Death and the Conjuror (2022) by Tom Mead

A review of this book almost feels pointless. Surely anyone reading this blog has already heard of and has made up their mind on Tom Mead and his debut novel. But I am determined to review as much as I can, and maybe there’s someone out there who passed this book up when it first came out.

Death and the Conjuror takes place in a fantasy England, one where locked room murders have "rolled over the city like a fog." Indeed, no less than three impossible crimes will afflict London’s finest. The first is the murder of psychologist Dr. Anselm Rees, his throat slashed in his locked office mere minutes after a mysterious, unknown visitor that appeared out of the rainy night left. The door was locked, the hallway under observation, and the locked French windows opened into a muddy yard with no footprints…at least, none near the window. This is the main impossibility of the book.

The second comes quickly: the theft of El Nacimiento, a lost painting by the insane artist Mantolio Espina. The painting was kept in a locked chest with the only key around the neck of its owner. Even if someone could have stolen the painting, the window was too small to push it through and the maids saw no one leave with it or anything that could have held it. The final impossibility comes later in the book, where a victim turns up strangled in an elevator…even though the police were just in it and it was under observation from when they left until the discovery of the body.

As mentioned, Rees’s death is the core of the book. The likeliest suspects are his three patients. There’s Floyd Stenhouse, a musician with the Philharmonic…who’s tormented by bizarre nightmares. The second murder takes place in his apartment building. There’s Della Cookson, an actress and star of the play Miss Death...and a kleptomaniac who was also the only person who know of El Nacimiento. Finally, there’s Claude Weaver, a famous author…who slips into fugue states where he’s unaware of what he’s doing, and who’s being stalked by a mysterious man…

And how is this all connected, if it’s connected at all, to Dr. Rees’s one failure, the suicide of the patient Der Schlangenmann, “The Snakeman”?

That’s the “death.” The “conjuror” is Joseph Spector, a magician who’s age could be "anywhere from fifty to eighty" and who "looks like he could get away with any crime." Spector is an appealing protagonist, someone who has the understanding both of mechanical trickery and human nature to unravel the crimes. And the crimes are good. The theft of the painting is a bit of a let-down, and the elevator murder is a tad too complex (this is one that would benefit from the television adaptation), but the murder of Dr. Rees is really good. In practice it’s simple, but there’s a very clever deception at the heart of it, and Mead does a good job of making the fiddly mechanical bits feel clever. I think the best way of summing up my thoughts on the impossible crimes is satisfied. That’s not a negative. I’ve just read enough locked rooms to not be as easily wowed. It’s satisfying to see the locked rooms, the two murders especially, explained and pieced together. There are even clues! Footnoted! (Although for some I though, “Come on Mead, no one would notice that!”) Yes, I was pleased here.

Of course, there’s the whodunit to consider as well. There’s an irony here. We’re told that the locked room mysteries at the center of the plot are "hard to let oneself become emotionally invested in" and that "you must retain a sense of intellectual distance from them." And indeed, on a mechanical level, access to the physical tools necessary to commit the crimes is important to Spector’s logic. But in practice, solving the crime requires Spector to understand “insanity.” There’s a bit close the end of the book where Spector discusses Théodore Géricault’s Portraits of the Insane and it is clear that he wishes to understand what drives the different suspects. Some are genuinely tormented by a morbid psychology that they wish to alleviate, others have far more venal motives for their actions. While I wish that we had spent more time with the suspects to get to know them, the whodunit isn't just a throwaway aspect of the book.

I quite enjoyed this. While I have some issues with it, they are ultimately minor blemishes on a very good book. Death and the Conjuror got a lot of attention among intense and casual mystery fans alike for being a locked room mystery released in the modern day. I’m sure that Tom Mead has done better since his debut, but this is still very much worth your time. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Beneath the Stains of Time, The Invisible Event, James Scott Byrnside, Tangled Yarns, Mystery*File, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, AhSweetMystery, CrossExaminingCrime, Tangled Yarns, Solving the Mystery of Murder, and Stephen M. Pierce.