The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009/20??) by Arthur Porges (edited by Richard Simms)

A quick explanation of that second date in the title: There are two editions of this collection floating around. See this review from TomCat and this one from Christian Henricksson; the latter reviews two additional stories, “The Scientist and the Missing Pistol” and “The Scientist and the Impassible Gulf.” The one on Amazon is the full collection, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re looking for it used or something similar. I’m reviewing the updated collection.

I need a list of science jokes or something for short story collections like this.

Some time back, I looked at No Killer Has Wings, a collection of short mysteries by Arthur Porges. I enjoyed the collection, but felt that it was a tad too short. Thankfully, I also had two other Porges collections by the time I read it. This is one of them.

The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey is a collection of short stories dealing with the investigations of the titular scientist, who was crippled in a mountaineering accident (except in “The Scientist and the Impassible Gulf,” where it gets retconned into a car accident that also killed his wife), but who still uses his brain to solve the variety of impossible problems brought to him by Lieutenant Trask. Grey often makes use of his son Edgar, a teenage genius who serves as Grey’s eyes, ears, and legs when crime scenes need to be investigated. Unlike No Killer Has Wings, the stories here are mostly reverse whodunits; there’s very rarely questions about who, the question is how. The stories are much shorter than in the previous (actually published later) collection, but there are more of them.

“The Scientist and the Bagful of Water” is more of a “howtoproveit” than anything. A man murders his business partner and tries to pass it off as a freak accident caused by a bag of water being dropped on the victim’s head from a hotel. The question is simply how Grey can prove his guilt. The solution is okay, but you the reader probably won’t solve it.

“The Scientist and the Wife Killer” is more interesting. Samuel Clayton is “a fox” who has already disposed of two wives in “accidents” and has decided to up the ante for his third wife. He rings her up on the phone, but when she doesn’t respond, he summons the police to investigate. They break down her locked bathroom door to find her dead of electrocution…but there are no electrical appliances in the room to shock her. Once one gets around the question of asking why Clayton would make this third death an obvious murder instead of just going the accident route again, the story itself is solid. Once again, not much of a chance of solving this on your own, but it’s fascinating to sit back and watch Grey unravel it all.

“The Scientist and the Vanished Weapon” begins a story type that will be seen many more times in this collection: A killer makes a weapon vanish. This time the weapon is a .38 that a delinquent unloaded into a police officer before fleeing into an apartment. The killer was cornered, but the pistol has vanished. Once again, the explanation is based on something that you might not know about, but is honestly pretty cool anyway. One gets the impression when reading these stories that Porges would read about or see these interesting phenomena and try to find ways to work them into a story.

“The Scientist and the Obscene Crime” is more in line with “...Bagful of Water.” Grey is brought in to help a woman receiving obscene phone calls from a stalker who is just clever enough to evade police attention. The way that Grey deals with him is expected, especially since the clue is given a little bluntly.

The next story is both the longest in the collection and also the most gruesome. “The Scientist and the Multiple Murder” opens with the discovery of eight executives floating dead in a rooftop pool. The doors were either locked or watched, and the roof could not be accessed from other roofs. The solution to this one is vaguely guessable, but still requires some technical knowledge to fully piece together.

“The Scientist and the Invisible Safe” pits Grey against a clever jewel thief who is always able to conceal his stolen goods in his hotel room in spite of police searches. The hiding place is clever, although a key piece of information about the thief that might have made it a more fair mystery isn’t given until near the end. This is the case for most of the mysteries in this collection; they’re similar to No Killer Has Wings in that they’re more like problems to observe being solved than a straightforward mystery with clues to be pieced together, and that means that the clues are often withheld.

“The Scientist and the Two Thieves” is more of the same. A religious fanatic makes off with a small fortune in diamonds and is cornered in a blind alley. When the police move in for the arrest, they find that the diamonds have vanished. Grey actually manages to pull out two solutions for this one, and it’s even possible to deduce the second method, in my opinion. I do feel that the first one could have been better hinted at. Considering what I said about the last story and the collection as a whole, this might seem like an annoying and persistent complaint, but when the author can clue something fairly and doesn’t, I get frustrated.

The most unique story in the collection is “The Scientist and the Time Bomb.” Fifteen years ago, the home of Horace Colman, which his grandfather had planned to leave as a public museum, was effectively stolen from the family by the city and turned into a paying exhibit. Cut to the present day when a letter from Colman turns up, in which he claims to have planted a bomb before his death to blow the house up…with a fifteen year fuse. The main question is how he could set up a bomb with a fuse like that. The solution is certainly...unique, and again shows Porges’ knack for taking seemingly irrelevant facts and making them the centerpiece of his mysteries.

“The Scientist and the Platinum Chain” is another vanishing weapon story. The killer murdered his employer, an aggressive and short-tempered man, with a platinum chain, but somehow the chain vanished from a closed and watched room. Another good problem, although when I first read it, I felt that the police should have found the hiding spot. This feeling mostly faded on later re-reads, and I’m willing to admit it was probably down to me misunderstanding what the solution was trying to say.

“The Scientist and the Exterminator” feels like “Dead Drunk” from No Killer Has Wings. Another unpleasant man, this time an unrepentant warlord in the States for medical treatment, is gassed in his locked and guarded hotel room. The hotel itself was filled with guards and was being monitored from the outside, not that it stopped the killer from delivering a dose of cyanide gas into the room and leaving no trace behind. This time the solution feels clunky; the stories before and after this might have solutions that incorporate unfamiliar scientific principles, but they were explained in a way that was clear and understandable. With this one, I found the solution somewhat hard to visualize and understand, since there are a few moving parts around what is admittedly a simple idea.

“The Scientist and the Missing Pistol” is yet another vanishing weapon story. Two men meet in an office, and one claims that the other was shot by a sniper while writing a confession to embezzlement. Trask is suspicious of the story, but no weapon is found in the room, and the other man had no opportunity to dispose of it or pass it off to someone else. This story annoyed me a bit, since, once again, I felt that Porges could have very easily hinted at this one, but the solution itself is satisfying.

The next story breaks from the murder pattern, but still has an object vanishing from an enclosed space. “The Scientist and the Stolen Rembrandt” has Grey putting his brain to work explaining how a fence, cornered on his fancy yacht after a sea chase, can make the titular painting disappear. Another story with a good solution that could have been excellently clued if it were were adapted to a visual medium. The “The Purloined Letter” references aren’t quite 1:1 with this story, but I see what Porges was going for.

The final officially published story is a good finale for the series as a whole. “The Scientist and the Impassible Gulf” opens with Bryan Jennings Latimer (real subtle there Porges), a gentle if henpecked man, murdering his wife in a rage after she sends one of his model cannons into a gulch. Latimer knows he’ll be blamed but comes up with a plan, unseen by the reader, that leaves his wife’s body on the other side of a canyon, the surrounding ground unmarked by any footprints. This is a personal favorite of mine. For one, I like how Porges shows the build-up to the murder, which has always been offscreen until this point. This time he gives us an interesting murderer and victim, showing a murder that is both unjustified but understandable. I also like the “how”; this is one of the few stories where I feel that the average reader can solve the crime, or at least grasp the broad strokes about what happened. There is a little bit of luck that the murderer’s plan hinges on, but it’s pointed out in the story, so I can forgive it.

The next three stories were never published until now. “The Scientist and the Poisoner” opens with the poisoning of a nice old man in a crowded restaurant. Trask is angered by the death, but the death seems impossible. Not only was no poison found in the food, but no one approached the victim beyond an old waiter who has no motive for the murder (and no, he didn’t do it). The solution is clever enough, but the cluing doesn’t work for a very odd reason; it is partly based on a cultural reference that I do not think that most readers today would get. I didn’t, at least.

“The Scientist and the Heavenly Alibi” is a story that doesn’t match up to its awesome title. Trask suspects a rancher of murdering his business partner, but the man has a picture showing him two hundred miles away from the crime scene, and the sunlight in the picture seems to verify the time it was taken. It doesn’t take Grey long to break the alibi, but something about this story just doesn’t click with me. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like this should have been seen through sooner. Also, we have another example of Porges withholding a vital fact until the end.

The final story ends the collection on a bit of a plop. “The Scientist and the One-Word Clue” has an investigative reporter being stabbed to death in his office. The office was ransacked, but the victim was able to leave a note with only one word on it: “Thais.” Grey is the only one who can solve the case...but really, Trask was phoning this one in. Considering how most of the stories up to this point made the point that Trask is a thorough cop who leaves no stone unturned, the fact that he missed this one is disappointing.

All and all, I actually did like this collection. While I do sound nitpicky, it’s because I saw more pure mystery potential that to me seemed squandered. Also, the stories do start to seem familiar when you read them all in a row; even the solutions can feel like variations on the same idea. But I liked the way that Porges managed to work science into these mysteries in a way that shows that he had a genuine love of science and had the ability to make it interesting to others. Like I said earlier, these are “problems” more than “mysteries.” Read them with that in mind and you’ll get more enjoyment out of them.

Recommended, but don’t read too many at once!

The 8 Mansion Murders (1989/2018) by Takumaru Abiko (translation by Ho-Ling Wong)

It’s an infinite Mobius loop.

After way too long, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Takemaru Abiko’s The 8 Mansion Murders, the most recent Japanese translation from Locked Room International at the time of this post. Like Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders and Szu-Yen Lin’s Death in the House of Rain, there’s a heavy focus on the mansion the story takes place in. This mansion is the titular 8 Mansion, named because it looks like a figure 8 when viewed from above. It was the brainchild of Kikuo Hachisuka, current president of Hachisuka Construction. And it’s also the inspiration for a murder.

Kikuichiro Hachisuka, the above’s son, is woken in the night by a phone call telling him to come to the covered gallery over the house’s courtyard. His mute daughter, Yukie, and her sign language teacher, Mitsuko Kawamura, witness Kikuichiro enter the gallery from Yukie’s room. They notice someone standing in the room of Yusaku Yano, the son of the servants, before Kikuichiro is shot down...by a crossbow bolt.

The case is taken up by police inspector Kyozo Hayami, and it looks black against Yusaku. He claims to have been sleeping in his bedroom with the door locked, but Yukie and Mitsuko are clear that the killer was standing in his window. And he knows how to use a crossbow. And his personal one “disappeared” a few days before the murder. Thankfully for him, Yukie believes in his innocence and is a beautiful girl that causes Kyozo to fall in love at first sight. He can’t solve the murder alone however, and has to rely on his younger siblings, the realist Shinji and the more imaginative Ichio.

Unlike the other shin honkaku novels I’ve read up to this point, The 8 Mansion Murders tries to be funny. There’s more wit in the dialogue, the characters (especially Kyozo and his siblings) try and play off each other more, etc. It doesn’t fully work for me, I admit. I don’t know how much of this is due to the style of the comedy (a good bit of it is physical, especially the comedy surrounding Kyozo’s hapless assistant Kinoshita, who more or less is crippled over the course of the story) and how much of it is due to the relatively dry writing/translation. It’s certainly more entertaining to read than The Ginza Ghost, but I can see someone being annoyed at how “off” the writing can feel compared to English works. This extends to the characters, who don’t really come to life outside of the main cast. The only one who stood out to me at all was the victim’s younger brother. The pacing feels odd in places; the main example that stands out to me is the summation grinding to a halt so we can get a locked room lecture. I don’t mind locked room lectures normally, but not when they’re used to kill time.

It’s annoying, because honestly the mystery is very well done. Jack Hamm in the comments of this review from The Green Capsule put it well; there’s not one big surprise, more like a set of smaller surprises that link together. (Interestingly, Soji Shimada notes this trend among more recent shin honkaku writers in his introduction, although there it’s in the context of those writers freely taking ideas from previous authors and using them in different ways.) There’s a second impossible murder about halfway through the book, again committed in a locked room, and this time the evidence implies that the killer was standing outside the window in mid-air. I honestly feel that the “how” for both murders is very possible to solve. I got the general gist behind the first murder and had the best possible feeling about the second: the feeling that I could have solved it if I had been willing to think about it a bit more. There’s also a clever explanation about why the killer had to move the body, even though I thought it wasn’t used to its fullest potential. The killer is also a nice surprise, but their plan is utterly bonkers, I just don’t believe that it would work, and they never do the thing that would help their plan. The motive also boils down to “I was mad, mad, MAD!!!” which is disappointing.

But all in all, I enjoyed it. I had my issues, and I can see someone finding them to be a deal-breaker. But I still get a thrill when thinking about the simplicity of that second death, and I can see someone new to mysteries having a blast while someone familiar enjoys the in-jokes and the well-put together locked rooms. Ultimately, I’ll give it a Recommended, but the more critical can think of it as a Recommended, with Caveats.

No Killer Has Wings: The Casebook of Dr. Joel Hoffman (2017) by Arthur Porges (edited by Richard Simms)

Killers don’t drink Red Bull.*

Another blast from the past here. Back in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries, I read a story by Arthur Porges, “No Killer Has Wings,” starring Dr. Joel Hoffman. I really liked it, but assumed that I would never get to read the rest of his stories, or at least that it would be a while before I could. But I hoped, and lo and behold Richard Simms Publications came out with a collection of the Dr. Hoffman stories, as well as many other collections of Porges’ work.

No Killer Has Wings contains all six of the Dr. Hoffman stories, and I admit I wish that there had been a little more here. I’m not at all blaming Richard Simms for not bringing Porges back from the dead to write more stories, but the length makes it harder for me to recommend this collection to my friends because of how short it is. I had the same issue with Edward D. Hoch’s The Spy Who Read Latin. But I’ll get back to Hoch later in this review.

Dr. Hoffman is a pathologist who’s often called in by Lieutenant Ader to fill in for the political hack of a local coroner (which Porges reminds you of once a story). The series kicks off with a gut-punch for Hoffman in “Dead Drunk.” He and Ader arrive at the scene of a brutal car accident that has left a child dead in the street. The reckless driver is a rich playboy, one Gordon Vance Whitman III, who’s quick to fall on the “diabetic coma!” excuse for his recklessness and whose father was smart enough to tie his son’s money up in such away that even suing him for damages is near-impossible. Needless to say, Hoffman isn’t shedding tears when the playboy turns up dead in his locked apartment, but Ader’s gut instinct makes him send the body to Hoffman for an autopsy. And what he discovers turns this into an impossible crime.

Whitman got a dose of phosgene gas in his modern, urban apartment. Phosgene gas is a gas used in World War I that gives the victim a coughing fit before turning into hydrochloric acid in their lungs. Not a pleasant way to die, and also a baffling one: the gas was only found in Whitman’s lungs and not in his apartment, meaning that the gas had to have been introduced directly into his lungs...which is impossible since the apartment was locked. The killer is obvious, but how was it done?

That “How was it done?” question fuels this collection, and is something that needs to be kept in mind if one wants to really enjoy these stories. I was under the impression that Porges was similar to one of my favorite mystery authors, Edward D. Hoch, but I think that there’s a difference: Hoch usually focus on a chain of logic in his mysteries, A--->B--->C, which in turn leads to D. etc. Or at least A+B+C=D. As JJ notes, Porges tends to focus more on a single problem, usually the “how,” and the other aspects of the mystery are secondary. That’s not to say that his stories aren’t as good as Hoch’s, but that they have a different focus. Once I got out of that mindset, I enjoyed these stories. “Dead Drunk”’s solution might not be solvable to the average person, but I enjoyed seeing it solved, and I felt like I learned something from it (contrast this with The Invisible Bullet, which I enjoyed but didn’t really feel more educated about science after finishing it.) And the ending brought a smile.

“Horse Collar Homicide” is more of the same. Another rich jerk dead, this one an old hidebound keeping his family under his thumb at all times and obsessing over the old days of gentlemen (who don’t work and are forbidden from doing so) and games, the latter of which proved fatal. The old man was sticking his head through a horse collar and making faces (it doesn’t make much more sense in context) when he suddenly had a seizure and died, right as the lights flickered. The death was not caused by electrocution, since the collar couldn't run a current anyway, and none of the victim’s relatives were anywhere near him at the time. So how was it done? This time, there’s a little more focus on the “who?” question, but it should be obvious long before the summation. The solution is more technical than “Dead Drunk,” and I found it harder to follow.

“Circle in the Dust” is an unusual story, and isn’t a locked room problem. An old woman is beaten to death in her home, and while it looks like a sordid everyday crime, a single circle in the dust indicates that the killer was after one of the woman’s many knick-knacks. But which one? Her nephew claims not to remember what was there, and the only clue is the circle. Once again, science is involved in figuring out what the object was, and once you know that the killer is obvious. While I will tentatively agree with JJ when he questions the science (I think I know what Porges was going for and it made sense while I was reading it) I will say that I really liked this. I enjoy these unusual problems that you can really only find in short stories.

“No Killer Has Wings” is the gem of this collection. A colonel is found battered to death on his private beach. The beach is surrounded by rocks, the tide is too rough for a killer to approach that way, and the only footprints on the beach are that of the dog...and the colonel’s hot-tempered nephew, who would lose his inheritance if he married. Said nephew’s walking stick was also the murder weapon, and things don’t look too good for him. Luckily, his fiancee is Ader’s niece, and she manages to pressure him into letting Hoffman investigate. This time, the solution doesn’t hinge upon science, but is simple and plausible. I want to say that it almost feels too simple, but I think there’s an elegance to it, and I can see someone who fails to solve it kicking themselves and grinning. A “fun” story, if that makes sense.

“A Puzzle in Sand” is a sequel of sorts. The family from the previous story has moved out and rented out their home, only for another impossible crime to take place on the same beach. This time, a well-regarded man is found shot to death on the beach. It turns out that he was far from a model citizen in the past and was being blackmailed by a rogue named Garrison. Garrison is now the main suspect in the murder, as his were the only other footprints on the beach. However, the case is so black that Ader is succumbing to fears that something else is going on (Porges is kind enough to point out how he was nowhere near this reluctant when it came to his niece’s fiance) and consults Hoffman.

Hoffman finds out that something is indeed going on, but it lacks the simple ingenuity of “No Killer Has Wings.” I still enjoyed it, and I might have been influenced because I caught the solution early on. Where the story stands out is in the ending. It’s surprisingly dark, and while one can say that justice is being done, I felt unsettled by it, so good work there. I think that Hoffman exaggerates how helpless he is though.

“Birds of a Feather” is the final story here, and a good one. This time the victim is a loan shark who apparently died of cyanide poisoning while changing a tire. Ordinarily it would be assumed that he was poisoned by food or aspirin, but there’s no trace of anything in his stomach...and there’s also the small matter of the poisoned canary at the victim’s side. This felt a little underwhelming compared to the previous two stories, but it was still a solid story. I do think that it is a little easy to tumble to what happened if just by process of elimination of the possibilities.

All in all, a really great one here. Excellent stories, and while they weren’t all winners, they were all satisfying to read, with some amusing narration. I have two more collections of his stories and you will see both of them on here soon, ideally, we’ll see. My track record on this is poor.

Obviously, Recommended, bordering on Highly.

*Sadly, not my joke.

The Invisible Bullet (2016) by Max Rittenberg (edited by Mike Ashley)

A nostalgia trip this time.

Way back when I reviewed Mike Ashley’s The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries, a massive anthology of impossible crime (and a few perfect crime) stories. Sadly, the original review was lost since Blogspot interpreted my efforts to add tags as code for “Delete this post.” I could re-upload it, but frankly it was pretty poor so I might just rewrite it entirely. But I digress. One of the stories that I liked from that anthology was “The Mystery of Sevenoaks Tunnel” by Max Rittenberg. The story stared a scientist named Magnum investigating a suspicious “suicide,” and I really enjoyed it. It was well-written and somewhat humorous. But I think that many of us who liked that story didn’t think we would ever see anything more from this obscure author. Thankfully, Mike Ashley provided.

The Invisible Bullet & Other Strange Cases of Magnum, Scientific Consultant is a 2016 collection of all of the Magnum stories. (That’s just Magnum, by the way. Not Dr. Magnum, not Magnum P. I., not The Artist Formerly Known As Magnum, just Magnum. The fact that no one laughs in his face every story after hearing that name is a testament to his brilliance.) The stories are early mystery stories, so there’s less focus on the pure detection we’re used to, and more sitting back and watching Magnum solve the cases with science. Or by making his assistant Ivor Meredith do it, either way. The stories are actually a fair mix of thefts, scams, and other crimes and non-crimes in addition to murder. So let’s get started.

“The Mystery of Sevenoaks Tunnel” starts things off with Magnum brought in by Stacey, a lawyer, in order to demolish a suicide. The victim was in fear for his life and this fear might have led him to jump out of a moving train. His niece suspects that his death was engineered by whomever he was scared of, but the dust in the train car show that he was alone, meaning that the insurance company won’t pay out. The method of murder is semi-clever, and there’s even some vague cluing to that effect, but what elevates the story is the actual writing. It flows well and there’s an undercurrent of humor to it, especially when it comes to Magnum himself. He actually falls short and gets his ego bruised in this story, and it makes the character more entertaining to read about.

“The Queer Case of the Cyanogen Poisoning” is a mass poisoning story. The family of Sir Julian Boyd is suffering from gastric pain and other symptoms, but there seems to be no way for them to be taking poison, as all the food and drink is tested. Magnum ends up freeloading there for a week to solve it. A decent story, and I even think that the reader has a fair chance of figuring it out, even if they don’t understand the exact science involved.

“The Bond Street Poisoning Bureau” is more of a thriller than a mystery. This time Magnum is hired to match wits with “Kahmos,” a seeming mind reader and psychic whose advice to his clients in need tend to be “Poison.” Sadly, this is the modern era, where the police can’t just beat him and kick him out of the country, they need actual evidence of wrongdoing. It is fun to see Magnum match wits with this poisonous Moriarty, and I’m willing to overlook the lack of traditional detection because of it. There’s even a (basic) impossible crime near the end where Kahmos seems to escape his watched hideout, but the solution is nothing special (although I like how Magnum eliminates a false solution).

“The Mystery of the Vanishing Gold” has Magnum hired by the Bank of England itself to deal with a madman who claims to be able to disintegrate gold...and has already seemingly already done so with gold that was being transported and under constant watch. It’s a good story, but there’s really no chance of being able to “solve” it; the explanation as is feels a little under-explained and I’m not sure how one aspect of it is supposed to work. But the fun is in watching Magnum bluster his way past everyone, and his reaction to the culprit is amusing.

“The Secret of the Radium Maker” has Magnum matching wits with an inventor who claims to have developed a way of making radium. This one is harder to describe, since the actual scheme going on isn’t clear until the very end. I enjoyed it though.

“The Invisible Bullet” is the central gem of this collection, a story that, if was better known and/or was more focused on detection could have been a classic of the early impossible crime. Magnum is walking down the street when he hears a shot from a nearby gymnasium. The scene is inexplicable: a man is dead behind some curtains, and the witnesses in the room all attest to hearing the shots but not seeing the killer escape. Making matters worse, the scene implies that the sergeant in charge had some role in the death, either in helping the killer escape or in concealing a suicide on his premises. Thankfully. his bravery in charging towards the gunshots impresses Magnum enough to defend him.

Like I said, this could easily have been a minor classic had it been better known. The solution is not dependent on some obscure scientific principle and had there been a few tweaks here or there it could have been very fair play. As it is, we can lament what could have been. But the final page of the story gives me a chance to talk about something that I really liked about these stories: Magnum isn’t infallible. It would have been easy to have Magnum as an unstoppable force barreling over every obstacle, but instead he’s often baffled, often motivated by hurt ego, and sometimes he only solves the case by chance. I’m not a huge fan of arrogant detectives, so this made the whole collection much better and entertaining; the narration doesn’t let him off the hook, and sometimes he flat-out bungles the case….

Like he does in “The Rough Fist of Reason.” Magnum is hired by a young woman to help free her aunt from the influence of a psychic who claims to have photographed her astral projection. It’s a good story, although the explanation is based on science that you have no chance of grasping. What makes it good is the portrayal of the psychic at the center of the plot and how the story resolves itself. Like I said in my review of The Madman’s Room, I’m used to psychics that are mustache-twirlingly evil and fake, so it’s interesting to see one handled with a little more ambiguity. And the ending is powerful, showing how Magnum can badly misread and misunderstand a situation.

“The Three Ends of the Thread,” like “The Secret of the Radium Maker,” is a little hard to describe. A man calls upon Magnum to look into an inexplicable event: An important document in the client’s possession suddenly vanishes in spite of being locked inside a secure safe. It doesn’t take long for Magnum to produce a solution, but there’s a twist in the tail this time. All I’ll say is that it amused me.

“The Empty Flask” is a murder tale. A Baron is found dead in his hotel room, apparently due to poison. The only evidence is a broken flask, but bizarrely it’s completely empty, even though the victim’s chauffeur swears it was filled. Once again, the story hinges on science, but it feels more grounded and down-to-earth then in some of the earlier stories. My main issue is that we get the backstory to the crime info-dumped on us at the end.

Next, we have “The Secret Analysis,” one of three kidnapping stories in this collection. They’re all kinda meh. This time, Meredith is the target as the kidnappers want to get their hands on a report Magnum made to the Admiralty about a torpedo depth charge. While the story is interesting for showing us that Magnum does actually care about his assistant (and for the odd suggestion from the police when his disappearance is first reported that temporary memory loss is common!) other than that it’s not very interesting.

“The Mystery of Box 218” was one of the more memorable stories in this collection. So memorable in fact, that I lost all memory of it and had to re-read it again. This time, Magnum is called in to investigate the disappearance of a necklace from a secured and guarded safe. On the one hand, it is interesting to read a story where Magnum has very little to go on. This is present in some other stories, but in this one it honestly feels like Magnum has to struggle a bit here, which is refreshing. But the plot flat-out doesn’t work. It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but I’ll just say that while the theft itself might work, I cannot see how one person involved would not notice something amiss.

“The Message of the Tide” is another kidnapping story, and apparently the last Magnum story Rittenberg wrote which makes me wonder what it’s doing at this point in the collection. The victim is a Canadian businessman who manages to send out a desperate cry for help written on a bottle label: he has been held hostage for over a year and kept alive to sign checks for his captors. While the premise is horrific, and there is some joy to be found in watching Magnum resolve a seemingly insoluble problem, the story itself is a little bland.

“The Secret of the Tower House” has Magnum playing House, M.D. A man comes to Magnum to have him look into the mysterious poisoning of his dogs, but Magnum quickly realizes that the dogs have died of plague, forcing him to find out the source before word gets out during the Coronation. It’s certainly an unusual story, and could even be seen as an impossible problem (as the dogs were under quarantine after an overseas trip), but on the whole this isn’t defined well enough to be a solid problem, and the story itself is a little bit too short. However, I still enjoy the story, both for the creepy last line and for the unusual plot.

“Dead Leaves” is another unconventional story. A scientist writes a will in favor of his fiancee before he rudely gets run over by a motor-bus. The will has vanished and since his family opposed the marriage, there is concern that the fiancee might get cut out, much to the horror of the much-wed lawyer Stacey. He brings in Magnum under the logic that since all scientists think alike Magnum can find out where the will might have been hidden. Once again, not fair play, but it is nice to see Magnum in action when he has little to go on, and the ending shows a softer side to him.

Next up, we have a murder tale, “The Three Henry Clarks.” A man named Henry Clark drops dead of poison in front of Magnum and Inspector Callaghan, the second man named Henry Clark to die in as many days. When a third Henry Clark winds up dead, Magnum investigates. This is actually a pretty solid story, and I’d even go as far as to say that it’s almost fair play. I think that a careful reader can figure out the method of murder and roughly why and how the killer is targeting Henry Clarks, although the full backstory is infodumped at the end.

“Cleansing Fire” is a personal favorite, even though I admit that some of the other stores in this collection are better. Magnum is brought in to look at a suspicious fire that burned down a factory. The insurance is refusing to pay up, but since they lack anything like “evidence that the fire was deliberate,” they expect Magnum to show how it was done. Sadly, there’s not much suspense about whether the fire was deliberate or not, meaning that the rest of the story is Magnum figuring out who set the fire and why. Again, as a mystery it’s nothing impressive, but I enjoyed the story and the minor horror of the solution.

The collections ends with “Red Herrings,” yet another kidnapping story. This one is slightly more interesting, as the kidnapping of the Home Secretary looks like it could have only taken place in broad daylight on a busy London street. However, the problem is again too vaguely defined to really be solved, and the story spends a little too much time on the (admittedly clever) plan of the kidnappers to collect the ransom than on the investigation.

All in all, I liked this collection. For all my griping about fair play, I understand that this was written before mysteries were being held to that standard. I will say that I found the science somewhat vague at times, which is an issue when your collection is about a scientific consultant. But I enjoyed the unique stories on display here, and the writing and narration were well-done. Recommended.

Magpie Murders (2017) by Anthony Horowitz

This post is only half-finished.

Other than watching Operation: Stormbreaker when I was younger (apparently it was bad, not that I noticed), I never had any experience with Anthony Horowitz. I knew that he wrote the Alex Rider books, and later learned that he created Foyle’s War (which I haven’t seen) and did episodes of Poirot (ditto). But then he comes out with this book called Magpie Murders and everyone loves it. Now, I was reluctant. As a firm and irrational skeptic about modern attempts at mystery, I held off, but after seeing good things said about his two most recent mystery novels I decided to take the plunge.

The book takes place in the 1950s, in a little village called Saxby-on-Avon. It’s a quiet little town, with the only real excitement recently being the funeral of Mary Blakiston, a servant in the home of local lord Sir Magnus Pye. The village shows up for the funeral, but some are quite fine with her death, as she was an infamous busybody. However, her death was a tragic accident, falling down the stairs in Sir Pye’s locked house. But this is a traditional village mystery, and some are wondering, especially since her son Robert is known for stabbing a man…

These wagging tongues drive his fiancee Joy Sanderling to Atticus Pund, a survivor of the camps who is known as an amateur detective. She wants him to come and disprove the rumors and show that Mary’s death was an accident, but unbeknownst to her Pund is dying and has his own project to complete, and besides he can’t do much if the death really was just an accident. Joy goes away disappointed, but Pund finds himself in Saxby-on-Avon anyway when Sir Pye turns up dead in his home, his head chopped off with a sword…

I actually liked this one. I will say that I felt that Horowitz didn't have (or if he did he didn't show it here) Christie’s gift of being able to quickly give information about setting and characters and still keep things moving. It stood out to me because I just read The Mysterious Affair at Styles right before this, although in that book at least some of that brevity can be put down to Christie’s focus on the plot. Horowitz felt a little blunter about the exposition, but still does a good job at getting into the heads of the various suspects and giving them plausible and interesting reasons to go Highlander on Pye. Horowitz is also good at leading you into assuming you know some upcoming plot twists, only to have it be something else entirely--and I got caught once or twice by it. He does a good job of keeping the mystery complex yet clear. However, there is one huge issue with the book.

The last chapter is missing.

You see, Magpie Murders is also the most recent mystery novel by the eccentric Alan Conway. His agent Susan Ryeland is annoyed at the seeming mistake when she receives the first draft, but that annoyance turns to horror when Conway turns up dead, an apparent suicide. “Apparent” being the key word here, as Conway’s sister thinks that things don’t add up. And before long, she’s convinced Susan as well. But was does the missing chapter of Magpie Murders have to do with it?

Yes, there are two fully-fledged mystery novels in this book, and they’re both pretty good. Susan’s narrative is a little simpler than the Magpie narrative, and I’m not sure if that was intentional on Horowitz’s part or not. The tone is certainly different; the Magpie narrative is more late Golden Age with some more angst than might be expected (with Pund’s terminal illness), but not to the extent you might find in more modern works. The Susan narrative is more “modern” in tone, with Susan struggling personally (with her relationship issues) and as a detective (as no one believes that Conway was murdered and she has no obvious reason for investigating. There’s even a chapter which more or less consists of a police officer angrily complaining about mystery cliches like “the suicide is actually a murder.”) I found some of the Susan narrative to drag a bit because of that, but it was nothing severe. However, both narratives show a love of classic mysteries and both contain some very Christie-style cluing.

The Magpie narrative presents a more satisfying mystery, one with clues and plot twists and some good reveals. There is one part where you have to assume that something exists when you don’t know what it actually contains, but I feel that you can reasonably assume that this exists even if the content is more of a reasoned guess than an actual deduction. That being said, there are also some very good and subtle clues involved that can let you piece together the backstory behind the murder, and the identity of the killer themselves.

The Susan side of the narrative is a little simpler, but once again the clues are there, including a clever one that Horowitz waves in your face, totally convinced that you won’t get it. I didn’t, anyway. I don’t like how Susan solves the whole thing through more or less dumb luck, but again, the clues are there for you to notice and solve it before her. I will say that the suspects feel less developed than they do in the Magpie narrative, with the dead man standing out the most. Again, this is more due to the first-person narrative giving you less chances to get into the characters' heads, but it stood out to me. There was also a poor red herring thrown in that not only doesn’t do a good job of misdirecting, but feels poorly motivated in-story. You can argue that it was justified based on what the person involved knew (which I thought Horowitz was going for when I re-read the explanation), but it still rings a little false to me. However, this narrative also contains a certain clue that not only fits that favorite Christie clue of the overheard or misunderstood conversation, but also resolves it smartly with total fairness. This part of the story also has some interesting things to say about the creative process and how authors react to their creations, which I found interesting.

All in all, I really, really liked this book. I admit that perhaps I was just going into it with lowered expectations since it was a modern mystery, but I enjoyed seeing how everything played out. I somewhat wish that more had been done with the mixing of the two narratives, but in the end you have two well-done mystery novels for the price of one. It sold me on the rest of Horowitz’s mystery stuff, personally. Highly Recommended.

NOTE: Apparently there is version of the book, I'm assuming the hardcover, that contains an "interview" between Horowitz and Conway. I assume this since I've seen it mentioned, but it's not in my paperback copy.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) by Agatha Christie

And now, back to the beginning.

I really shouldn’t need to justify an Agatha Christie, especially one as well-known as this, to this audience, but you never know. There are some who might think that “Oh, this was her first book, so it wasn’t that good,” or “It’s probably totally different than anything she wrote after this.” As The Green Capsule notes in his review (linker below) neither of these things are true of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

World War I is underway and Captain Arthur Hastings is staying at Styles after his convalescence with the blessings of his old friend, John Cavendish. The estate is peaceful, the weather is good, and there are even a few young ladies for Hastings to admire. Heck, his old friend Hercule Poirot is here as a refugee from Belgium, thanks to the charity of Emily Inglethorp. The only issue is that said matriarch has married the disreputable Alfred (who Hastings doesn’t like), who everyone knows is a gold digger just after her money. But other than that, things are peaceful.

Then one night, a scream awakens the household. Emily’s bedroom is locked, and when the doors are broken down she’s found in her death throes. At first, it is assumed that she died of natural causes. But Dr. Bauerstein (who Hastings also doesn’t like, get used to this), is suspicious, and further examination confirms his fears: strychnine. And of course, the disreputable husband is everyone’s first suspect, but why is Poirot doubtful?

Reading this book, I was honestly surprised at just how Christie-like it feels. You would think that an early book like this would at least feel different, and while it does differ in some key respects, such as in Poirot’s physicality and the focus on physical clues over psychological ones (but there are plenty of those as well), it honestly has so many elements that Christie would use again and again in her later books that if you were to tell me that this was a later book or some kind of Christie parody I would probably believe you. It has:

• Death by poison
• Complicated family relationships and wills
• Disguise
• Characters misinterpreting conversation
• Characters giving looks that are not understood
• A non-locked room mystery despite looking like a locked room mystery.

It’s all a little overwhelming. These elements aren’t pulled off with the skill that you’d see in later works and stood out as a little obvious to me, but I was honestly amazed at how well they’re done here. I know that Christie had written before this, but for a first mystery novel this is very good. It’s shorter than most of her work, and the characters aren’t as well-drawn as they could be, but I can forgive that. It mostly falls under fair play; there are a few clues (especially the final one) which aren’t given, but there are some valid deductions (the fireplace!) and I think that a reader can work out a good chunk of the plot.

There are a couple of issues with the work, such as some pacing and plot threads that don’t go anywhere: most of the stuff with Bauerstein peters out, the courtroom scene is good but somewhat unneeded, and in the end the solution requires you to know about how strychnine works and a certain aspect of British law. This aspect has been used in other murder mysteries, but considering how important it is to the plot I can’t blame someone for feeling a bit cheated, seeing as these elements are not hinted at. I admit that it would be difficult to do so, at least in regards to the law aspect, without giving the game away, but it still feels like a cheat.* Alfred Inglethorp is also a bit of a non-entity for most of the story, which is odd considering how important he is to events. This is somewhat justified by the fact that Hastings is narrating and has no interest in being near him, but nonetheless.

Reading this book has also convinced me that Christie was parodying ignorant Watsons. I never really got the general dislike I’ve seen for Hastings among other mystery fans: he seemed inoffensive to me, and his narration was the only thing that made Dumb Witness bearable. In this one, I get why people don’t like him. He acts like a dolt, makes the obvious mistakes, jumps to every wrong conclusion, etc. Now, I know that from an in-universe perspective he isn’t familiar with Poirot being right about everything, but from a reader’s perspective it gets tiring. That is more of a personal gripe than an actual flaw of the book though.

All in all, I really did like this book, more than I expected honestly. It’s a well-done mystery plot, only suffering more from the conventions of the era than serious flaws that break the book. I really, really enjoyed it, and since it’s free on Gutenberg thanks to the march of copyright you really don’t have an excuse for sitting down and reading it sometime. Recommended.

Check out The Green Capsule's review here for...pretty much the same opinion as mine! Yay!

*Note: After writing this review, I read the chapter on this book in John Goddard’s Agatha Christie’s Golden Age, an analysis of the puzzle elements of the first 21 Poirot’s (which is a very good read). He discusses the strychnine at length, and while he says that the reader will “still need a chemist’s knowledge” to correctly interpret it, he does show that another key part of the solution is fairly presented. I’ll give Christie a half point on this one, as someone might be able to figure out the outline of what happened if they can interpret this clue correctly.

The Future is Ours (2015) by Edward D. Hoch (edited by Steven Steinbock)

I admit, I don’t really care for sci-fi that much.

At that. JJ suddenly sat up, bellowing in rage, but it’s true. Beyond watching The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron as a kid, science fiction has escaped my interest. I’ve never been able to understand why, beyond maybe thinking that the “soft” science is just space magic and the “hard” science is just a PhD thesis. But my friends, when Edward D. Hoch puts his name on something, I get it.

The subject of this review is The Future is Ours, a collection of Hoch’s sci-fi/horror/crime stories, edited by Steven Steinbock. There are only a few series’ stories here and they do not star the detectives I think that most Hoch fans would recognize. Very few of these stories are mysteries, and I’ll admit that the few that are mysteries aren’t among what I would consider Hoch’s best. But again, this is not my genre, and perhaps others will get more out of them than I did.

And it’s still a Hoch.

Since some of these stories aren’t crime, my comments might be briefer than normal.

We start off with some sci-fi stories in the "Strange Futures" segment. It is fair to note now that there is a fair bit of overlapping categories in these stories. “Zoo” is a quick, two-page story which involves a professor who brings in some aliens for a zoo. There’s a twist, but it’s a good, solid story that is even taught in schools.

Next up is “The Other Paradox,” which is also a bit of a horror story. A professor builds a time machine, albeit a limited one. It only sends people through their own personal timeline. Of course, something goes wrong.

“The Wolfram Hunters” is one of the longer stories in the collection. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where it seems the only survivors are the members of a Native American reservation. Hoch’s explanation for how they survived nuclear fallout is a little eyebrow raising, but I’ll chalk it up to the time period. This is actually one of the few stories in the collection that’s a mystery, as one of the guards of some executed criminals suddenly vanishes. It’s a neat idea, but comes too late in the story for it to really matter, and I honestly think that the killer is never mentioned before the reveal.* The story starts as a coming-of-age story with a young boy learning under a priest in the mountains, and I think Hoch should have stuck with that.

“The Times We Had” features a family man back from a year on the Moon getting ready for an interview with a reporter about his experience. The opening by editor Steinbock spoils the twist, but I thought it was done pretty well, even if the conspiracy theory at the heart of it isn’t as accepted nowadays as it might have been as the time of writing.

“God of the Playback” is one of the religious-themed stories in this collection. In a world where people have taken to literally recording prayers for their own convinces, a priest comes with a convert from an Amazon tribe, who’s talked into staying in the fast-paced modern city to record his tribe’s language for more auto-prayers. It’s an interesting idea and I agree with what (I think) Hoch is trying to get at with this, but it’s a little too shallow. The evil recorder man is too blinkered to make any good arguments for pre-recorded prayer (and I can think of a few), but not bad enough to deserve his fate.

“Cassidy's Saucer,” which is a story of a reporter’s investigation into strange balls of light seen in the night sky, shows my main issue with this collection: There are plenty of good ideas in this collection, like the one in this story, but a lot of them are just that: an idea thrown out there and then left with nothing else to work with. I haven’t read many speculative fiction stories, so maybe that’s common, but with this collection I did wish that some stories like this were a little longer or at least had some more build-up.

“Unnatural Act” is another alien story, although much better than the previous one. This time the aliens are happy to subject themselves to study, but the scientists can’t figure out how they reproduce. This hunt for alien sex organs and its resolution is hands down the weirdest version of the “hunting for the object in plain sight” that I have ever seen in a mystery. It’s actually handled well, but isn’t given enough focus for my tastes. My issue is that I don’t buy the worldbuilding. Essentially, we have an anti-sex group in the background who have so much influence that they can whip the people up into a frenzy in a day, but apparently have no issue with the aliens running around until the twist. I don’t buy it, frankly, either that they would be totally fine with the aliens up until the reveal or that they could whip people up into a frenzy about it all so quickly.

“The Boy That Brought Love” involves a vicious tyrant who is brought low by a young boy who deals with him via a very literal application of “love your enemies.” I like it, and the tyrant is well-drawn, but the plan is a little too based on his willing cooperation. But even so, it was very charming.

“Centaur Fielder for the Yankees” is honestly pretty good. It can be argued that it lacks structure, since the narrator is just an observer and the plot is just a series of events without a lot of flow, but I enjoyed reading about the trials and tribulations of a centaur playing for the Yankees.

We now move on to “Future Crimes” with “Co-Incidence,” the earliest published story in the collection. The unnamed narrator is an employee at Neptune Books fascinated with the methods of his coworker Rosemary, a woman who has an uncanny ability to know exactly when and where to sell books. Her secret is a strange form of math magic that seems perfectly harmless, until a jealous superior stands in the way of promotion. I actually really liked this one, if just because it feels like a complete story that uses the central plot point to the fullest.

“Versus” tells the story of a crime boss brought down by a wronged man, but it feels like the end of a longer story. There’s no real build-up, the boss doesn’t get to do much evil, and the way he’s taken down is simple and not really explained well enough.

“The Future is Ours” was read last due to my own tendencies, and it was actually pretty solid. A cop uses a time machine to go to the future and learn new crime-solving techniques and technologies in order to deal with the present rise in crime. It’s a bit of a joke, but a well-done one.

“The Forbidden Word” is a dystopia story, but one that doesn’t fully hang together for me. It’s a semi-chilling story of a man who accidentally utters the titular word while on a business trip. It rambles a bit, but it is effective. But the whole thing is really based on the main character being ignorant of something that he probably should have known about (and this is even worse with the ending!) and the wider world isn’t given enough detail, leaving the reading wondering why any of this is happening. Is that the point? Maybe, but I didn’t care for it.

“Computer Cops” is one of the longer stories in the collection, and a mystery to boot. The detectives are Earl Jazine and Carl Crader, the titular computer cops who investigate computer-based crimes. They’re also the protagonists of three of Hoch’s five novels, not that I’ve read them. The two are brought in by Nobel Kinsinger, a former war hero turned businessman who’s reporting a strange bit of sabotage. His computer, a bulky thing dedicated to stock exchange, has apparently been hijacked by someone using it to make stock exchanges. The computer is kept locked at all times, so how is the saboteur using it?

I admit that I didn't care for this story the first time through. It felt overlong, filled with too many details that went nowhere, and a somewhat muddled denountment. A re-read made me slightly more optimistic; with some decent world building and red herrings, but the culprit’s plan makes no sense. There is one bit of cluing that I liked, which is wrapped up in the very nature of the crime, but on the whole I thought this needed some work. The solution for the impossible crime is good if simple, but I don’t know how fair it is, since you'd need a little bit of computer/stock knowledge to figure it out.

The next story, “Night of the Millennium,” is one that I hoped I would like more than I actually did. A college student gets wrapped up in a conspiracy on the eve of a new millennium, and while the story looked like one of those guilty pleasure stories for me, it just didn’t work. The actual plot kicks off very late in the story and is on too small a scale for it to feel impactful. I guess I found some of the worldbuilding interesting, but the story is just too light.

The next two stories star Barnabas Rex, a detective who deals with minor scientific problems. “The Homesick Chicken” has Rex looking into a genetically-engineered chicken that suddenly escaped confinement to make a dangerous walk into an empty field. Yes, it’s Hoch’s take on “Why did the chicken cross the road?” and while it’s amusing, the solution relies a little too much on last minute science fiction for my tastes, and Rex makes (to me) a major deductive leap with no evidence.

“The Daltonic Fireman” is the better of the two. In this story, “firemen” are those who fire rockets into space like air traffic controllers (in space). They wear green suspenders as a comfort to the astronauts, but one man has come in occasionally wearing red suspenders, and while he always changes when asked he refuses to explain why he wears them in the first place. The answer as to why he wears red instead of green is pretty simple (the title gives it away), but there’s still another reveal about why this is happening. It reminds me of “Computer Cops,” in that the fact that the crime happens a certain way is a clue pointing to the culprit. If there were more stories in the collection like this (or even more Barnabas Rex stories like this) I would enjoy the collection a lot more!

Next up is “Tales of the Dark,” where Hoch goes for horror. “The Maze and the Monster” has a man shipwrecked on an island controlled by the descendant of Captain Cortes. The man is not fond of visitors and sentences our hero to a pitch black maze where he must find salvation...or a monster. A decent horror story.

“The Faceless Thing” is good but flawed. An old man returns to his family home to confront the creature that drowned his sister fifty years ago. It’s an interesting story with a good melancholy tone, but marred by Hoch going “THIS IS THE THEME DO YOU GET IT YET” every line.

“In the Straw” has a similar tone of rural horror, this time revolving around a farmer’s wife who seems to think that something in growing in a bale of straw. Very unsettling. My only real objection is that the monster has the superpower of, “Can do whatever the plot needs him to do,” but that’s a minor gripe.

“The Thing in the Lake” is more light-hearted fare, with a young boy getting to join a private detective in rooting out a monster in a lake. It’s split into two parts for some reason which really doesn’t make sense to me. I get that it was published serially, but I really can’t tell how it would be split. No matter which way I look at it “Part 1” would have to be nothing but set-up. Thankfully once the story gets going, it keeps a good, steady pace. Befitting the magazine it was published in it’s not as horrific as what we’ve had before, but the ending is fun.

“Exu” is weird but probably my favorite here. A man named Jennings goes south to Rio de Janeiro to learn about voodoo and the spirit cults. Fun times are had by all. This is one where Hoch’s slightly clipped style works very well, giving the story a surreal feeling of a world where the old gods are lurking beneath the veneer of civilization. The only false note for me is a last-second plot twist about our protagonist, which seemed to come somewhat out of nowhere.

“The Weekend Magus” was I assume the result of a bet to cram as many horror elements into one story as possible. It’s got everything; mummies, mad science, the Loch Ness Monster…

No really. The main plot has a reporter going to interview a scientist who’s doing dark science in Scotland. He finds out that the scientist is trying to reanimate the skeleton of a sea serpent that used to be the steed of an Egyptian general. You’d be forgiven for expecting Mulder and Scully right about now, or at least Kolchak. The whole thing is bizarre, and I enjoyed it as a pulpy story. But nothing can make the image the story ends on serious in any way.

The intro of "Just One More" promises a little more than it delivers. Art Muller is a photographer...of dogs for dog food promotion. His job makes him of interest to a professor who’s looking for a new kind of werewolf. It’s an interesting story, but the ending comes a bit out of nowhere.

“Bigfish” could have fit into the “crime” section, but fits easier in horror. A retired couple decides to see the titular Bigfish, a giant fish that serves as a tourist trap and sideshow. Then a young boy goes missing…

This is one of the few stories here to actually scare me. The story doesn’t go in the direction that you expect and manages to be all the more unsettling for it. It even has one of my favorite horror elements; the scenes and dialogue that makes perfect sense when you first read them but then take on a more disturbing light once the reveal lands. The only thing I don’t like is the last line; I get what Hoch was going for, but it can easily read as silly even with context. I would have maybe moved it just before the reveal.

“Remember My Name” is one of the longest stories in the collection, and sadly one that I forgot about after I first read it. It’s more of a slow burn, with a writer of mystery short stories meeting up with an old friend and the daughter of said old friend’s flame who bears an uncanny resemblance to her mother. I liked it on the re-read, but it feels very disjointed. My major issue with Hoch as a writer (at least in this collection, although it has cropped up in some of his other stories that I've read) is that some of his scenes don’t transition from one to the other very well and his characters sometimes do things for what feels like little reason. Such as our hero jumping into bed with a girl with what felt like to me very little set-up. I know that this is far from a Hoch-specific problem, but it stands out in these stories. The story itself is actually somewhat touching, although someone more familiar with the genre Hoch is writing in here will probably pick up on what’s going on sooner than I did.

We now move on to the last section, “History Retold,” a collection of historical stories. “The Last Unicorn” and “Who Rides With Santa Anna?” are quick stories with a twist. “The Maiden’s Sacrifice” proposes a different reason for the Aztec sacrifices, and while it’s interesting, the last line is a little too on-the-nose for me, blandly stating what will happen and ruining the implication that should be left to the reader to see.

“The Other Phantom” was the biggest disappointment for me in this collection, because it promises a Hoch-style mystery before fumbling it. Franz Vinding is a curmudgeon who hates this new-fangled Eiffel Tower that’s all the rage. He also hates being challenged, resulting in him taking a bet from a professional and romantic rival to spend the night in the Opera House, where it is rumored that the Phantom lurks in the tunnels below. He’s looking forward to using his prize money to continue his campaign against the Eiffel Tower, but he barely makes it five minutes before being stabbed to death by a mysterious figure.

This one got my hopes up: There’s a murder mystery at the center. There’s a dying message that implicates The Phantom of the Opera. There’s even the hint of a locked room, since all the theater doors were locked. But all of it amounts to nothing: the dying message can’t be solved unless you have very specific opera knowledge, the locked room doesn’t mean anything, and the killer is pretty easy to spot. Disappointing.

The collection ends with “Dracula 1944.” The story goes down in one of the Nazi work camps, where the commander is becoming unsettled by the fact that someone is going through and draining the guards of blood. Not to mention that some old woman is claiming that some irritating prisoner named Vlad can’t work in the sunlight for some reason. The story goes about how you would expect it to, but I found it enjoyable. The ending rings false for me though, if just because I don’t buy the main character’s actions with the presented logic.

All in all, this collection didn’t do it for me. I admit that part of it is just the fact that I read Hoch for his mystery plotting, and these stories just didn’t click with me. There were some good stories, good ideas even in the poorer stories, and if you’re a fan of more speculative horror/sci-fi, you might enjoy this collection more than I did. But otherwise, unless you’re a Hoch fan, I would skip.

Christian Henricksson has a more positive review here.

*EDIT: See Jack Hamm's comment below, I'm actually wrong on this. That being said, I do still hold that the killer gets so little mention that you're likely to forget about them, and there's no real evidence pointing to them until the reveal.