The Helm of Hades (2019) by Paul Halter

I've reviewed a sundry of short (locked room) stories over the past two years, ranging from the anonymously published "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909) to Anne van Doorn's ghostly "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018), but my last review of a short story collection was D.L. Champion's The Complete Cases of Inspector Allhoff, vol. 1 (2014) – posted back in April of last year. So it was about time I tackled another compendium and John Pugmire's Locked Room International recently published something that fitted the bill.

The Helm of Hades (2019) is Paul Halter's second collection of short stories to appear in English, preceded by the appetizingly The Night of the Wolf (2006), which formally introduced non-French speaking readers to Halter's imaginative brand of detective fiction. This second volume comprises entirely of translated stories that were published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine between 2007 and 2019. And celebrated French locked room anthologist, Roland Lacourbe, penned an introduction promising "the wildest impossibilities." Well, that enough to lure me into the back of your van!

"Le gong hanté" ("The Gong of Doom") is the fist of ten stories and takes place at "the meeting-place of a select circle of prosperous Londoners" devoted to "the discussion of puzzling mysteries," The Hades Club, where Dr. Alan Twist tells Superintendent Charles Cullen the story of "a senseless and inexplicable murder" – committed at the end Great War. Colonel Henry Strange has an argument with the prospective husband of his niece, Philip, inside his locked study. During their argument, the haunted gong in the study sounded without being struck and Colonel Strange sank to the floor with an arrow piercing his neck. However, the door of the study was locked on in the inside and the ground overlooking the open window was covered with virgin snow. So there was nowhere any mysterious archer could have hidden to fire the fatal arrow.

A solid and tantalizing premise reminiscent of the locked room situation from Carter Dickson's The Judas Window (1938), but the solution is a coincidence-laden farce and an absolute cheat! I suppose the farcical slant could, sort of, have worked has the ultimate fate of Philip not cast a bleak shadow over the story. However, I did like the false-solution that made use of the kandjar (a dagger) hanging on the wall. Otherwise, a very poor story that should not have opened this collection.

"L'échelle de Jacob" ("The Ladder of Jacob") is an excellently done short story about a man who fell to his death from a great height without any tall buildings or cliffs at the scene, but have already discussed the story in my review of the massive locked room anthology, The Realm of the Impossible (2017). The third story is "L'homme au visage d'argile" ("The Man with the Face of Clay"), but read it before and disliked the solution to the locked room shooting. One of my big no-noes.

The next story in line is "La vengeance de l'épouvantail" ("The Scarecrow's Revenge") and succeeded where "The Gong of Doom" failed so miserably.

Dr. Alan Twist is in France where Commissaire Pierre Legrand tells him about an abominable crime that took place in Gondeville, a small village not far from Cognac, which involved a dead, but vengeful, husband and a premonitory dream that came to pass only a few hours later – in "the form of an impossible crime." Janine is haunted by the memory of her late, unlamented husband and has a terrifying nightmare that he came back in the guise of their scarecrow. And killed her father with a pitchfork. This nightmare became a reality when her father is found the following morning lying on the muddy ground beneath the scarecrow with only one set of footprints going from the front door to the scarecrow.

A very well-done, properly motivated impossible crime story with a better and more original solution than the answer to the homicidal snowman from "L'abominable homme de neige" ("The Abominable Snowman," collected in The Night of the Wolf). A solution that both worked and was genuinely tragic without the grim bleakness.

"Les feux de l'Enfer" ("The Fires of Hell") is, plot-wise, one of the weakest story in the collection and revolves around a man who can see visions of the future, which he used to predict a series of "inexplicable fires" that even a police cordon was unable to prevent. However, the firebug is easily spotted and the method was more underwhelming than disappointing. You can find better treatments of the impossible fire-starter gimmick in John Russell Fearn's Flashpoint (1950) and Arthur Porges' "To Barbecue a White Elephant" and "Fire for Peace" (collected in These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie, 2018).

Last year, I reviewed "Le loup de Fenrir" ("The Wolf of Fenrir") together with "Le livre jaune" ("The Yellow Book") and three other, non-English detective stories in a post entitled "Murder Around the World: A Review of Five Short Detective Stories" – which, like this review, turned out to be a mixed bag of tricks. On the one hand, "The Yellow Book" was a wonderfully crafted story with an excellent variation on a locked room-trick from one of Halter's earlier novels. In comparison, "The Wolf of Fenrir" was only so-so.

"La balle de Nausicaa" ("Nausicaa's Ball") is the only non-impossible crime story to be found in this collection and seems to be modeled after such Agatha Christie stories as Evil Under the Sun (1941), Towards Zero (1944) and "Triangle at Rhodes" (collected in Murder in the Mews and Other Stories, 1937). Dr. Alan Twist is on a much deserve holiday in Corfu, Greece, where he hopes to have a break from all the inexplicable, seemingly unsolvable murders dogging his every step, but, on his first day, bumped into a holidaying Superintendent Cullen. Soon their attention is drawn to the cast and film crew staying at their hotel. And, in particular, the eternal triangle of the group.

Rachel Syms is a gorgeous actress who was the female-lead in a movie that was shot in the same location a year ago, but she fell in love with her young, unknown screen partner, Anthony Shamp, who, according to the critics, played "a marvelous Ulysses" – returning a year later to shoot the sequel. She brought along her husband, George Portman. A perfect recipe for murder! This comes to pass when George's falls to his death from "a series of steps cut into the rock which zig-zag down a hundred feet to the beach," but the lonely, isolated location of the lagoon severely reduces the number of suspects. The solution hinges on pulling apart a carefully-planned alibi, but there's one technical detail that raised an eyebrow. Nonetheless, this story still stands as a nicely done homage to the Queen of Crime from a modern craftsman of the locked room puzzle.

"La tombe de David Jones" ("The Robber's Grave") is a good example of Halter's fertile imagination when it comes to dreaming up new seemingly impossible situations and reviewed it last year, under the title  "Devil's Soil: Halter, Hoch and Hoodwinks," together with a story from the King of the Short Story, Edward D. Hoch.

Lastly, the collection closes out with the most recently translated short story, "Le casque d'Hadès" ("The Helm of Hades"), published in the March/April, 2019, issue of EQMM. This time the detective is the Edwardian-era aesthete and amateur reasoner, Owen Burns, who acts as an armchair oracle as he listens to the tale of a murder that appears "to have been inspired by the prince of darkness himself." A well-known archaeologist, Conrad Berry, who threw a party to celebrate his greatest discovery, the Helm of Hades. A legendary bronze helmet that makes everyone who wears it "as transparent as the air that you breathe." During the party, Berry is savagely attached inside his archaeological room while people were sitting outside.

According to their evidence, they heard the footsteps of "an invisible creature" walking across the creaky floorboards of the room, open and close the door of the archaeological room, carry out a brutal and noisy assault – after which it retraced its footsteps and knocked over a Chinese vase on the way. As if an invisible entity had entered and left the scene of the crime! A very original and grandly staged premise for a locked room mystery, but the solution, while acceptable enough, has a weakness I've come to associate with Jonathan Creek (e.g. Angel Hair, 2003). A type of involved solution that can only work when it's really, really involved.

I used to believe the short story format brought out the best in Halter, because it allowed him to play on his major strengths (plot and imagination), while downplaying his weaknesses, but have only read a selection of (mostly) his better short stories since his first collection was published in 2006. This colored my perception over the years. The Helm of Hades shows he was very hit-and-miss and needs the length of a novel to give his plethora of ideas some breathing space. Halter still produced a some classic short locked room stories, but, in general, I think he's better when writing novel-length impossible crime stories. Just read L'homme qui aimait les nuages (The Man Who Loved Clouds, 1999) or Le montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019).

So, yeah, The Helm of Hades is, as so often is the case with these collection, a mixed bag of tricks, but the better specimens, such as "The Scarecrow's Revenge," "The Robber's Grave" and "The Yellow Book," still makes it a welcome addition to my locked room library.

The Second Shot (1930) by Anthony Berkeley

Anthony Berkeley's The Second Shot (1930) is the sixth title in the Roger Sheringham series and was first published at the dawn of the Golden Decade when the traditional, plot-oriented detective story burst into energetic adolescence, but Berkeley was already looking decades ahead with The Second Shot – asking the question "what is the future of the detective story?" Berkeley prophesied in his dedication that "the puzzle element" will become "a puzzle of character" rather than "a puzzle of time, place, motive, and opportunity."

A type of detective story exploring "what remarkable combination of circumstances did bring X" to "the decision that nothing short of murder would meet the case," which is sadly the direction the genre went with by the time the 1960s rolled around.

So you might be worried to learn Berkeley endeavored to write "the story of a murder" rather than "the story of the detection of a murder" with The Second Shot, but Berkeley was more than a visionary. He was a talented plotter who understood that even the most detailed character portrait needs a frame to be truly complete. This is done here by not disclosing the murderer's identity and telling "the reader-detective" to "use his own wits a little more," because not all of his thinking is done for him here and showcases that valuable mystery writer's asset – namely the ability to lie through your teeth by strictly speaking the truth. You have to remember Berkeley was playing with these ideas when the pure, Golden Age detective story still had to produce most of its monumental classics. But did it work? Let's find out!

The Second Shot opens with a grabbed-from-the-headlines prologue reporting on "a shocking accident" that occurred at the residence of the scientific farmer and celebrated mystery novelist, John Hillyard. A small house party had staged an outdoors murder mystery at Minton Deeps Farm, but the pseudo-victim was found at the end of the day with a very real gunshot wound. And the police have their reasons to believe this was not an unfortunate accident with a carelessly-handled rifle.

The story then shifts to first-person narration with the manuscript of Cyril "Pinkie" Pinkerton, who comes across as, what I believe the British call, a bit of a posh twat.

Pinkerton had often thought of writing a detective story from the point-of-view of the murderer, "showing his hopes and terrors as the process of detection progresses," but now had an opportunity to put "academic theory" into "grim practice" – because he's primary suspect in a murder case. Pinkerton is a childhood friend of Mrs. Ethel Hillyard and was invited under a neutral flag to a house party given under false colors and an ulterior motive.

Mrs. Hillyard acts as the self-appointed guardian of the young daughter of a late friend of hers, Elsa Verity, who's "innocent in the ways of the world" and has fallen under the spell of a popular, well-known man-about-town and all-around cad. Eric Scott-Davies is a womanizer, mired in scandals, who's rapidly squandering the family fortunes. So, Mrs. Hillyard not being born yesterday, pretended to go along with Elsa's fancies and made her believe the party had been solely arranged for their benefit. But in reality, she mixed together a social party guaranteed to explode and consume Eric. Eric's name has been coupled with Sylvia de Ravel in the gossip columns and only her husband, Paul, gives the impression of being unaware of the affair, but Sylvia's not the kind of woman "who can be picked up, toyed with for a time, and then dropped," which is why Ethel invited them both. She also asked Eric's cousin, Armorel, to balance out the numbers, but she has her own reasons to prefer her unruly cousin dead rather than alive. Pinkerton is simply there to distract Elsa from Eric.

A potentially hazardous social gathering and, through Pinkerton's narrative, the reader sees the wheels of murder slowly grinding into motion, but the human element also begins to intrude as not everyone is what they appeared to be on first glance – in particular our narrator, Pinkerton, who becomes more likable as the story progresses. Berkeley delivered on his promise to craft a puzzle of characters and what makes them tick. But not to the deep, murky depths of the contemporary crime novel. Because the story still has a plot.

Once the mock-detective investigated the scene of the staged murder, the party returned to the farm and on their way back two shots, five minutes apart, where heard. When Eric failed to return, two of them went looking for him in the woods and found his lifeless body a short distance away from the scene of the staged murder. Since our narrator becomes the prime suspect, he dispatches a telegram to Roger Sheringham telling him he's stuck in "a perilous position" and urgently needs his help.

My confrere, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, complained in his 2016 review of The Second Shot that A Challenge to the Reader around the halfway mark, "the reader should now, at this stage in the story, be fully aware whose finger pulled the fatal trigger," rendered Sheringham subsequent investigation useless to the reader. But this is not entirely true. Firstly, Sheringham always brings a story to life with his energetic detective work and fanciful theories, which had its effect on the other (main) characters who become more human-like in his presence. And, noticeable, a comedic element slipped into the story (e.g. Armorel at the inquest). Secondly, Sheringham is the best of the so-called fallible detectives and his multiple, false-solution, particularly the last one, were needed to make the ending work – which is where Berkeley showed his brilliance. Although one aspect of the solution hasn't aged very well over the past ninety years.

The central idea behind the solution had already been experimented with in the 1920s, but The Second Shot would probably still have surprised readers in 1930. Readers who read Golden Age mysteries in 2020 are more genre-savvy than those in 1930 and this allows us to spot Berkeley telegraphing the final twist very early on in the story. Something that couldn't be more obvious, if he was semaphoring the murderer's name in your living-room. So, plot-technically, the story is a clever piece of work, but where the solution acquired a timeless quality is how it subverted its own premise.

Berkeley told in the dedication that "the days of the old crime puzzle pure and simple" where, if not numbered, at any rate in "the hands of the auditors" with "psychological ties" slowly replacing the hard puzzle pieces. This he said when the plot-driven detective story was only just beginning to bloom, but Berkeley wanted to write a character-driven tale of murder and basically an anti-detective story with Sheringham miserably failing at deducing the truth. Only to turn around and show the crime was executed with all the grandeur of a Golden Age detective story. Something you would expect from a writer like Ngaio Marsh! Yes, Berkeley was playing with the conventions of a type of crime fiction that would not fully emerge until two or three decades later! What a guy!

Some aspects of The Second Shot don't work as well in 2020 as they did in 1930, but the story, as a whole, is an excellent showcase of Berkeley's originality and talent as a plotter, which shined even when he was shining the spotlight on the characters – complimented with a superb use of the multiple twists and false solutions. So definitely recommended (sorry, JJ!).

Rescue Rangers: Case Closed, vol. 72 by Gosho Aoyama

The 72nd volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published in Japan as Detective Conan, begins with the conclusion to the massive story that covered nine of the eleven chapters of the previous volume, which brought Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan to London – where Conan becomes engaged in a hunt for Sherlock Holmes-themed clues. A hunt leading him straight to Wimbledon where he has to prevent the public assassination of the Queen of the Grass Court, Minerva Glass.

Plot-wise, the last act of this story is pretty standard for the series with Conan having to locate the culprit in a capacity-filled stadium, which has been done before, but the tennis setting provided a way to make this culprit stick out "like a sore thumb." However, the plot played second fiddle here to the main-characters and particular the story-line between Jimmy/Conan and Rachel.

The second story begins with Conan and Anita discussing the former's adventure in England. Interestingly, Anita addresses my complaint mentioned in my review of volume 71.

I can see how it made sense to keep Jimmy's predicament a secret from Rachel when the series began, but, in the story, more than two years have passed and the secret has become a story-telling device to create these needlessly complicated personal situations – keeping Jimmy trapped between Rachel and Conan. Logically, she should have been told by now. Aoyama will probably resolve this problem by saying she knew all along and the final panel of the series will show them with their son who's a carbon-copy of Conan.

Anita reminds Conan what he has said about not allowing Rachel to get too close to him, because not being able to be with him would only make her unhappier. So he can't be in the spotlight and has "to hide in the wings until the right moment," but the brats of the Junior Detective League overheard them and misinterpreted it as a suggestion to play a game of hide and seek. One of them knows an abandoned building, scheduled to be demolish, perfect for such a game. During the game, they get "an emergency earthquake alert" on their cellphones and they hear someone knocking out the emergency-code for "Rescue Needed," which leads them to two shady looking construction workers. Conan concludes "a person in need of rescue" from kidnappers is trapped somewhere inside the mostly empty building.

Generally, I dislike kidnapping stories because they're seldom any good, or memorable, but there are two reasons why this story is one of the exceptions. Firstly, the clever way in which Conan and the Junior Detective League used their personalized cellphones to squeeze out of a very tight corner. Secondly, the identity of the kidnap victim came as a genuine surprise. I honestly didn't expect that twist!

The second, complete story of this volume brings Conan, Rachel and Serena Sebastian to Teitan University, renamed here as Baker University, where Richard Moore giving a lecture, but "he's just drooling over college girls" and a group of Film Majors offers them a more palpable sight – a haunted house exhibition. Students are working on a horror movie as their project thesis and want to make it "as realistic as possible." So they created a house of corpses and want to test it on the girls, because Rachel and Serena have seen dead bodies before. The exhibition does what it intended to do... scaring the girls.

One of the film students, Anna Tadami, is strapped to an operating-table and surrounded by dummy surgeons, but, when they walked pass this scene, she started "trembling and thrashing her legs." She shook so hard "it rattled the bed." Anna Tadami was dead! There's "an almond smell" at her mouth and "the remains of capsule between her teeth," which means suicide as Rachel and Serena saw nobody else standing around the operating-table. So a quasi-impossible crime with an obvious murderer, a hack stage-trick and a motive that felt tacked on resulting in an average story at best.

The third case is another kidnap story, of sorts, but this time without Conan, because he's in bed with a serious cold. Conan was supposed to meet the Junior Detective League at Amy's house to play karuta, a Japanese card game, but, when Conan is video chatting with them on his cellphone, a young boy knock's at the door of Amy's department – screaming that there are "bad people" he doesn't know in his apartment. Masao is a boy with a reputation in the apartment building for playing pranks and telling lies, but cries he doesn't know the man and woman who introduce themselves as his parents. And he's dragged back into his apartment. Conan tells them to call the police, but they decide to investigate Amy's neighbors for themselves.

At the heart of the story is a coded message Masao surreptitiously sends under the nose of the culprits to the Junior Detective League over a game of karuta, but this is one of those language-based codes. So practically unsolvable for most non-Japanese speaking readers. Not a bad story, but a pretty minor one.

Sadly, the last chapter is the beginning of new story that will continue in volume 73 and the premise is intriguing, to say the least! Richard Moore is hired to protect the matriarch of the Hoshina family, Rukako Hoshina, who's obsessed with clocks and the ancestral manor house is ticking to the brim with clocks – even has a clock tower. Rukako Hoshina received a death threat accusing her disrespecting "the flow of time" and she'll die at the time she "came into this world." The letter was signed with the moniker, The Guardian of Time. I can't wait to read the rest of the story!

So, all things considered, this volume can be summed up as an average entry with only one good story and the conclusion of the London-case as its sole standout moment. I don't think it helped either that it ended with a teaser of a case that already promises to be much better than the three complete cases that preceded it. Oh, well, here's hoping for the best in the next volume!

The Mystery of the Hidden Room (1922) by Marion Harvey

I've a long-standing affinity for the American detective story and in particular those who belong to the Van Dine School of Mystery Fiction, which was founded by S.S. van Dine when he introduced his snobby, upper-class sleuth, Philo Vance, who appeared in twelve novels – starting with The Benson Murder Case (1926) and ended with the partially-finished The Winter Murder Case (1939). A series that served as a model or influenced many of my favorite American mystery writers. Such as Harriette Ashbrook, Clyde B. Clason, Stuart Palmer, Ellery Queen, Kelley Roos, Herbert Resnicow and Roger Scarlett.

So my curiosity was piqued when I stumbled across a potential forerunner of the Van Dine-Queen School detective story.

Marion Harvey was a Brazilian-born American lawyer and, unlike the name suggests, a man who turned to writing detective stories, stage plays and pulp fiction, but the only magazine publication I was able to find is the novel-length "The Gramercy Park Mystery" – published in the December, 1929, issue of Complete Detective Novel Magazine. Nothing else is known about this elusive writer except that he penned at least six detective novels during the 1920s and two mystery plays in the 1930s.

Three of Harvey's mystery novels were listed by the late Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991), of which two are the extremely rare, hard-to-get The Arden Mystery (1925) and The House of Seclusion (1925). Fortunately, Harvey's first locked room mystery is now in the public domain and you can grab a digital-copy from the Project Gutenberg website.

The Mystery of the Hidden Room (1922) looks to also have been Harvey's debut as a novelist and is narrated by a young stockbroker, Carlton Davies, who recently had his heart broken when his fiance, Ruth Trenton, married the director of the Darwin Bank, Philip Darwin. But money was not the reason behind their break. Ruth has a "handsome, spoiled" brother, Richard, who "she had mothered almost from the time he had been born" and had been given everything on silver platter by his doting father. So no wonder Richard possessed "no moral strength" to resist temptation as an adult and, under Darwin's tutelage, he became "a devotee of the twin gods of gambling and of drink" – which had a dramatic consequences when they visited "a questionable gambling den." During an argument, a drunk Richard pulled a gun and killed someone.

As the shell-casings were still falling to the floor, Darwin extinguished the lights and in the confusion got Richard back home. And his father packed him out West.

There was, however, a price to pay as the devil demanded his due. Darwin had always admired Ruth and was "quite willing" to rat out her brother to the police unless she agreed to become his bride. Reluctantly, she acquiesced and Davies promised to honor her decision. They agreed to sever all ties with one another.

Six months later, Davies receives a note with a brief, but urgent, message from Ruth, "will you return at once with my chauffeur? I need you." So he immediately sets off to the New York mansion of the Darwins. A black bulk of a house, "like some Plutonian monster," modeled after "a type of dwelling" popular when the English held a sway over the Island of Manhattan and basically "a replica of the relic of a bygone era" – reminiscent of the dark mansion stories by Van Dine and Scarlett. Ruth lived a lonely, miserable existence since she got married and in a weak moment she had written a love-letter to Davies, but tore the letter up and threw it away. However, Darwin got his hands on the letter and has threatened Davies. This is why Ruth summoned him to their home.

Davies tells Ruth to get him the letter from Darwin's study, "the den of a sybarite," but this is the point where everything goes horribly wrong.

As the old time-piece in the hall announced the midnight hour, the sharp report of a gunshot emanated from the direction of the study and Davies finds Ruth standing over the body of her husband with a gun in her hand. Davies had seen Ruth enter the study and had the only door under constant observation. The windows were not only securely locked on the inside, but were equipped with burglar-alarms! Nobody else had been in the room unless this person vanished into thin air after shooting Darwin. So nobody, except for Ruth, could have pulled the trigger and the jury of the inquest, covering six chapters, found that "the deceased had come to his death by a pistol shot fired at the hands of his wife." A trial date is set giving Davies only two months to prove her innocent.

This brings Davies to the doorstep of a gentleman detective, Graydon McKelvie, whose hobby is solving problems of crime and only takes cases he finds interesting or pose a challenge. McKelvie is a devotee of Sherlock Holmes (referred to as a real person) and, as to be expected, he makes such comments "you see and hear without observing" or "eliminate the impossible, you see" – even performing Holmes' mind-reading trick on Davies. But as Van Dine remarked in The Great Detective Stories (1927), "the deductive work done by Graydon McKelvie is at times extremely clever." McKelvie makes his entrance in Chapter XIV, but hits the ground running with a list of fifteen questions that need to be answered in order to name "the person who committed the crime."

However, while the story acknowledges Sherlock Holmes and M. Leqoc, McKelvie is the prototype of the American detective-character from the Golden Age.

There are the obvious features of the Van Dine school: an upper-class, amateur detective operating in New York City and on friendly terms with an official homicide detective, Jones. A welcome departure from the stubborn, bumbling Lestrade-type of policemen from the Gaslight-era of crime fiction. The scene of the crime is closely scrutinized and the peculiar architecture of the house plays a key-role in the solution, but more on that in a moment. Another interesting aspect is how McKelvie's investigative-style sometimes anticipated Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason (e.g. taking a peek inside a locked strong-box stored in a bank vault without a warrant).

The intricate, maze-like scheme of The Mystery of the Hidden Room is indeed delightfully complicated with multiple twists and shines with the first glimmers of the Golden Age, but the plot is not a flawless diamond. Firstly, there's the titular room that gives the locked room a disappointing explanation. Harvey gave the hidden room a little more thought than merely placing an invisible door inside the room, but not the kind of solution you want to find in a locked room mystery. Secondly, in order to succeed, the murderer had to take an enormous risk that would not have dissipated along with the gun smoke, which would have collapsed the whole scheme had only person, such as Ruth, had noticed it – which was a very serious risk. This is one of the things that the murderer look like a hard-to-take, omniscient arch-manipulator.

Finally, as Kate of Cross Examining Crime pointed out in her 2015 review, The Mystery of the Hidden Room is probably what Monsignor Ronald Knox had in mind when he compiled his Decalogue, because the story breaks a number of his commandments.

So the plot is unquestionable flawed with a disappointing locked room-trick, but there's more to the plot than mere a shooting a locked and watched room. There are many complications, clues and an odd bunch of suspects to content with. How did a decorative lamp in the study turned itself on? Was there a second bullet and what happened to it? Who's the woman supposedly to be the sole beneficiary under Darwin's new will? Why did he kept a stoneless ring in his safe? Who unlocked the door and why did one of the suspects commit suicide? These clues have to be fitted to a cast of suspect befitting such a dark, gloomy place. A disinherited nephew, Lee Darwin. A prowling, eavesdropping private-secretary, Claude Orton, who has no problem with helping the police strapping Ruth to the electric chair. A brother-in-law who already has committed a murder and a father-in-law who had been humiliated.

Harvey genuinely wanted to give his readers an opportunity to solve the problems for themselves and you can read, between the lines, how he tried to spell out the truth without giving anything away in an too obvious a fashion. Only problem is that the plot is perhaps a little too involved to expect the readers to figure out everything for themselves, which isn't helped by that previously mentioned risk that needed an illogical line of reasoning to arrive there. Nonetheless, the solution to the who-and why were much better than the potential suicide-disguised-as-murder-trick that some of the clues began to suggest.

So, on a whole, I tremendously enjoyed The Mystery of the Hidden Room, in spite of some of its shortcomings, which is still very readable today and full of historical interest. A detective novel showing the genre transitioning from the Gaslight-era of Conan Doyle to the (American) Golden Age of Van Dine and Queen.

The Triple Bite (1931) by Brian Flynn

Last year, the indispensable Dean Street Press reissued ten detective novels of one of the unsung, long-forgotten mystery writers of the past, Brian Flynn, who was unearthed by the Puzzle Doctor, Steve Barge, when he found a copy of The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) among his Christmas presents in 2016 – he has been beating Flynn's drum ever since. Fast-forward two years, Flynn got his long overdue reprints and these new editions came with introductions written by the newly-minted crime fiction historian, Steve Barge.

The Triple Bite (1931) is the tenth novel in the Anthony Bathurst series and, "out of all of the first ten Brian Flynn novel," it was by far the rarest of the lot. A novel which had never before been reprinted and only a single copy was located outside of the British Library! So this might be the rarest title DSP has reprinted to date.

The introduction aptly describes The Triple Bite as a "love-letter to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" with a mysterious cipher, hidden treasure and a villain who could have been member of The Red-Headed League.

Young Cecilia Cameron is the story's narrator and she relates the unbelievable events that took place in "a big, ten-roomed bungalow" in Dallow Corner, Sussex, which Colonel Ian Cameron was prompted to buy by a friend of his son, Nigel Strachan – who had a very peculiar reason for doing so. Strachan is a barrister and six months ago, he was called upon to defend "a born thief," Sam Trout, who got a reduction in sentence. Something the old career criminal gratefully remembered when he was dying of pneumonia. Trout wrote a letter to Strachan telling him he had been one of only two people who ever lifted a finger to help him and gives them "an equal chance of a fortune."

An opportunity encoded in "a piece of doggerel" and the only part Strachan had been able to decipher is a location, Dallow Corner, which is why he brought the bungalow to Colonel Cameron's attention. But there are pirates on the horizon!

Colonel Cameron and Cecilia caught whispered fragments of a conversation in a restaurant mentioning Dallow Corner and salmon-fishing, but there's not a stretch of water big enough for such a thing as salmon-fishing within ten miles of Dallow Corner. Someone else is looking for Sam Trout's fortune is confirmed when they're visited by a red-headed giant of a man, "Flame" Lampard, who introduced himself as "the bearer of a warning" and advises Colonel Cameron to immediately leave Dallow Corner. Otherwise, it may be too late. What treads on the heels of this ominous visit is best described as a siege on the bungalow and echoes the plot of Flynn's tremendously enjoyable Invisible Death (1929).

Shots are fired at the bungalow in the middle of the night. The housekeeper is tied to a chair and gagged, while the intruders excavated the garden, which culminated in the apparently death by heart failure of Colonel Cameron – whose body was found lying against the hedge between the bungalow and their neighbor's house. Cecilia is convinced her uncle had been murdered and "send for Anthony Bathurst first thing in the morning." Bathurst not only agrees with her opinion Colonel Cameron had been murdered, but found the page that had been torn from his notebook curled against the hedge. A piece of paper with the dying man's "last message to the world" scrawled on it, "for God's sake, mind the red thing that flies." More than once, this last message is referred to as "the dying message of Colonel Cameron."

Brian Flynn

The dying message is a trope closely associated with Ellery Queen, but this association began with two novels post-dating The Triple Bite, namely The Tragedy of X (1932) and The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933), which makes Flynn's novel one of the earliest examples of the dying message story. There are, however, a number of short stories and novels predating The Triple Bite, but I believe Flynn was the first to use the phrase "dying message." Interestingly, Flynn was perhaps the first to use another trope inextricably linked to another American writer, S.S. van Dine, who introduced to concept of a collector's private museum in The Bishop Murder Case (1929). Something that became somewhat of a trope with Van Dine and his followers, such as Clyde B. Clason (e.g. The Man from Tibet, 1938), but Flynn was there first with The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928). Flynn was a little ahead of the curve when it came to the Golden Age mindset!

A second, typical American aspect of The Triple Bite are the brief, but unmistakable, "Had-I-But-Known" moments in Cecilia's narrative. A very specific brand of suspenseful mysteries almost exclusively written by American female novelists such as Mary Robert Rinehart and Dorothy Cameron Disney.

You can find the clearest example of HIBK in the final lines of the opening chapter when Cecilia writer, "had I known, however, what lay in store for us," from "the coming of "Flame" Lampard" to "the night of horror in the darkened room" when the last scene was enacted, she would not have responded so flippantly to salmon-fishing. So not style you expect to find among the works of a male, British mystery writer who debuted in the 1920s.

Anyway, Colonel Cameron's dying message is one of the practically unusable clues to the fanciful method employed to dispose of two men in the story, which also includes "the puffy pink marks" on the bodies, a pink smear of blood and "a ghastly whirring kind of noise" – like "something was zipping through the air." I gathered from these clues and the many allusions to fishing that the murderer was fooling around with a rod and a hook smeared with some kind of exotic poison, but the solution was something else altogether! John Norris described this utterly bizarre method as something "right out of the weird menace pulps." I agree!

Fascinatingly, the method was based on an obscure line from a Sherlock Holmes story, which helped Bathurst tumble to the solution, but he refers to Holmes and Dr. Watson as actual people. And not as fictional characters like he did in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927). Flynn was such a massive fanboy!

The who-and why were much easier spotted and the coded message, or parts of it, can be deciphered by the reader, but everything is draped in the style of the 19th century detective story and pulp-thrillers. Some bits of the plot might be hard to swallow for the Golden Age purists, but The Triple Bite stands as a warm homage to Conan Doyle and is as enjoyable as the previously mentioned Invisible Death. Just pure, pulpy fun! I think pulp readers and Sherlockians will get the most out of this classic rendition of their favorite reading material.

Well, this leaves me with only two more of Flynn's novels, The Five Red Fingers (1929) and The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1930). So, hopefully, we don't have to wait too long for DSP's second serving of Anthony Bathurst cases.