The Last Warning (1962) by Gerald Verner

Gerald Verner's The Last Warning (1962) is the fourteenth title in the Detective-Superintendent Robert Budd series and is, particular compared to They Walk in Darkness (1947), the shortest novel I've read by Verner to date – practically a novella. I begin to believe that the Superintendent Budd novels were written according to a formula.

I've previously read the novella "The Beard of the Prophet" (1937) and The Royal Flush Murders (1948), which have very similar premises with men under a deadly threat in their own home and a police presence unable to prevent murder from happening. One of the murders is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances in a locked room closely guarded by policemen. The plot of The Last Warning follows the same pattern.

The Last Warning opens on a Friday evening, the 13th of November, when the assiduous, ill-tempered and unlikable Mr. Criller returns home to find the capital 'S' scrawled in red chalk on his gate. A greatly annoyed Criller assumes it was done by some of the unruly village boys, because he's not exactly popular in Thatchford. But this incident comes back to haunt him the next day.

Criller lives with his servants and an adopted niece, Grace Hatton, who acts as "a kind of unofficial secretary" to her uncle and, in return, she receives food, shelter and "a microscopic dress allowance" – making some people wonder why she put up with her "impossible life." A sub-plot that deserved better treatment. One of those people is her neighbor, Jim Langdon, who lives with his mother at Yule Lodge and wants to marry Grace. Naturally, Criller wants to hear nothing about it ("I'll not have any philandering, understand that").

Twenty years ago, Criller made "a nice packet" of money in a mysterious, underhanded scheme with two confederates, Franklin Brinn and Sir Benjamin Gottleib. A scheme not so subtly alluded to during a business meeting between Criller and Brinn, but details are kept as sketchy as possible at this early juncture in the story. When the meeting ends, Brinn strolls into the garden to smoke a cigar, but never returns. Grace is ordered to go look for him and finds his body in the summer-house. A rough letter 'S' was drawn in blood on the garden table!

The stout, deceptively sleepy-eyed Detective-Superintendent Robert Budd happened to be in the neighborhood on an unrelated case and had been talking with an old friend, Superintendent Hawkins, when he got news of the murder – coming on the tail of telling Budd that they "don't get much excitement" in Thatchford. So he tags along and they soon discover that the two remaining men are in mortal danger.

A threatening letter tells Criller that he'll be next and Gottleib receives a similar worded death threat announcing "tomorrow night at twelve you will die too."

They decide to spend the night at Criller's house. Gottleib is placed in a room with two police constables patrolling the ground beneath the window, which are securely fastened and bolted on the inside. Budd and Hawkins will be in sight of the locked door the entire time. Only thing Gottleib has to do is call out "all right" at regular intervals, but, when the clock had chimed twelve, everything remained silent behind the locked door and there's no response to their knocking – which made them decide to break down the door. What they find is Gottleib, slumped in a desk-chair, with "a small round hole in the center of his forehead" and "the hot-iron smell of burnt cordite" still lingering in the air.

A pretty solid premise for an impossible crime, but the locked room-trick employed here has been done before. A trick not as well known to mystery readers who aren't also wholesale consumers of impossible crime fiction, but I've come across numerous examples and variations on this idea, which was kind of old hat by the time The Last Warning was published. That being said, this trick is still better and less disappointing than secret passages, keys being turned with pliers or pieces of string, duplicate keys or keys being reintroduced to the room after the door was broken down.

My real problem with the impossible shooting is how it destroyed any shred of doubt I had about the murderer's identity. I already had this person tagged as my number one suspect, but there was another character, suspiciously hidden the background, who presented a possibility. Unfortunately, this was not the case and story became blatantly obvious and, as short as it was, a tedious right after the murder in the locked room. There's was an interesting little game of musical chairs with false identities and wills towards the end of the story, but this came too late to help prop up the weak solution.

So, while The Last Warning had a good premise and some interesting ideas, the plot failed to deliver the goods in the end and has convinced me Verner is not a writer you need to look to for good locked room mysteries. Luckily, Verner's Noose for a Lady (1952) and Sorcerer's House (1956) demonstrated he could be an excellent, second-string mystery writer without having too lean on an impossible crime. I found a promising, non-impossible crime, title that looks promising with a plot and setting reminiscent of John Russell Fearn. But that's a detective story for 2020.

The Kindaichi Case Files: The Santa Slayings by Yozaburo Kanari and Fumiya Sato

The Santa Slayings is the 7th volume in the original series of The Kindaichi Case Files, written by Yozaburo Kanari and illustrated by Fumiyo Sato, which was among the 17 volumes that received an official release in the West – published during the golden days of TokyoPop. I mentioned in a previous review that there were gaps in my reading of the American releases and The Santa Slayings was one of the gaps.

So what better time to finally read, to my knowledge, the only seasonally-themed mystery in the series than the week preceding Christmas?

The Santa Slayings opens with a bleak prologue telling the reader that, ten years previously, the body of an unidentified woman was found off the coast of Kushiro, Hokkaido, which marked "the beginning of a tragic case." A case that would conclude ten years to the day later.

Hajime Kindaichi is unexpectedly invited by Detective Kotaro Tawarada, who first appeared in the abysmal The Mummy's Curse, to attend a Mystery Night at an exclusive, Western-style hotel during Christmas. However, this gracious invitation is in actuality a plea for help. The hotel received a letter threatening that whoever dares to disturb, or spoil, the writer's sanctuary "a bloody death as retribution" awaits them on Christmas Eve – signed "The Red-Beared Santa Claus." A mysterious figure who rented Room 315 for ten years and lived there as a recluse, but vanished one day. Reportedly, he had died in an accident.

A second problem bugging Detective Tawarada is the presence of the coldly competent, hard-bitten Hokkaido Police Superintendent, Fuwa Narumi. Several weeks before, there was a joint investigation between Aomori and Hokkaido Police, but, when the case was successfully closed, she wrote in her report that "the case was hindered by the Aomori police." And this damaged their reputation. So Detective Tawarada is now burdened with proving the real worth of the Aomori police force.

After this, the focus of the story shifts to the members of The Aprodia Theater Group, lead by the hated Suzue Bandai, who'll perform a two-part mystery play, but they immediately become the target of the red-bearded menace. Suzue Bandai receives a severed, but gift-wrapped, cat's head and their dressing room is thrashed. And that set the stage for murder.

During the final scene, the characters in the play share a toast, but the glass of the troupe leader contained cyanide and the police surveillance ensured nobody could have "snuck on to the stage to poison the glass" – which limited possibilities to "someone within the theater group." What follows is a series of murders, leaning heavily on some clever tricks, that carried the story. Starting with the poisoning-trick that made the murder on stage appear as if it was completely random. A trick that, in theory, only works with a very specific kind of victim, but a clever stunt nonetheless.

 

The third murder in the series is a tragic one and involved and involved Kindaichi personally, in more ways than one, when his roommate is murdered in Room 315 and Kindaichi is rendered unconscious by the murderer. So, when the door is opened, Kindaichi is placed under arrest, because he's the only one who could have committed the murder. The doors in the hotel have locks that can only be opened and locked with key cards, which automatically expire every twenty-four hours and the timing of the murder seems to exclude everyone except Kindaichi. A second aspect of the impossible murder is that Detective Tawarada saw the murderer standing in front of the window, of Room 315, five minutes pass midnight, but how did he manage to disappear from the locked room?

What makes this, plot-technically speaking, an interesting locked room problem is not the patchwork-trick, but how thoroughly the explanation broke down that locked room and the triple-layered motive justifying this elaborate setup – making this impossible murder a key-piece of the plot. Another noteworthy plot-thread is the one-hundred year history of Room 315. A grim history beginning with the suicide of the original hotel owner and the long occupation of the room by the red-bearded stranger, but it was never explained how this person was able to turn the whole room red.

So with a bag full of good tricks, false solutions and a surprising departure from the customary avenger-from-the-past motive, you would assume The Santa Slayings stands as one of the better, early titles in the series. Well, you're wrong. Remember, this is one of the volumes that was written by Yozaburo Kanari. And the poor sod was unable to keep the plot together during the denouement.

Despite all of the good or interesting plot-strands, Kanari thought it was necessary to add one more layer to the story. A layer allowing to add a surprise twist to the identity of the painfully obvious murderer, but this twist, coming out of nowhere, is so cringe-inducing ludicrous and unnecessary that it soured the whole story for me. I suspect this was only worked into the plot so that Kindaichi could have one of his moralizing speeches and emotionally break down the murderer in the last chapters. This is why I dislike Kanari so much. Watching him trying to plot and keep it together can be like watching a fly trying to get out of an open window.

I can only recommend The Santa Slayings to genuine fans of The Kindaichi Case Files, but advise everyone else to save themselves the money you'll likely have to spend in tracking down an overpriced, secondhand copy of the TokyoPop edition.

The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930) by Harriette Ashbrook

The Murder of Cecily Thane (1930) is Harriette Ashbrook's debut as a mystery novelist that simultaneously launched the career of her dilettante detective, Philip "Spike" Tracy, who's a lighthearted, irreverent reflection of S.S. van Dine's Philo Vance – leading only seven of Ashbrook's dozen detective-and suspense novels. Spike makes a memorable entrance.

The Murder of Cecily Thane opens with Spike's older brother, District Attorney R. Montgomery Tracy, wondering out-loud why God allows his troublesome younger brother to live. Or why his little brother lacked the good sense to get himself arrested "in some place besides New York." Spike had been taken into custody on a charge of being drunk and disorderly. So his older brother had to come down town to bail him out.

Ashbrook briefly explained why there's such a stark difference, in personalities and life philosophy, between the Tracy brothers.

R. Montgomery Tracy grew up under "the stern Purnitan rule" of his father, which, combined with an occupation entrenched in "the majesty of the law," gave him a humorless disposition and life, he felt, was "not to be taken lightly" – a mirror opposite of his carefree brother. Mrs. Tracy had enough of her husband Puritanism and picked up her youngest son, Spike, and went to Europe. So he grew up as "a charming hybrid," half American and half continental, who lived an utterly useless, but infinitely amusing, existence. A careless lifestyle backed with "the unceasing flow of dollars from the paternal estate."

So, to nobody's surprise, they ended up with clashing personalities and their verbal exchanges ("Philip, I refuse to permit such levity") reminded me of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (who first appeared in Fer-de-Lance, 1934).

Montgomery dreads that every "damned paper in town" will plaster the story of Spike's arrest on the front page, which comes on the back of editorials chiding him that has three unsolved murders on his desk. And he had been on his way to the scene of another murder when he had to get his brother out of jail. A murder that promises to be a real headline grabber.

Cecily Thane is the wife of a well-known jewel merchant, Elton Thane, who amassed a small fortune as an importer of rare, precious gems which had once "adorned the now defunct crowns of Europe" and Cecily had quite a collection of jewelry – worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cecily's body was found in the bedroom of their brownstone, shot through the heart, with the door of the private wall safe standing wide open. An estimated "$200,000 worth of diamonds, emeralds and pearls" had been taken from the safe!

Interestingly, Mr. Thane allowed Cecily to engage a professional gigolo, Tommy Spencer, twice a week to take her to dances, parties and the theater. Something Mr. Thane didn't care about at all. However, it turns out Spencer was involved in an identical murder, the Schlockenhass case, which had "stirred the city six months before" under different name. A simple, or so it appears, because the house was "simply teeming" with people who had "no particular fancy" for Cecily on the night of her murder. There's her estranged brother, George Griffis. A very old friend and his daughter, Mortimer and Nina Fennel, who had their private reason for hating Cecily. And even her husband is revealed to have had a gem of a motive.

So, when Spike learns his brother has "a murder on the pan," he decides to cancel his elk-hunting trip, to British Columbia, and stay in New York to hunt a murderer instead ("much better sport") – accompanying his brother as an unofficial observer. A vivacious Spike embarks on his first murder case in "a jolly spirit of fun," but everyone soon discovers there's "a quickness of perception" under his cheerfully irresponsible exterior.

Spike's airy comments about the construction workers outside the house, his strange behavior with the lipstick at the crime scene and fiddling with the pillows on the chaise lounge all turn out to have an important bearing on the case. Slowly, but surely, he not only wins the trust and respect of his older brother, but even Inspector Herschman slowly has to adjust his an opinion on Spike. An opinion Herschmen expressed with letting Spike know that the only reason he hadn't thrown into the Hudson River, with a five-hundred pound boulder tied to his feet, is the fact that he's the District Attorney's kid brother.

The Murder of Cecily Thane is a more breezily written detective novel than my two previous reads by Ashbrook, The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) and Murder Makes Murder (1937), which were much closer to the psychological-driven mysteries by Helen McCloy. They also had knottier and original plots. By comparison, The Murder of Cecily Thane is an ultra-conventional with an ultimately simplistic plot that owes some debt to Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case (1926). But even when being highly conventional, Ashbrook couldn't help herself but show flashes of ingenuity.

One of the clues is reproduced in the book and, as John Norris pointed out in "The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook," this is kind of an interactive clue allowing the reader to study the clue in exactly the same way as Spike did. A very innovative idea for the 1930s. Secondly, there's a cleverly done, tricky alibi worthy of Christopher Bush.

So, all in all, The Murder of Cecily Thane is a pretty solid and promising debut from a talented mystery writer who, inexplicably, never got the acknowledgment she deserved. Recommended as a lighthearted take on the Van Dine-Queen School of detective fiction.

I wanted to save the remaining three Spike Tracy novels, The Murder of Stephen Kester (1931), Murder Comes Back (1940) and The Purple Onion Mystery (1941), for next year, but might sneak in one more before the end of the year.

Murder Makes Murder (1937) by Harriette Ashbrook

A closed circle situation, not to be confused with the locked room mystery, is a trope beloved of Golden Age detective readers and, in its purest form, confines its cast of characters to a single location, such as a country house or train, which are often cut-off from the outside world – traditionally due to a freak blizzard or an ungodly rainstorm. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) made the lonely, isolated island an emblematic setting for closed circle detective stories. Or, at least, that's the perception.

Over the years, I've come to regard the isolated island setting more as a staple of the Japanese shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) movement than of the Western, Golden Age detective story.

The Kindaichi Case Files series is littered with these tiny, isolated islands, where grisly deeds are done, but you can find them in practically every anime-and manga detective series like Detective Academy Q and Case Closed – a notable example is "The Koshien Murder Case" from the latter. But even among the translated novels there are three classics, Yukito Ayatsuji's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), Alice Arisugawa's Koto pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989) and NisioisiN's Zaregoto: Kubikiri saikuru (Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle, 2002).

On the other hand, I can only think of a handful of (truly good) Western examples with an isolated island setting from the genre's golden era: Anthony Berkeley's Panic Party (1934), Robin Forsythe's Murder on Paradise Island (1937), Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1941), Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Seven Sneezes (1942) and Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954). So I'm glad to report that I can now add Harriette Ashbrook's Murder Makes Murder (1937) to the list!

Murder Makes Murder opens in 1921 with a passel of newspaper reporters en route to the Long Island estate of a multi-millionaire, Thaddeus Culver, on the shore between Brooklyn and Montauk.

Thaddeus Culver is a "president or director of some twenty-odd corporations in the chemical world" and has the astronomical sum of $50,000,000 to his name, which, adjusted for inflation, is close to $650,000,000 in today's money – making him quite a catch. However, Culver was "a notorious bachelor" and the world was surprised when he married, at the age of sixty, his widowed housekeeper, Mrs. Sarah Martineau. And legally adopted her five-year-old daughter, Elise. This meant that his sister and nephew, Mrs. Florence Anson and Maxwell, lost "a big slice" of that multi-million dollar pie.

The next two chapters skip eleven years ahead and Culver has passed away. Mrs. Culver and Elise, who has become a budding poet, live a reclusive existence on an island somewhere off the coast of Maine. A stroke forced Mrs. Culver to return to their Long Island estate, but, when Elise meets a charming young man, she promptly tells her daughter to pack her bags. And they return to Hallett Island. Finally, the story moved forward, to 1936, Elise has garnered recognition as an emerging poet with a slim volume, entitled Sky Song, but, more importantly, she's secretly engaged to her New York publisher, Hamish Hurd – a friend of playboy and amateur detective, Spike Tracy. Tracy is going to be his best man when he marries Elise on the Maine island in a few days time.

Hallett Island is a small, wooded island with Mrs. Culver's estate and a tiny village, whose only connection to the mainland is a ferry, but the wedding guests arrive on the island around the same time as a big storm. There are things going on the normally quiet, peaceful island that will prove to be a sinister prelude to brutal and shocking murder.

A few days before the wedding, Mrs. Culver came stumbling back from her evening walk in the woods, scared and shivering, after which she ordered her personal maid to lock up the house at night. Something that had not been necessary before. Somehow, the newspapers got wind that something was about to happen and "a swarm of reporters" tried to get to the island, but the storm prevented them from making the crossing. Only one of them was brave, or stupid, enough to steal a boat and make the dangerous journey. So the stage has been set!

On the eve of her wedding, a ruthless murderer entered Elise's bedroom and goes to town on her with a pair of scissors in a frenzied attack, but why would anyone want to butcher the lovely, kindhearted and innocent poet? Someone had seen "a ghostly figure" coming out of Elise's bedroom in the middle of the night and it had left a trail of muddy tracks that mounted a stairway, which led up to the third step from the top and then "vanished in thin air." Sadly, this aspect is not treated as a full-fledged impossible crime and the explanation pretty disqualifies it as such, but the rest of the story is as engrossing as it's baffling.

An observant reader, who pays close attention, is able to catch a glimpse of the truth early on in the story, but complete, fully-realized picture will probably elude them until very late into the story when they're in possession of all the known facts – only for Spike to turn around to a spring a surprise on them. A well-done twist with an original and powerful motive as the coup de grâce!

My only misgiving is Ashbrook waited until the last acceptable moment to divulge two relatively important pieces of information. Not late enough to make it unfair, but they took their time in getting to the reader. More importantly, this little smudge didn't weaken the plot or took anything away from the strong ending.

I've mentioned in my review of The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) that Ashbrook was a mystery writer from the Van Dine-Queen School, as A Most Immoral Murder (1935) can testify to, but The Murder of Sigurd Sharon and Murder Makes Murder stand much closer to Helen McCloy. There's more emphasis on the psychological than the physical clues and they just struck me as something McCloy could have written. Just compare The Murder of Sigurd Sharon with Through a Glass, Darkly (1950) or Murder Makes Murder with The Man in the Moonlight (1940). I wonder if this has anything to do with Spike being away from usual stomping ground. So my next read is probably going to be one of Ashbrook's New York set mystery novels (likely The Murder of Cicely Thane, 1930).

So, all in all, Murder Makes Murder is a cleverly constructed, but very human, detective novel filled with tragic characters, anxiously kept secrets, obsession and a shockingly original motive. A highly recommendable detective novel. One that has left me seriously baffled why Ashbrook was so thoroughly ignored or dismissed in her days. She was great!

The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) by Harriette Ashbrook

Harriette Ashbrook was an American mystery novelist who embarked on her underappreciated literary career as a writer of plot-oriented detective stories, penned in the tradition of The Van Dine-Queen School, but she abandoned the puzzle detective in the early 1940s to write suspense fiction – which were published under the penname of "Susannah Shane." During her short-lived career, Ashbrook received "short shrift" from reviewers and was "never taken seriously in the mystery arena."

So, as a consequence, she was ignored by the paperback publishers of the day and her untimely passing, in 1946, ensured her novels would be consigned to obscurity. Not a single one of her detective or suspense novels were reprinted in nearly seventy years!

But was this deserved? Not on your life! I've only read three of her novels and agree with John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, that Ashbrook not only was a good writer and smart plotter, but her ideas were "often very original for the time they were written." I believe it was John who brought her back to everyone's attention with his 2013 blog-post, "The Detective Novels of Harriette Ashbrook." Since that blog-post, she has been slowly clawing her way back onto the printed page.

A small, equally obscure publisher, Jerry Schneider Ent., reissued the fascinating A Most Immoral Murder (1935) in paperback in 2016 and this was followed by a couple of reprints from a dodgy publisher of ill-repute, Resurrected Press – known for altering the original texts of their reprints. A year later, Coachwhip Publishers republished one of her Susannah Shane dames-in-danger suspense novels, Lady in Lilac (1941). These were the first reprints in nearly seven decades, but, after they were published to little fanfare, everything quieted down again. Until a few months ago!

Back in late September, Black Heath Editions reissued all seven titles in the Philip "Spike" Tracy series and this includes one of her more expensive, hard-to-get detective novel, which is the subject of today's review.

The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933) is the third novel about Ashbrook's Philo Vance-inspired series-detective, Spike Tracy, who's the smart aleck, playboy brother of the Manhattan District Attorney, R. Montgomery Tracy. This personal relationship allowed Spike Tracy to cultivate a reputation of someone who "goes around nosing into affairs" that aren't his and unearthing closely guarded secrets that doesn't make him exactly popular with "certain parties." This is opinion held by the murderers he helped bring to justice and Inspector Herschman of the New York Homicide Squad.

However, The Murder of Sigurd Sharon finds Spike Tracy stranded in rural Vermont with a dead car battery and there he watches a young woman rushing down a hill in a futile attempt to catch the last train out of the village.

Jill Jeffrey is a woman with a fluctuating personality. One minute she's "a charming, delightful creature" and the next moment she turns into "the most cold blooded, heartless hussy" you'll ever meet – especially for the time. A fascinated Spike is torn between "a desire to kiss her" and "break her neck," but quickly catches on something is going on back at her house. A lonely, isolated house occupied where she lives with her ill, bedridden twin sister, Mary, who she seems to loath. There's also their guardian, Dr. Sigurd Sharon, who used to be a Methodist preacher and a frigid live-in nurse, Miss Wilson. And their only contact with the outside world is their only neighbor, Jerome W. Featherstone, and Mary's physician, Dr. Carmack.

Jill tells Spike that Dr. Sharon is trying to kill her, when the only thing she wants to do is to live, but what he's trying to do is "just plain murder." Spike meets a household who greets him with "frigid politeness" and they resent his presence, but he's stranded there for the night.

During that night, Dr. Sharon is fatally stabbed in his bedroom and Jill is carried out of the room by Featherstone and Wilson muttering that he can never hurt her again, because he's dead. Murdered! However, the case soon becomes increasingly complicated with a false confession and impossible disappearance from the house with all the exists either locked or guarded by policemen. So nobody could have left the house unseen and place is searched, top to bottom, without result. This is followed by an equally inexplicable reappearance and this person tells them that even "Houdini himself would have given millions" for the secret. I think shows how obscure and little-known Ashbrook had been for the better part of a century, because The Murder of Sigurd Sharon is not listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). And this impossible disappearance/reappearance functions as a clue of sort.

However, this is the point where the plot becomes tricky to discuss as time, alas, not been kind to the primary plot-thread of the story, which was very innovative and original for the time, but has since been done to death – robbing the story of the effect of its bewildering premise and surprise ending. A reader today will have no problem figuring out a large chunk of the plot. Fortunately, this came with one (plot-technical) upside. You get to admire how fairly Ashbrook played with her readers throughout the story.

All of the clues and red herrings are present. Some strange, illogical remarks with one line being as good a clue as the verbal-clues from Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (1937) and Five Little Pigs (1942). Why everyone in the household was against Jill. The impossible disappearance from a guarded house. There's even a bookshelf clue and in particular a hefty, Danish tome they can't read and gets stolen. Most of these clues spell out a very clear solution to the modern read, but Ashbrook, who knew how to plot a detective story, actually managed to add a twist in the tail of the story that averted an ending now considered cliché!

So even with time completely obliterating the novelty of a truly innovative and original idea, Ashbrook still turned it into a good, old-fashioned Golden Age detective novel towards the end – complete with an unbreakable alibi and surprise ending. And that, my friends, is talent.

The Murder of Sigurd Sharon has most of the hallmarks of the Van Dine-Queen School and could even be given the Queen-ish book-title The Danish Tome Mystery, but I thought the book had a closer resemblance to the work of Helen McCloy than either S.S. van Dine or Ellery Queen. An early foreshadowing of Ashbrook's switch from detective to suspense fiction in the 1940s. So I think admirers of McCloy will get a little more out of this book than the adherents of Van Dine and Queen, but I believe The Murder of Sigurd Sharon is still recommendable as an original piece of crime fiction, possibly a first, from a long, unjustly ignored mystery writer.

I'll return to Ashbrook with my next read, which is going to be a three-cornered fight between The Murder of Stephen Kester (1931), Murder Makes Murder (1937) and Murder Comes Back (1940).

A Devil on the Court: Case Closed, vol. 71 by Gosho Aoyama

The 71st volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published in Japan as Detective Conan, is an unusual entry in the series as the only two stories in it, a short and a long one, focus entirely on breaking codes and finding hidden messages – only hint at murder is tucked away in the grim back-story of one of the characters. So, if memory serves me correctly, this is one of only two volumes without a single murder case.

This volume opens with a short, so-called slice-of-life mysteries and takes place in the audio/visual storage room of Teitan Elementary.

Ms. Kobayashi recruits Conan and the Junior Detective League to help her find a videotape in the A.V. storage room, crammed with thousands of tapes with faded or hard-to-read labels, but they also find a former student of the school rummaging around in there. Detective Chiba, of the Metropolitan Police, was a member of the A.V. club and had a crush on a girl who was about to move away. So he wrote her a love letter. She wrote cryptically wrote back that she left her answer in the A.V. storage room and hoped it leave on a mark on him, but Chiba "searched the room from top to bottom." And he couldn't find anything. Now a class reunion is just around the corner and Chiba is determined to find that 13-year-old reply.

A charming story, as most these slice-of-life stories tend to be, with Aoyama's favorite trope (long-lost) childhood friends with a romantic interest. My only problem is that the hidden message seems a little bit too clever to have been concocted by such a young child. And on such a short notice.

The second story covers the remainder of the volume, nine of the eleven chapters, which begins with a hint of the Had-I-But-Known School. A story that "began with a strawberry" and Conan "never imagined that this would set off an adventure" – both "sweet and sour." A lucky incident with a strawberry and cat gave Conan, Rachel and Richard Moore to visit England during a school holiday. Conan is a huge Sherlock Holmes fanboy and he can't wait to visit all the places from Conan Doyle's stories. There are, however, some obstacles to overcome. Such as the pesky problem of his double identity. Just read the series and you'll understand.

Conan eventually makes it to London to embark on his "Sherlock Holmes pilgrimage," something only mystery fans will understand, but he finds several hurdles on his path.

On the doorstep of the Sherlock Holmes Museum, on 221B Baker Street, Conan meets an eight-year-old boy, Apollo Glass, who's the kid brother of tennis-star and "the top-ranked Queen of the Grass Court," Minerva Glass. Earlier that day, Apollo was at the tennis court when he was approached by a man telling him that he'll get "a greater thrill" than he would expect. Someone, somewhere in London, will be murdered in front of him and to tell Scotland Yard – if it doesn't make any sense to "leave it to Holmes." So this mysterious event plunges Conan in hunt around London for Holmesian-themed clues and codes. This part of the story almost reads like a travelogue with the characters hunting around all the London landmarks for clues.

As to be expected, not everything goes smoothly and Conan forgets himself for a moment and makes a mistake. One of several mistakes in this volume. In the first story, he talks as if he was a long-time student at Teitan Elementary, but officially, he has been there for only a year or two. At the start of this story, Conan starts speaking fluently English in front of Rachel and Richard Moore. Conan's third mistake convinces Rachel that Jimmy Kudo is London and has purposely avoiding here.

I've said this before, but I'll say it again, the relationship story-line between Jimmy/Conan and Rachel has become stagnant and a weakness at this point in the series.

I concede that it made absolute sense keeping Jimmy's predicament from Rachel when the series started, but, in the series, nearly two years have passed since the first volume and continuing to keep the secret is now only used as a story-telling device – in order to create these needlessly complicated situations. Logically, Rachel should have been told by now as she would have been valuable alley/cover for his Conan identity. Seriously, I begin to suspect that the final volume will reveal that all these stories were told by Jimmy and Rachel on the coach of an incredulous, harassed-looking relationship counselor. Mark my words!

The penultimate chapter of this story, which will be concluded in the next volume, takes place on the court and the tennis match is one that could only be played in an anime or manga series (e.g. The Prince of Tennis). And even for this series, or anime/manga in general, the code cracking in this part of the story stretched credulity a little too far.

Still this was a fun, if somewhat weird, story and look forward to the last chapter, but don't think it will stand as a classic story-arc in the series. However, I do think this volume, as a whole, stands as a notable example of the code cracking detective story and a Holmesian homage to boot!

They Walk in Darkness (1947) by Gerald Verner

Gerald Verner's They Walk in Darkness (1947) is the second novel in a very short-lived series about a thriller writer and his wife, Peter and Anne Chard, who debuted in Thirsty Evil (1945) and rapidly descended into the catacombs of obscurity after their second outing – which was only dimly remembered as a locked room mystery. Astonishingly, this obscure, barely remembered detective novels reprinted three times in the past ten years!

Ulverscroft published a large print edition in 2011 as part of their Linford Mystery Library and Ramble House reissued the book in hard-and paperback in 2016, which was followed this year with an ebook version from Endeavour Media.

Regrettably, these various reissues seem to have done precious little to bolster the profile of the book and that's a shame, because honestly, it's one of Verner's best detective/thriller stories – certainly of the handful of titles I've read to date. I believe this has to do with the fact that Verner gave himself the space to tell the story. They Walk in Darkness is twice as long as, for example, The Royal Flush Murders (1948), Noose for a Lady (1952) and Sorcerer's House (1956), which showed Verner was closer aligned with the pulp-style thrillers than with the pure Golden Age detective stories. Verner evidently attempted here to write something more in line with the traditional mystery novel. Something that's more evident in the first than the second half of the book.

They Walk in Darkness opens on a cold, snowy evening, in late October, when the Chards are traveling to a small, East Anglia village to visit a close relative of Peter, Aunt Helen.

Fendyke St. Mary used to be "a hot-bed of witchcraft in the Middle Ages" and "the abominable orgies of the Witches' Sabbath," attended by Satan himself, were regularly practiced at a place known as Lucifer's Stone. There's also an old, derelict cottage, Witch's House, which used to belong to leading light of "a particularly virulent coven" and was burned to death in 1644. So with such a long, ancient history and tradition in devil worship, it's hardly surprising many villagers are only too ready to explain anything "strange and inexplicable" as witchcraft. A belief they apply to the terrors that has plagued the village for the better part of two years.

During a dinner party, Peter and Ann learn that a child murderer is roaming the village, but "the prelude to the baby murders" was the theft of several lambs, at various intervals, which were found back as cadavers – all of them had their throat savagely cut. And then the children began to disappear. One of them was taken from his pram in the garden and another never returned home for tea, but their bodies were eventually found in clumps of reeds somewhere on the edge of Hinton Broad. Only suspect the police has seriously considered is a mentally undeveloped man, Tom Twist.

However, the dinner party's response to the wanton child killings going on in the village is extremely cool, level-headed and very British. They shake their heads in disapproval, mutter something about a maniac and chide the local police for their lack of progress.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed They Walk in Darkness back in March and commented on the British stoicism of the characters "this wholesale murder of helpless children." I left a comment suggesting he read Paul Halter's L'arbe aux doigts tordus (The Vampire Tree, 1996) and compare it with Verner's They Walk in Darkness, but had no idea at the time how apt my comparison really was.

The Vampire Tree is also set in a small village with a dark, bloody history and has become the playground of serial killer targeting children. This killer has pretty much the same modus operandi as the child murderer from Fendyke St. Mary and the characters have the same cool, detached response to the murders as they do here. I remember the children in Halter's story were allowed to continue to roam the woods, where the bodies were found, but Verner was even colder and had one of his characters suggest they use one of the village children as living bait ("like the old hunter's trick, eh?") by leaving the child in a lonely spot under discreet observation – a "tethered kid to attract the lion." One of those subtle hints that the English are, in fact, completely insane. The only reason they have been able to hide it so well is that they happen to share this continent with the French and Germans.

There's also the curious coincidence that both They Walk in Darkness and The Vampire Tree have characters named Twist and an impossible crime of the no-footprint-in-the-snow variety.

After the Eve of All-Hallows, a group of four people from Fendyke St. Mary briefly go missing from their home and their bodies are found, seated around "a very old worm-eaten table" laid for five people, in the dirty Witch's House. They sat "strangely contorted" with their eyes turned towards the empty chair at the head of the table with an "expression of horror." A considerable quantity of cyanide was found in the wine glasses and one of the bottles, but the cottage had been locked and there were four tracks in the snow outside. However, the tracks only went in the direction of Witch's House, but there was none coming back!

So, this situation presents the Peter and Ann with two possibilities, which are both utterly impossible: the four people either committed suicide and the door magically locked itself, before the key miraculously vanished, or there was a fifth person present in the cottage – who somehow managed to lock the door and disappeared with the key from "a house surrounded by snow without leaving any tracks." An intriguing premise and the solution was only slightly soiled by the clumsily handling of an important clue, which has always been weakness of Verner. Yes, "the snow trick" is not terribly original and have come across a very similar solution recently, but, somehow, I didn't mind that here. That has very much to do with the identity of the murderer and strong motive.

I thought I would never come across characters more deserving of murder than the "victims" from Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933) and Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Orient Express (1934), but Verner served his reader four of such human abominations. This aspect reinforced many of the weak points of the overall plot and held the story together in the end.

The no-footprint-in-the-snow is, as mentioned above, hardly a classic of its kind and the second half of the book is written in the lurid style of the sensational, pulpy occult thrillers littered with adjectives (beastly, blasphemous, diabolically, horrible, etc), but the murderer and motive made up for a lot. I thought the vigilante mob scenes and the Biblical event that ravaged the region towards the end was a nice touches to the story.

They Walk in Darkness stands as one of the darkest, highly unconventional and spellbinding village mysteries, written by a professional story-teller, but not everyone is going to appreciate what Verner tried to accomplish here – either because the plot has its weaknesses or the unpleasant subject matter. This makes hard to unhesitatingly recommend the book to everyone. That being sad, if you liked Gladys Mitchell's The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) and Ellery Queen's The Glass Village (1954), both equally unconventional, you'll probably find They Walk in Darkness a fascinating and rewarding read.

And on a final, related note: when reading the book, I came up with an alternative solution to the impossible murders in Witch's House. An alternative solution that in no way resembles the actual explanation and wanted to share it with you. My solution placed two people inside the cottage, before the snow began to fall, which are the murderer and one of the four victims. They are preparing the cottage for their devil's banquet. When the snow stops falling, the other three arrive and, when they're dead, the murderer leaves the cottage by walking backwards – creating a fourth track of prints in the snow. Yes, I know walking backwards in the snow is an old, tired and hacky trick, but, usually, this trick is done by retracing a previously created trail of footprints. In this case, the murderer leaves an untempered track that's simply misinterpreted.