Son of a Gun: "The K-Bar-D Murders" (1976) by Gerald Tomlinson

Gerald Tomlinson was an American school teacher, a full-time freelance writer and a consulting specialist in the field of education, who has edited many high-school grammar and composition textbooks, but, during the 1970s, Tomlinson began to write short detective stories – printed in such publications as Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. One story in particular attracted my attention.

"The K-Bar-D Murders" was originally published in the November, 1976, issue of EQMM and reprinted in the anthology Ellery Queen's Masters of Mystery (1987).

On his informative and detailed website, "A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost briefly discusses Tomlinson's "The K-Bar-D Murders," which is where I learned of the story. Grost described "The K-Bar-D Murders" as "a brief but well done detective story" packed with as much details as possible about the characters, murders, sociological background and a plot with surrealistic touches – one of several points linking the story to the work of Ellery Queen. This sounded promising enough to place the story near the top of my short story to-be-read list.

Robert Ollinger is a notorious syndicated newspaper columnist, whose column, Capitol Hot Line, ran "in 112 newspapers from Maine to California" and a quarter of a century of investigative reporting had left "a host of enemies in his wake." The terrible "price of telling the truth." Some have even tried to kill him.

However, Ollinger not only has enemies everywhere, but also paid informants and "electronic bugs." So there's always a hot tip, somewhere, down the pipeline.

When the story opens, Ollinger gets a rambling phone call from someone identifying himself as Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte from Honotassa, New Mexico, who tells him a guy by the name Poindexter is responsible for "the branding-iron jobs." A case referred to by the newspapers as the K-Bar-D murders. Someone has shot and killed four men, in four different states, after which he brands their foreheads with a branding-iron from the K-Bar-D ranch, but there are two problems – such a ranch never existed and the victim's don't have a thing in common. They didn't "serve on the same jury, or fight in the same platoon in World War Two, or take the same plane from Dulles to O'Hare, or receive the same coded message from Hong Kong."

Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte warns Poindexter is moving east and is going to kill the hard-nosed columnist, because he's so well-known Poindexter isn't likely to go through "a dozen phone books to find some other Robert Ollinger." So what does this mean? Ollinger orders one of his personal investigators, Mort Bell, to deliver him the K-Bar-D killer or else he can find himself another job!

The plot comprises of two mini-puzzles: finding the obscure link that chains the victim's together and the meaning of the K-Bar-D brands on their foreheads, which functions here as a dying message of sorts. The murderer is "a trigger-happy psychopath" who never appears in the story and is captured off-page by Bell. And this ending exposes the story's main weakness. It's too short.

Tomlinson crammed too much material in too short a story. The characters, premise and plot ideas were all excellent, but the story was too short to do them any kind of justice and should really have been expanded into a full-length, Golden Age-style serial killer novel – similar to Arthur W. Upfield's Winds of Evil (1937) and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949). So what we're left with is a story full of good and promising ideas, but the short story format prevented Tomlinson to develop those ideas further and deliver on their promise. You can't help but feel that a good mystery novel was wasted on this short story. All of that being said, "The K-Bar-D Murders" still makes for interesting detective story. What it does, it does well. So there's that.

Yes, my next post is going to be my long overdue return to Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's historical Carpenter & Quincannon series.

Till Death Do Us Part (1944) by John Dickson Carr

After slogging through Jonathan Latimer's tediously paced The Dead Don't Care (1938), I needed a palate cleanser and there were only two names that immediately came to mind, John Dickson Carr and Bill Pronzini, who have receded into the background of my blog over the last couple of years – which can entirely be blamed on the avalanche of reprints and translations. Don't you dare to stop, DSP and LRI!

Predictably, I decided to go with the inimitable artisan of the pure detective story and purveyor of miracles, but my next read is going to be Pronzini's The Flimflam Affair (2019). So you know what to expect next. But first things first.

I've wanted to reread Carr's Till Death Do Us Part (1944) for a while now, because, over the past fifteen years, the book has been elevated from a mid-rank title in the Dr. Gideon Fell series to one of Carr's ten best (locked room) mystery novels – a trend I first noticed on the message board of the now defunct JDCarr.com (archive). Since then, I've seen nothing but praise and high, often five-star, ratings for Till Death Do Us Part online. So I was curious to see if this newly proclaimed masterpiece stood up to rereading. Yes, it absolutely did!

Till Death Do Us Part is a testament to Carr's gift as a natural storyteller and a demonstration of his abilities as an artisanal craftsman of fantastic, maze-like plots, which beautifully complemented each other here. An ultimately simple idea swathed in layers of obfuscation without the plot becoming a convoluted, tangled mess of plot-threads.

Lesley Grant is the linchpin of the plot of Till Death Do Us Part. A young woman who looked about eighteen years old, "in contrast to the twenty-eight she admitted," who's a recent addition to the charming, old-world village of Six Ashes. Lesley turned "the heads of half the males," but after six months, she becomes engaged to "a rather well-known young playwright" of psychological thrillers, Dick Markham. Very much to the disappointment of Six Ashes. For two years, the village has tried to get their local celebrity together with a local girl, Cynthia Drew, but Dick refused to marry "just to please the community."

When the story opens, Dick and Lesley are on their way to a garden party with a bazaar at Ash Hall. Lesley wants to see the fortune teller before mingling with the rest, but she leaves the tent looking upset. So he goes into the tent to have a word with the Great Swami, palmist and crystal gazer.

The man under the white linen and colored turban is none other than the celebrated Home Office Pathologist, Sir Harvey Gilman, who's "one of the greatest living authorities on crime," but their conversation is cut short by the crack of a rifle-shot – after which "the world dissolved in nightmare." Sir Harvey is struck in the shoulder by a bullet. Before rushing into the tent, Dick had pressed a rifle from Major Price's miniature shooting-range in Lesley's hands. And she says the rifle went off by accident. But did it?

Sir Harvey only has a flesh wound and is brought to his cottage, but instructs Doctor Hugh Middlesworth to circulate the report that he was dying and summoned Dick to tell him an unsettling story.

According to Sir Harvey, Dick's youngish looking fiance is a forty-one year old poisoner, named Jordan, who has killed three men with "a hypodermic full of prussic acid" inside rooms that were found to be locked or bolted from the inside. So they were all as suicides, but Sir Harvey, Superintendent David Hadley and Dr. Gideon Fell believed they had been cleverly murdered. Only the locked rooms had them utterly beat. Someone from Scotland Yard is on his way to Six Ashes to identify Lesley as the elusive poisoner.

Lesley Grant is a very similar character to Fay Seton from He Who Whispers (1946). Two women who find themselves ensnared in a web of murder and suspicion.

Fay Seton is arguably Carr's most well-known tragic (female) characters who became the victim of a slanderous whisper campaign, following her engagement to Harry Brooke, which accused her of being bloodsucking vampire – malicious gossip and rumors are reinforced by two seemingly impossible (attempted) murders. The apparent handiwork of a supernatural being. Lesley is accused of being a serial poisoner of men and this claim is strengthened when her accuser is murdered in circumstances that are identical to the past murders.

On the morning following the incident in fortunetellers tent, Dick receives an early, anonymous phone call telling him to immediately go to Sir Harvey's cottage, because if he doesn't come at once, he'll be too late. So he hurries towards the cottage, but, when he arrives, sees how somebody stuck a rifle over the boundary wall of Ashe Hall Park and fired a shot. And he saw how the star of a bullet-hole jump up in the window-glass of the cottage. However, Sir Harvey was not killed by a bullet.

Sir Harvey is found sitting in an easy-chair, beside a big writing-table, in the middle of the sitting-room with a hypodermic syringe lying on the floor and the unmistakable odor of bitter-almonds in the air. The door to the sitting-room is bolted on the inside and the ordinary sash-windows are fastened with metal catches. So how did the murderer enter or leave the room? And who switched on the lights in the locked sitting-room seconds before the shot was fired? These locked room-tricks are a little bit more technical in nature than most impossible crimes found in Carr's work and basically found a new way to apply a very old locked room-trick, but it was innovating enough to reinvigorate the idea – making it even feel original. Carr pulled off a similar stunt with the impossible murder from the slightly underrated The Dead Man's Knock (1958), which found an ingenious new angle to another age-old locked room-trick.

The murder of Sir Harvey brings Dr. Gideon Fell to the village and the news he brings drops one of many bombshells on the case, but it was great to see the good doctor again when he was at the top of his game.

Dr. Fell enters the story as only he can as he emerged from the back of a car, like "a very large genie out of a very small bottle," clad in a box-pleated cape, shovel hat, a pair of eye-glasses on a broad black ribbon and leaning heavily a crutch-handled cane. A few pages later, Dr. Fell is pacing through the garden of the cottage, immersed deep in thought, addressing "a ghostly parliament" with gestures and inaudible words. This is how I like to see Dr. Fell. A wheezing, larger-than-life Chestertonian figure who can be simultaneously perfectly logical and maddening enigmatic without negatively affecting the plot... usually.

Dr. Fell begins to peel away the various layers of the plot, but the problems remain as baffling and murky as the moment the whole case began in the fortuneteller's tent, because each answer posed new problems and questions – which began to gnaw at my memories of the solution. Where my memories deceiving me? Hey, it has happened to me before! This is why so few can match Carr when it comes to plotting and telling a detective story. Even when you know the solution, the plot still tries to throw sand in your eyes.

The solution is pretty solid and technically sound. An ultimately simple idea complicated by circumstances, personal secrets and an unexpected murder in a locked room. I think it was very impressive how Carr managed to keep everything shrouded in mystery until the ending with even Lesley's guilt or innocence being up in the air until the very last moment. There really was nobody better than Carr. Nobody!

So, all in all, Till Death Do Us Part was even better than I remembered and deserves its current reappraisal as one of Carr's top-tier mystery novels, but I have one caveat. Yes, Till Death Do Us Part is a five-star mystery novel, but it earned those stars on points rather than by a convincing knockout. Still, this is an excellent detective story that comes highly recommended.

A note for the curious: there are numerous references in the story to "a hard path across open fields towards Goblin Wood," which is the setting of Carr's most celebrated impossible crime story, "The House in Goblin Wood" (1947) – published as by "Carter Dickson." I like to believe this means the Dr. Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale series take place in the same universe. What a shame so very few writers pooled their series-detectives together.

The Dead Don't Care (1938) by Jonathan Latimer

Jonathan Latimer was an American writer who began his career as a journalist at the Chicago Herald Examiner and the Chicago Tribune, but turned to writing hardboiled crime fiction in the 1930s and worked as a screen writer in Hollywood – penning episodes for Columbo, Markham and Perry Mason. The capstone of Latimer's writing career are definitely his traditionally-structured, hardboiled and alcohol-fueled mystery novels often laced with impossible crimes and some screwball comedy.

Three years ago, I read two of Latimer's hardboiled whodunits, Murder in the Madhouse (1935) and Headed for a Hearse (1935), which take place against the somber backdrop of a private sanatorium and the death-house. They're pretty dark, grim hardboiled private-eye novels, but competently plotted, complete with locked room puzzles, and some memorable set pieces. The scenes with the condemned men in the death-house immediately come to mind.

So a return to Latimer was long overdue and settled on the fourth entry in the Bill Crane series, entitled The Dead Don't Care (1938), listed in Locked Room Murders (1991) as having no less than two impossible crimes – an inexplicable poisoning and the miraculous disappearance of ransom money. Regrettably, it turned out to be one of those cases in which both the author and detectives phoned it in.

The Dead Don't Care calls two private-eyes, Bill Crane and Thomas O'Malley, from rain-swept streets of New York to "the languorous perfection" of Key Largo, Florida.

Union Trust Company are the trustees and legal guardians of the heirs to the Essex fortune, Camelia and Penn Essex, who hired the two detectives from New York to ferret out the person who has been sending Penn threatening demands for money. The letters tell the young man the time has come to pay his debts and instructs him "to get fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bill," which are all signed "The Eye." These letters also present a quasi-impossible problem, because their delivery appear to defy any logical explanation. Ten days ago, Penn put five-hundred dollars in his wallet for "a fling at the Blue Castle," a gambling house, but, when he opened it to buy some chips for the roulette game, a letter fell out – which makes for an interesting premise. However, the solution to the letters disqualifies them as impossible problems.

Once again, the premise is pretty solid with the mysterious deliveries of the threatening notes and even our detectives receive a couple of them. Telling them to get out or "the gators back in the swamps will be fatter," but the pacing completely goes to pieces with Crane and O'Malley spending most of their time on drinks, food, gambling and women. Crane and O'Malley actually managed to turn a paid job into a busman's holiday without any of that pesky extra work. Not even the kidnapping of Camelia was able to fasten the pace of the story or give the plot any sense of urgency. Mind you, Crane didn't think "the average kidnaper was above a little rape." What a useless detective!

Thankfully, the two previously mentioned impossibilities turned out to be the only bright spots in an otherwise overly indulgent, mediocre and underwhelming mystery novel.

Firstly, Crane spends the night with an exotic dancer, Imago Paraguay, but the following morning, she lies dead next to him in bed with "a faint, bitter odor" on her cerise lips – she has been poisoned. The door of the bedroom was bolted on the inside and the balcony looked out over "an impossible jump." Someone must have been in the bedroom with them, because this person had stolen Crane's pants! This is Latimer's best locked room-trick to date with a more tricky method and a potentially good clue, but a certain something had to be shown or mentioned to have made the "two small scars" on the box of veronal a proper clue. Still, this the most inspired aspect of the plot.

The second impossibility centers on the delivery and miraculous disappearance of the ransom money. Penn is instructed to put fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bills, wrapped in oil skin, in a carton box and leave it under a bridge, but the location is kept under observation by the police. Somehow, the carton box disappears as if it was taken by an invisible man! A good attempt was made here to misdirect the reader, but the explanation was still disappointingly simple. And confirmed what I had been fearing from the beginning.

The Dead Don't Care has officially replaced Ellery Queen's The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) as the most transparently plotted detective novel from a highly regarded Golden Age mystery writer. I suspected this exact solution very early on in the story, but tried other combinations with the same motive, because it was way too obvious. And yet, this was the conclusion Latimer had the nerve to serve his readers after making them sit through all that hedonistic bullshit!

So, all in all, The Dead Don't Care is one of the worst hardboiled (impossible crime) novels populated with shallow, immature characters, a paper-thin plot and sparse detective work by holidaying detectives. The Dead Don't Care and neither should you.

The Medbury Fort Murder (1929) by George Limnelius

Lewis G. Robinson was a medical officer in the British Army during the First World War and wrote three very obscure, army-themed detective novels, The Medbury Fort Murder (1929), Tell No Tales (1931) and The Manuscript Murder (1933), published as by "George Limnelius" – a reference to his mother's maiden name, Limmel. Robinson also penned an inverted mystery novel under his own name, The General Goes Too Far (1936), which was adapted as the motion picture The High Command (1937).

The Medbury Fort Murder is perhaps the least scarce and most interesting title of three mystery novels Robinson wrote under the Limnelius name.

Robert Adey described The Medbury Fort Murder in Locked Room Murders (1991) as "a straight locked room novel" that "rises above most of it contemporaries by virtue of the excellent writing and characterization." John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, lauded the book as "one of the most unique novels" from the early 20th century, because it's both "an inverted detective novel" and "a true detective novel" – while Martin Edwards called it a "terrific book." So, with such glowing recommendations, the book rocketed to the top of my (locked room) wish list, but it took me some time to finally get around to it.

Admittedly, The Medbury Fort Murder is an excellently written piece of detective fiction with surprisingly (for the time) mature characterization and an ambitious plot twisting, and reshaping, the inverted detective story.

The Medbury Fort Murder opens with a lengthy introduction of the characters, spearheaded by Major Hugh Preece, Royal Army Medical Corps, who's a serious-minded medical officer with only "a few flirtations" and ''temporary connections of a more intimate character" under his belt, but has now fallen in love with Prunella Lake – a small part musical comedy actress. They have a short-lived, but earnest, fling "interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War." After which Prunella married the then future Sir Tremayne Ronan and Major Hugh started a family with Claire Chisholme.

Ten years come and go, Hugh receives a letter from Prunella asking him to meet her to chat about old times, but they end up spending the night together, secretly, in a hotel room. And nine months later, Prunella finally gives birth to her first child and passes the boy off as Sir Ronan's. This was supposed to be a secret between only two people, Hugh and Prunella, but Lieutenant Charles Lepean has gotten wind of their little secret. Lieutenant Lepean is best described as a vile, blackmailing miscreant.

The other potential suspects introduced in these chapters are Captain Wape, Lieutenant Harris and Private Swansdick, who'll be with Hugh the primary suspects of the impending murder at Medbury Fort – one of "the chain of forts in the Thames and Medway Defenses." This part of the story also include a brief, richly detailed flashback to an episode in West Africa, which had a glimmer of that memorable, second-half of Christopher St. John Sprigg's The Corpse with the Sunburned Face (1935). George Limnelius was a good writer who knew how to spin a yarn with characters acting like actual human beings, but Limnelius also proved himself to be a very proficient plotter.

John Norris suggested in his previously mentioned review Limnelius seems to have been inspired by Anthony Berkeley's mystery novels. I don't think this is true, because the only typical Berkeley novel he had written at the time was Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery (1927) with Jumping Jenny (1933) and Trial and Error (1937) still being in the future, but The Medbury Fort Murder certainly resembles them by inverting the inverted detective story.

In a letter, Prunella tells Hugh that Lieutenant Lepean "must be silenced," because they'll both be ruined if their secret is exposed or "else bled white." Hugh and Lepean happen to be both stationed at Medbury Fort.

So, Hugh begins to plan the murder of Lieutenant Lepean and takes inspiration from a well-known classic of the locked room mystery, but, when Lepean is murdered with surgical precision behind the locked door of his bedroom, it becomes doubtful he actually committed the murder – or did he? There are only three other viable suspects, Captain Wape, Lieutenant Harris and Private Swansdick, where the only ones who could possibly have had access to the officers' quarter at the time of the murder. You can only reach the stone stairs leading to the officers' quarters and mess by passing through the guard room, which had been constantly guarded by either one or three soldiers. So not only is this a locked room puzzle, but also a very tight closed-circle of suspects.

A problem complicated by the presence of three possible murder weapons: a surgical knife, a West African machete and "one those obsolete, long, curved, French bayonets." A problem reminiscent of G.K. Chesterton's "The Three Tools of Death," collected in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), but here it was not used quite as effective. The clues themselves also turn out to be somewhat troublesome. Who oiled the lock on Lepean's bedroom door and why was the key stolen after the door was broken down? More importantly, the murderer appeared to have employed a different kind of locked room-trick than the one Hugh had planned on using.

Limnelius deserves credit for handling the impossible crime, because normally I would hate these creaking, dated and shopworn locked room-tricks.

There are two (false) solutions proposed to the impossible murder that many readers have seen before, which can also be said about the last and correct solution. However, I can't remember any other locked room story pre-1929 using this exact explanation. I know of a mystery novel from 1931 that used it, but not one predating The Medbury Fort Murder and, keeping this in mind, the ending probably worked better in 1929 than in 2019 – because the timeworn explanations was followed by an original one. A very simple solution that can be seen as an inversion of the locked room problem.

The way in which Limnelius structured and presented the murder of Lieutenant Lepean reminded me of Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detective (1936). We have a murder in a locked bedroom investigated by three detectives, under the guidance of Chief Inspector McMaster, who gather various pieces of evidence and try to fit to one or more of the suspects. The result is an engagingly written, solidly plotted and mostly satisfying detective novel with a nice surprise packed away at the end.

There are, however, a couple of minor smudges. I don't think the clueing is as strong as it could have been, which helped make the surprise a genuine surprise, and the explanation as to what happened in the locked bedroom required a pretty big coincidence. Some modern readers, like Aidan of Mysteries Ahoy (his review can be read here), might have a problem with the classist attitudes aired and imposed on the characters. Chief Inspector McMaster even confidently states that in "the history of crime" there's "no single case of a murder of violence having been committed by an educated man," which is reflected in the motive of the murder.

If you can look pass these imperfections, you'll find an excellently plotted and characterized detective novel in the tradition of 1930s Anthony Berkeley that made surprisingly good use of some old, tired locked room tropes. So, yes, highly recommended!

The Back-Seat Murder (1931) by Herman Landon

Herman Landon was a Swedish-born American writer best remembered for his pulp stories and novels about a reformed arch-criminal, "The Gray Phantom," but how did the obscure, largely forgotten Landon appear on my radar – since he was even omitted from the GADWiki. Well, Robert Adey listed two of his regular mystery novels in Locked Room Murders (1991). I know, I know. You're stunned with surprise.

The two impossible crime novels listed in Locked Room Murders are the plainly-titled Mystery Mansion (1928) and the more intriguing-sounding Three Brass Elephants (1930), alternatively published as Whispering Shadows, which concerns the disappearance of "a red-and-black room that had contained a body." I haven't tracked down either of these titles yet, but I did stumble across another one of Landon's locked room mysteries. One that was entirely overlooked by Adey!

The Back-Seat Murder (1931) immediately plunges the reader in the middle of a dark, murky and ominous plot that begins in the cellar of Peekacre. The country home of a well-to-do businessman, Christopher Marsh.

Leonard Harrington is the private secretary of Christopher Marsh and, "a little after two o'clock in the morning," is raking an ash pile in the cellar, but he's caught in the act by the live-in nurse of Mrs. Marsh, Theresa Lanyard – who asks him a startling question. She asks him if he thinks the cellar is "the place where David Mooreland was murdered." Seven months before, Mooreland disappeared before he could "lay certain unpleasant facts before the authorities" that would probably have resulted in a lengthy prison term for Marsh. Mooreland had visited Peekacre on the day of his disappearance, but the house was searched and not a trace was found.

So the pseudo-private secretary believes Marsh has destroyed the body to the best of his ability, but had "failed to realize that even in a raging fire a body can't be completely obliterated." Harrington has found a gold tooth in the ash pile that already been identified. Who are Harrington and Lanyard? What links them to the missing and presumably dead Mooreland?

All these questions remain unanswered, for the time being, but they decide to work together to prove Marsh has murdered Mooreland to save his own neck. And here the plot begins to thicken considerably.

On the following morning, Marsh dictates a letter addressed to the attorney prosecutor of the county, James C. Whittaker, but the content is unsettling to Harrison. Marsh brazenly accuses the newly-minted partners in crime, Harrington and Lanyard, of plotting his murder and the former is ordered to deliver the incriminating letter, in person, to Whittaker – which is when two utterly impossible situations follow each other in short succession. The first impossibility occurs when Harrington has been driving for forty-five minutes and glances in the rear-view mirror to see "the course, crafty and malevolent countenance of Christopher Marsh" in the back-seat.

Harrington had been going between thirty-five and forty miles an hour. He was the sole occupant of the car, which is confirmed by the garage owner who changed the car-battery after he left Peekacre, but somehow, Marsh had miraculously appeared in the back-seat of the car! An impossibility very reminiscent of Edward D. Hoch's "The Theft of the Bermuda Penny," collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (1978), but in that short story someone disappeared from the back-seat of a car going seventy miles an hour.

Marsh has a gun and tells Harrington to drive to an old, abandoned mountain top hotel, where he plans to dispose of him, but, when they arrive, Marsh is murdered in the back-seat – stabbed in the neck while Harrington was looking him in the eyes! They were the sole occupants of the car. Three of the four doors were locked and the fourth door, unlocked, was on the right side of the driver, but no mere mortal could pull off "a murder in such stealthy fashion" without being seen by Harrington. The windows were closed and there were no footprints in the soggy dirt road surrounding the car.

A solid premise with an intriguing, double-barreled impossible situation, but Landon was unquestionably a second-string mystery writer and The Back-Seat Murder reads like a cheap dime novel.

There a number of shady and sinister personalities moving in-and out of the story. Such as the scrawny blackmailer, Samuel B. Tarkin. After Marsh is murdered, Harrinton finds Lanyard in the abandoned hotel with strange man, Harry Stoddard, who calls her "a lying, cheating, two-faced, double-crossing crook." The elderly and obliging Martin Carmody had lent his car and chauffeur to Lanyard on her "mysterious mission" to the hotel. Rounding out the list of suspects is the dangerous, thickset Roscoe Carstairs.

They're all unconvincingly-drawn, paper thin stock-characters who are annoying secretive about their motivations and act only in service of the plot, which makes it appear only the murderer acted semi-logical throughout the story – because this character actually had a reason to act like that. But, on a whole, the characterization is very poor.

However, there's a good, undeveloped pulp-style short impossible crime story buried in The Back-Seat Murder. The attorney prosecutor, Whittaker, acts as the primary detective of the story, but a chunk of the credit for the work has to go to a county policeman, Storm, who has "the right kind of brains for this sort of job." Admittedly, they did a fine job in selling the impossibilities as they go over all the possibilities and this convinced me the solutions were either going to be good or pretty bad. Luckily, they were more good than bad.

The solution to the seemingly impossible appearance of Marsh in the back-seat of a speeding car was something you would expect from a locked room yarn by Hoch. I assumed Marsh had simply emerged from the empty space under the back-seat, but this was a pleasant surprised. The second impossibility, stabbing in a locked car with an innocent eye-witness, is rooted in the traditions of the pulpiest of impossible crimes (c.f. John Russell Fearn's Account Settled, 1949) and certainly is an original, one-of-a-kind trick, but a lack of clues made it hard to swallow. However, Landon made a sporting attempt to produce a fairly clued, last-minute surprise, but one of the chapter-titles in the table of content ruined that party. So avoid it like its Julian Symons.

I don't remember who of you said that a case can be made that good ideas should be taken away from bad writers, but The Back-Seat Murder should be entered as Exhibit A. The impossible situations in the locked car were original and genuinely baffling, which were actually played to good effect, but Landon simply was not good enough to fully deliver on them. So you'll end up with a mixed, poorly written bag of tricks.

Still... I didn't entirely disliked it. Yes, this mainly has to do with the originality of the two impossible crimes. Landon was a second-string (perhaps even third-string) writer of pulp stories and dime novels, but appeared to have contributed some interesting and original titles to the locked room library. So you can expect me to return to Landon at some point in the future, because I'm an unrepentent locked room fanboy.

Lion's Den: "Circus in the Sky" (2000) by Edward D. Hoch

Back in March, I reviewed a short parody story by Jon L. Breen, entitled "The Problem of the Vanishing Town" (1979), which satirized one of Edward D. Hoch's most popular and unforgettable series-characters, Dr. Sam Hawthorne – a country physician who's a magnet for seemingly impossible crimes. Breen littered his parody with passing references to unrecorded locked room problems that have taken place in the small New England town of Northsouth.

One of these references was to the inexplicable murder of a circus clown, who was mauled to death by "a lion on the fifth floor of the Northsouth Hotel," but "the lion was in his cage five blocks away." The idea behind these references was to describe a situation so utterly impossible that "no one could possibly solve it rationally." Twenty years later, Hoch found a solution to the problem and worked it into a short story.

"Circus in the Sky" was originally published in the anthology Scenes of Crimes (2000) and reprinted in the June, 2001, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

The story is narrated by a computer programmer in his mid-twenties, whose name we never learn, working for a month in an unfamiliar city far from his home office and decides to kill a boring evening by going to circus – which no longer played "in big tops set up along the railroad tracks in cities like Omaha and Des Moines." A big circus were now arena events competing rock stars, ice shows and professional wrestling for the best dates.

After the show ended, the narrator goes to a late-night restaurant to have a drink and strikes up a conversation with the female lion tamer the Breen Brothers Circus, Mimi Gothery, whose stage-name is "Carpathia." They're interrupted by two policemen who request they accompany them to the seventeenth floor of the office building across the street. The body of a lawyer, Richard Strong, had been found in his high-rise office with his face and suit "shredded by bloody claw marks" as if "a lion had appeared from nowhere," lashed out violently, "and then vanished."

Richard Strong was "one of the business acting as clowns" at that night's performance, which is done for charitable or promotional reasons, but, during the lion tamer's act, he attempted to push some flowers on Carpathia. And he was brushed aside. However, the narrator is her alibi and the physical evidence is on her side, but it makes the murder look even more impossible than it already did.

The police matched the claw marks on the body with the paw of one of Carpathia's lions, Gus, but nobody believes she walked around that night with "a lion on a leash" and there are two witnesses, circus owner and a stable boy, who swear Gus was in his locked cage after his performance – either one or the other was around the lion's cage the entire night. So nobody could have taken him out of the cage to commit a murder in a very dangerous and roundabout way.

Breen has admitted he has no earthly idea how to explain the miracle problem he had posed in "The Problem of the Vanishing Town," but Hoch explained the conundrum of the invisible lion with a devilish ease with all clues you need to figure it out yourself (I did!). More importantly, the simple, down-to-earth explanation didn't fell flat coming on the tail-end of such a fantastical premise. You can almost describe "Circus in the Sky" as a Clayton Rawson impossible crime story ("Claws of Satan," 1940) as perceived by John Dickson Carr (The Unicorn Murders, 1935). And the fact that the central puzzle started out as a throw-away joke in a parody of Hoch added another layer to the overall story.

So, all in all, Hoch's "Circus in the Sky" is another one of those impossible crime stories baffling absent from any of the locked room-themed anthologies published during the last two decades, but anthologists should keep it in mind for potential future anthologies. This short story is vintage Hoch and shows why he was the flesh-and-blood incarnation of the American detective story (after Ellery Queen, of course). Highly recommended!