The Realm of the Impossible (2017) by John Pugmire and Brian Skupin

And now, a long one.

For years now, Locked Room International has been delivering locked rooms from around the world, much to our greedy pleasure. While most of their works have been both novels and from specific countries such as France, The Realm of the Impossible takes a worldwide view and is a pretty solid short story collection. Since this post will be long, I’ll say right now that the collection is very much worth your time even if you don’t care one iota about the idea of foreign locked rooms; most of these stories have not been anthologized so you’re getting some original work from here.

Before I go on, it is fair to note that this collection also has a compilation of 12 real life impossibilities, ranging from the gruesome to the charming to the “I can’t believe that this wasn’t a mystery ploy dumped into reality.” For the sake of space (and because I honestly have little to say) I shall point the reader at JJ’s commentary here. And read his blog (although I can’t imagine someone knowing me but not him!).

First up, we have France’s Paul Halter with “Jacob’s Ladder.” The premise is excellent: a religious fanatic yells about seeing a golden ladder and is shortly after found dead from a high fall, but there’s no place for miles around for him to fall from. Like most of Halter’s short stories, it’s a brilliant problem with a simple yet elegant solution. However, while the problem and solution are solid, the story frays around the edges, with the killer’s frame-up plan betting on the police noticing a certain item and making a very specific leap from said item. Not to mention I can’t see when they could have planted it.

Next up is England, represented by Christianna Brand’s “Cyanide in the Sun.” This story has only been published once before this point, and I can’t really understand why; this is a good little work. A serial killer is operating near a seaside resort, poisoning people with cyanide seemingly at random. A group of guests receive a threatening note and attempt to take measures to ensure their safety, which is about as effective as you would think: a woman dies of cyanide poisoning in spite of every ingredient in her sandwich being fresh, under observation, and none of the suspects having the opportunity to poison them.

It’s honestly very good. Brand is skilled at taking small, seemingly irrelevant facts and making mysteries turn on them. It’s a little rough in places, such as the first note which is never fully motivated, but the story hangs together well. I did figure out the gist of the method, but was still caught off-guard by the ending and by the killer. Excellent story, and it reminds me that I need to (literally) dust off The Spotted Cat and re-read it sometime.

Next we have Ulf Durling representing Sweden with “Windfall.” A local lord dies from what seems to be natural causes and...that's it. I admit I don’t totally understand how this is an impossibility, but. The story is well-done, with a good method of murder and the reason for it, but the whole thing is short-circuited by a twist that, like the literal last-page twist of his novel Hard Cheese (also published by Locked Room International!), renders the whole thing moot. I suppose he’s going for a tragic bent, but it isn’t done with the needed pathos to pull it off.

Also, for some reason the text is larger in this story than in any of the others. Probably just a technical error, but it’s a little distracting.

Next up, the Czech Republic. Joseph Skvorecky gives us “The Case of the Horizontal Trajectory,” a story starring Lieutenant Boruvka. The good inspector investigates when an old woman is found stabbed in the eye (!) in her locked bedroom. The killer might have fired it through the open window, but the math doesn’t add up considering the force used. It’s an interesting story, but a little slow. The solution is clever but a bit unnecessarily technical for my tastes.

Next we have Freeman Wills Crofts representing Ireland with “The Mystery of the Sleeping Car Express.” This story is one of his earliest ones; it doesn’t even star Inspector French! The crime is a rather brutal double shooting in a locked train car (in which the door is partially “locked” by one of the bodies!), and the whole thing is quite painstakingly worked out so that every possible option for the killer’s escape is accounted for. It’s all quite fascinating, but marred by the minor fact that if you don’t know the details of train cars at that time you'll be completely lost. I’d like to think I’m not alone in this, since every other review I’ve seen of this story has gone, “Good, but it needed a map.” This is disappointing, since I can’t give a good judgment on if the solution works. But I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Australia’s story is Mary Fortune’s “Dead Man In the Scrub.” Sadly, this is more of a historical curiosity than a full-blown locked room. The opening, in which a highly decayed body is found in a padlocked tent, is effective, but the solution is simple and the killer discovered by dumb luck.

Melville Davisson Post’s “The Hidden Law” is also a curiosity, and also a desperate attempt to not put “The Doomdorf Mystery” into yet another locked room anthology. This is one of Post’s Uncle Abner stories, a preacher who serves as a sort of frontier Father Brown, only much more blunt. He’s been called in to help a miser whose gold is somehow vanishing from his locked house, and somehow and for some reason the thief is returning parts of it. The first half of the story is the best, with the atmosphere of a place on the boundaries of civilization, where belief in witches seems not only plausible, but wise. But the solution falls flat, with a solution that the paranoid miser should have hit on by himself. I did like the answer as to why he felt that he would plunge into Hell if he struck out against the thief after he nearly caught them in the night, and perhaps that aspect could have been drawn out more.

France returns with Alexandre Dumas’s “House Call.” Fans of this author might protest that he has no story by this title. That’s because this story is the result of mashing two chapters from one novel, Les Mohicans de Paris, into one. In fairness, it’s relatively seamless, and I couldn’t pin down any part that seemed out of place. The story itself is about the disappearance of a girl from her locked bedroom, and it’s all investigation. Pure, tedious investigation as the detective marches about with his hanger-ons looking at footprints. It’s quick and can be skimmed, but does fall into that “historical curiosity” category, especially when it comes to some of its conclusions about footprints. But it’s interesting, even if the solution is old hat.

We now move to Argentina for “The Twelve Figures of the World.” The authors are Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, telling one of the tales of Don Isidro Parodi, a man who solves crimes from his prison cell where he’s been rotting since being falsely accused of murder. The “client” is a young man who recounts his being sucked into a cult obsessed with the titular figures, and the bizarre initiation ritual that ended in murder and arson. This was a good story that kept my interest and had a good explanation for everything, but if there was an impossibility I’m afraid I missed it entirely. I think it was something to do with the ritual? But that’s so broad that Parodi’s explanation for it can be argued to be one of many possible answers. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it and thought it was a good example of how to let the biases of a narrator cloud the story and obscure clues (the solitaire!), and I am almost tempted to seek out the other Parodi stories based on it. I just didn’t fully grasp why it was in this collection.

Herodotus’s “Rhampsinitos and the Thief” is Greece’s short, two-page entry. It’s not even really a mystery, more of an account of a young man who robs a “sealed” vault and just goes around outsmarting everyone. Short, but fun.

Next we skip this “Earth” business and head to outer space with Poul Anderson’s “The Martian Crown Jewels.” The titular jewels vanish from an unmanned, remote-controlled ship that’s been drifting in outer space for months. The disappearance threatens relations between Earth and Mars, meaning that the Martian Sherlock Holmes has to be called in. I recall TomCat not caring for this story even if I can’t remember why without checking the post, but I found it a good little story. The setting felt sufficiently “different,” and while my lack of familiarity with sci-fi prevents me from mentioning originality, the world building felt plausible and interesting. The solution is also good, although the key part of it only comes about a page from the solution. I understand the author worrying about giving the plot away early, but it should have been possible to explain what “that thing” was and what it did before the problem was defined.

Dudley Hoys gives us a Lebanese story with “Leaving no Evidence.” It’s not a mystery tale per se, more an adventure yarn where the arrogant Englishman blithely dismisses rumors about the nameless thing that makes men vanish in the snow, only for his travelling companions just to stop existing on a trek. Good story, actually somewhat clued as well. There could have been a little more build-up to the horror and tension, but that’s a minor flaw.

We now go to India with Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s “The Venom of the Tarantula.” In one of those coincidences that would never be accepted in fiction, the set-up resembles that of the real-life locked room mystery of actor Lewis Calhern, who managed to get himself drunk in a locked dressing room that had been searched and cleared beforehand. This time the “victim” is a crude old man who spends his days writing the most perverted of dreck while getting high off tarantula venom. But how is he getting access to it? A more minor mystery, but a good one. I suppose it’s not hard to figure out, and it is fairly clued, but I can believe that the family missed it. I liked it, perhaps I could check out more from this series.

We return to the United Kingdom once again for Victor L. Whitechurch’s “Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture.” The crime in question is one of the most interesting in mystery fiction: the disappearance of an entire train car from a train in motion. The car also contains the titular picture. It’s short but pleasant, with no real surprise in the game being played but a surprisingly good if mechanical solution. It’s hard to visualize, and you have to take it on faith that the train is moving slow enough to pull it off, but I bought it. On reflection I found it interesting to compare this to Crofts’s story, which should in theory be simpler but is much harder to understand than this.

Szu-Yen Lin cheats and gets to be counted as two countries, China and Taiwan, with “The Miracle on Christmas Eve.” The case at hand for once is not a crime, but a Christmas miracle. A man, Ko, comes to Lin’s detective Ruoping Ling for help in explaining a mysterious event that occurred when he was a child. After Ko is mocked by his classmates for his belief in Santa Claus, his father decides to prove his existence in the most dramatic way possible: Ko’s bedroom is searched; the window is locked and taped; the door is locked, taped, and the key is placed under the pillow of the leader of the bullies; everyone sleeps outside the room. And yet, in the night, the sound of a music box draws the children to the room, now with a tree and presents inside! And the shadow of Santa’s sleigh can be seen on the moon...

I like this one. It’s charming and light, and a good mystery besides. The solution is a little simple and might require too many moving parts (this might be due to the over-long explanation), but I liked it; it makes sense. The only bit I didn’t like was the sleigh on the moon; I don’t buy the explanation and it falls into the same trap that Death in the House of Rain did: great explanation at the beginning, then boring, flawed, last-minute impossibility. But more stories like this please!

Alexis Kivi comes to us from Finland with an excerpt from the novel Seven Brothers. This story, which isn’t even two pages, has a man stumble on footprints that turn into the footprints of a fox. A simple answer is provided, but it’s a charming thing. I wonder how the editors discovered it though.

We have a good one up next from Portugal. Afonso Carreiro’s “Lying Dead and Turning Cold” is a tale told by an uncle to his nephew, detailing a murder that occured one cold, snowy night, under the veil of old wives tales and a rumor of a witch. A group of citizens meet in the night to discuss the reappearance of a local cad who’s already left broken hearts in his wake and taken a fair bit of blackmail money. The meeting is tense and eventually one stomps out in fear and finds the body of the cad, strangled to death in the snow, with no other footprints surrounding the body. This is a good one, with good and subtle cluing and excellent atmosphere. It does suffer somewhat from there being a lack of plausible false solutions to the problem, but even then it would take a skilled reader to pick up on the clues, as opposed to just blind guessing.

Next we go to Canada for “The ‘Impossible’ Impossible Crime,” by the not-Canadian Edward D.

Hoch. But he lived in New England and set the story in Canada, so it’s all fine. The story is set in the Canadian wilderness, where two men are cooped up in an isolated cabin while they perform research. Things start well, but the isolation and the fact that one envies the life of the other makes things tense...and then, in the early morning, a gunshot.

One man is dead, the other isn’t the killer. Suicide is impossible, but how could anyone get out to the snow-bound cabin, much less deliver a perfect headshot through frosted glass? It’s a good set-up, but it’s a little dry, Hoch doesn’t really milk the potential horror of the set-up, and after the murder the tension falls a little flat. While I don’t agree with JJ’s idea that the protagonist realizes everything at once, there’s a little technical aspect to the solution and the explanation that dulls the horror of the scenario when the narrator realizes what happened. It’s good, but better is coming...

After the Egypt story! Elizabeth Peters gives us ”The Locked Tomb Mystery.” As the name implies, we have a case of tomb robbery here. When the tomb of an arrogant and emotionally cruel woman is robbed and her mummy is vandalized, it falls to an Egyptian Sherlock Holmes to unravel it, although he doesn’t have to do much; the case is easily resolved. I don’t mind this, since while the solution is in theory simple there are quite a few moving parts to it, and I enjoyed seeing it unfold. It somewhat reminds me of “The Miracle on Christmas Eve,” both in construction and in having a too-long summation. But that story was much more charming than this one I admit.

Next, back to the U.S. for “Deadfall,” Samuel L. Taylor’s contribution. And what a contribution! Two men, Vince and Jim, set off for the wilderness but a deadfall (a log trap) leaves Vince with a broken leg and the two men stranded in a hunter’s cabin. The story is told through diary entries in a journal that Jim discovers, chronicling the lonely days and nights in the cabin. He also talks about the strange, impossible footprints that appear in the snow...

This is very good, well-told and with an intriguing framing device that honestly could have been a tad longer. As is, the shift from penultimate to last entry has one character suddenly reveal things that they learned off-page, and it’s a little jarring. There is a good example of character in one entry, as the writer more or less confirms every negative impression of them without deliberately trying too. A very worthy addition, although one might argue that the plan is a little obscure.

We now move to Japan for Norizuki Rintaro’s “The Lure of the Green Door.” Rintaro’s detective Norizuki Rintaro (again I curse the name of Ellery Queen) is dragged along to negotiate the release of an occult author’s personal library. His wife is dragging her feet on the matter, and while she claims it’s due to her husband’s ghost asking her not to, Norizuki suspects something more sinister. Could it have something to do with the suicide of her husband in his study? Norizuki suspects murder, but one door was bolted from the inside, the window was nailed shut and blocked with a bookcase and the other entrance was the titular green door, which seemingly cannot be opened…

I admit, I wasn’t fond of this story when I first read it, but a re-read improved my opinion a bit. I do think it’s a little hard to fairly clue, but the how of the murder is honestly ingenious, probably original. It’s very well done, and actually manages to be a little light in the writing, as opposed to someone like Keikichi Osaka.

We now go to Italy for Pietro de Palma’s “The Barese Mystery,” which could also be re-titled “Every Locked Room Fan’s Personal Dream Yes Please I Want This.” It was actually written for this collection! The main character is a mystery fan recruited to look into the “suicide” of a count in his locked study, with the privilege of being able to read a lost C. Daly King manuscript as a reward. The mystery is short but good, and while I don’t care for “he shot himself with the wrong hand!” gambit, the rest makes up for it. JJ thinks it isn’t fairly clued, but I think it comes close. And the solution is well-done and concealed. Certainly more practical than the Joseph Commings story that I think it’s referencing.

Next up is another original story, this time from Germany. Jochen Fuseler’s “The Witch Doctor’s Revenge” is a neat little story. Thirteen years ago, two adventurers ran into a small tribe and managed to save the life of the chief’s daughter. The failure of the tribe’s witch doctor resulted in him being hung upside down, but not before he cursed the two adventures to meet their end in thirteen years, one by hanging upside down and the other by vanishing. Cut to the present day, and one calls upon an officer named Faust, as his partner has locked himself in his hotel room in fear and isn’t responding to phone calls. They look through the keyhole (after the key in there is knocked out) and see him hanging upside down. The door is broken down, but the body has vanished.

That was a lot of set-up, but the rest of the story is dedicated to explaining all of this, as well as the sudden disappearance of the other man when our hero turns his back (this part is disappointing). The whole explanation is long, but contains some interesting ideas, especially with how the body disappeared. I also enjoyed the contradiction of the Gregorian calendar, minor though it was. I have seen comments on JJ’s blog that point out a flaw, but it was minor enough that I missed it. Good all around, but the ending is abrupt. And the motive is…let’s just say my first response was something along the lines of, “But there are easier ways of doing that!” and leave it at that. But I’d like to see more from this author. When’s the novel John Pugmire?

Off to Iraq for Charles B. Child’s “All the Birds of the Air.” This time the victim is a judge who
suffered a blow to the head in his private chambers, which he retreated into to escape the heat. The judge had ruled against a fanatical Islamic sect and was under guard at the time, so how did the killer get in and out? The answer could have been “They got in when the guard was asleep because he totally was,” but instead we have a slightly more complex solution. It’s not much, and honestly was the first thing I thought of when reading. The killer is also a non-entity, I’m pretty sure they don’t even get a speaking part. But it was a light, entertaining read that got a good snapshot of Iraq (I assume anyway, and it was at the time that the author was writing), and I’d be interested in reading his other impossible crime stories (which frankly sound more interesting!)

And now, we move to Ireland once again for a story that was part of A Master of Mysteries, one of the first collections of locked room mysteries: L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s “The Warder of the Door.” The story revolves around a creepy underground cell containing a coffin. The father of our hero John Bell’s friend is terrified of old family legends which suggest that the first-born of each family will become the “warder of the door” on their death. It’s getting so bad that he starts telling his son not to bother with this “marriage” thing, while never really explaining why because that might make his son understand or something silly like that.

Turns out that father dear had a bizarre dream which confirmed where the old cell is. This is, oddly enough, not the impossibility of the story, but it does set it up. Bell and his friend track down the cell, and find that the door is one that seems to close on its own...until they remove the coffin inside, causing the door to stay open like the warder is holding it. I think I enjoyed this in spite of myself. It’s a very Victorian melodrama, but I honestly got sucked into things (I seem to enjoy the writing style), and the final sequence is quite tense. The secret behind the door isn't exactly what I was expecting. I don’t deny that it could work, but you kinda have to take it on faith here. But it was a fun story.

We now head back to Japan to wrap this up with Soji Shimada’s “The Locked House of Pythagoras.” An artist and his lover are brutally killed in his home. Oddly, the two are found lying on pictures that the artist was judging for a school competition, in a locked room in a locked house! The only footprints in the mud outside only walk around the house twice, but they belong to the husband of the artist’s lover, so he gets browbeaten into a confession, even though neither he nor the police know how the killings were done. Enter Kiyoshi Mitari, age 8.

Once again, there is little question of “who” but the focus is entirely on the “how.” It’s an interesting “how,” with the layout of the house playing a role in the construction of the crime (if not necessarily the locked room itself). But on the whole I’m a little disappointed. It’s a very technical crime, and the explanation is spread out over so many pages that it’s easy to miss details here and there, which can result in the final solution seeming very muddled. I almost wish that Pugmire and Skupin had gone with “The Executive Who Lost His Mind,” which while very reliant on coincidence and not a straight mystery, is certainly much more interesting!

Like I said at the beginning: this is very much worth your time. It’s a collection of locked room stories from around the world. What more can you want? Not all of them are winners, and some feel like they were just here for historical curiosities’ sake, but very few of these have been collected, and there are many hidden gems in here. It’s honestly great to see all of this here in one place, and I’m looking forward to what LRI does next. Here’s to locked rooms, no matter the nation!

Locked Rooms and the Suspension of Disbelief

Warning: This post spoils Edward D. Hoch’s “The Problem of the Pilgrim’s Windmill.”

So I’ve been flipping through Robert Adey’s Locked Room Murders recently (and man it feels good to type those words), and seeing all the different types of locked rooms out there. It’s not a perfect book--I’ve noticed a few errors and the descriptions are a little more terse than I would like--but on the whole I’d rather have it than not have it. As part of my flipping, I’ve been seeing how Adey describes some of the locked room mysteries that I’ve actually read, such as Edward D. Hoch’s Dr. Sam stories. So I checked out “The Problem of the Pilgrims Windmill,” an excellent little story that has people apparently being set on fire by Satan in the titular windmill, with no footprints in the surrounding snow. The imagination is sparked at once, and the story is in my opinion quite good. How does Adey explain this?

“Both incidents occurred when gasoline-filled balloons were accidentally ignited.”

Well.

He’s not wrong. But I feel this does the story a disservice. The impression is that some madman is lighting gas-filled balloons and sicing them on the windmill, or a very odd comedy of errors. But the whole thing is played seriously, the motives for the burnings are very serious, and the one behind it all is one of the more repulsive killers in the Dr. Sam canon. While one aspect of the second burning is a tad weak (I do think he would have smelled the gas), the whole thing is actually well-done and put together.

This isn’t a criticism, more speculation. While reading Adey’s book, I was struck at how stupid some of these solutions sound out of context. While some of that is down to the book itself being bad, there are probably some well-regarded stories here that leave you going, “Well, yes, that is pretty silly when you put it like that.” This isn’t a knock against quality though, I’ve seen forum games where the entire point is to take well-regarded works and make them sound as boring/inane as possible. But that’s beside the point.

In some ways it makes me appreciate authors who manage to make these stories work all the better. Yes, yes, many mystery plots, if you just sum up the bare minimum, sound really stupid, cliche, or inane. Take Death in the House of Rain for example. If I just blandly stated the solution (and you can sum it up in a sentence), you would probably cry “That’s stupid!” But it’s the sign of a good mystery writer (or writer in general) who can sell you on this set-up, not so much so that you believe that it happened, but that it could have happened, or at least that in the story’s world it’s plausible. In Death in the House of Rain’s case, for all that I have issues with the rest of the book, it does do a good job of justifying why this solution, even if some parts seem shaky to me. I think Hoch does a good job of that justification in this story as well, personally.

No real final point to this. Just me musing about how absurd the things we like are and how creators take the most bizarre ideas and sell us on them. What are your thoughts?

Death in the House of Rain (2006/2017) by Szu-Yen Lin

Rain, rain, go away.

After going from France to Japan, we now continue my new multicultural focus with a Chinese mystery novel. Death in the House of Rain is author Szu-Yen Lin’s first English-language novel after having two short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The intro for the book goes into detail about the history of the locked room mystery in China, showing both that that history is shorter than one would think, and that China has some of the battiest locked room ideas (a story from the point of view of a fly! Twenty tape tricks in one story! Teleporting locked rooms!). But on to the book at hand.

The story is set in the titular house, so named because it looks like the Chinese character for rain when seen from above. Some years ago, the house was the scene of a vicious family slaughter. A couple and their daughter were found dead in the house, and while the police determined that the wife was killed by the husband, he and their daughter were killed by an unknown, who they identify as Weiqun Yang. Yang admits to having an affair with the wife and raping the dead girl’s corpse(!!!) but denies actually killing anyone. This is about as convincing as it reads, and he kills himself in the detention center.

Cut to the present where Renze Bai, the brother of the husband of the murdered couple is sent a bizarre email containing photos of the crime scene, along with a string of numbers. Bai has concerns about Yang’s guilt and decides to invite philosopher Ruoping Lin to the House of Rain to investigate. His daughter, Lingsha, also has some classmates over at the house, completing the ensemble of victims. Because a lot of people die in this book.

Decapitation in a locked and watched room! Strangulation in a locked and watched room with no footprints in the mud outside! This is just the first two deaths, and it gives the book a nice pace to it, something is always happening. The problem is that this leaves us with little time to get to know the victims, who end up being cardboard at best, actively unlikable at worst. We’re in near-slasher movie territory here, which fits with the overall dark tone of the book, but makes it hard to get invested at times. It suffers from the same dryness that hampered The Ginza Ghost, mixed with a very terse style that makes it a little too easy to skim-read.

The pacing also suffers a bit. While the murders keep coming, Rupong doesn’t do much effective investigating until very late in the book. The actual murder method is absurd yet excellent, one of those solutions that sounds hilarious on paper but actually works well and is justified in the book. I do think that it is a little unlikely that no one would have stumbled onto it before now, but I accept it, even the desperate waving of Poe around as a shield for how everything unfolded. What I am less fond of is how the people responsible for the whole mess get let off rather lightly, considering what they did to cause it. The fourth death also breaks from the simplicity of the previous deaths for a more technically complex and less interesting solution, although the provided diagrams make the broad strokes of what happened clear. But the solution for the past murders is disappointing, very little cluing and it feels completely tacked on.

All in all I admit this is mainly of interest to pure locked room fans. There just isn’t a whole lot of meat here for fans of more “traditional” mysteries to chew on. The dark tone doesn’t make it a good intro to the genre either. If you’re a fan of locked rooms and don’t mind a bit of the Grand Guignol in your mysteries, then this is a good read. But if not, you’d be better off with something else from LRI’s catalog.

See TomCat, JJ, Brad, and Aiden for more positive takes.

The Ginza Ghost (2017) by Keikichi Osaka

I confess, I confess--I don’t have a good intro here.

Normally us mystery fans are familiar with the idea that Japan gets all the good stuff. They have the best mysteries, all our obscure authors get translated and end up there long before we ever get them, and we’re stuck reading about them in a form of literary torture. This time, we all get to share in an obscure and talented author with Keikichi Osaka’s The Ginza Ghost.

The opening by Taku Ashibe gives a good summary of the life and works of Osaka, from his first stories to his sadly premature death during World War II. He also looks at the works in this collection, and while he doesn’t trip the spoiler alert for all of them, he comes very close in a few cases, so you might want to read this one last.

I’ll also say that Osaka is as dry as the Sahara during a drought. This didn’t bother me too much, but I admit trying to read too many at once can be a little draining. It’s not bad writing, but it makes one skim a bit. But that’s enough of that. On to the stories.

We kick off with “The Hangman of the Department Store” the first of many stories starring Osaka’s detective Kyosuke Aoyama...and his first of two appearances here. The case at hand is about a department store employee who’s been strangled and hurled off the roof of the store with unnatural force, along with a robbery at said store. This is less a fair impossible crime to be solved and more a chance to sit back and watch Aoyama unravel everything in minutes, exposing one of the more creatively terrible deaths in mystery fiction.

Aoyama stars again in “The Phantasm of the Stone Wall.” A woman is found stabbed to death outside a small mansion, and two figures are seen walking away from the scene...but a witness at the other end of the road saw no one. The killers are identified as twins at the mansion, but that’s not the end of strange events on that quiet road. I can’t really call this “fair play,” and I find it unlikely that no one ever noticed this happening before, but it’s still a good story.

“The Mourning Locomotive” beyond having one of the better titles in the collection, presents one of its most unusual stories. The titular locomotive is a train that has become infamous for the accidents it’s been involved in, to the point that the drivers have gotten in the habit of hanging a wreath whenever someone dies. Now, it seems someone is setting up pigs to be run over by the locomotive, but why? The answer disappointed at first, but after musing on it, I’ve gained an appreciation for how simple it is.

Next up is the pulpy “The Monster of the Lighthouse.” This story has one of the most audacious murders in mystery fiction: a lighthouse keeper is crushed beneath a rock seemingly flung from the island below, as a “monster” is seen fleeing the scene. Again, this is more about discovery than deduction, since there are only so many ways to explain this type of situation. But it is well-done, and the explanation for what the “monster” is is suitably gross and yet tragic.

“The Phantom Wife” is, based on other reviews I’ve read, widely considered to be the weak link in the collection. I am glad to announce my conformity and agree. The story revolves around a schoolteacher with a seemingly happy marriage with his wife when the wife dies after sinking into a deep depression for reasons unknown. Soon after, the man becomes increasingly fearful and paranoid, and is found murdered in his home, the bars on the windows ripped off by an inhuman force. All well and good, but the solution is as flat as possible. When you better understand the context of the story, it works slightly better, but even then it’s flawed. We just don’t get enough details about the husband’s actions to feel like his fate was deserved.

Next up is “The Mesmerising Light,” which takes on that rare impossible problem: the vanishing car. Lawyer Otsuki and his driver are zooming down a winding and dark mountain road when they stumble on a man clinging to life after being hit by another car that broke through one of the road’s checkpoints. The two don’t recall seeing one, but ring the checkpoint at the other end of the road to keep an eye out for the reckless driver. Minutes pass and the guards confirm that no car went by, even though there’s nowhere for it to go.

On the one hand, I’m not overly fond of the solution here, which is pretty much the obvious answer with some window dressing. But the deductions Otsuki makes from a knife the reckless driver used in a murder begins to show a shift in the stories. Up until now, most of Osaka’s stories have been more about watching the detective unravel events you personally have very little chance of solving. But now, we see a simple but clever double-bluff that shows a shift towards more orthodox detection that will only become stronger as the collection goes on.

The next story, “The Cold’s Night’s Clearing,” was my introduction to Osaka in the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine issue that published it. The titular clearing is a place which is often coated in snow in the winter months, and when the clouds clear, the moon and night sky can be clearly seen. It is over this field that a man escapes after murdering a woman and her bodyguard, taking the woman’s son with him. The tracks from his skis can clearly be seen...but fade away in the middle of the snowy field. The solution is simple in the best possible way: When you learn what exactly happened that night, you’ll probably be tempted to smack your forehead in frustration that you missed it (unless I’m just projecting). It’s an elegant, totally fair solution, and honestly probably made me hold this collection to a higher standard then I normally would. The only real sticking point is the rather somber ending, but I did not find it an issue.

Christian Henriksson did bring to my attention a “cheat” of sorts in the story. It’s in the comments (also read his review for a slightly less rosy view of this collection).

“The Three Madman” is even more orthodox, being a Queen-style “which of the three did it?” story. The three in question are the titular madmen, the last three patients of a cash-strapped asylum. Diva sings and dances endlessly, Knock-Knock kicks the wall with his foot, and the Injured picks at his face, but all three appear harmless...until the doctors show up to find the hospital’s director dead, his brains scooped out, and the patients gone.

This story sets itself up as more of a manhunt story than a mystery, but it’s pretty obvious where it’s going, especially to the experienced mystery fan. But it’s still a dark, tense, almost creepy story that continues to show Osaka’s move towards the orthodox.

Next on the list is “The Guardian of the Lighthouse,” which once again features the impossible occurring at a lighthouse. The keeper is forced to leave his son on the island alone during a raging storm, but is pleased to see the lighthouse working through the night. But when he returns to the island, his son has vanished into thin air.

This wasn’t published in a mystery magazine, so we have more of a return to the early stories, less deduction that you can solve in advance and more gradual discovery. The discovery is genuinely horrifying, and the whole story almost reminded me of one of those “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” collections, only slightly less mean-spirited and more touching. It also has one of my favorite types of horror, the type where things seem scary until the reveal, and then they get even worse.

“The Demon in the Mine” is the longest story in the collection, and one of the highlights (Sorry JJ!). The story is set in a mine, and Osaka's style can't blunt the brutal nature of life in the mines. I had to wonder while reading if Osaka wasn’t writing from personal experience. The mine is brutal to the workers and the only comfort workers O-Shina and the ironically named Minekeichi have is each other. Unfortunately, this tale of love ends in a massive explosion and fire that leaves Minekeichi sealed behind a massive door, doomed to die either from the flames or the toxic air. At least, that’s what people think before the murders begin.

The men involved in sealing Minekeichi behind the door start turning up bludgeoned to death. At first, suspicion falls on the dead man’s family, but that have alibis for the murders. The other miners have no reason to kill on the behalf of the dead man. Could Minekeichi have survived?

This is very well done, honestly. Perhaps a bit too long, but the atmosphere of desolation in the mine is brutal, and the mystery at the center is very well done. You honestly don’t know which direction Osaka will go here, or if he’ll pull out a third path. The trick is familiar but the misdirection will keep you (it did me) from suspecting it until it’s too late. I do think Osaka doesn’t play fair at an early part of the story, which is quite galling, as he could have played a genius deception that would have put this story on the level of “The Cold Night’s Clearing.” As it is, it falls a little short.

We now have a light comedy story, “The Hungry Letter-Box.” Toki is lovestruck man who posts a letter to his sweetheart, but is horrified to discover, while trying to get a stamp onto it, that the letter has vanished from the solidly locked letterbox. This is probably the lightest story in the collection, and good fun. I do think that the trick could have been better hinted at, but that’s a minor gripe.

The collection ends with “The Ginza Ghost,” which takes place on the modern (at the time of writing) streets of Ginza, a place of coffee shops and nightclubs, and a place where something anti-modern stalks in the alleys and under the bright lights. A young woman is seen being killed inside a tobacco shop, and the body of another woman is found strangled upstairs. At first the police assume that the latter killed the former before taking her own life, since she was wearing the same clothes as the killer, but the evidence shows that she died over an hour before “her” victim! And there is no way for an outsider Did a ghost do it?

No. Of course not. This is a good little story with a simple but plausible solution. TomCat compares it to a Hoch story and I agree...but Hoch would have trimmed the explanation by a few paragraphs, since as it is the whole thing gets bogged down in people repeating themselves.

All in all, an interesting but flawed collection of stories. The main issue is how stoic the narration is in the stories. In the early stories especially it makes for some tedious reading, but it soon picks up with more interesting situations and solutions. And reading it gives one a good overview of the development of the detective story in Japan. All in all, Recommended, with caveats.

The Madman's Room (1990/2017) by Paul Halter

That cover is- I mean, it looks like a horror B-movie poster; a movie about Satanic manuscripts, evil rooms, and psychics. Actually, that describes this book pretty well.

Paul Halter hasn’t had a good time on this blog! It’s a shame, because I enjoy the man. I think he’s certainly imaginative, and personally I’d rather have someone who aims big and fails than someone just churning out average dreck (the former, for one, makes for more entertaining reviews). But usually there’s a false note in his books that make it hard for me to rec them for non-mystery fans. Which is why The Madman’s Room pleases me greatly.

There’s a bit more build up this time around. The first two chapters introduce us to Patrick Nolan and Paula Lyle two young would-be lovers, except for the slight complication that Paula is getting married to Francis Hilton...whose sister Sarah is also getting married to Harris Thorne. Obviously, Patrick and Paula only realized they’re in love right as it’s too late, and the romance (and relevant dialogue) doesn’t get any better from here.

Thankfully, the focus is instead on the plot, and it’s a twisty one. The story goes down at Hatton Manor, the Thorne ancestral home, which has a cursed room that is associated with death and insanity. The original inhabitant was Harvey Thorne, a quiet man who preferred to spend his days in his study writing his manuscript. But when he finally showed it to his father, the man soon fell ill and died (an experience I subject my proofreader to with every post!). Harvey’s response was to further isolate himself, and his room started to give visitors a strange sense of unease. Eventually things reached a climax when Harvey died of a heart attack, apparently in front of an inexplicable water stain in front of his fireplace, proclaiming that his family would pay for their sins in fire. And indeed, the house caught fire and the sole survivor ordered the room sealed.

Back in the modern day, Harris wants to unseal the room to make it his personal study, but the project is opposed by his brother Brian, a supposed psychic who is well-known for his uncanny ability to predict the future. This time he predicts doom when Harris unseals the room, and indeed, doom comes some months later. Harris takes a plunge out the window, and while the evidence seems to indicate it was a jealously-induced suicide, suspicious behavior at the time of the death makes Inspector Hurst suspicious. Not to mention the minor matter of the water stain on the floor…

The Madman’s Room differs from Halter’s normal fare. Normally, a Halter novel has a seemingly endless load of twists and turns that don’t always end somewhere good. This time, the flow is more focused and the tone slightly more somber. We really don’t start getting the usual Halter twists until near the end, and there they come off forced, like Halter realized that things weren’t bizarre enough. The first part of the book is a little slower, due to the needed set-up, but once Harris dies things begin to move at a steadier pace, as the cursed room continues to cause people to become terrified when they pass the threshold. Halter’s explanation for this, as well as the water stains that keep popping up, are excellent.

I enjoyed the character of Brian. Most psychics in mysteries tend to be almost self-consciously fake and malicious, so it was interesting to see one who seemed to not only believe in his own powers but is actually treated with a level of respect. I admit, the explanation for his “predictions” is a little weak, but he was actually my favorite character in the book, although spoilers prevent me from saying if my respect was misplaced.

I remain unsure if this is totally fair-play. I enjoyed the final summing up, but I admit there are few firm clues. It is more an example of “this is the only chain of events that makes sense.” But it’s a complex chain, and I’d be surprised if anyone figured this out all the way. Some of the explanations are slightly weak, but the central murder plot is ingenious, a near-perfect and honestly creepy crime that I can see John Dickson Carr grinning at. There is one alibi that I have seen a couple of reviewers (Sergio and TomCat, whose link I cannot grab at this moment) note was done poorly, but I wasn't bothered by it (probably because I had spotted the clue and drawn the completely wrong conclusion from it so it was in my head!)

The atmosphere of dread is much better than in The Vampire Tree. Halter's actual writing remains dry, but having read two other works that felt so dry the books cracked when I opened them, this is refreshing by contrast. There are a few clunky lines of exposition, including this (paraphrased) bombshell:

“I looked forward and saw them. Doing that! Clearly, before my eyes was that person doing that thing. I fell back in horror as I saw sights unimaginable. Why were they doing that? Could it mean that...Yes. It did. All was clear now. The entire case made perfect sense. What I had seen...but no, I shuddered to think about it. It was very clear to me that I should say nothing about it on-page until that pompous windbag of a detective wore himself out jabbering.”

But I exaggerate. This is honestly a very good book, and I was surprised to learn that it was written so early in Halter’s career. It read like a Halter that had been around the block a few times, had gotten some of the excesses out, learned a little bit more about pacing and cluing, etc. But I’m not objecting. If it weren’t for the lack of a “true” locked room (only an assault later in the book qualifies, as the attacker seems to vanish into thin air, but it is a minor part of the plot) I would probably say it was the most Halter-like Halter. But as it is, it’s just a very good mystery. Recommended, particularly for those new to Halter.

Silent Nights (2015) by Martin Edwards

This isn’t late. It’s actually very early.

For years now, the British Library has been republishing older mysteries and helping to fuel a public interest in this esteemed genre and its history. Martin Edwards has been consulting them in this, and has edited a number of short story collections. This is one of them. Silent Nights is a collection of Christmas mysteries by a variety of authors from the Golden Age. Now, I’ve reviewed anthologies before and they tend to be pretty hit or miss, since you have a bunch of separate stories linked by a vague theme and little else. Thankfully, this one is actually good.

We kick off with “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” by Arthur Conan Doyle, a requirement in any Christmas mystery anthology. Blah blah man’s dinner is stolen, blah blah there’s a jewel in it, you know how this goes. Reading over it, it’s pretty slight; Holmes knows most of what happened from early on, it’s just a matter of tracking down where the goose came from, and he and Watson stumble into the thief by accident. It's more notable for the ending, which plays with an idea you see a lot of in mystery fiction but with a pure pragmatic humanitarian motive rather than sympathy.

Next up is the little known “Parlor Tricks” by Ralph Plummer. From the intro I assumed it would be a locked room story, but it’s not, really. It's about a magician and his audience as they try and challenge him, so more of an expose of magic tricks with a twist at the end. It’s simple and well-done, not much more to say (although I doubt at least one of the explanations).

Raymond Allen’s “A Happy Solution” is just that, the most Christmassy story in the collection. A young woman finds herself accused of trying to swipe some money and pass it off in a love letter, and the usual coincidences make it look bad for her. Luckily, the rat responsible is obvious, but he claims he was watching a chess game, which apparently was so engrossing that no one would notice him getting up and walking away. He was able to give an account of the game, but could he have deduced what happened?

Obviously, yes. This is one of those “reverse chess” problems (where you have a position and have to figure out how it ended up that way) and while I’m sure it’s very interesting to those who like chess, it didn’t do much for me.

Next up is G.K. Chesterton's “The Flying Stars.” This one takes its sweet time getting to the crime, with both it and the resolution happening one after the other. But the build-up to the inevitable theft of the titular stars by the thief Flambeau is easy and well-done, and there’s even an excellent theological and moral point made that doesn’t feel forced or shoehorned, always a risk with these types of stories. Is it fair? I’m not sure. Is the reveal of what you just witnessed fun? Very much so. Must check more of these stories out.

Edgar Wallace's “Stuffing” is more or less “The Blue Carbuncle,” just with stupider names. Seriously, where did he come up with half of them? It moves quickly and has some good description, but was the main disappointment of this collection.

Next up is an anticipated one, H.C. Bailey's “The Unknown Murderer.” This is actually oddly grim for a Christmas story. It opens happily with Reggie Fortune (reluctantly and with much griping) being dragged to a charity event for orphans, but things get dark when a doctor has her throat slashed during the event. And then a child is poisoned….

I’m not sure what I think. On the one hand, it flowed well, there was tension, etc. Yet I’m not sure. Reggie pulls together a connection between events not because the facts point to it, but because this is a mystery so they have to be connected. Nick Fuller claims it’s fairly clued, you just aren't walked step-by-step through the logic.I believe him, but I think I’m still iffy on Mr. Fortune.

J. Jefferson Farjeon, the man who started this British Library crime craze with Mystery in White, is up next with “The Absconding Treasure” in which the creatively named Detective Crook investigates theft done by an apparently loyal toyshop employee. The man is found murdered in the woods, and the identity of the killer is no great shock. A nice, simple story.

Dorothy L. Sayers comes next with “The Necklace of Pearls” which goes down at the estate of a traditional man who likes playing traditional games, but someone took advantage of the fun to swipe his daughter’s pearl necklace. And to make matters more interesting, it can’t be found on the guests or on the grounds. Yes, it’s an impossible theft!

Well, a minor one, but I appreciate it. The answer to where the pearls are hidden is good, and I think Sayers could have clued it a bit more and been fine. The whodunit element is weak, there are too many suspects for a story this short, and Whimsey doesn’t even figure out who was responsible via some genius detection, but just setting up a trap. But it’s still good, on the whole.

Next up is another reread, Margery Allingham’s “The Case is Altered.” Albert Campion is invited to a large Christmas party, but is distracted when his womanizing friend Lance thinks he’s got a letter asking for a meeting from that cute girl in the train on the way in. Even Campion can’t deny that she looked afraid, but why Lance? And why does she want to meet with him?

Like “The Flying Stars,” this one takes some time before getting to any crime, but unlike that story which made clear what was going to happen early, this one takes a tad too long to get to the point. I read this story once already in another Christmas mystery collection and didn’t care much for it, and while this re-read improved my opinion a bit it’s still a tad too slow, and with an obvious culprit. Even Campion admits that the first real clue only comes about five pages from the end! I’ll acknowledge that the reason for the note is clever, however.

Next up is more of a suspense story. “Waxworks” by Ethel Lina White stars a reporter who decides to write an piece about the power of superstition and fear by spending the night in the titular waxworks, where two people have already been found dead. This can in no way go wrong, especially with a possibly murderous coworker lurking in the wings…

Not mystery, but suspense. I freely admit I read this story in a crowded restaurant which may have killed some of the atmosphere, but it was still a good, suspenseful story that didn’t go the way I thought it would, which is always a pleasant surprise. Good story, on the whole.

Next up is Marjorie Bowen’s “Cambric Tea.” Like before, this is more suspense than mystery, as a doctor is called in to the house of a minor lord who’s convinced his wife is poisoning him with her tea. The problem? Said wife was the doctor’s fiancee way back when, so even if she’s responsible (which he isn’t sure of) he may not know what to do about it…

This is actually a pretty good Gothic, with good tension throughout. Where it falls short is in pacing; the plot behind the scenes is revealed too early, and while there is still some mystery about the identity of who’s giving the poison, it becomes too obvious. The resolution also falls a bit flat, being resolved not through the ingenuity of the protagonists, but because a character has a change of heart when he has given no indication that he would have one. But I enjoyed it.

Next up is Joseph Shearing...better known as Marjorie Bowen. Yes, she’s back, this time with “The Chinese Apple.” By all appearances, this is more of a somber story, as a woman makes the painful trek back to her childhood home to pick up her niece. This sparks a rather emotional and honest conversation between the two women, and while this an interesting and tense in its own way, it reveals the game too early. I think that once that element comes in, the reader can see what’s coming. But the ending twist remains good, nonetheless.

We get back into mystery with a good three-story send-off. The first is Nicholas Blake’s “A Problem in White.” The set-up is almost mockingly classic: A snowbound train filled with total strangers--or are they?-- sit around griping and clashing, and when one rebellious soul decides to just walk away he’s found suffocated in the snow. And it’s all very fair too, to the point that the end of the collection details the solution with labeled clues. Which is to the story’s benefit and detriment.

On the one hand, the clues aren't generic, simple things; you do have to read the story and actually pay attention to events and make inferences if you want to solve it, but it is possible to just stumble on something that you know is a clue and solve the whole thing because it only points to one person. I would know because that’s how I solved it. Admittedly not the whole thing, because there are more twists than just whodunit, but it’s an irritating short-circuit.

Next up is Edmund Crispin’s “The Name on the Window.” I read “Beware of the Trains” a while back and while it didn’t suit me for one reason or another, this was much better, combining the dying message with the impossible crime!

The victim this time is an architect who takes a bet to spend some time in the pavilion on his estate, rumored to be haunted by ghosts, because of course it is. He’s barely in there a few minutes when the alarm bell rings, promoting the guests to head out there, where they discover him lying the floor with a stiletto in his back! Unlike most victims of murder, he was kind enough to scrawl the name of his killer,  an ex-Luftwaffe man his daughter is in love with, on a dust-covered window. He’s even nice enough to confirm that yes, he wrote it and yes he meant it before dying. But the issue that brings Inspector Humbleby to Fen is the fact that the floor was coated in dust, and only the victim’s footprints were there!

Needless to say it doesn’t take Fen long to see through the illusion, chiding Humbleby (and the reader!) that he has “Locked rooms on the brain.” The solution is simple and elegant, and the twist behind the dying message well-handled. The only issue is that the motive is only spelled out on the last page, but unlike “The Necklace of Pearls,” the suspect list is short enough so that it doesn’t matter.

The collection wraps up with Leo Bruce’s “Beef for Christmas,” which left me wanting more of a taste of these stories. Beef, a private detective, is invited to the home of a rich man who’s been receiving threatening letters. It seems that like most Golden Age patriarchs, he’s threatening to leave his children with no money, but it’s not because he’s a spendthrift; he’s a major spender who might blow through all of his wealth long before his family can even get a taste of it. It’s a cruel form of torment, and it’s no surprise that a couple of days after the arrival of Beef and his Watson that someone is found hanging in an upstairs room, an apparent suicide.

It’s not, as Beef quickly demonstrates. He also quickly brings the crime home to a cruel killer, and shows Bruce’s skill at cluing in the process. Multiple parts of the story combine to bring the story to a close in a way that reminded me of the best Hoch stores and I loved every moment of it. Only a slight lack of fair-play keeps it down, but it inspired me to seek out more of these.

All in all, this is an excellent little collection of winter murders. They don’t all show their authors at the top of their game, but there are only a few clunkers and many excellent brainteasers. Recommended.

Favorite Sleuths (1965) by John Ernest

At last, a mystery anthology that isn’t terrible.

I’m not sure of the background behind Favorite Sleuths, other than that it was composed by someone named John Ernest. The book is a collection of numerous classic sleuths. Ellery Queen. Miss Marple. The Saint. Tommy Hambledon.

Yeah I don’t know who he is either. But let’s not waste any more time.

First up is Ellery Queen with “Object Lesson.” The setup is almost too mundane for a Great Detective, as he’s been invited to a classroom to give a lecture on the futility of crime in hopes of scaring straight a trio of juvenile delinquents responsible for petty robberies. Of course, he arrives to find that there’s been another robbery from the teacher herself, namely that of an envelope with money for another teacher. So the lecture becomes a demonstration of crime solving techniques, but one where Ellery nearly ends up the fool, as the envelope containing the money vanishes, in spite of a search.

While an impossibility is always fun, this one is a little weak. The location of the money is clever, yes, but we’re never really granted a chance to see when the hiding occurs, and it’s all based on Ellery not doing a very specific thing. Considering how the thief was operating on a strict time limit, this makes sense, but even so. The “whodunit” aspect is also a little arbitrary. But the story is quick fun.

Next up is Philip MacDonald not with Colonel Anthony Gethryn but with Doctor Alcazar“who had no right to the name and even less to the title.” The good doctor is a fortune teller who one day gets a nervous client who refuses to give her answer in detail, even after some cold reading, but does admit her sister is at risk of being betrayed. But with no further info, the good doctor takes her pay and watches her leave...and reads in the newspaper later that she was murdered.

Not much of a mystery here, admittedly: the killer soon becomes obvious, with the only real twist being the cruelty of their plan. The main joy of this story is watching Alcazar unleash a never ending stream of bull to get what he wants. He strikes a good balance between scammer and charming rogue: He’s solving this case for the reward money, but doesn’t exploit the loved ones of the victim to do it. My main issue is that he never runs into an actual obstacle, he just blows over everything in his way with little effort. I’d like to read more of him, but apparently he only starred in one other story.

Next up is Dorothy L. Sayers with “The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba.” Oddly, this isn’t much of a mystery, more revolving around the exploits of a secret society of thieves and how Whimsey (presumed dead at the beginning but I highly doubt that’s a spoiler) takes them down. It’s good, but like the other Sayers story I’ve reviewed, very arch and polite and British, beyond vague implications of the group’s tortures. And the fate of the leader, geez. Maybe Jigsaw read this story for inspiration?

“A Window for Death” is Rex Stout’s entry, and it plays the whodunit game….and the howdunit one. David Fife comes to Wolfe with a case of maybe-maybe-not murder. His estranged brother had returned, now a rich man thanks to a uranium discovery, but soon expired from a bad case of pneumonia. Nothing major, but another brother has become convinced it was murder, based on some empty hot water bags, but how can one arrange death by pneumonia in a New York apartment?

I’ve read one Wolfe story before this, but this worked quite a bit better. Considering how much of the story is taken up with people saying “This isn’t murder.” over and over, it flows well. The whodunit aspect is a bit weaker however, with what I almost swear is a contradiction is Wolfe’s reasoning.

“The Case of the Perfect Maid” is Christie’s contribution, and is one of the later Miss Marple stories. This time, the problem is a purely domestic one for the old maid of fiction, as her maid notes that a relative has been fired from her job due to a minor issue requiring Marple to go in and preserve her job. The employers have little interest, as they’ve found a wonderful new maid, perfect in every way….

Obviously, this is a simple enough story, with a solution that will seem familiar to the Christie fan, but it's still nice, relaxed piece of detection. Which of course just makes it all the more irritating when the back cover gives the crime away. Not the solution, but the crime itself, which considering how much of the story is build-up to said crime, is quite an offense.

Leslie Charteris with Simon “The Saint” Templar is up next with mostly unexplored territory in mystery fiction: The Loch Ness Monster. The Saint finds himself drawn into this old Scottish mystery when animals start turning up mutilated, resulting in him rooming with a pair of Nessie enthusiasts. Of course, there’s a human hand behind it all, and while the story is well-told, the solution won’t bring any surprises (and in fact, in the height of my arrogance, I'll state that my solution was much more unexpected!)

The next two stories have one thing in common: They both have premises that John Dickson Carr would drool at and they’re both disappointing. Mannings Coles’ “Handcuffs Don’t Hold Ghosts” has a group of ghost hunters vanish during a live radio broadcast of their investigation of a seemingly haunted estate. Sadly, the explanation is simple, lacking any real deduction.

Albert Campion stars in Margery Allingham’s “The Man in the Window.” The titular man is an actor, well-known for sitting in the same chair at the same window at the same club for years. He practically lives in the chair...and then dies in it, of totally natural causes. A time of sadness for all, but the body is barely removed and the papers have barely been circulated when he shows up again, alive and well.

Again, an interesting premise, and there’s more deductions than in the previous story, but the story is a little too simple for my tastes.

Next up is Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason in “The Case of the Crying Swallow.” The longest story in the collection kicks off with a colonel coming to Mason to set up a defense for his wife. It seems that valuable jewelry was stolen, shortly after said wife insisted on cutting off the insurance. Now she’s vanished, leaving only a cryptic message behind, cuing Mason’s investigation.

This is actually my first experience with a Perry Mason story, and man, it was fun. No courtroom drama here, just Mason investigating and trying to decipher a cryptic note with the help of the small army he apparently has on call to investigate every lead that comes up. Not to mention beholding his probably unlawyery behaviors. You see, when most men stumble on a dead body that their client might be implicated in, they call the police and go from there. Perry Mason is not most men. Perry Mason wipes his fingerprints (and when called out on destroying evidence just hand waves and says, “Eh, I’m sure the killer did it already.”), then finds his client, and only then does he report anything.

Considering how fun the the story is, it disappoints me somewhat to note that the detection isn’t as good as it could be. It's more about watching the gradual unraveling of events then true detection, with the final summation coming out in a rush, and with the killer barely getting any page time. But it was so much fun that I’m hoping the rest of the novels are like that.

The final story of the collection is also my first encounter with H. C. Bailey, “The Little Dog.” Bailey's Reggie Fortune is called in to give his opinion of the death of the black sheep of a family who was found drowned in a boathouse, although the victim was kind enough to tie his legs beforehand (in fairness, the idea is that he did so in order to avoid instinctively swimming to the surface, but still). While Fortune can’t officially say it was murder, he was reason to think so, especially the matter of the dog he found near-death outside the boathouse…

After hearing so much about Bailey (thank you Nick Fuller), I was worried that he had been overhyped for me. This story actually worked well, with plenty of logical deduction...in the first bit. At the three-quarters mark we suddenly take a hard right into Victorian melodrama land, with shootings and suicide as our finale. It’s never even explained how Fortune came to his conclusions. But I still enjoyed it, and am cautiously optimistic for more.

On the whole, an enjoyable little anthology. Sadly, while the stories are of even quality, nothing really excels or stands out, and it’s not a must get. But if you can find it cheaply or in a library, it’s Recommended, with caveats.