Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947) by E. and M.A. Radford

Back in March, the modern-day prospectors of Golden Age mysteries, Dean Street Press, reissued three classic, but obscure, detective novels by a forgotten husband-and-wife writing tandem, E. and M.A. Radford – who were big proponents of the fair play principle. As they demonstrated in their very early Murder Isn't Cricket (1946). A detective story littered with challenges to the reader, clues and a clue-finder.

Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947) is the Radfords sixth mystery novel and one of three titles Dean Street Press selected for reprinting, which were picked on the strength of their "strong plots, clever detection" and "evocative settings." Nigel Moss noted in his introduction that these three titles also present an attractive portrayal of their series-detective, Dr. Harry Mason.

A portrayal showing a combination of powerful intellect, reasoning and "creative scientific methods of investigation," but never “losing awareness” and "sensitivity concerning the human predicaments encountered." A scientific police detective for the modern age!

You can find all these qualities within the pages of Who Killed Dick Whittington? A fine example of the theatrical mystery, plotted around the popular Christmas pantomime Dick Whittington and His Cat, which here provides a stage for a bewildering murder – one that initially appeared to be utterly impossible. However, this is not an impossible crime story in any shape or form.

Henri de Benyat theater company is performing the pantomime Dick Whittington at the Pavilion Theatre, Burlington-on-Sea, with Miss Norma de Grey as the Principle Boy playing Dick, but Miss De Grey is famously unpopular backstage. De Grey "resented applause" except when "it was directed towards her own performance" and went as far as having gags or verses cut which gave other members "more applause than she herself received." So there's more than one members of the theatrical company who daydreamed about wringing her neck.

Dick Whittington and His Cat has a well-known scene, known as the Highgate Hill scene, in which Dick and the Cat take a nap on a mossy bank by the milestone on Highgate Hill. And dreams of the Bow Bells "Turn Again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London."

During the performance, Miss de Grey misses her lines and doesn't stir from the mossy bank. Someone else shouts her lines, the curtain comes down and they rushed to the bank, but Miss De Grey has passed away and the doctor has some dire news – she died from "a dose of prussic acid." The post mortem reveals the poison had been injected with a hypodermic syringe and the only person who could have done it is the man who played the Cat, Jimmy Martin.

Vintage poster

However, the Cat is found poisoned and on the brink of death in his dressing room. This gave the murder the initial appearance of an impossible crime, but this is illusion dispelled before the halfway mark. Nevertheless, the local police are getting nowhere and decide to call in the Yard.

Detective-Inspector Harry Manson, head of the Forensic Research Laboratory, is called in, but, while looking into the murder, he also investigates a secondary case. A firebug who's setting fires to dress shops, warehouses and antique stores with stock of "a peculiarly inflammable nature." Resulting in a total loss of inventory and high insurance payouts. This fire-raising case features some of the most satisfying scientific detective work since R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke solved crimes through science in Victorian-era England! Which is not all that surprising. Edwin Radford was "a keen admirer of the popular Dr Thorndyke." I wonder if he had also read the early forensic mysteries by Eric Wood (c.f. Death of an Oddfellow, 1938).

Dr. Harry Manson visits the scenes of the fires to collect samples, such as portions of charred wood, soot and ash, which are analyzed and revealed that the fires were no accidents, but the key piece of evidence are traces of "a curious metal" – which is exceedingly rare in Britain. Showing in the end how only one person in the whole country could have had a hand in the fires. Dr. Manson also engages in some good, old-fashioned detective work in the Dick Whittington murder case.

Most notably, Dr. Manson deduces that two items were taken from a dressing room and the reader is challenged to figure out what these two missing items are. Naturally, he finds a link between the murder of Miss Norma de Grey and the fires. Nearly everything, except for the motive, fitted nicely together.

Who Killed Dick Whittington? is a fascinating, highly successful merger of the sophisticated theatrical mysteries of Ngaio Marsh with the scientific detection of the Dr. Thorndyke series. The result is a satisfying detective novel that was even better than Murder Isn't Cricket. So expect a review of the third reprinted title, Murder Jigsaw (1944), sometime in the future.

I hope Dean Street Press decides to reprint more by the Radfords, because they have written some intriguingly-titled detective novels with equally intriguing premises: Death of a Frightened Editor (1959), Murder of Three Ghosts (1963), Murder Magnified (1965) and Death of an Ancient Saxon (1969).

The Invisible Indian: "Murder by Scalping" (1973) by S.S. Rafferty

John J. Hurley was an American writer who worked as a newspaper reporter for the Bridgeport Post Telegram and as an advertising executive, but during the 1970s, he began to prolifically write short stories for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – published under the name of "S.S. Rafferty." Over a ten year period, he produced more than fifty short stories and most of them starred either one of his two series-detectives, Chick Kelly or Captain Jeremy Cork.

Chick Kelly is a New York night-club comedian and amateur detective, who appeared in eighteen stories and one collection (Die Laughing and Other Murderous Schtick, 1985), but his most successful detective-character was Captain Jeremy Cork.

Captain Cork is an 18th century businessman in colonial America (1625-1775) who delights in picking apart so-called "social puzzles." An unproductive activity his yeoman and narrator, Wellman Oaks, labeled "non-lucrative excursions into the solution of murder, mayhem, and other forms of criminal skulduggery," which didn't stop him from writing down thirteen of Captain Cork's cases – each story taking place in one of the thirteen original colonies. All of the stories were collected in Fatal Flourishes (1979) and reissued five years later under the title Cork of the Colonies.

The series began ambitiously with "Murder by Scalping," originally published in July, 1973, issue of EQMM, which was listed by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991). The story brings Captain Cork and Oaks to the Rhode Island ranch of Squire Norman Delaney.

On their third evening at the ranch, the Squire tells Captain Cork how crime is practically undetectable in the colonies, because many of the foul deeds committed along the frontier were "entered in life's ledger as accidents." People who were assumed to be lost on the trail or taken by Indians. So what stands in "the criminal's way in these rude climes?" Captain Cork's answer: "I do." And his words are immediately put to the test.

Goodman Stemple is the owner of a prosperous trading post, Stemple's Redoubt, who comes to the Squire with the startling news that his future son-in-law, Donald Greenspawn, was killed and scalped in his own home! Now there's talk among the frontier folk about raising "a punitive expedition" against the Tedodas.

Interestingly, the seemingly impossible murder of Greenspawn is constructed around the colonial custom of bundling.

Greenspawn had agreed to take Stemple's daughter, Faith, in marriage and during their period of courtship, they bundled by sharing a bed fully clothed and protected from temptation by a wide, wooden bundling board between them. This had quite a practical reason. During the day, the time of the couple is entirely consumed by work and chores, which only leaves the evening for a private conversations and this sleeping arrangement is preferred during the winter – because cabins on the frontier usually only have one fireplace. Rafferty astutely saw the possibilities for an impossible crime.

On that morning, Faith awakened to find Greenspawn dead in his side of the bed with his head caved in, his scalp gone and covered in gold dust. The room had been closed and a house guest, Vicar Johnson, was stricken with gumboils and had been unable to sleep. So, to pass the time, spent the night reading and he said nobody entered or left the room except for Donald and Faith. Only the persons who could have killed him were either Faith or "an Indian who could walk through walls."

The solution to the murder is a clever little variation on a locked room-trick from a rather well-known impossible crime novel and the basic idea even predates that story, but it has never been used with these, uhm, tools before – resulting in a darkly humorous locked room situation. Leo Bruce or Edmund Crispin could have spun comedic gold out of this idea!

Unfortunately, the who-and why or the murder are not as well handled as the how and disliked the sudden ending. After visiting the scene of the crime, Captain Cork picks the murderer from the crowd or people standing outside the cabin. You're never given a clue or even as much as a hint to the solution. Or how he reached that conclusion. And, no. Not even the gold dust on the body constituted a clue, which had an answer that completely came out of nowhere. This made Captain Cork come across as an oracle, rather than a detective, when delivering the solution.

"Murder by Scalping" marked the debut of both S.S. Rafferty and Captain Jeremy Cork, which comes with the imperfection one expects to find in an unpolished writer, but the story has a good historical setting with an original application of an old locked-room-trick – resulting in a memorable impossible crime. So readers of historical mysteries and impossible crime fiction are most likely to appreciate this short detective story.

Shed a Light On the Past: Q.E.D, vol. 3 by Motohiro Katou

Last year, I started reading the Q.E.D. series, a Japanese detective manga, created by Motohiro Katou, who produced 50 volumes between 1997 and 2014, which sold over 3 million copies and received a live-action TV drama adaptation – centering on the 16-year-old genius, Sou Touma. A former MIT graduate student who moved back to Japan, to experience life as normal high-school student, where he becomes friends with Kana Mizuhara. She's the antithesis to the lonely, withdrawn genius.

I've only read the first two volumes, reviewed here and here, but my review of the second volume dates back to a little over a year! So it was about time I returned to this series.

The third volume of Q.E.D. comprises of two stories, entitled "Breakthrough" and "The Fading of Star Map," covering three, somewhat longish, chapters each. I'm still very earlier in the series, but these two stories are my favorites as of now. And for vastly different reasons.

The first of these two stories, “Breakthrough,” is, technically speaking, not really a detective story of any kind, but fills in some background details of Touma's character and the time he spend in the US – drawing on his days as an MIT student. One day, two American MIT students turn up at Touma's school in Tokyo, Eva Scott and Syd “Loki” Green, who were friends of Touma. They were surprised and worried when he suddenly left college without a word. Everyone suspected it had something to do with the incident in the research lab.

Someone "threw Touma's thesis into the river." The thesis was supposed to be kept in the research lab, but it was taken nonetheless and "even the back-up data on the computer was erased." However, Touma doesn't want to talk about it and it's revealed that he took the blame. So was he shielding someone? The story also has a tiny sub-plot about the quasi-impossible disappearance and reappearance of a string of pearls, but these problems are only secondary to the story about the friendship between Touma and Loki. A story of two lonely geniuses who became friends and, when together, they actually act like normal teenagers and have a bit of fun. So this is really a slice-of-life story about friendship presented as a detective story. I liked it.

Sou Touma is not as popular a detective-character as Conan Edogawa or Hajime Kindaichi, but, after merely three volumes, his personality already has more depth to it than either of his more well-known counterparts – an opinion some of you will vehemently disagree with. However, Kindaichi has always been a two-dimensional character, while Conan's development slowly moves along with the red-thread running through the series.

The second and final story in this volume, "The Fading of Star Map," is a fine example of the Japanese shin honkaku detective story.

The story revolves around an abandoned, rundown star observatory, standing on a lonely, snow-capped mountain, but the place is now surrounded by a ski-resort. So the ramshackle observatory now poses a potential danger to curious skiers who might get injured as they wander around the place. Obviously, the place has to be demolished, but the observatory's founder, Fukutaro Tsukishima, disappeared twenty-five years ago and a district court investigator has gathered all his living relatives to decide "who the legal beneficiary is" – who will have to pay for the demolition. Someone accidentally opened the giant telescope and it revealed the charred remains of a long-dead person.

Murder by Starlight

Naturally, a snow storm delays the arrival of the police and, shortly after the discovery, Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara arrive at the observatory. They're on a school trip, to the ski resort, but they got lost and were brought to the observatory. Where they have to spend the night.

On the following morning, they find the body of Fukutaro's brother-in-law, Muneaki Miyabe, hanging outside the bathroom window. This turns out to be a cleverly contrived, quasi-locked room murder showing that the Japanese are not only the masters of the corpse-puzzle, but understand the endless possibilities of the architectural mystery like no one else. A wonderful trick that could have been fleshed out into a full-fledged locked room conundrum. However, even better than the trick is the identity of the murderer and the clues that were found in the stars, an old drawing of a dog and the cruel lies adults tell to children. The murderer is a truly tragic figure, but, even more tragic, is the death of this character.

If you're going to kill off the murderer at the end of the story, this is how it should be done with exactly right emotional punch to punctuate the ending. A highly recommendable story.

So, all in all, this was an excellent, well-balanced volume with a character-driven and plot-oriented detective story, which both showed improvement in characterization, plotting and story-telling. I might tackle the next two volumes in the coming weeks, because two volumes a years is simply not enough.

By the way, I know only a tiny segment of my regular readers actually read and watch anime-and manga detective series, but I like to know what you uninitiated think when you read these reviews. Are you intrigued? Tempted? Why don't you take the plunge? You'll find some of the cleverest detective stories you have ever read in these series. And they're banquet, if you're a locked room fanboy. For example, I think the Detective Conan episodes The Case of Séance Double Locked Room and The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly are modern classics of the impossible crime genre.

The Clue at Skeleton Rocks (1932) by Hugh Lloyd

Percy K. Fitzhugh was an American writer who published close to a hundred boy scout novels, comprising of a handful of distinctly different scouting series all set in the fictional town of Bridgeboro, New Jersey, which were very popular with both children and adults – contributing greatly to the growth and popularity of the Boy Scouts in the U.S. Reportedly, there were thousands of boys who joined the scouts "because of his writing."

During the early 1930s, Fitzhugh's popularity began to decline and decided to turn his hand to the juvenile detective story.

Between 1931 and 1934, he adopted the penname of "Hugh Lloyd" and produced ten volumes about Hal Keen. A tall, red-headed youth whose uncle, Denis Keen, is an agent for the Secret Service Department and functions as the plot-device that allows Keen to have adventures all over the world as the book-titles testify – e.g. Kidnapped in the Jungle (1931), The Lonesome Swamp Mystery (1932) and The Lost Mine of the Amazon (1933). However, the Hal Keen books are very different from most juvenile mystery series that have been discussed on this blog. Very differently.

A distinguishing characteristic of Fitzhugh's writing is realism. This is why so many of his scouting novels bore "the official seal of approval of the BSA" and regularly received fan mail addressed to his various Boy Scout characters.

Fitzhugh's adherence to realism resulted here in a more mature, but darker, series closer to Peter Drax and George Bellairs than William Arden or Bruce Campbell. As one reviewer noted, "people are not only killed," but they are murdered and have "a noir feel" without having urban settings. I agree. Another notable difference is the age of Hal Keen. I assumed Hal was somewhere in his late adolescence, between 17 and 19, but a late chapter revealed he was a "young man of twenty-one."

So this series promised to be something out of the ordinary and decided to sample it with the seventh title.

The Clue at Skeleton Rocks (1932) begins with a wrecked schooner, Sister Ann, which has struck the reef at Skeleton Rocks, Maine, where one of those "lonely, wave-swept lighthouses" stands and this immediately begs the question – why was the ship wrecked so close to the light? And what happened to the crew? Secret Service in Washington believes the wrecked schooner was none other than an old smuggling vessel, Isle of Tortuga, which carried opium. So this brings Denis Keen to Skeleton Rocks. And he brought along his nephew, Hal.

Captain Dell of the lighthouse tender, Cactus, tells them nothing thrilling has happened on Skeleton Rocks in more than forty years, but one of the two lighthouse keepers, Bill Hollins, had committed suicide on the night Sister Ann ran up the reef. These events turned the hair of the other keeper, Edgar Barrowe, white over night and his behavior became even more peculiar than usual. And than there's the man who Hal saved from drowning, Danny Sears, who vanishes at the first opportunity he got. This won't be the last time Sears made a sudden entrance and exit.

Denis Keen described his nephew as someone who "invites trouble" and, when it doesn't come, "he just goes looking for it." Hal decides to stay behind on Skeleton Rocks to spend his Easter holiday as a lighthouse keeper's apprentice, but he really wants to figure out what happened on that fateful night and befriends "the orphaned half-wit," Dillie Rawson – who was very close with Hollins. Hal also finds the time to fall in love with the daughter of the doctor from the nearby Porthmouth, Elissa.

Unfortunately, this is all I can tell you about the plot of The Clue at Skeleton Rocks, because the plot is paper-thin and has an infuriating explanation breaking one of the cardinal rules of detective-fiction.

I already mentioned how Lloyd's realism and writing-style reminded me of Bellairs and Drax, but have only read one novel by each of them, High Seas Murder (1939) and The Cursing Stones Murder (1954). Nonetheless, they have more than one thing in common with The Clue at Skeleton Rocks. All three are darker, moody crime stories with a shipping background, minimalistic plotting and a lack of any meaningful detective work. Sure, you have the titular clue, but, since the murderer's identity is draped in a layer you can never peel away, until it's revealed, the clue is rendered completely useless.

All things considered, The Clue at Skeleton Rocks is an interesting curiosity, to be sure, but failed hard as a genuine detective story and was perhaps a little bit too much on the darker and serious side to be considered a juvenile mystery – which makes this curiosity only recommendable to the curious. If you're one of those curious-minded, I have some good news. The previously mentioned The Lost Mine of the Amazon is available on Gutenberg, but I'll be giving the rest of the series a pass.

And if you want to try some genuinely good juvenile mysteries, you should track down one of these titles: J. Jefferson Farjeon's Holiday Express (1935), Martin Colt's Stranger at the Inlet (1946), Manly Wade Wellman's The Sleuth Patrol (1947), Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953), Robert Arthur's The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965) and William Arden's The Mystery of the Shrinking House (1972).

Sorcerer's House (1956) by Gerald Verner

In my previous post, I reviewed John R.S. Pringle's The Royal Flush Murders (1948), published as by "Gerald Verner," which ended with the promise to immediately return to the work of this obscure, pulp-like mystery writer with, reputedly, one of his best detective novels – namely the intriguing-sounding Sorcerer's House (1956). A detective story clearly intended as a homage to the great maestro, John Dickson Carr, but without leaning on an impossible crime. Nearly everything else is pure Carr!

One of the primary characters of Sorcerer's House is a young American, Alan Boyce, who's on holiday in England and is staying with a long-standing friend of his father, Henry Onslow-White, in the charming village of Ferncross. On the day of his arrival, Boyce learns of the abandoned, decaying and haunted Threshold House. A house long forgotten by the world, but the villagers remember the time when it was used as "a kind of wizard's den" by one of history's most peculiar characters, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro.

Cagliostro was a self-professed magician, occultist, alchemist and very likely a died-in-the-wool conman.

During his second and last time in England, Cagliostro had rented Threshold House where, if local legends are to believed, he attempted to replicate his famous Banquet of the Dead in the Long Room – which has been haunted every since by "a dim, bluish glow." A mysterious light that is seen as "a sign that somebody is going to die." Violently! In recent years, the bluish light in the window preceded a deadly motor cycle accident in the village and the discovery of dead, unidentified tramp underneath the window of the Long Room.

Boyce learns of this local legend in the garden of Bryony Cottage, home of Mr. and Mrs. Onslow-White, where a group of people are sitting around in deck-chairs on a hot, airless summer evening. These people are Avril Farrell and her brother, Dr. Farrell, who's accompanied by his daughter, Flake. She naturally becomes somewhat of a love-interest to Boyce. Paul Meriton rounds out the party. The plot begins to roll when Avril Farrell makes the disturbing remarks, "there was a light in the window last night" and "I wonder who is going to die this time?"

That night, Boyce looks out of his bedroom window, overlooking the old, ruined and ivy smothered house, and sees a light in the window of the Long Room. So he decides to investigate and makes a terrible discovery. The body of Meriton lies underneath the window of the Long Room, exactly like the dead tramp, with the back of his head caved in and turns out he had been killed with "a loose banister torn from the staircase" – after which he had been pitched out of the window. So this is murder. And this brings one of Verner's short-lived series-detective onto the scene.

Simon Gale is a flamboyant, beer guzzling artist-of-leisure and an incorrigible contrarian with an unruly shock of hair, aggressive beard and the dress sense of a Dutch flower field. He smokes vile, acrid smelling cigarettes rolled from black tobacco and booms such phrases as "by the orgies of Bacchus" or "by the cloven hoofs of Pan." Gale is unmistakable meant to be a Great Detective in the tradition of Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale, but many readers will probably find his mannerisms tiresome. And this probably makes him more of brand-store version of Dr. Fell and H.M. Still, I didn't entirely dislike him, but he can be tedious at times. Lee Sheldon created a very similar, but more convincing, JDC-inspired detective in Impossible Bliss (2001). Anyway, the most obvious nod to Carr had yet to come.

A key-part of the overarching plot is finding out what exactly happened to Meriton's wife, Fay Meriton, who apparently absconded with a secretive lover, but nobody has ever been able to find a trace of her. Gale is convinced there's more to her sudden disappearance and believes he'll find the answer in the decaying house. This is the point where the story becomes tricky to discuss, but Fay's back-story is directly tied to the dark and hidden tragedies of the house. However, it's not exactly what you think it is. Gale was even surprised by two of their discoveries, but, slowly, Fay emerges as a tragic and wronged woman. You can say what you want, but this largely mirrors the story of Fay Seton from Carr's classic He Who Whispers (1946).

As I mentioned above, Sorcerer's House becomes tricky, if not impossible, to discuss once they begin to explore the house in earnest, because the story is almost structured like a magazine serial and the discoveries are excellently used here as cliffhangers – baffling everyone from reader to the detective. These are some of the best set-pieces of the story and the closes Verner came to matching Carr when it came to story-telling. Verner also deserves praise for showing the excitement and gossip in Ferncross when the police and press descended on the small village. A particular highlight was the character of the village gossip, Miss Flappit, who was in "a seventh heaven of excitement" and shot all over the village like "a noisy and virulent wasp."

Plot-wise, Sorcerer's House only suffers from ramshackle clueing and an otherwise excellent, well-hidden murderer who falls for an obvious trap set by Gale, but most readers will probably forgive that last point. Because you'll get one of those great, Carr-like scenes in return. A genuine surprise played to great effect, but again, the murderer was acting as an idiot here and should not have fallen for it.

Leaving aside these imperfections, Sorcerer's House is a superior and more original detective story than either The Beard of the Prophet (1937) or The Royal Flush Murders. The former borrowed a little too freely from Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), while the plot of the latter was pretty much a pastiche of S.S. van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928). Yes, Sorcerer's House evidently drew inspiration from He Who Whispers, but most of the plot is entirely original. In some ways, you can even say the plot of Sorcerer's House anticipates Paul Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990). So maybe Brad and JJ want to take note of this one.

Long story short, Sorcerer's House is a good, second-string mystery comparable to the more Carr-like mystery novels by John Russell Fearn (e.g. The Five Matchboxes, 1948), but, above all, it's a much appreciated homage to the master with patches of truly great story-telling. So this one has definitely given me a reason to return to Verner in the future.

The Royal Flush Murders (1948) by Gerald Verner

John R.S. Pringle was a veritable one-man factory of crime fiction, who wrote hundreds of novels, short stories and plays, published under a handful of pennames and translated into more than thirty languages, but, upon his passing, his work began to fall into neglect – until the redoubtable Philip Harbottle intervened. Since then, a good chunk of his detective novels, thrillers and short story collections have been reissued by the Linford Mystery Library and Endeavour Media. Such as the interesting locked room novella I reviewed last year, The Beard of the Prophet (1937).

I had planned to return to his work with the promising-sounding The Last Warning (1962), but Harbottle recommended The Royal Flush Murders (1948). A mystery novel with "a very much better locked room murder" than the one from The Last Warning. Well, say no more!

The Royal Flush Murders is the ninth book in the Superintendent Robert Budd series, published as by "Gerald Verner," which has a plot with a distinctly American flavor to it. I can only describe it as S.S. van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928) or Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Y (1932) as perceived by John Russell Fearn (c.f. The Man Who Was Not, 2005).

The Royal Flush Murders begins with Superintendent Robert Budd, of Scotland Yard, looking askance at a newspaper report of a murder with, what he called disparagingly, "story-book stuff," because "murder in real life was usually sordid" – without "sealed doors" or "long lists of suspects." However, the murder at the quaint, old-world village of Long Millford certainly has some very unusual features.

John Brockwell was the youngest son of Mr. Henry Brockwell, despised by everyone, whose body had been found by a forester "impaled to the trunk of a tree with a pitchfork" with the ten of diamonds "pinned to the lapel of the dead man's jacket." Three weeks pass without any arrests being made and the local authorities decide to call in Scotland Yard. And this brings Superintendent Budd to Long Millford.

When he arrives at The Croft, Budd finds a highly dysfunction family. Or, as the locals call them, "a very queer lot." Henry Brockwell is a boorish loudmouth with a short temper and constantly fights with his wife and children, which even can get physical. The two remaining children, James and Sandra, don't like each other very much either. Nor do they appear to mourn the death of their younger brother. They simply yell, fight and throw around accusations in front of the police, but, in the middle of all of this, a letter arrives with the five playing cards of a royal flush in diamonds written on it – a cross was drawn besides the ten of diamonds. The murderer more than delivers on this veiled promise of more bloodshed.

Budd has to look on, often rather hopelessly, as one family member after another gets shot, stabbed and strangled. Only clues the murderer left behind were the playing cards of the unbeatable hand in poker.

The long list of suspects with potential motives, such as revenge, extends all over the village, but Budd also has two other problems to contend with. One of them being the presence of an unpleasant tabloid reporter, Joshua Craven, who's a sour man with "a perpetual grievance against his fellow men" and functions here as a rival detective, but often appeared to act as a lazy plot-device, or deus ex machine, by uncharacteristically dropping clues and hints – which actually turned out to have simple, but decent, answer. A second problem is Budd's direct superior's getting antsy about the lack of progress, bad press and the mounting body count. And they even threaten to take replace him, which would be a black mark on an otherwise impeccable record.

When a fourth murder is committed under completely impossible circumstances, Budd is only given four more days to find the murder or be taken off the investigation completely.

Mrs. Brockwell is shot to death in her bedroom, while Budd was watching the door, and the only window was not only shut, but fastened on the inside and suicide is out of the question, because she could not have shot herself under her shoulder-blade. And there was no weapon found in the room. So how did the murderer escape from the room without being seen? The locked room-trick is modeled around a pretty standard, often used, idea in impossible crime stories, but was put to decent use here. If only as a fairly minor side-puzzle. The only problem with it is that it made it even more obvious who's behind the murders. And this is where the plot becomes quite unfair to the reader.

More than once, Budd hammered on the fact that "the most important thing about these crimes is the motive." If they knew why someone was busy exterminating the whole Brockwell family, they have have their man, but Verner holds these cards close to the chest. So you can figure out who's behind these murders, but the motive remains murky until the end. This made me eye another potential suspect based on, what I assumed was, a very lively clue.

So, yeah, the plot of The Royal Flush Murders didn't exactly gave me the "unbeatable hand" of its namesake, but it was still a really quick and entertaining read with an interesting take on the American-style mansion mysteries – transplanted here to Jolly Ol' England. More importantly, I started to like the plodding Superintendent Budd and ended the book with a line perfectly describing his role in the story, "I'm like Great Britain... I lose all the battles except the last one." I might have found a companion for Fearn in Verner!

Just so you know, I'll return to Verner with my next read, because Sorcerer's House (1956) is supposedly one of his better detective novels and very John Dickson Carr-like. Well, say no more!

Murder Around the World: A Review of Five Short Detective Stories

Exactly a year ago, I reviewed a collection of short stories, The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories (2018) by James Holding, which gathered all ten short stories about two mystery writers, Martin Leroy and King Danforth, who play armchair detectives with their wives during a world cruise – which were originally published between 1960 and 1972 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Obviously, this series is hugely indebted to Ellery Queen falling somewhere between Queen's International Case Book (1964) and the Puzzle Club stories from Queen's Experiments in Deduction (1968). But with story-title structure of the early international series (e.g. The Greek Coffin Mystery, 1932).

So, I was a little surprise to learn that the man behind Wildside Press, John Gregory Betancourt, penned a brand new "Leroy King" story. You read that correctly. Betancourt wrote a pastiche of a pastiche!

"The Jamaican Ice Mystery" was originally published in Malice Domestic 13: Murder Most Geographical (2018) and reissued earlier this year, in ebook format, as a separate short story, in which Martin Leroy and King Danforth are reappear as two octogenarians – adding another layer of EQ lore to the "Leroy King" series. You see, Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu wrote a superb pastiche, entitled "The Book Case," in which a 100-year-old Ellery Queen solves the murder of a collector of detective novels in 2007. This story is collected in a recent Wildside Press anthology, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018).

The story opens during one of the yearly cruises of Martin Leroy and King Danforth, accompanied by their wives, Carol and Helen, who are enjoying the Caribbean sun on the deck of the Jamaica Queen. There are complaints about how the bartender doesn't know how to mix a gimlet and their disastrous Netflix miniseries. They reminiscence about "the unsettled '60s" and observe that they didn't have "a decent murder to solve in decades." And as on cue, a porter informs them a woman had been murdered and robbed in the suite next to the Danforths.

Obviously, Betancourt was having too much fun with resettling the characters into a contemporary setting, which came at the expense of the plot. They're using smartphones, Google and Twitter, but the plot is paper-thin and the two problems, a poisoning and theft of a necklace, pose no challenge to the reader whatsoever – especially when the borrowed ice bucket is mentioned. So, purely as a detective story, I can't really recommend it, but, if you're a fan of the original series, you might want to pick it up to see how Martin and King are doing.

The second story comes from one of the founding members of the shin honkaku school of detective fiction in Japan, Takemaru Abiko, who debuted last year in English with a translation of Shinsoban 8 no satsujin (The 8 Mansion Murders, 1989). A funny and clever impossible crime novel translated by Ho-Ling Wong and published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International. This time, they ferried a short story across the language barrier with a practically unique detective-character.

The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu

Ho-Ling Wong called "Ningyou wa tent de suiri suru" ("The Puppet Deduces in the Tent") quite good as a locked room mystery and deemed it the best of four short stories from Abiko's Ningyou wa kotatsu de suiri suru (The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu, 1990). The translation changed the story-title to "A Smart Dummy in the Tent" and can be found in this years double June/July issue of EQMM.

The detective of the story, or to be more precise, the vessel for the detective is a young, shy ventriloquist, Yoshio Tomonaga, whose puppet-character is the more outspoken Mario Marikōji, but this is more than merely a ventriloquist act – because Tomonaga has a split personality. And that other personality expresses itself through the puppet, Mario. Was this series the inspiration for that atrocious anime detective-series, Karakurizōshi ayatsuri Sakon (Doll Puppeteer Sakon)?

"A Smart Dummy in the Tent" takes place on the opening day of carnival, among the colored tents on large vacant lot, where Tomonaga performs in the big circus tent with Mario, but the festivities are canceled when one of the performers is found murdered. Panda Gotanda was a "slapstick magician," like Tommy Cooper, who was found beaten to death in one of the partitioned dressing rooms on the western end of the tent. The entrance to the dressing room was "under observation," until the body was found, while the hemline of the tent fabric is secured to the ground with metal anchor pins. You need a special instrument to pull them out. So this leaves the police with only a single viable suspect, Mutsuki Seno'o, who's a friend of Tomonaga. And one of the few people who know about his split personality. She encourages him to help the police solve the locked-tent murder.

The solution to the locked-tent is excellent and entirely original, which makes you wonder why nobody else came up with it before. My only complaint is the unnecessary final twist in the story's tail, but suppose it fits Abiko's tongue-in-cheek approach. Other than that, "A Smart Dummy in the Tent" is a welcome addition to the steady growing pile of shin honkaku detective stories and novels.

By the way, Abiko made a reference to "the protagonist from that famous comic by the legendary Osamu Tezuka," Jack Black, which must have pleased Ho-Ling to no end.

The next story is Paul Halter's "Le loup de Fenrir" ("The Wolf of Fenrir"), published in the double March/April, 2015, issue of EQMM, which was ranked by JJ as Halter's eighth best short story back in February – placing it above "The Abominable Snowman" and "The Robber's Grave." See, JJ, this is exactly why we had four Anglo-Dutch wars.

"The Wolf of Fenrir" opens in the winter of 1912 in the comfortable flat of Owen Burns, in St. James's Square, where he tells Achilles Stock the story of woman who was attacked and killed by a wolf in France. She was all alone in a cabin, in the wood, which was surrounded by snow and the only prints in the snow belonged to the victim and the animal she believed had been tamed. Naturally, this turns out to be a deviously contrived murder, but the solution turns out to be two very basic locked room-tricks spliced together. So not very impressive. However, the no-footprints scenario is arguably the hardest type of impossibility to plot and even harder to be original. And the rest of the plot was pretty solid.

So, on a whole, "The Wolf of Fenrir" is not a bad detective story, but Halter has written better ones. Some of those stories appeared were ranked lower by JJ.

Luckily, Halter and JJ redeemed themselves with the excellent "Le livre jaune" ("The Yellow Book"), published in the July/August, 2017, issue of EQMM and coming in third on JJ's best-of list of Halter short stories – beaten only by "La nuit du loup" ("The Night of the Wolf") and the unrivaled "La hache" ("The Cleaver"). Seriously, "The Cleaver" is one of the best impossible crime short stories ever written!

"The Yellow Book" takes place during the winter of 1938 in a small village on the outskirts of Verdun, Malenmort, where a group of people meet once or twice a month at the home of Daniel Raskin "to invoke the spirits of the dear departed." When the story opens, the group receives a message from the spirits that one of them has been murdered and they discover "the sacrificial obsidian knife in the glass-fronted bookcase" has been stolen, but nobody at the gathering has been murdered. However, one of the regular members, Captain Marc Santerre, had called earlier in the day to excuse himself. And he lives in "a small, isolated house, less than five minutes' walk" from Raskin's house.

Captain Santerre is found beaten and stabbed to death in "a chalet locked from the inside" and "surrounded by virgin snow," which had been revealed by the spirits, who accused one of the people linking hands at the table. An inexplicable crime, if there ever was one. Luckily, Dr. Alan Twist happens to be in the neighborhood and unravels this tangled skein without leaving his armchair. I love these kind of armchair detective stories!

When the yellow book and mental state of the victim was brought up, I was afraid this was going to be house-of-monkeys-style shenanigans and wanted to tar-and-feather JJ, but the explanation took a decidedly different turn with an excellent variation on a locked room-trick from an earlier Halter novel – which worked even better as a short story. So, yeah, this is without doubt one of Halter's better short stories. Highly recommended!

"The Corpse That Went For a Walk"

Finally, I have a short story from my own country: "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" ("The Corpse That Went For a Walk," 2019) by "Anne van Doorn," a penname of M.P.O. Books, who can be credited with having penned one of the best Dutch detective novels, De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011).

Several years ago, Books abandoned Inspector Bram Petersen of District Heuvelrug and introduced two new series-characters in 2017, Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong, who are particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators) specialized in cold cases. This series succeeded admirably in marrying the traditional detective story to the modern misdaadroman (crime novel) and littered with impossible crimes. One of my favorite stories is the locked room mystery "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018). "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" is not an impossible crime tale, or even an old-fashioned whodunit, but the setting makes it somewhat of a standout in the series.

Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research & Discover is located on the fifth floor of a residential tower, the Kolos van Cronesteyn, standing on the outskirts of Leiden, South-Holland. One evening, the woman living next door, Lettie Kreft, comes to them with the astonishing story that she found a body of woman, in the hallway of an apartment, on the thirteenth floor. A knife was sticking from her back. The apartment belongs to a sleazy, womanizing artist, Hans Molica, but when they arrive the body has disappeared! So what happened the body, if there was a body? And how do you dispose of a body on one of the top floors of a residential tower?

"The Corpse That Went For a Walk" is a relatively minor story, compared to some of the other entries in the series, but loved the idea of a murder-without-a-body problem with the Kolos van Cronesteyn as a backdrop. So, plot-wise, not one of the top Corbijn and De Jong stories, but still found it to be a good and fun read.

On a final note, I've some good news for all you non-Dutch speaking mystery readers: the very first Corbijn and De Jong short story, "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In," 2017), has been translated into English and will be published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – either later this year or sometime in early 2020. Hopefully, this will kick open the door to get Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) and "The House That Brought Bad Luck" translated.