An Impossible Murder for Markus (1969) by Aster Berkhof

Lode van den Bergh is a Belgian writer and, once upon a time, he was the most read author in Flanders who, under the nom de plume "Aster Berkhof," wrote a 101 novels and stories covering various genres and topics – ranging from adventure and humorous stories to children's books and detective novels. Berkhof debuted as a mystery novelist with De heer in grijzen mantel (The Gentleman in the Gray Cloak, 1944) and his long, storied writing career ended nearly seven decades later with De marmeren meisjes (The Marble Girls, 2013). So this makes the now 100-year-old Berkhof the last surviving Golden Age mystery writer!

Een onmogelijke moord voor Markus (An Impossible Murder for Markus, 1969) is one of an unknown number of entries in a series about the French-Swedish Inspector Fugger Markus and his assistant, Brigadier Chic, whose cases usually bring them to colorful, sun-soaked climes. Some of you can make a pretty good guess what drew my attention to this title, but I'll return to that in a moment.

The story opens with Inspector Markus en route to the villa of a well-known French movie producer, Claude Bloch, on the Côte d'Azur, which had been erected on the remnants of a Saraceem castle and overlooked "a fantastic ravine" – more than a hundred meters deep! And at the rock strewn bottom, like a smashed dot, lays the body of Bloch's wife. Lucia Cana was an Italian film diva who loved to sit on the balustrade, directly below the yawning ravine, which is why people predicted she would go over one day, but evidence begin to emerge suggesting that she had been pushed. An unlikely suggestion considering the bizarre circumstances.

On the previous night, the housekeeper had heard a scream and the sound of furtive, muffled footsteps running away, but the summoned policemen found nobody on the premise who didn't belong there. It was too dark to see the bottom of the ravine and it was not until the following morning that the body was spotted by a shepherd. This is where the case becomes complicated.

Everyone thought Canna was in England, but apparently, she returned to the villa unannounced and without being seen, or heard, she puts on shorts and a bolero to sit on the balustrade on a cold, dark evening – which is unlikely to say the least. But if she was thrown over or pushed out of a window, why didn't any of the people heard a struggle and more screams? And if she had been knocked unconscious first, who screamed and why? Where did her husband go the previous night with a young actress, Natalie Reyran, who was rumored to take Cana's lead role in an upcoming movie project. She left her worried mother and talent agent at the villa. Not to mention the troubling lack of motives. There were five people in the villa and "instead of all having a motive for murder, so you don't know who to choose, they all have a motive for not committing the murder."

So this is why Markus calls it "an impossible murder," but, as you probably guessed by now, the murder is not an impossible crime as we understand it. Nonetheless, the book still has a strenuous claim to be labeled as a locked room mystery with a very late, but excellently presented, second murder that's first teased as a genuine locked room mystery with the victim apparently having been flung from the window of a guarded room before its almost immediately downgraded to a puzzling what-happened? – only to turn out to have been an impossible crime after all! Unfortunately, the locked room-trick didn't show the same inspiration as its presentation, but it still qualifies as one. And it was tacked on at the end. So, yeah.

What was very well done is, while Markus and Chic work on the case, two skilled mountaineers slowly scale down the ravine to photograph and retrieve the body. Their background activity not only added a macabre touch to the sunny scenery, but effectively used to introduce the second corpse shortly after they come back up. Berkhof eagerly exploited the possibilities the setting had to offer, but you see every twist and turn coming from a mile away. I quickly caught on to the first "twist" in the tale with the rest of the story filling in the blanks, which allowed me to anticipate the second murder. And by that time, the murderer had become a walking, talking billboard of guilt.

So you probably think An Impossible Murder for Markus left me disappointed, underwhelmed or even disgusted, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

Believe it or not, the promising book title was only the second thing I noticed. The first thing was the recognizable and distinctive style of cover art of the 1988 Hadewijch edition, which is identical to the style Fontein used for my first mystery writer, A.C. Baantjer (see second cover)! A rush of nostalgia was followed by a healthy dose of curiosity about this Flemish Baantjer before the title finally registered in my mind. Judged by those standards, An Impossible Murder for Markus is comparable to a very readable, but thinly plotted, late-period Baantjer politieroman (police novel).

All in all, An Impossible Murder for Markus is the most transparent detective novel I've read in 2020, but liked it enough to try another one by the last-living Golden Age mystery writer. Moord in Mandalay (Murder in Mandalay, 1961) looks promising!

On a final, related note: before my copy arrived, I knew what the cover looked like and the basic premise of the plot (a dead actress who fell from a precarious position), but nothing else. Naturally, I began to wonder what, exactly, the impossibility entailed. Going by the bright picture on the cover, I assumed the murder was committed during the day and Cana was pushed when people had seen her sitting alone on the balustrade. And that's when a solution occurred to me. The murderer could have thrown a refrigerator snowball or an ice cold drink at her back. If you're sitting, or daydreaming, in the summer sun and something ice cold hits your back or neck, you're likely to stand, or tighten, up in reflex. But what happens when you do that to someone perched dangerously on the edge of a ravine?

I was actually angry with myself for having figured out the whole thing before the book arrived and the prospect of having to begin this review with admitting that I've read too many locked room mysteries. No such luck, guys. More locked room reviews coming soon! :)

The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician (1956) by Bruce Campbell

"Bruce Campbell" is the penname of a husband-and-wife writing tandem, Sam and Beryl Epstein, who together produced the eighteen volume Ken Holt series, which has been rightly praised for its fine storytelling, logical plots and mature characterization – depicting two cub reporters on the brink of adulthood. More importantly, the series made a small, but not insignificant, contribution to the locked room and impossible crime story.

The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953) poses the conundrum of a speeding car that miraculously vanished from a dangerously narrow, hillside road and The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy (1959) concerns a highly secure and hermetically sealed laboratory leaking secretive information. Robert Adey overlooked these titles in Locked Room Murders (1991), but Brian Skupin corrected this oversight in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). And added a third title!

The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician (1956) is the twelfth entry in the Ken Holt series, a young cub reporter, whose famous father, Richard Holt, "roamed the world as a foreign correspondent for the Global News Service" and therefore lives with the Allen family – who own the town's weekly newspaper, the Brentwood Advance. Ken works together with his best friend, Sandy Allen, as respectively a reporter and photographer on Pop Allen's newspaper staff. The opening chapter finds Ken and Sandy sitting in the audience of a charity show at the Brentwood High School auditorium, gathering material for the next edition of the Advance, when Sandy's older brother, Bert, recognizes Chris Bell in Magnus the Magician. A man who had once saved his life during a nearly deadly skiing holiday, in Vermont, but Chris Bell disappeared before they could properly thank him. And any attempt to trace him had been fruitless. Now he was standing in front of them, on stage, performing magic tricks!

During the big final, Magnus the Magician is going to perform "the old magical escape-and-transfer feat," magically transporting himself from one locked trunk to another, but he needs volunteers to inspect the trunks, handcuffs and to help shackling him. Bert is actually the one gets to cuff him and they see him saying something to magician, before he's lowered into one of the trunks. After three minutes have passed, the trunks are opened and they both turn out to be empty! But "he's not supposed to vanish!" However, this is not the impossibility of the story. That part comes later.

A backhand stage had seen Magnus coming out of the trunk and went away with the vague excuse that "he was unable to go on," but, as he made his getaway, he badly wrecked his car and is brought to the hospital in pretty bad shape. But things only go down hill from there. Police Chief or Brentwood, Alan Kane, identifies Chris Bell as Christopher Bell wanted in connection with a botched burglary and robbery of a jewelry store in Hilldale, Pennsylvania, where he had worked for nine years. Two men were nabbed by a cruising police car and they were so angry, because "the burglar alarm went off right after they entered the store," that they immediately identified Bell as their accomplice – whose only job was disabling the alarm and opening the safe door. Bell had already disappeared and with him "two hundred thousand dollars' worth of merchandise." And he has been on the run for four years!

It takes seven whole chapters of stalling and, yes, a little padding to finally get to the point of the story and the crux of the plot, but it was worth the wait, because the impossibility is an interesting one!

When they finally hear Bell's side of the story, they realize that "nobody else could have taken the stuff" except him, but the impossibility here is not represented by the double-locked door with an automatically-activated alarm system. The impossibility here comes in the form of a narrow window of time in which either Bell got clean away with the loot or one of his colleagues, James Turney, found a way to get merchandise out of the store. I know the premise sounds a little loose for a locked room mystery, but this is the genuine article with a well done false solution, accusing a least-likely-suspect with "a watertight alibi," based on classic locked room misdirection. I liked it that my initial, very Chestertonian, solution was mentioned in passing ("Or maybe you think he spread it out in the show window, where of course nobody could see it") right before the real trick was revealed. A wonderfully simplistic and logical explanation that was fairly clued and alluded to.

Unfortunately, the original locked room premise and its clever explanation also betrayed that The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician reads like an expended short story, because the whole plot hinges on the locked room-trick, but luckily, the Epsteins knew how to write – which is why I didn't notice it until well towards the end. But looking back on it, the plot is a bit of a patchwork.

The first seven chapters form a human interest story, ripped from the headlines, when Bert spots the man who saved his life, but inadvertently drove him into "a crack-up, and if he lives, he'll go to jail." So the Allens and Ken decide to help Bell prove his innocence. The detective work is done in the middle portion with Ken's two solutions as the highlight and the final quarter of the story moves into thriller territory.

A common trope in these junior detective novels is the obligatory spot of danger, or tight corner, in which the young heroes finds themselves trapped or tied up in an empty room or dark basement of an abandoned building. But these moments tend to be of a much more serious nature in this series with the Grim Reaper breathing down Ken and Sandy's neck. The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician could very well describe their most harrowing experience when they find themselves at the mercy of several crooks, inside a disused mine, who play a cat-and-mouse with each other full of bluffs and double-crosses. So its not just played for cheap thrills and shows how much the authors respected the intelligence of their teenage readers.

So, plot-wise, The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician is not quite as good, or intricate, as the previous two Ken Holt novels I've read, but the excellent storytelling masked those shortcomings and liked what it did with the locked room problem. Yeah, a relatively minor mystery novel, but a good example of the surprisingly original, often high quality, detective/impossible crime fiction hidden away in the often overlooked juvenile corner of the genre. 

 

Lastly, I especially recommend the Bruce Campbell locked room trio, The Clue of the Phantom Car, The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician and The Mystery of the Invisible Enemy, to every impossible crime aficionado as a fascinating contribution to the genre from the 1950s.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) by Anthony Boucher

The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) is the ambitious first detective novel from the hands of respected genre critic, editor and science-fiction author, Anthony Boucher, which drew heavily on his college days and knowledge of the detective story – delivering what can only be described as a mystery reader's mystery novel. Boucher also used his debut as a stage for his diverse array of talents and interests.

Boucher was "a natural linguist" who was fluent in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and more than averagely proficient in Sanskrit. During his college days, Boucher was active on-and around the stage as an actor, director and playwright, which are all worked into this academic mystery novel. More importantly, the plot, structure of the novel and storytelling radiates with its authors love and understanding of the Grandest Game in the World. Boucher is more restrained in his later novels (The Case of the Solid Key, 1941), but him going all out here was a treat. I can understand why so many readers consider The Case of the Seven of Calvary to be his best detective novel.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary hits the ground running with its dramatis personae that comes with a footnote: "the reader who approaches a mystery novel as a puzzle and a challenge is cautioned that he need keep his eye only on those characters marked by an asterisk; the rest are merely necessary extras." But it doesn't stop there.

The story begins with a prelude in which Anthony Boucher discusses whether, or not, the Watson is "an outworn device" with one of main characters of the story, Martin Lamb, who's a student and resident of International House at the University of California – where he once acted as a Watson to Dr. John Ashwin. A well-known and celebrated professor of Sanskrit whose translations rank among the indispensable standard works of every library worth its name. Martin begins to tell him the story and promises that his account "shall be a model of fair play."

A story that begins with the arrival of Dr. Hugo Schaedel, an unofficial ambassador of the Swiss Republic, who's on a worldwide lecture tour to preach World Peace and argue in favor of a universal brotherhood of man. A brotherhood as exemplified by the "incredible assortment of nationalities" at International House, which is one of the reason why he decided to address them. So a peaceful and harmless man, who was a complete stranger, but, during an evening stroll, Dr. Schaedel is attacked and killed with an ice pick! The murderer left behind a piece of paper with a symbol on it: "a curious sort of italic F, mounted upon three rectangles shaped like steps."

This symbol is quickly identified as the calling card of the Vignards, "Seven of Calvary," which is an obscure Swiss sect of political and religious sectarians who have fomented and fostered "most of the dissensions which have torn Switzerland." Such as their 1920s secret campaign against the League of Nations, but even Dr. Ashwin finds this possibility "a trifle too early Doyle" for his taste.

Dr. Ashwin acts throughout the story as an armchair detective and uses Martin as an accessory to his reasoning (i.e. a Watson) as they discuss and analyze that immortal trinity of detective fiction – namely Motive, Means and Opportunity. They go over the six motives for murder classified by F. Jesse Tennyson in Murder and Its Motives (1924) and exchange ideas why a murderer would leave behind a cyrptic message. Was it an artistic embellishment? A warning to others? A red herring? There's also the question of opportunity and a peculiarity with the alibis or why the murderer used an ice pick to kill his victim. Was it because it's an uncharacteristic and untraceable, but deadly, weapon? Dr. Ashwin funnily remarks that Sherlock Holmes would have deduced from the ice pick that "the murderer was a cuckold," because "his household still employs an icebox in these days of electric refrigeration" and "most probably occasioned by his wife's intrigue with the proverbial iceman."

Boucher made a gutsy move during the first seven chapters by revealing the truth behind the murder, minus the murderer's identity, which is something that has been done before and since, but usually trotted out as a surprise twist towards the end. A surprise that rarely lands. But here it beautifully paved the way for the second murder. An onstage poisoning during a dress rehearsal of a college play, Don Juan Returns, with another cryptic note left on the stage.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary very much belongs to that category of the simon-pure jigsaw-puzzle detective story (to borrow a phrase from Boucher) sharing the essential facts with the reader and then, "in the manner of the admirable Ellery Queen," challenges them to solve it – referring back to all of the clues in the footnotes of the penultimate chapter. And urges the reader to check their solutions against "the obvious certainty of Dr. John Ashwin." That's how you write a detective story!

Nevertheless, classifying The Case of the Seven of Calvary merely as a solid, puzzle-oriented detective novel in the Van Dine-Queen School would be selling Boucher short as a writer in general. All of the locations in the book are places where Boucher had lived, studied or worked and this allowed him to portray university life in an authentic and convincing manner. It feels like a real place filled with real people. Boucher was very brazen for his time when he touched upon the interracial romances at International House and an abortion, which must have raised some of his readers' eyebrows at the time. You have to remember that the author of The Strawstack Murder Case (1936), Kirke Mechem, had his second manuscript rejected because these subjects were central to the plot. The manuscript was lost to history and Mechem never wrote another detective novel.

So it was quite daring for a debuting novelist to casually throw that into the story, but Boucher didn't stop there. Dr. Ashwin and Martin discuss how a very sordid crime, known as the Twin Peaks Murder, usurped the newspaper headlines. A married man who left behind his mistress, naked and dead, in his own car that was parked on Twin Peaks. The murder weapon, covered with fingerprints, was found nearby. A stark contrast with the puzzling, seemingly motiveless, murder of the visiting emissary and the curious symbol that was left beside the corpse.

But these realistic touches and convincingly drawn backdrop helped massage out a flaw usually found in these overindulgent detective stories that are more than a little conscious that they're a detective story ("Well, I'm that worst abortion of nature, an amateur detective"). As fun as they may be to wholesale consumers of detective fiction, they tend to be a trifle artificial, but that was not the case here. The Case of the Seven of Calvary reads like a storybook murderer had escaped the printed page and there just so happened to be a brilliant professor and a student on hand to help sort out the mess as that "imperishable Master of Baker Street" and his indispensable Watson. I also liked how Boucher handled and used, what could be called, an unrealistic, minutely-timed alibi and cleverly employed in the greater good of the plot. And how it related to the second murder. Very 1930s Christopher Bush! And that's another point in its favor!

So, all in all, The Case of the Seven of Calvary is an enthusiastic and vigorous first detective novel from a well-known, highly respected critic and with logical, fairly clued plot that arguably makes it one of the best debuts of the Golden Decade of the Golden Age. Highly recommended!

In Plain Sight: Arthur Porges' "The Invisible Tomb" (1967) and Edward D. Hoch's "The Flying Fiend" (1982)

I've not done as many single, or uncollected, short story reviews in 2020 as in the previous two years and, consequently, the number of short stories, mostly locked room mysteries, on my to-be-read list has swelled considerably – which means I'll probably do another anthology post towards the end of the year. But for now, I bring you two stories from two masters of the short detective story, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges.

Porges' "The Invisible Tomb" was first published in the February, 1967, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and is one of only four stories in the short-lived Julius Morse Trowbridge series.

Trowbridge physically resembles "a dissipated gnome badly hungover from too much fermented toadstool juice" with a vast, pallid face, but "inside the big, bullet-shaped head was a remarkable brain" – packed with "esoteric knowledge instantly available on call." Once he had been a child prodigy, graduating from Harvard at fourteen, until he broke down and fled the academic world. Now he lived as a 50-year-old man in "a ramshackle house," crammed with books, "where he acted as a kind of neighborhood Solomon" by handing out free and usually quite good advice "to all those who asked for it."

One of the people who regularly consults him is a policeman, Captain Gregg, who's often confronted with "seemingly impossible puzzles" involving "tricky hiding places."

This time, Captain Gregg is stumped by the inexplicable disappearance of a woman, or rather the disappearance of her body, because he knows her husband killed her. Neighbors heard them fighting again, before everything went eerily quiet. He claimed she had simply walked out of the house, but nobody had seen her leave and he had no opportunity to bury, or dispose, of the body around the house – a roomy suburb with miles of tidy lawns. So the body had to be somewhere in the house, but the police had searched the place for hours without finding anything. And they returned several times to see if they could catch the whiff of a decomposing body. But even that was missing.

"The Invisible Tomb" is only five pages long, closer to a short-short than a short story, but there are enough clues and hints to enable the reader to make an educated guess where the titular tomb is located. Not a classic of its kind, but a good and solid story that's perfect for its short length. I've always loved these type of impossible crime tales about invisible hiding places, phantom pathways and Judas windows that can only be used by criminals and detected by detectives.

On a related side note: I recommend everyone who's new to Porges to read the article "A Talent to Burn: A Guide to the Mystery Fiction of Arthur Porges" by Richard Simms. Porges was a massively underrated mystery writer who deserves to be rediscovered!

"The Flying Fiend" was originally published in the mid-July, 1982, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and is part of Hoch's short-lived series of lighthearted tributes to the Great Detectives of the Golden Age, embodied by Sir Gideon Parrot (pronounced parroe), whose name recalls two of the all-time great detective characters – John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Two of the five stories in the series are full-blown homages to the impossible crime story.

"The Flying Fiend" finds Sir Gideon Parrot on holiday on a small island retreat in the Strait of Georgia, on the American-Canadian border, where he learns upon arrival that a maniac is terrorizing the cluster of islands. Several weeks ago, the body of a young man was found on the beach with his throat cut, but there were no footprints except his own leading up to the spot. So everyone figured the sleeping man had been attacked by a buzzard, "believing he was dead." This was only the beginning.

Some time later, a sunbather was killed under identical circumstances and she was immediately found by her husband, who heard her scream, but, when he arrived, there was nobody else in sight – no other footprints but the victim's own. Another man is killed, on one of the Canadian islands, while all alone on the beach. Sir Gideon arrived in time to be there when the fourth murder is announced. And this time, the murderer left a calling card.

I didn't know exactly what to expect from "The Flying Fiend" going into it and the opening pages suggested that uncovering a hidden link between the victims was going to be more important than the impossibilities. The names of some of the victims, such as King and Quinn, were very suggestive. I began to half suspect that the murderer was in a boat and used a fishing took (like a steel-gaff hook) to kill, but the story proved to be more interesting as an impossible crime story than as a who-or whydunit. Hoch used something here that has turned up in other impossible crime stories from the 1970s and '80s. Amazingly, they all managed to get something completely different out of it, in presentation and solution, with Hoch's contribution being the most conventional of the lot.

So a good and fun detective story for most readers, but an item of interest for locked room and impossible crime fiends!

The Five Red Fingers (1929) by Brian Flynn

Several years ago, I reviewed Annie Haynes' The Crime at Tattenham Corner (1929) in which a well-known racehorse owner on the eve of the Derby, but the victim owned the odds-on favorite to win the race and the rules are clear on this – an owner's death renders void all his horses' nominations and entries. So the death of the owner took the prospective winner out of the race.

Brian Flynn was a criminally underappreciated mystery writer, as well as a racehorse enthusiast, who used a practically identical premise in one of his earlier detective novels. A novel that was published in the same year as The Crime at Tattenham Corner.

The Five Red Fingers (1929) is the fifth entry in the Anthony Bathurst series, rediscovered by Steve Barge and Dean Street Press, which centers around a South African millionaire, Julius Maitland, who returned to England to indulge in his ruling passion – horse racing. Maitland and his much younger wife, Ida, each own a racehorse, Red Ringan and Princess Alicia, who have the odds in their favor to win the Big One of the racing season. But, even more than that, Maitland dreams of "the classic double" of Derby and Oaks "won by husband and wife."

A good portion of the first half flies through the year leading up to the Derby with hints drops throughout the narrative that something is amiss.

Maitland suffered a severe shock when he spots a stout, overdressed man and a dark-haired woman of "very uncertain years" passing through the corridor of a train, but the person with him could not say whether it was the man or woman who shocked him. Even stranger is that Maitland is unexpectedly called back to South Africa to attend to an extremely urgent and important business matter, which means he has to miss the highly anticipated Derby. And with her husband out of the picture, Ida decides to run her own horse in the race.

Red Ringan and Princess Alicia "pulled up within a few yards of each other past the winning past," respectively coming in first and second, which is a huge victory for Maitland's stable, but as the results were flashed around the world, the police station at a seaside village receives a frantic phone call – a man shouting he's being murdered. What the policeman on the phone hears next is a heavy thud, loud laughter and the strains of a violin before the line goes dead. So they go to the bungalow from which the telephone call came and find the body of Maitland. Shot through the throat! And according to the medical examiner, he had been "dead for a good couple of days."

This has costly, far-reaching consequences because, under Derby rules, his horse had "no right to run in the race" and is retroactively disqualified with Princess Alicia declared the new winner. A change that was either a deadly blow or an unexpected blessing to the people who had either drawn Red Ringan or Princess Alicia in the Calcutta Sweep.

Flynn never explained what, exactly, the idea behind the Calcutta Sweep is, but Steve Barge, our very own Puzzle Doctor, explained it in the introduction as follow: "a high money sweepstake, linked to important races, where, for a significant sum of money, a ticket is bought that is randomly assigned to one of the horses. The money is put into a prize pot, but then the tickets are potentially auctioned off, with that money also going into the pot. The prizes are then apportioned between the owners of the tickets for the first, second and third horses." You only get an idea how high the stakes truly were until Maitland is willing to part with twelve thousand pounds for half a share on a single ticket. If you adjust for inflation, "£12,000 in 1929 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £767,355.07 in 2020."

So with all the bizarre circumstances and high stakes, Sir Austin Kemble, Commissioner of Police, immediately throws up his hands in despair and tells the family that he's prepared to hand over the case to "a brilliant man" who "has helped Scotland Yard more than once when it has confronted very grave difficulties," Anthony Bathurst – a dilettante with no official standing whatsoever. I liked it!

During their investigation, I began to disagree with the general consensus that The Five Red Fingers is not to be counted among Flynn's best detective novels, but that was because I was following a false trail with a familiar scent to it.

I was already gravely suspicious of the gunshot wounds to the throat. You can bet dollars to donuts that every notable deviation from the knife in the back, bullet to the head or twist with the scarf usually turns out to be an important piece of the puzzle. Robin Forsythe made it a specialty of his Anthony Vereker series (e.g. The Ginger Cat Mystery, 1935). So when Bathurst comes across a nest of clues, inside a disused barn, I read them to mean that the plot was a delightful, Golden Age-style elaboration on a very well-known Sherlock Holmes story. Flynn was not only a horse racing enthusiast, but also a massive Conan Doyle mark and his detective novels are littered with references to the Great Detective and Easter eggs.

Well, I missed the mark completely here. The Five Red Fingers does a good job in setting out false trails, real or imagined, with strategically placed red herrings all over the place, but there were so many of them that actual clues became scarce and weakened an already coincidence-laden, sometimes illogical, solution even further – with one of the coincidences bordering on an Act of God. An anti-climatic and deeply unsatisfying solution to a detective story that began with the promise to play a high-stakes game.

So, yes, The Five Red Fingers is not representative of Flynn's work of the period and, if you're new to him, I recommend you begin with either The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) or Murder en Route (1930). But if you, like me, are waiting for the next ten reprints to be released, The Five Red Fingers will do until then.

Exit for a Dame (1951) by Richard Ellington

Richard Ellington was an American radio actor, announcer and scenarist, who was the main writer on Dashiell Hammett's The Fat Man, but between 1948 and 1953, he also penned a handful of "deftly plotted, satisfyingly complex mysteries" with "an appealing medium-boiled hero" – an actor turned private investigator, Steve Drake. Ellington abandoned his writing career to run a small hotel, Gallows Point, on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. You can read more about Ellington's fondly remembered hotel in the comments of a 2008 review of It's a Crime (1948) posted on the MysteryFile blog.

The Thrilling Detective described the Steve Drake novels as "one of the unfairly forgotten P.I. series" of the period that at times "seemed to be almost wandering into amateur sleuth territory" with one of them "recalling an Ellery Queen impossible crime story."

Exit for a Dame (1951) is the fourth entry in this short-lived series and is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) with no less than three, distinctly different impossibilities, but there are five in total – although the additional two are variations on the other impossibilities. So why is a detective novel littered with impossible crime material hardly remembered today? Well, the book has somewhat of a poor reputation. Barry Ergang told me to avoid it, because the impossibilities were "not fairly clued" or easily guessed at. And responded to my question on whether, or not, the impossibilities were at least somewhat original with a short, "no, not at all." A double negative!

So you can hardly call that encouraging, but, as a hopeless detective addict with an insatiable craving for locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, the prospect of a mediumboiled detective novel with a string of impossible situations still had its appeal. Since my expectations had already been blown to pieces, I decided to take the plunge without any expectations and turned out to be much better than expected! Not anywhere near an unrecognized masterpiece of the impossible crime story, but neither is it to be avoided. And now having read it myself, I understand why the story has left so many locked room readers crestfallen.

Exit for a Dame begins strongly with an excellently written, detailed account of the multi-impossibilities, covering the first seven chapters, which have the potential to deceive the unsuspecting reader into believing he's reading something on par with Norman Berrow's The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947), Herbert Brean's Wilders Walks Away (1948) and Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) – topped with a slight hint of Theodore Roscoe and Hake Talbot. Sadly, this side of the story was pushed aside in Chapter 8 to make room for a much more mundane, sordid and run-of-the-mill crime story. However, it did regain some of its earlier magic in the chapters explaining the various miraculous disappearances and ghostly occurrences.

Exit for a Dame has a great opening that begins on "one of those windy, screwball days in late March" when "spring decided to open the door on winter and gets kicked in the teeth for trying" on streets of Greenwich Village, New York.

Steve Drake is on an early morning stroll through Greenwhich Village when his hat is knocked off by a piece of heavy brown cardboard with "HELP" crudely scrawled on it with crayon. Drake noticed an elderly lady sitting in the open, second-floor window of one of the apartment buildings and her eyes are staring straight down at him. She kept staring at him in silence and unnervingly began to nod when he pointed to the piece of cardboard, but she remained silent and kept nodding her head. When the building's superintendent opened the door, they discovered that the old lady has been dead for over a week!

So how did the very dead corpse of Old Mrs. Vogelmeir nod her head? Who moved the curtains? How did this person, if there was somebody else in there, managed to get out of the apartment without being seen? And it was out of the question that anyone could have left through the windows. Drake witnesses a second impossibility when he returns there and is confronted with old Mrs. Vogelmeir's empty rocking chair creaking "gently back and forth against the bare floor" of the locked apartment. One of the two impossibilities not mentioned in Adey's Locked Room Murders.

I think the problem of the nodding corpse and her supposedly haunted apartment is one of the two highlights of the story, which is given a wonderfully simplistic, but entirely acceptable and believable, explanation – imaginatively used to create two very different impossibilities. Ellington would have done his idea and legacy a service had he condensed it into a short story, or novella, as it's too good to be stuck in this mostly mediocre novel.

Another impossibility comes to light with the introduction of Drake's ex-girlfriend, Marge Lewis, who walked into the apartment building minutes after the body of the old lady was found, but immediately walked out when she heard the police were on their way. She later explains that one of the residents of the apartment is Virginia May Roundtree, a female Uriah Heep, who had played a very dirty trick that had cost Marge a very good and cushy job. So he has a good reason to hate her, but now she fears the police will think she had motive to get rid of her, because Virginia Roundtree "literally vanished" in front of her eyes. One second Marge saw Virginia walking along the sidewalk towards her and the next she was gone. She had simply vanished in the blink of an eye!

An excellently posed and presented miraculous vanishing with several references to the unsolved disappearance of New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph F. Crater, in 1930, but the practical solution is both disappointing and uninspired. Comparable to the strange, but disappointingly explained, vanishings from Brean's Wilders Walk Away.

The second highlight of the story comes when Drake is inspecting Virginia's "well-filled bookcase" crammed with book-of-the-month club novels, some of the obvious classics, bibles and "a sprinkling of mysteries," but there are also several hidden books of a more mature nature that leads him to a secondhand book dealer, Sydney Scales – who sells under the counter smut. Virginia's reading taste also included the occult with a special interest in demonology, witchcraft and voodoo. Drake found a copy on her shelves of Tom Toms in Top Hat and Tails written by a well-known paranormal investigator, Carol Sleet. One of the chapters detailed a series of experiments with the Yi King, an ancient Chinese book dealing with divination and magic, which "had been written long before the time of Confucius." An experiment with a set of so-called magic wands that could open a doorway to another world, but it ended with the strange, inexplicable disappearance of the woman who had attempted to open that phantom door. A trick that would later be repeated with Sleet's maid vanishing from a closely watched room.

Regrettably, the disappearance mentioned in the book is left unexplained, but you have to assume Sleet made it up in order to "fluff up" his material and the solution to the last vanishing is almost an insult to the reader's intelligence! Just mindbogglingly stupid.

There's not much that can be said about the seedier, mediumboiled side of the story. A murder in a secondhand bookshop is, or could possibly, be linked to the large sum of money that had been taken from Mrs. Vogelmeir's apartment, Virginia's mysterious disappearance and a couple who cheat on each other, but it was all done halfheartedly. And there were some missed opportunities. Such as the suggestion of a name-based alibi or the underwhelming identity of the murderer, because the relationship between the murderer and victims had an interesting aspect that should have been used as a red herring earlier on in the story. It could have made the reveal a genuine surprise.

Exit for a Dame was published around the time Ellington was winding down his writing career to move to the Virgin Islands (having already purchased the land in 1948) and strongly suspect he wanted to use as many of his best ideas before bowing out. So what he did is smash together two, or even three, different stories together to create Exit for a Dame. You can even see the seams where he stitched the plots together! For example, the parade of impossibilities in the opening chapters turn out to be incidental to the culprit. You'll know what I mean when you read it.

I can see why some people would end up hating it, but with your expectations dialed back to zero, Exit for a Dame can be an entertaining, pulp-style detective novel with the various impossibilities and linked plot-threads giving the plot a pleasant, maze-like quality – even if it failed to do something really good with it. So, year, it's mostly a mediocre novel, but I didn't hate it. And should not be avoided by rabid locked room readers. Just don't expect too much from it.