Tread Softly (1937) by Brian Flynn

On October 5, 2020, Dean Street Press is going to drop the second set of Brian Flynn reprints, comprising of books 11-20 in the Anthony Bathurst series, which includes a title with all the promise of being as much as a classic as The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) and Murder en Route (1930) – namely Tread Softly (1937). Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor, wrote the introductory pieces and described Tread Softly as having "a truly unique plot" that, to his knowledge, has "never been imitated." So my inner fanboy was squealing with delight when I found a review copy in my inbox.

Tread Softly begins with Chief Inspector Andrew MacMorran, of Scotland Yard, consulting the Sherlockian gentleman detective, Anthony Bathurst, on what should have been a cut-and-dried case.

Claude Merivale is a reasonably successful stage-and screen actor, of independent means, who appeared to have been happily married, but one day, he turns up at the Yard to announce he had strangled his wife, Vera Merivale – whose body was left in their bedroom. The police immediately went out to investigate and found that the facts were exactly as he had stated, but "the defense that he's putting up is so extraordinary" that he very well may "leave the New Bailey a free man." What he claims has happened is that "he dreamt he was being attacked by a number of people" and he fought back, but in the struggle he turned to his sleeping wife, "seized her by the throat and strangled her." Supposedly, this happened in a state of semi-conscious unconsciousness.

A hardly credible story, to say the least, but with an eager counsel for the defense, a highly reputable medical expert, a hypothetical motive and a presentable suspect who obligingly confessed suddenly placed the case for the Crown in jeopardy. MacMorran wants "to hang the woman's murderer" and there only three weeks left until the trial starts.

Anthony Bathurst, astute and helpful as ever, promises MacMorran to look into the case and raises a number of points the police missed, or neglected to investigate, because the murderer had come down to the Yard and volunteered to full story to them – a story that checked out. So there was no reason to delve deeper until they realized the strength of the defense. And while some time has elapsed, Bathurst still manages to unearth a clue or two. Such as a seaside snapshot of Claude and Vera, the position of the seating of a deckchair, two hidden tickets to a dance party at a fashionable night club and nail-scratch on the body that shouldn't be there. Flynn even shows the reader a scene where Bathurst is not present and tells the reader that, had he witnessed the scene, it would have "proved invaluable to him in his initial attempts to understand thoroughly the psychology of the case." You don't often get a bonus clue, but they don't make the core problem any clearer.

You're never exactly sure what you're reading. An inverted mystery with a murderer who plays a high stakes game of bluff poker? A whodunit posing as an inverted mystery, because Claude Merivale was either framed or shielding someone? Or perhaps an early precursor of the psychological crime novel? These possibilities kept me puzzling along with my first suspicion being something along the lines of Harriette Ashbrook's The Murder of Sigurd Sharon (1933), which had at the time of its publication a startling original and unique solution, but it didn't hold water for long. A second, more traditional, idea formed around the facts that Merivale locked the bedroom door behind him and went straight to the Yard instead of the local police, but that one didn't hold either. Before you know it, you've arrived at the last two chapters of Part One, "The Trial" and "The Verdict," which didn't conclude in the way I expected.

There's not much that can be said about Part Two without giving anything vital away except that it involves a recently finished movie, The Painter of Ferrara, which linked to a second death with all the ingenuity of the Golden Age that was briefly teased as an impossible crime – because a towel went missing from the locked crime scene. So how does it all stack up? Is it as good as people say it is? Well... it depends on what you expect.

Steve noted in his introduction that Flynn always tried to do something different with his novels and the style, or framework, "shifts from courtroom drama to gothic darkness, from plotting serial killers to events that spiral out of control." Where Tread Softly can be called original, or unique, for its time is how the plot is presented and played out, but not how it's resolved. Part One is a modern crime novel decades ahead of its time with Part Two returning to the proper, Golden Age-style detective story with one of those devilishly murder methods. So, needless to say, I preferred the second half over the first half.

I'm a little cautious here, because I don't want to overpraise Tread Softly and give the false impression it's another The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye, The Murders Near Mapleton (1929) or Murder en Route. Tread Softly is not that kind of detective story. What it is, is another fine example of the creative versatility of Brian Flynn who continues to emerge as one of the most unjustly forgotten mystery writers of the genre's Golden Era. You can look forward to reviews of The Padded Door (1932), The Edge of Terror (1932), The Horn (1934) and The Fortescue Candle (1936) in the not so distant future.

A note for the curious: Steve and Kate were the first to review Tread Softly in 2017 and 2018 and they were less hesitant in praising it as a masterpiece.

The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel (1952) by Christopher Bush

Christopher Bush has been described as one "the most reliable and resourceful" mystery novelists of his day, who made his name in the 1930s as a craftsman of elaborate and magnificently baroque detective novels, but the turmoil of the Second World War took the series in a different direction – starting with The Case of the Murdered Major (1941). The first title in Bush's wartime trilogy that began the transformation of Ludovic Travers from an unofficial affiliate of Scotland Yard to licensed, but genteel, private investigator. A change that was influenced by the American hardboiled school of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, which reached its zenith in the early fifties with such novels as The Case of the Corner Cottage (1951) and The Case of the Fourth Detective (1951).

I noted in my review of The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) that then 70-year-old Bush was probably feeling a little nostalgic when he wrote the book, because the plot reminded me J.J. Connington, Freeman Wills Crofts and R. Austin Freeman. Early writers of the Realist School. A school Bush has always been associated with on account of his expertise in taking apart seemingly unbreakable alibis and whose early practitioners he must have read as a young man. So it's not unlikely Bush returned in his old age to the type of detective stories he read and enjoyed in the 1910s and 1920s.

That's the impression The Case of the Flowery Corpse left on me and The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel (1952) strengthens that observation with a typically Croftian alibi, false identities and a (hidden) criminal scheme, but no idea if this is actually a third phase in the series – or simply brief, nostalgic nods to a bygone era. Either way, the results were very satisfying.

The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel is the forty-first entry in the series and begins with Ludovic Travers, chairman and owner of the Broad Street Detective Agency, personally accepting a routine assignment.

Henry Clandon is a publisher who served at a place called Larentza, in Sicily, where "an unsuccessful night attack" had left him "in no-man's-land with a lump of shrapnel in his belly." A young officer from another regiment, David Seeway, had brought him in and had later come to see him in hospital, but only for a few minutes with sister nervously fluttering around the bed. Clandon never got to properly express his gratitude and now feels "damnably ungrateful" to the young soldier, which is why he wants the agency to find Seeway, but he only has a general description of the man – an infantryman in his mid-twenties who probably came from a place called Bassingford. A quiet little town about twenty-five miles north of London. A second clue is that Seeway made a reference to a man named Archie Dibben.

Travers believes there's something "remarkably peculiar" about the case and decides to make the opening moves himself, but all he has to work with are two names and a location. Soon he learns that Archie Dibben is a two-bit comedy actor who used to be part of a touring company that spent one week, in 1939, in Bassingford to perform Under My Thumb. So why would Seeway reference an obsure actor at the bedside of the wounded Clandon? What exactly happened during that week that made them completely disappear from the map?

The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel is a tightly knotted affair, but the complexity is not derived from an overly elaborate plot, but the way in which the problems are presented. The story begins with a simple request to find a person and the only clues are a couple of names, but every piece of information that's unearthed also brings more questions to light.

So the plot becomes more complex as the story progresses and it's not until the twisted, dimly-lit path of the past brings Travers to a small house, where he finds the body of the titular “colonel,” that the problem begins to assume a definitive shape – which brings one of my favorite policemen to the scene, Chief Superintendent George Wharton. Wharton has lost some of his luster here ("looking a bit tired" and "his huge shoulders were more hunched than usual"), but it was good to see him again working alongside Travers. I really missed Wharton in The Case of the Flying Donkey (1939) and The Case of the Flowery Corpse.

The murders provides more physical clues to get a handle on the case, such as two faded photographs and a mysterious fingerprints, which Travers and Wharton use to meticulously reduce the number of suspects. And by the end of the story, there are only two of them left. There is, however, a complication that demonstrated why Bush was a craftsman: one of these suspects fabricated an alibi, while the after had left an incriminating fingerprint at the scene of the murder. So who killed the colonel and how does that explain either the alibi or fingerprint of the other suspect? How is it possible that there a mystery readers who don't like Bush?

All in all, The Case of the Counterfeit Colonel is a gratifying detective novel with a deceivingly uncomplicated front, but the clever writing and story structure spins a great deal of complexity around, what really is, a simple and uncomplicated plot. This allowed Bush to get more out of the situation than what originally was in it. I don't think you give a mystery writer a bigger compliment. Another great reprint from Dean Street Press.

An American Tragedy: Q.E.D, vol. 10 by Motohiro Katou

Seven months ago, I began my review of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. volume 4 with a belated New Year's resolution, namely to reach volume 10 before 2020 draws to a close, which came sooner than imagined with a little less than five months to go – opening the way to end 2020 with a review of volume 20. This should be doable if I discuss volumes 11-20 as twofer reviews. But lets take a look at volume 10 first!

I've commented in previous reviews that Q.E.D. is practically incomparable the other, more well-known, anime-and manga detective series, because Motohiro Katou took such a radically different approach to characterization, plotting and storytelling-and structure than Case Closed, Detective Academy Q and The Kindaichi Case Files. The tenth volume honors this reputation with one of the most atypical anime/manga detective stories. Yes, I've said that before about previous volumes, but this is truly something else. And for various reasons.

Firstly, the previous ten volumes all comprised of two stories, spread out over two longish chapters, but volume 10 is one long, novel-length story, "In the Hand of the Witch," which is a prequel story that takes place in Salem, Massachusetts – where 300 years ago "the famous witch hunts started in America." So you might reasonable expect a detective story drenched in the lore of witchcraft and witch hunts, but the story is one of murder trial with all the courtroom shenanigans and wizardry of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. You never see a good, old-fashioned courtroom dramas in these anime/manga detective series.

"In the Hand of the Witch" begins with the return of Sou Touma's younger sister, Yuu Touma, who was introduced in volume 6. She came back to Japan with a postcard that was delivered to her brother's address in the United States and she needed an excuse to visit Touma, but he's not home when she arrives. So she begins to tell Kana Mizuhara the story of the case he had been involved in when he was a 10-year-old child prodigy at MIT. A case that happened five years ago.

At the time, the 10-year-old Touma held a part-time job inputting data for the Massachusetts' District Attorney office where comes into contact with a young and ambitious prosecutor, Annie Craner, who's about to make her courtroom debut.

Craner has been placed in charge of the Marcus Osborne murder case and is tasked with prosecuting and securing a conviction against their suspect, Mrs. Sarah Osborne, who was found to be all alone with the body of her husband when two local policemen on patrol heard a gunshot coming from the Osborne mansion – perched at the end of a cape in Salem. The roads coming in and out of the cape were barricaded and a mountain hunt was conducted without result. So the only person who could have shot Marcus Osborne was his wife. Sharah was a devout member of a dubious organization, The Path to Arcadia, which taught "self-enhancement through the cosmic forces" and "donated a lot of money" to the group.

The police "suspected she killed her husband for the inheritance" and was taken into custody a week later.

 

An easy, slum-dunk case that a young prosecutor can put on their resume, but the oafish, incompetent-looking and nameless defense attorney is giving her an unexpectedly tough fight. A character halfway between Gardner's Perry Mason and Craig Rice's John J. Malone, who not only begins to punch holes in Craner's case, but drops a bombshell in the middle of the courtroom with an alternative solution! A (false) solution backed by ballistic evidence. And on top of that, the public opinion begins to turn against Craner as she's being accused of conducting a modern-day witch hunt.

It takes an astute observation from Touma to put Craner's case back on track, but Touma acts mostly as background character struggling whether, or not, he should help a troubled student, because he sees himself as "a bringer of misfortune" – who always ends up hurting the people around him. Touma is depicted here as a child with too much weight on his shoulder, which gives the story a dark edge. Particularly in the light of the tragic conclusion of the story and trial. Something that had a "profound influence" on him.

So, character-wise, "In the Hand of the Witch" is an important entry in the series and the solution to the murder has some clever and even ingenious ideas, such as where the murder weapon was hidden, but the scheme had too many loose nuts and bolts rattling around to make it convincingly work. Some of those loose nuts and bolts depended on a large repository of pure, undiluted cosmic luck and planning to either obtain or make them work the way it did. This made the murder look more like a reckless gamble than a carefully planned crime and ruined, what could have been, a first-class cat-and-mouse courtroom drama.

Yeah, the plot-technical side of this volume was slightly disappointing with bits and pieces that were hard to swallow, but the storytelling and characterization were as fascinating and surprising as usual. How many of these anime/manga detective series would reduce their main protagonists to background characters in the longest story of the series? A story with a sequel, of sorts, that will be told in the second chapter of volume 12. So you can very likely expect a twofer review of volumes 11 and 12 sometime later this month.

The House of the Red Slayer (1992) by Paul Doherty

Paul Doherty's The House of the Red Slayer (1992) is the second novel in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series, originally published as by "Paul Harding," which opens with a prologue, set in 1362, showing Moorish pirates capturing a carrack in the Middle Sea and massacring the passengers – pilgrims, merchants, travelers and tinkers. A gruesome, long-forgotten episode that would nonetheless lead to more bloodshed nearly two decades later.

A "murderously cold" wind swept over London in December, 1377, which despite the ice and hail is supposed to be "a time of innocence and warmth," but Sir Ralph Whitton, Constable of the Tower of London, exchanged his comfortable quarter for a grim cell in the North Bastion tower. The stairway to the room is guarded by two trusted retainers with the door between the steps and the passageway securely locked. Sir Ralph and his guards are the only people with keys to the doors.

The reason for these security measures is that Sir Ralph receives "a drawing of a three-masted cog" together with "a flat sesame seed cake," which frightened him enough to lock himself up. Sir Ralph also doubled the wages of his guards and insisted that visitors be searched, but the moat underneath the tower window became frozen solid – opening a pathway to his assassin. An assassin who climbed the wall using the footholds cut into the tower, prized open the wooden shutters with a dagger and killed the sleeping Sir Ralph. A possible matter of treason that brings Sir John Cranston, Lord Coroner of London, to the Tower of London with his scribe, Brother Athelstan.

The House of the Red Slayer is surprisingly conventionally-structured during most of the first half of the story with Sir Ralph's family-and social circle filling the small pool of suspects.

There's his daughter, Philippa, who's betrothed to Geoffrey Parchmeiner. A young man who enjoyed the approval and trust of his prospective father-in-law. A brother, Sir Fulke Whitton, who can expect to inherit a chunk of his estate. A mute Moorish servant, Rastani, whose conversion to Christianity is doubted and has a reason to harbor a grudge against his master. Gilbert Colebrooke is his disgruntled lieutenant and wanted Sir Ralph's post for himself. A chaplain, William Hammond, whom Sir Ralph "caught selling food stocks from the Tower stores." Finally, there are two friends of Sir Ralph, Sir Gerard Mowbray and Sir Brian Fitzormonde, who are now hospitaller knights, but served with Sir Ralph in Egypt.

So most of the first half of the story is told as a traditional, Golden Age-style detective story with its focus primarily on the mysterious murder in the tower room and there only two, very minor, subplots dangling in the background – concerning Cranston's marital problems and the desecration of Athelstan's churchyard. The Great Community is "plotting treason and rebellion" in the shadows, but these plot-strands barely have a presence.

Doherty is a cruel God who cannot be appeased, or satisfied, with a single, measly corpse and the wholesale bloodletting in the prologue proved to have been the soup severed before the meal.

A second victim slipped from a parapet and spattered his brains on the sharp, icy cobbles below, which coincided with the sounding of the tocsin bell, but that "great brass tongue only tolled when the Tower was under attack." Something that was not the case and when the soldiers went to investigate, they found only "the claw marks of the ravens" in the snow surrounding the bell! A minor impossibility of the no-footprints variety with a simple, but good, explanation. After this second murderer stops being subtly and the murders that follow are even by Doherty's standard savagely brutal and gory, which is underlined by his unfurnished depiction of the times.

Doherty doesn't romanticize the past and has no problem with the showing the stinking streets, the heaps of human waste and the unwashed masses or how the frost tortured the wandering lepers and slaying beggars huddled in their rags – while the blackened corpses of river pirates hung picturesquely from the low scaffolds. And remember that this is supposed to be a Christmas-themed mystery novel!

Regrettably, The House of the Red Slayer is a better historical novel than a detective story, because the murderer is not is difficult to spot or hard to figure out who this person was in the prologue and motivated this person. But it was admirable the way in which Doherty tried to misdirect the reader by presenting one of the murders in a very different light than you would expect from him, but that's what immediately aroused my suspicion. Once you look at that murder as a [redacted], there's only one person who could have done it. So, yeah, I didn't reach the same conclusion as Brother Athelstan with a dazzling piece of armchair reasoning, but the scant clueing made that nigh impossible anyway.

The House of the Red Slayer is one of those Doherty novels that is strong on historical content and writing, but have weak clueing and a plot that is easy to pick apart. So not the strongest title in the series, but, as a historical novel presented as a detective story, it's a very immersive read and the idea to "camouflage" one of the murders was a genuinely clever touch. Even if it can give the whole game away to a reader who has consumed an unholy amount of detective fiction.

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories (1998) by Roy Templeman

Roy Templeman's "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" is one of three novella-length pastiches, collected in Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998), which came to my attention when reading a fascinating description of the plot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – a theft from "a locked trophy house" protected with "trip wires, booby traps and a flock of geese." A bit of detective work revealed that two of the three stories are impossible crime tales! So on the pile it went.

I've never been a huge fan of pastiches and only handful of writers, like Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges, wrote pastiches that truly honored or even added to the original source material instead of staining it. Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery Queen is a good example of a pastiche that should considered canon. More often than not, they're nothing more than glorified fan fiction or aspiring authors hitching their wagons to classic, ready-made characters. This is something that's especially true for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which has become somewhat of a cottage industry.

There is, however, a third, much rarer, kind of pastiche. Pastiches with either good plots, ideas or writing that were depreciated by being presented as imitations.

Templeman's three Sherlock Holmes pastiches definitely fall into this category and can't help but feel that these stories would have been better remembered today, particularly among locked room fans, had he created an original detective character – like a modern-day Rival of Sherlock Holmes. Either that or he should have tried selling the impossible crime ideas to David Renwick, because these stories would have worked remarkably well as Jonathan Creek episodes. Something tells me Templeman had at least watched the first season before he began working on the stories.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" is the first of the three stories and opens with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being summoned by Mycroft Holmes to have a private interview with the Prime Minister and a cabinet member, Sir Simon Clayton. Sir Simon has bizarre story to tell of, what could be, either "a huge confidence trick" or "a world-shattering discovery which could topple Empire." Great Britain could be at "great peril" from it.

Sir Simon recently rekindled an old friendship with a crony from his university days, Rodger Hardy, who came from a family of industrialists with "a flair for invention," but the family went bankrupt and the ancestral home, Halam Hall, became a ruin. Rodger had gone abroad and nothing was seen of him for years until, one day, he turned up again to invite Sir Simon, to Halam Hall, where he wished to show him something. And that something was a sight to behold! Halam Hall is "an unbalanced architectural mongrel" that had been flogged over the decades with the whims of fashion and individual tastes, which includes an underground ballroom that was left unfinished and down there ten grinning Chinamen were constructing "a full-sized ocean-going wooden junk" – over fifty feet in length. But why was he spending six months to construct a large boat in a place where there was no hope of ever getting it out?

Rodger asked Sir Simon to come down every month to observe its construction and promises all

will be revealed upon completion. When the time comes, the completed vessel was surrounded by poles and caged in with strands of copper wire, which appeared to make a buzzing sound. Rodger told his friend the junk is being "electrically energised" and invited him to join him for dinner, but, when they returned two hours later, the huge Chinese junk that had taken up the whole space of the ballroom had simply vanished into thin air. A situation that becomes even more impossible when Rodger drives Sir Simon to the River Thames where the newly build ship was floating on the water.

 

So what's the catch? Rodger claims to have invented a way to transpose "matter through space by means of converting solids, by electricity, into waves, which could then be converted back again into the original solid state." And he's willing to part with the secret for the then astronomical sum of one million pounds. British government wants Sherlock Holmes to find out whether they've got the hands on paradigm shifting invention or if they're being trick, which means finding an explanation how the vessel was removed from the underground ballroom to which the door was "too small to allow exit." And how it reappeared on the River Thames.

A neatly posed locked room puzzle cleverly making use of the underground ballroom, because it immediately excluded the possibility that the architectural monstrosity housed two large, identical rooms – promising something more original than a simple piece of misdirection. I'm glad to report that the solution delivered on the promise made by its premise and the locked room-trick made this story the most Jonathan Creek-like in the collection. No idea why it wasn't included in Locked Room Murders: Supplement.

Unfortunately, "Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" also has some flaws and shortcomings preventing it from becoming a true (locked room) classic.

Sherlock Holmes only deduces the motive behind the scheme, but has to relay on subterfuge to find out how the vessel disappeared from the ballroom and reappeared again on the Thames, which came at the expense of the clueing. So what should have been a how-was-it-done type of puzzle detective story becomes a story about a detective tackling a massive locked room mystery. You can only make an educated guess how it was done. A second problem is that the story is a little overwritten with modern attitudes bleeding through in certain parts, which is true for all three stories in this collection. Each story could have been told in half the number of pages without compromising the plots. Still a highly enjoyable story with an originally worked out impossible crime.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" is pretty much a (historical) travelogue of the Peaks District, Derbyshire, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are spending a holiday when they begin to hear about the mysterious death of an old, German watchmaker – who was found in his ransacked home with a head wound. The doctor concluded that the wound was not fatal and that he had died of heart failure, but the villagers believed it was "an unnatural death." A believe strengthened by escaped pet raven of the old watchmaker who has been frantically screaming, "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen," around the village. The message of the raven turns out to be a dying message by proxy that reveals where the old man had hidden his money, but most of the story has Holmes and Watson soaking in the local color and history. There's a darkly humorous anecdote about a mischievous parrot and the history of "the plague village," Eyam, which is remembered for the way "the god-fearing folk contained the pestilence" by isolating themselves that stopped the plague from spreading to other nearby villages. Here's to your memory, Eyam.

So a very minor, but readable enough, story with a simplistic, paper-thin plot and a holidaying detective that makes it one of Holmes' least exciting and memorable cases.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" convinced me Templeman is either a schoolteacher or an (amateur) historian, but probably a teacher, because I heard the voice of a teacher every time one of these stories slipped into lecture mode.

The last story is the one that got listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room," in which Holmes is consulted by Viscount Siddems who recently returned from India with a collection of trophies and eastern armory – building a trophy house-cum-armour museum to store the collection. Viscount Siddems had his house burgled and this made him decide to protect his trophy house, built a few hundred yards away from the hall, with "man-traps, trip-wires to set off shot guns" and "a flock of geese." Geese were used in Roman times as watchdogs because the slightest unusual sound would set up "an unholy honking."

However, these securities measures didn't stop a thief from walking up the trophy house, unlocking the door with a key and taking a Japanese shield from the wall without setting off the flock of geese. So the viscount doubled the number of traps, shotguns and fixed bells to the trip-wire, but the thief simply took away another shield. But how?

Just like the opening story, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" shows a lot of ingenuity and originality with how it presents the impossible situation, but this time that's not reflected in the explanation. Such an elaborate setup requires a scrap of cleverness to either put the traps out of commission or circumvent them with a way to keep the geese quiet, but the solution, while perfectly workable and logical, was a little too facile. And underwhelming. Luckily, the reason behind the thefts was good and something Arsène Lupin would have warmly approved of.

So, as some of you probably noticed, my take on the individual stories don't seem to align with the opening of this review, but I believe the flaws and shortcomings of these three stories were enlarged by being pastiches. It comes with certain expectations that Templeman was unable to live up to. But had he created his own detective characters, Templeman could have told his stories on his own terms with the result being something along the lines of Hal White's The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (2008), Andrew May's The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012) and Stephen Leather's The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014). I think originally created detective characters would have softened some of its flaws.

After all, even as pastiches these were superior detective stories, especially the first one, compared to most what was being published at the time.

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories is not a timeless classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a well intended collection of stories written by an enthusiastic amateur with a commendable interest in locked room puzzles – something that was too rare in the nineties. So recommended to the ferocious locked room reader and addicted Sherlockian who'll read everything with the name of the Great Detective printed on it.

The Sulu Sea Murders (1933) by Van Wyck Mason

The Fort Terror Murders (1931) served as my introduction to both the pulpy, spy-tinged crime fiction of Francis van Wyck Mason and an exceedingly rare, well hidden subcategory of the locked room and military mystery novel – set in lonely, desolate army posts and fortresses. Since then, I've found two more novels that belong to this very specific subcategory, George Limnelius' The Medbury Fort Murder (1929) and Mason Wright's The Army Post Murders (1931).

Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) appended that list with a fourth novel, Van Wyck Mason's The Sulu Sea Murders (1933), which described the locked room problem as the "shooting of a man alone in a room at the guarded top of a tower on a military base." The military base here is a godforsaken outpost on a small, sultry island, Sanga Sanga, on the edge of the Sulu Sea in the southwestern Philippines.

The Sulu Sea Murders is the seventh title in the Captain Hugh North series and begins with Captain North listening to the dying words of a pearl diver, George Lee, who had been shot at a dive bar, but the only substantial thing Lee can tell him is that the shooter had a butterfly tattooed on his arm – mostly rambling and raving about a sunken ship, pearls and the "blue dog's belly." So its up to Captain North, an intelligence officer of the Department of Criminal Investigations, to apprehend his murderer. A task bringing him to the gates of Fort Winfield.

Fort Windfield is an old Spanish fortress, nicknamed Killers' Castle, where the "withering, nerve-blasting heat" made "killing easy" and the natives say that the fort has been unlucky ever since "the bleeding hands of Spanish slaves" had reared its solid walls. A commander during Spanish times had gone on a killing spree and there have always been "an unholy lot of suicides," which makes "a sinister Jolly Roger" more suitable to raise on the top of the guard tower than the Stars and Stripes of the United States. A bad reputation that scarcely improved under the iron rule of the unpopular, much despised commanding officer, Major John Flood.

Captain North feels upon his arrival that something is not quite right, because normally, men tucked away in distant corners of the world welcomed strangers and particularly an army legend, like North, but the "weary, heat-tortured men" reminded him of card players "interrupted by an intruder" – right before a game for high stakes. Why is everyone so interested in the barometer dropping? These are the first signs that the case is not going to be as easy as Captain North had hoped.

The man who killed George Lee is quickly identified as Private Paul Laval, of B Company, who's placed under arrest and confesses to have shot the diver during an argument. But what Captain North learns too late is Laval's past circus career as an acrobat, escape artist and human-fly. When goes to check on the prisoner, Laval had indeed found a way out and left behind a dead guard. A second, practically identical, murder soon follows with the victim dying with that strange phrase on his lips, "blue dog's belly."

The Sulu Sea Murders actually comprises of two different, intertwined, story lines tied together in the last few chapters, but the contrast between the first and second half of the book showed how much this series occupied the borderlands between the adventure, detective, espionage and pulp fiction – colored with the palette of the regional mystery novel. The first half is a mild adventure/thriller with an escaped murderer running loose on "a postage-stamp island" and Captain North eavesdropping military style or diving to the sunken ship without any equipment, which gave the book one of its best and most memorable scenes. Captain North is presented as someone who's as much at home on the pages of an adventure story as he would be tangling with villains in James Bond-style spy thriller, but the second half revealed him to be somewhat of a Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Thorndyke!

After the second murder, the primary suspect is kept in protective custody in one of the top rooms of the tower, guards posted at the stairs, with the only other way up being two hundred feet of unbroken masonry. A physically demanding wall to climb and impossible to complete without being seen by the sentries below, but the person who was held there was found with his head blown to pieces. However, the description from Locked Room Murders: Supplement wrongly described that the victim had been all alone, which is incorrect, but a chemical experiment eliminated this suspect when it showed his gun had not fired the fatal shot. Captain North also relies on his scientific knowledge to crack the locked room problem, but not before carefully constructing and then having to discard a "once glittering theory." A unexpected, but nicely done, false-solution.

The correct solution to the shooting at the top of the guarded tower was and unexpectedly good, and interesting, trick, but not for the usual reasons.

Van Wyck Mason shamelessly "borrowed" from two short impossible crime stories written by the same, highly regarded, writer, but I detest those two stories and finding out that their solutions were melted together here to create a superior locked room-trick earned him my forgiveness – because he showed how these tricks should have been used in the first place. Although some will likely disagree with me on that point. But there's more to the second half than the impossible shooting.

I already mentioned Captain North conducting experiments and building theories, but there's also a surprisingly amount of clueing and fair play that almost makes you forget certain details were glossed over. The Sulu Sea Murders has a busy plot and might have missed a thing, or two, but don't believe it was ever explained how exactly Laval got out of his prison cell. You can say he was an escape artist, but the cells are inside a centuries old fortress with thick walls, arrow slit windows and iron eyes where prisoners were shackled to back in the days. So you have to show how exactly he was able to escape. Another thing that remained unexplained is who bandaged the wounded pearl diver.

Nevertheless, in spite of these smudges on some of the finer details, the main plotlines were clearly stated and resolves in a highly readable blend of the traditional, Golden Age detective story and the pulp-style adventure thriller. And these two different styles came together in a spectacular way when Captain North tried to lay a trap for the murderer. Sometimes things don't go exactly as planned! This all helped make The Sulu Sea Murders the best I've read so far by Mason and will be hard to beat as my personal favorite Captain Hugh North title, but The Yellow Arrow Murders (1932), The Hong Kong Airbase Murders (1937) and The Munitions Ship Murders (1941) all look promising. There's always Mason's standalone locked room mystery novel, Spider House (1932). So this blog hasn't seen the last of Mason or Captain North.