Murder on the Blackboard (1932) by Stuart Palmer

A couple of months ago, I read Stuart Palmer’s debut novel, The Penguin Pool Murder, which introduced the world to Miss Hildegard Withers, teacher at Jefferson School and a battle-ax who stubbornly forces herself into murder investigations. While I had my issues with the book, I enjoyed it enough to set out to read the rest of the series. I intended to read it in order, and so downloaded Murder on the Blackboard…only to find that it was the third book in the series. More fool me. That aside, I sat down to enjoy a book that, as the title implies, brings murder very close to home for Miss Withers.

The book opens with Miss Withers sitting in on detention for one of her students, who made tactless comments about Anise Halloran, the sweet young music teacher, and her relationship with the school principal. Miss Withers hears the teacher’s heels clacking into the cloakroom before unsteadily heading out. When she goes to the cloakroom to see if Miss Halloran is alright, she finds the woman lying dead on the couch, her head caved in.

This is only the beginning of one of the worst days of Miss Withers’s life. When she returns to the school with NYPD Inspector Oscar Piper in tow, the body has vanished. Piper knows better than to doubt Miss Withers, but his search is cut short when the murderer bashes him over the head, leaving the investigation in the hands of Inspector Taylor. "She had little respect for the intelligence of the police when Oscar Piper was in charge of a case, and none at all now that he lay on the operating table in the emergency ward at Bellevue.” A feeling vindicated when Taylor latches onto the school’s drunken fool of a janitor, Mr. Anderson, as his prime suspect.

This is a surprisingly gritty book! We have critical comments on the use of the third-degree by the police, and the discovery of the victim’s body, while not dwelled on, is disturbing and treated as such by the characters. Miss Withers is on the defensive for much of the early chapters and it’s not until later that she’s able to really get a grasp on the case. The set-up is good. The idea of setting a murder at a school is an interesting one, and Palmer gives us a nice, multi-chapter section where Withers explores the school, looking for clues and a murderer. Palmer also throws multiple interesting questions at the reader. Why does the secretary have a gun loaded with two blanks? Why has Miss Halloran been acting sickly over the past few weeks? What is the meaning of the sequence of musical notes she scrawled on the blackboard? There’s even a minor locked room mystery thrown into the mix, as the janitor makes a surprise appearance in the school basement even after it’s been gone over with “a fine-toothed comb.” Twice! It’s a neat little problem. I enjoy these little locked rooms Palmer’s given the reader in the two books I’ve read.

Like Penguin Pool, even if you hit on the killer early, it’s still satisfying to see Withers piece everything together. There are some good clues throughout the book, and it’s always fun to see an author lay the groundwork for what the killer did without the reader noticing. And Palmer gets credit for subverting a common mystery plot point. But I don’t think Palmer quite sticks the landing here. Part of the problem is the characters. Palmer implies a lot of suspects—the various teachers at the school—but in practice we only focus on a handful of them, meaning the reader can probably hit on the killer through pure chance. There are also a couple of minor dangling loose ends, and the whole sequence with Professor Pfaffle, a criminologist, goes nowhere beyond letting Palmer take shots at psychology. And some of those questions I wrote earlier don’t get satisfying answers. The biggest example is the motive. “Why would someone kill the harmless music teacher?” is a question underlying the investigation, and when we get to the explanation, Miss Withers implies it’s important…and then just glosses over it. It makes for a slightly dull ending to an otherwise hard-hitting novel.

But you know what? I enjoyed this book anyway. I think it shows a more confident Palmer, with a more complex mystery for the reader to unravel. Miss Withers is on fine form too, high-handedly bulldozing her way through the investigation. All in all, I’d put this book about on the same level as Penguin Pool. I’m looking forward to seeing Palmer improve himself more. Recommended. (Although right on the borderline here.) 

Other Reviews: Ah Sweet Mystery! (contains other Miss Withers reviews), The Book Decoder, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, CrossExaminingCrime, Bitter Tea and Mystery, Tipping My Fedora.

"The Violent End of Duncan Malveine" (2020) by nicked

And now, time for something completely different.

Outside of mystery fiction, my other big obsession is the Thief franchise. The first game, Thief: The Dark Project came out in 1998 and, along with Metal Gear Solid, played a key role in inventing the “stealth game.” (Although I know about its predecessors, such as Castle Wolfenstein.) The series revolves around Garrett, who used to be a student of a group of a secretive scholars called “the Keepers” before leaving the organization. Now he uses his training to work as a freelance thief operating in an unnamed city. Garrett would like to just steal enough loot to pay the bills and be left alone, but the Protagonist Curse means he inevitably gets sucked into saving the city, if not the world. But for all its influence, the franchise has had a very short shelf life: the original trilogy of games, a tepidly-received reboot/sequel in 2014, and now a VR game set after the 2014 game.

The franchise has retained its power thanks to a very active fan mission community. Ever since 1999’s “Gathering at the Bar,” there have been hundreds of missions placing Garrett in everything from basic Thief missions set in sparkling mansions to sprawling cities to horror to comedy. While there are less missions nowadays than there used to be, the community is still going strong. December 2023 saw the release of The Black Parade, a full campaign easily on par with, or even surpassing, the original games. With such a wide variety, it should come as no surprise that some creators have turned their hands to mystery.

One of the most prolific creators in this field is Nick “nicked” Dablin, who’s made almost two dozen fan missions since 2006. Most of nicked’s missions are high-quality missions that provide twists on the normal Thief format. “The Violent End of Duncan Malveine,” a fan mission for Thief's sequel, The Metal Age, is his most “technically ambitious.”

A journal in Garrett’s apartment sets the scene. Garrett has been eyeing Lord Malveine’s Star of Séraphine, “the world’s largest diamond,” but before he can make a move, Lord Malveine is murdered, meaning it’s likely that the diamond will pass to one of his children. Garrett is about to abandon the job when he’s introduced to an anonymous figure who asks him to track down Lord Malveine’s murderer. This person doesn’t care what Garrett steals, so long as he points to Lord Maleveine’s killer by leaving their portrait light on in the gallery. So Garrett gears up to infiltrate the manor.

Of course, not too many people are weeping over the dead man. There’s his wife, Elizabeth. Or his younger son Leon, a Pagan who resents his father’s conversion to the hyper-technological Mechanists. A conversion that’s also offended his eldest daughter and a priest staying at the estate. Or what about his older son, Raymond? He’s “a sadist with a mean streak” who’s determined to get into a vault built by Duncan’s father Gregor. Not to mention his wife, Lucy, a gambler with a temper. And that’s not counting the family doctor, lawyer, various other guests, and the servants. Which of them is the murderer?

Well, it could be any of them.

The mission’s gimmick is that it’s semi-randomized. I don’t mean in the Clue sense, where everything about the solution is random, but there are nine different choices of killer, each with their own method of committing the crime. The player will spend the mission sneaking through the manor, alternating between stealing loot and digging through the diaries and letters of the guests, figuring out who has an alibi, who has motive, who had the weapon, etc. The first time through, you’ll take extensive notes, desperately seeing who could and could not have committed the crime, you’ll angst over the autopsy report, and you’ll wonder if you have the right person right up until the ending.

Your later playthroughs will be much simpler. Part of this is just what happens when you replay something, but the fact is that the scenarios are too simple for the hardcore mystery fan. Once you know how the mission works, it becomes easy to check what you need to check and ignore everything else, even taking the randomization into account. In fact, the randomization kind of cuts against the mission. It gives the mission some replay value, but I think it would have been better off with two or three in-depth mysteries, with red herrings and double bluffs, then the current set-up with nine pretty basic scenarios. But I’m approaching this as a mystery fan, rather than as a Thief fan mission player. As a Thief fan, nicked does a great job here. Most people don’t think “Thief” and then “mystery,” so it was neat to see how nicked managed to emulate solving a mystery in a game engine not really suited for it.

And the thing is, this would be a very good mystery. You have maps, and the mansion is huge. There are plenty of suspects, with secrets ranging from the mundane to the disturbing. The gameplay mechanics—such as the security cameras you can turn off, but if you flip too many off they’ll all come back on—could be linchpins of a mystery plot. The best is the horror undertones. Nicked’s missions often feature horror, but the horror here got under my skin because you can actually completely miss it if you don’t explore thoroughly. It gives the mission an unsettling undertone if you don’t pick up on the dark thread weaving through it. There are cards and diary pages hidden throughout the manor, and every time you pick one up, there’s the sound of sliding metal from somewhere deep within the estate. “I don’t believe in curses,” Raymond brags, but the player will. It’s like if John Dickson Carr was inspired more by Lovecraft than by Poe. There are more jump scares involved than I would have liked, but most of the horror comes from the atmosphere and build-up.

So while I don’t know if this will be of any interest to this blog’s normal readers, I had a great time with this mission. It’s a solid Thief mission that any fan of the games should check out. Those who aren’t can safely pass on it, or just watch a Let’s Play. Even so, Recommended.

You can check out the mission (and nicked’s other work) here.

Towards Zero (1944) by Agatha Christie

I was inspired to read this book when I saw the commercials for the BBC adaptation. Look at when that came out. Now look at when I released this review. Clearly, a lot happened between then and now, but everything led towards this…

Towards Zero is one of Christie’s Superintendent Battle novels, and a very well-known one at that. It was interesting to compare this to my previous review of an Ellery Queen novel. The Queen novel technically has a stronger hook. Two characters enter the strange world of The Hamlet, meet the eccentric great detective, and we immediately go into an eye-catching murder. Christie’s book opens with lawyers and their hangers-on discussing a case, and yet while the Queen book is a little slow, Christie essentially rams a hook down the reader’s throat from the jump.

One of the attendees at the meeting is Richard Treves. Treves reflects that most mystery novels “begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that—years before sometimes—with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day…All converging towards a given spot…And then, when the time comes—over the top! Zero Hour.” A philosophy that Christie follows here, as the next portion of the book shows the reader snapshots of different events, from an attempts suicide to Superintendent Battle’s daughter being accused of theft.

But the main focus is a triangle. Nevile Strange is a professional tennis player who’s recently divorced his wife Audrey for another woman, Kay. Still, Nevile feels bad about the whole thing and his guilt has led to him hitting on a terrible great idea: He and Kay will visit his mother-in-law at her home in September while Audrey is there. He’s very insistent that this was his idea, but Kay is skeptical. Also skeptical is said very traditional mother-in-law, Lady Tressilian, who dislikes the concept of divorce and isn’t fond of Kay anyway. Also going to be there in September is Mary Aldin, Lady Tressilian’s caretaker who comes into money if the old lady dies. Also present is Thomas Royde, a distant cousin of Audrey who still carries a torch for her and Ted Latimer, a dancer who carries a torch for Kay. Not to mention Mr. Treves himself.

This is already a trainwreck in the making…but the reader knows that it’s going to get worse. For one of the snippets we get is of a person plotting, “a clear, carefully detailed project for murder.” And the date of this plan’s climax? “A date in September.”

Towards Zero is one of Christie’s best works. She throws a lot of characters at the reader, and it’s a testament to her skill that they quickly sharpen and stay in the reader’s mind. There’s ghost-like Audrey, drifting through the house, seemingly inscrutable. There’s Kay, who beneath all her garishness truly cares about Nevile and, having schemed to get him in the first place, thinks she recognizes what Audrey is doing. Nevile himself is key to the narrative. While most readers will be appalled at his decisions, they are understandable. This is a man who has never suffered a serious setback in his life, and the idea that he’s willingly built a time bomb to sit on never seems to occur to him. The other characters are well-drawn as well. Of note is Ted. Normally, Christie’s angry young men tend to get eye-rolling pity at best, but here Christie gives a sharp scene with Mary where she recognizes his frustration and anger with all the snobs he’s surrounded by and offers him genuine sympathy. It’s a good scene and speaks to the depth Christie gives her cast. The only part that rings false is a last-second romance. You can kinda justify it if you tilt your head and squint a bit, but it still comes out of nowhere. And I don't like the language used to describe marriage.

I’ve been deliberately leaving out details about the murder, because I want to leave as much as a surprise for the reader if possible. While reading this book, I thought about Peter Lovesey’s The False Inspector Dew, another book with the same formula of having the murder occur halfway through with the first half of the novel being build-up. While I thought that Lovesey’s ended up being a pretty simple mystery, Christie manages to construct a much more dense and complex mystery from her page count. The reader is struck by a series of odd details about the crime—Why did the killer drug the maid, for instance—and the plot takes a number of twists and turns, subverting the reader’s expectations and sending them off asking new questions. I think that Christie could have highlighted some bits of evidence more—and it should go without saying, but some of those opening scenes have important clues—but she gives you most of the important bits and gives you plenty of time to chew over what they mean. And to fail to understand them, of course. I had been spoiled on this book before reading it, so it amused me to see how smoothly Christie introduced a series of red herrings designed to confuse the reader who thought they were a step ahead of the Queen.

Obviously, I had a blast with this book. Excellent characters interacting in a solid mystery. Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, Only Detect, Mysteries Ahoy!, The Grandest Game in the World, Ah, Sweet Mystery!, Countdown John's Christie Journal, Clothes in Books, A Crime is Afoot, Tangled Yarns, The Invisible Event (podcast, contains spoilers), and The Green Capsule.

The Tragedy of X (1932) by Ellery Queen

Image taken from The Invisible Event.

The year 1932 was a banner year for cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, better known for their pen name, Ellery Queen. After writing a couple of novels and short stories, the cousins made the decision to really buckle down and turn mystery writing into a career. That year saw the publication of The Greek Coffin Mystery and The Egyptian Cross Mystery under the Queen name, and the subject of today’s review, The Tragedy of X, published under the pen name of Barnaby Ross. (The sequel was published the same year.)

The Tragedy of X opens with Inspector Thumm and District Attorney Bruno making their way to a house that could serve as the setting for the next Yukito Ayatsuji: “The Hamlet,” a castle populated by old servants with Shakespearean names and the hunchback Quacey, “the world’s premier make-up man.” And the lord of the castle is Drury Lane, a renowned actor who solved “the Cramer case.” Thumm and Bruno want his help in resolving “the Longstreet Murder.”

Harley Longstreet was a Wall Street broker, a swaggering bully who thought little of others. His birthday party was less a gathering of friends and more a barrelful of targets for Longstreet to shove around. The festivities were set to continue at another location, meaning that a gaggle of people crowd onto a streetcar. But on the way, Longstreet reached into his pocket, only to jerk it out. Something had pricked him. Minutes later, he died. The weapon proved to be a ball of nicotine-coated needles. Circumstances demonstrated that the only time the ball could have been planted was after the party boarded the car, but who was it?

There’s Longstreet’s fiancée, Cherry Browne, a “musical comedy actress.” There’s Michael Collins, a government man who’s convinced that Longstreet gave him a bad tip. The police really like Longstreet’s business partner, John DeWitt, who’s the frequent target of Longstreet’s bullying and possibly blackmail. Not to mention that Longstreet likely had an affair with his second wife and made a pass at his daughter. There’s motive for both women, and for the daughter’s boyfriend, Kit Lord, who laid Longstreet out with a punch. But the best efforts of the New York police are for naught, and the case hits a dead end.

Drury Lane astonishes his visitors when he says he already has a good guess about who the killer is, but demurs to identify Mr. X on the grounds of lack of proof. Mr. X has no interest in waiting for the denouement, however, and hurls a possible witness off a New York ferry. DeWitt is inexplicably on the scene and refuses to explain why, making him suspect number one is the eyes of the police, but Drury Lane—and the reader—are certain that Mr. X still lurks in the shadows…

It was only near the end that I realized that this was my first full Ellery Queen novel. I’d read a handful of radio plays and short stories, as well as The Tragedy of Errors years ago, but that was a (meaty) outline. For an introduction, it was good. Tragedy of X is a solid novel. It is a bit slow-paced; the Queen cousins lack Agatha Christie’s smooth prose and dialogue, and we really don’t see too much of the non-DeWitt suspects after the initial murder. It feels like we lurch from one murder scene to the next without much connecting them. It didn’t bother me too much, but I was aware of how much time it was taking to finish each section. And it’s not much of a “tragedy.” I can kind of see what the Queen cousins were going for here (ROT13: gur cybg vf rffragvnyyl n Funxrfcrnerna eriratr fgbel gbyq sebz gur cbvag bs ivrj bs gur vairfgvtngbef jub gel naq snvy gb fgbc gur zrybqenzngvp naq znfgre znavchyngbe ivyynva sebz rknpgvat uvf iratrnapr), but it didn’t come off like that for me because I wasn’t really connected to the characters. (ROT13: Naq jr qba’g urne nalguvat sebz gur xvyyre nsgre uvf neerfg. Jr qba’g rira trg dhbgrf sebz uvf pbasrffvba, Guhzz naq Oehab whfg fhzznevmr vg!)

I enjoyed the mystery though. Ho-Ling is a huge Queen fan who praises the novels as the height of logical detection; you’re granted all the clues and can follow along with the detective to the truth. And here, you can. Lane is right, you can solve the crime from the initial account of the investigation. I picked up on some of the same things he did and very well could have gotten it for myself. I do think the police would have hit on the key fact eventually, but I accepted it here. While there isn’t a big epic chain of logical deduction at the end, I did enjoy Lane’s explanation, especially the reason for why the killer had to leave behind a piece of evidence that directly incriminated them. Lane methodically demolishes every other choice the killer could have made, so by the end you’re nodding your head in agreement: The killer really did have to do that.

This book also marks the first (novel) appearance of that Queen staple, the dying message. The third victim crosses his middle finger and forefinger in “the protection-sign against the evil eye.” The final explanation of what this message means is played more as a nice final line to the book, but again, you can figure out what this message means, it’s just unlikely since the key information is only briefly given. But it is there.

So overall, I liked this book. While I can’t say that, if I’d read it with no context, I’d want to rush right out and get more, when reading it knowing that this is Ellery Queen, and that there’s more and better to come…well, I’m looking forward to it. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, The Green Capsule, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Invisible Event, and Dead Yesterday.

The Spy and the Thief (1971) by Edward D. Hoch (edited by Ellery Queen)

Many years ago, I downloaded some Edward D. Hoch collections for my Kindle, determined to read more of him. One of those collections was The Spy and the Thief, “a double-barreled collection” containing seven stories of Hoch’s spy C. Jeffery Rand, and seven stories of his thief Nick Velvet. I started the collection, read most of it…and then never finished it due to having other things to read. Well, I remembered this book and set out to finally read it all the way through.

The history of The Spy and the Thief goes back to 1943, when Ellery Queen* published multiple short story collections containing stories by some of the finest writers in the genre, from Stuart Palmer to Dashiell Hammett to Roy Vickers. The goal was not only to give the public some good reading, but also to preserve magazine stories that otherwise would have fallen into the cracks of oblivion. The Spy and the Thief was part of a second round of these types of collections, which started in 1969. The collection comes with some brief dossiers on not only Hoch, but also on his two stars. On that basis, it’s worthwhile for the Hoch fanatic, but what did I think about it as a book?

I’ve already reviewed the first story in the collection, “The Spy Who Came to the Brink,” so we’ll move onto “The Spy Who Had Faith in Double-C.” Cecil Montgomery is a priest and spy at work in the island nation of Buhadi, which is currently in the midst of a power struggle between two charismatic leaders…one of whom is under the employ of the Chinese. Montgomery discovers which of the two men it is, but agents of that man kill him in a blind alley, leaving only a vague message for Rand to interpret. It’s a nice little puzzle, although one has to wonder if Rand would really be stumped by it as long as he is. Or that the killers wouldn’t have found it. I haven’t posted it since I feel that most readers, if they think about it, can crack the code.

“The Spy Who Took the Long Route” is similar to “Brink” in that there’s no doubt about the spy who’s passing information about ship placements in microdots on postcards; the question is why he’s transmitting the information the way he is. Sending the information by postcard ensures that it’ll arrive in Russian hands weeks after it’s of any use. I do like the explanation that Hoch provides. It’s bit odd, but the summation does a good job at showing why this method was used and not something else. But the main clue that tips Rand off…frankly, it makes no sense. (ROT13: Fb Enaq vf gvccrq bss orpnhfr vg’f irel hayvxryl gung gur zbyr jbhyq unir abgvprq gur zvpebqbgf ng nyy. Bxnl. Fb jul gura qbrf gur zbyr zragvba gurz, vs ab bar xabjf nobhg gurz?) It mars the story. More impactful is Hoch’s portrayal of his fictional city of Hoihong, a muggy and hazy city where the West and Russians co-mingle like the Cold War doesn’t exist. Hoch had a cynical attitude about the conflict, and I think this setting demonstrates it, as does the next story.

“The Spy Who Came to the End of the Road” opens pre-Pearl Harbor at a facility where scientists are doing work with electric eels to find a possible cure for Russian nerve gas. One man kills two workers, and then we cut to the present, where the killer might have resurfaced under another name. He claims to have worked with codebreaking, and so Rand is sent in to talk with him and test his story. This is almost a pure espionage tale with little detection until the end, with a nice little plot twist that readers might miss until the explanation. Although Hoch uses the story to talk about how much he knows about electric eels, this is pretty good.

The Lavender Machine in “The Spy Who Purchased a Lavender” is a new encryption device developed by the Americans. Old spy Peter Smith purchases one for Britain, but the odd behavior of the seller and a piece of carbon paper with a duplicate signature on it makes him suspect that the man might be trying to sell one to the Communists. I found the mystery aspect of this one pretty weak. The final explanation for the possible espionage is quite good and well thought out. But the actual crime—for of course there’s a murder committed late in the story—isn’t as well done. My issue with it, and the other Rand stories collected here, is that they almost all revolve around a dying message or code of some kind. That makes sense, seeing as Rand is a codebreaker, but it also means that alternate clues tend to be a bit thin on the ground. If the reader can break the code, they know the killer. Hoch does his best, but in order to ensure that the reader knows enough to break the code, he has to explain how it works and highlight to readers what to watch out for. Which is what happens here.

It's a shame, because I do like this story as a spy story. It’s a drag, but that’s the point, as Smith chases down thin leads that Rand is increasingly convinced are going nowhere, clumsily questioning every possible acquaintance of his suspect. Hoch does a good job of capturing Rand’s increasing frustration with what looks like a wild goose chase without making him unsympathetic.

“The Spy and the Calendar Network” is a traditional whodunit. The titular network was active after World War II, dedicated to learning all they could “about German scientists working for the Russians.” It was disbanded without accomplishing much, but now the surviving members of the group, including Rand, are gathering at Cornwall for a twenty-year reunion. But not even 24 hours in, one of the group is found stabbed to death in his room, the only evidence being a piece of paper with the word “Tarsus” scrawled on it. Once again, it probably shouldn’t take Rand as long as it does to crack this one, and again, there’s not too many clues pointing to the killer, but I liked this one. Hoch does a good job with the moody atmosphere and symbolism, and I liked the backstory behind the crimes.

We end the Rand section with “The Spy and the Bermuda Cipher.” A late-night phone call brings Scotland Yard and Rand to a Liverpool house where a Double-C agent is lying dead of a stab wound. Bizarrely, the room is filled with encyclopedias, textbooks, and clocks. 24 to be precise. Rand suspects the murder is tied to the Bermuda Cipher, a new cipher stumping the greatest minds of Double-C. The reader has no chance of figuring out how to break it, but honestly, it’s a very clever cipher that feels very practical. Unfortunately, the focus on the cipher means that the murder is a bit perfunctory, but Hoch slips in a very good plot twist that has been carefully set up. Though would a clever spy really do that? It feels like someone would notice.

I’ve become more of a Rand fan over the years, since I feel that some of Hoch’s most interesting and out-there ideas come from his espionage stories. But these aren’t Rand at his best. They’re good stories but lack the needed “oomph” to be great. And the reliance on dying messages limits them as mysteries.

We now move onto the Nick Velvet stories. Velvet is one of Hoch’s most interesting series characters, a thief who doesn’t bother with “the usual valuable things, like cash or jewels,” but “the unusual, the bizarre, the worthless.” It’s a neat hook that adds a little mystery to all of his stories, even the ones that don’t feature another crime: Why does the client want Nick to steal pool water, tickets, or a calendar? But that’s something of a soft retcon, since Hoch’s original vision for Nick placed more weight on the “unusual” rather than the “valueless.”

This is best shown by Nick’s debut, “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger.” Nick is approached by a shady trio looking for him to abduct the titular clouded tiger “a strangely mottled beast long thought to be legendary” from a public zoo for their employer, a Middle Eastern prince. The focus is on how Velvet will slip an angry tiger out of a zoo. Hoch handles this part well. Perceptive readers will figure out where the plot is going, but this was a good debut for an interesting series character…albeit one who’s quite savage here; Hoch would later tone Velvet down.

“The Theft from the Onyx Pool” sees Velvet hired by Asher Dumont, an heiress with an odd target: the water from the pool of mystery play writer Samuel Fitzpatrick. She wants it stolen not drained. And she wants it done before the Fourth. Most of the story is spent on Velvet scheming to steal the water, and his plan is honesty pretty smart. The motive for the theft is good, and I liked the reason it had to be done before the Fourth. Velvet considers a false solution which I would have also been impressed with, which is a testament to Hoch’s imagination.

I remembered liking “The Theft of the Brazen Letters” the best of my first read-through, and this reread almost held up. Velvet is hired to steal three of the letters from the sign on the Satomex Corporation building. Velvet not only has to steal the letters and figure out why his clients want them, but dodge around Charlie Weston, “a smart cop and an honest one.” I felt that most of the Velvet stories fell under “The ‘worthless’ item is secretly valuable,” but that’s not the case here at all. (Nor for the rest of the stories, honestly.) The ending is great, with Velvet explaining the risky-if-clever plan at the heart of the story and turning the tables on Weston. Some of the cluing is a little clunky, but I believe that most readers won’t think through what they mean or notice the real key evidence.

“The Theft of the Wicked Tickets” has Velvet hired to steal the tickets of the Broadway play, Wicked. The play has been closed for two months, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for Nick’s client, the father of the play’s producer. Of course, this is no simple job, as Wicked seems to still be a hot commodity in spite of it crashing and burning. Not to mention the dead man Velvet finds in the theater during his break-in. I rose an eyebrow at the reason for the theft, but I’ll trust that Hoch read about something like this.

Oh, and this story has nothing to do with the hit musical Wicked. Don’t be silly.

“The Theft of the Laughing Lions” starts with Nick’s sailboat being invaded by Ran Brewster, a “mermaid” with a job for Nick: one of the lion decorations on the tables of Phil Rumston’s “Capital Clubs.” Rumston is an odd man, an “open, friendly man” who's also "perhaps the most talkative person in the public eye." His every secret is already out in the open, so what does a young woman want with one of his lions? This is almost pure caper, as Nick’s first attempt isn’t sufficient, and his second goes wrong. Not the most amazing explanation at the end, but still a good story.

“The Theft of the Coco Loot” see Velvet hired to steal a calendar. “A calendar of this year, of the type that is given out every December. It has absolutely no value.” What makes the theft interesting is the calendar’s owner: John O’Donnell, currently in a federal penitentiary. The only thing O’Donnell seems to use the calendar for is “to cross off the days while he waits for the end of his sentence,” but when Nick and the reader learn that the crime he’s imprisoned for is piracy, it becomes obvious what makes the calendar valuable. Wisely, Hoch devotes much of the story to Velvet’s effort to steal the calendar, and I quite enjoyed the process. The main deduction hinges on trivia, but it’s trivia that Hoch seeds the story with, making it feel more fair. And a clever reader can make an educated guess if they notice those seeds. This romp ends with a gun battle and a clean win for Velvet.

Finally, Velvet is hired to steal a wooden horse from a merry-go-round in “The Theft of the Blue Horse.” The merry-go-round is part of a carnival, soon to close, near the Canadian border. But Nick’s hopes of an easy job are dashed because it seems that someone else has the same idea and has already stolen one of the horses. I thought I remembered what the reason for the theft was and was prepared to be disappointed, but it turns out I misremembered. I admit, I don’t quite follow the reason for the theft, but it’s an interesting twist that gives Velvet's actions more impact. There’s a good deduction at the end too.

Once I accepted that the Velvet stories were more likely to be caper stories than capers with full-blown mysteries, I enjoyed them more. I liked the variety of reasons for the different thefts, and the mystery elements tend to be solid, at the very least. Velvet is an appealing protagonist; it’s fun to watch a master at work—whether that be a master thief or a master author.

When I first finished this collection, I wasn’t super fond of it. The stories didn't stand out to me, and there are a bunch of typos in this edition. But on thinking about it, I can safely say I enjoyed the book. While I might put this on the lower tier of Hoch collections, I do think it’s a good book overall. I could see myself picking it up again and flipping through it, enjoying the work of an expert. But that’s because Hoch is a comfort read to me, and I don’t know if someone going into his work blind would agree, and there’s not really a story I can point to and say, “You have to read this,” (except maybe “Bronze Letters”). To be fair, I’ll label this as Not Recommended, with Caveats (I liked it, but you might not.)

*I'm assuming this refers to Frederic Dannay, but I'm labeling this as Queen to be sure. 

Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle: The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User (2002/2017) by NisiOisiN (translated by Greg Moore)

What is a “genius”?

It’s easy to say that “A genius is a very smart person,” or “a genius is someone who excels in their field.” But then you have to ask how we’re judging “smart” or “excel.” There are a lot of people who know a lot about an arcane topic, but who can’t apply to their everyday life at all. There are a lot of people who are pretty ignorant, but who carry out their day-to-day affairs with undeniable wisdom. So who decides who counts as a “genius”? The geniuses themselves? Non-geniuses?

If I met him in real life, I’d call NisiOisiN a “genius.” After all, most of us couldn’t produce a novel like Decapitation: Kubikiri Cycle: The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User (originally published as Zaregoto, Book 1: The Kubikiri Cycle, adapted into the anime Kubikiri Cycle: Aoiro Savant to Zaregoto Tsukai from 2016-2017) at the age of twenty, much less go on to write over one hundred books since then. Maybe he’d agree or laugh it off. Maybe he’d be a bit frustrated. After all, most people know him through the SHAFT adaptation of his urban fantasy Monogatari series, and probably haven’t read a single word he’s written. Or maybe he’d be annoyed, because he sees all the flaws in his first book, the characters he’d define better, the themes he’d make sharper. Or maybe he’d be angry that I’m implicitly dismissing all the thought, time, and effort he put into plotting and then writing this book with, “I’m sure it all came naturally to you.” Which is what I’m saying. He’d probably snap back with, “I just work harder than you.” Which is pretty undeniable.

But that’s just nonsense. In the end, Nisio has no right at all to call himself a genius. That’s something that I think only a critic can say. So I’m labeling him as a “genius” whether he likes it or not. But it’s clear in Zaregoto (literally, “nonsense”) that he’s been thinking about what makes a “genius.” 

The mystery is set on Wet Crow’s Feather Island, home of Iria Akagami, heir to the Akagami Foundation before being suddenly and mysteriously disowned. She amuses herself by gathering geniuses to live at her island mansion. There’s a genius cook, Yayoi Sashirono. But really, she just has naturally strong senses of taste and smell. She just became a cook because she thought that was the best use of her gift; her “genius” is just hard work. There’s Akane Sonoyama, who’s an all-around genius. Well, unless you count her irrational (though she would say otherwise) hatred of artists, including crippled genius painter Kanami Ibuki. And then there’s genius fortune teller Maki Himena. But she’s not really a “genius,” since she “just” has extraordinary ESP abilities that let her tell the future and read minds. So, since it’s all based on a unique skill that most people don’t have and that you can’t practice, can you really call her a “genius”?

I’m sorry, that’s rude of me.

There’s also Tomo Kunagisa, a genius techie who used to perform acts of borderline cyberterrorism as part of “Team.” Now she’s on the island, accompanied by the narrator, Il-chan. He’s certainly not a genius. No, he’s not a genius at all. He was part of the intellectual ER3 System but dropped out. He’s the detective of our tale, though how effective he is is an exercise for the reader. There’s also the island’s staff, including twin maids. That’s quite a cast, and to be honest, I wish Nisio had highlighted them more. They all have illustrations from artist “take” at the beginning of each chapter, but I had trouble telling them apart, especially the staff. Il-chan isn’t always the best at describing people, you see, preferring to talk up, down, and all around in most of his conversations, bulldozed by his conversation partner, who says what they like about him with almost no pushback.

But the murders are distinctive enough. They’re all impossible crimes, but Nisio gives them all a twist beyond the conventional locked door. A decapitated body in an atelier blocked by a river of paint. A decapitated body found in a locked room where the window is ten feet off the ground. Both heads “cut off from the very base of the neck.” A brutal act of sabotage performed when everyone has an alibi. Unconventional mysteries for an unconventional cast. The solutions to the crimes don’t always awe, but they impress. Nisio is smart enough to resolve the “how” of the first murder early on, making the explanation for the rest all the more impactful.

And the solution is really good. I would never come up with it. That’s why I say that the author is a genius, where he would say I just don’t think about things enough. Which is pretty undeniable. After all, I came close to solving the crimes, I just missed some key points. There’s one clever clue that I wish Nisio had described earlier, but he still gives the reader time to chew over the implications. The final explanation is logical and makes “sense.” Well, it makes sense to a genius.

This book is all about being a genius. What it means to be one. What geniuses do. How they act. How they exploit the fact that they’re “a genius.” How they can be kinda pitiable. I’m thinking of Maki here. A terrible person, but the reason she’s terrible makes total sense. I’d act terrible to people if that were true. You get the sense that Nisio really does care about this island of lunatics, even when they perform the unforgivable.

But I don’t like to talk nonsense. I like to get to the point, and I mean everything I say. So let me start by giving my full kudos to the translation. The words flow and feel very natural. And I say this book is Recommended, especially if you’re looking for something familiar yet different in your mystery diet. 

Other Reviews: Beneath the Stains of Time, The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Bad Player's Good Reviews.

Note: This book was originally translated in 2008 by published by Del Ray. I read the 2017 translation by published by Vertical (same translator though), hence the dates in the title. 

It Walks By Night (1930/2020) by John Dickson Carr

Cover image taken from In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.

It Walks by Night was the novel debut of John Dickson Carr. Carr had been published beforehand—in fact, this book was an extended version of his novella “Grand Guignol”—but those were stories for his college’s literary magazine. This was his major step into the big boys’ club.

It Walks by Night hits the ground running when narrator Jeff Marle gets a wire from juge d’instruction Henri Bencolin “saying merely that there was danger ahead, and was I interested?” Bencolin is endeavoring to protect the great sportsman “Raoul Jourdain, sixth Duc de Saligny.” The Duc’s new wife, Louise, was married to the mad scholar Alexandre Laurent. Was married, since trying to slash your wife up with a razor out of a cold and senseless bloodlust puts a damper on your relationship. Laurent was institutionalized, but has escaped, and paid a visit to a renowned plastic surgeon. That surgeon is dead now. “They found Rothswold’s head looking out from one of his own jars of alcohol on a shelf.” Bencolin fears that Laurent is posing as someone close to de Saligny, and the great man himself is terrified of Laurent’s wrath.

The incident happens on the Duc’s wedding night, while he and others are celebrating at a shady nightclub. The Duc is seen entering a card room; one door is watched by Bencolin while the other is watched by a loyal police officer. de Saligny is heard to ring for drinks, but the waiter is in for a grotesque shock when he arrives: “The head itself stood in the centre of the red carpet, upright on its neck; it showed white eyeballs, and gaped at us with open mouth in the low red light.” Multiple questions present themselves: Why was the victim kneeling on the floor? Who left a copy of Alice in Wonderland in the nightclub outside? And, most important of all, how did the killer leave a watched room? Laurent’s statement, “I have ways of getting into houses, Herr Doktor, that no one knows but myself,” weighs heavily on the problem.

This is a book that leans heavily on its atmosphere. Carr is writing more in the tradition of the Gothic than a conventional mystery novel and buying into it is vital for enjoying the book. Sadly, I did not read this in the best of conditions, and the already-quite-florid language bounced off me. But there were times when it clicked, and Carr got me to believe in this dark, surreal Paris where the educated man’s idea of a good time is discussing famous murderers, and where you can almost believe that a bloodthirsty werewolf is lurking in the moonlit garden. And the end of chapter 3 is perfect pitch-black comedy.

This is not quite your conventional mystery novel. Oh, there are clues, and plenty of them. I even noticed some but failed to piece together what they meant. But Bencolin is in full omniscient detective mode, a step ahead of everyone, including the reader. The British Library edition is sadly lacking a map that makes the solution quite clear when everything is explained.* The solution a bit of a letdown after all the darkness you have to move through to get to it, but it is a simple and ingenious solution, layered well into the narrative and the other plot twists. The best is one dropped on the reader in the build-up to the finale. It’s very improbable and I don’t quite buy it, but again, Carr clues and justifies it well, and the moment of revelation is a perfect, Poe-style shocker.

The characters aren’t much to write home about. Douglas Greene rather dryly calls them “vengeful or mad,” and yeah, pretty much. I did like Bencolin’s father-son relationship with Jeff, which a dynamic you don’t often see in Holmes-Watson pairings. It humanized him while still letting him be the malevolent chess player, the pieces being human lives. And he gets some funny lines too: “Is this room ever used for any purpose other than assassinating guests?” But Sharon Grey shows Carr has absolutely no idea how men and women talk to each other.

But like I said, this is a book that demands you be invested in the exact mood it’s trying to build. If you’re not, it’ll be a slog full of melodramatic ninnies. If you are, well, they’re all still melodramatic, but they’ll have your attention. While I would not make this your first Carr, it is Recommended, especially if you can read it in the dim light, while wind rattles the windowpanes.

The British Library edition also comes with a bonus short story, “The Shadow of the Goat,” Bencolin’s debut. The story revolves around a bet between dashing young Billy Garrick and the sinister Cyril Merton, an actor with “a medieval soul.” Merton claims he’s read of sorcery that allows a man to vanish from a sealed room and Garrick bets him a thousand pounds that he can’t. The party escorts Merton upstairs where he is left behind in a room with a barred window, and the guests gather outside a door bolted on the outside to see if can escape. Then a loud bang is heard, and when they rush upstairs, they find that Merton has, indeed, vanished.

It seems that becoming invisible has caused Merton to go mad, as he follows up by killing a man in his burglarproof home and then assaulting Garrick before vanishing into thin air. Bencolin quickly wraps the whole case up, exposing Merton’s location and explaining all of crimes. The explanations aren’t Carr’s most brilliant (and indeed, one can question the feasibility of the first disappearance), but this is a young man’s mystery, and is quite well constructed, with a solid ending. (ROT13: Gurer ner nyfb fbzr cnenyyryf jvgu gur fbyhgvba gb gur obbx, juvpu znxrf vg vagrerfgvat gb pbzcner gur gjb.) This is a nice addition that almost makes up for the lack of a map.

*There are conflicting reports about this; as far as I can tell, some copies have the map, some don’t. My e-book copy did not have one. 

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, CrossExaminingCrime, The Green Capsule, Mrs. K Investigates, A Crime is Afoot, Tangled Yarns, Playing Detective, James Scott Byrnside, The Grandest Game in the World (contains labeled spoilers), Ah, Sweet Mystery! (contains vague spoilers), Mysteries Ahoy!, Dead Yesterday, The Reader is Warned (contains vague spoilers), and Bad Player's Good Reviews.