Detective Conan: Who's the Boss?

Some weeks ago, I discussed Tetsuya Ayukawa's The Red Locked Room (2020) and ended the review with the promise to post my fan theory regarding the secret identity of the leader of the Black Organization, which is the red-thread running through the main storyline of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed – published outside of the English-speaking world as Detective Conan. Mild spoilers ahead!

I'm currently at vol. 73 and wanted to bridge the gap with vol. 74 by rereading and reviewing the landmark story, The Sunset Manor Case, from vol. 30. A story that takes place in palatial, Western-style manor house where six detectives have gathered to solve a decades old mystery and getting murdered. I'm not far enough in the series to officially know that the elusive boss made an appearance, of sorts, in that story, but bits and pieces have been spoiled to me over the years. And when going through the story, it suddenly occurred to me who the boss could be. A character who shrewdly cloaked himself in someone else's feathers, but not in the way long-time readers of the series might assume.

First, I've to get those annoying, but necessary, spoilers out of the way. Continue to read at your own risk. The reader has been warned!

On December 13, 2017, Gosho Aoyama revealed that the boss is, or was, the multi-millionaire who owned Sunset Manor, Renya Karasuma, who "died half a century ago under mysterious circumstances" and, if he's still alive, he would be over a 140-years-old – suggesting he was the first one to rejuvenate. And assumed a new identity. Just like Jimmy/Conan in vol. 1. Very likely, he has appeared more prominently under that identity and has interacted with Conan. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that this identity had already been decided on when the series started with the idea existing some time before the first chapter was published.

So, if you take a look at the earliest characters Aoyama created, one character stands out as a possible candidate to be revealed as the rejuvenated boss. A character who did not originate in Detective Conan and would not appear in the series until that important story in vol. 30. I'm talking about the great teenage detective and arch rival of Kaito KID, Saguru Hakuba! Admittedly, I've only so-called "psychological clues" and a bit of educated guesswork to give as evidence, but they make sense to me. You can decide for yourself.

Saguru Hakuba: "Do you have any proof of that, Tom?"

Renya Karasuma is depicted in vol. 30. as an ominous silhouette with a pet crow perched on his left shoulder and, considering how he has clung to life, the passage of time is likely to great concern to him. Hakuba is hyper-conscience of the flow of time and can note time down to the millisecond, which is quite a developed sense of time for a 17-year-old. Something you would expect from a much older man whose "mind time" quickened its pace as he started to grow older. Since it's very possible Renya rejuvenated more than once, his "mind time" could have developed to the point where he's not only aware of the minutes and seconds ticking away, but the milliseconds as well – making it all the more interesting they appeared in vol. 30. A story in which clocks and outward appearances were integral to revealing the secret of Sunset Manor. You could read it as a metaphorical clue that someone more brighter and appealing was hidden behind that dark silhouette. This leads me to what is perhaps the most tangible clue.

Aoyama is very fond of parallel, or mirrored, characterization that he primarily reserves for his main and recurring characters. Jimmy/Conan and Kaitou KID are the most obvious example of this. But if you accept Hakuba and Renya are one and the same person, you can see this mirror approach to characterization all over their double identities.

I believe the most blatant clue is Renya's depiction, in vol. 30, as a dark silhouette with a black crow on his shoulder and Hakuba debuted in that same story carrying his pet hawk, Watson. Crows and hawks are natural enemies! Renya and Hakuba also mirror each other outwardly, an old, Moriarty-like master criminal and a young, Sherlock Holmes-inspired detective, but apparently, Renya tends to overthink his schemes – which makes him prone to mistakes. If my idea is correct, you can see this mistake reflected in his disguise.

Jimmy and Conan

A disguise that was put on a little too thick when he debuted, in Magic Kaitou, wearing a cape and deerstalker, which he later ditched, but could indicate Aoyama had already decided to make him the boss in Detective Conan. Renya is based on Professor Moriarty. So why not make him pose like a young detective who used to dress up like Sherlock Holmes who has the Japanese Arsène Lupin as his nemesis, which also gives him a double-layered motive to hunt down the KID. Firstly, KID is the kind of character who could become a potential threat to his organization and, one way or another, has to be eliminated. Secondly, a long-standing rivalry with a master criminal cements his position as one of the good guys. Thirdly, it would be a masterstroke to hide your main villain in another series and only have him appear in the main series as a novelty, crossover character to make some of the bigger stories even more special. It would be one of the greatest play on the least-likely-suspect!

There is, however, a weakness in my theory: Hakuba has two known relatives, a father and uncle, who can only be explained as members of the organization posing as relatives and help prop up his false identity. I know this is stretching things, but remember Renya has the resources and time to create such an elaborate identity that he could (literally) grow into over the years. And the relatives hold positions in society that can be very handy to a criminal organization. Hakuba father is the Superintendent General of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department and his uncle is the owner of a research laboratory, which is another aspect that could be tied to the main storyline of Detective Conan.

When you take all of this together, there's one more thing that stands out as a potential clue. As previously mentioned, Hakuba made his first appearance, in Detective Conan, in the Sunset Manor Case and remarked that, "after 40 years," he was "finally able to step inside the scene of the tragedy" he had "long heard of only in frightened whispers" – not that he had never been inside before. And that the decades-old tragedy was hardly his "first reason for coming." In the story, his reason for being there is Kaitou KID, but if Hakuba is Renya, his remarks meant something very differently.

So what do you make of my theory? Do you think its close to the truth or just another internet fan theory that will turn out to be completely wrong? This is one post I would very much like some feedback on.

If this post happens to attract Detective Conan readers, I reviewed volumes 38-73 under the Gosho Aoyama tag. I also discussed two brilliantly original impossible crime episodes, The Case of the Seance Double Locked Room and The Cursed Mask Laughs Coldly, and compiled a list with my favorite locked room mysteries from the manga series. Occasionally, I dip into The Kindaichi Case Files or Q.E.D., but the primary focus of the blog is on classic, or neo-classical, detective stories and novels. That where I'll return to with my next post. So stay tuned.

The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) by Christopher Bush

The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) is the 49th Ludovic Travers novel by Christopher Bush, now "an Elder Statesman of Murder," while Travers has completed his transition from an amateur detective to a genteel private investigator with a controlling interest in the Broad Street Detective Agency, but this late novel hearkens back to the quiet, rural village mysteries of previous decades – rife with blackmail, gossip and murder. Something very different from the post-war malaise or the seedier murders found in The Case of the Fourth Detective (1951) and The Case of the Amateur Actor (1955).

The Case of the Flowery Corpse begins with Travers driving down to roads of rural Suffolk, where he was born, to spend a belated holiday with an old college friend, Sir Henry Morle, who bought a little place in the village of Marstead. When he was close to being lost, Travers was overtaken on the road by a reckless driver who must have been either "drunk or mad." So he was not surprised to find the car ahead of him "piled up against a scrub oak in the hedge" with its front in shambles and the driver without a heartbeat.

An unfortunate, if unsurprising, roadside accident without an apparent hint of foul play, but a closer examination and a strange coincidence turns Travers' vacation into a busman's holiday.

Norman Ranger is the name of the dead driver, "virtually the stage type of Irishman," who deliberately set out to to ingratiate himself with the villagers, but, once accepted, suddenly changed his behavior and "had made himself objectionable to practically everybody" – while never divulging a single thing about his past or the source of his income. Curiously, on the night he got killed, someone tried to burglarize his home and that's quite a rare crime in the peaceful village. What are the chances the burglary and the car crash happened on the same night? And to make it even more suspicious, the doctor send the organs to the county analyst to be tested for poisons. So they're either looking at a bizarre accident littered with coincidences and mysteries or deliberate murder.

Sir Henry is elated at the possibility of a crime and getting to see the "unofficial expert" of Scotland Yard tackling their little domestic murder, but the Chief Constable quickly decided to call in the Yard. Sadly, the case is too unimportant for Superintendent George Wharton to handle. This is where The Case of the Flowery Corpse begins to differ quite a bit from the early and later novels in the series that I have read.

So my favorite Scotland Yard detective is replaced with the quiet, competent and keen-eyed Chief-Inspector Jewle. Where Wharton "would have raised hands of despair and upbraiding to high heaven," Jewle "would shrug his shoulders and carry on," but I can understand why Bush sidelined Wharton here – because the plot required a more plodding detective. There are no alibis that need destroying and even the identity of the murderer is not central to the plot, but peeling away the layers of mysteries surrounding the victim's identity and his past, which eventually exposes a link between him and his murderer. Interestingly, the plot is propelled by a surprising amount of forensic detective work carried out in the background of the story.

I've already mentioned the chemical analyses, but an examination of the second victim's clothes, found covered in straw, reveals he had come in very close contact with chrysanthemums and microscopic fibers inextricably linked the two deaths together. Casts are made of footprints and tire marks found at the crime scenes. Travers asks the police to get him a picture of Ranger with the hair lightened up. So that people who knew him with lighter hair can easier recognize him. An early example of (forensic) photoshopping.

So the structure and feeling of The Case of the Flowery Corpse differs quite a bit from the novels Bush wrote during the 1930s and 1940s. It actually felt like a J.J. Connington or Freeman Wills Crofts novel from the 1920s with the same quiet, unassuming competence of the British detective story from that period. Bush was 70-years-old when The Case of the Flowery Corpse was published and you have to wonder if he was feeling a little nostalgic, but the ending was a reminder he had taken the series in a new direction. And the ending finally gave Travers the full detective experience! So, yeah, another welcome, long overdue reprint from the wonderful Dean Street Press.

The Thieving 'Tec: "The Theft of the Venetian Window" (1975) and "The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" (1983) by Edward D. Hoch

For the past two years, I've been reading a lot of single short stories covering a 100-year period, ranging from the anonymously published "The Grosvenor Square Mystery" (1909) to Anne van Doorn's "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018), but noticed my last short story review was posted in March – discussing Mike Wiecek's techno-thriller "The End of the Train" (2007). So it was time to return to the short story and decided on a pair of locked room mysteries written by the master of the short detective story, Edward D. Hoch.

Over a career that spanned half a century, Hoch wrote close to a thousand short stories and created a whole host of popular detectives-characters. Some more well-known than others.

Nick Velvet was created in 1966 as, to use Hoch's own words, an answer to Ian Fleming's James Bond. A modern, sophisticated thief specialized in "unlikely thefts of valueless objects," but, like many fictional thieves before him, Velvet often had to play detective in order "to accomplish his mission, free himself from a frame-up or collect his fee" – which is easier said than done. Particularly when the problem he has to solve is of the impossible variety.

"The Theft of the Venetian Window" was originally published in the November, 1975, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Velvet is engaged by Milo Mason to go to Venice, Italy, to steal a mirror that he considers to be "the most valuable object on the face of the earth." Mason assures Velvet that the value of the mirror is not monetary, but spiritual, because the mirror is a window, or doorway, to an alternative universe and claims "the mirror might have inspired Lewis Carroll." So he accepts the assignment and goes to Venice to meet with the owner of the mirror, Giorgio Lambazi, but then everything goes horribly wrong.

During their conversation, Velvet drops sleeping pills into Lambazi's espresso, but, before the drug took effect, Lambazi asks him to leave and he has to wait outside the door until the old man goes to sleep. After fifteen minutes, Velvet begins to skillfully pick the lock and unscrewing the chain-link bolt, but, upon reentering the apartment, he finds Lambazi apparently peacefully slumbering in his chair before the mirror – except that his throat had been neatly cut! Lambazi had been alone in the apartment. The only door was locked and bolted with Velvet standing outside it all the time and the only window, overlooking the canal, was "shuttered and bolted on the inside." So how did the killer get in and out?

Surprisingly, considering the premise of the story, "The Theft of Venetian Window" worked better as whodunit than as an impossible crime story, because the locked room-trick is disappointingly simplistic. Easily one of Hoch's most basic and simplest locked room-tricks, which is disappointing coming on the heels of an intriguingly posed impossibility. Nevertheless, Velvet still has to earn his $20,000 fee and how he collects it makes it a worthwhile read, but certainly not one of Hoch's classic short stories.

If you want a second opinion on this story, I recommend you read Christian Henriksson's "Stray Impossibilities – Part Hoch," posted on Mysteries, Short and Sweet, who praised the solution to the locked room murder as "excellent in all its simplicity."

"The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" was originally published in the March, 1983, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and introduces "a highly skilled antagonist," Sandra Paris a.k.a. The White Queen, who specializes in impossible feats before breakfast – in the manner of the White Queen from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Velvet first heard of the White Queen from Rooster Vitale, a minor organized-crime figure, who wants to hire him "to steal a roomful of furniture." But he never steals anything of value. So the job goes to the White Queen and she delivers on her promise in a seemingly impossible manner!

One morning, Douglas Shelton passes his study to the kitchen to make his breakfast, glancing inside to see if everything was already, but, as he was squeezing oranges, he gets a phone call asking him to take a look at his study. The study was completely empty. In the few minutes Shelton had been preparing breakfast, someone had managed to remove all the furniture, but this was not the last escapade of the White Queen. The next day a roulette wheel from an unused gaming table at the Golden Fleece casino vanished with the place full of people!

Velvet decides to confront Sandra Paris about cutting into his business, but learns Rooster hasn't paid her fee yet, because there was supposed to be papers hidden, somewhere, in the stolen furniture. So she offers him his usual fee to find the papers in the stolen furniture that she had already "reduced to rubble in a futile attempt to find the papers," which makes for a good, Ellery Queen-like hidden object puzzle with a double-layered solution. Velvet also to figure out how every stick of furniture was taken out of the study within a couple of minutes and how the roulette wheel vanished from the middle of a crowded casino, but Velvet also has reputation to protect and makes a bet with the White Queen that he can steal her menu at breakfast some morning – she promises to pay him twenty-five thousand dollars if he succeeds. And he earns his money by making the menu miraculously disappear from her hands. Hoch showed why he was master of the short story with the casual revelation of the solution to this third and final impossible disappearance.

My only objection is that Paris should have immediately figured out how the menu disappeared, but, in every other regard, "The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" is a splendid and richly plotted caper with no less than three miraculous disappearances. Somewhat reminiscent of Norman Berrow's caper The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) with the solution to disappearance of the furniture being the absolute highlight of the plot. The problem of the stolen roulette wheel and menu were very minor in comparison, but certainly added to the charm of the story about two master thieves locking horns. Definitely recommended!

The Penny Murders (1979) by Lionel Black

Dudley Barker was a British journalist and literary agent, who turned to fiction, becoming a full-time writer in the 1960s and wrote seventeen crime, detective and spy novels over the next twenty years – all published as by "Lionel Black." One of his books is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but, believe it or not, the impossible crime element is not what attracted my attention. Not entirely, anyway.

The Penny Murders (1979) is the fifth of seven novels in the Kate and Henry Theobold series, a modern interpretation of the husband-and-wife detective teams of Frances Crane, Kelley Roos and the Lockridges, which takes place in the world of rare coin collectors. Everything I read about The Penny Murders suggested it was an English precursor to the very distinctive locked room mysteries penned by Herbert Resnicow in the 1980s. And my impression was pretty much on the money!

Kate Theobold is a nosy reporter for a London newspaper, the Daily Post, while her husband is barrister and a humble collector with a "coin cabinet he coos over." So when a coin collection comes up for auction, one of the biggest in over fifty years, Kate decides to cover it for her newspaper and takes along her husband to watch how a tray of old coins is sold for "twelve thousand smackers" – followed by a bidding war over a Charles I Oxford crown. Henry identifies the bidders as Cornelius Ball, one of the best-known coin collectors in United States, who is going at it with a with a well-known London dealer, Harvey Foskett. Henry suspects Foskett bidding on behalf of Ball's long-time rival, Miles Cabral. A millionaire who made his pile during the newspaper takeover games of the '60s and survived the crash in the '70s.

Cabral is reputed to have one of the finest collection of coins in England and particular a so-called 'small change' collection ("Athenian fractions of the obol, the first English pennies, rare United States dimes, that sort of thing"). And they have been at each other hammer-and-tong for years.

So, when Kate learns Henry's father is an old acquaintance of Cabral, she asks Henry to introduce her to him and they get invited to his house for drinks at six o'clock, but they arrive at a silent and locked house! Kate decides to enter the home through the unlocked garage door, assuming Cabral has fallen ill, but, when she goes into the coin-room, she finds his body sprawled on the floor – a gunshot wound to head and a gun lying nearby. The house has "one of the most elaborate and effective burglar alarms in London," which got triggered when Kate opened the garage door, immediately summoning the police when the alarm goes off.

Cabral died in "the best-locked house in London," locked electronically with the keys in the corpse's pocket, which can only mean he died by his own hands. Nobody else could have entered, or left, the premises without setting off the alarm system. However, Kate is convinced he had been murdered and launches a journalistic investigation with Henry helping out in the background.

The main focus of the investigation is the coin collection and Henry, who examined the collection, noticed Cabral had left open "a few very optimistic spaces" in his cabinets that even he can never seriously have expected to fill. A spot had been reserved for an Edward VIII twelve-sided three penny piece and two placed for the 1933 and 1954 English pennies. The 1954 penny is the rarest coin of them all and the possible existence of a second specimen is a central plot-thread of the story.

Black's The Penny Murders is not solely concerned with the tug-of-war between two collectors with deep pockets, but there are also the various plots, and counter plots, between the characters and victim – such as the battle with his ex-wive and her soon-to-be husband. They both have enough pull, or incriminating material, at their disposal to destroy each other. And there are some other possibilities to consider. Who's threatening Kate to stop writing articles on Cabral and why? Does it have any connection with the Lebanese silversmith who's always lurking in the background? And did Cabral help himself to some rare coins from the collection of his former mistress's dead uncle? And does it give the girl, or her boyfriend, a motive for murder?

Whoever pulled the trigger, the problem that has to be solved before the murderer can be apprehended is figuring out how this person entered, and left, the house that was equipped with a sensitive, high-tech burglar alarm. This is where the story becomes a little frustrating and difficult to explain.

You see, Black found a way to break an unwritten, but cast-iron, rule of the locked room mystery, a really big no-no, without actually breaking it. Something you'll probably never stumble to. Just to give you an idea, imagine a locked room with the murderer exiting through a secret passage, but the passage was created by the murderer when he was locked inside with the victim – somehow finding a way to cover the passageway behind him. This is the kind of locked room-trick Black cooked up here, but slightly more ingenious and frustrating. A solution that left me torn whether to applaud the infernal cheek of it or toss the book across the room in disgust.

Anyway, the solution to the locked house did give the story a much needed punch in the end, because the who-and why were either a letdown (who) or obvious (why), but the how certainly made it memorable. It successfully pulled the wool over my eyes. I had reasons to believe that the solution to the electronically locked house was a modern redressing of an age-old trick, which is why I suspected a completely innocent person. And than the explanation revealed something else all together. Sometimes, I'm just a really shitty armchair detective.

All in all, Black's The Penny Murders is an enjoyable mystery novel with an interesting background milieu of numismatics and coin lore, but the overall solution isn't perfect or particularly exciting. So I can only really recommend it to fanatical locked room readers on account of the bold solution, because it would probably generate some discussion among fans.

The Red Locked Room (2020) by Tetsuya Ayukawa

Tetsuya Ayukawa was a mystery writer who has been described as "the Japanese honkaku mystery story," comparable to how Ellery Queen is called the American detective story, whose forte were cast-iron alibis that were minutely-timed with "the diverse trains" that ran along "the web of railways that covered the islands of Japan" – as well as having a predilection for the locked room mystery. Ayukawa had an interesting perspective on the impossible crime and unbreakable alibi: an alibi is a "locked room in time" while a locked room is an "alibi in space." Just like that, Ayukawa handed us an excuse to include alibi-tricks in the next supplement edition of Locked Room Murders. Get to work, Brian!

Ayukawa created two very different detectives to tackle these, somewhat, specialized tropes.

Chief Inspector Onitsura is "Ellery Queen wearing the face of Inspector French" and his métier is disassembling carefully fabricated alibis, which means that his stories have the outward appearance of a Croftian police procedural, but his cases are crammed with "original tricks and impressive lines of logic." Ryūzō Hoshikage is a dashing, well dressed, but obnoxious, pipe smoking merchant with pencil mustache and "a gifted amateur detective" – who earned the respect and admiration Chief Inspector Tadokoro. Hoshikage mainly acts as an armchair detective who listens to Tadokoro every time he gets stuck in one of those locked room mysteries, mutters some cryptic remarks and than produces a solution that had eluded every one else.

So how can you not be enticed by a traditional detective novelist whose assets were locked rooms and unbreakable alibis? John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, agreed and formally introduced Ayukawa, Hoshikage and Onitsura to Western mystery readers with a collection of specially selected short stories.

The Red Locked Room (2020) comprises of seven stories, originally published between 1954 and 1961, which were translated by our resident tour guide in the world of the Japanese detective story, Ho-Ling Wong. Taku Ashibe penned an informative introduction to Ayukawa and his two series-detectives. So let's investigate.

The first story in The Red Locked Room is "The White Locked Room," which opens with a female student, Kimiko Satō, visiting the snow-covered, cottage-like home of Professor Zama, but the door is answered by the editor-in-chief of New Century, Nobuo Mine – who came to have the professor proofread one of his articles. Nobuo tells Kimiko he arrived only three minutes before her and found the professor's body in the study. Chief Inspector Tadokoro when the murder turns out to be an impossible crime. The whole house had been searched, top to bottom, but "not even a mouse was found" and the only, untampered traces in the snow were the footprints of Kimiko and Nobuo. So how did the murderer entered and left the house without leaving any footprints behind?

Tadokoro decides to consult his friend and celebrated detective, Ryūzō Hoshikage, who acts more as an armchair oracle than an armchair detective. Hoshikage listens to every detail of the case, makes some cryptic remarks and asks a baffling question ("any talk about a cat or dog being burnt in the neighbourhood?"), which he neatly works into a logical and ultimately simple explanation. A clever locked room-trick that uses a well-known impossible crime technique to create a new solution to the no-footprints problem. I don't recall having ever come across this exact solution before. So well done, Ayukawa!

The second story is "Whose Body?" and has a plot suggesting to me that the unbreakable alibi is not the only reason why Ayukawa's Chief Inspector Onitsura novels and short stories are "often categorised as realistic police procedurals." This story hinges entirely on breaking down someone's identity. An important feature of the Realist School.

"Whose Body?" begins with showing why the exterior of a police procedural can be deceiving and exposed it ties to the intuitive school of detective fiction. There are three artists who all receive packages respectively containing a recently fired gun, a rope and an empty bottle of acid. Some get mad, while others assume it was a prank, but the person whose name was used to send the packages claims to be innocent. And then a body is discovered in the basement of a burnt-out building. A headless body with his hands chemically burned, but the victim still had all his possession and the name tags were not ripped out of his clothes – making identification of the mutilated victim suspiciously easy. Chief Inspector Onitsura finds an "exceptionally intelligent" killer who came up with a scheme that would have tricked a less astute policeman. A well-done play on an age-old trick.

"The Blue Locked Room" is the next story in line and starts with a drunken actor, Fuyuto Shinano, assaulting his stage director, Katsuhiko Kashimura, with a knife, but the timely arrival of a police officer prevented them from killing one another. However, the next morning the director is found murdered in his bedroom with the door locked from the inside and the open window overlooking a flowerbed, which was unmarked by any footprints. So, once again, Chief Inspector Tadokoro turns that famous amateur detective, Ryūzō Hoshikage, but the person he fingers as the murderer shocks even him.

A good and decent enough story, but very much a patchwork of old ideas and therefore can across as a trifle weak surrounded by more original and intricately-plotted stories. Edward D. Hoch actually wrote a story so similar to "The Blue Locked Room" that Hoshikage's summation of the case gave me déjà vu, but you can probably ascribe that to Ayukawa and Hoch using the same locked room mystery as their model. However, they both used a different locked room-tricks.

"Death in Early Spring" is an outstanding example of how to apply a classic impossible crime technique to the manufacturing of indestructible alibis! Chief Inspector Onitsura has to find the murderer of a young man, Kazuomi Kokuryō, who had been strangled to death at a construction site on the outskirts of Gofukubashi 3-Chōme – a one, or two, minute walk from the Yaesu Exit of Tokyo Station. Only suspect is a rival in love, Fukujirō Fuda, who possesses an unshakable alibi. Ayukawa assured the reader in the opening of the story that it was "necessary to examine a dry series of railway timetables" to understand "how the culprit managed to mystify the chief inspector without utilizing any special trickery." I count this as a challenge to the reader and perhaps the most fitting story to use it in. Ellery Queen would have approved!

It's very tempting to compare the next story to John Dickson Carr, but "The Clown in the Tunnel" stands much closer to Carr's modern-day followers and imitators. Such as Paul Halter, Jean-Paul Török and David Renwick.

A clown is witnessed entering the lodgings of a band, Swing Wagon Lodge, where stabs the singer to death in the bathroom and than ties up the maid in the kitchen. After the clown had washed his hands and tidied up his custom, his went outside and the maid saw him disappear into the tunnel that connected the house with the streets. There was, however, a traffic accident on the street-side of the tunnel and the policemen on the scene swore that nobody, let alone a clown, emerged from the tunnel. So what happened to the clown inside the tunnel and how was the vanishing-trick pulled off?

Chief Inspector Tadokoro and Ryūzō Hoshikage have to closely examine and weigh every minute that had ticked away between the moment the clown was seen entering the building and was seen escaping through the tunnel to uncover the solution – which revealed one hell of a trick! The previous story used an impossible crime technique to create an alibi, but this story employed the tricks of the alibi story to make a clown vanish into thin air. Something tells me this story is going to turn up in a future anthology of locked room and impossible crime stories.

The next story is "The Five Clocks" and has Chief Inspector Onitsura doggedly pursuing a murderer whose alibi was backed by five different clocks in as many different locations. A clock in the study. The wristwatch of a witness. A radio broadcast. The clock at the murderer's tailor and the clock at the wall of a soba restaurant, but more is not always better and only the trick with the restaurant clock was impressive. So not exactly a classic of the alibi story, but a good example of how to break them down.

Finally, we come to the titular story, "The Red Locked Room," which is a simple red brick building, containing the dissection room, standing on a lonely corner of a university campus. Honestly, a dissection room or mortuary has not been used enough as a setting for a locked room story, because the mood and atmosphere practically creates itself. This time, Tadokoro and Hoshikage are confronted with the body of female student, Katsuki, who had been expertly cut to pieces and left behind the locked door of the dissection room – secured on the outside with a combination-lock. And only one person knows the combination to that lock.

However, if you're familiar with the tropes of the Japanese locked room mystery, or are simply aware of them, you should be able to work out the trick before Hoshikage reveals it to a baffled Tadokoro. Still a solid impossible crime story and another possible candidate for inclusion in a future locked room anthology.

On a whole, The Red Locked Room is an excellent and highly recommended introduction to a writer whose debut novel, Petrov jiken (The Petrov Affair, 1950), was seen as at the time as "a bellwether of the arrival of a new generation of honkaku mystery writers." So, hopefully, this isn't the last we have seen of Ayukawa in the West.

On a last, semi-related note: I didn't want this review to linger in my blogging queue for over a month and decided to find a hole in the schedule to cram it in, but now have to find another hole to play armchair detective. You see, there's a change I might have figured out the true/double identity of the mysterious boss from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed. I know I'm not far enough in the series to officially know about the revelation that was hidden volume 30, but bits and pieces have been spoiled to me over the years. Recently, the pieces began to fall into place. I still have to work out the details in my head, but it makes sense up there. Nobody on the internet seems to have considered this possibility! And even if it collapses, I'll probably still post my little theory just for the fun of it.

Dead Weight (1946) by Addison Simmons

Addison Simmons was an American writers described by our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, as "a prolific professional writer of both short stories and radio plays" who produced two detective novels, Death on the Campus (1935) and Dead Weight (1946), which had been withering away in obscurity – until Coachwhip Publications decided to reissue them in 2018. And, as to be expected, Evans penned an excellent introduction to those brand new editions.

Years ago, I came across a short reference to Dead Weight in The Anthony Boucher Chronicles: Reviews and Commentary, 1942-47 (2009), praising the book as a small town mystery with "quite a bit of ingenuity," which earned it a notation on my wishlist.

Needless to say, I was glad to see this little-known novel returning to print, but the due to the deluge of reprints, translations and my crippling impossible crime addiction, it took me more than a year to get to it. So my only regret is that I didn't read it sooner. What an enjoyable and interesting little piece of detective fiction!

Dead Weight centers on the creators of "a nice quiet little radio serial," Ed MacIntyre and Walt Tuttle, who formed "a perfect combination" with Walt cobbling together the plots and Ed writing the dialogue, but Home Town became "the top ranking serial on the air" – playing havoc on Ed's digestive system and nerves. For years, Ed and Walt have been battling their sponsor, Slade Lattimer, who's "one of the wealthiest men in the country" with the habit of treating his employees as stooges who have "to be beaten into line." And every single day, for two years, Lattimer interfered with the scrips and direction of the show. So when an opportunity presented itself to get out, Ed and Walt eagerly grabbed it.

Walt returned to his old home town, Hamsted, where he bought a drug story that came with two full-time registered pharmacists, a store manager and a girl at the soda fountain. Only thing they have to do is learn how to sell the patent medicines, candy and hardware, which will land them a comfy 75 bucks a week!

Shortly after they arrived, Ed discovers Walt's slumped body in one of the ice cream booths at the pharmacy, clutching a torn piece of paper, with an overturned glass of strawberry soda next to him. Someone had shot him! Curiously, on the night of the murder, there were several people from their Chicago past in town. One of them was their old radio-executive, Harry Leibowitz, but also the hotblooded, short-tempered daughter of their former sponsor, Sandra Lattimer, who's passionately in love with Walt and nearly killed him back in Chicago – when she confronted him with a loaded gun. There are also potential suspects closer to home who warrant some consideration. Such as the strawberry soda guzzling village idiot, "Dodo," who's holding something back and the "tight and bitter" Forsythe family. Years ago, 19-year-old Calla Forsythe was murdered and her body dumped in Hamsted Wood, but the murderer was never caught and Ed discovers Walt used the case as a story-line in Home Town.

So, together with his wife, Binnie, Ed decides to get to the bottom of this business, but that's easier said than done when you're dealing with a missing dying message, lying witnesses, hostile suspects and a growing bodycount.

There aren't any references in Dead Weight to other mystery writers, or detective characters, but the plotting and writing suggests Simmons admired Ellery Queen and Craig Rice. Dead Weight has the type of characters and background recalling Queen's Hollywood and Wrightsville novels, but, as Evans described it, "baroque in plot" reminiscent of the earlier, more puzzle-driven, Queen novels. I think the presence of a dying message was the clearest evidence Simmons aligned himself with Queen, but Dead Weight also has a dreamy, slightly surrealistic quality. Ed has some very strange dreams, "like Alice Through the Looking Glass," which actually help him get closer to the solution. Something that reminded me of the often dreamlike detective stories by Rice. Another mystery writer who also greatly admired Queen.

But how well was this Queen-Rice style detective executed in the hands of Simmons? As usually, Anthony Boucher was right when he wrote that Dead Weight has plenty of ingenuity, but this doesn't come into play until the final quarter of the book when the dying message turns up and an alibi-trick came into play – skillfully blindsiding this unsuspecting armchair detective. So I was very pleased with how the story and plot developed and turned out.

Dead Weight is not a shimmering, long-lost classic of the Golden Age detective story, but it's a tremendously enjoyable, well written and handily plotted novel with good ideas, memorable scenes and served with a slice of small town Americana. A fine example of "the entertaining legacy" left behind by those "young detective fiction enthusiasts of eighty and ninety years ago." Recommended, especially if you have a special fondness for the classic American detective stories of writers like Queen and Rice.