The Libertines (1978) by Douglas Clark

In my previous review, I mentioned several modern classicists like the pharmacist of crime, Douglas Clark, who specialized in medical mysteries and ingenious, sometimes impossible poisonings that were quite popular in the 1970s and '80s – only to disappear into obscurity upon his death in 1993. Strangely enough, these retro mystery writers tended to vanished quicker and more thoroughly from popular culture than their Golden Age counterparts. But they, too, are being rediscovered today. 

Douglas Clark has been fortunately enough to have all twenty-six of his Detective Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Bill Green reprinted over the past five years by Lume Books (formerly Endeavour Media).

So, technically, the series is available again to the public, but they're very much hidden in plain sight. Lume Books is a small indie publisher that pumps out novels ("...over 3000 books written by 800 authors"), but settled on a bleak, unimaginative style of generic and uniform cover-art that gives the impression Clark wrote dark, psychological crime thrillers – which couldn't be further from the truth. Clark wrote traditional, fairly clued detective novels posing as a police procedurals with a pharmaceutical gimmick. And eschewed cheap thrills or plunging the murky depths of the human psyche. For example, the most rounded and fleshed out character in The Longest Pleasure (1981) is the botulism bacteria. Clark simply wrote pure, Golden Age-style detectives and howdunits.

The Libertines (1978) is the tenth title in the series and takes place on Samuel Verity's Ravendale Farm, situated in Ravendale Bridge, Yorkshire, which hosts a yearly cricket fortnight during high summer. Versity is one of the founding members of a cricket club, the Libertines, when none of the members had much money. So they were determined that it should not become a rich man's club, but "a cricket club anybody could afford to join" with everyone contributing something to hold the Libertines' fortnight. A tradition that began right after the war ended.

Three decades later, there are only three original members left. Samuel Verity and his long-time friend and London solicitor, William Dunstable, whose family will become intertwined as his son, Stephen, is dating Sarah – who's the daughter of Samuel and Sally Verity. But not everything is roses and sunshine. Old Tom Middleton, "an irascible old devil," is the third surviving member whose behavior is tolerated because he's a wine-shipper and furnishes the bar for the fortnight at wholesale rates. But he has become worse as his health declined. And very venomous.

Last year, Tom advised Sally Verity to keep "a motherly eye" on her daughter, because he had witnessed Sarah and Stephen "misbehaving at nights in the copse" when he was out on a light night walks. She called him "a dirty old peeping-tom" and Sarah not only denied it, but she was "quite willing to have old Dr Michaelson examine her to prove she was still intact." Stephen is less than pleased when he learns of this a year later and her brother, Teddy, also gets the Middleton treatment. Soon the younger members of the team are talking among themselves about "breaking the old bastard's neck" and that "the best place to dispose of the body would be the dung tank," which sets the stages for murder. Tom is not the first to bow out of the story with his nose in the air.

Nick Larter is an elderly, ailing and retired window cleaner who's not a Libertine, but he's been barman for the fortnight ever since it began. A fun, exciting summertime job that earned him a few extra pounds, but his health has been deteriorating rapidly and, while shaking Middleton's customary three drops of bitters in a gin glass, he collapses behind the bar – dying a few minutes later. A death that hardly surprises his doctor and unhesitatingly signed the certificate, but, three days later, Middleton dies in the wake of the first cricket game. So the local authorities order post mortems on both bodies, which revealed the presence of the quick-acting poison nicotine.

Superintendent George Masters and Detective Chief Inspector Bill Green are dispatched to Ravendale Bridge to untangle this poisonous puzzle.

A double poisoning Green described as "one by a chance which is mathematically impossible" and "the other by a means which is physically impossible," but whether or not they count as impossible crimes depends on your generosity. I don't think Middleton's death has any claim to it, but Larter's poisoning is a different story. While serving behind the bar, Larter slipped with the bottle-opener and snagged his right forefinger on the serrated edge of the crown top, "a trifling cut," but he died minutes later with "a qualified doctor and a score of others as witnesses." But nobody could daub nicotine on a crown top expecting the victim would touch it, "let alone scratch his finger on it." However, the trick here is figuring out how the two poisonings can be linked together. Don't read it solely for the impossible crime element.

Clark excellently contrasted the death of the "poor old retired window cleaner" with the murder of the "well-heeled wine importer who lived hundred of miles apart" and "the only possible link between those two was this annual cricket lark." This makes it a double murder that could have only taken place at Ravendale Farm during those two weeks of summer. A very well done and convincing closed-circle of suspects situation.

You can say contrast is the overarching theme of the story with the older characters struggling to keep up with a changing world and social mores, while the younger generation try to live up to the standards of the old-world while trying to find their own way and voice. Good examples of this are the conversation between Sally and Sarah concerning Middleton's accusation and Sam and Teddy trying to balance traditional and modern methods to run the family farm. I thought that made for a more interesting backdrop than the cricket scenes, which I don't understand and everything related to it completely went over my head, but I know it's supposed to be a boring, excruciating slow-paced game with older players taking naps – which doesn't seem like a sport that can be played with "a savage intensity." Playing cricket savagely sounds like a brutal game of curling or a grueling round of golf. Anyway...

So the characters, setting and setup are good and sound, but what about the plot, you ask? Not too bad. Admittedly, the clueing is a little sparse, but Clark's approach here wasn't without interest. Masters and Green begin to hunt for "anomalies in the conversations" conducted with the club members in lieu of physical clues to see if they can "explain away that which is odd or out of character." When they've sniffed out such anomalies, they "look very closely at those involved." Not wholly unlike Agatha Christie with one remark unmistakably echoing one of her 1940s mysteries ("Guvf qevax vf svygul"), but Masters and Green also have to search for a piece of physical evidence hidden somewhere on the farm. Where this piece of evidence was hidden points straight to the murderer, because only the murderer could have hidden it there. You can figure out where it's hidden and, in combination with the anomalies, identity the murderer with only the motive requiring a bit of educated guesswork. The whole puzzle is pretty solvable without being too obvious from the beginning. If you pay attention to what's being said and done, you can see where and how all the puzzle pieces fit.

There are, however, two (minor) drawbacks. The ending felt a little flat with Masters cutting a deal with the nonthreatening and even sympathetic murderer, but rather liked the final lines of the story. I already said Clark created a murder mystery that could only have taken place at Ravendale Farm during those summer weeks, which turns out to have been 100% preventable. Secondly, I don't think The Libertines is a good title for this kind of detective story. I don't think it really fitted the story. The Libertines' Fortnight or the more genre-driven Sudden Death would have been better titles. Looking at a glossary of cricket terms, Contrived Circumstances or Farm the Strike would have been even better titles for this cricket-themed detective novel.

But all things considered, The Libertines stands as a good, rock-solid and competently plotted continuation of the British Golden Age detective story with a poisoning-trick that would have received the nodding approval of the Queen of Crime herself. However, if you're new to the series, I still recommend you begin with the excellent Death After Evensong (1969).

An Alibi Too Soon (1987) by Roger Ormerod

Together with Kip Chase, Douglas Clark, Charles Forsyte and Jack Vance, Roger Ormerod belonged to the Lost Generation of detective novelists who attempted to conserve the genre's past as a foundation for a modern interpretation of the traditional, more plot-oriented, detective story – enjoying varying degrees of success and longevity. But they all arrived on the scene a good three, four decades too late. And they're practically forgotten today. 

Ormerod would never have appeared on my radar, if it weren't for Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) listing three of his impossible crime novels. Well, you know me. I dived down that rabbit hole head first and found not only a criminally forgotten, unexpectedly prolific writer of locked room mysteries, but a writer who perfected the modernization of the traditional, Golden Age period mystery with his best novels feeling like a natural continuation of that era. The Key to the Case (1992) and A Shot at Nothing (1993) are two great examples of Ormerod building on the past with a distinctly contemporary touch. That's not just me saying it.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, succumbed to the temptation of my previous reviews and tracked down a copy of Ormerod's The Hanging Doll Murder (1983), which he praised as "an engaging and devilish bit of detective fiction" and "a throwback to the heyday of detective fiction" – when plotting and storytelling superseded "character study and grim psychological probing." John has since joined me on an genre-archaeological expedition to unearth this too quickly forgotten, retro GAD author. So keep an eye out for his reviews.

I've previously read six of his nine, perhaps ten, confirmed locked room titles and wanted to keep the remaining three on the pile, for now, to see what else Ormerod did with the genre. Since I appreciate a good alibi-puzzle as much as a deviously-plotted impossible crime, An Alibi Too Soon (1987) was a logical place to start as I cherry pick my way through his work. 

An Alibi Too Soon is the third entry in the series about ex-Detective Inspector Richard Patton and his wife, Amelia, who are two highly reliable murder-magnets.

This story finds Richard and Amelia Patton in Welshpool, Wales, where they've come to view a converted water-mill with an option to buy it, but Richard remembered a former colleague, ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Llewellyn Hughes, retired to his beloved Wales to write his memoirs. And he decides to give him a call. Richard is surprised when he hears Llew Hughes has frantically been sending letters to his cottage on the south coast, while Richard was within a few miles of him "admiring a water-mill." Hughes has come across something in his memoirs about "a most important case" and believes they might have gotten it wrong, but he can't make any sense out of it.

So he promises to drop by with Amelia, but, when they arrive, the wooden barn house is ablaze and Richard only just managed to drag out a badly burned, dying Hughes clutching a manila envelope – name "EDWIN CARTER" printed cross its face. The envelope contained his notes on the Edwin Carter case. A case that was closed a decade ago and ended with a conviction, but Hughes spotted something in his notes that provides the story with its central puzzle. I think it's save to assume An Alibi Too Soon was intended to be Ormerod's take on the so-called "Humdrum" detective school of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode.

Edwin Carter was a playwright who made a lot of money with his social-comment comedies, but flopped as a stage director and lost all of his money. Carter was an eccentric manic-depressive, "way up one minute, way down the next," who threw a party, "a kind of wake," to celebrate his failure and ruin. During the party, Carter announced he was going to drive out to get "a fresh supply of booze." Later that evening, Carter's body is found in one of the two closed garages, belted into the driving seat, with a crate of beer and bottles of spirits on the backseat. So everyone presumed he committed suicide upon his return, but the police figures it was murder. This is where a technical piece of the puzzle comes into play.

There are two garages on the estate with up-and-over doors that can be either opened, or closed, with a radio transmitter or manually with the two buttons between the two doors. One of these garages was Carter's and the belonged to his niece and secretary, Rosemary Trew. But, for the system to work, "they had to keep to the correct garage for the correct car." And that's where the suicide became a murder. Another car had been parked in his garage and he was found in his niece's garage. So he had to push the outside button to close the door, run back under the door as it came down and belt himself into the driving as he waited for the car fumes to overtake him – which comes on top of an ugly bump on his forehead. However, the local police doesn't have to look very far to find someone who fitted the role of murderer like a glove.

Only person at the party without one of those "positive alibis" and a hint of a motive was Carter's nephew, Duncan, who came out on parole a few months ago. Duncan served ten years and is keen on getting pardoned in order to claim damages.

Richard Patton first has to figure out what incongruity Hughes had found that placed the case in a new light and he does notice something in a crime scene photo, which would give Duncan an alibi while removing all the others. But would his late colleague be driven half-crazy by a reversal of those "blasted alibis" or is there something else in the evidence? A stone cold, long-closed case is not the only problem he has to overcome.

Detective Chief Inspector Grayson was one of the original investigators of the Edwin Carter case and has diligently worked on his inflexible career ("he succeeds, you see"), which he's determined to protect by presenting Hughes death as an accident and frustrating Richard's private investigation. So they lock horns a few times over the course of the story, but he also comes across another, murky death of a blue movie actress, Glenda Grace, who had falling from the balcony of Carter's London flat during a house party – apparently sozzled and high on drugs. Some people believe she had been pushed. Several blackmail attempts had been made on various party guests. Richard also come to respect one of his suspects, Rosemary, who still lives at her uncle's estate where she used her "paltry inheritance" to produce plays and hold dress rehearsals. The theatrical crowd who hangs out there hasn't changed all that much from the time of those two tragic deaths.

So how well does Ormerod's An Alibi Too Soon stack up as a modern interpretation of the Crofts and Rhode-style detective story? Well, that's a bit of a mixed back of tricks.

Firstly, the two past murders of Carter and Grace were easily the best aspect of the plot with all the clues in place to give the reader a fair opportunity to figure out who, why and (mostly) how, which admittedly is not too difficult to do. Just like with Crofts and Rhode, the tricky part is putting all the pieces in the right place to get a complete and correct picture of the case. Something that was nicely complicated by the technical monkeying with the garage doors, a single word on the side of a beer crate and the premature alibi that gave the story its title. Ormerod gave some much needed weight to this part of the plot and his reputation as a retro GAD writer with a double-reversal of how the alibi-trick was perceived. A double-reversal nicely tied together with these other past plot-threads.

Unfortunately, the two present-day murders (a second body is found in a millrace) felt inconsequential and unnecessary. I think this story would have worked as well, perhaps even better, had Hughes not died. Grayson told Richard that Hughes' brain was going and Richard gently probing Hughes failing memory would have allowed for more engaging storytelling. This would have introduced a vital clue much earlier into the story. Now we have a murder that came about by pure change that's quickly shoved aside as an side-plot and used only as a reason to have Richard cross swords with Grayson. Oh, the Pattons become the new owners of Hughes' dog and they rename her Cindy (short for Cinders). I don't know why the second murder was necessary except to add some darkness to the story, but you can put down to the rushed ending giving the impression that a lot was left unanswered. 

An Alibi Too Soon is not one of Ormerod's best or strongest detective novels, but the story has a solid, competently plotted core with a clever play on the always tricky problem of arranging an alibi which makes it a worthwhile read to fans of Crofts and Rhode. But perhaps even more important that that, An Alibi Too Soon is another confirmation that Ormerod may have been one of the most anomalous mystery writer to have ever appeared on the scene. Not only was he a mystery writer who was both out-of-time and with the times, but his plots became stronger and his storytelling clearer as he neared the end of his career with his earlier novels, like The Weight of Evidence (1978) and More Dead Than Alive (1980), coming across as clunky compared to the previously mentioned The Key to the Case and A Shot at Nothing – published during his last active decade. I know writers are supposed to improve over time and maintain a certain standard, but, more often than not, there's an inevitable drop in quality in the work of prolific mystery writers. Not so with Ormerod.

I know my reading of Ormerod has been very limited to date, but my impression is that he spend his whole career honing and sharpening his skills. Beginning to show drastic improvement in the mid-to late 1980s and reaching his zenith in the 1990s. That's why When the Old Man Died (1991), Third Time Fatal (1992), Mask of Innocence (1994) and Stone Cold Dead (1995) have moved up a few layers on the big pile. So, yeah, expect more Ormerod in the coming months!

The Forbidden House (1932) by Michel Herbert and Eugène Wyl

Michel Herbert and Eugène Wyl were French authors of whom little is known outside of their short-lived collaboration in the 1930s, producing three detective novels of "varying quality," but their locked room mystery novel, La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932), is considered "a minor classic" with a courtroom denouement – praised by Roland Lacourbe as "a triumph of Cartesian logic." So a long out-of-reach classic of the French detective story that was finally made available in English by John Pugmire's Locked Room International. 

On first glance, The Forbidden House appears to be a fair representative of the type of impossible crime novel that was written in France at the time. The Forbidden House takes place in a castle-like mansion surrounded by a large, "entirely walled," garden similar to the almost fortified settings in Noël Vindry's La bête hurlante (The Howling Beast, 1934) and Gaston Boca's Les invités de minuit (The Seventh Guest, 1935). A place that proved to be insufficient to protect one, or more, of the characters from being pestered and picked off by an invisible menace, which recalls Boca's The Seventh Guest and Marcel Lanteaume's La 13e ball (The Thirteenth Bullet, 1948).

There is, however, one very important difference: Herbert and Wyl's The Forbidden House is the superior detective and locked room novel, which has a plot and unusual story structure made possible only by the French judicial system – weirdly anticipates a well-known, non-French classic of the genre. No. I'm not talking about one of John Dickson Carr's famous locked room fancies, but more on that in a moment.

Marchenoire Manor is a splendid manor house, close to Compiègne, equipped with all the modern comforts, a small guardhouse and a walled park of five hectares situated right in the forest of l'Aigle. But over the years, the place has garnered an unsavory reputation.

Five years ago, the founder of the Société du Crédit Continental, Abraham Goldenberg, built Marchenoire Manor, but, one day, he absconded with twenty-five million francs. A swindle that ruined both "magnates of finance" and "a multitude of small investors," which earned him seven years of hard labor. But he died two months after starting his prison term. So his home was sold and changed hands multiple times over the years, because the owners were either murdered or frightened away by an anonymous letter writer. M. Desrousseaux ignored the warning letter and his body was found in the park "dead from a rifle shot," but succeeding owners cleared out before the second, or third, letter arrived. However, the latest owner refuses to surrender "the residence of his dreams."

Napoléon Verdinage is the founder and executive director of a grocers' association and grocery chain, which made him a multi-millionaire, whose only relatives are some distant cousins. So he moved into Marchenoire Manor with his small, tightly-knit domestic staff. Thérèse Chapon was M. Verdinage's wet nurse who calls him Napo and acts as the steward of the manor. Her husband, Charles Chapon, is the negligent butler who gives more attention to the stock of vintage Pommard in the cellar than performing his duties. Another husband-and-wife team on the domestic staff are the chauffeur and cook, Edmond and Jeanne Tasseau. Adhémar Dupont-Lesguyères is M. Verdinage aristocratic secretary and head of protocol to his nouveau-riche employer on everything from dress conventions to social behavior, which he tends to do with an ironic smirk. Lastly, there's the young, misanthropic valet, Gustave Colinet, who spends his leisure hours shut away in his room and "the vigilant watchdog of the property," Jacques Bénard, who took a cripple, Clodoche, under his wing out of charity – both came with the property. But before the contract could be signed, the first letter is delivered under mysterious circumstances.

The letter warns to not purchase "THE FORBIDDIN HOUSE" (yes, mispelled), if he wants to live. M. Verdinage reasons that "only a prankster would use a fireplace as a letter box" and buys the house with the intention to move in as soon as possible.

A month later, a second warning is delivered under somewhat impossible circumstances. The letter is discovered on the first step leading down to the cellar, but the door was locked and "a very tight fit at the bottom" that "you couldn't thread a hair under it." Let alone a letter. A warning, once again, ignored and another month passed before the third letter is delivered. This time it announced the time his executioner would arrive, but M. Verdinage is not planning to back away from a fight.

M. Verdinage instructs Clodoche to wait at the gates and bring the visitor to him. After which he has to stay on the front steps, "like a good guard dog," whacking everyone with his crutch who leaves without his masters consent. Clodoche is seen escorting a figure to the house with his hat jammed down on his head and his coat collar up around his ears, which made it impossible to see his face as Clodoche's lantern provided only a moving circle of light – casting the figure's upper-body in semi-darkness. Shortly after crossing the threshold, the sound of a gunshot and an agonized cry shakes up the house. M. Verdinage had been shot and killed in the library!

Due to a fault in the construction, the manor "only has one door leading to the outside" and Clodoche was banging on it from the outside and yelling to be let in. So the murderer had nowhere to escape, or hiding place, with every exit either locked or guarded and several witnesses around. Some way, somehow, the murderer had vanished from the house in a puff of cordite smoke! This locked room problem is a lot more trickier and original than the premise suggests.

However, the murderer's vanishing act is not the main attraction of the story, but provides the main act with all the material to make it a main event. This is where the story becomes a treat to every mystery readers with special place in their heart for the multiple false-solution gambit, because The Forbidden House has them in spades!

There are several detectives, official and unofficial, who enter the case with their own ideas and theories, but, as one of them points out, "even the best of their hypothesis explains absolutely nothing" as they can make a case who and why it was done – except explaining "how the murderer left the scene of the crime." So they spend the lion's share of the story building up and tearing down each others theories. Some of the proposed solutions were quite clever while others were a little flimsy ("...he became agitated... that's indisputable proof of his guilt"), but always stamped with the personal motives or personality of the detectives. Lieutenant Taupinois wanted to show the inspector of the flying squad "the gendarmerie was every bit as capable as they were of carrying out an important investigation" and comes to a hasty conclusion (see quote). Paul Malicorne (Substitut du Procureur) and André Pruvost (commissaire divisionnaire de la brigade mobile) come up with more practical answers, but they, too, are unable to explain how the murderer disappeared. Claude Launay, juge d'instruction, is a headline chaser interested only in "celebrity, glory and rapid promotion," but he eventually has to accept the solution of a British private detective, Tom Morrow. And he has a financial stake in the matter as he represents the victim's estranged and disinherited cousins.

Now if any of this sounds vaguely familiar, you're right, because it's pretty much the same approach Leo Bruce took in his comedic masterpiece, Case for Three Detectives (1936). Something that can be boiled down to a group of troublesome, competing detectives who make things unnecessary complicated and difficult. Surprisingly, The Forbidden House has a line echoing a Sgt. Beef quote from Case for Three Detectives that I've never been able to forget.

Halfway through Case for Three Detectives, a tired Sgt. Beef exclaims "because these 'ere private detectives can't mind their own business... with their stepsons, and their bells, and their where-did-the-scream-come from. Why, they try to make it complicated." I always hear those words running through my head when a fictional detective is acting too much like a fictional detective. But before those lines had time to haunt me again, M. Launay gave his opinion on the gendarmes "who serve no other purpose than to send investigations on the wrong track, so as to complicate the simplest situations." Not that he was in any position to criticize any detective or policeman. I think it shows how close both novels are in spirit with one of the two only differences being that one was typically British and the other unmistakably French.

The other difference can be found at the end of the story as both end with the real detective revealing a much simpler, more elegant solution that beautifully contrast with all the fanciful theories that preceded it, but The Forbidden House is not only a who, why-and howdunit – also a who'll-be-the-detective. With the final line promising more adventures from this newly-minted "amateur detective."

There is, perhaps, a third, not unimportant difference between the endings of The Forbidden House and Case for Three Detectives. The latter has sometimes been criticized over its fourth and final solution, which some deemed as routine, unimaginative or disappointing (that's the joke). Herbert and Wyl avoided that pitfall and came up with a locked room-trick that's both better and simpler than all the proposed theories, but also didn't completely destroy the mystic and intrigue of the setup. A kind of locked room scenario and resolution that the master himself could have dreamed up.

So, needless to say, The Forbidden House is a tremendously enjoyable detective novel with a first-class locked room conundrum, which stands head and shoulders above the other French '30s and '40s mysteries published by LRI. Pugmire's tireless to ferry all these non-English impossible crime stories across the language-barrier has given me a better appreciation and understanding what the French were up to at the time. Some of those French mystery writers were a few years ahead of their British counterparts. I hope that statement won't lead to a fifth Anglo-Dutch War. Sorry, my British friends, but facts are facts.

On a final, related note: The Forbidden House has two appendixes on the French judicial system and the French GAD, which Pugmire ended with the comment that "several of the foregoing novels may well be candidates for future LRI publication." So why not tack my personal wishlist of French-language locked room mysteries to this review. The following titles/writers are criminally absent from my bookshelves: Stanislas-André Steeman's Six homes morts (Six Dead Men, 1931) and La nuit du 12 au 13 (The Night of the 12th and 13th, 1931). Pierre Boileau's Six crimes cans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Killer, 1935), which I want more than a lost manuscript by Joseph Commings or Hake Talbot. René Réouven's English-titled Tobie or not Tobie (1980) and Jean Alessandrini's La malédiction de Chéops (The Curse of Cheops, 1989). Any of Vindry's remaining locked room titles.

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) by Bill Pronzini

Last year, I posted a short story review under the title "The Nameless Detective: "The Hills of Homicide" (1949) by Louis L'Amour," which is best described as a western-flavored, hardboiled locked room mystery solved by a Los Angeles private eye – whose name is never revealed. So labeled the story as a curious ancestor of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" series, but recently stumbled across a much more fascinating link with Pronzini's historical private eye novels. I'm not talking about the handful of Carpenter and Quincannon short stories that originally appeared in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine during the mid-1990s. 

"The Hills of Homicide" mentioned in passing miners, or high-graders, smuggling gold ore out of a mine under seemingly impossible circumstances, but it was an anecdote without an answer. I closed out the review with my own solution to the problem of the pilfering miners. Not a bad solution, if I say so myself. However, I was less pleased with past Tom's cleverness when coming across an identical impossible situation in one of the latest Carpenter and Quincannon novels. Did I inadvertently spoil a locked room mystery by coming up with the best possible explanation for a rather one-of-a-kind locked room problem? Only one way to find out! 

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) is the eight, of currently nine, novels about John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, Professional Detective Services, who operate in 1890s San Francisco when the glory days of the Old West began to wane and fade – as a new century dawned. A time when the line between the American frontier and the settled states blurred and motorcars, or horseless carriages, began to replace "horse-drawn conveyances as the primary method of transportation." One of the constants in this ever-changing world is the always adaptable criminal.

John Quincannon is summoned by one of the city's wealthiest businessmen, Everett Hoxley, to his social club to discuss a particular vexing and costly problem.

Hoxley is the head of a large mining corporation that "owned several gold and silver mines in northern California and Nevada," but the production of high-quality ore in the Monarch Mine has dropped noticeably and there have been rumors of high-grading. So he wants Quincannon to go undercover as a newly hired timberman to "identify the individuals responsible for an insidious high-grading operation" and "to put a satisfactory end to their activities," which comes with a generous fee, expensive and a possible bonus. Only obstacle is that it's likely a four-week assignment and his marriage to Sabina Carpenter is planned three weeks from then. But that's the life of a detective.

Quincannon arrives in the small mining settlement of Patch Creek, northeast of Marysville, under the alias J.F. Quinn where's confronted with multiple, quasi-impossible crimes and a full-blown "locked room" murder – twelve-hundred feet underground! Firstly, he not only has to identify the gang of high-graders, but figure out how they were refining gold-bearing ore to produce pure gold dust in "a mine operating with mostly full crews twenty-four hours a day." Secondly, the method used to smuggle the gold out of the mine. Thirdly, he has to do all that while doing eight-hour of backbreaking, mining labor in "the dangerous bowels of the earth." A place where cave-ins, premature detonations, rock gas and runaway cages or tramcars were greater threats to his health than "the actions of a gang of gold thieves." Quincannon believes there's "no better detective in the Western states" and gets some quick results, but, having stumbled across an important piece of evidence, he is knocked out in a abandoned, dead-end crosscut. He's awakened by the sound of a pistol shot and is found next to a dead body. There's only one way in and out of crosscut, which was in sight of several miners when the shot sounded. Nobody else entered or left the crosscut. So "as pretty a frame as ever had been set around an innocent man."

The passages of the story that takes place in the mine are the best part of the book, but the solutions to the various problems vary enormously in quality. The locked room-trick used for the shooting is good and simple, which nicely fitted both the underground conditions and the circumstances in that crosscut. Indubitably, the best plot-strand of the Monarch Mine case. Quincannon more or less stumbles across the refining process, but a clever little criminal operation nonetheless. Regrettably, the method used to the smuggle out the gold was a huge letdown, because I expected something a little more ingenious rather than a gross oversight on the part of the shift inspectors. But they remain the best and most memorable parts of the whole book.

So, while Quincannon is playing the Sherlock Holmes of Agartha in the Earth's crust, Sabina is holding down the fort, but the detective business experiences one of its slack periods and only has two minor cases on her hands.

Firstly, Sabina is doing a background check on an unsavory character who turned up in Quincannon's case and how to get that information to him, because Patch Creek didn't have a Western Union office. Secondly, she unofficially and unethically ended "the criminal careers of a confidence man and an embezzler" without a paying client or earning "so much as one thin dime," which is a cardinal sin – to "John's way of thinking." They meet up again in the last quarter to hunt down the last high-grader as the story becomes a charming, well written period railway mystery with an impossible disappearance as their quarry vanishes from a moving train without a trace.

One thing to remember is that the novels in this series are rewrites and expansions of the short Carpenter and Quincannon stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Louis L'Amour Western Magazine from 1994 to 2018. The Stolen Gold Affair is an expansion of "The Desert Limited" (LLWM, Nov. 1995) and "The Gold Stealers" (EQMM, Sep/Oct. 2014), but had previously only read "The Desert Limited" in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Servives (1998) and hoped the solution would be better in a novel-length treatment. There are some clever touches to it (how Sabina solved it and why Quincannon missed it), but not everything holds up. I thought (ROT13) Zbetna hfvat “fbzr fbeg bs ehfr gb trg gur onttntr znfgre gb bcra hc” was a cop-out answer and too easily glossed over. That was suppose to be a legitimate obstacle in closed, moving locked room and presenting it as "an educated guest" doesn't make it any less unfair.

That being said, my opinion of the short story at the time is that the whole trick and setting would probably work better in a visual medium, which is also true for its expanded version in The Stolen Gold Affair. I believe this series, particular its novel-length treatments, would make perfect source material for a television series as it has everything on the ready. A beautiful, striking period backdrop during a time of great change with two great, memorable lead-characters who came with their own personal, and intertwined, storylines – culminating in their marriage. There's also the ongoing storyline with the crackpot Sherlock that ran through multiple novels (beginning with The Bughouse Affair, 2013) and ready-made plots that are neither overly complicated or insultingly simplistic. Some of the impossibilities from this series would translate beautifully to the small screen like the ghostly apparitions in The Spook Lights Affair (2013). Not to mention Pronzini and Marcia Muller's time-crossing crossover, Beyond the Grave (1986), can be adapted to give such a TV-series a strong and memorable ending.

So, on a whole, I did enjoy my time with The Stolen Gold Affair with the chapters that take place underground and the impossible shooting in the crosscut standing out, but the problem is that they were noticeably better done than the other plot-strands. So it's the Monarch Mine case that's the main attraction of The Stolen Gold Affair and comes particular recommended to locked room readers as there are not that many impossible crime stories that use the woefully underutilized mine setting. Pronzini demonstrated what you can do with a deeply buried, rock-solid locked room situation. Just one question remains... did that throwaway anecdote from "The Hills of Homicide" gave Pronzini the idea for the "The Gold Stealers" or was it Clyde B. Clason's Blind Drifts (1937)? An impossible crime novel with a mine setting Pronzini fanboyed all over it.

The Devil is Everywhere: "Triangle at Rhodes" (1936) by Agatha Christie

Last time, I revisited Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1941), a classic of the simon-pure jigsaw puzzle detective story, which served as a reminder why Christie towered above so many of her contemporaries and made me want to take another look at an earlier, shorter version of the novel – generally considered to be one of her better short stories. So did it stand up to rereading? Let's find out! 

Christie's "Triangle at Rhodes" was originally published in the February 2, 1936, issue of This Week, reprinted in the May, 1936, publication of The Strand Magazine and finally collected in Murder in the Mew and Other Stories (1937). 

"Triangle at Rhodes" takes place on the titular, sun-soaked island where the celebrated Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, had come to for a much deserved rest and holiday. A hopefully non-criminal, corpse-free holiday and he had booked his holiday during a period when Rhodes would be nearly empty. So the island resembled "a peaceful, secluded spot" outside of the tourist season with only a small group of guests staying at the hotel, but, even within that "restricted circle," Poirot noticed "the inevitable shaping of events to come." The internal triangle!

This small circle of holidaymakers comprises of Miss Pamela Lyall, a student of human nature, who's "capable of speaking to strangers on sight" instead of "allowing four days to a week to elapse before making the first cautious advance" as "is the customary British habit" – acting, more or less, as the female counterpart of Arthur Hastings. Pamela is there on holiday with a friend, Miss Sarah Blake. Old General Barnes is "a veteran who was usually in the company of the young" or boring other guests with anecdotes military career in India, but the foreboding, triangle-shaped patterns take shape among two married couples, the Chantrys and the Golds.

Valentine Chantry is a "man-eating tiger" who widowed one husband, lost three in the divorce courts and recently married a navy officer, Commander Tony Chantry. Douglas Gold is a good looking, golden-headed man who there with his mousy-looking wife, Marjorie, but becomes infatuated with Valentine. So the familiar, age-old pattern of murder begins to take shape and ends with Valentine drinking poisoned gin and an arrest.

Poirot and Pamela were the only ones who observes the eternal triangle take shape, but Pamela saw it "the wrong way round" and here the story turned out to be weaker than I remembered. There's no meaningful clueing or misdirection with its only strong points being its geometrical plot-structure and how beautifully the ending reversed the whole situation, but the conclusion played out off-page with Poirot being an eyewitness to the murderer's handiwork – telling the reader about it afterwards. So plenty of good ideas here, but not very satisfying as a detective story nor anywhere near as good as its novel-length treatment. That's a shame as I used think "Triangle at Rhodes" would easily make my top 10 of best short detective stories. Don't worry. Christie will still be represented on such a hypothetical, future list with the massively under appreciated "Wireless" (1926).

Evil Under the Sun (1941) by Agatha Christie

Previously, I reviewed three originally non-English or untranslated detective novels, namely Mika Waltari's Kuka murhasi rouva Skrofin? (Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll?, 1939), Ton Vervoort's Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965) and Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998), but promised to end my little world tour to return to the civilized, English-speaking world – which gave me an idea. Why not revisit another timeless classic that I have only read before in a Dutch translation? Something I did last month with John Dickson Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939). 

So my pick was between Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932) and Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1941), but the latter seemed more appropriate for the time of year. 

Evil Under the Sun takes place on a small, fictitious island off Leathercombe Beach, Devon, where an 18th century sea captain had made his home and left his descendants with a cumbersome inheritance, but the 1920s birthed "the great cult of the Seaside for Holidays" – property was sold and developed into a tourist destination. The Jolly Roger Hotel, Smugglers' Island, is "usually packed to the attics" during the holiday season. A quiet, peaceful place where the sun shines, the sea is blue and the beaches packed with sunbathers. Not exactly "the sort of place you'd get a body," but Hercule Poirot knows all to well that "there is evil everywhere under the sun." And evil comes to the island to cut the detective's holiday short!

Arlena Stuart is a retired stage actress who's as famous as she's notorious, "fatally attractive," who has the habit of making "men go crazy about her" everywhere she goes. She was cited in the Codrington divorce case, but Lord Codrington turned her down flat when the divorce was finalized. Only for the gallant Kenneth Marshell to come to the rescue and married the scandal plagued actress. Arlena and Kenneth Marshell are spending their holiday on Smugglers' Island with Kenneth's adolescent daughter, Linda, but trouble begins as soon as Arlena sets foot on the island.

There's another, much younger, married couple staying on the island, the Redferns. Christine is a quiet, nice looking woman in "her fair washed-out way," but her husband, Patrick, is a handsome and athletic man with "a kind of infectious enjoyment and gaiety" about him. Patrick becomes quite infatuated with Arlena and they're very open about it, which naturally puts a strain on the situation. But there are more people who a problem with that devil of woman.

Rosamund Darnley is a well-known, successful dressmaker and a childhood love-interest of Kenneth, but she's worried what kind of influence she has on her stepdaughter, Linda, who's not particular fond of her stepmother – which is why she asks him to divorce her. Kenneth is determined to stick to the 'till-death-do-us-part bit of his marriage vows. Reverend Stephen Lane is another hotel guest and a religious fanatic who believes evil walks the earth and its name is Arlena Stuart Marshell. In addition to a few less suspicious-looking hotel guests who get to witness this prelude to murder. Such as the retired Major Barry ("a teller of long and boring stories"), Miss Emily Brewster ("a tough athletic woman" who disliked women "smashing up homes"), Horace Blatt (who tries "to be the life and soul of any place he happened to be in") and the Gardeners ("those yapping Americans"). But then again, is anyone ever really above suspicion in a detective novel?

Hercule Poirot can feel there's murder in the air, but, as he said once before in Egypt, that "if a
person is determined to commit murder it is not easy to prevent them." So everyone's holiday comes to an abrupt end when Arlena is found strangled to death on the beach of Pixy Cove. Inspector Colgate is only too happy to accept Poirot's help and give him a free hand.

So now he has to gather and arrange "every strange-shaped little piece" of the puzzle, physical and psychological, as he tries to see where every piece fits to get a clear and comprehensible picture of the murder. Clues such as an overheard conversation and an empty bottle thrown from a window. A bath that no one would admit to having taken. A new pair of scissors and a smashed pipe found at the crime scene. A green calendar and skein of magenta wool with several pesky, somewhat unusual alibis hinging on typewriters, wristwatches and physical impossibilities complicating the case even further – while blackmail, dope smuggling and witchcraft discreetly hover in the background. This all sounds like an incredibly tricky, labyrinthine-plotted detective story, but it actually might be one of Christie's simplest and most uncomplicated novels. She just knew how to play the reader like a fiddle.

I largely remembered the who-and how with only the why having become muddled in my memory, but, as the story began to fill in the blanks, I was reminded why Christie is the Queen of Crime. Carr and Christie are the only readers who consistently gave their readers two different experiences with the same book with the second read showing you how everything was logically and fairly laid out in front of you. So you couldn't have missed the obvious, but, more often than not, you did and a second read probably wants to make you kick yourself. That has been my experience with Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule and Christie's Evil Under the Sun.

Remembering most of the solution, I could sit back to simultaneously admire and be astonished at how brazenly obvious everything was while she made it appear like a maze without an exit! The old bag lied through her teeth without uttering a single untrue word and I say that with the upmost affection. She even hinted at the solution before the murder was committed. What a woman!

So, technically, Evil Under the Sun is a small masterpiece and a shining example of the Golden Age detective story, but there are two tiny, almost minuscule, specks that need to be mentioned along with the praise. Poirot's observation that Arlena's murder is "a very slick crime" and the information he requests was a lucky guess, or an inspired piece of guesswork, as opposed to logical reasoning. Secondly, Christie indulged in some of her favorite themes and tropes, which is fine, but she has used them even better and in a much grander fashion in some of her better-known mystery novels. But having writing that down, I feel like I took a magnifying glass to Rembrandt's Night Watch to haunt for small imperfection.

As long-time readers of this blog know, or something you probably guessed from this review's opening, I like to explore the obscure, little-known nooks and crannies of the detective story, but, if you spend too much time there, you can forget why Carr and Christie towered above their contemporaries. The Problem of the Green Capsule and Evil Under the Sun were a much needed reminder that they earned their reputation as the absolute bests ever on merit and not merely for being popular fan favorites or selling copies like a money printer.

Murder Among Virgins (1965) by Ton Vervoort

My previous blog-posts were reviews of translations of two non-English detective novels, Mika Waltari's Kuka murhasi rouva Skrofin? (Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll?, 1939) and Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998), which annoy some of my readers as they tend to have availability issues – either being out-of-print or not on hand in English. So my apologies for rambling about three, non-English detective novels in a row, but wanted to do the hat-trick and end with a Dutch-language mystery. Rest assured, I'll return to the Anglo-American detective sphere in my next post. 

Peter Verstegen is a Dutch author, editor and translator who wrote half a dozen detective novels during the early 1960s under the name "Ton Vervoort."

I've recently discovered Vertegen began writing detectives at the time purely to make a living, which were published as Meulenhoff-pockets with a circulation of 12000 copies. But he only received a nickel per sold book. So he earned "1200 gulden if they sold out" or about a 1000 gulden if they didn't. That's roughly 3000 euros today.

Vervoort likely wasn't profitable enough for Verstegen to continue the series, which was a lost to the genre, because he wrote some authentic, plot-driven Dutch mystery novels penned in a deceivingly light and airy style – packed with all the potential to have been a serious rival to Appie Baantjer. Critic, poet and one-time mystery writer, C. Buddingh', said in the 1950s that if the detective story in the Netherlands wanted to have a personality of its own, it needs "to have a Dutch setting, populated with Dutch characters, where a murder committed by a Dutchman is solved." Vervoort checked all those boxes with novels like Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) and Moord onder de mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964), which also possessed many of qualities of his Anglo-American counterparts. Although not quite as good as some of the well-known American and British mystery novelists, but Vervoort unquestionable was a cut, or two, above most Dutch writers who tried their hands at the detective story.

The back cover of Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965) says its Vervoort fourth novel, but this has to be a mistake as the publishing date and information online clearly places it as the fifth and final entry in the Floris Jansen series. Who's now a Chief Inspector of the Central Police in Amsterdam. 

Murder Among Virgins is Jansen's last recorded case, but appears only in the opening and closing chapters to begin and close the book on the "sordid history" surrounding a rich toothpaste magnate, Agnes Wels. A history that begins to slowly unravel on the morning after the Sinterklaasviering (St. Nicholas celebration), December 6, when Ton Vervoort reads in the paper about a "strange death" the previous night. Benno Haakman is a 20-year-old student who played Sinterklaas for the children of an orphanage in the Warmoesstraat, but collapsed while the children were singing a song and slipped into a diabetic coma – passing away later that night in hospital. There are, however, one or two aspects begging the attention of the police in the guise of the newly appointed Chief Inspector Floris Jansen. Vervoort gets a front row seat.

Benno had told the orphanage father he played Sinterklaas on behalf of a student-run Sinterklazencentrale, but they had stopped using the year prior. What happened to the man who played Zwarte Piet (Black Pete)? Why did they act so strangely? Doing "a sort of war dance with the sack and rod" and "pretending to take a little boy." Benno is the eccentric, overly sensitive son of the well-known toothpaste magnate, Agnes Wels, but it becomes "a brief investigation" when Jansen and Vervoort discover evidence of suicide. So they have to drop the case.

After only two chapters, Murder Among Virgins changes from a festive, seasonal December mystery into a travelogue with newlyweds Ton and Sannah Vervoort spending their honeymoon during the three-day carnival in Maastricht, Limburg. Same locality and carnival setting used by F. van Overvoorde's Moorden in Maastricht (Murders in Maastricht, 1937). Never imagined I would get an opportunity to reference that obscure mystery novel. Anyway, Vervoort has to be obnoxiously from Amsterdam by calling Maastricht a pleasant enough little town, but "it remains a fairly dozy place for Amsterdammers on honeymoon." But he becomes human again once the drinking and partying begins.

 

 

During their honeymoon they meet a "bilious antique dealer" at the hotel and a curious, old-fashioned, but kindly, priest who has a cabin in the wood, where he prays and meditate, but also enjoyed the brief excursion to the Sint Pietersberg – a "gigantic molehill of marl." A natural and historical labyrinth "where the first Christians hid from the heathens, later the heathens from the Christians, later the Protestants from the Catholics and then the Catholics from the Protestants." This part of the story is interspersed with entries from Sylvia Haakman's diary. Sylvia is the daughter of Agnes Wels and lives at an incredibly stern, Catholic convent boarding school in an old monastery, outside of Maastricht, but she's a rebellious teenager and constantly gets in trouble with the nuns. Ton and Sannah even get to witness one of the nuns hitting Sylvia during a walk in the woods.

I've to note here that, stylistically, Murder Among Virgins is very much a product of 1960s Dutch cultural revolution and secularization, which means that religion and the nuns are not cast in a very flattering light. Such as the morbidly obese Mother Superior who attempted to guilt Sylvia's mother in handing over 25000 gulden. The convent school becomes the scene of two "inexplicable murders" in the second-half of the novel.

Firstly, there's a cleverly done, wonderfully clued poisoning that came close to being a perfect murder and one of those things placing Vervoort among the top-ranked, second-tier mystery writers. Something not wholly unworthy of Agatha Christie or Gosho Aoyama. The second murder at the school surprised as it unexpectedly throw out a locked room mystery! A body is discovered in one of the toilets, locked from the inside, which is why everyone assumes it's the murderer who committed suicide, but don't expect too much from the routine trick. The locked room is only there to serve as a cheeky clue. But I didn't expect to come across one. So it was a nice surprise to add Vervoort's Murder Among Virgins to the growing list of Dutch locked room and impossible crime fiction.

Vervoort obviously tried to do something different with each novel. Murder Among Astrologists is an homage to the zanier, Alice in Wonderland-esque Ellery Queen mysteries with a dying message. Murder Under the Mantle of Love allowed a serial killer to escape from a closed-circle of suspects to wreak havoc on the invalids of the city. Murder Among Virgins mixes the seasonal and scholastic type of mystery novel with a travelogue, which were all written in a worryingly nonchalant, almost careless, style. A very light touch to the storytelling usually translates into a featherweight detective story with scant clueing, but, somehow, Vervoort always succeeded in pulling everything together in the last chapter – revealing an authentic, properly plotted and clued detective story. Murder Among Virgins is no exception in that regard.

There are, however, one or two flaws that places it slightly below Murder Among Astrologists and Murder Under the Mantle of Love. The murderer's motive is a huge gamble, which is acceptable enough (murder is a risky business anyway), but it turned the Sinterklaas murder into one big red herring. One that's not really fair. So don't pay too much attention to that murder. Having now read three of Vervoort's novels in short succession, I've begun to notice he has a preference for cloaking his murderers in a particular type of camouflage. And that made the murderer here standout with the locked room clue eventually confirming my suspicion.

So, overall, Murder Among Virgins is not the strongest entry in the short-lived Floris Jansen series, but certainly not a bad detective novel offering an ingenious poisoning-trick, a surprise impossible crime and dealt a generally fair hand to the reader. More importantly, it ensured Vervoort a permanent place among the troupe of mystery writers I affectionately refer to as my favorite second-stringers. Sadly, I only have to track down a copy of Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Stage Actors, 1963) to complete the series, unless some previously unpublished manuscripts (Moord onder detectives?) turn up somewhere. I can only hope.

Deadly Thunder (1998) by Seimaru Amagi

Earlier this year, I tracked down and reviewed an obscure, hard-to-get Japanese light novel in The New Kindaichi Files series, Operazakan – aratanaru satsujin (Opera House, the New Murders, 1994), written by the Soji Shimada of the anime-and manga detective genre, Seimaru Amagi – who crafted a beautiful, perfectly executed theatrical (locked room) mystery. One of the better entries in the Kindaichi franchise demonstrating Amagi is a mystery writer who's firmly entrenched in the traditions of the shin honkaku school. 

A fact he already proved with another light novel, Dennō sansō satsujin jiken (Murder On-Line, 1996), which is perhaps the first whodunit to use the internet in a meaningful way. Not to mention his original manga stories/anime adaptation of The Prison Prep School Murder Case, The Rosenkrauz Mansion Murders and The Legendary Vampire Murders. So I was eager to get my hands on the other two translations in the series, but those editions were intended for Japanese readers learning to read and speak English. Consequently, the well of secondhand copies in the West is practically empty and bone-dry.

Nevertheless, I managed to get hold of a copy of the sixth title in the series, Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998), which is the fourth and last novel to be translated and is a relatively minor story compared to the bigger, previously mentioned cases – centering on "a spontaneous crime" with an improvised trick. A trick turning an otherwise simple, straightforward murder into an impossible crime! It's not the no-footprints trick that makes Deadly Thunder somewhat standout, but how the plot combined everything from elements of cultural anthropology and entomology to geology and meteorology. All of these different aspects come together in the remote, unique setting of the story with the result reminding me of the regional mysteries by Todd Downing and Arthur W. Upfield. Two names not often associated with the Japanese shin honkaku detective story. 

Deadly Thunder has a standard enough opening with Hajime Kindaichi and Miyuki Nanase traveling to a tiny, remote village to visit a former classmate, Akie Asaki.

The land around Kumoba Village is "shaped like a valley or a basin," which makes it very hot during the summer with clouds forming above the surrounding mountains to produce heavy thunder and rain storms. In the past, the locals thought these thunderstorms were an act of the gods and appeased them with the three-day Thunder Festival. A long-standing, unbroken traditional of 300 years that has preserved to the present-day, but the rain and thunderstorms also gifted the village something special and unique. A kind of clay that's only found in Kumoba Village, which is washed down from the mountains.

Akie comes from a long line of potters whose "curious, translucent white" pots were presented to the Shogun during the Edo period and the ground their family home stands on has the best pottery clay, which is why it's surrounded by a large, foreboding wall with spikes on top – erected by previous generations "to protect the clay from robbers." She has to share the home with her stepmother and stepsister, Hazuki and Shigure Asaki, who Akie and her aunt, Haruko, consider intruders ("those two"). They also have a quasi-residential house guest staying at the annex, Kyoichi Muto, who's an entomologist. Apparently, the village is also rather unique in its "variety and number of cicadas."

So the setting is very well piece of miniature world-building as Amagi created a small, unique geographical area and populated it with a unique, somewhat isolated culture. A culture with its own history, religious practices and even architecture. Such as all the houses being low built, single-storied "to avoid being struck by lightening" with a tall tree in every garden to "serve as a lightening conductor." Another interesting aspect is how rich Deadly Thunder is in sound. Deadly Thunder is filled with the sound of falling rain, claps of thunder, chanting, beating of drums and "the incessant drone of cicadas," which all helped elevate a mostly routine detective story.

This kind of world-building is unfortunately a rarity in the detective genre, but Amagi has done it before, on a much larger scale, for Detective Academy Q with The Kamikakushi Village Murder Case. I co-reviewed the anime adaptation with Jim here.

Anyway, as the story moves towards the halfway mark, everyone begins to prepare for the first day of the annual Thunder Festival, but the celebration, or rather spectacle, ends with Hazuki discovering Muto's body in annex – bludgeoned to death. The body was covered in "hundreds, no thousands, of cicada shells," but even more inexplicable where the two sets of footprints going from the back of the house to the annex. A set of fresh, recently made prints belong to Hazuki, while the older, rain washed tracks were made by the well-worn, easy to identify sandals of the victim. So with the question of time and rain taking into consideration, the tracks turned the murder into a locked room mystery! 

Deadly Thunder has only one body and three suspects, which has been done before in the series (e.g. The Blood Pool Hall Murder), but not very often and the plot really needed a good locked room-trick to give the plot some weight. Thankfully, the locked room-trick delivered as it did something new with the no-footprints scenario, but with all the clues in place necessary to arrive at (nearly) the same conclusion as Kindaichi. Why the body was covered in cicada shells was an inspired piece of plotting functioning as both a clue and a red herring.

The reader has an easier time putting all the pieces together than Kindaichi as he has to deal with a local policeman, Detective Akai, who's more annoyed than impressed by the grandson of "the master detective Kosuke Kindaichi." Even if he "solved several murder cases and mysteries that the police couldn't solve." Detective Akai only sees an ordinary high school student who speaks to adults like they were taking classes together. Kindaichi has to learn and show a little humility before getting an opportunity to prove himself to Detective Akai. One of those many small touches that made the story shine.

There is, however, a minor problem with the solution. Amagi added a last-minute twist that gave the story an ending as black as the ink with which it was printed, but not a fair surprise as it's impossible to anticipate the motivation behind the act. A smudge on an otherwise very well written, competently plotted detective story.

That being said, the good definitely outweighed the bad with a simple, but good, locked room-trick and a splendid, vividly realized setting, which told its story in less than a 130 pages with full-length illustrations. The short length proved to be an asset as it enlarged all its strong points and prevented the story from overstaying its welcome by dwelling on its weaknesses. So, yeah, a perfect detective story to nip at during a lazy summer afternoon.