Cowdroy or Mr. Moh until Dean Street Press decided to exhume them from the literary graveyard of forgotten detective stories.

Early last month, DSP republished two of Cowdroy's Mr. Moh titles, Murder of Lydia (1933) and Death Has No Tongue (1938), which are introduced by genre historian and obvious suspect, Curt Evans. Interestingly, he points out Cowdroy probably "derived her inspiration for Mr. Moh," not from Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan, but "trips to the Far East to visit her brother." A Superintendent of the Rubber Control Office in Singapore. So when he died in 1939, Mr. Moh went along with him.

So with two of these obscure detective novels at my disposal, I decided to go with the more tantalizingly-titled Death Has No Tongue.

Death Has No Tongue takes place among the residents of Pound Lane, Linnet, which used to be "a jolly, old-world sort of village," but, over time, the place got "swamped and suburbanized" – slowly turning the village into an outlying faubourg of London. Mr. Li Moh tends to the garden of a spinster, Miss Hyde, who lives together with her brother and "celebrated author," L.V. Hyde. Lately, someone has been destroying her garden and flower-beds. A lovely almond tree was destroyed. The flowers were "hacked and crushed" and "the torn-up bulbs smashed."

A "cruel, wanton act of destruction" that gravely offended Mr. Moh and turned to his old friend, Chief-Inspector Gorham, to help him collar the vandal. But when they arrive on the scene of the crime, they notice a group of three men standing in the garden of one of the three houses on Pound Lane. What has their attention is the naked body of woman behind the screen of laurels growing beneath the veranda.

The body is that of a local woman, Ellen Shields, who was a simple, very religious woman who cleaned houses in Pound Lane. So why had she been "stripped naked, strangled by hands" and "a man's jacket stuck on her" before being dumped in the garden of a house? A house that belonged to a journalist, Lewis Hardwicke, whose fiance died weeks before the wedding and had been away from the house they were going to live in, but unexpectedly returned moments after the body was discovered. And he's not the only resident of Pound Lane giving Gorham problems by complicating the case.

And then there are the clues. Why did Miss Hyde's dog went missing on the night of the murder and how did it get wounded? Why was the victim's beret found in the garage of her last employers, the Hubberds? What made "a jagged hole" in one side of the beret "where a piece roughly V-shaped" had been torn out? And what had happened to the victim's clothes?

So all of this makes for an intriguing and appetizing premise. However, I have one, but not unimportant, complaint about the investigation.

DSP billed Death Has No Tongue as a "Mr. Moh Mystery," but he's a complete non-entity here and the bulk of detective work is done by Gorham. Mr. Moh has a few appearances to kick-start the plot and throw in some flowery-worded comments or observations, but is mostly absent until the ending and this appears to be par of the course – because Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, observed the same problem in her review of Murder of Lydia. After the titular murder in that book, "Moh is not seen very much." I agree with Kate that a potentially interesting character, like Mr. Moh, should have been "centre stage or at very least as present as Gorham."

This makes me suspect Mr. Moh was not intended as the main series-character, more like a recurring character or understudy to Gorham, but got top-billing from DSP to appeal to a modern audience. Personally, I think it would have been smarter to have billed these two reprints as "A Chief-Inspector Gorham & Mr. Moh Mystery," because they do arrive at the same conclusion. Sadly, Mr. Moh's contribution to the solution and even saving a life is not as impressive, because you never really got to see him at work.

Something that'll inevitably disappoint some readers who'll pick up these books hoping to find Britain's answer to Charlie Chan or Lily Wu.

Nonetheless, the plot of Death Has No Tongue nicely fitted together and picked up enough clues to understand the motive of the murder, which, in turn, revealed the identity of the murderer. An observant reader with a reservoir of fairly useless knowledge should be able to spot an all-important clue, early on in the story, before it's blatantly pointed out later on. So this was definitely one of my triumphs as an armchair detective.

Cowdroy is a good addition to the list of long-forgotten, more literary, female mystery writers DSP has brought back from oblivion such as Elizabeth Gill, Annie Haynes, Winifred Peck and Molly Thynne. So you can expect a review of Murder of Lydia in the hopefully not so distant future, but first I'll be returning to one of my two favorite DSP writers, Christopher Bush and E.R. Punshon!

I Want to Play a Game: "With a Twist" (2005) by J.A. Konrath

J.A. Konrath is an American writer of more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, mostly crime and horror fiction, who has won the Derringer Award and Ellery Queen Reader's Choice Award, but my only exposure to his work has been "On the Rocks" – a short story anthologized by Mike Ashley in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2006). A good little locked room story featuring the forty-something Chicago homicide detective, Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels. This was not the last time an impossible crime would be dropped into her lap.

"With a Twist" originally appeared in the December, 2005, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and republished in 2011 as an ebook. This story is, in my opinion, a minor classic and I'll tell you why in a moment.

The story opens with Jack Daniels and Herb Benedict, of the Chicago Police Department, standing in the blood-splattered living room of the Edward Wyatt, a 67-year-old retiree, who lies splayed out on the beige carpeting "damp with bodily fluids" – his skull had been shattered and "his spinal column looks like a Dutch pretzel." Evidently, Wyatt had fallen from a great height, but the ceiling is no higher than eight foot and the place had been securely locked up. The front and back door were fitted with so-called privacy locks and dead-bolted from the inside. Same story with the windows, which were also locked from the inside.

You probably think the whole scene was staged by a devious killer, but all of the physical evidence, including the locked doors and windows, point towards an impossible suicide.

There are hundreds of carpet fibers embedded in the body and the wall-to-wall carpeting has a secondary splatter, indicating that the body bounced when it hit the floor, which is all consistent with a fall from a great height. A religiously-worded suicide note is found on the bookshelf. Wyatt could have only taken his own life that way, if he had taken off the roof, "jumped out of a plane" and "landed in his living room." So, either way you look at it, the case is an impossible one.

Where the story becomes truly great is when items in the house reveals the victim to have been "a man who loved mysteries, games, and puzzles." The book shelf was crammed with mystery novels, such as G.K. Chesterton and John Sladek, puzzle magazines, books on logical thinking and some old-fashioned (puzzle) games – like Clue and a 1980s Rubik's Cube. They also found cancer drugs. And this is where the game really begins.

Lt. Daniels quickly comes to the conclusion that this was a very ingeniously contrived and elaborately arranged suicide, staged by a puzzle fiend, who wanted to go out on his own terms and hid tell-tale clues, codes and messages all over the house – somewhat reminiscent to an escape room game. But here it gives you the solution to a seemingly impossible puzzle.

So what exactly makes "With a Twist" a minor classic of the modern locked room story? I hate and loath it when an impossible crime is explained away as a suicide-disguised-as-murder, because it's a bullshit cop-out and, worst of all, hacky. It barely requires any imagination or plotting skills. For example, you can have a stabbing inside a sealed, concrete bunker and explain it away by saying the victim committed suicide by walking backwards into the knife that was wedged in between something.

I never expected to read an impossible crime story, with a suicide, that not only worked, but was good. Konrath pulled it off here by making it clear early on Daniels was investigating a suicide. And she had to figure out how it was done. This approach made for an interesting take on the inverted mystery and helped making the more labored aspects of the plot more acceptable, because you know the victim was a dying man who loved puzzles and why he would go through all trouble of turning his suicide into one big riddle – which I completely respect. I liked it there were basically two impossibilities, an impossible fall and a locked house, of which the latter was better than the former. A simple, straightforward, but effective, locked room-trick that nicely played on an old idea.

So, all in all, "With a Twist" is a good and fun detective story with a victim who played the role of a benevolent Jigsaw Killer, from Saw (2004), which resulted in an unusual, but pleasant, locked room tale. I would like to read his third locked room story, "Mixer" (2015), which he apparently co-wrote with Nick Andreychuk, but it appears to have been scrubbed from the internet. It's not available anywhere. Hopefully, that one will get reprinted, because I would like another shot of Jack Daniels.

Murder Isn't Cricket (1946) by E. and M.A. Radford

Edwin and Mona A. Radford were a British husband-and-wife writing team who compiled several encyclopedic works, such as the Encyclopedia of Superstitions (1949), but they wrote mostly "well-conceived and cleverly plotted murder mysteries," thirty-eight in total, which were published between 1944 and 1972 – thirty-five featured their series-character, Dr. Harry Manson. A scientific detective along the lines of the many detectives created by John Russell Fearn and Arthur Porges.

There is, however, an important difference in that Dr. Manson is not only the head of the Forensic Research Laboratory, but also a high-ranking Scotland Yard detective who attained the rank of Commander. So here we have a genuine rarity of a character fulfilling the dual role of police detective and a scientific consultant.

Edwin Radford was a voracious reader of the Dr. John Thorndyke mysteries by R. Austin Freeman, whose forensic detective stories left their prints all over this series, but even more remarkable is the undeniable influence of Ellery Queen, because the Radfords made liberal use of the "Challenge to the Reader" to alert the reader to the presence of clues – scattering these challenges across numerous chapters throughout a story. Apparently, the Radfords were not above bragging that the fair play principle is the foundation of their detective novels by providing their readers with "the facts and clues to give them a fair opportunity" in "solving the riddle."

Sadly, the Radfords have been out-of-print for decades and practically forgotten today, but, once again, Dean Street Press is here to save two more mystery writers from biblioblivion.

Earlier this month, DSP reissued three titles, Jigsaw Murder (1944), Murder Isn't Cricket (1946) and Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947), which were selected for their "strong plots, clever detection and evocative settings." This time with an introduction from another genre historian, Nigel Moss. Now here's where the story gets interesting.

Edwin and Mona A. Radford occasionally dipped their pen in the (invisible) inkwell of the impossible crime genre and they produced four titles, three novels and a short story collection, but only three were listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991) – two have now been reprinted by DSP. Firstly, there's the short stories, collected in Death and the Professor (1961), which stars their one-time sleuth, Prof. Marcus Stubbs, who solves some of their more conventional impossible crimes. Such as shootings and strangling deaths in locked or guarded rooms. Who Killed Dick Whittington? and Death of a Frightened Editor (1959) deals with seemingly impossible poisonings.

Finally, there's the overlooked Murder Isn't Cricket and probably flew under the radar, because the murder is not really treated/viewed as an impossibility. More like an improbable crime. Nonetheless, it certainly qualifies as an impossible crime novel. Or, in this case, an open air locked room mystery. 

 

Murder Isn't Cricket is set in the village of Thames Pagnall, in the county of Surrey, which has been embroiled in a century-old rivalry with the cricket team of the neighboring village of Maplecot. On a Saturday afternoon, their a tie-breaking match between the two villages, which ended in a draw, but the damper came when a man is found slumped in a deck chair. A bullet wound is later found in his back. The victim was a complete stranger and the man has no identification on him, but a diary shows he had been touring the British countryside on a round of sightseeing and had come to Thames Pagnall with the same reason. So why kill a complete stranger in full view of a thousand people? And why did saw the murder happen or spotted the shooter?

The county police are out of their depth and Doctor Harry Manson, of Scotland Yard, is placed in charge of the case and they begin a meticulously, step-by-step, reconstruction of the murder by using logic and old-school CSI work – such as the use of mini-vacuum cleaner to such "the dust thickly engrained in the cloth" of the victim's clothes. This helped them to identify the victim and opened another avenue in their investigation closely linked to the criminal underworld. Every couple of chapters, the reader is asked either to answer certain questions or whether they spotted all the clues given in that chapter.

So the unraveling of the story is like walking down a dark pathway with a flashlight, illuminating more of the path with every step, until you reach the end. An ending you can anticipate, if you picked up all the breadcrumbs that were dropped along the way. Something that should appeal to fans of early Ellery Queen (e.g. The French Powder Mystery, 1930).

All of that said, the story would have really benefited from a clear, well-drawn map of the crime scene and Doctor Manson made an amateur mistake when he referenced Edgar Allan Poe's pioneering 1841 short story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," but described the plot of another iconic tale by one of the giants of the detective story. Very sloppy.

However, those are minor flaws and the only thing that really bothered me was Doctor Manson's illogical statement that something, like heads in a coin toss, can "turn up twenty million times in succession" and "still leave the law of averages undisturbed," because some time within "the next twenty million years," or so, tails can turn up an equal number of times. I could be completely wrong here, but, when someone keeps getting head when tossing a coin or keeps throwing sixes with dice, the law of averages dictates that the person is probably playing with a double-headed coin or loaded dice – which is the only thing that annoyed me a bit. Otherwise, this was quite an enjoyable detective story with barely an ounce of fat (i.e. padding) on the plot.

Murder Isn't Cricket is, what Anthony Boucher called, the simon-pure jigsaw-puzzle detective novel that eagerly played the Grandest Game in the World. A spirited game that not only included numerous challenges and sign-posts to where the clues can be found, but the Radfords even included a clue-finder going over all of the clues. I wanted to kick myself for having missed that obvious slip-of-the-tongue. Oh, well, better luck next time.

 

I'm tempted to make Who Killed Dick Whittington? my next read, but I'll probably take a look at another little-known mystery writer who was recently brought back into print. So stay tuned!