Cabaret Macabre (2024) by Tom Mead

At the beginning of the year, I read The Murder Wheel, Tom Mead’s second novel staring magician Joseph Spector, and, unfortunately, I didn’t really care for it. I was annoyed about disliking a modern-day writer trying to emulate the Golden Age of Detective fiction, and who liked locked rooms. However, other reviews I’d read indicated that his third novel, Cabaret Macabre, was his best. I was looking forward to trying it, but was it worth the hype?

Cabaret revolves around Judge Giles Drury. Almost ten years ago, his secretary, Gloria Crane, died of strychnine poisoning. It’s unlikely that anyone would choose to commit suicide with such a painful poison, but there was no trace of it in any of the food and drink that she shared with the Drury family. Her fiancé, Victor Silvius, believed that Giles Drury had something to do with it and went after the judge with a knife, an act that got him sentenced to a sanitarium, where he has remained ever since. Both the judge and the head doctor are both part of a gentleman’s club called the “Tragedians,” and they take care of their own.

Cut to the present, and Victor’s sister, Caroline, comes to Inspector Flint claiming that the judge is trying to kill her brother. Broken glass has been discovered in his food. Around the same time, Judge Drury’s wife Elspeth calls on Joseph Spector claiming that Victor is trying to kill her husband. The man has been getting death threats, and someone even takes a shot at him while he’s meeting with Spector. Of course, that doesn’t explain how Victor could send the threats from his asylum cell.

And so, Spector agrees to accompany the judge and his family their estate, Marchbanks. Even the unflappable Spector can’t shake the eerie atmosphere and foreboding the house gives off, and his worst fears soon come true: Not even twenty-four hours after their arrival, a man is found stabbed to death on the frozen lake outside the home…and he will not be the first to die.

And what does all of this have to do with the brutally battered body stuffed in a trunk discovered at the novel’s opening?

Yes, Tom Mead once again stuffs this book full of incident. I complained about Murder Wheel having too much going on, but it works much better here, since everything is traced back to Marchbanks, the center of a web of revenge and bloodshed. The central idea that Mead plays with here is also very appealing to me. One of my favorite mystery stories is Agatha Christie’s “Motive vs. Opportunity.” There, the central problem revolves around a will that’s replaced by a blank sheet of paper. Those who had a motive to switch it had no opportunity, those who had the opportunity had no motive. I love mysteries that hinge on that duality, where one explanation seems impossible but the other makes no sense, or where both options seem impossible: “Every single interpretation had an equally valid opposing interpretation.”

Is Drury trying to kill Victor or is Victor trying to kill him? Did the judge kill Gloria Crane as his wife thinks, or did she kill Crane as he thinks? This even extends to the murders. On the one hand, the ice on the frozen lake was too thin to carry the body out. So he must have been killed before midnight and launched out onto the lake. But everyone had a alibi for that time and the weapon only went missing past midnight, so he must have been killed after the lake froze. But that’s impossible. Or take Gloria’s death. No one would choose to kill themselves with strychnine, so it must have been murder. But everyone shared food and drink and no one else was affected. So it must be suicide. But that makes no sense…and so on and so forth. Even the third death at Marshbanks, a shooting with a shotgun inside a room bolted from the inside, has elements of this: If the killer could have slipped onto the estate, why commit the crime with such an attention-getting weapon?

The explanations are, for the most part, satisfying. Mead prefers a different type f impossible crime than I do. I suspect that most readers will have a broad idea of the lake murder, even if they can’t explain the specifics. The shotgun locked room was fine, again, not my preferred style of solution. Gloria’s death is the one I can see being…not controversial, but I can see people not liking it. Thinking about it, I believe that it works and hammers in the “tragedy” theme that the book is going for, but it hinges on a type of logic I don’t like from locked room mysteries. And if Mead wanted to emphasize the tragedy part, Spector should have told the answer to more than just Inspector Flint.

The cluing is stronger than in the previous book. There, I complained that they were too vague, here they work much better. Some of the footnoted ones still fall in that category of “Come on, how could I have noticed that?” but most of them were things that I saw, or least felt like I should have seen. There were a couple of times when it felt like Spector was making some real big leaps, but I was, for the most part, satisfied. The pacing was also good. Mead is wise enough to resolve one of the murders at the two-thirds mark, meaning the final explanation isn’t backloaded. It’s a very good book.

Which makes it very odd that I kind of bounced off it overall. It’s like the opposite of my last review, where I had nothing but complaints about a book I liked, while here I have a lot of nice things to say about a book I didn’t care for. I’m inclined to think I just didn’t click with Mead’s writing style, because is an objectively good book that’s an improvement over its predecessor. It’s a fair bit better than his first book as well. I guess that the final solution has a few too many reversals for my taste. And I felt that some of the characters got off a bit too lightly, considering what they did.

But overall, I must give Cabaret Macabre a verdict of Recommended. If you’ve liked Tom Mead’s previous books or just locked room mysteries in general, this is well worth your time. If you didn’t like his previous books, this just might make a believer out of you. I’m only disappointed that it didn’t do the same for me. 

Other Reviews: Stephen M. Pierce, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Beneath the Stains of Time, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).

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.

Death and the Conjuror (2022) by Tom Mead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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