The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944) by Enid Blyton

So far, I've grossly neglected the juvenile detective story in 2021 with my review of Bruce Campbell's The Mystery of the Vanishing Mystery (1956) dating back to October, 2020, but a certain someone acted as a constant reminder to return to this largely unexplored nook of the genre – particularly to the surprisingly plot-conscious Enid Blyton. The Rat-a-Tat Mystery (1956) was my previous exposure to Blyton and it was disappointing, but it didn't erase the rigorous plotting, clueing and clever use of red herrings in The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950). The Rilloby Fair Mystery (1950) added a new angle to an age-old locked room-trick. Why not return to Blyton with another one of her locked room mysteries that has received some praise from her resident fanboy. 

The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944) is the second novel in The Five Find-Outers and Dog series and takes place at the beginning of a long, nine-week summer holiday. A holiday reuniting Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip, Bets and Fatty's free spirited dog, Buster, who solved The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943) over the Easter holiday. So they wish there will be another mystery for them to solve during the summer, but everything appears to be quiet and peaceful in the Peterswood.

Only thing of interest that has lately happened is Lady Candling moving into the house next door to Pit and Bets. While their new neighbor doesn't have any children their age, Lady Candling has brought along her prize-winning collection of Siamese cats, who have a cat-house in garden, where they strike up a friendship with the gardener's boy, Luke – a 15-year-old lad who can hardly read or write. Luke is "terribly clever with his hands," carving wooden animals and making twig-whistles, as well as knowing everything about the birds in the countryside. And that's more than enough for the Five Find-Outers! All they have to do is watch out for the head-gardener, "horrid Mr. Tupping," who's one of the vilest creatures to ever wander onto the pages of a children's story. More on that in a moment.

The Five Find-Outers finally get "a real, proper mystery" when the cream of Lady Candling's prize-winning cats, named Dark Queen, disappears from her cage in the cat-house, but the Monkey's Paw is at work as their wish comes at a prize. Dark Queen was stolen between four and five o'clock, which means that only Luke could have stolen the cat. At the time, Luke was working around the cat-house and swore nobody else had been anywhere near it.

Constable Goon is more than willing to go along with Mr. Tuppering to apprehend Luke as the cat-napper, as nobody else could have possibly done it, but The Five Find-Outers believe their new friend "would never, never do a thing like that." So they recklessly plunge themselves headfirst into another rabbit hole with Buster leading the charge.

A notable highlight of their detective efforts is when they investigates the cat-house, ahead of Goon, where they find an incriminating clue and conclude it must have been planted to cast suspicion on Luke. So they nick the evidence, empty their pockets and litter the cage with false-clues like peppermint drops, a shoe lace, a ribbon, a button and cigar stubs – which "surprised and puzzled" Goon to no end. An act so legally questionable that it would make Perry Mason beam with pride at the next generation of detectives. Another thing I thought was really well done is that the disappearance act is repeated a second time, like a script, under practically identical circumstances. Once again, the only person present at the time was Luke. Even the Find-Outers begin to wish "everything wasn't so dreadfully puzzling."

Blyton showed her credentials as a mystery writers by playing a fair hand, although not quite as brilliantly as in The Mystery of the Invisible Thief, but the given clues should give the story's intended audience a shot at putting all the pieces together themselves. However, it won't fool an adult reader for even a minute and a jaded mystery reader can figure out the locked room-trick before it happens. But there was still much to admire about the plot. 

Blyton used the locked room trope like an expert as it served two very specific purposes (ROT13): gb tvir gur png-anccre na hafunxnoyr nyvov and unaqvat gur cbyvpr n ernql-znqr fhfcrpg, which Blyton handily jenccrq hc naq cerfragrq nf n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel. Something I can appreciate as a snobbery prone connoisseur of puzzle plots and locked room mysteries. While the whole thing is as clear as day to adult readers, it was amusing to see how Blyton misdirected her young readers using adult authority (gur haoernxnoyr nyvov) and the general inexperience of the Find-Outers. Such as not immediately understanding the clue they smelled in the cat-house, but never in a condescending or superior way. Blyton respected both her characters and readers. A fact perhaps better reflected in the dark, realistic undertone of the series.

Firstly, in this story, there's that "rude, bad-tempered old man," Tupping, who regularly abuses Luke verbally and boxes his ears, but he also tore apart Bets strawberry garden in a rage. Bets had been given a few strawberry runners from his garden ("he really thought it was his garden, and not Lady Candling's") and had to get even with an 8-year-old girl. Luke also lives in constant fear that his abusive stepfather will belt him "black and blue," if he finds out he's suspect or loses his job. Something else that's always hovering in the background is the parental neglect of Frederick "Fatty" Trotteville as Larry remarks in passing to him "Your mother and father don't bother about you much, do they?" as "you seem to go home or go out just whenever you like," which is very different from the household of the brother and sister of the group, Pip and Bets – whose parents have a bed-time bell to let them know its time to brush their teeth. So these moments drift over the blue, sunny skies of this series like dark, wispy clouds that occasionally intrude on the lull of the lazy, endless summer holiday as brief reminders of their impending adolescence and coming adulthood. However, it's still something far away on the horizon and there's nothing that will impede on the summer-time mystery adventure!

So, yeah, The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat is another top-notch (locked room) detective story and stands closer, quality-wise, to what made The Mystery of the Invisible Thief such a pleasant and welcome surprise. So, hopefully, there's more where those two came from.

Murder Under the Mantle of Love (1964) by Ton Vervoort

Three months ago, I reviewed Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) by "Ton Vervoort," a penname of Peter Verstegen, who's (or was?) a Dutch author, editor and translator partial to astrology, chess and detective fiction – penning six detective novels himself during the 1960s. Murder Among Astrologists displayed the influence of S.S. van Dine and Ellery Queen on Vervoort's work complete with weird architecture and a dying message. 

Aligning your work with the Van Dine-Queen School is a high bar to clear, especially for a Dutch mystery writer in the '60s, but Vervoort cunningly pulled it off by under promising and over delivering on the plot. An all too rare quality in the Dutch-language detective story and an invitation to return sooner rather than later. So moved another one of his novels to the top of the big pile. 

Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964) is the fourth title in the Inspector Floris Jansen series and gives the reader a modern take on the Golden Age serial killer story. A very odd one at that, but a genuine whodunit pull a la Agatha Christie. But despite the Anglo-American touches, it's also one of the most stereotypical Dutch detective novels I've ever come across. 

Murder Under the Mantle of Love begins as a regular detective story with the narrator, Ton Vervoort, perusing the newspaper and reading about the brutal murder of "the well-known doctor, botanist and sinologist," Dr. Ed Hinke – who had his neck broken in his private study. Dr. Hinke had fallen victim to a "terrible disease," polio, which left him partial paralyzed and forced him to retire. Not merely from his medical practice and public life, but from his family as well. Only one with constant, unfettered access to the doctor is his live-in nurse, Anjo Collet. Vervoort reads that the investigation has been placed in the capable hands of Inspector Floris Jansen, of the Amsterdam police, who's an old friend of his. So it takes one phone call to secure a front row seat as his "secretary."

A practice that's not particularly popular with his colleagues and the story notes that there was "a strong animosity" against Jansen's "way of life and methods." But he can get away with it due to his "independent position" at headquarters.

Vervoort follows Jansen to Dr. Hinke's seventeenth century grachtenpand (canal house), on the Keizersgracht, where he lived with all of his immediately relatives, but they're not an ordinary family. Dr. Hinke's oldest son, Hans, is an interior decorator and a pedantic snob with an inferiority complex and posses "a stiff dose of jealousy" towards his younger brother, Maarten. A sensual, womanizing student of medicine with all the wrong friends and an abrasively liberal attitude towards euthanasia ("Hitler discredited the killing of the terminally ill and insane"), which all infuriated their sister, Daphne. She's a geologist and secular puritan who believed that "the morals of the Dutch were in a pitiful state" and passionately disapproved of her brother's openly flaunting his frivolous love life. Something else she hated is having to share the third-floor with her father's secret, long-lost Dutch-Indonesian wife, Topsy, who thought Dr. Hinke had died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp – until she came to the Netherlands. Topsy came to the house a month before the murder and she brought along the 21-year-old son Dr. Hinke had never seen, Tjallie. Lastly, there's Tanny Hinke, Hans' wife, who has a very expensive and luxurious taste and it was costing her husband a pretty penny. This really angered his father. Dr. Hinke believed "a woman should be grateful for every penny awarded to her" and getting into debt to finance her lavish lifestyle was ridiculous. And even offered to pay for the divorce.

So they're practically a happy, tightly-knit and stable household, but the biggest discovery Jansen makes is that Dr. Hinke was addicted to smoking opium. Not only was Dr. Hinke smoking three, or more, pipes a day, he was growing poppies right next to the orchids in his locked attic. We have a victim who made drugs in his attic and suspects who are the flesh-and-blood incarnation of Dutch bluntness. Yes, a prostitute briefly appears as a witness during second-half of the story. I told you this was an unmistakably, bordering on stereotypical, post-war Dutch detective novel.

The murder of Dr. Hinke can be summed up as a traditional whodunit with a new coat of paint to reflect the changing times, but, around the halfway mark, the whole case is turned upside down and inside out.

Nurse Anjo confides in Jansen that she often has "predictive dreams" and had a dream-like prophecy about Dr. Hinke's murder. Before the murder, she dreamed that her employer was killed with a hammer, which is not exactly what happened, but pretty close and she continues to have strange, predictive dreams throughout the second-half of the story – revealing an active serial killer in Amsterdam! A killer preying on invalids who had become embittered with "nothing more to expect from life." These serial murders take the police out of the original crime scene and scatter them across the city which, especially to non-Dutch readers, can come across as a sight-seeing tour of Amsterdam.

A gallery attendant at the Rijksmuseum, who lost all his fingers in an accident with a cutting machine, unexpectedly drops dead among the museum visitors. An invalid with a cigarette-and-candy cart on the boisterous, rowdy Zeedijk is found dead by a window prostitute and a third dream has the police scouring all the cafes in the city for a man with a seeing-eye dog. All of them are poisoned with an uncommon, difficult to trace substance.

So the story moves away from a modern whodunit with a closed-circle of suspects to parapsychological manhunt for not only a serial killer, but the prospective victims with the last murder being somewhat of a tragedy. Just like with Murder Among Astrologists, I began to wonder how Vervoort was going to tie everything together satisfactory as his loose storytelling and small page-count didn't quite promise a neo-Golden Age detective story. What seemed to make the most sense was that Dr. Hinke had, somehow, distributed the poison and someone killed him to put a stop to it, which turned out to be wrong, but it did put me on the right track. Vervoort ended up doing something completely different with the motive, how the murders were carried out and kind of liked how he spun a complications out of inconvenient alibis, accidental clues and vanishing red herrings – some being better and clearer than others. But, on a whole, it made for a good and unusual Dutch detective story.

Only thing that can be said against Murder Under the Mantle of Love is the same as about Murder Among Astrologists. Vervoort had some good and clever ideas, some were even inspired, but he had too light a style, or touch, to utilize them to their full potential. So it doesn't fully measure up to its Anglo-American counterparts.

Nonetheless, it was quite impressive that Vervoort managed to tell two different types of detective stories in his light style with a small page-count, but still managed to link them together with a logical, inevitable solution that didn't feel like a letdown. Vervoort evidently knew what makes a plot tick and wish he had continued writing detective novels, because half a dozen is hardly enough to keep me satisfied. I need more Dutch detective writers like Vervoort!

So his remaining detective novels, Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Stage Actors, 1963), Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965) and Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965), have been bumped to the top of my wishlist. I'm also looking into the few short stories he wrote. Such as "Burleske aan de galg" ("Burlesque on the Gallows," 1965) and "Het alibi" ("The Alibi," 1968). Wordt vervolgd!

Murder at Government House (1937) by Elspeth Huxley

Elspeth Huxley was a British conservationist and renowned author of biographies, memories and fiction about Africa, whose most well-known work is the semi-autobiographical The Flame Trees of Tikha (1959), but among her forty-some books are a handful of detective novels – three starring her series-detective, Superintendent Vachell. Murder on Safari (1938) is perhaps Huxley's best remembered mystery and prompted one critic to declare her "a dangerous rival to Agatha Christie." Regrettably, Huxley's modest contribution to the detective story, as the Arthur W. Upfield of Africa, has been largely forgotten today. 

Huxley wrote the three Vachell mysteries during a five-year world tour to avoid playing shuffleboard on the ocean voyages and returned to the genre two decades later with two standalone novels, The Merry Hippo (1963) and A Man from Nowhere (1964). But it was her trio of exotic, 1930s mysteries that cinched Huxley's place in the annals of crime fiction. 

Murder at Government House (1937) marked Huxley's debut as a mystery novelist and takes place in the British colony of Chania, Africa, where Sir Malcolm McLeod acted as the King's representative.

Sir Malcolm came into the colonial service from the outside and the Colonial Office took "a rare gamble" by offering him the Governorship of British Somaliland, but he had introduced "more reforms and innovations" there than during its entire existence as part of the Colonial Empire, which had earned him the appointment to Chania – a senior Governorship. And he took a hands-on approach to governing the colony. One of his first actions was reviving a long, vaguely discussed idea of federating Chania with a neighboring Protectorate to the north, Totseland. Something that is seen as a first step towards "welding into one confederacy the territories under British rule lying between the Zambesi and the headwaters of the Nile." A plan not entirely without obstacles or opposition.

The story opens with a Government House dinner-party in honor of Sir Bertrand Flower, the Governor of Totseland, which preceded their discussion merging the two countries into one territory. A huge stumbling block is the amalgamation of the two railways as both territories believe the neighbors railway is "nothing but a collection of scrap-iron." However, the meeting is prevented when murder rears its ugly head.

Sir Malcolm is found strangled to death in his private office and his murder poses something of a locked room problem. Both windows were closed and locked with catches that can only be worked from the inside. The door to the Governor's office was guarded "day and night" by a sentry and the other two exits were under observation. This is just one of the many problems facing the Canadian-born Superintendent Vachell.

First and foremost, there's a whole slew of potential suspects hovering around Goverment House. Maisie is "the girl-wife" of the Director of Education, Mr. Watson, who's "principal source of scandal" and the mistress of Sir Malcolm – everyone held their breath to see what action the injured husband was going to take. Victor Moon is the Secretary for Native Affairs and he's not a great admirer of his immediate senior, Mr. Pallett, who's the Colonial Secretary and now Acting Governor. But despite his long, successful career, Vachell discovers Pallett is unable to stand up to open opposition or bullying. Donovan Popple is a settler, farmer and trader with a twenty-five year history in Chania and has called Sir Malcolm a "damn fool, pocket Mussolini," which makes him a primary suspect when his thumbprint is found at the crime scene. Mr. Jeudwine is the slippery private secretary of Government House who gives "the impression of dwelling apart with thoughts profounder than those of ordinary men." That's not all as "too many darned people in this murder," but there are also outside forces Vachell has to take into consideration.

Vachell is told about "one of these strange secret societies that periodically crop up among natives," the League of the Plaindwellers, who have an ax to grind with the British government over the Wabenda witchcraft case. Someone else tells him there's a Somalian organization, Black Aisa, who have personal motive dating back to Sir Malcolm's governorship of British Somaliland. So, luckily, Vachell finds an old friend and anthropologist, Olivia Brandeis, staying at Government House to help him sort out the whole mess. One reviewer noted on the GADwiki that Brandeis comes across as a young incarnation of Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley. I kind of can see that comparison, especially during the opening chapter.

Their joined-investigation presents a faded, but fascinating, snapshot of a time and place now long-gone, which were nearly all tightly-woven into the fabric of the story and not merely confined to the realm of colonial politics of Goverment House – touching everything from settlers to the natives. Such as the Timbergrowers' Association wanting to know why the blazes they didn't use local hardwood for the governor's coffin or the less pleasant sideline in the way local natives deal with curses, witchcraft and witches in general, which leads to a gruesome, unavenged murder of a 10-year-old girl. A lot less darker is that magical, almost surrealistic scene when Olivia hits upon a secret meeting of the Plaindweller League and "felt as if she were another Alice translated into an African wonderland."

So here you have why Huxley was to Africa what Upfield was to the Australian outback as she wrote a detective story that could not have taken place anywhere else except in 1930s colonial Africa. Murder at Government House had everything to turn it into a minor classic of the so-called regional mystery, but the plot is frustratingly uneven and not entirely fair.

Huxley held back a lot from the reader and, in particular, the motive is something you can only guess at while an important clue, or hint, regarding the how was obliterated by the passage of time. However, if you've done your homework (i.e. read detective stories), you should be able to put one and together to figure out the murderer's identity. There were two aspects about the murder that made this character suspiciously standout, but you can't figure out how, exactly, it was done as those clues were not available. Don't expect too much from the locked room-angle. The whole locked room setup was used for something completely different, which could have worked beautifully with more clues as the trick was quite clever.

So, purely as a detective story, Murder at Goverment House was pretty much the same as my recent experience with Nat Lombard's Murder's a Swine (1943). A detective story that was better written than plotted with a ton of historical interest that could not have taken place anywhere else except in that specific time and place. This makes it difficult to recommend. 

Murder at Government House was not a bad read at all that actually made good use of the story's setting and enjoyed my time with it. The problem is that it's, plot-wise, a sloppy, poorly worked-out detective story that could have used an editor to smooth over the plot. Normally, a poor and sloppy plot is enough to sink a detective story for me, but here, the good ever-so slightly outweighed the bad.

The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) by John Dickson Carr

Somewhat recently, I reread two of John Dickson Carr's reputable locked room mysteries, The Three Coffins (1935) and Till Death Do Us Part (1944), but the latter has only gained its reputation as one of his all-time greats over the past two decades – elevated by the internet from a mid-tier title to top 10 material. At the same time, his monumental, landmark locked room novel received a downgrade. I ended up agreeing about Till Death Do Us Part, but The Three Coffins remained to me an otherworldly performance more than deserving of its once colossal status. 

So decided to reread another one and was torn between The Plague Court Murders (1934) and The Crooked Hinge (1938) with The Reader is Warned (1939) as a dark horse, but ended up with The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939). There are two reason why I picked that one over the other three. 

The Problem of the Green Capsule is another title who received a reputational boost during the internet age of the genre and one that has been at the back of my mind ever since discovering Christopher Bush. Bush was to the unbreakable alibi what Carr was to the locked room, but he tried his hands at a Carr-style impossible crime novel with The Case of the Chinese Gong (1935) and has "a situation worthy of Dr. Fell." In my memory, The Problem of the Green Capsule retroactively became a Bush-style detective novel with an alibi problem that would have delighted Ludovic Travers and wanted to reread it to test my recollection of the plot – which actually fitted the theme of the book like glove. I'm doing it on hard mode as my first read was a Dutch translation titled Blinde ooggetuigen (Blind Eyewitnesses). So let's see how Watson-like my memory really is! 

The Problem of the Green Capsule, originally published as The Black Spectacles and subtitled "being the psychologist's murder case," opened in the Street of Tombs, Pompeii, where Marcus Chesney is holidaying with his family and cronies. A party comprising of his brother, Dr. Joe Chesney, whose professional skills leave something to be desired, but generally well liked and "lots of people swear by him." Marjorie Wills is the sweet, innocent looking niece and ward of Marcus, but she has a temper and "sometimes uses language that would startle a sergeant-major." Professor Ingram is a psychologist and an old crony of Marcus with whom he had "eternal, non-stop arguments" about crime and psychology. Wilbur Emmet is Marcus' tall, wooden and "spectacularly ugly" business manager. Finally, there's a young research chemist, George Harding, who Majorie met on their holiday and they quickly fell in love with each other.

Marcus tells George that, in spite of his wealth, neither he or his inner circle is accustomed to take three-month holidays, but circumstances back home forced them to take a break.

Several months previously, the village of Sodbury Cross became the playground of "a criminal lunatic who enjoys poisoning people wholesale" as three children and an 18-year-old girl were poisoned (one fatal) with strychnine laced chocolates, which came from Mrs. Terry's respectable tobacco-and sweet shop in High Street – who does not sell poisoned chocolates as "a regular thing." So the police believes poisoned sweets were left in the shop when Mrs. Terry's attention was distracted. But there's another possibility suggesting Marjorie had planted the poisoned chocolates. Now she can't even walk down the street without the danger of having mud thrown in her face by the village children, which is why they decided to go on a long holiday. However, the situation had barely improved upon their return. And things got much worse!

Marcus is a peace grower who fancies himself a scholar and his pet theory is that "ninety-nine people out of a hundred, as witnesses, are just plain impossible." To prove his point, Marcus stages a psychological experiment at his home with Marjorie, George and Professor Ingram as audience and eyewitnesses. George is filming the experiment with a small ciné-camera. So nothing what happened on the stage was unobserved.

What they see is Marcus sitting at a table with a box of chocolates and writing instruments when a curious figure enters the room in a long coat, collar turned up, hat pulled down, dark glasses and face wrapped in a muffler – all bundled up like the Invisible Man. The thing in the top-hat carried a black bag with R.H. Nemo, M.D. crudely painted on it. Next thing he does is push "a fat green capsule" down Marcus' throat, took the bag and left through the French windows. A few minutes later, Marcus is dead of cyanide poisoning!

A clever murder serving Chief Constable Major Crow and Detective Inspector Andrew Elliot with a peach of problem, because there are three witnesses who saw the murder happen under their eyes. But they can't agree on what they saw. On top of the blind eyewitnesses, they represent "a triple alibi which all the weight of Scotland Yard cannot break." Carr assured the reader in a footnote "that there was no conspiracy of any kind among the three witnesses." So an exasperated Elliot turns to Dr. Gideon Fell to help him make sense of everything.

Dr. Fell is at the top of his game here and states upon appearing that if he "cannot do the thing handsomely," he's "not going to do it at all," which was a reference to his drinking habits, but can also applied to his detective work. Slowly, but surely, Dr. Fell brings clarity to an incredibly muddled problem by examining the questions Marcus had prepared, which were laced with psychological traps. Why all the answers were different. There's also a brilliant plot-thread with a clock that could be tampered with and how it ruined a fourth unshakable alibi. It's almost a shame Carr used the trick here as a side issue as it could have carried a whole plot by itself. Something as ingenious and inspired as the alibi-trick from Bush's Cut Throat (1932).

More than the galore of alibis, false-solutions and Dr. Fell's booming presence, I enjoyed and marveled at Carr's ability to rub the truth in your face with one hand and pull the wool over your eyes with the other. I remembered the murderer's identity from my first read, but not much else and was amazed to discover how subtly blatant he was here. Carr planted psychological clues in the mind of the reader that doubled as blind spots to hide the murderer without keeping back any clues. Carr was at his best when he was really cavalier with his clues and red herrings.

Another thing that came as a kind of surprise is how spot on my comparison with Bush turned out to be. I discovered Bush long after my first reading of The Problem of the Green Capsule, but it really reads like Carr's take on a Bush-style detective novel with its multiple alibi-puzzle and two different crimes closely-linked in time or place – a staple of Bush's 1930s detective novels (e.g. Dead Man Twice, 1930). I don't think Carr wrote it with Bush in mind and, as the ending demonstrated, Carr was a better showman than Bush. An ending with two things that deserve to be highlighted.

Dr. Fell explains why has an unfair advantage over the police as he started out as a schoolmaster and "every minute of the day the lads were attempting to tell me some weird story or other, smoothly, plausibly, and with a dexterity I have not since heard matched at the Old Bailey." So he has valuable experience with habitual liars and that comes handy in this particular case. Secondly, Dr. Fell precedes his explanation with a lecture on poisoners reminiscent of his locked room lecture from The Three Coffins, in which he famously broke the fourth wall ("because... we're in a detective story, and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not"). The lecture on poisoners also breaks the fourth wall, but in a much more subtle way as Dr. Fell tells his audience he will be discussing a particular type of poisoner by looking at "a dozen well-known examples from real life." More importantly, the psychological profile of the poisoners under discussion fits only one of their suspects. All he has to do after the lecture is explain the nuts and bolts of the case. And those aren't any less ingeniously played out as all the psychological trickery. Carr must have had a blast putting the plot of this one together. 

The Problem of the Green Capsule is a double triumph as Carr demonstrated didn't need to lean on his hermetically sealed rooms, seemingly impossible murders and suggestions of the supernatural to write an elaborate, maze-like and scrupulously fair and logical detective story. The locked room murders and impossible crime are simply there to make everything more challenging and fun. So this triumph is a shining example of the purely plotted, 1930s whodunit and deserves to be reprinted. I suggest that potential reprint edition to be titled either The Case of the Green Capsule or The Case of the Black Spectacles.

Murder's a Swine (1943) by Nap Lombard

Earlier this year, British Library Crime Classics reissued an obscure, long out-of-print and intriguing-sounding mystery, Murder's a Swine (1943), written by the husband-and-wife team of Gordon Neil Stewart and Pamela Hansford Johnson – who produced two detective novels under the name "Nap Lombard." Martin Edwards wrote an insightful introduction with the most surprising bit being that Pamela Johnson's second husband was C.P. Snow. 

Murder's a Swine was published in the United States as The Grinning Pig and belongs to that British dominated sub-category of the genre dealing with the Second World War. A period in history that gave the British home front detective story a new and distinctively unique flavor that can never be replicated again. 

Murder's a Swine is set during the so-called "Phoney War," an eight-month period of restless inactivity on the battlefield, which began with the blitzkrieg on Poland and ended with May 1940 invasion of the Low Countries – proverbial calm before the storm. Someone remarks in the story that another character must think it's "a rum show to the last war," but the Phoney War completely upheaved British society. There were enforced blackouts, sandbag barricades, gas masks, children being evacuated to the countryside and the general effects of mobilization.

This is the backdrop of Murder's a Swine. A story that begins with a young ARP Warden, Clem Poplett, accidentally stumbling across a decomposing body behind the sandbags of an air-raid shelter. The body is that of a man dressed in ARP overall and Wellington boots with a bullet hole in his back. Poplett was not alone when he made the gruesome discovery in the shelter. A resident of a nearby block of flats, Agnes Kinghof, had accompanied him into the shelter and she has together with her husband tangled with murder before. Agnes and Andrew Kinghof solved their first case in Tidy Death (1940). Much to the annoyance of Captain Kinghof's cousin, Lord Whitestone, who's "someone of considerable importance at Scotland Yard."

Lord Whitestone prefers the Kinghofs go to "one of those dreary, disgusting leg-shows" or the Yellow Chicken before they're "compelled to raid it" instead of getting involved with police business again. But in their defense, the murderer doesn't leave them much choice.

Firstly, the victim is identified as a long-lost relative of one of their neighbors and the residents become the target of a series of sick pranks. A stick with a pig's head is fixed to the service lift and frightened a woman into hysterics when it appeared at her bedroom window, "all shining and blue," snout pressed against the pane – before disappearing again. This is followed by more pranks and a mocking letter, "greasy fellow aren't i," signed "the pig-sticker."

So they have to take a closer look at their own neighbors to see if any of them might be the murderer, which is easy as half of the flats stand empty, but still enjoys enough occupancy to fill out a decent-sized pool of suspects. Mrs. Rowse is known to the public as the author of popular stories for growing girls, "Phyllada Rounders," who shares a flat with her friend, Mrs. Adelaide Sibley. Mrs. Sibley who was frightened by the pig's head at the window. Madame Charnet is a doddering, deaf old French woman who came to England right before Germany stopped caring about borders. Felix Lang is a medical student with an unclear background and no means of identification, while George Warrender worked late nights at a government office and was seldom seen by the tenants. A potentially significant fact as another suspect is the unknown, long-lost prodigal son of the victim and he might be in England under a new name. There's also the presence of the Free British Mussolites whose goal is to tear "filthy veil" of Democracy from "the fair face of England." Apparently, the FBM hate the Scotsmen ("who wear women's skirts in the streets of their Babylonic cities") more than communists, socialists, unionists, bureaucrats, atheists, the Freemasons and even the Jews. Yes, the FBM are played as a joke. Like a comedically inept counterpart of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts who bristle when learning nobody locally has heard of their "influential organization."

There you have all the ingredients for an engrossing, first-class World War II detective story, but, regrettably, the quality became split between the writing and plotting. And it's a notable split.

Let's get the good out of the way first. Gordon Stewart and Pamela Johnson knew how to write and set a scene, which is the strength of Murder's a Swine. There are several very well written, memorable set pieces strewn throughout the story. Such as a second pig head, "a red Punch's cap set between the ears," appearing during an illegally-staged street show of Punch and Judy or the murderer with pig mask terrorizing and trying to add another body to score – like some demented Scooby Doo villain. There are the snippets of life under wartime conditions like the fire-precautions committee meetings, the big ARP casualty exercise and the secret FBM meeting with the hayloft scene. What elevated the story is that the dark, depressing wartime atmosphere and thriller-like bits were brightened with flashes of humor and lighthearted banter from the Kinghofs that can stand comparison with Delano Ames and Kelley Roos.

But, purely judged as a detective story, Murder's a Swine turned out to be a poor showing as the murderer stood out like a scarecrow. I thought it was so thickly laid on and obvious that I half-suspected it was a red herring and began to cast suspicious glances in another direction. There's another character who would have fitted the role of murderer much better (Pyrz Cbcyrgg). That being said, the unmasking of the murderer was very well handled and how this person was compelled to confess was unusual, to say the least!

So here we have a classic example of a detective novel that was better written than plotted and therefore, as someone to whom plot is the foundation of any detective story, I can only recommend it to fans of bantering, mystery solving couples or WWII era crime fiction. Sorry, Kate, but my vote is certainly not going to Murder's a Swine for 2021 Reprint of the Year Award. My purist streak doesn't allow it.

Nevertheless, while the plot of Murder's a Swine failed to win me over, Martin Edwards noted in his introduction that he was sure it "helped its original readers to forget, for an hour or two at least, the miseries of wartime," because "to lose oneself in an enjoyable, unserious book is an under-estimated pleasure" – especially during an ungoing pandemic and lockdowns. I agree as it was an enjoyable read with some very memorable scenes. So, in that regard, it comes recommended without hesitation.

After School Activities: Q.E.D. vol. 14 by Motohiro Katou

The 14th volume of Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. begins strongly with "Summer Vacation Case," which is presented as relatively minor, uncomplicated slice-of-life mystery, but don't be fooled, the story poses a tricky puzzle with an impossible situation, alibi charts and a 3D floor plan – situated among the members of various college clubs. These after-school clubs are an important part of Japanese school-and university college and often feature in shin honkaku detective stories. You might remember the mystery club members who populated Yukito Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) and Alice Arisugawa's Koto pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989). Not to mention a staple of the anime-and manga detective story. 

"Summer Vacation Case" takes place at Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara's high school during the summer holiday when "only the sound of club activities" echoed through the buildings. But everything is far from normal or peaceful on the quiet school ground and empty classrooms.

A hooligan is active on the premise and has been committing weird acts of vandalism in-and around the various school clubs. A big "X" was drawn with ink on the floor of the newspaper club's classroom. A pail with the ashes of burned newspapers was left in front of the calligraphy clubroom and the third incident happened in the corridor of the third-year classrooms, which is where a spray painted graffiti was discovered alluding to the fourth incident – providing the plot with a fresh and original impossible crime. A basketball crashes through the window of the dojo of the kendo club, but there was no one outside and the classrooms opposite the dojo are too far away to assume "someone threw the ball with that much strength." So it's almost "as if the ball appeared out of thin air."

Mizuhara is a member of the kendo club and injured her wrist in the incident, which immediately brought Touma to the scene. This is where the story became so much more than its premise suggested. What makes "Summer Vacation Case" such a great detective story is simply synergy.

Firstly, there's the division of work between the two detectives. Mizuhara often played the Archie Goodwin to Touma's Nero Wolfe, but it worked better here than usual and complimented the plot. She talks to the various club members and uncovers the contours of the motive, but it's Touma who figures out the "curious connection between these events." I particular appreciated the trick that was hidden behind the graffiti. But than all of the plot-strands were pulled together to show how they worked in conjunction, which demolished a cleverly-staged alibi and the basketball illusion. It's detective stories like this one why I doff my deerstalker to the shin honkaku writers.

The second story, "Irregular Bound," is a quasi-inverted mystery in which a city council member of T City, in Tokyo, is found next to his private plane at F Prefecture's airport with a stab wound in his upper arm – who quickly lost consciousness from the lost of blood. An envelope with "a political contribution of one million yen" has "completely disappeared." The reader is more than aware that one of the characters has fabricated an alibi with a radio broadcast of a baseball game, but the story is essentially a multi-varied whydunit with a twist. What is the real reason behind the fake alibi? Why did the wounded victim fly from Tokyo to F Prefecture? And why does Touma believe "this case will automatically reach a dead end" if the victim wakes up.

This is one of those typical-atypical Q.E.D. character-driven detective stories that you can only find in this manga series and "Irregular Bound" managed to weave several, character-focused plot-threads around a very simple and sordid crime. The key to the problem are the victim and suspects themselves. So you can say it succeeded in what it was trying to do, but without doing anything to make it standout and the whole story felt very inconsequential compared to the after-school shenanigans of the previous story. A decent, but forgettable, story.

I would have flipped "Summer Vacation Case" and "Irregular Bound" around to end the volume on a high note, but either way, "Summer Vacation Case" carried this volume and a candidate for my top 10 favorite Q.E.D. stories from vol. 1-20. Six more to go!

The Key to the Case (1992) by Roger Ormerod

I reviewed two of Roger Ormerod's late-career novels in January, A Shot at Nothing (1993) and And Hope to Die (1995), which he wrote during his twilight years, but the writing and plotting were as clear and ingenious as ever – crafting some of his strongest, modern GAD-style novels. My ramblings tempted John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, to try one and raved about The Hanging Doll Murder (1983) as "an excellent example of the modern mystery that honors the traditions of the Golden Age" with "several amazing twists." Something that appears to have been a hallmark of Ormerod's detective fiction. 

From my limited reading and playing internet detective, Ormerod seems to have experimented a lot with ways to frame the traditional, plot-oriented detective story as a modern crime novel. An ambition to link the past with the present to create a new kind of detective story for the future. Some of Ormerod's earlier novels are less than perfect in this regard (e.g. The Weight of Evidence, 1978), but drastically improved during the '80s and became amazingly good at in the '90s. Ormerod could very well have been the best mystery writer of the nineties and today's subject did nothing to persuade me away from that premature conclusion. 

The Key to the Case (1992) is erroneous listed online as a standalone novel, but it's the ninth title in the Richard and Amelia Patton series. More importantly, The Key to the Case is a textbook example of how to consolidate the traditionalist and modernist approach to the detective story.

Richard Patton is an ex-Detective Inspector who continues to get involved in murder cases and "the recent affair of the clocks," presumably a reference to When the Old Man Died (1991), had received too much media coverage for his liking, which had given people the idea Patton sorted out personal problems – having already been approached about boundary disputes and lost dogs. The Key to the Case has a treble of much more serious and confrontational problems for Richard and Amelia to deal with.

Firstly, Richard is approached by a small-time, but expert, burglar, Ronnie Cope, who's out on bail and facing an aggravated burglary charge. Ronnie is not known to be violent and claims to have "an unprovable alibi," but Richard initially has no interest in getting involved. Secondly, a former crook and current owner of a gaming club, Milo Dettinger, asks Richard to prove that his son, Bryan, was murdered. A death that had been filed as a suicide on account of the whole house being a locked and bolted from the inside. Milo had to smash the front door and the bathroom door to find his son hanging by a length of rope, but Richard has to do a little detective work to find out why the place was "well-nigh impregnable to an outsider."

Every day, before going to his club, Milo ensured Bryan locked and bolted all the doors and windows behind him. Milo would also make a midnight call to ensure everything was alright and they agreed on a coded message with the doorbell. Milo fixed this "complicated system of security" to protect his son from an outraged community. Bryan had served two years of six-year prison sentence for raping three young women and he wasn't exactly welcomed back with open arms by the community, but a month after he got out, a woman was raped and murdered. So plenty of abuse and death threats started pouring in. Richard reluctantly gets pulled in, but, once he gets started, he can't stop and this places him at odds with his former colleague and friend, Chief Inspector Ken, who's in charge of a troublesome inspector, Les Durrell – who's "is not simply anti-rapist, but violently so." Meanwhile, Amelia has to face her own demons to help her husband and she's the one who talks with Bryan's victims.

So not exactly the frame you expect to find around a classically-staged locked room mystery, but the touches of the modern crime novel were expertly used here to further a very tricky, complicated and puzzle-oriented plot.

Richard's investigation revealed that the house was not only "completely sealed" with keys, bolts and double-glazed windows, but closely-tightened by a narrow, two-or three minute window of time. That's simply not enough time to have done the murder and vanish from a sealed house. Richard also considers two false-solutions based on the smashed front door with a dash of morbid psychology, which required either a particular hardhearted or cruel murderer. I can't say much about the actual solution and, purely as locked room mystery, the trick is not one for the ages. So don't expect anything in the grand manner of John Dickson Carr or Paul Halter, but it's quite clever and novel in its own unique way. A cheeky play on the cussedness of all things general with a dark undertone and severe consequences.

Where the plot really excels is the clever clueing, red herrings and the double-twisted ending. Ormerod played his cards brilliantly as it was not until the penultimate chapter that everything began to click inside my head, but was still unprepared for the shining radiance of the central, double-edged clue. A clue that was in plain sight, but ingeniously rendered invisible and the explanation how that was accomplished is worthy to be compared with the best from the Golden Age! Simply marvelous! 

The Key to the Case is, plot-wise, Ormerod's best detective novel to date with a great and trickily-done solution, which also succeeded in balancing the old-fashioned, puzzle-oriented locked room mystery with the darker elements of the modern character-driven crime novel – adding a new dimension to both styles. Not to mention an impressive feat of dovetailing making it a highlight of the 1990s (locked room) mystery novel. 

A note for the curious: the writing, characterization, dovetailing and balancing between the classic and modern style in The Key to the Case strongly reminded me of the detective novels by M.P.O. Books, a.k.a. "Anne van Doorn," who took a very similar direction as Ormerod in his stories. The Key to the Case especially reminded me of De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011; the dovetailing), Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013; an impossible crime) and De man die zijn geweten ontlastte (The Man Who Relieved His Conscience, 2019; the surprise).

She Had to Have Gas (1939) by Rupert Penny

Rupert Penny's She Had to Have Gas (1939) is the sixth novel in the Chief Inspector Edward Beale series and has a premise as enticing and provocatively bizarre as its title, which kind of delivered on its promise, but Martin Edwards warned that its elaborate plot came "close to sinking under the weight of its own cleverness” – even JJ's four-star review came with a few caveats. Admitting that She Had to Have Gas presented Penny as a first-rate second-stringer and placed it last on his Chief Inspector Beale best-of list. So imagine my surprise when I turned over the last page and concluded I had read the most enjoyable Penny to date. 

I wouldn't rank She Had to Have Gas quite as highly as Policeman in Armour (1937) or Policeman's Evidence (1938), but found it to be much better than The Lucky Policeman (1938) and played in a completely different league than Sealed Room Murder (1941). Sorry, Jim. But you can take solace in knowing you helped rehabilitate Penny's reputation as a purveyor of puzzles in my eyes. I was wrong to write him off so quickly. 

She Had to Have Gas tells the story of two women, Alice Carter and Philippa Saunderson, whose stories become intertwined and provide the story with one of the most baffling and grisly crime scenes of the 1930s detective stories. This is likely the reason why Edwards picked it to tell The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017).

Alice Carter is fair-haired, blue-eyed girl of about twenty-four, but her landlady, Mrs. Agatha Topley, had summed her up almost immediately "as no lady" and had "never seen cause to take back her judgement," but money was tight – as dreary Craybourne was not a popular seaside tourist attraction. Mrs. Topley accepted the silent, secretive girl and the first two weeks passed satisfactory until her cousin, Ellis, turned up. A gruff, suspicious-looking character habitually dressed in a long, tightly buttoned trench coat, check cap and spectacles with colored glasses. Alice and Ellis bottled themselves up in her room for hours on end, but where the situation becomes truly bothersome is that she owes more than three pounds in rent money.

One evening, Mrs. Topley returns from a family visiting to discover Alice had taken her late husband's battery wireless set and loudly blaring music in her room, but there's no response to the hammering on her locked door. So she takes a chair to peek through a glass partition covered with decaying, half peeled away frosted paper and sees the blanketed body of Alice in front of the gas fire. An "evil-looking curve of red rubber tubing" disappeared into the blanket by the head, which all pointed towards suicide. But when the police breaks down the door, nine minutes later, the body has "impossibly vanished." Sadly, no, it's not a locked room mystery. There are two situation in this story that were presented as impossible crimes, but you have to read the book to learn why they really aren't.

The second plot-strand concerns the niece of Charles Harrington, "a writer of murder mysteries," whose "productively imaginative pen" has produced more than twenty intricately-plotted detective novels, but now he finds himself in the middle of homegrown mystery problem – one that concerns his niece, Philippa Saunderson. Philippa had been deeply involved with the dandy, but disreputable, actor Robert Oakes, who now demands £5000 in return for a stack of embarrassing letters, compromising photographs and a nude painting. An astronomical sum that even her generous uncle can't or wants to cough up. So she has to bargain to get everything back or her new, much more respectable boyfriend, Colin Dennison, will find everything. But why did she disappear?

What gets the ball rolling, following fifty pages of setup, is the grisly discovery of a mutilated body in Oakes' bungalow. The body of a young woman, clad only in underclothes, whose head, hands and feet were cut off. Perplexingly, the stumps of the neck and wrists were "encased grotesquely in yellow oilskin tennis-racket covers." A situation you would expect to find in a Japanese (shin) honkaku mystery, but Penny gave the corpse-puzzle the good old college try in 1939! Obviously inspired by early period Ellery Queen.

At first glance, Penny's acrostic, diagram-and timetable riddled detective novels with their occasional excursions into locked room territory and policeman protagonist invites comparison with Freeman Wills Crofts and Christopher Bush. Penny has always openly aligned himself with the American writers of the Van Dine-Queen School and included an EQ-style "Challenge to the Reader" in each of his Chief Inspector Beale novels. Nowhere else is the influence of early period Queen as noticeable as in She Had to Have Gas, which really tried to imitate the elaborate, surrealistic flair of such EQ novels as The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) and The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932). Just like those novels, the bizarre circumstances in which the body was found and what happened at the crime scene being the key to the plot. Also note that one of the missing woman, fueling the plot, is named Alice. There's no way that's a coincidence with a mystery writer whose literary role model was Ellery Queen.

Penny managed to lit a fire and set my mind ablaze with all the questions and possibilities that arose from Chief Inspector Beale's investigation. Whose body was found in the bungalow, Alice or Philippa? What happened to Alice's body at the lodging house and, if the body belongs to her, how and why did she end in the bungalow? What happened to Philippa and, if it's her body, where was she originally murdered since the bungalow is not connected to gas, which comes with a mini-lecture on cheaply produced, household gas – why it's attractive to people considering suicide. Why did the murderer put tennis-racket covers on the neck and arms, but not the legs? What's the link between the two women and who really is Ellis? Where's he now? What part did the stolen delivery van and blackmail plot play a part in the murder and disappearances? This is just a small sampling of what to expect from this richly flavored, maze-like detective story that even slightly disoriented the author a few times.

Even though the story and plot tick and move with slow, mechanical precision, everything becomes somewhat mired and muddled at times, which required flipping back a few times to keep track of all the intricate details and moving parts. So it's not as smoothly written, or clearly plotted, as some of the others I've read. I suspect there will be many reader who'll find it all a little too mighty, too rich and too artificial for their taste, which here is underscored by the presence of a challenge to the reader and a clue-finder. There is, however, no denying it required some genuine craftsmanship and ingenuity to erect such a staggering, breathtaking edifice to the simon-pure jigsaw detective story. It's just that it did so very ungracefully.

For example, Beale points out in his explanation that they had "a strong lead to the solution" under their noses and they "did everything but recognize it." Due to a specialty of mine, I actually spotted the lead very early on, but what Penny did with it turned out to be much more contrived than I imagined. You see (ROT13), gur qvfnccrnenapr bs Nyvpr jnf cerfragrq nf n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel naq gung znqr zr fhfcrpg jung gur ynaqynql fnj jnf n cubgbtencu (bs Cuvyvccn?), juvpu vf jul Zef. Gbcyrl abgrq “gur pbzcyrgr nofrapr bs nal zbgvba fhpu n oernguvat.” N cubgbtencu, be crrc-obk, vf rnfvre gb erzbir va avar zvahgrf guna n obql. However, Penny had a much more contrived explanation as to what happened there.

So, yeah, I really appreciated what She Had to Have Gas tried to do and not entirely unsuccessfully, but it also represents the traditional, plot-oriented detective story at its most artificial with a cluttered plot, muddled direction and a sometime unsteady grip on the various plot-strands – preventing it from fully delivering on its promise. But, what it tried to do, made it Penny's most enjoyable endeavor to date. Not even the few loose nuts and bolts rattling around inside could spoil my enjoyment. One of the most delightfully bizarre, ambitiously plotted and convoluted curiosities of the genre's Golden Age. I think fans of early period Ellery Queen will probably get the most out of it.

Having now read four of Penny's Chief Inspector Beale novels since that first, disastrous encounter with Sealed Room Murders, I'm now ready to take on his Croftian dreadnought, The Talkative Policeman (1936).

Beware of Snakes: Case Closed, vol. 77 by Gosho Aoyama

This year, Viz Media will be publishing a translation of vol. 80 in Gosho Aoyama's long-running, immensely popular detective-series, Case Closed a.k.a. Detective Conan, which is amazing considering the first English release dates back to September, 2004 – roughly a decade and fifty volumes behind the original Japanese releases. So that backlog will be reduced to about twenty volumes by the end of 2021! 

Unless there's a drastic change in their schedule, Viz should catch-up with the Japanese releases sometime this decade and hand me the excuse needed to finally reread the series. While complaining about having to subsist on one or two new releases a year. But that's a post-2025 problem.

So, for now, let's tackle vol. 77, which begins with the conclusion to the kidnapping case that ended the previous volume on a cliffhanger. Detective Takagi, of the Metropolitan Police, disappears without a word and the next day a package is delivered to police with a stripped and modified tablet showing a live camera feed of the missing policeman – gag and tied to a plank on a high-rise construction with a noose around his neck. Conan helped track down the kidnapper, but this person slipped through their fingers and now it has become a race against the clock to find the ever weakening and fatigued Takagi. Satisfyingly, the ending revealed the story was a little more than merely thriller-filler.

I'm not overly fond of kidnap stories as they tend to be an author's excuse for lazy plotting, but Aoyama regularly proves himself to be the exception to the rule and knocks out a good one every now and then (e.g. vol. 72). This story is another one of his demonstrations that some ingenuity can be applied to a kidnapping plot, but here it also helped that one of the character-centered plot-threads ran through the story. So not a bad start to a new volume.

The second story is fairly simple and straightforward with a who-of-the-three situation, which is typical for the series, but the plot has a great take on the alibi problem.

Conan, Anita and Takagi happen to be nearby when a sleazy tabloid publisher, Daisuka Katsumoto, dropped to his dead from a top-floor of a condo building with a phone in his shirt pocket, which has a recent message he texted to multi people – cleverly used to isolate the three suspects from the crowd of onlookers. Conan resents the message and three phones in the crowd began to buzz. All three suspects live in the same building as the victim and even worked under him, which turns out to give them a motive as he used them to concoct a dirty smear story. A story that resulted in a suicide. Only problem is that they all possess a very unusual alibi.

The three suspects lived on the third floor of the condo complex and the victim resided on the 26th floor, but "they claimed they could prove they'd been in their condos" and could not have made the seven-minute trip to the victim's condo. And reappear seconds later on the sidewalk. What they give as evidence is "a beer with fresh foam... steam from a coffee cup... and smoke from a cigarette." So no tinkering with clocks or people's perception of time, but foam, steam and smoke that gave the suspects a solid, ten-minute alibi!

I can think of one other detective story that played with a similar idea, Arthur Porges' "Black Coffee" (1964), in which a burning cigarette and a cup of hot coffee in a locked room were the ingredients of a clever alibi-trick. The trick here is a little simpler in idea and execution, but, what propped it up, is (ROT13) gung gur zheqrere unq vzcebivfr ba gur fcbg. This made an otherwise simple trick a little bit more impressive. So, yeah, I liked it.

Unfortunately, the next story began very promising, but deteriorated and crumbled into one of the worst stories in the entire series!

Ten years ago, a nursery school principal stumbled on an uneven stone pavement with a fish bowl in his arms and was stabbed in the chest by a glass shard, but "the kanji for death was written in blood beside the corpse" – suggesting the hand of a murderer or even a serial killer. Conan/Jimmy's father dismissed and abandoned the case, unresolved, assuring everyone that they'll "never again see this bloody kanji." A decade later, a body is discovered in an alleyway with the kanji of death written in blood. However, the police defers the case to the division investigating thefts and robberies. So why do the homicide detectives refuse to touch the kanji deaths? Regrettably, the solution is preposterous and stretches credulity beyond what's reasonable to expect a reader to accept. You can blame that on the second death. I can accept that happening once, but not twice. This aspect of the story should have been solely focused on that past, unresolved case.

Only thing that somewhat saves this story is the ongoing, character-oriented story-arcs running in the background and the development in this story is very significant. Subaru Okiya observes Conan doing his Jimmy voice over the phone!

The closing story is mostly filler in order to setup vol. 78 and furthering those ongoing story lines, which begins with Anita giving Conan a Mystery Train Pass Ring to the Bell Tree Express. A steam locomotive, "made up to look like the Orient Express," which the Junior Detective League will be riding next week and Anita tells Conan she hopes "that's the only resemblance to an Agatha Christie novel" – a story that will be centerpiece of the next volume. I really look forward to its publication, but now they're on their way to a campsite in the woods. Naturally, they caught someone red handed trying to bury a body near a "Beware of Snakes" sign and this lands them in a heap of trouble. But the focus of the story is on how Anita is going to get them out of it (predictable) with ending showing that her identity, too, is compromised. 

A note for the curious: Anita packed the (temporary) antidote to APTX 4869, but refuses to share it with Conan, because he would use it "to play out your little romantic comedy." I've been saying for years that the only logical flaw in the series is Conan/Jimmy continue to keep his secret from Rachel. The third story here showed why it's cruel to keep her out of the loop ("Don't creep me out like that! You're already the spitting image of him") and the ending why it would be valuable to have her in on it. It's not like she would be any more or less danger than usual.

So, on a whole, this was a very uneven volume, but liked the conclusion to the kidnap story and the alibi-trick of the second story with the two weaker stories benefiting greatly from all the character-development and story progression being played out in the background. Not too badly. I really look forward now to reading the next volume!