Sleightly Lethal (1986) by Patrick A. Kelley

Patrick A. Kelley is, or was, an American magician from Altoona, Pennsylvania, who performed magic tricks at banquets and children's parties in the 1970s, but I had to dig deep to find that obscure, biographical detail in the internet archive of the Altoona Mirror – advertising as "Magician Entertainment" in the August 11, 1975, edition. Ten years later, Kelley had gone from doing magic tricks at children's parties to writing detective novels about a down-on-his-luck magician, Harry Colderwood.

During a brief period between 1985 and 1988, Kelley wrote a handful of detective novels that all have "sleightly" in their title, beginning with Sleightly Murder (1985), but these books have done very little to immortalize his name.

I stumbled across the series by pure chance! You can only find most of the book covers and a list of titles online, but barely anything about their content or any reviews with exception of a 2014 interview, "Getting to Know Tracy Revels," in which Revels names Harry Colderwood as one of her favorite detective-characters – praising the books as "really clever." So, the Colderwood series is surprisingly obscure considering it was published relatively recently and had a magician-detective as its protagonist. A normally popular figure in the traditional detective story.

So the series was probably garbage, I reasoned, but the book covers were very close in style to those of another, 1980s writer of traditional, puzzle-oriented detective novels, Herbert Resnicow (see The Gold Deadline, 1984). Some of the titles and capsule plot-descriptions suggested they could be impossible crime novels not listed in either Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) or Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). Sleightly Invisible (1986) is the most obvious example with the usual shenanigans during a séance, but the title that caught my eye was Sleightly Lethal (1986). A book with an intriguing cover showing a clown stuffed into a safe and telling the reader "it was murder, not magic, that put a dead clown in a locked safe."

Sleightly Lethal is listed online as the third title in the series, but it could just as well be the second title, because Kelley wrote two Harry Colderwood mysteries in 1986, paperback originals, and my edition only gives Sleightly Murder under "other Avon books by." No mention of Sleightly Invisible. Anyway...

Just five years ago, Harry Colderwood was a relatively successful magician, but the graph of his career "shows a steady downhill trend" and had the graph been a cardiogram, he would have been "legally dead" two years ago – a nasty rumor has it he's now doing trade shows! A poor man's Alexander Blacke who travels the country in a ramshackle van loaded with magic tricks that are starting to break down. But when he sees an old friend on TV making a dire prediction, he races with the van to an old, magic-themed hotel in Roselle, Maryland.

Marcus Spillman is known to the world as Quimp the Clown and Colderwood catches an interview with him on television, in which he says to have no believe in psychics and fortune-tellers, but predicts that "Quimp is not long for this world" and he won't be checking out of the Fitch Hotel alive. Somebody is planning to do away with him!

Fitch Hotel is owned by Jack O'Connell, "a magic-lover," who turned the hotel into "a gathering place for magicians" overflowing with conjurers "pulling bouquets from nowhere, finding chosen cards" and "burning and restoring borrowed handkerchiefs." The Fitch is a never-ending magic convention and, once a year, the hotel hosts Magicade and Quimp holds the record for the most consecutive Magicade engagements, which is "the magic world's equivalent of an Oscar nomination." Unfortunately, the municipal council has condemned the whole block without exception and the hotel is in the process of closing down.

Portuguese edition

Colderwood arrives three days after the last Magicade at a partially closed and practically empty hotel, surrounded by torn down buildings, but just in time to be there when the hotel-safe is opened to reveal the body of a clown – crammed into the safe so tightly that knees touched chin. A clown who looks like the spitting image of Quimp. However, Marcus Spillman is very much alive and he has four people with him, dressed and made up as his clown persona, who are competing to become the next Quimp. So who was the clown in the safe? The dead man is identified as "a local punk," Perry Vaughn, but Sheriff Virgil Tarrant believes Vaughn had accidentally locked himself inside the safe during a botched burglary. Just one of those bizarre accidents under peculiar circumstances. Colderwood disagrees.

So, once again, the poor magician turns amateur detective and begins to poke around with an empty hotel and a clowning competition as a background, but a background with some complications.

One of the competitors is his former assistance and love-interest, Cate Fleming, who's the only person Colderwood trusted "to fire a .537 Magnum" in his face. But she's married now. Colderwood is also entangled in a friendly game of catch-me-if-you-can with a special field agent of the IRS, Jeffers, specialized in "tracking down hard-to-find citizens" and "serving them with audit notices." The so-called treasure room of the Fitch and a local serial murderer, christened The Soda Pop Killer, lurking in the background complete the mise-en-scène of the story.

The treasure room of the Fitch is a basement storage room filled with memorabilia and souvenirs left behind by magicians, which had become a tradition over the decades ("visit the Fitch and leave a piece") and the collection had become to big to keep on permanent display. I liked the scenes in which Colderwood was rummaging through the storage room, trying to figure out The Great Halsto's Mystic Box or watching a 1930s film reel of a comedy drunk-act, but particular appreciated when he came across a photo-album of the first Magicade and a picture of a famous Dutch magician, Fred Kaps – who's "pouring buckets of salt from an invisible shaker." His trademark trick!

Sleightly Lethal is a very specific, but kind of hard to describe, type of quasi pop-culture inspired mystery novel, often taking place during a convention, which were apparently popular during the 1980s. The story has a very similar feel to it as Bill Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981), Richard Purtill's Murdercon (1982) Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987), Richard A. Lupoff's The Comic Book Killer (1989) and Daniel Stashower's Elephants in the Distance (1989). I'm sure there are more.

However, Sleightly Lethal is not quite as good as some of its contemporaries and you blame that on how the plot-threads and clues were handled. Admittedly, the central idea with the dead clown in the safe was clever and somewhat original, especially how it played out, but the reader can't really piece it all together with the clues that were provided. And this took the punch out of the ending. So not exactly an example of the blazing surprise ending that makes the reader suddenly see the whole design.

I was slightly disappointed with the conclusion, lack of an impossible crime and that the story gave me no opportunity to shoehorn in a "Doink brah, you makin' kids cry, brah" reference, but Sleightly Lethal was still a fun and entertaining read. So I'll eturn to the series to see what Sleightly Invisible and Sleightly Deceived (1987) have to offer. Or what that extremely obscure, final novel, Sleightly Guilty (1988), is about.

Diving Death (1962) by Charles Forsyte

Last month, I reviewed Diplomatic Death (1962) by “Charles Forsyte," a shared penname of a husband-and-wife writing tandem, Gordon and Vicky Philo, who, regrettably, wrote only three, classically-styled detective novels and a standalone chase thriller that have a penchant for impossible crimes – published between 1961 and 1968. A surprisingly solid, ambitious and puzzle-oriented debut for the period that made me even more curious about their second detective novel.

Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), alternatively published as Dive into Danger, is the second appearance of Detective-Inspector Richard Left, of Special Branch, who had been "overworked to the point of exhaustion." So he was glad to finally go on a long-anticipated, much deserved holiday in the south of France.

Port-st-Pierre is a fishing village and a holiday resort where Left plans to do little more than relax, eat, swim and trying to avoid his fellow countrymen, but he's recognized by an old acquaintance, Sir Paul Pallett. A world-famous archaeologist who looks like "a more animated Churchill" and speaks (mostly) in telegraphic sentences ("Probably hopes to find a drowned city. Atlantis. Underwater archaeology. All my eye. Good excuse for undergraduates who want a holiday in the Mediterranean"). Sir Paul is not only a celebrated scholar, but a decidedly poor one as well and has to indulge the fancies of a rich, dilettante archaeologist with "intellectual pretensions," Dermot Wilson – who has assembled a respectable crew for an archaeological expedition at sea. An expedition scavenging the sea bottom around the recently uncovered, spongy remains of an ancient Greek shipwreck where Roman coins were found on a previous diving excursion.

Sir Paul was persuaded (read "cornered") to have a look at the site and arranged to have him picked the next day with a motor-boat, but nobody expected Left would be invited by the eminent scholar to come along with him. And unwittingly acts as the fuel powering the engine of the plot!

When they arrive on the spot, the crew aboard the anchored Knossos were getting ready to dive. So the three people on the motor-boat, Sir Paul, Left and the boatman, had to stay on there and watch the divers plunge below the surface to the wreck. An area marked by a couple of buoys moored about a hundred yards apart. The minutes leisurely ticked away when the body of Wilson comes bubbling to the surface with a steel harpoon projecting from a bloody patch on his chest! Left realizes that it will be hours before the French police can get to them, "evidence may have vanished by then," which prompts him to take charge of the investigation until the proper authorities arrive.

An investigation forcing Left "to follow the route that had just been taken by a corpse" and dive to "the muted two-colour world of the sea-bed" where he establishes the time of the murder and searches the bottom for clues – finding a used harpoon-gun, a weight belt and a small hole in the sea-bed. These diving scenes recall the underwater explorations from Vernon Loder's Death by the Gaff (1932) and Allan R. Bosworth's Full Crash Dive (1942), which helped make the book standout as something different from your average detective novel. And, here, it's an integral part of the puzzle-plot. But not the whole puzzle.

Left also to untie a tightly-knotted mess of alibis, motives and opportunities of the crew-members. A crew comprising of an experienced, much respected archaeologist, Edward Syce, who made "some unexpected finds on his digs." A younger, inexperienced, but brilliant archaeologist, Sidney Lockhead. The victim's "current girlfriend," the Honourable Julia Ferrers, who's the daughter of an impoverished Irish peer. A student of Wilson, Mary Lawton, who does his secretarial work and mechanic/diving expert, Joe Marshall. Only problem is that everyone has an alibi! The divers alibi each other and everyone on the surface have an alibi as unshakable as a bloodhound! So, where's the impossibility, you may ask? Diving Death qualifies as an impossible crime novel, but it's one of those stories in which the impossibility becomes apparent after the solution.

I compared Diplomatic Death with the detective novels and short stories by Clayton Rawson (stage illusion-inspired crime) and Peter Godfrey (setting), but Diving Death is more in line with Anthony Berkeley and Christopher Bush.

The multiple alibis and the importance of timing is what reminded me of Bush, but Forsyte's brilliant use of false-solutions and grand play on the fallible detective trope was pure Berkeley! Forsyte provided the reader with three false-solutions of which two are tightly intertwined, giving different perspectives to the same story, while a third accounted for the possibility of an outside killer – lovely foreshadowed in the third chapter. Even better is how Left blundered to the solution. Or, to be more precise, how his blundering affected and hampered reaching the correct solution earlier. Left has to pay the devil for his "unforgivable police sin," but, by that time, you probably feel too bad for him to laugh. The physical altercations also give the story a slightly hardboiled edge.

Nevertheless, it was his mistakes and blunders, in combination with the false-solutions, setting and technically-detailed underwater murder, that turned an otherwise routine plot into a first-class detective tale that, like its predecessor, stands out. This all makes for a very satisfying, puzzle-driven detective novel with a superb play on the fallible detective trope that helped to lift the plot above its normal status. My only piece of nitpicking this time is that it occurred to nobody that the harpoon could have been used to stab, instead of having been shot, which is what I expected until the empty harpoon-gun was found. So my expectation were thoroughly subverted.

So, yes, Diving Death comes highly recommended and particular to mystery readers who love their false-solutions, fallible detectives or picking apart alibis and stands as solid argument why these two unjustly forgotten mystery writers deserve to be reprinted.

A note for the curious: locked room murders and impossible crimes under water are relatively rare, but there are two finely-crafted examples that deserve a mention. Joseph Commings' 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones," collected in The Locked Room Reader (1968), in which a hard-hat diver is murdered while exploring a recently sunken shipwreck. The 15th episode of the Detective Academy Q anime-series, which deals with the body of a diver found in a locked cabin of a sunken ship and the underwater setting allowed for a new variation on an age-old locked room-trick.

Inspector De Klerck and the Diabolical Game (2020) by P. Dieudonné

Rechercheur De Klerck en het duivelse spel (Inspector De Klerck and the Diabolical Game, 2020) is the second novel in a brand new series of politieromans (police novels) written by a Dutch-born Canadian, Paul Dieudonné, who dedicated Rechercheur De Klerck en het doodvonnis (Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence, 2019) to the memory of the master of the Dutch politieroman, A.C. Baantjer – littering his stories with nods and winks to his work. Dieudonné is not the first writer to attempt to become the next Baantjer.

Towards the end of his life, Baantjer even tried to become the next Baantjer when he co-created the Bureau Raampoort-series with his former policeman colleague, Simon de Waal. Dieudonné already managed to stand out in this crowd with better writing, plots and an emerging presence of its own.

Inspector De Klerck and the Diabolical Game is set in the publishing world and Dieudonné thanked the people behind his own publisher, E-Pulp, whom told him about "the dark side of the book trade" and "most examples in this story were taken from life."

Inspector Lucien de Klerck, of the Rotterdam Police, is visited one evening by an "exceptionally beautiful" woman, named Laurette Kasemier, who's the hardworking owner of a small, independent publishing house, Amor Vincit Publishing – specialized in publishing romantic fiction. A tough job with "a very high risk of getting burned," financially, which is bad enough without being terrorized by a sleazy competitor. Stefan le Couvreur is the man behind Burgman & Pijffers, a publisher of pulp fiction, who has been waging a long-term, online guerrilla campaign against Amor Vincet. Every time Kasemier tries to promote her books, Le Couvreur is there with disparaging remarks and negative comments. And this sustained campaign has created "a cloud of damaging negativity" around her publications. Kasemier believes this harassment campaign was spurred on by her soon-to-be ex-husband.

There is, however, precious little De Klerck can do except advising Kasemier to have a good, openhearted conversation with Le Couvreur, because it's kind of difficult "to harass someone you know personally." A disgustingly European solution, I know. This is where the case would have ended for the police, but, two days later, De Klerck and Ruben Klaver are summoned to the scene of a gruesome murder.

Ewout van Bokhoven was a respectable notary/solicitor whose body was found in the sunroom of his house, slumped in an easy chair, with the back of a silver Parker pen protruding from the left eye socket – destroying the eyeball. On the table lay an old, yellowed paperback with a woman on the cover who's being menaced by a man with a crossbow, but, instead of an arrow, "there was a silver pen on the crossbow." A bizarre murder that becomes increasingly complicated when they discover that Van Bokhoven is the husband of the struggling publisher, Laurette Kasemier!

Baantjer's manuscript mystery novel

There are many potential suspects, plot-threads and red herrings to keep both the police and reader busy, which range from disgruntled, underpaid writers and dishonest representatives to angry clients and the neighbors of the victim. But most notable were the plot-thread concerning an unknown, recently surfaced manuscript from the hands of a famous pulp writer and the second and third murders.

Firstly, the well-known, but sadly fictitious, pulp writer is "Geoffrey Parker," a pseudonym of a Dutchman, Frederik Poleij, who made millions with his pulp stories about "the hero of the Chicago underworld," Don Fernando. Parker died in the 1980s and his publisher claimed an unpublished manuscript has turned up, but is this true, as it disappeared as quickly as it appeared! Secondly, the pulp novel left at the scene of the next murder is Rosina Tarne's You Murdered Me!!! One of John Russell Fearn's unpublished, long-lost manuscripts I talked about in The Locked Room Reader: A Return to the Phantom Library. An extremely obscure reference, perhaps a little too obscure for most Dutch readers, but I appreciated it. And it might be the first-ever reference in a detective story to Fearn.

The third and last murder, committed in the penultimate chapter, has a possibly new take on the problem of the cast-iron alibi, but, because it happened so late in the story, the alibi-trick felt underused.

However, the trick provides the bulk of the solution with an extra, crushing layer, which is always welcome. I would also welcome a future novel in this series with the title Rechercheur De Klerck en het onwrikbare alibi (Inspector De Klerck and the Unshakable Alibi). We're still shockingly low on Dutch detective novels with locked room murders, dying messages and unbreakable alibis.

Inspector De Klerck and the Diabolical Game showed tremendous improvement over Inspector De Klerck and the Death Sentence with a better realized milieu and a bigger pool of suspects, filled with red herrings, but the observant reader can spot the clues pointing straight in the direction of the murderer – only smudge is that you can't work out the exact details of the motive until the last leg of the story. But, if you worked out the who, you can make an educated guess in which direction the motive runs. I believe it helped that this second novel was more than a tribute to one of the greats. Dieudonné plays to Monk to Baantjer's Columbo with De Klerck series. Every one who has been weened on Baantjer will recognize the style of storytelling and characterization, but not too derivative that it can't stand on its own. That makes it a continuation, rather than a copy, of the traditional, Baantjer-style Dutch politieroman. So I can't wait to see what Dieudonné is going to do in his third novel.

Man of Steel: "The Super-Key to Fort Superman" (1958) by Jerry Coleman

So, as you've probably noticed, I've been on a locked room mystery bender since February and you can blame that on the publication of Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) coinciding with the holidays, which significantly increased the size of my wishlist and to-be-read pile – glutted with more impossible crime stories than usual. I'm now almost done with trimming down my stack of newly acquired locked room and impossible crime novels. You can expect a little more variety to return by the end of the month.

One of the more peculiar titles listed in Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement is entry 2215, "The Super-Key of Fort Superman," written by Jerry Coleman and published in Action Comics, #241, 1958. A 12-page comic book story in which Superman has to find out who, and how, someone gained access to the "locked and impenetrable" Fortress of Solitude.

The Fortress of Solitude is hidden "deep in the core of a mountainside" in "the desolate arctic waste" with the only entrance being a massive door, "sheltered from view by jutting rocks," which can only be opened with "a super-key that weighs tons" – a ponderous key only Superman can lift. There's no one on Earth who can get through "the solid rock out of which it is hewn." A quiet, solitary place where he "conducts incredible experiments, keeps strange trophies and pursues astounding hobbies." Sound like the next best thing to a Batcave, but the Fortress of Solitude is more like the lair of very dedicated stalker or serial killer.

Superman has rooms, or shrines, dedicated to his friends, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Batman, complete with wax dummy replicas, mementos and specially made gifts.

A personally strung-together rope of pearls for Lois, a handmade sports car for Jimmy and a robot-detective for Batman, but they'll only receive these gifts if, not when, Superman dies. What a dick! Lois and Jimmy will probably have been slumbering in their graves for decades by the time he gets a wrinkle or gray hair! Why not give Batman that super advanced, robot-detective to fight crime now? Apparently, Superman is also an abusive animal hoarder with a private, inter-planetary zoo, hoarded from across the galaxies, crammed inside tiny cages – one panel showing several, large-sized alien animals in crate-sized cages. Well, at the very least he keeps the cages in a "locked chamber" and the floors aren't littered with rotting, half-cannibalized carcasses of former pets. So there's that, I suppose.

Anyway, one day, when Superman returns to the Fortress of Solitude, he discovers someone has entered the fortress and left a taunting message on the wall, "I can enter and leave at will! Who am I? How can I do it? I dare you to find out!" This happens another two times with a third message saying, "Kent is Superman." No one else, except Superman, could have lifted the giant key, moved the door or plunge through fifty feet of solid rock. These are the only ways in, or out, of the fortress.

Superman briefly considers some possible solutions. Such as one of his inter-planetary pets "concealing superhuman powers and intelligence" or "that strange apparatus made by Luthor," which can summon beings from the fourth dimension, but the solution unveils a legitimate locked room-trick cleverly modeled around an idea nearly as old as recorded history. And it worked surprisingly well! I expected someone had simply crawled through the large, gaping keyhole, but the solution turned out to be so much better and the identity of Superman's "most cunning opponent" was a nice touch to the who-and why of the plot. A victory for brains over brawn!

I read "The Super-Key to Fort Superman" on the assumption it would be nothing more than an amusing curiosity of the impossible crime story, but didn't expect I would end up liking it. But here we are. More than worth the five minutes it takes to read the story.

Death Knell (1990) by Nicholas Wilde

Back in 2015, I picked up a copy of Robert Arthur's The Secret of Skeleton Island (1966) on a whim, but the book unlocked a whole new wing of the detective genre to me, a sub-genre known as juvenile mysteries, where many, often completely unknown, locked room mysteries remained hidden for years or decades – some of them proved to be quite good. Over the years, I found together "JJ," of The Invisible Event, some twenty of these junior locked room novels and short stories.

Just to give everyone who's unfamiliar with these elementary-and high-school equivalents of the impossible crime story an idea what to expect, I cited half-a-dozen of the more notable examples below.

A burglar inexplicably disappears from a house with all of its exits either locked or under observation (Enid Blyton's The Mystery of the Invisible Thief, 1950). A car racing down a dangerous, snaking mountain road vanishes into thin air (Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car, 1953). The theft of charity money from a locked school safe and the substitution of an empty box in a watched room (Norvin Pallas' The Locked Safe Mystery, 1954). A 3000-year-old mummy is heard whispering in an unknown, long-dead language (Arthur's The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, 1965). Paintings being moved around inside a locked, fortress-like studio (William Arden's The Mystery of the Shrinking House, 1972). An elderly, wheelchair bound woman seemingly evaporated from inside a moving, closely watched ski-lift gondola (Clue Club episode "The Real Gone Gondola," 1976).

So, as you can see, these junior detective novels rarely deal with murders, or even natural deaths, but are, as a rule, written around strange disappearances, thefts, buried treasure, haunted house, codes and gangs of criminals – omnipresent tropes of the juvenile detective story. This is not a rule cast in iron and exceptions can be found (e.g. Hugh Lloyd's The Clue at Skeleton Rocks, 1932). An exception that has become more common over the past thirty years.

JJ reviewed Robin Stevens' Murder Most Unladylike series on his blog, most notably the impossible crime novel First Class Murder (2015), while I discussed a Japanese light novel (young adult), Zaregoto series: kubikiri saikuru (Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle, 2002) by "NisiOisN," in which one of the victim's is decapitated inside a locked storage-room. So child-and teenage detectives meddling in murder cases, like good kids, have become more common and a staple of the Japanese anime/manga detective stories. Recently, I came across, what could be, the earliest example of a juvenile mystery novel with an adult plot when thumbing through my copy of Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). An adolescent locked room mystery that could have been penned by John Dickson Carr, Paul Halter or Derek Smith. Yes, it's that kind of a detective story!

Dutch edition

Nicholas Wilde's Death Knell (1990) is an ingenious, classically-styled impossible crime novel with a ghostly murder, steeped in history and legends, inside a sealed crypt with two crime scene maps and a handwritten chart – tabulating alibis, motives and opportunity. However, the book also has a warm, human touch and the teenage protagonists are realistic, convincingly drawn characters.

Tim is a 14-year-old boy from London who takes his friend, Jamie, along for the winter holiday at the old-world vicarage of his grandfather in Lychwood, Norfolk.

Wilde describes Norfolk as a place "not really seen at all, only guessed at" or "half-glimpses sometimes" when "you weren't quite looking" and "slipping into hiding when you looked too hard." A landscape that "watched you from behind your shoulder." So a perfect habitat for ancient legends and old ghost stories! During their holiday, Tim and Jamie are told the haunting story attached to the abandoned church, which dates back to the time of Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the late 1530s, the church was closed down as "a place of the old Catholic worship" and the priest was told to pack his bags, but the priest's old day-book contains three entries following the closure of the church. The first entry warned "God has departed from His house," but, "where God is not," there "shall another power enter in" and "take possession" – a second entry confirms a creature has "come forth from his hiding in the earth." What followed is a historical horror story.

On four, separate occasions, a single stroke of the bell emanates from the locked, deserted church and every time a villager died. One time, a shadowy creature was seen edging away from the church and vanishing into the locked crypt. So the bell was taken down and the middle of the floor of the crypt was sealed tightly with a giant stone resembling "an old, forgotten tombstone." And, as the story ended, the church-bell "tolled one single stroke."

So, when they go to investigate they discover that Old Jefford, who lives at the High House, lying face down on the floor of the crypt with a pick-ax and a bunch of keys next to him. The door is not only locked from the inside, but blocked with the giant stone! Nobody else had been hiding in the room and the crypt has no hidden tunnels, secret passageways or camouflaged doors. Only window is small, narrow with an inch thick glass that was closed when the murder was discovered. So how did the murderer get away? How was the large, unyielding stone lifted and hauled up a flight of stone stairs? The hole situation looked plain impossible!

The vicar believes it was an unfortunate accident, but the police is convinced it was murder and, for months, they uproot and disturb the normally quiet, everyday routine of the village. But by that time, the boys have returned to London and it would take a whole year before they were allowed to spend another (winter) holiday with Tim's grandparents, which is where the story becomes a little more than a well-done locked room mystery for teenagers – showing Tim's grandparents had "aged about twenty years in twelve months" under the strain. Tim and Jamie are determined to get to the bottom of the case, but this is easier said than done, because Jamie, as somewhat of an outsider, can "look at it like a maths problem." On the other hand, Tim is not as detached as his friend as the solution to this math problem will affect his grandparents, their friends and neighbors. A nicely-done, warm human touch to the characterization.

Unsurprisingly, the inquisitive, logical-thinking Jamie is the one who puts together all of the puzzle pieces, but they still work wonderfully together and their investigation in the still-falling snow is full of wintry charm. A search for the truth ending with a great scene in the dark crypt and an emotionally regretful confrontation with the murderer, which makes Wilde's Death Knell one of the best characterized, plotted and written juvenile mystery novels. But, for me, the absolute highlight of the story was the solution to the impossible murder inside the locked crypt and the explanation how a slab of stone came to rest against the door. A very original locked room-trick in the spirit of Carr, Halter and Smith. Seriously, all three of them could have written Death Knell and the book is a must-read for everyone who thinks highly of those lauded mystery writers. You won't be disappointed, I promise!

There are only two things marring the story. Firstly, the seasoned armchair detective will quickly suspect who's behind the murder, which still leaves you with having to pick apart how it was done and that's a bit trickier to do. Secondly, Wilde provided no explanation for the series of ghostly, seemingly impossible, deaths in the 1500s and only served as a ghost story to add some atmosphere to the scene of the crime. Somewhere, there's a good historical mystery hidden in that ghost story.

Putting my nitpicking aside, Wilde's Death Knell is one of the best written and now one of my favorite juvenile detective novels with an a well-imagined, excellently executed locked room-trick worthy of the grand masters of the impossible crime genre. Good, believable characterization and solid storytelling. What a shame Wilde didn't write more of them!

A note for the curious: I read Death Knell in English, but discovered that the book had been translated in Dutch, under the title Doodsklok (Death Clock or Death Bells), but I think Zielenrust would have been a better title. A literal translation of zielenrust is soul rest, but peace of mind would be a more accurate translation and would fit the slightly haunted ending of the story.

Away Went the Little Fish (1946) by Margot Bennett

Margot Bennett was a Scottish author, copywriter and scenarist, who produced a number of screenplays for the 1960s BBC adaptation of Maigret, but she also contributed short stories to Lilliput Magazine, wrote an apparently well-known science-fiction novel (The Long Way Back, 1954) and a number of now largely forgotten detective novels – two of which featured her short-lived series-character, Captain John Davies. When they were first published in the 1940s, Bennett was most earnestly praised and criticized by one of the Golden Age luminaries, Anthony Boucher.

British edition

Boucher reviewed Bennett's debut novel, Time to Change Hats (1945), in The San Francisco Chronicle (collected in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-47, 2009), which he commended for its "unobtrusively witty, sly and delightful" dialogue and characterization. But added that the plot has "the English endlessness of a Miles Burton" with "an anything but a watertight solution." Boucher thought her second novel, Away Went the Little Fish (1946), was "far better plotted" without losing any of the rich, delightful writing and wit of her debut.

What transplanted Bennett's Away Went the Little Fish from my never-ending wishlist to the peaks of my to-be-read pile, is its inclusion in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). My only problem was tracking down an affordable copy.

Away Went the Little Fish has long been out-of-print and secondhand copies have become scarce over the decades. So imagine my surprise when discovering that the book had been translated in Dutch, titled Waar bleef het visje? (Where Did the Fish Go?), as part of the equally obscure, short-lived Pyramide zakromans (Pyramid Pockets) series – published between 1949 and 1950. A copy of this translation was a lot easier to get than an original English edition.

The cover of my Dutch edition announces Away Went the Little Fish as a "humoristische speurdersroman" ("a humorous detective novel") and Bennett's comedic approach to the detective story is comparable with Edmund Crispin's satirical mystery novels (c.f. Buried for Pleasure, 1948), but with the clever, technically-sound plots of The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), Swan Song (1947) and The Long Divorce (1952). Yes, those also happen to be three of Crispin's most accomplished locked room mysteries!

Captain John Davies' personal file had been misplaced, presumably lost forever, in the maze-like archives of the Ministry of War and promptly placed in the wrong folder when it resurfaced, which assigned as captain of "a well-nigh non-existent army unit" stationed in Wetherfold – a stately village forty miles from London. When he arrived in Wetherford, he choose private quarters over been billeted in a wing of "the fifth oldest and second ugliest castle in England." And now lives in fear of the social tendencies of his landlady, Mrs. Cole. This was shaping up to be his life, for the foreseeable future, until an auction and murder humorously disrupted the routine of Wetherford.

Dutch edition

Wetherford is buzzing with "the excitement of an approaching circus" over the estate auction of the contents of the home of the late meat pie king, Seward Corker, which provides the book with its most satirical scenes. Most notably the scene in which several "bargain-hunters" feverishly bid on a giant, mahogany-wood wardrobe that "could be sold as an emergency home in some places," even though they have no room for it, or an old set of copper fire-dogs. But the auction takes a turn for the worst when a bridal chest is carried out with the body of a local smut writer crammed inside.

Raphael Sands was a writer of ill-repute who "wrote 100.000 salacious, but very profitable, words" and achieved a popularity of "the most dubious kind," but his personality was as unpleasant as his books. So the person who split his skull with a tomahawk was seen by some as a public benefactor.

Captain Davies has helped bring a murderer to justice before and is hired by the victim's wife, Vicky, to keep her out of the hands of the police, which means he not only has to wrestle with his feelings for the beautiful widow, but tackle a cast of slightly cracked suspects – who all have their own peculiarities. Such as a missionary doctor, Miss Ida Clarke, who begins most of her sentences with "when I was in Africa." A reclusive scientist, known as "de Tijd-Techniker" ("The Time-Technician"), who's working on a secret super-weapon (a death ray or an antidote to the atom bomb). A local physician, Dr. Hooper, who wants to become Harley Street boffin specialized in rheumatism, because you can't cure it and that means there's bread in rheumatism. There's an old, scandal-prone army major, Broome, who's dragged into the case and the smart, 10-year-old daughter of Mrs. Cole, Jodie, who seems to know something about the murder. But she closely guards her secret.

Even the old-fashioned, less-than-perfect translation can darken the bright, sparkling comedic tone of Bennett's storytelling and characterization, but Boucher was right that Away Went the Little Fish is too long and too digressive. But "a good thing is a good thing" even "if there's too much of it." So, while the story is overwritten in parts, the various plot-strands stuck together nicely with a logical and satisfying solution with some good clueing. Particularly the titular clue of the fish, which actually cut the number of potential suspects. What about the locked room, you ask?

French edition

Away Went the Little Fish is a genuine locked room mystery, but the impossible crime aspect is a little underplayed. However, it's not without interest to the fanatical locked room reader/impossible crime fiend. Bennett provided us with one of those rare, but delightful, two-pronged impossibilities.

One of the impossibilities is the question how the murderer could have struck down his victim in full view of the visitors, on viewing day, before hiding the body and weapon under similar circumstances, but this plot-thread will eventually give the murderer away to the observant, suspicious-minded reader – some of whom will no doubt spot one of the tale-tell clues. Second impossibility is the possible, inexplicable entering, or exiting, of the house after it had been securely locked-up for the night. The solution to the problem of the locked-up house is of such blinding simplicity that you have to wonder why nobody else has thought of it before or since then. Not at all what I expected! A clever little locked room-trick and criminally underplayed here.

A note for the curious: when I finish a novel or short story listed in Robert Adey or Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders, I go to the back to see if they have anything to say on the locked room-trick. There were no additional comments this time, but Adey, or Skupin, only described one of the two tricks. So, even if you can't contain your curiosity, you still have to track down a copy to learn the locked house-trick. :)

So, on a whole, Bennett's Away Went the Little Fish is an amusing, if slightly overwritten, lighthearted take on the British village mystery reminiscent of Crispin's comedic detective stories with a dash of Michael Innes and a clever, well put-together plot. A highly recommendable mystery novel that deserves to be reprinted. Are you reading this, Dean Street Press?