The Locked Room Reader XI: Locked Out

 

Back in 2016, I compiled a blog-post, "The Locked Room Reader IV: The Lazy Anthologist," in response to an angry rant by JJ, of The Invisible Event, lambasting David Stuart Davies' Classic Locked Room Mysteries (2016) as one of "the laziest anthology of classic crime tales ever assembled" comprising largely of stories from the public domain – of which most had been anthologized countless times. JJ ended his rant wishing for someone to put together some "compendiums of unheralded locked room stories."

So I decided to play armchair anthologist and compiled a hypothetical locked room anthology, called Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums, with public domain stories that were never, or rarely, anthologized. Stories covering a period from Classical Greece to the First World War. Three months later, JJ made that anthology a reality and you can download it here (completely free).

There were quite a few locked room-themed anthologies published between The Locked Room Reader: Stories of Impossible Crimes and Escapes (1968) and the upcoming The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths (2020), but there are some baffling omissions in all of those volumes. Since it was time for another, long overdue filler-post, I decided to compile another hypothetical impossible crime anthology with stories that have been inexplicably absent in previous anthologies – or simply deserve to be considered for future compendiums. I hope editors and anthologists who may be lurking on this blog will find this list helpful. Stories are listed in no particular order.

John Sladek's "By an Unknown Hand" emerged victorious in Times of London 1972 short story competition and earned a contract to publish, what would come to be regarded as, one of the finest, post-WWII impossible crime novels, Black Aura (1974). So a rather important short story that was collected The Times of London Anthology of Detective Stories (1973) and Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2001), but strangely enough never made an appearance in any of the locked room-themed anthologies. Sladek also penned a short-short parody of the genre, "The Locked Room" (1972), which amazingly has a story-within-a-story structure on a mere handful of pages. I think they're both perfect material for a future anthology.

D.L. Champion's "The Day Nobody Died" (1944) is one of the best impossible crime stories from the pulps, originally published in Dime Detective Magazine, which not only has a great locked room-trick, but a unforgettable cast of regular characters – headed by a mentally unhinged New York ex-homicide cop. Inspector Allhoff lost his legs during a botched arrest, resulting in a shootout, condemning him to live in a dirty flophouse, but his unique mind proved to be indispensable to his former colleagues. So now he acts as a special consultant under the condition that the man he holds responsible for the lost of his legs, Battersly, is assigned to him as a personal assistant. And enjoys mentally torturing the poor guy. This makes for a one-of-a-kind story and series.

Kendell Foster Crossen's "The Closed Door" (1953) is one of the earlier attempts at resettling the traditional detective story in a science-fiction territory and expending the plot into a full-length novel, or even a novella, could have resulted in a classic science-fiction mystery along the lines of Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel (1954). However, the story is still anthology material on the strength of the cheeky, but clever, solution to an inexplicable slaying at a Planetary Hotel constructed out of nearly three-hundred different kind of plastics.

Edward D. Hoch kept the impossible crime story alive during the second half of the previous century and believe he has had a short story in practically every locked room anthology published in the past 50 years. There is, however, one story in particularly that deserves to be anthologized, "The Case of the Modern Medusa" (1973). A brilliant little gem taking place against the backdrop of a Mythology Fair, in Switzerland, where a man is stabbed to death in a small, crammed and locked office-room with a trident. The explanation for this little locked room riddle is one of Hoch's most creative and original!

I also recommend anthologists take a gander at Hoch's "Circus in the Sky" (2000), in which he found a logical explanation for the fantastical problem of man shredded to death on the top-floor room of a high-rise office by bloody claw-marks – as if a lion had appeared out of nowhere and then vanished. A new kind of impossible crime for a new century!

J.A. Konrath's "With a Twist" (2005) can also be labeled as a new kind of locked room story for a new century with a highly unconventional, but innovative, approach to the locked room problem. A lover of mysteries, games and puzzles decided to take his own live, but his elaborately staged suicide seems to defy any logical explanation and poses a challenge to the police. Christian, of Mysteries, Short and Sweet, even called the story "a modern classic of the genre." It certainly deserves to be anthologized.

Frederic Anderson's "Big Time" (1927) is a peculiar, little-known impossible crime tale, collected in Book of Murder (1930), which was overlooked by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991), but has a delightful solution for an utterly bizarre murder in a locked room. Something you would expect from Edmund Crispin.

Speaking of the devil, Crispin also wrote a short story rarely recognized as a locked room yarn, namely "A Country to Sell" (1955), collected in the posthumously published Fen Country: Twenty-Six Stories (1979) and takes place during the Cold War – as vital pieces of information are leaked from locked and secure room. Admittedly, the technical aspects of the solution makes the story a little dated, but still presents the reader with something a little off the beaten track.

Herbert Resnicow was a civil engineer who brought his drafting pencil to the detective story in the 1980s and brought something never seen before to the (Western) impossible crime tale: large-scale, architectural mysteries that turned whole floors or entire buildings into tightly locked crime scenes. The Gold Deadline (1984) and The Dead Room (1987) are classic examples of this. Resnicow wrote only one short, but very charming, locked room mystery, "The Christmas Bear" (1990), in which a great-grandmother explains how a teddy bear could have taken from the top row of a rickety shelf.

During the mid-1920s, the Father of the Japanese Detective Story, Edogawa Rampo, wrote two short stories as a response to critics who claimed it was impossible to set a Western-style locked room mystery in the wood-and-paper house of Japan – showing it was possible in "D zaka no satsujin-jiken" ("The Case of the Murder on D. Hill," 1925). However, the solution to the locked room problem was routine and uninspired. Something he would improve with a classic example of the inverted impossible crime story, "Yaneura no sanposha" ("The Stalker in the Attic," 1925), which is the earliest Japanese story to incorporate unusual architectural features into its plot. A corner stone story that deserves to be absorbed into a Western locked room anthology!

A more modern examples are Soji Shimada's "Hakkyō-suru jūyaka" ("The Executive Who Lost His Mind," 1984) and Takemaru Abiko's "Ningyou wa tent de suiri suru" ("A Smart Dummy in the Tent," 1990). The former is the utterly bizarre done correct with the problem of a body decomposing at a supernatural speed and the latter is in a more lighthearted vein with an impossible murder in a carnival tent, which has a satisfyingly simple, but original, explanation and unusual protagonist – a ventriloquist with a split personality. Both of these stories would make fine additions to any locked room anthology.

Back in 2013, I compiled a small list with real-life examples of the locked room mystery, entitled "Out of the Tidy, Clipped Maze of Fiction," which included a case solved by a well-known magician, John Scarne. A puzzling problem how horse race results could have leaked into a locked, soundproof room where a bookie entertained his customers and encouraged them to bet on horses. Two months later, I accidentally came across a fictionalized account of the case written by Richard Curtis, "Odd Bodkins and the Locked Room Caper" (1969), who added a very well done false-solution to the plot. The result is an excellent detective story with an interesting back-story.

Arthur Porges produced two all-time classics of the impossible crime stories, "No Killer Has Wings" (1961) and "Coffee Break" (1964), but one story anthologists should consider including in a future volume is "The Unguarded Path" (1963). A devilishly clever story with an unconventional, but original, premise: a murder has to be prevented with the victim locked up in tightly guarded house. The solution is a completely new take on the macabre Judas window from Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938). Other stories by Porges worth considering are "Dead Drunk" (1959), "Horse Collar Homicide" (1960) and "The Scientist and the Wife Killer" (1966).

Theodore Roscoe is known to locked room readers as the author of the brilliant Murder on the Way! (1935) and the much lesser-known I'll Grind Their Bones (1936), but, during the 1930s, he also wrote a series for Argosy about a small town full of criminal intent, Four Corners – which may have inspired Ellery Queen's Wrightsville (Calamity Town, 1942) and Shinn Corners (The Glass Village, 1954). One of the stories in the series, "I Was the Kid With the Drum" (1937), is an excellent impossible crime story about a phantom drummer and an impossible disappearance.

James Holding's "The Japanese Card Mystery" (1965) has a plot along the lines of Crispin's "A Country to Sell" and Curtis' "Odd Bodkind and the Locked Room Caper" with the impossible leakage/transmission of information as its central plot-point and there are multiple false-solutions given to the problem. A shamefully overlooked story!

Historically, Max Rittenberg's "The Invisible Bullet" (1914) is another woefully forgotten, unappreciated locked room story about an impossible shooting in a fencing saloon on the top-floor or a high-rise building and the solution shows the kind of ingenuity often lacking in detective stories from that period – a solution that in some ways the works of John Dickson Carr, Alan Green and Clayton Rawson. One of the best locked room mysteries from the 1910s.

The premise and solution to Max Afford's "The Vanishing Trick" (1948) could have easily been the plot of Jonathan Creek episode (c.f. Ghosts' Forge, 1999) with someone miraculously disappearing from a hungry room with an appetite for humans. Admittedly, this is a very minor locked room mystery, but Afford came up with a splendidly original solution and cleverly planted one of those tell-tale clues.

Robert Arthur is the creator of The Three Investigators and wrote a collection of short detective stories for Young Adults, Mystery and More Mystery (1966), which probably explains why the crown jewel from that collection, "The Glass Bridge," has never been acknowledged as a locked room classic! A semi-inverted mystery centering on the question how a gravely-ill, physically weak man could have murdered a woman and made her body vanish into thin air. Xavier Lechard, of At the Villa Rose, is the only other one who recognized its greatness. And placed it on his list of twelve favorite short stories.

Finally, I want to submit a recently translated story from my neck of the woods, Anne van Doorn's "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In," 2017), in which a poet apparently killed himself behind the locked door of a log cabin in the woods. The plot is entirely focused on proving this was a case of murder. So a pure, John Rhode-like, howdunit centered around a sealed room puzzle and therefore a fitting story for a locked room anthology.

I believe this constitutes as a pretty strong selection of unheralded locked room stories, but, since these stories have already been crossed off my list, I would like to end this bloated filler-post with a modest wish list – comprising of obscure, hard-to-find stories that sound interesting. I'll keep it as short as possible. :)

Anthony Abbot's "About the Disappearance of Agatha King" (1932). Herbert Brean's "The Man Who Talked with Spirits" (1951) and "Nine Hours Late on Opening Run" (1954). Vincent Cornier's "Dust of Lions" (1933). Arlton Eadie's "The Clue from Mars" (1924). Bruce Elliott's "Death Paces the Widow's Walk" (1944). Allan Vaughan Elston's "The Shanghaied Ship" (1933). Alfred Feeny's "The Mystery of the Round House" (1906). Wilson S. Freesland's "Treachery Tarmac" (1932). Vincent Griffin's "Martin Speed Unveils the Invisible Death" (1957). Rex Hardinge's "The Cinema Murder Mystery" (1927). Bruce D. Pelletier's "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (1961). Edgar D. Smith's "Killer in Khaki" (1948). Leonard Thompson's "Close Shave" (1946) and "Squeeze Play" (1946). And pretty much everything that hasn't been anthologized, collected and reprinted by Joseph Commings.

I told you my wish list was rather modest. Sure, I trimmed it down a bit, but, hopefully, this list will proof useful to someone in the future.

Death After Evensong (1969) by Douglas Clark

Douglas Clark was an English author of twenty-seven traditional, puzzle-oriented detective novels of the typical, post-World War II police procedural variety and, reportedly, the plots often employed ingenious poisoning methods – a heritage from his days as an executive of a pharmaceutical company. Clark used to be a popular writer and his books were easy to come by.

The late Noah Stewart noted in a 2015 blog-post, "200 authors I would recommend (part 4)," that "you couldn't be in a used bookstore without finding a stack of them," but "now they seem to have disappeared." Curt Evans discussed Clark in 2016 and gave as a reason that the books "having been out-of-print now for over a quarter-century." Somehow, mystery writers from the second half of the 20th century, no matter how good or popular they were, seem to fall harder and faster into obscurity than their Golden Age counterparts. At least, that's how it looks to me.

Last year, Endeavour Media reissued a large chunk of Clark's Superintendent George Masters and Inspector Bill Green series, but, while certainly praise worthy, the editions from this publishers come with a drab, gloomy and generic style of cover-art – which they slap on all their crime-and detective novels. These uniform covers makes it very hard to differentiate between their classic reprints and the more contemporary stuff. Or mistake one of their classic reprints for a modern thriller. Just take a gander at the covers of their editions of John Russell Fearn, Roger Ormerod, Shelley Smith and Gerald Verner. So you have to know what exactly you're looking for when delving into their catalog, but enough complaining for one day.

I picked up the second title in the series, Death After Evensong (1969), because Robert Adey listed it in Locked Room Mysteries (1991) with an intriguing sounding impossible crime and seemed like an interesting follow up to my previous read, Christopher Bush's The Case of the Dead Shepherd (1934). Well, I wasn't wrong.

The setting of Death After Evensong is a bleak, desolate and isolated village, Rooksby-le-Soken in East Anglia, which (surprisingly!) turned out to be a Dutch enclave, who are the descendants of the Dutch that introduced land-reclamation methods to the English – only they have clung to the austere, Calvinistic Protestant traditions of their ancestors. A village of frugal, gloomy and often rude, but hard working, people with "an unenviable reputation for early, shot-gun marriages" and a deeply ingrained distrust of outsiders.

Herbert "Gobby" Parseloe was the devious-minded, universally unpopular and even hated vicar of Rooksby-le-Soken. A practically penniless clergy who "stooped to the meanest and dirtiest tricks to gain his own ends." Usually, Parsloe's schemes were related to money, or rather, how not spend a single dime. But the tradesmen of the village were simple, hard-headed people that "wouldn't wait for money from Father Peter himself." So there were more than enough people who could drink his blood.

The old Church School was closed down after Christmas and had moved to a new building, but the former school was let to a potato factory as a dispatch store. So there were local tradesmen busy with turning classrooms into offices and making a loading bay out of the school hall, but, when they return to work on Monday morning, they discover the body of the hated Parseloe in one of the classrooms with a gunshot wound to the chest – a single bullet had gone right through him. The wall behind the vicar was a mess of blood, tissue and bone, but "bore no sign of a bullet hole or pock mark of any kind." As if the bullet had vanished into thin air when leaving the body. A magic bullet!

So the local police immediately called Scotland Yard for assistance and they dispatched their two best men, Superintendent George Masters and Inspector Bill Green. However, they're a little different from most protagonists you find in these kind of post-WWII police procedural series.

Masters and Green have, what you might call, incompatible personalities and there's no love lost between them. It was their misfortune always "to be officially paired for murder enquiries."

Masters is a tall, intelligent and vain man who, as a bachelor, can afford to spend money on clothes as a way to fly "a personal flag among a group of conformists," which made Green feel inferior and awkward. So they were uncomfortable in each other's company and very few words were wasted between them. This is a good way to (slightly) alter the dynamics between the detective-characters without dragging their personal demons, kicking and screaming, into the story and their animosity has all the potential for them become rival detectives (of sorts) – something seldom used in Western detective stories. Something I referred to in my previous review.

However, the dislike for each other does not negatively affect the case and they diligently begin to sift through the evidence, suspects and a dozen motives. Not always a difficult task when you're the ultimate outsider in an isolated community.

Firstly, there's the small, but dysfunctional, household of the victim. Cora Parseloe is the youngest daughter of the vicar and generally considered not to be very bright, but the poor girl was used by her late mother and murdered father as a house slave. The eldest daughter, Pamela, works as a teacher in a nearby town, but, during his trips home, she acquired a reputation as a relationship wrecker. She's basically a chip of the old block. And then there are the various victim's of Parseloe's schemes and dirty tricks.

Dutch edition

Arn Beck used to be the church warden, but resigned in disgust over vicar's schemes to pocket as much money from the church as possible. Jim Baron was the headmaster of the old Church School, but Baron refused the vicar a highly unethical favor and Parseloe ensured Baron wasn't to continue as headmaster at the new school, which took a big chunk out of his income. Harry Pieters is simple carpenter who also got screwed out of his job and the ironmonger, Percy Jonker, had an order for an expensive, custom made gate canceled. And he had vowed vengeance as recently as Christmas. There are a number of other villagers, like the proprietors of the Goblin and the father-and-son doctor team, who all have a role to play in the tragedy. 

 

Masters and Green have to lay bare a lot of well-kept secrets and some painful motives to finally arrive at the truth and, purely as a whodunit, Clark stubbornly stuck to the traditions of a bygone era when most of the genre had moved into a different direction – which makes him perhaps the last true Golden Age writer to arrive on the scene. I've referred to Kip Chase as a next generation GAD writer, but Chase seriously attempted to resettle the classic detective story in a modern-day setting. Clark had no such pretensions and you can find precious little of the then modern world of 1969 in this story.

Death After Evensong is dressed up as a police procedural, but acts as an old-fashioned detective novel, reminiscent of Freeman Wills Crofts and Francis Vivian, with an excellent and genuinely original impossible crime. The explanation as to how a bullet can vanish in mid-air is one of the few modern intrusions upon the story, but what an intrusions (particularly on Parseloe)! Something John Rhode would have approved of.

So, all in all, I've practically nothing to complain or nitpick about. Personally, the bleak, desolate backdrop of a Dutch enclave, frozen in time, fascinating and appreciated that not all of the Dutch names were butchered. A pesky habit of Americans. The who-and why of the murder were satisfyingly worked out, but the solution to the problem of the magic bullet is what makes Death After Evensong truly noteworthy as a detective story. Highly recommended!

Well, I have been on a hot streak these past two months when it comes to picking mystery novels and short detective stories. There were one or two duds, but overall, the last months have been golden! Hopefully, I haven't jinxed my next read with this acknowledgment. :)

The Case of the Dead Shepherd (1934) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush retired in 1931 from teaching in order to dedicate himself full-time to his writing career and his twelfth detective novel, The Case of the Dead Shepherd (1934), was drawn from his own experiences as a teacher, but, as Curt Evans observed, Bush was "rather glad" to leave the classroom behind him – if judged by the "comments made in his detective novels" (e.g. The Perfect Murder Case, 1929). The Case of the Dead Shepherd gives the reader a depressing and sullen picture of school-life, but with a top-of-the-class plot!

The Case of the Dead Shepherd was published in the U.S. as The Tea Tray Murders and begins when Superintendent George "The General" Wharton invited Ludovic Travers to accompany him to the dismal Woodgate Hill County School.

Woodgate Hill County School is a co-educational school, housed in "a jail-like building" with a nine-foot wall, where one of the masters has been found poisoned in the masters' common room. A young pupil was sent down to fetch some papers, but found the master, Charles Tennant, "crawling on his hands and knees." But when the boy returned with help, the master had died. Curiously, he had been tightly clutching "a perfectly enormous catalogue" of "chemical and physical apparatus" from 1910. A dying message?

Charles Tennant was "the only really cheerful person on the staff" and enlivened faculty meetings by infuriating the despised headmaster, Lionel Twirt, who's a lazy, ego-driven tyrant and self-appointed shepherd with "the habit of haranguing the school on every possible occasion" – making his removal a popular subject of discussion among the teachers. Travers and Wharton have good reasons to believe that the oxalic acid in the sugar bowl was intended to kill the unpopular headmaster. A hypothesis that seems to be confirmed when Twirt's body is found on the school grounds with his skull caved in!

A note for the curious: oxalic acid is not a poison you often come across in detective stories and know of only two, oddly-linked examples, C.H.B. Kitchin's Death of My Aunt (1929) and Richard Hull's The Murder of My Aunt (1934), of which the latter was published in the same year as The Case of the Dead Shepherd. However, Bush is the only one who found a truly clever way to employ this unusual poison (see the ink-mark clue). Anyway, back to the story!

Travers and Wharton take their time to track everyone's movements at the time of the murders, testing those pesky alibis and questioning anyone even remotely linked to the case. And the list of suspects they have to consider is a long one.

There's the always helpful Maitland Castle, a senior master, who's the odds-on favorite to succeed Twirt as headmaster, but he refuses to consider it. Mr. Godman is a junior language master who had suggested it would be easy "to drop some poison" in the headmaster's tea. Miss Holl is a geography teacher and is, what the novelists call, "sex-starved" without a solid alibi. Miss Gedge, or Ma Gedge, is "a bitch of authentic pedigree" who always cuts her classes to gossip with Twirt. Young Furrow had offered his assistance to frame those two for indecent behavior, but was away from the school to attend a wedding at the time of the murders. The daughter of the local police inspector, Miss Daisy Quick, is a secretary at the school and the murdered headmaster had shifted practically all of his daily work on Miss Quick, which gave him more time "to think of still more schemes" – or simply harassing his staff. Such as the groundsman, Vincent, who was regularly threatened with the sack and the caretaker, Flint, has gone missing around the time of the murders. And to complicate the case even further, they even have to consider a few outsiders. A school governor, Mr. Sandyman, was invited by the headmaster to see him on a most particular business and the mysterious Indian visitor, Mr. Mela Ram.

A cast filled to the brim with potential murderers, but there are many more plot-threads to be tidied up. Such as why Mela Ram disappeared or why a shed was burglarized just to empty a pail of water. Or why Tennant was lugging around a heavy, outdated catalogue around when he was dying. And the solutions to most of these questions show why I love Bush so much.

I mentioned in my review of The Case of the Platinum Blonde (1944) that nobody has nailed the relationship between the amateur and professional detective quite like Bush. The Case of the Dead Shephard is a good example of Travers and Wharton each solving a piece of the puzzle. Wharton masterfully explains the clever poisoning method used to kill Tarrent and Travers destroyed the rock-solid alibi in the headmaster's murder, but it was Travers' manservant, Palmer, who helped him figure out the meaning of the dying message (of sorts). I find this teamwork between different kind of detectives a pleasing approach to the detective story, but, like rival detectives, something you sadly only find with any regularity in anime-and manga mysteries.

So, all in all, The Case of the Dead Shepherd was a pleasant return to those tricky, clockwork-like plots of early Bush, but, as devilish complex as the story appears on the surface, the overall solution to the murders is marvelously simplistic with all of the plot-threads neatly tied up in the end. Recommended!

Owl & Raccoon: "The Single Staircase" (2012) by Matt Ingwalson

Matt Ingwalson is an award-winning, independent author whose "desert noir" novel, Sin Walks into the Desert (2015), was named Best Indie Book of 2015, but what brought him to my attention was a blog-post by "JJ," of The Invisible Event, who briefly discussed two of Ingwalson's "Owl and Raccoon" novellas – a police procedural series focused on impossible disappearances! So it was finally time to give these "tightly architected mysteries" a shot.

"The Single Staircase" (2012) is the first of only three recorded cases of "Owl" and "Raccoon," together with "WDYG" (2013) and "Not With a Bang" (2016), which were collected in Owl & Raccoon: Locked (2016).

Detectives Drazen and Boska earned their nicknames during their time with the local SWAT team: Drazen is a smart guy who "knew people upside down" and got nicknamed "Owl," while Boska is "sneaky and fast" like a raccoon. And these names stuck with them when they became Missing Persons detectives.

"The Single Staircase" has a deceptively simple premise. David and Daphne Grey put there three-month-old baby, Sophia, to bed in the nursery on the third-floor of their condo. All of the windows on the third-floor were locked from the inside and the single staircase "landed right in the family room," where the Greys were watching a movie, but after the movie ended, Daphne went to the nursery – only to find an empty crib. They searched the house for over an hour, but a three-month-old can't get very far on foot or "plot out a game of hide and seek." So they call in the police.

Owl and Raccoon have two impossibilities to explore. Firstly, the parents are speaking the truth and someone, somehow, found a way to take a baby from a locked and watched nursery on the third-floor. Secondly, the parents are lying and either had a hand in the death of their child or have hidden the body. A pretty messed up puzzle either way you look at it.

A number of possibilities arise from these two scenarios and they're thoroughly explored, which gave me the opportunity to come up with my own solution. Naturally, it turned out to be incorrect. However, the clues appeared to be there.

My incorrect solution was based on descriptions of the family room, on the second-floor, which was described as "too small" with a 15 feet couch and a flatscreen TV "mounted on the wall right up against the stairs" – while the first-floor only had a desk, laptop and some bookcases. A second clue (to me) was when David and Daphne were found sound asleep in the waiting room of the police station. One of the detectives even asks, "do people about to be accused of their missing child's murder fall asleep in police stations?" What if they were physically exhausted from moving two rooms around?

So, based on these poorly interpreted facts, I figured the body had been hidden behind the now invisible door of the cupboard under the stairs. The door was made invisible, physically and psychologically, by papering it over and moving the family room from the first to the second-floor, because a TV had to be mounted to the spot to psychologically mask that there used to be a cupboard door there. I was even convinced Chapter 17 was a big hint that confirmed my theory.

I still liked my false solution, but it would probably disqualify "The Single Staircase" as a proper locked room mystery. However, the actual solution makes the story hang on to that status by a very thin thread. I can see why and how it still qualifies as an impossible crime story, but it surely is highly unconventional. And that would be an apt description for the story as a whole.

Ingwalson took an unconventional and minimalist route with very short, snappy chapters and dialogue. Very little characterization in spite of the inner monologues and an epilogue preceding the final chapter. Structurally, I was bizarrely reminded of R.H.W Dillard's The Book of Changes (1974), but, plot-wise, is actually consistent with a laser-focus on the central puzzle and an unusual, but good, solution that has a motive rarely found in Golden Age mysteries – making it a notable title in the fascinating list of 21st century impossible crime fiction. Even if the who-and why turned out to be more interesting than the how.

So I'll definitely return to this series in the future, but, for my next read, I'll be tackling a more conventional detective novel from the 1930s.

The Missing Moneylender (1931) by W. Stanley Sykes

Dr. W. Stanley Sykes was an eminent anesthesiologist from Morley, Berkshire, England, who wrote extensively on medical subjects and dedicated the final years of his life working on his magnum opus, Essays on the First Hundred Years of Anaesthesia – a three-volume series completed posthumously in 1982. More than twenty years after Sykes passed away in 1961.

During the early 1930s, Sykes turned his logical mind to the detective story and produced two scientific mystery novels in the tradition of R. Austin Freeman, The Missing Moneylender (1931) and The Harness of Death (1932). A third novel, The Ray of Doom (1935), is a science-fiction mystery in which "the eponymous ray is presented with some scientific rigor." Sykes' demonstrated in his first detective novel his ability to turn hard science into fiction, but in The Missing Moneylender, he used it to create "an almost undetectable method of murder."

The Missing Moneylender was bluntly re-titled in the U.S. to The Man Who Was Dead and this obscure, long-forgotten book was brought to my attention when "D for Doom," of Vintage Pop Fiction, reviewed it in 2017 – calling it "a marvel of intricate and ingenious plotting" with "exasperatingly, inexplicable crimes." You can almost call them impossible crimes!

This peculiar crime story begins with an interesting conversation between Dr. James Osborne and a friend, George Woods, who discuss such topics as public executioners, professionally trading places and one of the doctor's pesky patients, Israel Levinsky. A moneylender who hasn't paid a penny yet of the forty pounds in unpaid doctor's bills. Dr. Osborne lets Woods read a strongly-worded letter he drafted, in which he tells Levinsky that he can't expect medical care at "the price of unskilled labour," but is called away to the sickbed of a convalescing colleague, Dr. Harold Laidlaw. Dr. Osborne diagnosis him with meningitis and the situation, while seriously, looked not entirely hopeless. He died less than two days later.

I think this opening showed Sykes was clearly influenced by Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke stories, but the second puzzle-piece of the plot fitted snugly in the early police procedural-style detective novels of Freeman Wills Crofts.

Isreal Levinsky is a creature of habit who has made "a fetish of punctuality" and has never been known "to be late or away from the office without due notice," which causes his clerk, Mr. Rosenbaum, to worry when Levinsky was absent without a notice – something unprecedented in his thirty-year tenure with the company. Rosembeam learns from Levinsky's maid that his bed has not been slept in and his breakfast was left untouched. So he called in the police.

Initially, the case is handled by Inspector Ridley, of the Southbourne Constabulary, but the Chief Constable applied to Scotland Yard for assistance. Conveniently, Scotland Yard dispatches a friend of Ridley, Inspector Dennis Drury, and together they methodically sift through the evidence and, unexpectedly, come across a link between the missing moneylender and the dead doctor. Even more surprisingly, Drury engineers an impossible situation in order to extract the contents of a sealed envelope without opening it! An admittedly minuscule, but interesting, aspect of the plot, because you rarely (if ever) see a detective employing one of these impossible crime-tricks to further their investigation.

The evidence they have to go over consists of such clues as fragments of a spectacle lens, pieces of a medical syringe, paraffin wax, a fingerprint, a missing address book and the astounding discovery of a police sergeant – which leads to an exhumation and the discovery of, what still is, "an undetectable murder." One that might be impossible to prove in court, because the pathologist, Sir James Martin, has to admit at the inquest that he has "no idea" what killed the victim. There are no marks of violence anywhere. No signs of disease or any traces of poisons.

I don't know if there are any quasi-impossible crimes or locked room puzzles in The Harness of Death, but Sykes was definitely experimenting with them in 1931. There's the sealed envelope-trick and inexplicable death in The Missing Moneylender, but Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) also lists two short stories, "How Was the Knife Thrown?" and "The Locked Room," which were published in Hush in early 1931. So I'll have to look into those two stories sometime in the future.

Unfortunately, the second half of the story is very tricky to discuss without giving anything away, because the plot becomes a semi-inverted mystery with the police-detectives, assisted by Sir James, trying to figure out how the murder was committed – edging the story a little closer to the more intuitive detective tales. They're theorizing more and the ingenious solution was even complimented by a clever, nicely done false solution. One that made the murder look like "an absolutely insoluble problem" when it was scientifically disproven!

So the first and second halves of The Missing Moneylender differ noticeably in tone and approach to the problem. If the first half betrayed the influence of Crofts and Freeman, the second half can be entered as evidence that Sykes had read and greatly admired Dorothy L. Sayers' Unnatural Death (1927). Sykes was certainly guilty, to some degree, of imitating either his personal favorites or simply what had come before him. Something not uncommon in the early works of Golden Age mystery writers (e.g. Brian Flynn's The Billiard-Room Mystery, 1927), but Sykes brought such a clever and original idea to the table that you can easily overlooked that beginners mistake. I think I liked it even more than the solution from Unnatural Death!

D mentioned in his review that the method the murderer used appeared to be a little out-of-time, but apparently, this was all brand spanking new in 1931. Demonstrating, once again, that the advance of knowledge and technology only provides new possibilities, not obstacles, to a talented plotter with imagination.

So, purely as a good, old-fashioned how-was-it-done, The Missing Moneylender comes highly recommended with an ultimately simple plot that appeared to be an inescapable labyrinth. That being said, not every reader today is going to appreciate Sykes' characterization or his condescending "social smugness," which undoubtedly will rub most of you the wrong way. The reader has been warned!