The Night My Friend (1992) by Edward D. Hoch (edited by Francis M. Nevins)

It’s been a while since I last looked at a non-series Hoch collection. That book, The Future is Ours, didn’t impress me and I’ve stuck to his series fiction since. But recently I’ve decided to really sit down and read all those various Hoch collections out there. Hence today’s book, The Night My Friend. According to editor Nevins, this “celebrates the unfamiliar side of his output,” with more of a focus on stories of crime and suspense than mystery. Though there’s plenty of that too. 

The darker tone is clear from the first story, “Twilight Thunder.” During WWII, Dale Fielding and some of his fellow soldiers fragged an unpopular commanding officer. Well, to be exact, the other two fragged him, Dale didn’t do anything. Now one of his old war buddies is in town and talking blackmail. Dale hems and haws but decides there’s nothing to it but to arrange a “hunting accident”… Good story, and the ending is thematically appropriate, but I don’t know if the other man would be so willing to just walk away.

The title story introduces us to Johnny Noctune, a songwriter who sometimes rides with the cops at night, looking for inspiration. This means he’s on the scene when a young woman wearing only a coat runs up, collapses, and utters the name of Cotton Cravess, a newspaperman turned politician, before dying. Johnny is later summoned (read: kidnapped) to Cotton’s office where he gives an explanation of the girl’s death that puts him legally in the clear but would spell the doom of his campaign. So when one of the cops present when the girl died is shot to death, Johnny steps in. That being said, the mystery part is weak. Johnny’s logic boils down to “vibes.” But speaking of vibes, this has some good ones. I read this—and a lot of the other stories—late at night while in a slightly melancholic mood, and Hoch really captures the appeal of the night.

The next two stories are short ones. “The Suitcase” is a bitter-bit story about a farmer who takes a suitcase from the wreckage of a plane crash. His wife convinces him to bury it behind their barn, but he just can’t stop thinking about what could be in there…well-written, if conventional. The narrator of “The Picnic People” crashes a picnic to meet with some old friends. At first, things just seem a little off and passive-aggressive, but it soon becomes clear that our narrator hasn’t met up with these people because he’s been in an institution after killing a girl…I was worried Hoch was going to take this a dark direction. But it feels like just a vignette, part of a longer narrative that just ends. Reminds me of the stories I didn’t like from Future.

Speaking of picnics, “Day for a Picnic” is one of the few genuine mystery stories here. The narrator reminiscences about a wonderful month with his grandfather in the country, the highlight of which was the annual picnic. Well, it was a highlight for different reasons than you might expect, as a rising politician in that little town died after drinking from a poisoned mug of beer. No one could have poisoned his glass after it was poured, and others drank from the pitcher without a problem. I suspect most readers will quickly leap to both the solution and murderer, but I still liked how carefully Hoch clued it.

Speaking of clues, I was impressed with “Shattered Rainbow.” O’Bannion quits his job in a fit of anger and is stuck trolling for a new one. Meanwhile, a man named Green steals a necklace and kills a man. Obviously, destiny will bring them into each other’s paths. Green needs someone to take some “candy” over the Canadian border, and O’Bannion is feeling quite desperate. I shouldn’t have been surprised at how it all unfolded, and I was kicking myself for missing some of the hints. A good story.

Carley is “The Patient Waiter,” a man who is always waiting, waiting, waiting. He waits on customers for his job, he waits for the right chances to come along. He also waits for his clients, business owners whose businesses are failing and who need insurance money fast. This is another Hoch tale about an isolated loner wandering unknown through life, and while the ending is a bit silly, the story as a whole touched me.

“Too Long at the Fair” sees tax attorney Sam Clinton trekking up to the titular fair, which is currently in the off-season. He’s looking for a General Spindler, the head of the Noahites, an eccentric group who believe that Noah and his ark came from space. Clinton is here because the Noahites’ meeting place was written on a piece of paper in the pocket of one of his clients…who was shot and burned. Once again, I missed an obvious clue and was kicking myself for it; it elevated the story for me.

I’d first heard of “Winter Run” in a review from Mystery*File, where a comment mentioned how this story, which was first published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, it was darker than the kinds of stories Hoch tended to write for EQMM. And that was right. The protagonist, a cop, shoots a man and quits the force. He and his girlfriend go up north, where he gets a job as a security guard for a sleepy resort. It’s easy work and easy money, but he soon runs into his predecessor on the job, who was fired for sleeping with some of the ladies at the resort. And his own girlfriend is growing distant…A well-written story with a slight shock at the ending.

“The Long Way Down” is the highlight of his collection for mystery fans. Billy Calm is the mighty head of Jupiter Steel, which is heading into an advantageous merger. But something seems to be wrong with Calm. He’s late for a meeting one foggy morning, and when he does show up, he enters the directors’ meeting room and jumps out the window. His security chief, McLove, rushes to the street to find…nothing. No glass. No body. Calm has vanished into the fog. The rest of the board run around to try and resolve the financial side while McLove tries to figure out what happened to the body. Like the best of Hoch’s mystery fiction, the cluing is very well done, and the possible fake solutions are all shot down by details you see in the story. The solution is pretty good too. I have to wonder if the culprit would really come up with this plan on short notice, but it’s a clever explanation. I wasn’t super impressed with this when I read it for the New Locked Room Library, but I enjoyed it much more this time.

“Dreaming is a Lonely Thing” introduces us to Dave Krown and his girlfriend, Helen Reston. Helen isn’t brilliant or pretty (c’mon Hoch), but she does have a unique gift: She dreams, dreams of clever criminal plots and almost seems to have precognition. Dave finds this a useful gift in his line of work, but Helen is getting antsy about walking away from crime, and Dave is too much of a gambler to ever really stop. Then, during one robbery, he meets Susan Brogare, who figures out who he is and wants to meet up. She becomes fascinated by him, and soon she and Dave are meeting much more often. But Helen and her dreams, literal and figurative, are in the way. Most will see the ending coming, but it’s still a solid and dreamy (hah!) story.

“In Some Secret Place” is similar in set-up to “Day for a Picnic,” also being narrated by a young boy recounting an incident in his youth. Here, it’s the funeral for his Uncle Ben (no relation to Peter Parker), who toppled off a tractor one night and hit his head on a rock, probably while drunk. Or so it seems. The sheriff has his own ideas about what happened out there in that field. And the narrator’s Uncle Charlie has some ideas of his own. The mystery isn’t really that strong. There are some good clues but some parts of the explanation feel like the detective is just saying stuff. Still, I liked it.

“To Slay an Eagle” is a good example of Hoch’s surprisingly cynical espionage fiction. The eagle in question is the oddly named Colonel China, who’s been looting German art in the ruins of (fictional) Augshiem to fund a neo-Nazi movement. Our protagonist, Visor, has been tasked with killing him. Visor is something of an eagle himself. During the war, he led a bombing raid on Augshiem, and he exploits that experience to get close to the Colonel. The colonel’s death is a bit of an anti-climax, and you could argue that the ending is too suddenly dark.

“They Never Come Back” has a premise straight out of a Harlan Coben novel. Harry Gordon is in a violent car crash that bangs him up and leaves his wife a charred corpse. Horrible enough, but then the wife of one of his friends says that she’s alive. And then Harry thinks he sees someone like her in the city, although he’s disabused of that. And then the note arrives:“Please help me. I didn’t die in the accident.” It’s a great premise, but the final explanation is a letdown, especially since one of the clues is too obvious. (ROT13: Abeznyyl V jbhyq svaq vg naablvat, ohg urer V jbhyqa’g unir zvaqrq n fyvtug fhcreangheny nfcrpg jvgu gur sevraq’f jvsr whfg cynva frrvat n tubfg.)

“The Only Girl in His Life” sees George Granger meeting up with old friend Harold Beach. Beach has a request for George: To track down Harold’s runaway wife Linda and deliver some jewelry and clothing. George is reluctant at first but eventually decides to track this hard-to-find woman down. Good story, and the ending caught me off guard this time.

Like “Too Long at the Fair,” “It Happens, Sometimes” is set at one. This one is more active though, and protagonist Craidy—another loner—is in charge of fixing the machines at the arcade. Craidy has lived a quiet life, but this time lets himself be pulled away by the fair’s “psychic,” Rita, to watch a boxing match. But the champion throws the fight, and the newcomer is found beaten to death in an alley. In spite of the summary, this isn’t a mystery at all. There’s no doubt about what happened, it’s just the various characters deciding what to do about it. It’s not bad, but this time the bleak ending comes out of nowhere.

The narrator of “A Girl Like Cathy” runs into, well, a girl like Cathy, his ex-girlfriend, in a Greenwich Village shop. The two strike up a friendship, and before long, Laura has talked him into helping her with a job. Specifically, stealing a jeweled chalice from a rebuilt chapel. The central idea is good, but alas! Hoch used this plan as an anecdote in a Nick Velvet story, so I knew what was coming. But I don’t blame him. It’s a good idea.

“What’s It All About?” is the shortest story of the collection, about a serial hit-and-run driver. It’s a chilling picture of a psychopath that doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

Next up is “First Offense.” This time, our hero is an angsty seventeen-year-old who spends his time at the drug store, chasing girls, and wishing he had a car so he can get out of his small town. That’s how he gets sucked into an older boy’s plan to rob some bank clerks while they’re transporting money. It’s not a bad plan, really... Hoch captures teenage ennui and naivety quite well, and the ending is good.

“Hawk in the Valley” is about another loner, this one a traveling harmonica boy who makes his way into a small town in the valley, looking for a job playing. He finds one but clashes with another player and kills him in his home, before being brought down by a single mistake.

I wasn’t sure if I’d like “The Ring with the Velvet Ropes,” but it was actually one of my favorites from the collection. Jim Figg is a boxer on the verge of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. He sallies forth, uncaring about the rumors of the real champion, Roderik Blanco. Turns out that Blanco is very real. His men kidnap Jim and bring him to Blanco’s mansion. Blanco is a rich man obsessed with boxing, but he’ll lose his trust fund if he’s ever caught fighting. So he has a boxing ring in his home and makes a habit of duking it out with the latest champion. He’s never lost yet, but Jim can take him. Of course, Blanco might not take defeat well…While I think the way Jim gets out of this mess is weak—there’s no way Blanco would go for it or accept defeat like that—I really enjoyed this story. It’s just so weird that I can’t help but like this very unusual thriller.

The collection ends with “Homecoming,” where the old boys—those that survived the war, anyway—come back to their old high school. Most of them haven’t done great things in their lives, but Mark Wedmer has. The perpetual victim of bullying, he’s become a big-name Wall Street man now, and he wants to make sure everyone knows it. His bullies certainly take notice. A downer ending for a downer collection.

While the mystery content is pretty minimal, I actually enjoyed The Night My Friend. Part of it was my mindset while reading. Like I said, Hoch was fascinated by loners—good and bad—who thrive best in the night. As a loner who enjoys the night myself, I was often drawn into these stories and their melancholia. While I wouldn’t recommend this for those who care about the mystery and nothing but the mystery, for anyone who wants to walk in the sometimes gentle, sometimes bleak night, this is well worth your time. Recommended.

The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933) by Stuart Palmer

Stuart Palmer’s fourth Hildegarde Withers book, The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree, is set on the island of Catalina, a vacation destination for Depression-afflicted America. Our story doesn’t begin on the island, however, but on the mainland. A man misses the boat to the island and reluctantly gets aboard the “flying boat” the Dragonfly. It’s quicker, but the turbulence is a killer. Possibly literally. For barely five minutes into the flight, the man begins to panic, screaming “I’m dying—I don’t want to die!” By the time the plane lands, he’s dead. The local doctor and police chief, who’ve barely seen any crime, much less murder, for years are willing to write the death off as natural causes, a heart attack from the stress. Unfortunately for the killer, one of the tourists on Catalina is schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers, who insists that the death is a murder. Her claims gain some force when the dead man’s identity is discovered: Roswell T. Forrest, a secretary who’s wanted back in New York by the police for testimony against his corrupt union bosses. Said bosses want him quiet, and they’re willing to pay $15,000 to make it happen.

Miss Withers will have to sort the killer out from the melting pot of people on board the Dragonfly. There’s a newly-wed couple, a director and his two assistants, a ship captain, a pottery seller, the pilots, and a young woman with dreams of stardom who becomes Miss Withers’s pseudo-Watson. Most of them are strangers to each other, much less the dead man, but $15,000 in 1930s money is motive enough. But there are other problems: How could anyone have poisoned Forrest on a crowded flight that he didn’t even plan to be on? Complicating matters further is that someone makes off with his body in the night. There’s no trace of it on the island even though there’s seemingly no place to bury it. And no, it wasn’t dumped in the ocean. Separated from dependable Oscar Piper of NYPD, Miss Withers will have to go this alone.

And it’s that aspect of going it alone that’s the main draw of the book. The previous book in this series, Murder on the Blackboard, toyed with having Miss Withers cut off from her normal support group, but this takes it further. Not only does Miss Withers not have any real allies, but it’s an uphill battle convincing the authorities that there’s even been a murder at all. Miss Withers gets pretty hardboiled here, even holding a gun on one of the suspects! But at the same time, Palmer subverts expectations a little bit here. Miss Withers’s stunt with a gun doesn’t really gain her anything and the whole chapter has her off-guard and flummoxed. When she does find herself face to face with an actual hardened criminal, she’s easily overpowered and almost killed. There’s this sense that the case might be a bit too much for her, at least on her own. I don’t think Palmer is using this as commentary on women being too weak for detective work or anything, but it feels like he’s trying to put Miss Withers in different circumstances and see how she reacts. It gives the book some interest for long-time readers.

Sadly, that’s probably the best part of the book. The actual mystery didn’t satisfy me. The explanation for the poisoning is fine. Similar to Murder on Wheels, Palmer is smart enough to know that the reader will likely figure out how it was done and reveals it early on. The location of the missing body is obvious but also clever. But the rest falls short. Near the end of the book there’s another death, a shooting. All of the suspects are tested for gunpowder residue, but no trace is found. Sadly, the explanation for how the killer managed to do this is just a trivia fact. And even when Miss Withers does point at the killer, there’s like, one clue pointing to them. It’s a good clue, yes, but it’s one clue! I agree with Dead Yesterday’s review that the killer really could have been any of the suspects.

All in all, while this was a good read, I found it to be a very weak mystery. I liked the island setting and seeing Palmer putting Miss Withers outside of her comfort zone. But the actual mystery wasn’t to my taste. I’m giving this a Not Recommended, With Caveats. If you like Miss Withers or Palmer’s writing, then this is worth a look because of how he plays with the formula. But if you’ve never read one of his books, or if you’re reading solely for the mystery aspect, you’d be better off picking another book from this series.

Other Reviews: Dead Yesterday, Bitter Tea and Mystery, The Grandest Game in the World.

A Fête Worse Than Death (2007) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

As has become clear by now, I really enjoy the works of Dolores Gordon-Smith. Her books make a genuine effort to emulate the Golden Age novels of yore, and even when she falls short, she still gives a charmingly written and dense mystery to chew on. I decided to go back to the beginning of her Jack Haldean series to enjoy it in full.

A Fête Worse Than Death opens at the village fête, run by Jack’s aunt, Alice. He’s enjoying the festivities, aside from the heat, but runs into a fly in the ointment: Jeremy Boscome, a former fellow officer. Boscome was only in the Royal Air Force to escape the front lines of World War I and was a notorious nuisance. A reputation he lives up to here, getting drunk, making insinuations, and being a pest, before crashing in the fortune teller’s tent to sleep it off. He’s seemingly left alone in there, but when someone peeks in, they find that he’s been shot in the head.

This murder is soon followed up by one of Boscome’s compatriots catching a bullet to the head in his hotel room. Luckly for Jack, the investigator in charge, Superintendent Edward Ashley, has heard about his previous work in crime solving and is willing to let him assist. Boscome was a vulture who had a nasty habit of prodding people’s emotional weaknesses, and Jack suspects he was making money off of blackmail. But against who? The truth lies in Boscome’s memoirs, where he recounts how a traitorous officer led good men into a German ambush in the tunnels under the battlefield…

Gordon-Smith does a good job here. There’s plenty of mystery and intrigue. There’s a love triangle of sorts. Marguerite Vayle has fallen for a war hero with movie star looks, Colonel Whitfield, but one of her trustees, Hugh Larwrence, opposes the marriage on the grounds that the colonel comes off as a gold-digger. There’s also shady parentage, more murders, the works. She evens hints at an impossible crime with Boscome’s death. It seems, if not impossible, certainly very unlikely that anyone could have slipped into the tent and shot him without being seen or heard. She doesn’t make much of this (although the clue that explains it is what breaks the case for Haldean), but I wanted to make a note of it. I predicted some of the plot twists in advance, but I can see someone less familiar with her work not reaching the same conclusions I did. The mystery isn’t as complex as her later ones, but there’s still plenty of theorizing for characters and reader alike to chew on.

If I have any complaints, it’s that the cluing is, again, a little weak. Haldean points out multiple little indications during his explanation at the end, and fair enough. While reading the explanation, I was impressed at how easily Gordon-Smith slotted the killer’s actions into earlier parts of the book. But those elements really only point to the killer after you know who they are. You can’t look at them and deduce who the killer is from them. I also think that there needed to be one or two more suspects for the reader to, er, suspect. Now, part of this is just the fact that I’ve read enough of Gordon-Smith to get a feel for how she constructs her stories, but the killer stood out to me here. She does a good job of spreading suspicion around, but I think another potential killer would have served her well.

All in all, while this isn’t my favorite of Gordon-Smith’s novels, it is still a good read. Remember that this was her first book and that she would get much better. You could certainly do worse than starting here if you’re prowling around looking for a new author. Recommended for anyone looking for good historical mysteries. 

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, The Invisible Event, My Reader's Block.

Turnabout Retribution (2023) by The Fury Wraith

I almost didn’t review this.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the fancase, which is quite good, and more with the premise. One of the reasons I haven’t reviewed more AA fancases before now is because I knew there would be a hurdle for those who hadn’t played AA before. I did A Game of Turnabouts because it’s pretty simple and doesn’t depend on knowing the plot of the AA games. But Turnabout Retribution, a fancase by The Fury Wraith, is different. The very premise of the case is a massive spoiler.

The plot revolves around the antagonist of the fourth game, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. The game opens with our hero about to face justice, when they’re suddenly transported to Hell. By the Devil. Who has an offer for our protagonist, because they’re just that much of a scumbag (“…Plus I think someone might have seen me appear on your hand in that one court case…”) The Devil will send our hero 24 hours before the court case that spelled their downfall. If they can avert their fate, they can live a full life. Fail, and the Devil gets their soul now instead of later. But that task is harder than it looks. In short, even if our hero finds a simple solution, there’s a ticking time bomb in the background that will ruin them anyway. The Devil happily leads them to the only real solution: Kill Phoenix Wright.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Phoenix is very safe for the full 24 hours. He was attending a poker tournament at a run-down casino, only for the dealer, one Roy Elflash (ugh) to wind up dead in his safe with a knife in his back. Luckily, the police already have a suspect in custody: one of the players, Bethany Ittal (ahhhhhh). She was caught in the locked safe with a bagful of money, and seeing as the dead man had the only key in his hand, there’s no way it could be anyone other than her (“It’s like one of those locked-room mysteries in novels. Only with an obvious culprit!”) However, our hero can’t let that stand. If they can’t lure Phoenix Wright into a blind alley to smash a bottle over his head, they’ll do the next best thing: Take Bethany’s case, and frame Phoenix for the murder.

Turnabout Retribution does a pretty good job at matching the Ace Attorney vibe. It’s not perfect; some of the contradiction logic is wonky, but for the most part this is a reasonable pastiche of an AA case. There’s only one original character, an actress participating in the tournament, but she’s good. Her gimmick is just the right level of annoying and her skill at brushing off contradictions makes her a formidable opponent in court. The mystery is good too. I found the contradictions were usually reasonable but sometimes quite hard, especially at the beginning and about two-thirds of the way through the case. One of the big contradictions in particular is tricky, because I can see players dismissing it as a limitation of the engine, but when taken in context, it’s clever.

The reason I highlighted this case is because the locked room is great. If I were to describe the solution flat-out you’d think it was stupid, but it’s very well done. It’s so silly, but it’s very well-justified. It feels like an Ace Attorney-style solution, with an idea that sounds absurd on paper until you start thinking about it... There are proper clues pointing to it (in fact, when I replayed the case, I wondered how I missed it) and I like how the case leads you to the bizarre but very creative truth.

The main hook for AA fans is the protagonist and their relationship with Phoenix. Let me start by saying that I think they’re a little too easily flustered. This character is usually portrayed as smooth and in-control, and they have a few too many freak-outs for me. Sure, you can argue it’s like Phoenix in Turnabout Revolution where he seems much more confident when you’re not getting his internal monologue, and the case does throw our hero curveball after curveball, but it didn’t sit right with me. I also didn’t 100% buy the face-turn you can have them make at the end. But I liked how the case handled Phoenix. This will mainly be of interest to those who are familiar with the fanon surrounding Apollo Justice-era Phoenix. While I found this less subtle on my second playthrough, I think case does something interesting with that and really plays with how fans view the battle of wits between our hero and Phoenix. It avoids a common cliché in AA fanon.

Of course, the case then does something I don’t like to see in fancases, but that’s more me.

All in all, Turnabout Retribution is really good! The hook is interesting, the mystery is very clever, and the characters are all great. I do think that you’ll get the most out of this if you’ve played Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney first. But if all you’re looking for is a new locked room mystery, you could do a lot worse than this. Recommended. 

You can play the case here. 

A Eulogy for Reason (2019) by DWaM

A delivery girl brings a package to a shady apartment. A woman goes on a date with a man she met online…and plans to rob him. A desperate man tries to make money for his daughter with a pyramid scheme (“T-triangle”). And the police investigate a brutal locked room mystery. And there’s even more going on in the city besides. It all sounds overwhelming. But just relax. The Inspector is coming.

And remember that the date is always April 17th, 2028.

Such is the set-up of DWaM’s A Eulogy for Reason. I admit, I was tentative going into this, unsure if I’d vibe with it, but there was nothing to worry about. Beneath the slightly unusual narrative structure is a very good, if nightmarish, mystery story. There’s a bombing, a cult that wears animal masks, and a book, The Inspector’s Arrival, that seems to predict the future and definitely mirrors the major crime. We get multiple perspectives on this fateful day (and following morning). There’s a fair bit of dark humor here (one of the narrators mocks conspiracy theorists online but proves to be more paranoid than any of them, one viewpoint character is a detective who gives a Lenny Briscoe-style one-liner and keeps apologizing for it for the rest of his chapter). Even if it's not clear how at first, most of the narrators fill in some piece of what happened on that fateful April 17th, 2028.

Oh, and one of the narrators dreams that a giant hand is coming out of the sky. There’s that too.

But what about the locked room? I hear you cry. Fear not, for there are two here. Kinda. One is fictional, contained within The Inspector’s Arrival. Both have a woman set on fire in her bedroom, which is not only locked from the inside, but taped. The solutions are pretty good. I liked the in-universe one a little better. It relies on some unusual behavior but is the right amount of twisted for me. The main locked room is still good though, not so much for the how but for the why, which connects the murder to a lot of the other weirdness going on throughout the novella.

Because, in the end, this is a pretty well thought out mystery. The multiple perspectives might seem confusing, but most of the connections are made pretty clear early on. I was impressed by how smoothly everything linked together. I’d hesitate a bit to call Eulogy a fully fair mystery. I would be shocked if anyone solved this 100%, since some of the smaller details are mentioned in passing and you really aren’t given the context to recognize their relevance. But those who pay attention and take careful notes can make it 85-90% of the way there. Come the explanation, we see that every key point was at least mentioned earlier, so the ending still feels satisfying. It may not be perfectly clued, but it is well-foreshadowed.

All in all, this was another great mystery from DWaM, and probably my favorite of his stuff that I’ve read so far. This may not be a traditional mystery, but it is a real one. Fans of Kitayama’s The “Lapis Lazul Castle” Murders who are craving something with that same sense of a mystery that takes place on the edge of reality might want to check this out. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event.

Strange Buildings (2023/2026) by Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion)

I didn’t plan to review this book so soon after it’s prequel, but my library gave me both when I checked Strange Houses out.

As it’s Japanese title, Hen na le 2, implies, Strange Buildings is a sequel to Strange Houses. The publication of the latter book has resulted in a flood of people contacting Uketsu to tell him about their own weird houses. Most of these don’t have an explanation (“I couldn’t bring those stories to an end.”), but there are some that do have answers…and connections. Strange Buildings collects eleven “files” that turn out to have far-reaching links.

I won’t talk about each file in detail; there are other reviews for that. Instead, I must give Uketsu credit for changing things up for this book. Houses used the same basic set up for each of it’s stories. Buildings mixes it up. There’s the conventional floorplan/interview format where the author has to examine houses with weird bits, like a dead end hallway, but there’s also the journal of a young boy subject to horrifying abuse, an exposé on a cult, a historical account of a mill house in the woods. There’s a little more variety to the mysteries as well. Two of the files are linked accounts of a fatal house fire. In another, a man finds that his house is listed on an app for “Incident Properties” “places where bad things have happened,” but his house was built after the date on the app. Most of the files follow the script format of Houses, but the variety in the storytelling gives the book some more life.

Strange Buildings is stronger as both a mystery and a horror novel than its predecessor. On the mystery side, it’s very well-clued. Most of the files have the author presenting an explanation or answering some kind of question, but there’s usually some hanging detail that he can’t explain. The last chapter has best bro Kurihara examine the files himself and connect all this mystery and bloodshed. And it’s good! Just about every twist has some sort of cluing or foreshadowing. The summation even has exact quotes from earlier in the book! I know that some people don’t like Uketsu’s illustration/recap heavy style, and I don’t disagree, but it works really well here and keeps everything clear. There’s even cluing for the big connection between the files, even if it does require some abstract thinking. The connection is weird and creative and hilarious and deeply cynical and kinda gross all at once. Some of it doesn’t work for me (ROT13: fheryl fbzr bs gubfr ubhfrf qba’g ybbx gung zhpu yvxr gur Ubyl Zbgure?), but for the most part I was willing to buy into it. I also had a problem with some of the smaller mysteries, (ROT13: Va Svyr 1, V sryg gung gur rkcynangvba sbe Lnlbv’f zbgure’f orunivbe qvqa’g jbex jryy. Fheryl n orggre rkcynangvba jbhyq or ure srne gung ure “puvyq bs fva” jbhyq or chavfurq, rfcrpvnyyl fvapr n xvq npghnyyl qvq qvr bhgfvqr ure ubhfr? Gur oybbq glcr vqrn sryg gbb qvfpbaarpgrq.) And in File 5 (qb jr rire yrnea jub chg gur ubhfr ba Vapvqrag Ncc naq jul?) Finally, the structure of the book means that the mastermind behind all this bloodshed gets less page time than a bit character. I accept it as a necessity of the culture, but it’s worth noting. And why was chapter 4 written in present tense?

And the horror aspects are better. Much “better.” I didn’t find Houses all that scary, but this book goes to some genuinely dark places. While there’s nothing graphic on-page, Uketsu pulls no punches. It fits with the cynical tone of the book. Just about every relationship or seemingly good deed is exposed as a sham, with something much darker behind it. It gets kinda comical, especially at the end, where Ukestu gives you a plot twist, then subverts it a page later just to set up the bleak ending. I didn’t feel that any of this was sleazy or overly exploitative, but I could see some readers finding the content distasteful.

In the end, I still enjoy Strange Pictures the best out of Uketsu’s work. It’s the best as a novel. But I can’t deny that Strange Buildings addresses every issue I had with Houses and is a massive improvement. If you completely bounced off Houses I don’t think this will make you a fan, but if you thought that Houses was good but flawed, or just thought the concept was neat, Strange Buildings is very much worth your time. If you’re a fan of mystery and horror in general, you should check it out. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Stephen M. Pierce, Beneath the Stains of Time, The Library at Borley Rectory, A Weekly Dose of Architectural Books, Fang's Mystery Blog.

Driysham 2 (2022) written and directed by Jeethu Joseph

Earlier this year, I reviewed the Malayali movie Drishyam (Visual) and really enjoyed it. It was a solid crime drama about a father trying to help his family after his eldest daughter accidentally killed a rapist. And the central alibi could have pulled right out the Golden Age. So it was with some interest that some friends and I sat down to watch Drishyam 2.

The movie takes place seven years after the events of the previous one. Georgekutty and his family are doing pretty well, all things considered. Georgekutty is now the owner of a movie theater where he gets to show off his favorite movies and is even working on a film of his own (though the production is going quite slow, to his wife’s frustration.) The family now lives in a nicer house. Georgekutty even has fancy CCTV at the theater and his old TV repair shop. Youngest daughter Anu is in her rebellious teenager phase, but she’s making friends at her school. There’s even hope of marrying off Anju, the eldest. Yes, life is looking very good for Georgekutty.

But there are shadows darkening the family’s lives. Anju suffers from nightmares and seizures from the trauma of Varun’s murder. Anu’s love interest has an unhealthy interest in the murder. Georgekutty’s newfound success breeds resentment among his neighbors, who are now more willing to believe that his family was involved in Varun’s murder, and it’s affecting his daughter’s marriage prospects. And the police haven’t given up trying to nail the family.

And unbeknownst to anyone, Georgekutty was seen that fateful night. The witness was arrested that same night and doesn’t quite realize the implications of what he saw, but he’s a desperate man, and there’s a reward offered for any information on Varun’s body…

After finishing the movie, my first thought was that I didn’t like it as much as the first one. But that’s a little unfair. Drishyam 2 is better paced than its predecessor. It’s still about an hour before the plot really kicks off, but there’s more intrigue since we know about the Sword of Damocles over the family’s head. And the midpoint has a really good twist that recontextualizes what we’ve seen so far.

My main issue was with the structure of the film, which really isn’t its fault. The original Driysham had a really fascinating cat-and-mouse game and central problem (How did Georgekitty fake an alibi?) Here, the tension comes from Georgekutty being oblivious to the tightening net around him, meaning we’re tapping our fingers waiting for it all to explode. This means, however, that the counterplays are all confined to the last half-hour of the movie. They are foreshadowed, but, like the first film, not in a way where you can watch and predict what the endgame will be.

And don’t get me wrong, the endgame is great. But it lacks the sheer impact of the first movie. To be as vague as possible about both: In the first film, Georgekutty beats the police in part because he’s able to manipulate them into destroying their own case. He knows how they think and act and exploits that. When he wins, it feels like well-deserved karma. Here, his plan boils down to "lie,” with his machinations meant to make that lie plausible. And they are good machinations, but because we’re not given the same insight into what he’s doing, they lack some oomph. It just felt implausible to me that he was able to get the police off his back with this plan, even if one of the main ideas is really clever. Maybe it would have helped if, after we get the evidence that “proves” his family is innocent, we were given a few minutes to see the aftermath and wonder how he managed to pull it off, but instead we get the moment and the explanation right after that.

Really, I’m just complaining that nothing can beat the final shot of the previous film.

There are also a couple of loose ends. The bit with Anu’s boyfriend being interested in the murder goes nowhere. The resentment towards Georgekutty from his neighbors also doesn’t impact anything, which is a missed opportunity in my view. Georgekutty’s plan in the previous film hinged on public sympathy, and it would have been interesting to see him try and account for a lack of it this time around.

But again, most of this is just me disappointed that I didn’t get the movie I wanted to watch. In the end, I have to give Jeethu Joseph credit for making a sequel that really does feel like a plausible outcome of first film. If you liked Drishyam and want to see Georgekutty win again, this is a solid sequel. Just keep in mind that this is a different film. Recommended.

Three Card Murder (2023) by J. L. Blackhurst

Back in 2023, the Puzzle Doctor reviewed Three Card Murder, a new book by J. L. Blackhurst. That's actually the pen name of Jenny Blackhurst, a writer of psychological thrillers. Three Card Murder, by contrast, was a colorful reference to the Golden Age of mystery fiction, complete with three(!) locked rooms. It sounded promising. But it wasn’t until the Honkaku Discord server chose it as a book club book that I finally got around to reading it.

Three Card Murder stars Tess Fox, a newly-appointed Detective Inspector looking to cut her teeth on a murder case. The murder is that of Shaun Mitchell, who crashed to the ground outside of his apartment building. He’s partly been bound with rope and his throat slit. But when Tess and her team enter his filthy apartment, they quickly realize they have a problem: The CCTV camera outside shows no one entering his apartment for a day before his death, and the door was boarded up from the inside. Tess isn’t looking forward to trying to chase down an invisible, intangible man, and she has enemies on the force who would love to use this as an excuse to one-up her. But she has bigger problems.

Tess is the daughter of Frank Jacobs, the biggest conman in Brighton, head of an organization of swindlers. Tess didn’t know her father growing up and tracked him down fifteen years ago. She was accepted with open arms but abruptly joined the police force six months later. The reason is only partly down to moral qualms. Tess’s half-sister, Sarah, made a foolish effort to con three men out of their ill-gotten gains and it went badly wrong. Tess ended up killing one of them to bail her and Sarah out. Shaun Mitchell was one of those men, and Tess has good reason to think that someone is trying to tie her half-sister, or even Tess herself, to his murder. So she, with great reluctance, asks Sarah for her help.

Shaun Mitchell isn’t the only locked room mystery our cop and con sisters will have to contend with though. Another man is found stabbed to death in a lift, even though no one was seen to approach him. Another victim is shot to death in a hotel room chained shut and that CCTV shows no one entering. There’s a nice sense of forward momentum to the book. The other members of the book club griped a bit about the writing, but I didn’t mind it too much. There are, perhaps, some chapters that are mostly filler, such as one where Sarah impersonates a psychic, but for the most part I found this to be a solid read on a writing level. The only thing I didn’t like was the book constantly reminding us that Tess killed a man. Yes, it’s important because concealing that and her connection to the Jacobs’ motivates some of Tess’s actions, but I didn’t need reminding of it.

The book falls apart for me at the ending. Take the locked rooms: They aren’t bad. You could argue that the first one makes use of a hackneyed plot device, but I’d say that the way Blackhurst uses it here is silly but plausible. The third locked room is pretty great, my favorite of the book. But there’s almost no cluing. This is especially egregious for the second death. We’re told that X was acting a certain way, but if you flip back, you’ll see that that detail is never mentioned. And it could have been a good clue! And, frankly, the police should have been able to solve it, they would have noticed that fact at some point. It would have been fine if that was the point, like, "they're going to figure this out but I just want to confuse them for a while,) but no, they just don’t notice it. The same goes for the culprit. They’re straight out of a thriller, no chance at figuring out who they are and what they want except through genre savvy and wild guessing. The worst bit is the ending. I can buy Sarah making the choice that she does at the end, I can’t believe that Tess would go through with it.

So, in the end, I was disappointed with Three Card Murder. It’s not an awful book, but it doesn’t live up to the promise of three impossible crimes with a backdrop of con artistry. I can’t in good conscience say you should check it out. Not Recommended.

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel,  Crossexaminingcrime, Beneath the Stains of Time, Fang's Mystery Blog.

A Game of Turnabouts (2019) by Gizmological

In light of just how popular the Ace Attorney series is, it should come as no surprise that there’s plenty of fan content out there. Fan art, fanfiction…and even fan cases. Programs like PyWright and Ace Attorney Online allow dedicated fans to make their own AA cases, ranging from straightforward pastiche to original fiction in the AA engine. One of these dedicated fans is Gizmological. While most well-known AA fan case makers tend to make cases that are either difficult, dark, or dark and difficult, most of Gizmo’s tend to be a little more conventional, including his own AA fan campaign, Beyond the Shadows. A Game of Turnabouts is his most recent fan case.

Set after Spirit of Justice, Game sees Phoenix and Athena invited to the home of millionaire Arkus Strater. Strater is hosting a party, though the guest list is pretty small: Phoenix and Athena, Strater’s business partner Paul Barre, said partner’s wife, Grace (née Gilding) employee Conner Irving, and Strater’s daughter’s boyfriend Ken Forza. Strater announces that they’re going to play a murder mystery game. “No need to be alarmed. Nobody here is going to die.” The guests are all given roles with certain objectives to complete before the end of the night. All harmless-sounding fun, but the guests seem very, very nervous about this. And the game is based off a real unsolved murder from three years ago that took place with this same group of people.

One guess who’s found stabbed to death upstairs at the end of the game.

Unfortunately for Phoenix, he’s the only one upstairs at the time of the murder, and so Athena has to defend him from (literal) rockstar prosecutor Klavier Gavin. (“Don’t worry boss, I won’t lose this case, no matter how dreamy the prosecution is!”) But don’t get hasty, this isn’t a lost gem of an impossible crime. The explanation is obvious and no effort is made to disguise it. The trial doesn’t revolve around, “How was this crime committed?” but instead around, “Who could have used this method?” And the mystery overall is pretty solid. The contradictions are pretty good, though most are pretty easy. The exception is one near the beginning of the trial. This is the third(!) time I’ve played this and it tripped me up twice. But the later ones are better; very subtle and tricky. Gizmological has a real knack for re-using the evidence in unexpected ways, or taking evidence that you think is just to set up the background and making it part of the mystery. There’s a clever and understated twist with the rules for the game that I especially liked.

The characters are all pretty memorable, though I wish we’d seen more of some of them during the investigation portion. I really liked what this case did with the killer. They’re not sympathetic in the Conan or Kindaichi sense, where they’re avenging some lost family member, but just someone stuck in a bad position who lashes out, with fatal consequences. Their portrayal—combined with a final twist about one of the characters—gives the case a somber tone without plunging into full darkness.

All in all, this is similar to Turnabout Idol, in that it’s a fun Ace Attorney pastiche that tries to emulate playing the original games. And it succeeds! It’s a good, solid mystery. And while you will obviously get much more out of it if you’ve played the games, you can even enjoy it without that (since the spoilers for the main games are very light until the post-credits). Recommended. I plan to look at more fan cases in the future.

You can play the case here.

Turnabout Idol (2016) by Mie Takase (translated by thewrightstuff)

Image taken from The Case Files of Ho-Ling

Considering how big the Ace Attorney series is, it might come as a shock to people that there aren’t a lot of tie-in novels. I mean, it’s a surprise to me. You’d think that it would be catnip. I guess that’s what the manga stories are for.

But, as Ho-Ling has noted in some of his posts on the series, the format of the games doesn’t really translate well to “traditional” mystery fiction. Ace Attorney is more about adjusting to new information. Series protagonist Phoenix Wright is no Perry Mason. He often goes into court with no idea about what happened or who’s responsible, and even when he does know the latter, there are always unanswered questions he has to figure out in court. So while the series is fair-play, and while it does foreshadow and clue some of its twists, the nitty-gritty is worked out in real-time. You can argue that the series’ focus on exposing contradictions, getting new testimony, exposing the contradictions that come from that, etc., means that you’re solving the mystery in real-time. But my point is that it’s deceptively tricky to make that formula into a book, or to translate a mystery into that format.

But that didn’t stop author Mie Takase from giving it a shot. Takase has written a handful of horror novels (Ho-Ling reviewed one here), but she’s also done a lot of tie-in novels for other video game franchises, from Persona to Kirby. Turnabout Idol was the first of her two books for the Ace Attorney series.

The book opens with Phoenix, along with his assistants, Apollo Justice and Anthea Cykes, arriving at the Pegasus Town mall to support Phoenix’s adoptive daughter Trucy, a magician. Trucy is sharing the stage with two others: idol singer Melody Cutter, who cuts up fruit with a giant knife during her songs, and Wade Ukulfaskul, a painfully unfunny comedian. After Wade crashes and bombs, Melody takes the stage, but it’s clear that her heart’s not in it, not to mention that she’s missing her knife. Phoenix goes to talk to mall’s owner about another job for Trucy, when he’s interrupted by the news: Wade’s been stabbed to death! And guess whose knife did the deed, and who is now in desperate need of a lawyer. Not that she’s very forthcoming about some very important information…

Takase made a real effort to translate game mechanics into book form. It’s not obvious unless you’ve played them, but there were multiple points where I saw gameplay moments like identifying locations on a map or the “Thought Route” seamlessly transferred into a conventional narrative. The characters feel like Ace Attorney characters too, quirky and memorable with funny dialogue. The case against Melody looks bleak, but Phoenix points out some minor flaws in the witnesses' testimonies that stack up to show that they’re lying. I think that some of the series staples like the witnesses having over-dramatic reactions to their lies being pointed out didn’t carry over well, but that’s a minor point.

But nevermind the fannish stuff, how’s the mystery? That’s pretty good too! You have to keep in mind that this was aimed at a younger audience, but with that caveat in mind, the mystery holds up. I suspect that most readers will figure out who the killer is, and maybe even have a pretty good idea of what they did after the crime, but the fun is seeing Phoenix prove that. The final confrontation has a lot of great back-and-forth as Phoenix almost corners the killer, but they come up with a lie to get out of it, but that creates another mistake that Phoenix can push back on, etc., until he finally catches them in a lie they can’t weasel out of. There’s a minor locked room mystery here, as the crime takes place in a room where one entrance is locked and another is under observation, but it’s a pretty small part of the story with a simple solution.

The main weakness is the motive. Not the motive for the murder—that’s fine. If I told you what it was it would sound stupid, but in context it’s actually kind of sad. No, the weakness is in why the killer frames Melody. We’re even told at the end that it was“Undue resentment due to a misunderstanding.” I think that this motive had an interesting core to it that could have been explored, but this book didn’t do that. But that’s the only flaw.

I must also give a shout-out to the translation by “thewrightstuff.” As long-time fans know, the AA series isn’t just a translation, it’s a localization, where the translators change the names and context to set the work in the country of the translation. And while this translator does provide a copy of the book with the original Japanese names, they also have a very good localization. “Melody Cutter.” That’s inspired.

So yeah, this was great. Turnabout Idol is a fun junior mystery novel. Fans of the series should absolutely check it out, but even someone who’s never played the games would enjoy this. Recommended.

The book can be found here.

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

The Lapis Lazuli Castle Murders (2002/2024) by Takekuni Kitayama (translated by Mitsuda Konno and cosmiicnana)

I suspect that most readers of this blog probably don’t know the name Takekuni Kitayama. Unless, that is, you play the Danganronpa series of games. Kitayama got his start writing novels in 1991 but didn’t really become prominent until his prequel Danganronpa Kirigiri novels. He would also work on New Danganronpa V3. But his start were the Castle books, a series of books that are connected not by recurring characters or a central detective, but by the recurring motif of seven cursed daggers, six headless knights, of fantastical settings. And, of course, by locked rooms.

And decapitations. Lots of decapitations.

Our chances of getting translations of his non-Danganronpa work were slim, but thankfully Mitsuda Konno and cosmiicnana stepped in to translate The “Lapis Lazuli Castle” Murders. Well, technically it’s human-edited MTL, but my understanding is that nana actually did contribute to the translation, and we’re going to focus on the “human-edited” part. I’d heard wonderful things about this book across the blogosphere, but would it hold up?

Japan, 1989. Kimiyo is a young woman who is a regular patron at a certain library, one so removed from civilization that it’s known as “The Library at the End of the World.” One day, a young man, Kito comes in and says, “Hey babe, you and me, we’re connected, reincarnations of a knight and his lady, doomed to kill each other with cursed daggers over and over again in an endless, brutal cycle, from which we cannot escape. There is no hope.”

Kito is very bad at pickup lines.

Kimiyo wants to dismiss it, but it is a very weird thing to lie about. And the library does have a weird dagger in the storeroom. And there are odd legends attached to it…

1243, France. Marie is the only daughter of Count Geoffrey, a brooding and possibly unstable lord who’s cooped up in the Lapis Lazuli Castle (“because of the bluish stones that made up the outer walls”). Marie has a cogent of knights at her disposal, led by the dashing Raine. Marie fears her father, suspecting that he had something to do with the disappearance of her mother. Marie saw the two of them enter a room, but when she entered, they had vanished. And then she saw footprints appear on the floor, one by one, heading into the wall. Raine is able to explain this but becomes the victim of a mystery himself. One night, Marie finds his helmet lying outside her bedroom. Come morning, the knights have all disappeared from the castle, seemingly slipping past the guards and leaving no footprints in the mud outside. They are found up a nearby river, their heads hacked off. What’s even weirder is that it would take a day’s journey to get to where their bodies were found, but all six knights were seen alive twelve hours before…

1916, Verdun. Jean is a French solider suffering through the horrors of trench warfare. Marie is now a nurse, and the two of them are looking for a way to break the endless cycle. Jean has other issues as well. He sees a German solider approaching, but when he gets close, Jean sees that he’s missing his head. One of his comrades reports another soldier’s head vanishing in an instant. He finds four bodies with their heads hacked off in a bunker, but they vanish in the seconds he takes his eyes off them.

And jumping between these periods is the nonbinary detective Snowy, someone who walks around “looking for chaos” to restore order. Luckily, there’s a lot of chaos to go around.

So, there’s a lot going on here. In spite of the long summary, the different periods are pretty well-segregated, keeping what could easily have been a sprawling mess under control. This is one of those books that’s all about the mystery. The back-and-forth between the characters is lively enough, but in the end, you’re reading this for the tricks.

They are, for the most part, good. I thought the WWI segment was the weakest in this regard. The explanation for the decapitations is okay, but the vanishing bodies are an anticlimax. Even Jean gripes about how the explanation doesn’t really help him out, "The answer gave me nothing.” The 1243 segment is pretty solid. The diagrams make it pretty clear what happened, I think, though it requires some specific knowledge to explain everything about the crimes. I love those diagrams though. And they’re very useful with the third set of murders in this book.

About two-thirds through, the Library at the End of the World becomes the stage for a brutal triple murder in a locked room that leaves two employees decapitated and another lying stabbed on the floor. Oddly, this one is solved pretty quickly after it happens, which is a shame because it’s the best one in the book. If I were to state the solution as bluntly as possible, it would sound stupid, but Kitayama makes it work. He’s helped in this by the diagrams, which make a confusing crime scene very clear. I looked at one and thought, “Hey, why is X like that?” and lo and behold, that was a clue. Even better is that there’s a very good reason—a very twisted reason—why the killer goes to so much effort to do it this way. I also like how Kitayama paces the explanations. He doesn’t just dump them all at the end but explains them at different points. (And Snowy isn’t the only one who gets the honors of summation.) Answering some of the mysteries keeps the book moving forward and prevents the climax from getting bogged down in explanations at the end, right when our heroes are facing the firing squad.

I do have a few issues. Like I said, this is not a book for those of you who want in-depth characterization or lyrical writing. The other major issue I had is with how reincarnation is handled. It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but I’ll try: If I were to tell you that a story revolves around reincarnation, you’d probably think that there are certain rules it operates under. I’m thinking of two in particular. Neither of them apply here. One of these twists is admittedly foreshadowed by dialogue earlier in the novel. The other twist came out of nowhere for me. I don’t know if reincarnation has other common themes in Japanese culture that would ground this twist better, but it really threw me at first. In fairness, I got over it, and Kitayama uses this violation in interesting ways, such as how it ties into the killer’s motive for all this bloodshed. And I liked how Snowy’s time jumping wasn’t just a fun gimmick but actually plays a role in the climax. For all my griping, Kitayama works the fantastical elements into the book instead of just using them as set dressing or as jumping off points for the rest of the story.

And the final map is a nice touch.

I can’t hate anything that swings for the fences like this. What we have here is a story with some eye-catching premises but with solid mysteries backing them. This is a roller coaster ride of a book, with ideas fired off left and right. There are a couple of duds, but the best land with the force of a mortar. Absolutely worth reading for locked room fans, or those who want to see some imagination in their crime fiction. Recommended.

The book can be read here. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Beneath the Stains of Time, To Solve a Mystery (under February), Puzzles, Riddles, and Murders, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).

Strange Houses (2021/2025) by Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion)

I enjoyed horror author Uketsu’s Strange Pictures when I read it last year. Thankfully for all the Uketsu fans, 2025 saw the English release of his first novel, Strange Houses, but I was a little uncertain. I’d heard that this book wasn’t as good as his second one. I’d also watched the YouTube video (make sure to turn off the auto-dub) that he later turned into Strange Houses, and while it had some interesting points, I didn’t find it all that scary. But, as the title of this post shows, I gave the book a shot anyway.

The book opens with the author/narrator, a freelance writer specializing in stories of the macabre, receiving a request from a friend. This friend is looking for a house for him and his wife, and he’s found a promising one. But there’s a weird anomaly in the floor plan: a space in the kitchen that’s completely walled-off and serves no purpose. Intrigued, the narrator brings the floor plans to his friend, Kirihara, “a draughtsman with a prestigious architectural firm.” Kirihara is fascinated, but he soon finds more oddities than just that odd space. There’s one more bed than there should be, there’s a window peeping into one of the bedrooms, and there’s one more glaring issue, one that gets him to thinking about something truly evil going on in that house…

…And that revelation comes totally out of nowhere. It’s ludicrous. It’s a massive leap based on what we know, but Kirihara is of course 100% right. The rest of the book expands on the central plot of the video. The narrator posts about the house online, looking for more information, and is contacted by a woman whose husband vanished after visiting another odd house. Again, Kirihara and the narrator go to work prying open the house’s dark secrets. After that, the two of them are shown one more floor plan, this one based off the memories of a house their client visited in childhood. What should have been a peaceful visit ended when a young boy turned up dead. The official story is that he fell from an altar, but Kirihara again draws darker conclusions.

When the book is focusing on the author and Kirihara looking over floor plans and making deductions, it’s great. A lot of the anomalies in the plans don’t require architectural knowledge, just thinking about how a room fits into the wider design of a house, or what a room would look like if you opened a window into it. The third story is honestly a good murder mystery in and of itself. And I like how Uketsu takes the basic idea behind the first floor plan and mixes it up for the other two. This book is pretty short, but I could have read a book twice its size just going over floor plans. The problem is the book’s overarching plot. Almost everything about it is ridiculous and the root of Kirihara’s wilder conclusions. The first and third stories end with him uttering something completely off the wall that’s barely, if at all, supported by what we’ve learned. Ho-Ling compares the first chapter to an urban legend where you don't need to have a 100% airtight explanation; in fact the irrationality is part of the appeal. But when Uketsu tried to expand and rationalize it, the wheels started coming off.

The problems with the book’s plot come to the fore in the final chapter, where the author and another character finally get some answers about what’s going on…in the form of an exposition dump. One long chapter of exposition. The thing is, the backstory is genuinely interesting and messed up! Feuding families! Sinister plots! Curses! Insane rituals! Delusions that wreck havoc on real people! It’s all so juicy, but it gets poured on you all at once. There needed to be one more chapter to pace these revelations out a bit or at least devote half of the final chapter to one more floor plan that could have let us deduce at least part of this. The book ends on a note of unsettling ambiguity, but the impact is lessened because it’s about people we’ve never met!

It’s frustrating, because the individual mysteries are quite good and worth reading, and I like the central concept for the horror, especially in the first story. (ROT13: Rirel ubhfr unf oyvaq fcbgf, naq guvf gnxrf vg gb gur rkgerzr jvgu jung’f nyzbfg n ubhfr-jvguva-n-ubhfr, haorxabjafg gb gur bhgfvqr jbeyq.) But I can’t really justify plopping down full price for Strange Houses in light of its issues. If you’re still interested, check out the linked video above, which would later become the first story of this book. If that intrigues you, try looking this up at your local library. If not, then this is Not Recommended.

I’m still gonna read Strange Buildings. Remember how I said I’d read a book twice this one’s length that’s all about floor plans? Buildings sounds like that.

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Stephen M. Pierce, Beneath the Stains of Time, Pretty Sinister Books (contains some spoilers, not much more than my own).

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) by G. K. Chesterton

While I’ve read a few of his stories in anthologies and a few for The New Locked Room Library, the works of G. K. Chesterton have been a bit of a blind spot in my mystery reading. I’ve never sat down and really read his stories starring the seemingly dopey Father Brown. I decided to change that and bought a compilation of the full series, giving me a chance to dive into the first collection of these stories, The Innocence of Father Brown.

The title is a bit of a joke. Father Brown might be as innocent as a dove, but he’s as wise as a serpent. “Has is never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?” he asks in his first appearance. His adventures demonstrate that he is, in fact, very aware of human evil, and his heart breaks over it.

We begin our journey with “The Blue Cross.” The story focuses on Inspector Valentin, who is in pursuit of the thief Flambeau, who is targeting the titular jeweled cross. Valentin is quickly on the trail of two priests, one tall like Flambeau, one short, kinda dumb-looking, “a silly sheep,” probably a sap dragged along for the ride. But the two seem to be leaving a lot of chaos in their wake, from switched salt and sugar dispensers to a broken window. Some of the impact of this story has been lost nowadays, since everyone knows this is the first Father Brown story and not the first Inspector Valentin one. But it’s a charming story with a twist that still holds power.

“The Secret Garden” sees Valentin invite some guests, including the good father, to his home for a party. The main attraction of the house is the center garden, which can’t be accessed from outside the house. The festivities are interrupted when a body turns up in the garden, sans head. Suspicion immediately falls on the American millionaire who seems to have ditched the group with the murder weapon in tow. But there’s only one entrance to the house, and the suspect was never seen leaving, nor, for that matter, can anyone figure out how the unnamed victim was able to get inside. This is a traditional mystery, complete with five questions that, when answered, point to the victim, method, and killer. I suspect that most people will at least suspect part of the truth, but the final reveal has some good shocks to it. It’s not a perfect story (it’s very vague on *when the murder is supposed to have happened), but an excellent forebearer of things to come.

Father Brown plays armchair—or at least, normal chair—detective in “The Queer Feet.” He’s recording the confession of a dead man when he overhears footsteps in the hallway. Strange footsteps, that seem to switch from a confident jog to meek tiptoeing:“But why on earth should a man run in order to walk? Or, again, why should he walk in order to run?” The explanation hinges on some classism that most readers won’t pick up on at all, but I’ll admit, it’s a good explanation. The setting is neat too; a private hotel that’s gained its reputation for quality based on nothing more than the fact that it’s exclusive. Chesterton is great with unusual or quirky locations.

This story also contains the most hype line from Father Brown:“I don’t want to threaten you, but—” “I do want to threaten you,” said Father Brown, in a voice like a rolling drum. “I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched.”

“The Flying Stars” is a Christmas story. Father Brown is invited to an estate for a Christmas party. One of the guests happens to be the owner of the titular stars, a trio of jewels that have been the target of every thief on both sides of the Atlantic, including Flambeau. The theft comes late, but how he steals the jewels is a thing of beauty. Of course, Father Brown foils him, and finally brings him to repentance with a well-argued bit of theology.

This is also the story where Father Brown reminisces about doing blackface and another character urges him to do it again, so.

And now we get to “The Invisible Man,” the most famous story Chesterton wrote and one of the most popular mystery stories of all time. It is also, to hear some tell of it, completely overrated with a nonsense solution. I don’t totally agree. But I think people get so focused on the solution that they overlook just how odd the actual set up is. You see, there’s this woman, Laura, who tried to get rid of some unwelcome suitors by telling them that she would only marry a man who’s made his way in the world. Bad news: One of those suitors, Smythe, has indeed made something of himself as an inventor of robot servants (I’m serious). Worse news: The other man, Welkin, has not made something of himself but seems to have taken the Jack Griffin route and developed invisibility.

Laura has heard his laughter in an empty street and Smythe has found his threatening letters in his home. When he leaves another public message saying that Smythe will die for contacting Laura, her current suitor brings the case to Flambeau, now a private detective. He even goes as far as to ensure that witnesses are watching his house. Alas, by the time he returns, Smythe has vanished, leaving only a pool of blood behind. And the witnesses say they saw no one go by, but there’s a trail of footprints in the snow…“God! The Invisible Man!”

You know, Chesterton probably was inspired by the H. G. Wells novel. Anyway.

I think this story is a little overrated, but I see how the solution would leave an impact on readers. People say it doesn’t work. I’ll contest this slightly. It works, but not in type of mystery on display here. Allow me to give the final word on this issue. (ROT13: Sngure Oebja’f rkcynangvba gung crbcyr qba’g abgvpr freinagf/zravny jbexref hayrff pvephzfgnaprf pnyy sbe vg vf n inyvq bofreingvba naq jbhyq unir orra rira zber fb ng gur gvzr. V unir ab ceboyrz oryvrivat gung abar bs gur jvgarffrf jbhyq dhrfgvba n znvyzna jnyxvat ol abe guvax bs uvz nf n “fgenatre” gb jngpu bhg sbe. Ohg gung’f abg gur fpranevb! Gurl’ir rkcyvpvgyl orra gbyq gb xrrc na rlr bhg sbe crbcyr! Gurl znl abg vzzrqvngryl whzc gb gur znvyzna, ohg fheryl haqre dhrfgvbavat gurl’q fnl, “Jryy, gur znvyzna jrag guebhtu.” Naq gurer’f ab jnl gung gurl jbhyqa’g cnl nggragvba gb uvz ng nyy. Vs Ntahf unq whfg nffhzrq gung sbhe jvgarffrf jbhyq xrrc Fzlgur fnsr naq qvqa’g gryy gurz gb xrrc na rlr bhg, vg jbhyq unir pbaivaprq.) So, not the highlight of the collection, that comes later, but it’s worth reading.

Next up is “The Honour of Israel Gow.” Gow was the servant of the reclusive Earl of Glengyle, the last of his disturbed family. He’s dead, of natural causes (or so they think), but since Israel didn’t bother to tell anyone that he died, there’s some suspicion flying around. Complicating matters further is that the house is full of odd objects. Jewels lying around unattended, snuff laying out without containers, the lead of lead pencils. All this baffles the investigators, only for Father Brown to toss out three different plausible connections between some of the missing items. It's a delightful scene, and one can't help but feel that the good father is showing off. But when Father Brown finds that someone has cut the halo from the Child Jesus and the name of God from missals and pictures, the normally unflappable Father suspects black magic. And that’s before they dig up the headless corpse.

Needless to say, with a set-up like this, you’re either going to deliver on the madness or have an anti-climax. Chesterton has the latter, but in fairness, it’s a deliberate anti-climax, hinging on the odd logic of the titular Gow. It’s possible to figure out what he’s done, but most modern readers likely won’t see it.

“The Wrong Shape” sees Father Brown and Flambeau at the house of a poet. A normal, everyday visit, were it not for the dagger laying outside, which is the wrong shape. And before Father Brown and Flambeau can take their leave, the poet’s doctor reports that something is wrong. The poet lies in his conservatory, the door locked, a dagger in his side. And on his table, a note: “I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!” How was the crime done? And why did the victim, killer, or whoever, snip a little bit of the paper? The locked room is pretty basic. The idea behind the paper is good, though later authors would use it better than Chesterton does here. Still, not a bad story.

This is also the story where Father Brown says that he sees evil in the design of Turkish carpets, so.

Father Brown and Flambeau enter the land of fairies in “The Sins of Prince Saradine.” The prince wants to meet with the old rogue and swap war stories, the prince being a man of low character himself, so Flambeau and the father arrive at the prince’s estate, a house made of reeds on an island. Father Brown thinks something is off here, and indeed, the normally sharp priest seems off-balance from the get-go…but there’s nothing obviously wrong. Then a man arrives, one with a grudge against the prince. There’s a duel, a death, and finally the horrid truth. Chesterton foreshadows the solution well, and the ending is powerful.“It isn’t only nice things that happen in fairyland.”

“The Hammer of God” takes us to the little village of Bohun Beacon. The local cad, Colonel Bohun, has set his sights on the blacksmith’s wife, to the disgust of his brother and, one must assume, her husband. Not to mention the lady herself. So it’s no surprise when someone smashes his head open with a hammer, but what is a surprise is that the hammer is a small thing, seemingly incapable of delivering the massive blow that killed him. The blacksmith could have done it with the hammer, but he has an alibi. His wife could have hit him with the hammer but couldn’t have delivered that strong of a blow. Luckily, Father Brown is in the area, and reveals the truth, an ingenious and well-foreshadowed one. While I doubt Father Brown’s description of the origins of Presbyterianism, I do like how the theology and the solution are intertwined.

Flambeau has a new office in “The Eye of Apollo.” On the floor below him are a pair of sister secretaries, on the floor above is Kalon, the founder of a new religion that believes in staring into the sun. Father Brown arrives just in time for one of the sisters to take a plunge down the elevator shaft. But both suspects—her sister and Kalon—have alibis. I can’t explain why, but I have a weakness for the type of solution here. But I think it’s a good one anyway, with some clever, and when you know the context, wince-inducing, foreshadowing. But I don’t 100% agree with Father Brown’s logic as to how he knew who the killer was. (ROT13: Nsgre nyy, ur jnfa’g rkcrpgvat gur snyy rvgure, naq ur qvqa’g ernpg.)

The next story is “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” but I’d recommend skipping over that and moving onto the final story, “The Three Tools of Death.” This is because “Sign” is very, very good and “Tools” is the only weak story of the collection. An aggressively-cheerful millionaire is found dead outside his home, and the crime scene is a mess. Someone unloaded a pistol at the floor, there’s a bloody knife in the room, there’s a rope wrapped around the victim’s legs…but he actually died from falling out his window. There’s some good bits in here (the sharp critique of aggressive cheerfulness, the clue of the bloody face), but, you know, I don’t believe a single thing that anyone does during the victim’s death. It’s well-clued, but my response when reading was sheer bafflement.

But “The Sign of the Broken Sword” redeems all. Father Brown takes Flambeau on a nighttime tour across all the monuments to the great war hero, Arthur St. Claire. He was killed after a battle with the Brazilian patriot, Oliver, after which he was hanged from a tree, his broken sword around his next. That’s the story everyone knows. “It is also entirely wrong.” Why would a skilled, knowledgeable general lead a suicidal charge? Why would Oliver, known as compassionate and merciful to his enemies, hang the general after the battle? “One of the wisest men in the world act like an idiot for no reason. One of the best men in the world acted like a fiend for no reason.” The evidence is there, clear as day, but the truth is horrifying, one of the great acts of evil in all of mystery fiction. This is the best story of the collection, and, while I still have four collections to go, is a shoo-in for the story that best represents Father Brown, his wisdom, and his compassion, even in the face of evil. Read this one last when you read this collection and end it on a high note.

I thought going in that the Father Brown stories would be more “vibes,” carrying basic ideas through Chesterton’s poetic language and scene-setting. Well, it has plenty of that, but there’s real brilliance here, some of the best of early mystery fiction and a fair bit better than some modern works. They have charm and they have power. If you’re interested in the history of the genre, The Innocence of Father Brown is a must-read. But even if you’re not, this is Highly Recommended. 

Other Reviews: The Grandest Game in the World, Solving the Mystery of Murder.

The Water Room (2004) by Christopher Fowler

I probably would have read Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room earlier, but for some reason I never saw it in bookstores. I would always see Full Dark House, but it was only a couple of months ago that I finally saw this in my normal used bookstore haunt.

The book opens with Benjamin Singh, a sometimes-consultant for the Peculiar Crimes Unit, asking Arthur Bryant to look into the odd death of his sister, Ruth. She died, apparently of a heart attack, in her basement. At first, it seems to be nothing more than a sad and slightly strange death, barring a slight injury to the back of her head, but Bryant finds that her mouth is full of water. River water to be exact. How did she ingest river water in her bone-dry basement?

Meanwhile, John May has a problem of his own. An academic acquaintance of his, Gareth Greenwood, has let himself be sucked into an illegal scheme involving London’s “lost” rivers. These are rivers that have been covered up by decades of construction and underneath the city; the Fleet is the most notable. What Greenwood is doing is anyone’s guess—perhaps being an accomplice to bank robbery—but it gives the PCU something to do and keeps their resources out of the greedy hands over their overseer.

Also tied in with this is Kallie Owen and her boyfriend, Paul, who move into Ruth Singh’s house. Kallie is looking forward to making a home of the place, but her renovation work is frustrated by Ruth’s overly large and dingy bathroom. She’s always hearing the sound of rushing water down there, and there’s a weird wet stain that sometimes appears on the wall…

Reading this plot thread, I was reminded that Fowler was mostly a horror writer until this series.

There’s a lot going on in this book. I didn’t even mention the homeless man lurking on Balaklava Street, or the other deaths that follow. Someone is butchering the residents of Ruth’s neighborhood, leaving no evidence behind when they do. And all the while, London is going through an unseasonable rainy period; Fowler never lets you forget about the ever present water that drones on and on, or the rivers below London. There's a lot of love for the city on display in the book. Fowler seizes any opportunity to drown the reader in arcane London facts, from interesting historical buildings to a lot of information on London’s water system that has subdued the lost rivers. When this works, it’s fascinating, but sometimes you feel like you’re getting a Wikipedia article every other paragraph.

So there’s good writing, but a weak mystery. First, I’ve seen this book labeled as an impossible crime, and it’s not. Ruth’s death is weird, but it’s never treated as an impossible crime (though the explanation for it is fine). There’s not much in the way of cluing. I wouldn’t be surprised if keen readers can make a good stab at the killer identity, but I would be shocked if anyone noticed all the clues and figured out their motive. Bryant’s explanation for the third murder involves a lot of “I guess” or “I’m pretty sure this is what the killer was thinking.” A big plot thread gets suddenly dropped until the ending of the book. But my main issue is that, once again, Fowler teases the reader wish fascinating esoterica and the motive has very little to do with it. It’s a little better than Full Dark House, and I was more satisfied with it, but I was still slightly disappointed. (ROT13: V guvax gung vs Sbjyre unq vzcyvrq gung gurer jnf fbzr zlfgvp vasyhrapr jbexvat ba gur xvyyre gb thvqr gurz gb qb jung gurl qvq, rira vs vg jnf whfg inthr uvagf, V jbhyq unir orra unccvre jvgu vg. Nf vg vf, vg’f nyy whfg n pbvapvqrapr.)

But was there anything good about this book? Yes, actually. This is our first look at Bryant and May as long-time partners, and I liked their dynamic. Bryant is like the great detective of yore; brilliant and knowledgeable but also prickly and rude. (Although there is an amusing chapter where he has to befriend the son of one of the families on the street and gives the kid the time of his life.) He’s always looking back to the past. Contrast this with May, who’s not only more technologically adapt and forward looking, but can read people better than Bryant can. He doesn’t do too much, and the final honor of the explanation goes to Bryant, but you see how they function as partners and how they complement each other. And like I said earlier, Fowler is a good writer with a deep love of London. You’ll learn something from this, I guarantee it.

So overall, I was slightly underwhelmed by The Water Room. The mystery was stronger than Fowler’s last book, and I don’t regret reading it, but it still wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Recommended, with Caveats, as the book is too high quality to dismiss outright, but those of you who only care about the mystery might want to look elsewhere. 

Other Reviews: The Grandest Game in the World, She Reads Novels.