Drishyam (2013) written by Jeethu Joseph

I really didn’t know what to expect from Drishyam (Visual). I knew it was ostensibly based off a Japanese novel, but that didn’t tell me much.* The film, written and directed by Jeethu Joseph, came out in 2013 and proved to be a hit in the Malayalam-speaking part of India; it’s one of the top 10 highest grossing Malayalam films of all time. Not only has it produced two sequels, but it’s been remade in different languages (the Hindi version seems to be the most well-known) and for other countries. There’s a Chinese remake out, and Korean and American ones in the works.

The film stars Georgekutty (Mohanlal), a kind of lazy cable TV serviceman who lives a simple, humble life with his wife Rani (Meena) and two daughters, Anju (Ansiba Hassan) and Anu (Esther Anil). Georgekutty dropped out of school at a young age, and so is a bit skeptical of his oldest daughter’s schooling, but ultimately it looks like he’s coming around. He has a good relationship with his in-laws. The only real conflict he has is with a power-tripping local cop. Yes, life is pretty good for Georgekutty.

That is until Anju goes to a nature camp, where she meets Varun Prabhakar, the only son of an Inspector General of Police who’s just as spoiled and entitled as that implies. He takes a video of Anju showering and tries to blackmail her into sex. Rani walks in on the whole thing, there’s a struggle…and Varun dies. When Georgekutty gets home that night, he instantly realizes how bad this is for them. There’s no way his family will get a fair shake considering the prominence of the victim, so their only hope is to cover up the death. The full might of the police will be on them, but Georgekutty has one major advantage:

He’s watched a lot of crime shows.

Drishyam takes a while to get going. The first hour or so of the movie is just setting up the family dynamics. I don’t in-theory object to this, but it goes on for quite a while. Not helping is that Georgekutty is kind of a sexist jerk. It’s valid characterization and probably fitting for a man like him, but it made me slightly uncomfortable. It’s thematic, since the movie is about a family patriarch doing what he needs to do to protect his family, but I can see it being a little off-putting. Once the murder happens, a lot of this stuff from the first part falls by the wayside a bit. Thinking back on it, it felt like the movie was divided into two distinct halves with wildly different tones. It makes sense; murder would put a damper on happy times with your family, but it was noticeable.

But the second half is where this movie gets really interesting for blog readers. Georgekutty and his family pretend to go on a religious retreat as an alibi for the murder. Indeed, they’re able to present plenty of evidence showing they were nowhere near the crime scene…but we as watchers know that the retreat was already over. So how was the alibi faked? Like Sleuth (link), this isn’t a fair-play mystery; most of the details, including some last-minute complications, are arranged off-screen. But man is it a good alibi. The movie’s tagline is “Visuals can be deceiving,” and the alibi is a masterclass in manipulation, with carefully worded questions and seemingly unimpeachable evidence combining to make a nearly unbreakable alibi. The scene where Varun’s mother explains how it was done is excellent. Freeman Wills Crofts’s Inspector French would have been honored to break this alibi.

And the ending is magnificent. If I’d watched it in a theater, I would have hooted and hollered in my seat.

All in all, I really liked this movie. Again, the first half drags very slightly, but it’s not a huge issue. Those of you who like inverted mysteries or good alibi busters will like this one. If you can find a good subtitled version—the Hindi language version on YouTube looks good, though me and my friends watched the original Malayalam—I’d check it out. Highly Recommended.

*I’m not naming the book because the similarities are very thin and the writer said that he didn’t use the book as inspiration, so I feel like it would mislead the reader like it did me.

The Mill House Murders (1988/2023) by Yukito Ayatsuji (translated by Ho-Ling Wong)

1987 saw the release of The Decagon House Murders, the debut novel of Yukito Ayatsuji. Breaking from the dominate mystery that focused on social realism, Ayatsuji’s book was a fantasy. The protagonists were college students, mystery fanatics who could reference the classics of the genre, and you knew they’d actually done the reading. The set-up of an isolated island where a vengeful killer stalked, a brilliant and eccentric detective, macabre twists…this stuff just doesn’t happen. But you really don’t care. But what elevated the book was its self-awareness. Ayatsuji wasn’t just copying the past to be contrary or to set himself apart in a crowded field, he wrote like someone who loved the mysteries of old and who knew them inside and out, and that knowledge meant he could both play with the format and turn a sharp gaze on the cliches. This was literally a genre-defining book, inaugurating the genre of shin-honkaku.

Its sequel, The Mill House Murders, had a lot to live up to.

The book takes place in the titular house, a construct by architect Seiji Nakamura. The house is situated in the middle of a valley, a place where time almost seems to have stopped. The only motion are the three waterwheels of the house that power it. Its master is Kiichi Fujinuma, who retreated to the house after being crippled and disfigured in a car accident. Besides him, there’s his much younger wife Yurie, who barely knows life outside of the house, and two servants. And the artwork. For you see, Kiichi’s father Issei was a brilliant painter, whose works could delight and move. Kiichi has bought all of them and keeps them in the house, only allowing a scant few people to view them once a year. And he doesn’t even show them his father’s rarest work, The Phantom Cluster, a painting that terrified its maker.

This September 1986, the normal guests have arrived: Mori, an art professor who discovered and encouraged Issei. Oishi, a greedy and unscrupulous art dealer who nonetheless handled Issei’s work. Mitamura, the surgeon who inherited the hospital where Kiichi’s life was saved. The three are here to gawk at the artwork and maybe haggle The Phantom Cluster out of Kiichi. But there’s an unexpected guest this year, a party crasher named Kiyoshi Shimada. He’s here because of the Nakamura connection; fascinated by the bloody history that seems to cling to his houses. And because, last year, there were two other guests. Shingo Masaki, a former disciple of Issei who was staying at the house for unknown reasons. His limbs were dumped into the furnace. And there was Tsunehito Furukawa, a Buddhist priest at the Fujinuma family’s temple. He vanished from the house one year ago and is the only suspect in Masaki’s murder. But he’s also an old friend of Shimada, who just can’t believe that he would do something like that…

Similar to Decagon, Mill House uses a dual-narrative structure. Half of the story is set on the fateful night in 1985, detailing the multiple deaths and art theft that happened under the blanket of a storm. The other half is narrated by the master of the house in 1986, as Shimada waltzes into this frozen-in-time house to poke and prod at the past. When I read the book, I felt like there wasn’t much meat on its bones, but I got more into it as it went on. Ayatsuji keeps the pace going on what could easily have been a very slow and draggy narrative, especially in the present one. Kiichi is being harassed by someone who wants him out of the house, which gives us something to chew on in the present. Shimada himself is pretty subdued. He gets a good bit early on where he uses one bit of evidence to decisively prove that a thought-accidental death was actually murder, but again, he doesn’t do much until the ending. The other characters aren’t super distinct either. You get your impression the moment they appear on the page, and they don’t waver from that. Oishi doesn’t show a hidden heart of gold, Mori doesn’t suddenly find a spine, etc. We get a little more going with our narrator, but that’s it.

Still, we read a book like this for the mystery. And it’s a good one! Most of the mystery is centered on the past narrative, and the two deaths that occurred a year ago. There’s also an impossible crime to contend with, as Furukawa vanished from an upstairs annex with two witnesses playing chess downstairs. The windows don’t open enough to leave through, and there are no other hiding places up there. The explanation is well-done; technically a small part of the narrative, but Ayatsuji ties it back into the main mystery very well. The ultimate solution to the book is great. The general consensus from other reviews I’ve read is that the solution is pretty obvious. And well, kinda. I knew what was going on because I’d seen some spoilers, but even with that knowledge, I couldn’t quite make it fit into the mystery, which speaks well of the complexity. There’s a lot going on here! I will say that I think Ayatsuji tips his hand near the end, but I see that as a final big clue, freely given to those who are still lost and confused.

I don’t know how many actual clues there are. There are some bits you look back on and go, “Oh,” but they tend to be one-off statements that are easily missed in the moment. Clues seem a little thin on the ground. Even when Shimada spells out how he solved everything, it’s less through evidence and more through actually thinking through what happened that fateful night a year ago. But I don’t mind it, and I doubt you will either. The shock moment is great, the climax of a well-thought-out mystery.

So, not the same trailblazer that Decagon was, but that’s unfair to Ayatsuji. Any author would be proud of this book, and he has better to come. Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Bad Player's Good Reviews, Puzzles, Riddles, and Murders, Ah, Sweet Mystery, CrossExaminingCrime, The Invisible Event, Beneath the Stains of Time, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Stephen M. Pierce, Criminal Musings, Abstracts and Chronicles.

Sleuth (1972), written by Anthony Shaffer

Among us mystery fans, the name Anthony Shaffer bring to mind fascinating-sounding-probably-good-but-we-don’t-really-know-for-sure-because-his-books-are-all-out-of-print mysteries: How Doth the Little Crocodile? or Withered Murder, co-written with his brother, Peter Schaffer.* But truthfully, Shaffer was a playwright and movie guy first and foremost. Most people know him through his adaptation of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. But for us mystery fans, he’s known for his play Sleuth. Debuting in 1970, Sleuth was a hit, winning the Tony Award for Best Play. In 1972, it was turned into a movie, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. It was this film that me and my Discord friends watched.

Sleuth takes place at the home of Andrew Wyke (Lawrence Oliver), an author of classic detective fiction. He’s invited Milo Tindle (Michael Caine) over to discuss business. Namely, the business of Milo’s affair with his wife. Luckily, Wyke isn’t too bothered by it. He knows how demanding Marguerite is and has sought comfort in another woman himself. But he knows that she’s going to bleed Milo dry and so proposes a plan that should solve all their issues: They’ll stage a robbery of some valuable jewels. End result: Wyke gets the insurance money and Milo gets the resources to keep Marguerite out of Wyke’s life.

So the two go about setting up the crime, though the practical, working-class Milo is frustrated by how Wyke treats the whole thing like something out of one of his mystery novels (which in fairness, it kinda is), but he begins to get into the spirit of it. The first half of the movie is a light-hearted romp where Wyke and Milo make fools of themselves in an overcomplicated farce. The viewer knows this is going to blow up in their faces at some point. I’ll leave the details up to the interested watcher. But suffice to say that the first half of the movie ends in a shocking and visceral act of violence.

From here, the movie throws out twist after twist, so I’ll merely say that Act 2 involves a character showing up to piece together the fallout from the first half, and it becomes clear that what we saw happen and what we’re told happened don’t seem to match up…

This was a good movie. The movie spends a lot of time in Wyke’s house, and I love the design, with its creepy animatronics populating the living room. The cast is pretty limited, but they all do a good job. The dialogue is all sharp and witty until it shifts into dead seriousness. You’re never quite sure how sincere the characters are no matter what they say, tying into the theme at the center of the movie: games. The set-up just seems so silly, but it keeps going and going, with plays and counterplays. It’s almost a relief when someone finally tries to poke a hole in Wyke’s pompousness, but we’re very aware that this too, is a game, even if the characters haven’t figured it out yet. Some people might read *Sleuth as a jab at GAD fiction, but I don’t think so. I think the movie criticizes snobbery and elitism and detective fiction is just the lens Shaffer uses.

This isn’t really a fair-play mystery. There aren’t any real “clues,” or even foreshadowing. Which is fine, honestly. I will give Sleuth credit for taking a common mystery plot device that we usually think of as unrealistic and showing that it does totally work if you know what you’re doing.

All in all, Sleuth is a great psychological thriller. It’s intelligent and keeps you guessing from start to finish. And the final line is a killer. Recommended

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event.

*EDIT: I originally said that Anthony wrote The Woman in the Wardrobe. That was actually written by Peter (with some help from Anthony). I apologize for the error.

"Knockin' On Locked Door" (2014/2020) by Yuugo Aosaki

Image taken from Beneath the Stains of Time.

Yuugo Aosaki is a Japanese mystery writer. He debuted in 2012 with The Gymnasium Murder, which won the 22nd Tetsuya Ayukawa Award and earned him the title “the Ellery Queen of the Heisei Era.” As implied, his work takes its cue from Queen, featuring elaborate logical deductions from minor evidence. However, his only work that’s made it to the west is the anime adaptation of his Undead Girl Murder Farce novels.

However, thanks to Alex of The Detection Collection, I’ve been able to read one of his short stories: “Knockin’ on Locked Door,” original published in Dokuraku magazine in 2014, then published in the collection of the same name in 2016. Does it live up to the hype I’ve seen?

“Knockin’ on Locked Door” is the first entry in the Knockin’ On Locked Door series, staring the Knockin’ on Locked Door Detective Agency. The agency is comprised of Tori Gotenba, who specializes in impossible crimes, and narrator Hisami Katanashi, who specializes in “why” problems. The central idea of the series is that each story is a competition between the two men to see who will solve the case first. But the case they have here will require both their skills.

The victim is Hideo Kasumiga, a well-known painter. He was found stabbed to death in his studio one morning by his son and by one of his admirers. The door was firmly locked on the inside by a rusty lock; it can be opened from the outside, but not locked. This seems like a perfect fit for Tori, but there are some odd questions that need to be answered. First, why did the culprit vandalize one of Hideo’s works of art by painting it fully red? And why did the killer even create a locked room in the first place? There was no effort to disguise it as a suicide or accident, and the dead man wasn’t even in the habit of locking his door anyway. Hisami remains in the background for much of the story before coming in at the eleventh hour to snatch the last word from Tori.

This is a really solid story. The banter between our heroes as well as the police officer on scene, a former classmate, is amusing. And the locked room is no slouch either. There are only three suspects and none of them have much page time, so the locked room is the main focus. And it’s well-clued! A careful reader can notice the key clue that puts Tori onto the murderer, and by thinking more about what that clue implies, the reader can make a genuine attempt at seeing how the crime was done. And it’s a really creative solution. It’s not wild or improbable, just unconventional. But what elevates the story is the “why” part. I doubt that anyone would figure this out without some knowledge of a historical fact (or at least an educated guess), but it’s a really good motive and does an excellent job of justifying why there’s a locked room in the first place.

I first read this story for Alex’s New Locked Room Library. I’d binged a lot of locked rooms for that project, and when I got to this one, I was getting burned out. I’d read a lot, seen a lot of locked rooms, and was getting tired of the whole thing. There was no creativity, just the same basic solutions repackaged. And while you can argue that this is more of the same, there’s enough creativity on display in method and motive to elevate it. It’s fair to say that this story reminded me why I love locked rooms.

Obviously, this story comes Highly Recommended, and I hope to see more Aosaki in translation.

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling (review of entire collection), Bad Player's Good Reviews (ditto), Beneath the Stains of Time.

Monica, O My Darling (2022) directed and written by Vasan Bala

Over the past few months, I’ve been watching some murder mystery movies with friends on Discord. I wasn’t going to review them, since none of them are really classic whodunits, but I decided to put my thoughts down anyway.

Monica, O My Darling, is a Bollywood film currently on Netflix, directed and written by Vasan Bala (and co-directed by Yogesh Chandekar). The film revolves around Jayant “Jay” Arkhedkar (Rajkummar Rao), a poor boy made good: He’s a roboticist at a top-of-the-line company, he’s being promoted to the board of directors, and he’s engaged to his boss’s daughter. He’s also sleeping with the secretary, Monica. He tries to break the relationship off, but Monica tells him she’s pregnant with his child, and while she’s not not blackmailing him, she expects him to take responsibility. Jay is struggling with his next move when he’s lured to a hotel where he meets two other men: his boss’s son and the company’s CFO. Turns out that they’re also sleeping with Monica and she’s telling them she’s pregnant with their child.

The son proposes a plan: They’ll kill Monica. Specifically, they’ll gamble on it. One person will actually kill Monica, the other two will transport her body in stages. To ensure compliance, the men sign a contract and stamp it with their fingerprints. Jay finds himself on body disposal duty, and, after some antics, leaves Monica’s body in a swamp. Suffice it to say, the plot gets increasingly complex from there. Someone’s gotten their hands on that contract, and there’s a perceptive police inspector poking around…

The reason we watched this film is because it’s an adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s Heart of Brutus, which has never been translated into English but must have been accessible to the filmmakers. Based on comments from someone who’s read the book, this more or less follows the plot beats, with a few changes (Higashino didn’t have murderous cobra attacks). Jay is also more likeable than that book’s protagonist. You aren’t quite rooting for him to get away scot-free—this situation is his own fault—but you are hoping he gets himself out of the mess he’s found himself in. There are quite a few moments of black comedy as Jay keeps running into complications while trying to dispose of evidence.

The movie also has some mystery elements as Jay tries to figure out the third party who’s rampaging in the background. I really can’t call this a fair mystery per se. The movie really makes no effort to disguise the mastermind, only their motive for doing what they do. The only reason I didn’t figure it out sooner is my face-blindness. What the movie does well is foreshadowing. Almost all of the twists are set-up in advance, and multiple times I had the experience of seeing something happen and remembering how the movie had laid the foundation for it earlier. This only breaks down at the very end, with a couple of last-minute twists that left even my fellow watchers baffled.

Oh, and the police inspector deserves her own movie series.

All in all, this is a fun little movie. If you’re a mystery purist you may want to look elsewhere, but if you like crime dramas, black comedies, or just a good movie in general—or if you’re a real Keigo Higashino addict—I’d Recommend this. Check it out

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.

Moonflower Murders (2020) by Anthony Horowitz

It's been a while since I’ve read one of Anthony Horowitz’s works.

Magpie Murders is one of my favorite mystery novels, expertly combining a classic, Golden Age style mystery with a modern, more serious one, with some excellent meta storytelling. I was surprised when I heard that Horowitz was doing a sequel, since the book didn’t really lend itself to one. But now that I’ve read Moonflower Murders, I can safely say that Horowitz succeeded.

After the events of Magpie, Susan Ryeland has moved to Crete with her partner, where they run a hotel. One day, Susan is approached by Lawrence and Maureen Treherne, a couple who own a hotel of their own back in England called Branlow Hall. They need her help. Their daughter, Cecily MacNeil, has suddenly disappeared, and they believe it’s connected to an old murder at their hotel. Eight years ago, on Cecily’s wedding day, the body of a guest, Frank Parris, was discovered in his room, savagely beaten with a hammer. Suspicion quickly fell on one of the hotel’s workers, Stefan Codrescu—there was blood on his clothes and bloody money was found under his mattress—and he was duly arrested. But Cecily became convinced that he was wrongly convicted. It’s because of a book she read. Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, by Alan Conway.

So Susan troops off back to England to look into the past murder and figure out what Cecily saw in the book. Conway took a perverse joy in inserting real people into his books, often in very unflattering ways, but Susan can’t see the relationship between the book and real life:“There was no advertising executive, no wedding, no hammer.” Horowitz takes some joy in teasing the reader with the future contents of the book. He’s not so crass as to spoil the killer, but does drop a few tidbits, building anticipation for when Susan finally bites the bullet and returns to Conway.

In the meantime, Susan digs up what she can on Parris’s murder. While the crime seems straightforward, there are questions that need to be answered. Why did the dog cry out on the night of the murder? How was the killer able to enter Stefan’s room to plant evidence? Who moved the Do Not Disturb sign on Parris’s door, leading to his body being discovered? Horowitz is good about crime scenes with weird details. And then there are the suspects…sort of. Because as Susan quickly realizes, almost none of the suspects have any obvious motive for killing Parris. The only exceptions are the shady Williams’ next door. They clearly know something about the murder, but the husband likes to play games, and his wife is deeply hostile to Susan. Cecily’s unmarried sister Lisa hates her, but did she kill Parris? Cecily’s husband, Aiden, is the perfect picture of a grieving partner, but he’s quick to shut down any serious questioning. Even Alan’s ex-wife Melissa turns out to be hanging around the night of the murder. It’s a baffling and challenging mystery.

But the clues are there. I really think that Horowitz got better and better at writing mysteries. Both Moonflower and Takes the Case are loaded with clues and hints. There are multiple plausible false solutions and red herrings for readers to chase after. And the explanations are satisfying. There’s even foreshadowing for some of the twists that aren’t necessary meant to be mysteries. It’s all very well-constructed. Like in Magpie, Horowitz contrasts the complex, deliberately implausible solution from Takes the Case with the “actual” solution. I do think that it’s a little more involved than *Magpie, but that’s because Horowitz gives a lot more clues and Susan’s chain of logic leading to the killer is more involved. Some of the clues for the outer narrative are a bit slight, but during the summation I kept nodding along whenever Susan mentioned something and going. “Yes I remember that…and that…and that…” The book also contains one of the funniest clues I’ve ever seen in a mystery novel. One clue hinges on knowledge of Italian opera, but other than that I have no complaints about the cluing.

My main issue is with the pacing. Don’t get me wrong, Horowitz uses his page count wisely, and he has Christie’s knack for good conversation and description that keeps the plot moving. But some of his characters don’t really get enough screentime. I think here of Cecily’s sister, who gets one chapter very early on and then barely appears for another 300 pages. This all reflects the looser nature of Susan’s investigation, but it is a disappointing part of the narrative. There are also a couple of plot threads, like the one with Susan’s own sister, that don’t get much attention or are quietly dropped (but those are very minor ones).

But overall, I really enjoyed this book. I doubted him, but Horowitz pulled through with an excellent two-in-one mystery novel. It’s a touch below Magpie in quality, but just a touch. Recommended.

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, Ah, Sweet Mystery, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Stephen M. Pierce.

Atticus Pünd Takes the Case (2009) by Alan Conway

Image pulled from Britbox Australia's Instagram account. For some reason it's really hard to find pictures of the book cover.

It’s been a while since I’ve read one of Alan Conway’s works.

Atticus Pünd Takes the Case is the third entry in Conway’s beloved series of classic mysteries starring Holocaust survivor and great detective Atticus Pünd . I admit it’s a bit weird to be reading someone’s books so soon after their death, but I figure that Conway would rather be remembered for his detective fiction than anything else.

The book is set in the small village of Tawleigh-on-the-Water, a gentler, long-forgotten England. The intro to the book is a little slow, as we get a bird’s eye look into the villager’s lives. The central figure is Melissa James, an actress creeping close to being past her glory days. She’s the owner of the local inn, the Moonflower, but suspects that she’s being ripped off by the managers, Lance and Maureen Gardner. Not to mention there’s domestic trouble at home: She’s growing distant from her husband and her butler, Eric Chandler, has a secret of his own. Finally, she has an unpleasant run-in with Simon Cox, a producer who’s based his upcoming script around James…and she’s not interested. There are also some other hangers-on who will play a role in the plot. Such as Algernon Marsh, who’s introduced thinking about how he’s scamming Melissa and other investors before hitting a man while driving drunk. Then there’s his sister, Samantha Collins, who might be able to come into a large inheritance, and her husband, the village doctor. Conway does a good job at setting up his cast and laying the groundwork for the murder, which comes at the end of chapter 4, when Melissa is found strangled to death in her bedroom.

At this point, we introduce Atticus Pünd, fresh off solving the Ludendorff Diamond case. Which is actually a locked room mystery where jewelry vanishes from a safe to which only three people know the combination and with only one key, in possession of the owner. I liked this, it’s a good little mystery, but it does slow the plot down right when it should be ramping up. I wonder what his editor was thinking. Anyway, Pünd is contacted by Melissa’s agents to investigate the crime, and he agrees. He’s assisted in his investigation by his assistant, Madeline, and the local police officer. This guy is a great side character. He’s worked in this sleepy little town all his life and is getting close to retirement and is frustrated that his last case is a publicized murder that’s he making little progress on. I really liked his interactions with Pünd; he’s not the typical “stupid cop” of fiction.

The mystery is pretty good on the whole. Pünd quickly picks up on some odd facts about the crime. Such as the tissues in Melissa’s house, two in the bedroom, one in the living room, and a ten-minute gap in her schedule that the murder must have been committed in. Pünd is on good form, and I really liked his explanations. Conway is good about crime scenes with weird details.

The characters are good, if a bit shallow. Like I said, we get a good bird-eye view of them early on, but some get more attention than others. But they are well observed; almost as if they were pulled from life. Some of them come off quite badly—Eric in particular —but they are at least memorable.

This is a well-clued mystery. As usual for Conway, in spite of all the chaff thrown around the central crime is quite simple. While there is one implausible bit about the murder—I suspect most of you will know what I’m talking about—this is easily overlooked. We get some solid cluing and even multiple false solutions, with proper evidence for each. Even some of the smaller plot twists get cluing! It’s all very well done. And the final twist is excellent. One clue hinges on differences between English and American culture, but other than that I have no issues.

All in all, this is another excellent mystery from a writer taken from us too soon. This tale of murder and skullduggery beside the English sea is another worthy mystery. Recommended.

The Tragedy of Y (1932) by Ellery Queen

A few months ago, I reviewed The Tragedy of X, the first novel written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee under the Barnaby Ross pen name. I admired the book more than I really liked it. I wanted to read an Ellery Queen and I was in the mood for something dense, but I acknowledge that it has problems. But the Queen cousins were busy beavers during 1932, publishing four books, including X, and they followed up the book with a sequel, The Tragedy of Y.

The book begins with the discovery of York Hatter’s body floating in the Hudson. A suicide note found on the body makes it clear that his death was self-inflicted. And no wonder, so tuts New York high society, when you consider that he was the second husband of the tyrannical Emily Hatter. Emily rules her family with an iron fist, and her husband was verbally beaten down over the years. And then there are their children. Barbara Hatter is“the most nearly human of Emily’s leaping blood,” a brilliant poetess. Conrad Hatter is much worse, a drunken playboy with a series of controversies dogging him, including one death. His long-suffering wife Martha is mother to Jackie and Billy, a pair of screeching demons who torment every adult in range. Youngest daughter Jill sleeps around, a sure sign of madness and insanity. And there’s Emily’s daughter from her first marriage, Louisa. Born blind and mute and having long grown deaf, Louisa is dependent on her mother and personal doctors for help and a board of Braille letters for communication. And yet, she has great strength and gentleness. What she does not have is the love of her siblings, who see her as an object of pity at best and a pest to be squashed at worst. Not helping the tension is that she is the apple of her mother’s eye and Emily will do anything for her daughter. But it seems that that tension is finally boiling over.

More than two months after the discovery of York’s body, someone poisons Louisa’s daily glass of eggnog. She is only spared because Jackie swipes it and gulps it down himself, barely surviving. Emily is outraged, and while she abhors the publicity, the might of the NYPD descend on the Hatter household. However, Inspector Thumm and District Attorney Bruno make no progress, even when they call about the great actor Drury Lane for his insights. Then,“a little less than two months later,” disaster. Emily Hatter is found dead in her bed. It seems that she interrupted another effort to poison Louisa and took a blow to the head from, of all things, a mandolin.

The pacing in this book is much better than in X. In retrospect, it was a mistake to have Drury bragging in that book about how he solved the case by page 100. It made him look smart but also meant all of the key information was frontloaded and made the rest of the book a drag. Here the cousins do a better job at disguising the downtime between incidents. There’s more going on as well as a more active investigation by the police and Lane. He’s still pretty sure of the solution early on, but he doesn’t brag about it and still focuses on gaining proof of the killer’s identity and making sense of the weird clues. These come from Louisa; she interacted with the killer on the night of the murder and reports that they had a smooth face and smelled of vanilla. The hooks are much stronger that its predecessor.

That being said, it does share an issue with X. The characters are memorably grotesque but are pretty shallow otherwise. We spend most of our time with Louisa and her caretakers, and while the character is memorable and the Queen cousins treat her with some respect, there’s also not much depth there. Her siblings aren’t much better. We get about one interview each and then they all but drop out of the book. And that’s not counting the family’s various hangers-on who also don’t do much after their introduction (though in fairness, most aren’t mentioned in the main cast of characters, so the cousins didn’t plan on us spending much time with them). We get more depth on Jackie and Billy’s tutor than we do some of the family members! And even then, it’s solely based around any motive he has for the crimes. The characters do what they need to do and leave. It’s efficient, if not impactful.

The mystery is very good, however. Lane’s final explanation of the killer and their actions is ruthlessly logical, debunking some casual assumptions from much earlier in the book and showing why the killer did what they did. Again, while the last book frontloaded the mystery, here the Queen cousins do a better job at sprinkling clues throughout the book. There’s even a point where I’d argue that any reader can sit down and solve the mystery, but the Queen cousins are rightfully confident that most readers won’t seriously consider the solution. Said solution is one of the best shock moments I’ve seen in a mystery novel, but the build-up to it is, again, very logical. Only the motive is a little obscure, but again, the cousins give you what you need. The reason why the killer used a mandolin? Brilliant, excellent, a real forehead-slapper that makes you go, “Why didn’t I see that!?” I did have some issues, but the overall idea is too solid to dismiss. To be as vague as possible, the solution depends on the killer making some very specific misunderstandings.*

The tone of the book is very good. Instead of the dry investigation of the previous book, we have a book that wallows in the Gothic. The doomed and grotesque family and parts of the solution pull from Gothic novels. However, some of this is not handled well. The “explanation” for the family’s madness isn’t actually stated flat-out due to the mores of the time, so if you’re not familiar with the few hints they do give, you’re going to be lost a key moment. Also, I can’t say that I’m fond of how much the cousins pound in how the state of the Hatter family is 100% on Emily and her diseased blood. And that’s not a metaphor! The misogyny is impossible to ignore.

The end of the book centers Drury Lane. He gets up to some high-handed acts that normally I’d roll my eyes at, but the cousins did a good job of building up to his decision. He doesn’t take it lightly and his summation is as much him wrestling with the magnitude of what he did as it is an explanation of the crime. It’s an interesting take on the “failable detective” idea that the Queen cousins would explore more later in their career. The “tragedy” consumes him as well. He’s still a shallow character overall, but he has some depth here.

Yes, I quite enjoyed The Tragedy of Y. There are some issues, and I don’t know if it would turn a Queen hater into a fan, but it has a better chance of that than most. This is a fascinating Gothic mystery novel that will linger in the memory. For Queen fans this is required reading, for everyone else, it’s Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Noah's Archives, The Green Capsule, Reading Ellery Queen (contains spoilers), Dead Yesterday, At the Scene of the Crime.

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