The Thefts of Nick Velvet (1978) by Edward D. Hoch

A few months ago, I read some of Hoch’s Nick Velvet stories. Velvet is a gentleman thief with an odd MO. For $20,000 ($30,000 for dangerous jobs) he’ll steal anything you want…as long as it’s worthless. No gems, gold bars, or valuable paintings. Nick Velvet will steal movie props, pennies, and trash. And yet, he always has customers. The Thefts of Nick Velvet is a collection of the best of the then-released stories.

I’ve already read the first two stories, “The Theft of the Clouded Tiger” and “The Theft of the Onyx Pool” in the last collection, so we’ll move on to “The Theft of the Toy Mouse.” Velvet goes to Paris to swipe a 98-cent toy mouse being used as a prop in a movie. Nick gets the request by mail, and his client doesn’t give his full name, but a paycheck is a paycheck. This is one of those stories where the heist is the main attraction; stealing the mouse proves to be a harder job than Nick intended, but of course he pulls through. The reason for the theft is perfectly fine. I feel like it comes a bit out of nowhere and it’s based on something that I’ve never heard of. I’m sure that this thing exists, so I accept it.

“The Theft of the Meager Beavers” sees Nick hired by the Minister of Information of the Republic of Jabil, an island nation with its own baseball team, but no one to play against. Nick is supposed to find them an opposing team. He settles on the titular Beavers, a low-ranking team who’s kidnaping won’t disrupt the season. The kidnapping is surprisingly mundane for such a bonkers premise. This is the story the Open Road Media e-book advertises on the blurb, and for good reason. It’s eye-catching, and the story is deeply silly. That’s not to say that Hoch neglects the plot. Velvet can’t shake the feeling that this is about more than a baseball game. While there’s no way for the reader to figure out what’s going on, there’s a great moment when Velvet spells out and connects a bunch of information that any reader can notice and piece together. The whole thing is a bit too unreal to feel satisfying, and while I get the final line it didn’t set well with me, but you know what? I enjoyed it. Feels like Hoch noticed an odd coincidence and decided to write a story about it.

The next story has an interesting publication history: It was originally published in the British version of the magazine Argosy, and its appearance here was its first American publication. Nick Velvet is sent up to New England by a resort owner who’s facing competition from a resort up the road. The main attraction? A sea serpent! The client thinks it’s a fake but wants Velvet to snatch it anyway to strike a blow to the competitor. But the resort’s guests seem very convinced that they did see a serpent. And Velvet himself sees it up close, right before finding a body. The explanation for what the serpent is, again, silly, but I accept it in the spirit it was intended. It’s clear that Hoch was paying attention to sightings of sea serpents, noticed a certain trait, and made a story out of it.

“The Theft of the Seven Ravens” opens with Velvet being hired not to steal something. An agent of the British government wants Velvet to help protect the titular ravens, gifts from the nation of Gola. They’re an important animal in Gola and protecting them will help avert a diplomatic incident. Of course, the story would be pretty boring if Velvet just sat around and went home, so he’s approached by a young woman working on behalf someone who wants Velvet to steal the ravens. Velvet expertly plays both sides and collects his fee. There’s no real mystery here—Velvet discovers all the key information off-stage—but I thought the reason the ravens needed to be stolen was clever.

“The Theft of the Mafia Cat” sees Velvet approached by a childhood friend who has Mafia connections. He wants Velvet to swipe the right-hand cat of Mike Pirrone, a big-time man. Pirrone’s house is built like a fortress, so Velvet will have his work cut out for him. The focus here is on the heist, and it’s a joy to see Velvet at work. But the story does make it very clear how much of his success is down to him getting very lucky and rolling nat 20s on his Charisma checks; he gets off too easily in the end. The reason why his old friend needs the cat is predictable, but still clever.

Velvet has an unusual job in “The Theft from the Empty Room.” His client is Roger Surman, who’s trucking business has made him a wealthy man, but not a happy one. He wants Velvet to steal something from his importer brother Vincent's house. What is that something? Well, Surman doesn’t get a chance to tell Velvet due a surgery that will leave him incapacitated for a time. And when Velvet goes to the house, he finds that the back room is totally empty! And not just empty, but covered in a layer of dust, meaning there’s no chance that anything was in there recently. Roger’s brother claims that he’s unstable and trying to break up his marriage, but what’s really going on? The dual hook of Velvet not knowing what he’s meant to steal and the impossible aspect of nothing being in the room is great. And Hoch’s explanation is clever and set up well.

“The Theft of the Crystal Crown” is another “Velvet in Ruritania” story (there are a surprising amount of these). This time he’s in New Ionia and his target is the titular crown (actually made of glass), which is said to give its wielder de facto rulership of the nation. But outside of the actual theft of the crown—I like how Hoch manages to make each theft feel different from each other—there’s really not much to this story. There’s another plot going on in the background, but the cast is too small to have the solution be a real surprise.

“The Theft of the Circus Poster” opens with Nick meeting his client while the man is wearing clown makeup. He wants Nick to steal a circus poster from a former clown who now lives with his granddaughter. The client has already made a failed attempt at the theft which has made the granddaughter paranoid. And she is, much to Nick’s horror, a snake charmer with plenty of snakes for anyone trying to sneak in at night. Here the mystery is less “Why does the client want an old circus poster?” which gets explained partway through and more, “Why go through all this effort to steal a worthless poster when the owner would happily give it away?” and the answer to that is a good one. Nick’s final deduction hinges on an interesting trivia fact that Hoch read about, but you get all the information you need to figure out what the issue that Nick notices is. This is a fun story.

“The Theft of Nick Velvet” opens with Nick being lured to a parking lot by a man calling himself Max Solar where he’s bashed over the head and wakes up handcuffed to a bed. His captor is a former employee of the real Solar who was cheated out of a computer program. He knows that Solar was planning to hire Nick for something and preempted it. Nick, who has little interest in lying around handcuffed, talks the man and his girlfriend into stealing the item for them. The item in question is a ship’s manifest, although as usual both Nick’s clients and Solar himself are tight-lipped about why Nick needs to steal it. I enjoyed seeing how Nick steals the manifest, but then the story indulges in Hoch’s weakness: the unnecessary murder. The crime is perfunctory and Nick catches the killer out in a trivia fact. Good opening, slightly weak ending.

Nick goes to Washington in “The Theft of the General’s Trash” and is hired by some reporters to go through a general’s garbage. Said general is the president’s advisor on foreign affairs. The reporters want his garbage, but he dumps it in the incinerator every day. Also, they don’t actually know when whatever it is they’re looking for will be in there, so Velvet has to infiltrate his apartment complex multiple times. This part is great, with Velvet effortlessly slipping into what should be a very secure area and dealing with complications. I didn’t care for the resolution of the story, which involves a lot of plot twists dumped on the reader at the last second. This story also has more focus on Nick’s partner, Gloria. For the most part she hasn’t done anything but moon over Nick, but here she gets…not development, not really. The resolution feels sexist honestly. But it clearly gave Hoch a little more freedom in constructing these stories. This story is also clearly Hoch’s reaction to the then-current Watergate scandal, which is interesting.

“The Theft of the Bermuda Penny” sees Nick hired by a young woman who does want him to steal something of value. One-cent worth, to be exact. She has a penny with a mark on it and wants Nick to get its twin from gambler Alfred Cazar. Nick poses as a reporter to get close to the man and his bodyguard and ends up in a car on a road trip to Saratoga. During this Velvet gets scammed twice by Cazar, but Velvet confirms that he has the penny on him. But after a pit stop, something bizarre happens. Velvet gets in the driver’s seat, with Cazar behind him. He hears Cazar gets in, hears his voice…but when a trooper pulls the car over for speeding, Cazar is no longer in the back set! And this stretch of road is already infamous for other cases of a hitchhiker vanishing from back seats…

I first read this story in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries and loved it. On this read, I’ll admit that there’s one aspect of the solution that’s a little cheesy, but otherwise the central problem is very good. There’s a lot going on here, from the disappearance to the reason for the theft to the scams Cazar pulls on Velvet, etc. There’s a really strong forward pace here, and Hoch mostly keeps a hold on his plot threads (except for the one about the hitchhiker, which even Velvet feels is a let-down). The story ends with a brilliant reversal that elevates it just that little bit more. But man, Nick lets the mastermind off real easily considering what they’ve done, and for little reason too.

Like I said in my last review, once I started reading the Velvet stories as heist stories rather than mysteries, I enjoyed them a lot more. Hoch varies up the thefts with every story and keeps them fresh. And this collection did a better job at giving a variety of reasons for stealing whatever item Velvet was after. I’d say that “Empty Room” and “Bermuda Penny” are the highlights, but this is an overall good collection. Recommended

Other Reviews: Mystery*File, Beneath the Stains of Time.

The Case of the Baited Hook (1940) by Erle Stanley Gardner

The Case of the Baited Hook opens with a great hook for Perry Mason. A man wants Mason to defend an anonymous, masked woman who won’t even speak to Mason. Defend her from what? He won’t say. How will Mason know if his other work will conflict with this? He can contact the client anonymously. Is this the shadiest thing imaginable? Absolutely. But the client cuts off part of a ten-thousand-dollar bill and gives part to Mason and part to the woman. If she gives him the other part, it’s a sign that she needs his help. The whole thing is too mysterious to not attract Mason’s interest.

This being a Mason novel, things continue to escalate. In the next chapter, Mason is approached by Mrs. Tump for some legal help. She wants Mason to help her with an issue regarding her semi-adoptive daughter, Bryl Gailord. Bryl is the child of Russian immigrants who died at sea while fleeing the Bolsheviks. Mrs. Tump was entrusted with the girl, but the orphanage she sent her to sold the child to a couple. Mrs. Tump has tracked her down and believes that her stepfather, Tildings, is misusing her trust fund. Tildings is a member of a hospital’s board of directors…that’s currently being investigated for embezzlement. And Tildings himself has vanished. All that’s left of him is his bloodstained car, with a bloodstained jacket with a bullet hole in it and a handkerchief with lipstick on it in the pocket.

Until Mason and Paul Drake find his body…

Baited Hook is a rush. There’s always some new turn of events or new connection between the characters. There are multiple factions acting against each other, so Mason always has some lead to follow. This is one of the Masons where he never ends up in court (there are more of those than you think), but he still has plenty of opportunities to be the shady lawyer we all know and love. Honestly, he gets vicious in this novel; he’s at his most unscrupulous here. But in fairness, this is one of the books where everyone who says more than five words to him is either playing coy or actively lying to him. As he tells Della, “The best fighters don’t worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking.” It’s interesting to contrast this with my last Mason read, where he was on the backburner for most of the book and even got outplayed a few times. Here he’s constantly in people’s faces, not always ahead but never behind.

Gardner raises some interesting questions throughout the book. Why were the dead man’s shoes removed? Why is the granddaughter of the hospital’s founder insisting on suspecting the trustee who is being open and transparent during the embezzlement investigation, but implicitly trusts the one who’s gone AWOL? Some of these questions get good answers, others get pretty basic ones. Penzler cheerfully admits in the introduction that the clues are rather thin on the ground here, which isn’t quite true. There are some good moments of deduction here. About halfway through, Mason overturns a major assumption about the crime and debunks a character’s story using details that the reader should have picked up on but didn’t. Mason’s reasoning as to the identity of the mysterious woman is a little vague but solid enough. But I have to admit, there’s a lot of sturm und drang building up to a pretty basic who-and-why solution. I didn’t see the killer coming and the explanation is logical, but Mason delivers it with little build-up. Not to mention that, as Mason himself points out, the police can solve it really quick by looking at a piece of evidence, which they never do until he tells them to.

But overall, I enjoyed this book. It’s what I’ve come to expect from Gardner: a rapid, ever-shifting plot, hard-boiled tone, some interesting observations of people, a lawyer’s job, and society itself, all as part of an overall wild ride. I was hooked. Recommended.

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event, Vintage Pop Fictions, Dead Yesterday, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.

The Phantom Ragdoll (2019) by DWaM

This is the third book in a row I’ve reviewed that mixes “murder in transportation” with an impossible crime. I didn’t plan it that way, but that’s how it ended up.

DWaM’s The Phantom Ragdoll is his second original novella. I enjoyed his first novella and was looking forward to this one. And just like Leviathan, a surreal and bizarre impossible crime takes center stage.

The narrator is Noel, a frustrated man whose marriage—an open one—is on the rocks. He’s sent by his company to a distant town to do some insurance work, and he’s looking forward to trying really hard not to think about the man his wife is sleeping with. But when the old-fashioned train goes through a tunnel, Noel finds himself with plenty of distractions. After the train emerges, there’s a scream from the corridor. He emerges to find two college students outside of their compartment. The woman thinks that there’s a dead body on the floor, and claims that it just “appeared.” When Noel goes to investigate, he finds that it’s actually a ragdoll. Still no answer for how it just appeared in the few seconds they were in the dark, but that doesn’t matter. Noel barely gets back to his compartment when the woman screams again. The ragdoll is gone…and in its place is a corpse. Of a man no one recognizes. Who couldn’t have got on the train.

Noel and the other passengers are semi-detained in a nearby town where Noel meets K, a real, actual detective who’s here to investigate the murder and wants Noel to be his assistant. Not that Noel wants to be. K is the other man, you see.

It’s the dynamic between these two men that gives Ragdoll some flair. We see their relationship go from one-sided loathing on Noel’s side to more tense to mutual contempt to…certainly not respect, not even understanding, but to some sort of connection between the two men that gives the ending a little more heft. K is a fun detective character to follow anyway, with the right level of snide superiority mixed with playfulness (well, not so much from Noel’s point of view). K drops plenty of teasing hints while never explaining what exactly his thought process is, while Noel tries to deflate him in his narration. He’s very insistent that K is lying about something but seeing as what he insists are lies are really just uncomfortable facts about Noel’s marriage, it’s hard to gauge how much of this is K and how much is Noel.

But as I said, the two men do have some kind of connection at the end, to the point that I feel that the end of chapter 6 feels like a more natural endpoint and conclusion, with chapter 7 more wrapping up the mystery as a postscript. I enjoyed said mystery a little more than I did Leviathan, but it’s nothing objective. The solution hinges on multiple moving parts and coincidence, but I was able to instantly grasp what was happening, whereas with the previous DWaM I was checking back at the map to make sure I got it. I think there could have been more clues—one of them gets one mention—but in the end, if a reader really makes an effort to think about what’s actually going on, and follows K’s philosophy of never making assumptions, they can at least grasp the outline of what happened.

This was another great work by DWaM. And, like most of his stuff, you can pay what you like. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Genmajou (number 12 on the list), The Invisible Event.

Murder on Wheels (1932) by Stuart Palmer

When I picked up the second book in Stuart Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers series, Murder on Wheels, I expected not to like it. Other reviews I’d read led me to believe that the book was obvious and not that good. But I wanted to read every book in this series, so I gave it a shot…and was pleasantly surprised.

The book opens with a car crash, a Chrysler smashing into a taxi, that draws the attention of a patrolman. Quickly he realizes that something is off: the Chrysler doesn’t have a driver. The man is lying in the street with a rope around his neck. At first it seems to be a bizarre suicide, but the cab driver protests that he saw the dead man“go up into the air […] and down the street…backwards.”

The dead man proves to be Laurie Strait, the bad ‘un of the Strait twins. Luckily, both Inspector Piper and Miss Withers are on the scene and take over the investigation. The Straits used to be New York elite but have fallen on hard times. The current occupants of the house are dotty Aunt Abbie, nervous cousin Herb, and the eccentric matriarch of the family, who’s one of the few to stand up to both Piper and Withers, along with her naked parrot. Hanging out in the background is Lew’s fiancée Dana (who’s in love with Laurie), as well as a traveling rodeo. The Straits went to their dude ranch last summer and it seems that Laurie earned the ire of the star shooter’s brother.

While the central problem is striking, once most readers see the word “rodeo,” a certain possibility presents itself. Other reviews I read gave me the impression that Palmer was going to try and make a twist out of this. But he doesn’t, actually. Withers and Piper realize the rodeo connection, but it doesn’t really help them, since there’s no way a man could swing a lasso at a moving car in New York and not get noticed. Nor are there any places where someone could drop a noose to catch the dead man. But again, Palmer wisely resolves this about halfway through, and his answer is a genuinely clever explanation that makes this a solid impossible crime novel.

Withers and Piper are on good form here. Withers is a little less blustery than in the preceding or following books but still takes the crown at the end. You see, Piper wants to get one over the amateur, meaning the two of them have a friendly bet going on over who can solve the case first. It’s not a major part of the plot, and frankly they share so much between each other that it’s not much of a competition, but it justifies Miss Withers keeping her conclusions to herself.

And good conclusions they are. I want to say that this is the most well-clued Miss Withers I’ve read. Some of them require some minor leaps, but for the most part when Miss Withers begins spelling out what happened and what led her to realize that, most casual readers will slap their forehead in frustration. I especially liked how she cleared an innocent man. Those who are better-read in the genre will likely anticipate some of the twists, but, as I’ve become one of those more experienced readers, I still appreciate a solid chain of logic, especially if I’ve reached the conclusions through genre savvy and not the evidence. The book isn’t perfect. There are some trails and evidence that either aren’t followed through on or get handwaved a bit at the end. For example, we learn one character has lied about something, but neither Piper nor Withers dig any deeper into this or interrogate this character further. And Withers’s explanation for a murder near the end of the book is hard to visualize.

But besides those flaws, I didn’t have a major issue with this book. I’d go as far as to say that it’s my favorite of the Miss Withers’ I’ve read. I didn’t expect much from this, but I’m happy to say I was wrong. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Beneath the Stains of Time, Pretty Sinister Books (contains spoilers), The Invisible Event.

The Lost Gallows (1931) by John Dickson Carr

Twelve years ago, I read an article that Otto Penzler posted to hype the upcoming The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries. One of the books he mentioned in that article was The Lost Gallows by John Dickson Carr, where a dead man drives a car and a whole street vanishes. Needless to say, I was hooked, and I’m glad to finally have a chance to read it, courtesy of the British Library Crime Classics imprint.

While It Walks by Night was set in France, Gallows moves to England. We open at the Brimstone Club, where narrator Jeff Marle, detective Henri Bencolin, and other guy Sir John Landervorne are discussing crime and mystery. Specifically, they’re talking about a strange incident that happened to Dallings, a friend of Sir John. Dallings met a young woman at a nightclub and enjoyed an evening out. But when he took her home, he missed the address she gave to the cab driver and found himself lost in fog-coated London, on a street he didn’t recognize. And there, he saw the image of a gallows, and a man walking up them.

And someone has left a miniature gallows in the room with them…

The three of them set out for the theater to watch a show and talk to Dallings but are almost run over by a car belonging to Nezam El Moulk, another patron of the Brimstone. But there’s something wrong: The chauffeur is driving, but he’s clearly dead.“We were flying in pursuit of a corpse.” After a wild chase, the car comes to a stop outside the Brimstone, where it’s confirmed that El Moulk is missing. And then a police inspector arrives, asking about Ruination Street. He received a phone call earlier that night:“Nezam El Moulk has been hanged on the gallows in Ruination Street.” El Moulk has run afoul of Jack Ketch,“A familiar hobgoblin of nursery tales […] A hangman, an executioner, applied in general to all hangmen.” Almost ten years ago today, El Moulk was involved in a shady duel that left one man dead and another hanging from the ceiling of his prison cell. It’s this latter death that Ketch wants to avenge, but the man in question was presumed dead in the war and using an alias besides, meaning our heroes will have their work cut out for them.

I should temper expectations now. This isn’t an impossible crime novel. The “dead man driving a car” bit is quickly resolved. The search for Ruination Street isn’t about a vanishing street, but the protagonists trying to find out where it is in the first place. That being said, there is a minor locked room later in the book. It turns out that Ketch has been leaving “gifts” for El Moulk in his rooms and can even make his deliveries while the doors are locked. While the explanation isn’t original, Carr clues it well and Bencolin ties it into some of the other mysteries in the book.

Because Carr puts everything in this book. Dead men driving cars! Dueling detectives! (Not that Sir John does much.) Ancient Egyptian curses! Reincarnation! You name it, Carr probably tried to put it in this book. Carr-through-Bencolin gives a sermon about how“fiction is stranger than truth,” and oh boy does he live up to that. What’s remarkable is that all of this mostly comes together. Bencolin is ten steps ahead of everyone, and Carr uses this in a teasing and creative way. Twice before the ending, Bencolin pauses to explain to Jeff (and thus the reader) some aspect of the plot and clear up some of the mysteries, directing Jeff (and thus the reader) to take that knowledge and apply it to the overall plot. And it is well-clued. When I reviewed Night, I mentioned that the main twist was well-clued but the killer less so. Carr resolves that here. There are plenty of clues, including some very clever ones that made me want to reach through the book and smack him (laudatory). And he doesn’t even bring them all up at the end! The events are confusing, but a careful and thorough reader can see through them to the truth.

My main issue with the book is the suspects. The ones in Night were all insane; these are saner but more annoying. For some reason Carr gives them not accents, but very weird speech patterns. El Moulk’s drunken secretary gets the worst of this. I know that Carr will do this throughout his career, but here it makes the suspects hard to follow. They also aren’t well defined, fading in and out of the plot. The killer is well-concealed, but Carr gets an advantage from how easy it is to forget about some of the suspects.

I enjoyed this book. Like its predecessor, it’s more of a Gothic (and a quite dramatic one) than a mystery, but the mystery aspect is stronger. I don’t know if I’d call this a hidden gem, but I’d call it an underrated Carr. Recommended for Carr fans or those who have read a lot of grounded mystery novels recently and want something a bit mad.

The British Library edition comes with an added short story, “The Ends of Justice,” written for Carr’s college magazine, The Harverfordian. Bencolin is milder in this story, although his wrath is kindled by Bishop Wolfe, a “churchman turned detective.” Wolfe played a key role in the arrest of charitable-but-impoverished Tom Fellows, who now stands under a death sentence. He stands accused of murdering his cousin Roger Darworth, a spiritualist whose death would bring Fellows five hundred thousand pounds. Darworth feared Fellows and brought Bishop Wolfe, a Dr. MacShane, and Sir John to watch his study where he and Fellows would meet. Fellows entered, but when the trio heard nothing, they entered to find Darwroth handcuffed to a chair, stabbed in the heart. And although the window was open, it led out onto a field of unbroken snow…

Luckily for the police, Bishop Wolfe found a witness who saw Fellows leaving through a window, ensuring that Fellows was scheduled for an appointment with the hangman. But Bencolin realizes the truth and rushes to save Fellows’s life. But this is a young man’s work. The solution is set-up well and makes sense of the story in the same way that Gallows does, but the solution is a bit of let-down. This isn’t a lost classic Carr. It’s good work from a twenty-something, but not the work of a prodigy, more notable for its ending and its anti-clericalism. S.T. Joshi thinks that Bishop Wolfe is a jab at Chesterton’s Father Brown. Douglas G. Greene disagrees and I’m inclined towards him, or, if it is a jab, it’s not a good one. There’s really no relation between Bishop Wolfe and Father Brown besides them both being crime-solving churchmen.

But in spite of my grousing, this story is a nice bonus for the British Library edition, and worth reading for Carr fans.

Other Reviews: The Green Capsule, The Invisible Event, Only Detect, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, A Crime is Afoot, Playing Detective, Tangled Yarns. Spoiler-free analysis at At the Villa Rose.

The Naked Sun (1956) by Issac Asimov

Issac Asimov is a well-known science fiction author, but he dabbled in just about every genre. Thankfully, one genre he was quite prolific in was mysteries. Asimov’s oeuvre contains multiple armchair detective stories (the Black Widowers), a mystery set at the ABA, and the Elijah Baily novels, one of the earliest examples of the sci-fi hybrid mystery.

I’d read the first two collections of his Black Widower stories some time ago but only got around to reading his first Elijah Baley novel, The Caves of Steel, while reading for Alex’s New Locked Room Library. In short: I liked it. Great worldbuilding, good mystery. The book takes place on a future Earth where a large chunk of the population has traveled to the Outer Worlds to settle the stars. However, most of humanity remained on Earth, burying themselves underground in massive “Cities,” where they snarl in disgust at their “superior” interstellar brethren, the Spacers. Another distinct feature of this world is robots. Earth has mostly rejected robots except in limited capacities, while the Spacers embrace them. Robots follow the Three Laws, which essentially makes it impossible for them to harm a human. They’re mostly clunky machines with little ability to function outside of their parameters. But there’s an exception: R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot designed to be able to emulate humans. Together, Baley and Olivaw solved a murder on Earth, but The Naked Sun will take them up into the depths of space.

Baley is assigned to investigate a murder on one of the Outer Worlds, Solaria. It seems that his success in the previous book has reached further than he thought. But he’s also on the planet on a fact-finding mission: Earth chafes under the Spacers’ military might and Baley is supposed to find out what he can about Spacer culture to see if there are weaknesses that Earth might exploit should relations deteriorate. Baley finds the idea of going to a planet under an open sky to be terrifying, but he goes. Olivaw is there, posing as a resident of the planet Aurora, giving Baley a familiar face to cling to on an alien world.

And make no mistake, Solaria is alien. Asimov pulls a neat trick here. After immersing the reader in a world unfamiliar to the reader but familiar to the characters in *Caves, he now puts both characters and readers alike in a world with strange rules and customs. There are only “twenty thousand humans” on the entire planet, “ten thousand robots per human.” Solaria is much more dependent on robots than any of the Outer Worlds, with robots assigned to every household task imaginable. They also toil doing farming work. Since there are no human workers and the estates are so large, Solarians have little reason to interact with others in person. preferring to “view” through vivid holograms. Baley is disoriented by this odd world where “seeing” is deeply intimate and the world “children” is a taboo reminder of sex. A local doctor is respected not for his medical skill—he has little—but because he is brave enough to interact with bodies in person.

For the first half of the book, Baley conducts his investigation through viewing. The victim is Rikaine Delmarre, a “good Solarian” who was found bludgeoned to death in his home. Normally, suspicion would at once fall on his wife, Gladia, and indeed the common assumption among the suspects is that she is the killer. After all, there’s no way that any Solarian, much less Delmarre, would let anyone get close enough to commit a murder. But there’s a problem: no weapon was found at the scene, and Gladia had no chance to get rid of it. Of course, the household’s friendly and helpful robots might have cleaned it up (like they’ve done with any other evidence), but if not, Baley needs to find the weapon. But Baley soon finds himself frustrated with investigation over Zoom calls and decides that if he wants to solve this crime, he’s going to have to brave…the naked sun.

The impossible crime is similar to the one in Caves. The impossibility is split into two parts: There’s the “normal” aspect (no weapon) and the part that’s tied in with the setting (the victim wouldn’t have let anyone approach him). The explanation is solid without necessarily being spectacular. To Asimov’s credit, the false solutions are good and hinted at within the text, with some key flaws that make them, you know, false. Baley’s final explanation fits with the rules of both Solaria and the Three Laws in general, but I feel that Asimov could have hinted at it better. As is, Baley has a last-second eureka moment, rather than looking back on what he’s experienced and realizing how X could be part of a murder. Better handled are the two attempted murders in the book. Baley’s contact on the planet is poisoned and, like Delmerre’s murder, it seems impossible that anyone could have gotten close enough to commit the crime. Baley’s explanation for this—and a later attempt on his own life—takes advantage of a clever loophole in the Three Laws.

This is mostly Baley’s story. Those hoping for some teamwork between him and Olivaw will be disappointed, as Baley sidelines him early on (since Olivaw is compelled by the Laws to protect the agoraphobic Baley from the outside). Asimov does a good job of showing Baley’s progression from terror of the open, endless sky to embracing it. “He faced it because he knew he wanted to and because he needed to.” And Asimov ties his embrace in with the motive behind the murder, giving a bit more thematic heft to a motive that takes a bit of a swerve into explicit science fiction.

I quite enjoyed this one. Asimov plunges the reader into an alien world and gives them a solid mystery to boot. I think I’ll lean towards a Highly Recommended for this one. The mystery could have been just that little bit better, but the worldbuilding and Baley’s character arc put it over the top. 

Other Reviews: Stephen M. Pierce, The Case Files of Ho-Ling.

The Murder Wheel (2023) by Tom Mead

Last year, I reviewed Tom Mead’s debut novel, Death and the Conjuror. I thought that the book was a solid if slightly flawed attempt at the classic locked room mystery. That didn’t stop me from looking forward to reading the next book staring ageless magician Joseph Spector: The Murder Wheel.  

“Can You Solve the Ferris Wheel Murder Case?” asks London newspapers. Edmund Ibbs hopes that he can. He’s recently taken over the defense of Carla Dean, the woman at the center of the case. She and her husband, Dominic, went for a ride on the Ferris wheel, but when the wheel was at its height, a shot rang out and the man collapsed with a bullet in his stomach. Carla’s fingerprints were all over the weapon, and the case appears to be open-and-shut. But what if…? If Carla isn’t the killer, then how was the crime committed? Could it be the“limping man” some witnesses reported seeing slink away from the crime scene? What does this have to do with the murder of a security guard at Dominic’s bank, which is connected to the shady but untouchable gangster, Titus Pilgrim? Ibbs has his work cut out for him but has little idea that the investigation is about to plunge him into the most intense 36 hours of his life.

Ibbs attends a magic show put on by “Professor Paolini,” a magician eager to cover up the damage done by the upcoming book The Master of Misdirection, an expose of magic tricks. Paolini and his assistant, Martha, wheel out a crate in which they construct a suit of armor. The crate is then spun around, and opened to reveal…well, what’s supposed to be revealed is a walking suit of armor, but instead this armor has a corpse in it. A vital witness to Ibbs’s case!

In spite of what the title might suggest, it’s this crime, not the Ferris wheel crime, that is the center of the novel. Magic, specifically the public performance aspect, is the major theme of the book. The armor murder has a lot of moving parts and suspects about, most of whom are theater staff. And yet Mead, with the help of some very nice diagrams and maps, makes this all much clearer than it has any right to be. No matter how the investigators go about it, the crime seems impossible. There’s a spare crate that could have been used in the crime, but the crates were constantly in sight of the staff and most of them can account for each other’s whereabouts during the performance. But Spector is quick to note that there were three gauntlets in the dead man’s crate, not the expected two…

But our focal character is Ibbs. Ibbs is an appealing protagonist. He’s an amateur magician himself, and he has enough intelligence to propose some good solutions to the crimes. I really liked his solution to the Ferris wheel shooting. Alas, he’s wrong. This book is much more of a Carr pastiche than Conjurer, and Ibbs is a very Carrian hero. He spends most of the narrative shadowing the investigators, being jerked around, falling in love…and finds himself at the center of another locked room. He’s approached by one of the characters with information on Dominic Dean’s murder, but when the two meet in the man’s dressing room, Ibbs is hit over the head. He wakes up to find his informant shot in the head and gun glued to his own hand. And the door is, of course, locked. Inspector Flint starts to suspect that Ibbs is a locked-room manic, forcing him to go on the run, and to Spector, to clear his name. But to give him credit, he does finally produce the solution to the Ferris wheel shooting…and this is where the problems begin.

Ultimately, I do not like the solution to the shooting. The clue that points Ibbs in the right direction is a good one, and it’s a plausible win over Spector. But I just don’t care for the solution, for reasons hard to explain without spoilers. To give Mead credit, the solution isn’t just a one-and-done deal totally disconnected from the other locked rooms: the central idea is also the main thrust of one of the other deaths. So Mead tied it together thematically, I just didn’t like the idea. I liked the other two impossible crimes better. I was worried that the armor murder was going to be overly convoluted, but while it’s complex it’s actually not finicky or pedantic. In fact, we get a good explanation of why the killer did what they did and some clever deception to make the plan work, with a nice macabre touch to top it off. The dressing room shooting wasn’t as clever, but I still liked it, in the end. The main clue is discovered off-screen, but I felt that Mead gave enough detail that a reader can at least make a plausible stab at the solution.

But that being said, I find myself dissatisfied with Mead’s cluing. I just came off reading Anthony Horowitz, and he’s very good at cluing. If the mystery hinges on the killer having a peg leg, buddy he’ll set up the killer’s peg leg. But when Mead does it, the clues feel too thin. They exist, certainly. He even footnotes them! But I just don’t see how any reader can look at the cited clues and from there deduce the killer’s love of antique dolls, for example. The book just feels a bit overstuffed with the three locked rooms, the book, the gangster, etc.

But I will give Mead credit: Carr would have been cackling at the ending.

I’m in a weird position here. Mead clearly had a blast writing this book and tying everything together, and it’s technically better than Conjuror. But I find that I liked that book just a little bit more than this. Everything clicked into place for me more there. I guess where I stand is that I read a library copy and enjoyed the experience, but if I’d bought it full price I might have been miffed at the end. If you liked Conjuror or locked room mysteries in general, I’d check this out, but I don’t know if I’d make this my first Mead, nor would it make a believer out of someone who’s not already on board with Mead or impossible crimes in general. So, with that in mind, this is Recommended, with Caveats.

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Ah, Sweet Mystery, Tangled Yarns, The Invisible Event, Crime Fiction Lover, Lesa's Book Critiques, Stephen M. Pierce, and Beneath the Stains of Time.