The Shanghai River Demon's Curse (1997) by Seimaru Amagi

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the co-creator of The Kindaichi Case Files, Seimaru Amagi, wrote nine "light novels" in the series and four were translated as part of either the Kodansha English Library or Kodansha Ruby Books, which were intended as an educational tool to help improve the English of Japanese readers – not to dazzle Western readers. Hence, each novel ends with a nearly thirty-page long English-Japanese vocabulary list. 

According to our resident expert, Ho-Ling Wong, the English editions enjoyed a long print-run in Japan and there must be "a fair number in circulation," but, in the West, copies have become as rare and elusive as a Kappa. Not quite rare or obscure enough to elude me forever!

Several years ago, I came across Dennō sansō satsujin jiken (Murder On-Line, 1996), which is possibly the first detective novel to use the internet meaningfully in a traditionally-styled mystery complete with an isolated, snowbound setting and ironclad alibis. You can borrow a digital copy from the Internet Archive. Next one that fell into my hands was Operazakan – aratanaru satsujin (Opera House, the New Murders, 1994), published in English simply as The New Kindaichi Files, but the plain, uninspired title hides a classic, first-rate theatrical locked room mystery – translating into my favorite Kindaichi title to date. Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998) is a very minor, short and somewhat flawed detective story, but you can cross-off some of its shortcomings against an imaginative piece of miniature world-building and an inventive impossible crime. So that left with me with one more title to track down. 

Shanhai gyojin densetsu satsujin jiken (The Shanghai River Demon's Curse, 1997) is the fifth novel in the series and the third to be translated, which turned out to be a bit of an odd duck. 

The Shanghai River Demon's Curse brings Hajime Kindaichi and Miyuki Nanase to Shanghai, China, where the famous Yang Variety Troupe performs a daily, two-hour variety show at the Mermaid Hall. An enormous ship moored along the bank of the Huangpu River. The main event of the show is an acrobatic underwater act, "The Legend of the River Demon," which is patterned after the tale of a creature that's half-fish, half-human that lives at the bottom of the river. A monster with the ability to curse, or even kill, human beings. In some places, it's considered "bad luck to mock such spirits on stage" like "in Japanese ghost stories."

Following a performance of "The Legend of the River Demon," the director of the troupe, Yang
Wang, is found in his office with a bullet in his head, but his body and the floor are unaccountably soaking – water has "the unpleasant odor of freshwater fish." Even stranger is that the murderer scratched a huge Chinese character for “spring,” a meter wide, on the wall. The first word of the lullaby of the river demon's curse. However, the Shanghai police have a very human suspect in their sights.

Once the show begins, with "animals like the tiger and monkey roaming around," the door to the dressing room is locked from the inside and it's "impossible for anyone from the audience to get in," which was still locked from the inside when the show ended. Nearly everyone on that side of the door had an alibi except the victim's son, Yang Xiaolong. His young sister, Yang Lili, writes her Japanese penfriend, Miyuki, a distressed letter saying her brother is suspected to have murdered their father. Miyuki decides to go Shanghai to help by bringing her childhood friend, Hajime Kindaichi, who's "the grandson of the master detective Kosuke Kindaichi" and "solved several cases for the Metropolitan Police Department." But his grandfather's name or reputation is not as well-known in China, which is one of the challenges facing the young detective who became a little timid when landed in foreign country for the first time in his life.

When they finally arrive in Shanghai, there are two big surprises waiting in the wings. Firstly, they find Detective Li Boer, of the Shanghai Police, in the company of their friend in the MPD, Inspector Kenmochi. Recently, the body in a decade old murder case was identified and "a small clue" led the Tokyo police to the Japanese director/producer of the Yang Variety Troupe. But is there's a link to the new murder? Secondly, Kindaichi and Miyuki get to witness a second murder during a performance of "The Legend of the River Demon" when a body plunged down from above the stage into the swimming tank. Another bullet to the head and the Chinese character for "summer" was slashed in the victim's back with a knife. So the murderer was intended to follow the grim lullaby. 

In spring, the boat is flooded,

In summer, the river turns a murky mauve,

In autumn, the traveler must drink putrid water,

In winter, fish no longer swim but sleep.

These murders also have an element of the impossible as the victims were shot with a derringer, which apparently can vanish, or materialize, whenever it's convenient to the murderer. The part of the ship between Yang's office and the dressing room was locked at the time of murder, which meant that nobody went in, or out, before the police arrived. So nobody had an opportunity to dispose of the gun, but they went over the entire ship with dogs and metal detectors without finding anything. They simply assume the murderer found a way to throw it in the river until discovering the second murder was committed with the same weapon! I've seen two variations on this type of vanishing weapon trick before and hated both of them. This one is marginally better, because Amagi tried to make it somewhat convincing. But the trick is still Yozaburo Kanari. Yes, Kanari's name in this context is a euphemism for shit.

Well, so far, it seems like a fairly standard and typical Kindaichi story with exception of the setting and its effect on Kindaichi's normally cocky attitude, but the story moves away from the series formula in the second-half – turning into a chase story with a coming-of-age angle. Kindaichi helps Yang Xiaolong to escape from police custody and they're chased to Shanghai as they make a run to the Yang's home village. A dirt poor place where the children had to grow up faster in order to make money, which is why Xiaolong and his sister acts so much mature than Kindaichi. But, while their on the run, they both find something of themselves they had either lost or never had. This comes at the expensive of the usual plot structure with the alibis, impossibilities and the nursery rhyme theme of the murders being heavily underplayed during the second-half.

I also hated that during the first-half an intriguing, quickly discarded plot-thread was introduced when Kindaichi learned of a former troupe member, Wang Meiyu, who was a superb swimmer, but a bit strange. Meiyu not only swam really well and could stay underwater forever, but "she only ate aquatic plants and freshwater fish." And it was her talent that lead the troupe to adopt the "The Legend of the River Demon" as their signature act. But then strange rumors began to circulate. Members began to talk that every time she took a shower, the bathroom would "reek of fish" with "large fish scales on the floor." So they began to avoid Meiyu and culminated in her committing suicide by jumping into the river from the toilet window. She left four characters scrawled in blood on the wall and has now risen from "the depths of that murky river" to extract revenge. But the plot-thread was quickly brushed aside. And given an even quicker explanation towards the end. So the only reason why it was even brought up was to give the book a snappy title.

Thankfully, the solution was not all bad with a pretty good alibi-trick and an inspired piece of misdirection, which successfully hid the murderer for a good chunk of the story. I eventually figured it out, because if you how the gun can vanish and reappear, you know who pulled the trigger. Not so good is that other parts of the solution stretches things considerably with an unnecessary, rather cruel twist nearly ruining the whole thing. I mean, this murderer is very likely going to be executed. So why throw that revelation out there? Amagi is the Soji Shimada of the anime-and manga detective story who is nearly unmatched when it comes to erecting grand-scale plots with majestic locked room-and alibi-tricks, but when it comes to characters, sometimes he goes one twist too far. Deadly Thunder has a similar problem.

So, on a whole, The Shanghai River Demon's Curse is not entirely without interest and its break with the formula and foreign setting makes it a worthwhile read to long-time fans of the series, but don't expect anything more than an average detective story. Regrettably, the weakest of the four translated novels.

This more or less closes the chapter on The New Kindaichi Files light novels with such untranslated novels as Yūrei kyakusen satsujin jiken (The Ghost Passenger Ship Murder Case, 1995) and Onibijima satusjin jikes (The Ghost Fire Island Murder Case, 1997) remaining tantalizingly out of my reach. Well, the novels are out of my reach, but not the '90s anime adaptations. So I might make one of those my next stop in the series.

Owl & Raccoon: "WDYG" (2013) and "Not With a Bang" (2016) by Matt Ingwalson

Matt Ingwalson is a public speaker and independent writer who self-published three mystery novellas that are "part hardboiled police procedural and part classical locked room mystery," which features two ex-SWAT team members, Owl and Raccoon, who became detectives with the Missing Persons divisions – encountering more than one seemingly impossible disappearance. I read the first novella, "The Single Staircase" (2012), back in 2019 and stands as one of the most unconventional pieces of impossible crime fiction I've read to date. 

What makes this short-lived series standout is not merely the attempt to marry the modern crime novel with the traditional detective story, which has been done before. It's minimalists approach to the characterization, plotting and storytelling.

Ingwalson surgically removed everything from the police procedural and locked room mystery except the absolute bare essentials with short, unadorned sentences and several dozens of chapters running anywhere from a half-a-page to three or four pages – allowing to point a laser-focus on those bare essentials. Someway, somehow, this radical modernistic style actually worked with the author revealing himself to be somewhat of a master of the whydunit. More than the who-and how, Ingwalson is interested in explaining why such an artificial, time-worn trope as the locked room mystery turned up in a very modern, realistically presented setting. This is especially true for the last two novellas in the series. 

"WDYG" (2013) brings Owl and Raccoon to a mall where 17-year-old Amanda McDonald was last seen shopping with her three school friends, Sarah Neils, Haley Comet and Katrina Dempsey. When they arrived at the food court, Amanda told her friends she had to use the bathroom while they waited right near the entrance. They never moved from that spot. After 15 minutes, they began to wonder what happened to her or why she didn't respond to their text messages ("where did you go?"). Katrina walked into the bathroom to discover Amanda's shopping bags in the corner of a stall, "paper bags ripped up" and "the clothes she bought all over the floor." Amanda's purse is later found in a trashcan, but she's nowhere to be found. She had vanished as if by magic!

Owl and Raccoon have a tricky situation on their hands, because they have no idea how reliable their witnesses actually are. They were texting and "teenage girls, you know? They lie." But why? She apparently had no reason to run away from home, nor was there's a way she could have been kidnapped without it being seen. So what happened? A case complicated as their witnesses could also be bratty, eye-rolling suspects who keep their lips closely sealed. Not to mention the discovery of a body (not Amanda), which could get the case assigned to another division.

The solution has some great synergy between the inexplicable disappearance of Amanda and the more darker, sordid plot-elements, one being a consequence of the other, but particularly liked how the illogical side of a logical decision fueled the plot – hinged on a rarely-used motive to rig up a locked room. John Dickson Carr gave four motives in The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) to create a locked room scenario, but one that's rarely mentioned or used is (ROT13) perngvat na vzcbffvoyr fvghngvba vf gb trg bhg bs n qnatrebhf fvghngvba be qvirefvba. My only misgiving is that the vanishing-act has an obvious answer staring you in the face, which, yes, made the why even more perplexing. And there was more than enough reason why Owl and Raccoon were "chasing shadows" before finally getting to the truth. But the only reason why it took Owl so long to figure out the vanishing-act, is because the plot wouldn't allow an earlier disclosure.

So, besides that one very minor flaw, "WDYG" is a glimpse of what the crime and detective genre could have looked like had it continued to build on its rich history instead of discarding it. 

"Not With a Bang" (2016) is the third and, as of this writing, last entry in the series and poses a spectacular impossible disappearance during a hostage situation. A commuter stops in the middle of Five Points, a busy intersection, blocking traffic in all directions. A police man approaching the bus is greeted with gunfire and calls-up the SWAT. Fifteen minutes later, there were "twelve patrol unites all over the damn place" with snipers covering both sides of the bus and a drone directly overhead. A teenage boy opens a window and yells, "please don't shoot my dad."

The boy is quickly identified as 17-year-old Todd Gonzales who disappeared the previous day when "he was allegedly snatched at gunpoint by his absentee father," Cody Jacobi. What follow were more shots and "a stampede of hostages" being released from the bus, which left Cody with only his son as a hostage. But then Cody opened a window and yelled, "you tell that bitch goodbye for us, we'll see her in hell." So they stormed the bus after throwing a flash bang grenade and tear gas canisters through a window, but they found Cody alone. There was "no trace of the teenaged boy who'd cried desperately through the window just a few minutes before."

What a way to begin your story! But the premise is perhaps a little misleading and you shouldn't expect some kind of thriller with an impossible crime angle, because everything quickly calms down.

JJ, of The Invisible Event, who directed the fandom's attention to the series back in 2015 and described "Not With a Bang" perfectly as "a deliberately, almost obstinately, lo-fi undertaking." Owl and Raccoon have a free hand to investigate the disappearance of the boy as his father is safely in custody, but says he has no idea what happened to his son or where he could be. So they have to retrace the steps of father and son during those twenty-four hours and dig through their family history, but "the not knowing" part of working Missing Persons is beginning to take its toll on the two detectives. 

"Not With a Bang" closes the door on the series without locking it so tightly that a fourth novella, or perhaps a full-length novel, is out of the question. A potential sequel is actually alluded to in the penultimate chapter. Even if a new story never materializes, this short-lived series received a fitting and satisfying conclusion with Ingwalson's most ingenious and daring locked room-trick. A trick with a very precarious and flashy setup demanding a good deal of motivation to convince the reader, which here was quite a hurdle to clear, but a lot of thought was put into the motive – dovetailing it with the backstory, characterization and clues. Add a good, old-fashioned piece of locked room trickery, brazenly performed in front of "a dozen rifle scopes," you have somewhat of a minor gem on your hands.

Matt Ingwalson wrote three beautifully paced, well balanced and thoroughly unconventional locked room stories, which shines a spotlight on the why of the impossibilities and how they came about. So they succeeded as both traditional, plot-driven detective stories and very modern, hardboiled police procedurals. More importantly, the Owl and Raccoon series possibly could be one of those extremely rare cases where a modernist build on tradition to create something truly good and special. Even demonstrating the modernistic dictum that sometimes less can be more. This is why Owl & Raccoon: Locked (2016), collecting all three novellas, deserves a place on the shelves of every self respecting and fanatical locked room reader.

The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021) by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr was the undisputed master of the locked room murder and impossible crimes, but not as well-known, or appreciated, was his pioneering work as a historical mystery novelist and writing some of the most suspenseful radio-plays to ever hit the airwaves – even contributing to the war effort with propaganda plays. These were "so effective" that "they led the BBC, unsuccessfully, to urge the American authorities to allow Carr to remain in the United Kingdom for the duration of the war." Carr contributed to some of the popular and classic radio shows, like Suspense and Murder by Experts, but one radio program, Cabin B-13, appeared to have been lost to time. 

Well, all except two, or three, recordings have been lost, but, in the early 1990s, twenty-three scripts were discovered in the Library of Congress. Three decades later, Crippen & Landru gathered those manuscripts under the title The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2021). Tony Medawar wrote an insightful foreword, "Suspense at Sea," with "Notes for the Curious" at the end of each play. 

Medawar's foreword and notes are scattered with little gold nuggets of equally fascinating and frustrating pieces of background information. Such as Carr's plan to have Cabin B-13 series-character, Dr. John Fabian, identified as the Man in Black from Suspense or references to his uncompleted and abandoned novels. 

Cabin B-13 was broadcast as two series, or seasons, between July 5, 1948, and January 2, 1949, which originated as a 1943 episode of Suspense – also titled "Cabin B-13." Suspense episode takes place aboard a luxury cruise-liner, Maurevania, which connects all the stories in the series as the protagonist is its "ship's surgeon, world traveler, and teller of strange and incredible tales of mystery and murder," Dr. John Fabian. His role in the story differs from story to story. Sometimes he simply acts as a storyteller and other he plays a minor role in the story itself, but, every now and then, he acts as the detective. When he plays detective, it's usually because the story is a rewrite that requires Dr. Fabian to take over the role of one of Carr's well-known detectives.

So, now that we got the introduction to the collection out of the way, you have to excuse me for a moment as I fanboy all over these radio-plays. 

"The Man Who Couldn't Be Photographed" tells the story of "the greatest romantic film-star in the first decade of talking pictures," Bruce Ransome, who feels like he has outgrown the people he used to care about. This results in a confrontation with his "social secretary" and love interest, Miss Nita Ross. She puts a curse on him before committing suicide. A curse promising that the conceited actor never faces a camera again, which apparently comes true when Ransome is turned away from every photographer in Paris like a leper. A very neat play and a clever inversion on an old urban legend that originated in a now obscure, 1920s detective story. 

"Death Has Four Faces" is different from the play of the same title Carr wrote for BBC's Appointment with Fear. This is a psychological crime tale, of sorts, in which Superintendent Bellman meets a young Canadian on the train, named Steve West, who asks to be handcuffed and escorted to the hotel like a criminal – where a perfect crime is foiled. Not my favorite play in the collection, but it was decent enough. And thought the lingering presence of the Second World War was put to good use. 

"The Blind-Folded Knife Thrower" is one of the highlights of the collection with a minor role for Dr. John Fabian in a tragedy that has become "a grim and evil memory" of what befall Madeline Lane on a previous voyage to Portugal. Madeline is haunted by the ghost, or memories, of her spiteful mother who committed suicide ten years ago by drinking acid. She has begun to haunt her daughter with disembodied whispers and a promise to visit Madeline on her first night in Lisbon. So the people who care about her place her in a room with solid walls, floor and ceiling and two windows "so closely barred that you couldn't even get your hand through." There are two people sitting outside the door until morning, but a figure of a woman with acid-burns round her mouth appears in the room as miraculously as she disappears again! Colonel Da Silva, Chefe da Policia Secreta, discovers a very tricky explanation for the nighttime visitation and the result is a better, fairer and much more convincing take on a particular locked room-trick that would turn up in one of Carr's later novels. 

"No Useless Coffin" is another highlight of the collection, but this time, Carr reworked an earlier short story with Dr. Fabian acting as a stand-in for one of his famous series-detectives. Dr. Fabian is accompanying the recently engaged couple on a picnic to a cottage where many years ago a 12-year-old girl, Vicky Fraser, disappeared from with all the door and windows locked from the inside, which left her parents nearly frantic, but two nights later she reappeared "through the locks and bolts" – "tucked up in bed as usual." Vicky claims to possess an "occult power" giving her the ability to vanish when she likes, where she likes, which the now adult Vicky promises to repeat during the picnic. She disappears "like a soap-bubble under the eyes of witnesses," but, this time around, the fairy tale of the vanishing girl has a dark and gruesome ending. The solution to the impossible disappearance is one of the most original and startling Carr has ever dreamed up. Just as good as the original short story with the only real difference being the detective and motive. 

"The Nine Black Reasons" is, curiously enough, a whydunit and brings "well-known writer of detective-stories," Frank Bentley, to Marseilles, France, where he discovers the body of a murdered man in the Royal Turkish Baths of a hotel. A short while later he meets an old acquaintance, Helen Parker, who witnessed the inexplicable murder of her uncle at the same hotel. Inexplicable because there's no earthly reason why the respectable Mr. Herbert Johnson killed the respectable Mr. Fredric Parker. Two complete strangers! The motive, while good, sorely needed polishing and fine-tuning, which makes it all the more frustrating that Carr abandoned a 1961 novel of the same title despite having completed eight chapters. And, of course, "the typescript of the eight chapters has long been lost."

"The Count of Monte Carlo" has Dr. Fabian coming to the rescue of a young man, Bart Stevens, who's engaged to Janet Derwent, but foolishly has gotten himself involved in "a love-affair to end all love-affairs." Bart has been fooling around with another woman, "Dolores," who's engaged to the Count of Monte Carlo, Jean Ravelle. A messy, tangled square that ends with a murder and two people confessing to have done the dirty deed. A good, but relatively minor, story with an original murder method that Carr reused to much better effect in a later novel. 

"Below Suspicion" shares its title with the contentious Dr. Gideon Fell novel Below Suspicion (1949), but the story has nothing else in common except, perhaps, that Carr would rewrite it in the 1950s as a Dr. Fell short story. Dr. Fabian tells the story of a stage actress, Valerie Blake, who retired from the stage before her time to retreat with her new husband on the Italian coast. Regrettably, Ralph Garrett proved to be a poor husband and two of her old friends came to the rescue, but they were too late to prevent her murder and struggle to find an explanation, because "the murderer must have walked on air" to have left her body on the beach – since there were no footprints except Valerie's. This story is actually better than the later version with a better developed backstory to the murder and always liked the clue of the rifle shots, which helped strengthening a somewhat sketchy murder method. 

"The Power of Darkness" is indelibly "one of his most audacious impossibilities" with two people traveling "back three hundred years in time" and witnessed "a whole suburb disappear" to reveal a scene from centuries ago. Dr. Fabian keeps telling everyone he's "not a detective," but he certainly had a guiding hand in revealing the sordid truth beneath this time shattering miracle. Some of you probably know how fond I'm of these rare kind of time-tampering impossibilities and enjoyed this one as much as the other version Carr wrote. The episode was originally intended to be titled "Last Night in Ghost-Land." A much better title and a pity it was never used for another story. 

"The Footprint in the Sky" is a fairly conventional impossible crime story, but told in a very unconventional way. The luxury liner Maurevania is tossed around during a storm at sea and Dr. Fabian, the ship's surgeon from Cabin B-13, is asked to come down to C-24 where a passenger, Marcia Tate, has lost her mind – believing it's Christmas over a year ago and asking "why she hasn't been hanged for murder." What follows is a backstory recounting a broken engagement and a new one, which resulted in murder with two sets of footprints in the snow pointing an accusatory finger at Marcia. The police "solved that 'studio-mystery' over a year ago" and Dr. Fabian has to retreat their steps to help Marcia regain her memory. A good framing device for a detective story, but have always found the solution to this particular no-footprints scenario to be cheap, hack and unworthy of the maestro. 

"The Man with the Iron Chest" is the nickname given "the best jewel-thief in the trade" whose "only burglar's tools are his ten fingers" and "an iron chest weighing sixty pounds." Why does he drag around a big iron chest? That's something the police from seven cities across the European continent would like to know and he nearly got caught in Amsterdam, which forced him to leave behind his ornamental iron chest. So he remained elusive until a young married couple, Don and Joyce, caught a glimpse of his face during a burglary, which lead the Greek police straight to his doorstep. But he then pulled of a minor miracle by making "an iron chest and a hundred diamonds vanish" from a locked and guarded room "as though they had never existed." A great piece of impossible crime fiction showcasing the author's love for stage magic and illusions. 

"The Street of the Seven Daggers" is a rewrite of one of my favorite short stories by Carr, but he improved the plot with a backstory and setting that really speaks to the imagination of readers who tend to like Carr. Like yours truly. Dr. Fabian is asked by a passenger, Miss Betty Parrish, to prevent her father from going to a certain street in Cairo or he'll be murdered. Who is going to kill him? Absolutely nobody! Mr. Edmund Parrish is "a superstition-breaker" and his attention has now been drawn to a little, dead-end alley called the Street of the Seven Daggers, which used to be the street of the hired killers in ancient times. Three hundred years ago, a bigwig of the Ottoman Empire "got annoyed about hired assassins" and had them executed in front of their houses – burnt out the street. But then people began to die and the rumors began. The "street's full of invisible people" and anyone who walks through the alley, "after midnight and alone," you're supposed to die with a dagger in your back. Dr. Fabian stands at the mouth of dagger-alley when Parrish is knifed while walking down the dark passageway alone. Only someone who's invisible could have stabbed the man, but Dr. Fabian reasons a more earthly explanation from the clue of the two wallets. Great stuff and even better than the original! 

"The Dancer from Stamboul" takes place in Port Said, at the gateway to the Suez Canal, where Dr. Fabian bumps into a New York policeman, Detective Lieutenant Jim Canfield of the Homicide Squad, who came with extradition-papers to take back a dangerous man-eater. Lydia White is suspected of having poisoned three men and the police has received information that she's somewhere in Port Said. So he asks Dr. Fabian to assist him comb out the port town, which leads to the titular dancer and her two lovers. A French fencer and an Italian nobleman. This ends in a duel at a fencing saloon and another poisoning. I liked the fencing scene, but otherwise an unremarkable as a detective story. 

"Death in the Desert" is not a detective or crime story, not even a horror yarn, but a historical adventure with a detective/espionage hook and presented as "a story out of my parents' time," namely 1895, which is set in the Sudanese desert. The crux of the plot is the completion and testing of an improved machine gun. A good story, if you like this kind of historical romancing. 

"The Island of Coffins" is, as Medawar rightly noted, "the most extraordinary story" in the series and demonstrated Carr didn't need to lean on the fancies and phantasms of the impossible crime to be the greatest mystery writer who ever lived. Story begins when the Maurevania, passing the Abyssinian Coast, sees a distress signal coming from Hadar Island. A very small, uninviting island with a big house where someone had sustained a serious bullet-wound. Dr. Fabian is shocked when he finds an elderly lady, Mrs. Almack, who was shot in the arm. She has retreated to the island with her grandson and two children (now all adults) to keep him company. But, when they arrived on the island, she "turned back the calendar to the year 1900." Those were "the only years that were worth living" and the current date on the island is November 12, 1920. Mrs. Almack kept her three wards on the island for two decades and they've no idea about the outside world. But why? And are the coffins on the island really filled with people who tried to leave? Dr. Fabian has to doctor out where the insanity lies and proof "tyrants aren't always so powerful as they think." Nearly as good and unforgettable as Carr's best radio-play, "The Dead Sleep Lightly."

"The Most Respectable Murder" is another one of those complicated eternal triangle stories littering the series. This time, Dr. Fabian goes to the Paris Opera where the future of two friends depended entirely on him finding an explanation how a "murderer could leave behind him a room locked up on the inside," which is easier said than done as Dr. Fabian recognizes it was "done in a completely new way" – openly admires the murderer's intelligence. The locked room-trick is the selling point of the story as it's genuinely original, but Carr would use it to much better effect in one of his late-period novels. No wonder that novel struck me as his last hurrah as the master of all crimes impossible. He came up with the trick a decade earlier! 

"The Curse of the Bronze Lamp" is a condensed version of the Merrivale novel of the same title in which an ancient bronze lamp discovered in a cursed Egyptian tomb is held responsible for blowing its owner to dust "as though she never existed." Regrettably, the shorter version exposed just how weak and unfair the impossibility really is, which needed the novel-length treatment to prop it up more convincingly. Now it felt more like the plot of a season 4 episode of Jonathan Creek. Anyway, whether it's the novel-length version or a short radio-play, I agree with Nick. This should have been "a full-blown Egyptian curse story, set in the Valley of the Kings, with murders in the pyramids, cobras at camp-sites and trouble in the tombs."

"Lair of the Devil-Fish" was an unexpected surprise as it belongs to that rare category of so-called "submerged mysteries," which tend to be impossible crimes and recommend you read my reviews of Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) and Micki Browning's Adrift (2017) to get more background on this type of story – including more links. Carr might have been the first to experiment with this type of setting as the earliest example I've come across previously was Joseph Commings' short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (1953), but, strangely enough, it's not truly an impossible crime. Unless you believe the deep, dark blue ocean is the natural habitat of Lovecraftian monsters. So the story takes place off the southeast coast of Cuba where a small expedition has gotten permission to dive to the wreck of a cabin-cruiser, which sank in a bay during the Spanish-American War of 1898 with a fortune in silver dollars. Legend has it the cabin-cruiser was "dragged under" by the giant, slimy tentacles of a monstrous octopus. What nearly killed their diver? A monster or something a little more human? A solid and entertaining addition to those rare underwater mysteries. 

"The Dead Man's Knock" is a weird crime story in which brash American secret service agent and a British crime writer have to figure out how to kill a closely guarded man in order to protect him. Not really a locked room mystery, but a fun how-can-it-be-done. 

"The Man with Two Heads" is a low-key great story in which Dr. Fabian meets Leonard Wade on the top deck of a bus. Wade is a well-known and celebrated thriller author who might have become the victim of a diabolical plot as he has become a wandering ghost. Or so it feels. And not without reason. Dr. Fabian reads his obituary in the newspaper and Wade tells him he saw his own body in his study. Somewhat reminiscent, in spirit, to Helen McCloy's famous doppelgänger novel Through a Glass, Darkly (1950), but with a slightly more convincing setup and solution. What a shame Carr never expended this idea into a novel-length mystery. 

"Till Death Do Us Part" is another one with an awfully familiar-sounding title, but the plot has no resemblance, whatsoever, to Till Death Do Us Part (1944). This is Carr venturing into the territory of domestic suspense with the backstory to an attempted murder-suicide in a remote house, which comes with a twist in the tail. Anthony Gilbert would have loved it!

So, on a whole, The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 is a stronger than your average collection of short detective stories with the quality ranging from very good to pretty decent, but not a single average or bad story – which says something how good Carr really was. Only drawback is the lack of truly new material as Carr used this series to try out new ideas or retool old tricks or stories. But who cares? Carr is always a treat to read and this volume finally gave us back Carr's obscure, long-lost series-detective. Highly recommended!

The Corpse with the Grimy Glove (1938) by R.A.J. Walling

R.A.J. Walling was a British journalist, magistrate and writer who, like his contemporary E.R. Punshon, "did not begin to write mysteries until he was nearly sixty" and spend the last two decades of his life writing detective fiction as a hobby – producing nearly thirty novels until his death in 1949. Walling enjoyed some popularity and critical acclaim during his lifetime and counted Ogden Nash, Alexander Woollcott and reportedly the Queen of Spain among his loyal readers. But, as so often is the case, his print-run and reputation fell into neglect following his passing. Most of his work remained out-of-print for decades. 

A situation that remained unaltered until last year when Black Heath Editions reissued the lion's share of Walling's detective novels as inexpensive ebooks. Since his work represents a huge gap in my Golden Age reading, it was about time I got around to giving Walling a shot.

Unfortunately, one of the titles Black Heath neglected to bring back into circulation is Walling's only known impossible crime novel, Murder at the Keyhole (1929), but "D for Doom," of Vintage Pop Fiction, is the only person who has been reading and reviewing Walling for many years now – which provided me with some good recommendations. My eye fell on The Corpse with the Grimy Glove (1938). 

The Corpse with Grimy Glove was published in the US as More Than One Serpent and is the thirteenth or twenty-two novels in Walling's Philip Tolefree series. An insurance agent who acts as a private investigator with his friend and ship-broker, James Farrar, narrating his exploits. It's an old acquaintance of Farrar who draws the two in a dark, murky case when he writes a letter asking about his friend with "some skill in puzzling out mysteries."

Arthur Treglohan is the parson of Bosenna Rectory, of Bosenna, which is a small, seaside town and "a corner of unspoiled beauty within a semi-feudal ring-fence" where Sir James Lanivet is the local "chief man." Sir James practically owned the entire village, the Rectory, selected the landlord of the inn and was "the patron of the living," but recently crossed paths with a city shark, Albert Tenterton, whose "crookedness has cost him a packet" and "mixed up his name in an unsavory transaction." So why did Sir James, having been robbed by this bandit, invite him and his retinue to his home in Bosenna. This is what worries his sister, Miss Victoria Lanivet. So the parson wrote to Farrar to invite him and Tolefree to find out what Tenterton doing there and "what he and James are cockering up between them."

Sir James has gathered a very curious house party at Lanivet Castle. There's the Lanivets brother-in-law, Colonel Mellows, who's "a devastating gun who annually did great havoc among the birds at Bosenna." The veritable Charles Michael, a freelance member of Parliament, who has a long list of pet dislikes headed by the financiers of Tenterton's ilk. Lionel Lawry is "the pianist of the day" and a victim of one of Tenterton's swindles. Alec Schuster is an American whose family Sir James encountered abroad and warmed to the personable and likable young man. Tenterton is accompanied to Bosenna by his secretary, Mr. Sherbery, his local lawyer, Mr. Peter Thuell, and his daughter-in-law and young widow to his late son, Mrs. Eva Tenterton – who lives "somewhat under his thumb." But, when they arrive in Bosenna, Tolefree's attention is immediately drawn to four persons who fall outside the closely-drawn circle at Lanivet Castle.

Firstly, there's the landlord of the Bosenna Arms, Mr. Murch, who Tolefree notices has "an observant eye." Secondly, the three-men crew of the yacht Guillemot, Martin Masterman, George Cray and Robert Melbourne, anchored in the middle of the land-locked creek under Mr. Murch's windows. They were very interested in the arrival of Tolefree and Farrar.

When they come to the party, Tolefree concludes that they're merely "onlookers at a private war" as "a stray shot from a gun during a partridge drive" hit a tree quite close to Sir James and someone "emptied a clip at the gallant young sailors," which forced them to abandon ship. A situation that ends dramatically during a firework fête when various members of the party go missing and frightened footman reports he saw the body of the financier inside the Tennis Court by the light of a rocket. But when they go there to look, the body has vanished and is not found until the police gets involved. The body is found lying between two shrubs with his arms tied behind his back, marks on his throat and "a bullet wound in the exact center of his forehead," but, most curiously, his right hand was covered with a white, stained dress glove.

On the surface, I can see why Walling invited comparisons with Freeman Wills Crofts and other craftsmen of the so-called Humdrum detective story, but he was a kindred spirit of Conan Doyle and Punshon.

The crime scene and circumstances of the body suggests everything you would expect from a detective novel of the Humdrum or adjacent Realist school, but physical evidence is not the primary focus of the investigation with the titular glove playing a significantly smaller role than the title suggests – which makes place for simple observations and deductions. Tolefree simply observes, deduces and soaks up the historic atmosphere of, what he called, "the Bosenna secrecy." That's where The Corpse with the Grimy Glove became somewhat reminiscent of Punshon's detective fiction. The setting is living with history from the moss-grown tombstones of long-gone Lanivets dotting the graveyard to a creek where Hereward the Wake "is supposed to have sailed up a thousand years ago." Even the disused Tennis Court is "an ancient arena" fitted "up as it might have been in the eighteenth century" with a spectators' gallery raised above the floor. Tolefree remarked that it was perhaps foolish to expect such an "ancient place to deliver up all its secrets in three or four days." You really get the idea this story is merely another chapter in its history.

It's interesting to note Walling was born in 1869 and Punshon in 1872, which means they up in the gaslight era with the age of (household) electricity still being a few decades in the future. So you have to wonder if that had any influence on how they portrait the world in the stories.

Another thing Walling has in common with Punshon is that neither were throwbacks to the 19th century and they applied some of that Golden Age ingenuity to their old-world detective stories. But, here at least, there was an important difference between the two. The plot of The Corpse with the Grimy Glove can be boiled down to a simple, Doylean crime story that took its cue from one of the short stories collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), but Walling managed to strike two very original notes. Firstly, he found a perfectly acceptable excuse to have the crime scene resemble a busy thoroughfare at the time of the murder. Secondly, Tolefree's positions becomes a very interesting one as he's sort of sucked into a conspiracy, but not because he either approved of the murder or throwing dust in the eyes of the police. But to lay his hands on Tenterton's murderer "before any of these people know a thing about it." I thought that made his position a very interesting one. And he even stages a mock inquest to show his fellow conspirators how much trouble a curious-minded coroner could present them. I don't remember having ever come across a better way to use the inquest scene than in The Corpse with the Grimy Glove.

Regrettably, the ending to this otherwise typical specimen of the British Golden Age mystery fell a little flat with a solution that has some serious fair play issues, which largely pertains to the motive. Not all. A complete "absence of alibis" and other hooks makes an educated, genre-savvy guess your only chance to identify the opportunistic murderer. So a mostly good, well written second-string mystery novel with some original touches, here and there, but a novel that can only be recommended to seasoned mystery readers.

I'm not giving up on "the ingenious Mr. R.A.J. Walling." Not yet anyway. The Corpse with the Floating Foot (1937) is currently on the big pile, which was highly praised by "D for Doom," Nick Fuller and Torquemada. So another story that will be continued sometime in the not so distant future.

In the Grip of the Lobster (1965) by B.J. Kleymens

I closed my relatively recent review of Ton Vervoort's Moord onder toneelspelers (Murder Among Actors, 1963) with a promise to smear out my future explorations of those obscure, untranslated and long out-of-print Dutch detective novels, but curiosity got the better of me – happily tumbling down another rabbit hole. So here we are again. You can blame it wholly on the ghosts of Vervoort and the Frederic Dannay of the Low Countries, Ab Visser. 

Back in March, I reviewed Vervoort's Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963), subtitled "het dood spoor van de tweeling" ("the twins' dead end"), which is the second title in the so-called "Zodiac Mysteries." An ambitious collaborative effort, under the editorship of Visser, who gathered a dozen writers each tasked with writing a detective or crime novel in which one of the twelve signs of the zodiac plays a central and perhaps even a decisive role. This idea had a ton of potential and could have been a notable contribution to the genre, but the project was abandoned after two years and eight novels. You can find a list of the eight published zodiac-themed mysteries in the review of Murder Among Astrologists.

I don't know why the series was abandoned, but it could not have been due to a lack of writers to pen the remaining four novels. While playing internet detective, I came across an archived article from 1964 mentioning the four unpublished contributors. So this opened the door to the elusive Phantom Library with potentially more items of "Lost Media" to add to its shelves.

I already knew Robert van Gulik was one of the four writers and that he "had already finished his story for the series," which was likely published in The Monkey and the Tiger (1965) as the Judge Dee novella "De nacht van de tijger" ("The Night of the Tiger," 1963) and can be read as a backdoor entry in the series – as Judge Dee was born in the year of the tiger in the Chinese zodiac. But what about the other three writers? Leo Derksen was a journalist and writer, but, to my knowledge, not with roots in the detective story. Dick A. van Ruler was the art editor of Utrechts Nieuwsblad and one-time TV presenter who has one detective novel to his credit, Moord op een negatief (Murder of a Negative, 1963), which is currently on the big pile. Jacques Presser was a historian and part-time mystery writer who penned four madcap detective novels between 1953 and 1965. Nothing else to link those three names or their work to that abandoned series beside that one article.

So this begs the question whether the series was, on paper, completed with article mentioned that all twelve writers wrote a novel around one of the astrological signs. What happened?

I suppose the publisher pulled the plug (disappointing sales figures?), but what happened to the unpublished manuscripts Derksen, Presser and Van Ruler contributed to the project? Are the manuscripts slowly crumbling to dust somewhere in a drawer or were they thrown away decades ago? Or did one or two follow the Van Gulik route? Derksen appears to have not written anything in our genre and Van Ruler's only novel was published around the time the series began, which probably got him the gig, but Presser's Moord in de Poort (Murder in the Poort, 1965) possibly could be a lost Zodiac mystery. The window of the time is very narrow, as 1965 was the year the series was canceled, but Murder in the Poort was Presser's last detective novel and the only one to be published by N.V. W. van Hoeve – which also published the Zodiac series. So tracking down a copy has been added to my priority wishlist and finding any trace of an astrological plot-thread should settle the matter.

But what has all of this to do with today's review? While exploring the rabbit warren of the Dutch detective story of the 1950s and '60s, I also stumbled across several contemporary reviews of the Zodiac series. One title, in particular, caught my attention.

B.J. Kleymens' In de greep van de Kreeft (In the Grip of the Lobster, 1965) was the seventh or eighth novel to appear in the Zodiac series, which received some surprising and suspicious praise from the normally hostile critics. Carl J. Bicker evoked the name of Raymond Chandler and pointed out that the detective-characters introduced in the story were unlikely to carry a whole series, but also noted it was a well put together deduction story. I knew the name of the reviewer sounded familiar and a quick search revealed Bicker was a pseudonym of the editor of the Zodiac series, Ab Visser! A second review was published under his own name. There were a few warning bells, but the premise sounded like something straight out of a Christopher Bush or Brian Flynn mystery. So I took a small gamble and tracked down a copy. But this presented me with another puzzle.

Who was J.B. Kleymens? This is a question with an easy and difficult answer. The easy answer is that it was the shared penname of J. Kleijn and B. Mensen, but the difficult part is answering who they were. A little detective work allowed me to identify the former as the journalist and writer, Jek Kleijn. Jek is an unusual name and his surname means small or short in Dutch, which makes his involvement evident as one of the two journalistic detective-characters is named Jek Groot – whose surname translates as big, tall or long. You can Anglicize those names as Jack Short and Jack Long. Unfortunately, I've been unable to pin down the identity of his co-author, because, without a first name, Mensen returns too many unrelated results. Not a bad piece of genre archaeology, if I say so myself.

Just one more thing before finally getting around to the review. In the Grip of the Lobster is listed in the review of Murder Among Astrologists as In the Grip of Cancer, which is a technically correct translation. But in Dutch, the name of the zodiac Cancer is Kreeft (Lobster) and thought In the Grip of Cancer sounded a little brutal for a well intended, but completely amateurish, detective story. Yeah... I'm afraid the review is going to be significantly shorter than the long, roundabout introduction. 

In the Grip of the Lobster takes place in the small, sleepy and entirely fictitious provincial town of Rooldrecht where normally very little or exciting happens. Least of all during the tri-weekly council meeting at town hall. Jan Frens and Jek Groot in the press box were secretly looking forward to a cold glass of beer in the favorite pub of the local journalists, which is when it happened. An elderly, venerable councilor, P.C. Hooftman, apparently decided to take a nap during the meeting. Very much to the annoyance of the mayor, but Hooftman is not sleeping. He's as dead as a door nail. The doctor determines he had a stroke, but then lightening strikes twice when, an hour later, the town hall messenger dies under similar circumstances and that same evening Frens witnesses a shady individual, face hidden under a big black umbrella, breaking into town hall – rifling through the documents of that day's meeting. So he follows the mysterious man with the black umbrella, but it's Frens who's caught red handed and eventually imprisoned, which places the two local journalists in direct opposition to the police. Frens and Groot are determined to get to the bottom of the business before the police.

What ensues is clumsy, amateurish dance around shady, small town politics with a development project, a dry-as-dust document that everyone wants to get their hands on and a black umbrella with an astrological sign stamped the handle. But nothing particular clever or good is done with any of the plot pieces.

There were one, or two, good ideas with a glimmer of potential. Such as the risky poisoning-trick, which is already unconvincing, but the way in which the poison was delivered could still have made for a good howdunit. But what did they do? They simply tell the reader how it was done without any real detective work. I also expected something clever from the journeying umbrella that was lost, found and lost again. The last time it got lost something suggested it could have been "Chesterton's umbrella," but that possibility would have only fitted an even more unimpressive solution. 

In Grip of the Lobster is written well enough, especially its opening and closing chapters, but, purely as a detective story, it's nothing more than a well intended, clumsily plotted and sparsely clued piece of amateur detective fiction. There were many tells in the story betraying its authors were either the most casual of mystery readers or complete outsiders, but appreciated the attempt to craft a genuine whodunit. So a textbook example of the chase being more fun than the capture.

The Crimes in Cabin B: Case Closed, vol. 78 by Gosho Aoyama

The 78th volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, originally published as Detective Conan, which has the longest story since vol. 58 that was setup in the previous volume and covers seven chapters with the second, three-chapter story acting as its aftermath – while the last chapter sets the stage for the return of Kaitou KID. A return alluded to in the opening chapter as KID's long-time nemesis, Jirokichi Sebastian, announced he was planning to use the Mystery Train to exhibit "one of his rare gems." Somewhat of a baited trap, as usually, but more on that in a moment. 

The Bell Tree Express is the "Mystery Train," owned by the Sebastian Conglomerate, which hosts an annual murder mystery game with "no stops until the final destination." A "murderer" and "victim" are chosen at random from from among the guests with the other passengers playing detective and "try to solve the mystery before the train reaches the station."

Anita presented Conan with a Mystery Train Pass Ring in the previous volume to lay the groundwork for a truly special kind of detective story. A story that succeeded in being both a classically-plotted, baroque-style mystery with no less than two impossibilities and a character-driven thriller with a galore of recurring characters and some major plot developments.

Firstly, the murder mystery game begins early when Conan and the Junior Detective League receive a note telling them they've been selected as the detectives and to follow instructions, namely visiting "Cabin B of Carriage 7 in ten minutes," where they witness a shooting – turning the murder mystery into "a game of tag" with the fleeing assassin. But when they meet one of the conductors, he tells them the mystery game is scheduled to begin in about an hour. So they rush back to Cabin B, which is when they make a startling discovery. Carriage 7 has "disappeared from a moving train" along with the victim in Cabin B!

Conan only needs a handful of pages to solve the impossibility of the vanishing train carriage, but the reappearance of Cabin B presents him with another miraculous murder. This time, the victim is actually dead with a very real bullet in his head, but the cabin door was "chained shut" from the inside and the conductor in the corridor "didn't see anyone enter or leave the cabin." A seemingly impossible murder in Cabin B begs to be compared to John Dickson Carr, but the story is unmistakably a clever and warm tribute to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934). There are many nods and winks to the story and Aoyama very effectively recreated a well-known scene for his own ends. Most amusing of all is Richard Moore badly imitating Hercule Poirot throughout the story and he barely broke character.

However, the story is not merely a lighthearted sendup of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express as the plot is quit good. The locked room-trick is a clever combination of simple trickery and elaborate misdirection strengthened by some good clues like the defective light above one of the cabin doors.

So the puzzle-side of the story is absolutely solid and a first-class specimen of the railway mystery, but there's a darker, parallel story taking place in the background involving a ton of recurring characters and agents of the Black Organization.

Black Organization received intelligence Anita, or "Sherry," is traveling on the Bell Tree Express, "a steel cell on wheels," which means the hunt is on and they intend to "flush her out like a deer" – catching a bullet as she leaps out. The opening pages revealed "Bourbon" is tasked with hunting down and eliminating Anita, but his, or her, identity has never been revealed. And, as to be expected, more than one familiar face has boarded the train who can all be the mysterious Bourbon. What follows is dangerous and explosive battle-of-wits crossed with a game of hide-and-seek, while Conan is busy investigating the impossible murder in Cabin B. A very well-done and handled piece of storytelling that not only added an extra dimension to the regular murder investigation, but furthered the ongoing story-arc and revealed the identity of Bourbon. My sole complaint is the surprise cameo, which pretty much was put to use as a deus ex machina. They were so lucky [REDACTED] decided to put in an appearance.

The second story is a strange and mixed bag of tricks, but not for the reasons you might think, because it's mostly a pretty decent detective story. The problem is that the various components don't "gel" together all that well.

A story best described as the aftermath of the previous case and "the Mystery Train was such a disaster" that "the Sebastian family decided to make up for it" and invited Richard Moore, Rachel and Conan to their villa in Izu – apparently famous for its tennis court. When they arrive, they find a group of college tennis players who use the court to practice and one of them gives Conan a light concussion with a flying tennis racket ("mada mada dane"). Bourbon is also there under the identity he was introduced to the reader. Conan is the only one who knows it. This seriously hampers his investigation when he wakes up in his room with a body blocking the inside the door, which places him smack in the middle of another locked room murder.

I liked the premise of Conan waking up in a locked room with a murder victim and the solution to the locked room found a new and original way to use an age-old trick. Something that has often been used for a very different type of impossible crime, but the premise and locked room-trick should have been two separate stories. I think it's a waste to not have used the premise for a story in which Conan is the only suspect. You can even have a never-before encountered police inspector who learns Conan has been involved in a ton of murder cases and begins to suspect he's a homicidal child. I don't think it helped the murderer stood out like sore thumb or that the plot played second fiddle to Bourbon looking over Conan's shoulder.

The last chapter sets the stage for another Kaitou KID heist, which was alluded to in the opening chapter, but Jirokichi Sebastian had to move the exhibit in the wake of the Mystery Train disaster. But the challenge to the master thief stands. KID already promised to steal the Blushing Mermaid on the opening night of the exhibition. Something that's easier said than done, because the pendant with a red diamond is stuck to the back of a turtle, named Poseidon, who swims in a large, bulletproof aquarium surrounded by twenty guards – which is as good as burglarproof. KID lives up to his reputation and stages a grand magic trick that makes both the turtle and pendant vanish from the aquarium. And leaves behind a note saying "the shy mermaid has dissolved into foam in my hand." This story will continue in the next volume.

So, on a whole, a pretty strong and interesting volume, but with all of its strength and interest lying in the Mystery Train story. The second story was not bad, but uneven and can't judge the Kaitou KID story until I've read vol. 79. A volume containing another promising-sounding, half-a-dozen chapters spanning impossible crime story involving vampire lore. More than enough to look forward to!

A Talent for War (1989) by Jack McDevitt

Back in 2013, Ho-Ling Wong introduced the traditional mystery corner of the web to James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), a science-fiction novel that's at its heart a detective story, but on a scale that's impossible to do in a conventional, earthbound mystery novel – landing a comfortable spot on the Japanese Tozai Mystery Best 100. Hogan's Inherit the Stars left behind a who's who of the classic and modern detective-and crime story. Even science-fiction author and part-time mystery novelist, John Sladek, had to eat dust with his almost universally beloved Invisible Green (1977) trailing far behind Hogan's hard science-fiction tale. Something smelled fishy! 

A closer inspection of Hogan's futuristic puzzle of 50.000-year-old human remains in a spacesuit discovered on the Moon proved to tick "about every single box that we want to see filled" with a "slow, devious, torturous and extremely clever unraveling of a complex puzzle." So we shamelessly appropriated Hogan's Inherit the Stars from the science-fiction genre.

Needless to say, I was not adverse to reading more of these archaeological space mysteries, but only found Ross Rocklynne's 1941 novella "Time Wants a Skeleton." A whowasdunin centering on an out-of-time human skeleton found inside cave on an ancient asteroid. But nothing more came to my attention until recently. 

Jack McDevitt is an American science-fiction author who specialized in archaeological and historical novels set in the far-flung future that often have a detective hook. McDevitt came to my attention as some of his work has been compared to Ellery Queen and probing a little deeper discovered that he credited G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown as hugely influential on shaping his Alex Benedict series. This comes with the caveat that McDevitt is not "an enthusiast about detective stories in general," but loves "the magic of Father Brown" that have more to do with "trying to figure out what on Earth happened" than simply whodunit and cites one of Chesterton's well-known locked room mysteries, "The Arrow of Heaven" – collected in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). So he belongs to the school of thought that believes the how of a crime is often more interesting than the who. A school that has Dorothy L. Sayers as its headmistress and John Rhode as its main lecturers.

So why not give McDevitt a shot and, if I like the series, boldly go where I've seldom gone before by dabbling in some chronological reading. 

A Talent for War (1989) is the first title starring Alex Benedict, an antique dealer, who lives and operates about 10.000 years into the future when "a thousand billion human beings" had settled "several hundred worlds" that formed a troubled Confederacy of planets. The story opens with the news that the flagship of the newest class of interstellars, Capella, had "slipped into oblivion" along with twenty-six hundred passengers and crew members, which failed to reenter linear space. Something that has happened before and none has ever reappeared. So everyone aboard is pretty much lost forever. And legally dead.

One of the passengers was Alex's uncle, Gabe Benedict, who left his estranged nephew his
entire estate and a historical puzzle dating back to "the last great heroic age" which has "provoked historical debate for two centuries." Two hundred years ago, an ever-expanding humanity came across an alien civilization, Ashiyyur, which resulted in an armed conflict between possibly the only technological cultures in the entire Milky Way. Christopher Sim was a history teacher from Dellaconda who became the leader of the Resistance and from the helm of his "immortal warship," the Corsarius, "spearheaded the allied band of sixty-odd frigates and destroyers holding off the massive fleets of the Ashiyyur," which eventually turned the tide as the other planets began to recognize the danger – driving the aliens back to their sullen worlds from which they came. But this victory came at a price. During his famous last stand, Sim was betrayed and abandoned by his crew with the name of navigator, Ludik Talino, becoming synonymous with cowardice. The names of the other deserters were lost to history and so is what exactly went down during that decisive and historically significant battle.

What did Gabe Benedict, an amateur archaeologist, knew that sent him tracking off into a region of space, known as the Veiled Lady, two centuries later? What is the connection with secretive journey of the CSS Tenandrome?

CSS Tenandrome is a big survey ship "involved in exploration of regions deep in the Veiled Lady," a thousand light years from Gabe's home planet, which returned under very mysterious and hushed circumstances. This churned the interstellar rumor mill. Officially, it was reported the ship's Armstrong units were damaged, but all kinds of rumors were flying around alleging it was either a plague ship or there was a time displacement that severely aged the crew members. There even rumors that the ship came across a new race of aliens or "an ancient fleet adrift," but "something among the encrusted ships" had "discouraged further examination" and returned home.

Alex has to take a deep drive into history to not only figure out what really happened two-hundred years ago, but what his uncle knew that could rewrite history. Admittedly, this makes for an engrossing, but slow-paced, read that takes some time to finish.

Alex has to gather and track down a ton of historical records, online and offline, war-time poetry, notebooks and watches simulated reenactments as well as visiting distant worlds, a historical society and even interviewing a representative of the Ashiyyur. But everything moves very slowly with only three points of action in the entire story. One very brief with the other two being saved for the end of the story.

So most of the story has either Alex sifting through information or talking with people, which is approach exceedingly rare in the detective genre and don't think it even has a name. I suppose you could call it a "research novel" with Katsuhiko Takahashi's Sharaku satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaku Murders, 1983) as the only example that comes to mind, but done on a much smaller scale than A Talent for War. The Case of the Sharaku Murders merely deals with an academic search for the true identity of a mysterious woodblock print artist who was briefly active during the late 1700s under a pseudonym. This makes the puzzle component of the plot is difficult to discuss, because it's as vast as our own star system. However, I was very impressed with the amount of world-building that was done. A massive, multi-worlds world that felt like it's actually populated with a human civilizations.

Over the years, I've read a tiny sampling of science-fiction mysteries and one thing always surprising me is that the earliest titles sketch a picture of the future in which culture and technology has stagnated or even regressed. Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) takes place on a drought-stricken Mars in the 30th century, but technology is clunky with references to only 19th and early 20th century literature and culture. David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944) takes place in mining community around an asteroid belt, but courtroom photographers still use flashbulbs and John Russell Fearn's The Master Must Die (1953) has snail mail between Earth and Mars. One stamp is enough to cover the cost of sending a letter from Mars to Earth. What a difference half a century makes!

I'm not an expert, of course, but I thought technology was much more convincingly handled here with Alex's conversation with an A.I. version of his dead uncle being eerily predictive of the very recent developments with a controversial deepfake technology digitally resurrecting dead relatives or friends. I also appreciated that the Armstrong Drive was not used as a magic wand to simply transport between the stars, because there are some serious limitations as to its reach and maneuvering that required a ship "to materialize well outside star systems" – which "left the traveler with a long ride to his destination." A trip to Andromeda was still off the table. But what I really appreciated where the little historical and cultural touches in combination with current affairs playing out in the background giving you the idea all those worlds truly are swarming with humans.

Every chapter begins with an excerpt or quote from a fictitious piece of future literature, philosophy or commentary on the war and wished McDevitt had told more about the history and myths surrounding the various settled worlds.

Alex reminiscent about his own home world that "only an historian can tell you now who first set foot on Rimway," but "everybody on the planet knows who died in the attempt" and trying to find the wreckage of Jorge Shale and his crew was the first archaeological project of his life. But he never did. Alex also visited a settled water world, appropriately known as the Fishbowl, which shares its binary star system with a planet that was once the home of an intelligent species, Belarius. A now inhospitable place which houses fifty-thousand-year-old ruins that were "humanity's only evidence that anything else had ever gazed at the stars" before their running into the Ashiyyur. Belarius has been largely given up as it's "an incredibly savage place" crawling with "highly evolved predators" in its dense jungles. What a great backdrop that place would be for an archaeological, space age mystery novel. Something halfway between Agatha Christie and Predator!

But more important is that long-ago battle and the symbol Christopher Sim has become to the Confederacy, which is just as important two centuries later as there's a political crisis brewing in the background of interstellar proportions. Earth is holding "a referendum on the matter of secession" and there are constant clashes along the Perimeter with the Ashiyyur. So hostilities with the Ashiyyur might be "the cement that binds your Confederacy together" and "stem the political power of separatists." This makes finding answers to a 200-year-old mystery potentially dangerous and highly explosive.

McDevitt wrote an imaginative, richly detailed and engrossing story that constructed entire worlds with its own history around the central puzzle with the only drawbacks being the slow pacing and not having quite the detective pull of Hogan's Inherit the Stars. But you can probably put the latter down to having to setup an entire universe while exploring one of that interstellar civilization's many stories. So you can expect a review of his second novel in the not so distant future.