Murder in the Air (1931) by Darwin L. Teilhet

Darwin L. Teilhet was an American journalist, advertising executive, screenwriter and novelist who started out as a mystery writer, authoring seven detective novels from 1931 to 1940, four of which forming a short-lived series – featuring the irrepressible, slightly unhinged Baron von Kaz. Hildegarde Teilhet co-wrote three of the brave Von Kaz novels, but her husband began his literary career with three standalone mysteries.

The most notable, best remembered of Teilhet's trio of non-series mysteries is the prescient The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), which takes place in Germany when the Nazis rose to power. It has the distinction of arguably being the first ever World War II detective novel beating Theodore Roscoe's I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) by two years. A big reason why it was reprinted in 1985 by Polygonics. Death Flies High (1931) and Murder in the Air (1931), a pair of aviation-themed mysteries, aren't as well remembered today, but that can be put down to neither having ever received a reprint. So, you can say they flew under our collective radars. Murder in the Air is an interesting case as it's not only an impossible crime novel listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but the central impossibility is based on a famous, real-life disappearance from the late 1920s. More on that aspect in a moment.

Murder in the Air opens with Peter Blue, a reporter for the Paris Journal, getting fired by editor, Henry Jackson, because he has "muffed every good story" given to him. Just when is ready to leave, the telephone rings with bombshell news. Dr. von Dolbenstein, "biggest financier in Europe," vanished from his tri-motored, Rhorbach monoplane while it was flying five thousand feet above the English Channel. There were five other passengers, not including the pilot and navigator, who saw Von Dolbenstein go into the lavatory alone and not coming back – no answers to their calls or knocks. So they broke down the door only to discover Dr. von Dolbenstein has vanished into thin air! What followed was a search of the small plane from cockpit to tail-end without finding a trace. They even tried to open the cabin door, to see if he might have accidentally fallen out, but "the blast of wind from the propellers was too strong" ("we couldn't budge it"). Only thing they can do is radio the police that a well-known, influential financier known on two continents has inexplicably gone missing from a sealed airplane in mid flight.

So, if this situation sounds vaguely familiar, the "fantastic disappearance" of Von Dolbenstein was based on a notorious, real-life disappearance under very similar circumstances. On July 4, 1928, the Belgian financier Alfred Loewenstein, third richest man in the world at the time, flew from Croydon to Brussels on his private air plane with a group of six people. They reported seeing Loewenstein going to the lavatory and not returning. Only difference is that when they checked the lavatory, they found the entrance door open and it was assumed Loewenstein had accidentally plunged to his death. However, the official reading didn't stop the speculations and conspiracy theories. Teilhet's Murder in the Air probably was the first fictionalized take on the case, but not the last as you might also be reminded of Franco Vailati's Il mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935) and Helen McCloy's short story "The Case of the Duplicate Door" (1949) collected in The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003).

Back to Peter Blue and Henry Jackson. When news arrives, Jackson has no reporters on hand and dispatches Blue to the airport to report on, what could be, the biggest breaking story of the decade. Blue, as the on-the-ground reporter, learns the other passengers consisted of Von Dolbenstein's two secretaries, Frederick von Stallf and Miss Geraldine "Jerry" Howard, two other well-known financiers, Harvey Gerbé and Sir William Wallace, and a former secretary, John Carson – who forced his way onto the plane before it took off. Lastly, the pilot and navigator, Clarence Pierce and Erich Rask. Blue also learns there's another layer to the seemingly impossible disappearance as "a cordon of men surged around the monoplane even before its wheels had bounced on the ground" ensuring Von Dolbenstein couldn't have been hiding on the outside, dropped off and escaped. Shortly following the disappearance, the man who called in the tip to Jackson is murdered in one of the hangars. And the victim left behind a dying message suggesting a link with the disappearance mystery.

However, this murder is of peripheral importance to the story and plot as it's barely mentioned again until towards the end. The story that follows is more of a medium boiled, almost pulp-style mystery with the plucky, elusive Miss Howard and the hardboiled John Carston giving him the most trouble, which comes with plenty of physical altercations. For example, the fifth chapter opens with a bandaged Blue waking up in a hospital bed.

Beside a couple of unruly suspects, Blue also has to deal with George St. Armand, the newly appointed Chef de la Sûreté, who's convinced Carson and Miss Howard are behind the disappearance ("they are two of the most infamous criminals"). Much to Blue's dismay who has become very interested in Miss Howard and somewhat confused why she's protecting Carson. There is, of course, the inexplicable mystery of Von Dolbenstein's disappearance from an airplane and the trouble his disappearance is causing. Before he disappeared, Von Dolbenstein was ready to market a new technical marvel, "a new, secret Diesel airplane," but the plans vanished alongside the financier. So the investors are ruined and a newspaper report how "the crash of the von Dolbenstein bubble" has already resulted in two suicides.

I have mentioned on this blog before how the "financial wizards" of the early 20th century took over the role of popular villains and ready-made, murderable victims from blackmailers in detective fiction following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 – e.g. The Mystery on the Channel (1931) by Freeman Wills Crofts. Murder in the Air is another example, but with a slight twist bringing me to the solution.

Murder in the Air is Teilhet's first stab at the detective story, a stab full of energy and enthusiasm, but a still inexperience hand at plotting reveals itself in the solution. First of all, Teilhet made a capital mistake confirming my initial suspicion was spot on. What was that mistake (HUGE SPOILER/ROT13): gur bcravat abgrq gur qbbe bs gur yningbel jnf ybpxrq naq unq gb or oebxra qbja, ohg gung ybpxrq qbbe jnf arire zragvbarq be pbafvqrerq ntnva nf n cneg bs guvf zhygvynlrerq ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel. Jul? Orpnhfr gur ybpxrq qbbe cynlrq ab cneg va gur fbyhgvba. Fb gur svanapvre unq gb unir unq n unaq va uvf bja qvfnccrnenapr. So that brought me halfway towards the correct solution, but muddled the method a little as I considered something a little different. Something silly that was rightfully mocked in the story itself. Teilhet deserves credit, given the limited scope the situation allows for locked room trickery, for not going full pulp and trying to deliver a somewhat detective-worthy solution to the impossible disappearance. The trick is a rather involved one, but not overly convoluted, but undeniably marred by (SPOILER/ROT13) qrcraqvat ba zhygvcyr pb-pbafcvengbef naq nppbzcyvprf. Jung vf guvf... na rcvfbqr bs Wbanguna Perrx? On the upside, while the dying message is only a small part of the plot, its solution shines with brilliant simplicity. It simply stands out against the involved vanishing-trick.

So, all in all, Murder in the Air is a diamond-in-the-rough written and plotted around the central idea of how a man can disappear from an airplane, but how that idea was executed caused the plot to experience some turbulence. Other than the rough patches on the plot, Murder in the Air is highly readable, fast-paced medium boiled mystery-thriller with pulp leanings and full of promise Teilhet would deliver on in future novels. It made me curious about Teilhet's second novel and aviation mystery, Death Flies High, which looks to be a classic, closed circle whodunit aboard a transatlantic flying boat. On the wishlist it goes!

The Name is Malone (1958) by Craig Rice

Craig Rice's The Name is Malone (1958) is together with The People vs. Withers and Malone (1963) and Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002) three, posthumously published short story collections starring the hard drinking, shop soiled Chicago criminal attorney, John J. Malone – who has to do without the company of Jake Justus and Helene Brand in his short story outings. Stuart Palmer's Miss Hildegarde Withers replaced Malone's troublesome friends in the above mentioned collection of crossover stories, but most of the short stories tend to be solo cases for the Chicago attorney. So they also tend to be less screwbally than the novels and the stories collected in The Name in Malone, while having comedic elements, are more in line with the hardboiled, alcohol fueled private eye fiction of those days with plots.

The first story from The Name is Malone is the curiously and tantalizingly-titled "The Murder of Mr. Malone," which appeared to have been originally published in 1952 or '53, but have been unable to find out in which magazine publication. But it was first collected here. It has that odd touch of surrealism that runs through a lot of Rice's detective fiction. Malone is hired by Ed Cable to investigate the death of his aunt, Eva Cable, who died from natural causes and left behind one of those "screwy wills." Eva left her entire fortune to the daughter of an old friend, Mici Faulkner, which left the young woman "a decidedly astonished heiress." Ed Cable ordered Malone to investigate the will and the cause of death, but his investigation showed Eva died of natural causes and the will to be genuine. But when Malone is stuck at a Los Angeles airport ("...still fogged down"), the case begins to twist and turn in unexpected ways. Malone's luggage and ticket gets mixed up with those of the "friendly stranger" he met at the airport cocktail bar and unknowingly travels under the stranger's name, J.J. McNabb. When he finally lands, Malone is greeted by newspaper headlines screaming, "JOHN J. MALONE, CHICAGO ATTORNEY, FOUND MURDERED ON PLANE." So he continues digging into the problem under the dead man's name, which turns out to have an interesting variation on murder hinging on a motive that's not a motive.

So good, tangled and sometimes humorous opening story showing Rice belonged to that small, select group of mystery writers who could write comedic mysteries that can be genuinely funny. For example, Malone arranges for the body of "Malone" to be be transported to funeral parlor of his friend, Rico di Angelo, who tells Malone that "ever since your body arrived, I have been expecting to hear from you" – "tell me, Malone, is it for your life insurance?" Yes, Malone enjoys quite a prestine reputation in Chicago. Lastly, I should note the story has a slightly bigger role for Malone's secretary, Maggie, who even gets herself arrested off-page for her employer's murder. It sometimes felt like Rice was nodding and winking towards Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and Della Street.

There is, however, nothing to laugh about in the second story, "The Tears of Evil," culled from the March, 1953, issue of Manhunt. A dark, grim tale of crime rather than a detective story where the question is not so much whodunit but why. Malone attends the wedding anniversary of two close friends, George and Kathy Weston, whom, of all the people he knew, they "were two of the ones he'd liked the best." During the party, George staggers towards Malone with the expression of "a punch-drunk prize-fighter" and tells him Kathy is dead. Murdered. George found her naked lying on the bedroom floor with a broken neck. There were about seven other people in the house and one of them, curiously enough, served time for "assault and rape" and is currently out on parole. Not a character you often find in the works of Golden Age mystery writers. But this is not a whodunit. The real murderer is pretty obvious and the question becomes why it was done, which is where the story falls to pieces. Firstly, this is one of the shortest stories in the collection and can only tell you these people are important to Malone ("If Kathy was dead, then a little part of him had died too"). Not show you. So the story completely misses the emotion punch it tried to deliver. Secondly, there's not a single clue to the motive and leaves a not unimportant detail unexplained. I can see why it was included, but surely, there must have been better, uncollected stories in the series?

The third story is a locked room mystery, of sorts, but already discussed "His Heart Could Break" (1943) not so long ago as part of the anthology Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022). So I'll be skipping that one here. 

"Goodbye Forever," originally published in the December, 1951, issue Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which is a virtually unknown impossible crime story in the tradition of G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and Edward D. Hoch – neither listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). Larry Lee, "handsome young orchestra leader" and "America's Number One glamor boy," who has a new song to feature on that night's radio broadcast. Lee worked up a special, last-minute arrangement using the first four notes from a cursed song, Tosti's Good-bye Forever. A prevailing, stupid superstition among musicians that any part of the song can never be played or broadcast without some terrible disaster happening immediately. Since it was a last-minute arrangement, it was impossible to rehearse and now Lee is worried about the nervous, highly superstitious clarinet players, Art Sample, because those four notes were "so skillfully hidden in the orchestration that no one would know what he was playing," until he had played it. So he asks Malone to come along to the radio studio as legal insurance in case something would happen.

Malone agrees to come along to the radio studio, but wonders whether it's a gag or publicity stunt cooked up by Lee's press-agent. But when the band played the four notes, Art Sample slowly crumpled to the floor in front of Malone's eyes. A medical examination reveals he had been killed with a quick acting poison, aconite, but "he didn't eat or drink anything, or even smoke, just before he died." No, the poison was not on the reed of his clarinet. So an impossible poisoning and the seasoned, borderline obsessed impossible crime fans will likely spot the method and murderer, before the vital clue is given. But normal people have a shot at solving it by spotting that tell-all clue. A very decent, very conventional impossible crime story that as Mike Grost observes "fits into the paradigms of John Dickson Carr's Locked Room Lecture" and reads like an ancestor of Hoch's locked room stories. This could just as easily have been the plot for a Simon Ark or Dr. Hawthorne story. Sure, "Goodbye Forever" is not a blistering original impossible crime mystery, but quite enjoyed it as a whole and really deserves to be a bit better known. 

"And the Birds Still Sing" was first published in the December, 1952, issue of EQMM and is best described as an imaginative flight of fancy with Rice's take on the multiple, false-solutions. Malone has a client dropped into his lap out of nowhere. Mona Trent, an ex-showgirl, needs his help and asks the lawyer to come to her apartment the next morning to discuss the matter in detail. But when he arrives the next morning, Malone finds Mona Trent sitting in a big chair near the window with "a neat little bullet hole in her forehead." She had been killed with a rifle shot. What follows is a carousal ride as Malone goes from client to client as he goes through multiple, different solutions involving the victim's jealous ex-boss, an even more jealous admirer and a woman who took a shot at the chirping morning birds. A fantastic story reminiscent of the best from Ellery Queen with its multiple, false-solutions and the real solution hinging on space, time and bits of seemingly trivial information ("Maggie, where can I find an Almanac?"). A highlight from this collection! 

"He Never Went Home," originally published in the March, 1957, issue Manhunt, is another unusually structured, mostly well-done detective story opening with Susie Snyder waking up in her apartment and finding the body of a stranger sprawled on her davenport – a knife sticking out of his chest. Whoever tried to frame Susie counted on her "flying into fits" and "coming unglued generally," but she kept calm and called Malone. Malone immediately goes to work on covering up anything that could get her into trouble, but first arranges a fake alibi before tampering with the evidence inside the apartment. But then he finds himself in a sticky situation when an anonymous tip to the police brings Captain Dan von Flanagan and Detective Lieutenent Klutchetsky, of the Homicide Squad, to the apartment. The strength of this story is definitely in how far Malone is willing to go to protect a client and the brilliantly posed, slightly surrealistic problem posed by the murder weapon later on in the investigation. It also provides a clue to the murderer's identity, which is not nearly as good or inventive as other elements. Great storytelling with a somewhat uneven plot that has moments of inspiration. 

"Life Can Be Horrible" comes from the September, 1953, issue of Manhunt and is possibly unique in the history of the genre as well as occupying a special in the series, but both for vastly different reasons. Firstly, the story gives a bigger role to a family of recurring characters headed by Joe the Angel, of Joe the Angel's City Hall Bar, where Malone usually celebrates his victories in court, drowns his sorrows or tries to pry a quick hundred-buck loan from Joe. Joe the Angel sends his two young nephews, Eddie and Frankie di Angelo, to Malone as they themselves in potentially a lot of trouble. Eddie and Frankie were approached by a big, pretty lady who told them her ex-husband was holding onto ten thousand dollars in thousand dollar bills that belonged to her. She offered the boys a cut of the money, if they agreed to get it and provided them with instructions ("sap him"). But what they find was a body and no money! Secondly, Malone is receives another client, "a king-sized Amazon," named Nadine Sapphire who's "a lady wrestler." Nadine Sapphire tells Malone the same story about a husband holding on to ten thousand dollars and Malone accompanies her to the secluded house expecting to help discover the body, but "now the body was gone and the money was here." And then Rico di Angelo calls Malone to tell that somebody had left a body in his funeral parlor! A pity you really can't solve what actually happened as some of the relevant information does not surface until Malone attends a wrestling event to watch Nadine Sapphire wrestle Daphne Flowers ("a combination of ballet and sheer mayhem"). That brings us to what this story a rarity and possibly one-of-a-kind.

First of all, I'm not American. So might have missed something culturally, but professional wrestling always struck me as more American than Teddy Roosevelt, MacDonalds and Bald Eagles mating to a gunfire rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. You would think the world of professional wrestling with its loud, colorful and clashing personalities, real and fake, would have provided fertile ground for mystery and thriller writer alike for the past 100 years, but appears to be practically untouched – only example being Rice's "Life Can Be Horrible." Sports mysteries have a long history to the point where you can call it a sub-genre or sub-category of the genre with its own fans and collectors. You can find sports mysteries incorporating murder in almost every sport imaginable, but not professional wrestler and their absence in the American detective story and pulps is simply baffling. I always understood it was pretty big in America and quite important during the early days of television, but, whenever a ring is involved in a sports mystery, it usually is a boxing ring (e.g. John V. Turner's Death Must Have Laughed, 1932). So why did it never, in all those decades, provided a backdrop or character for more than one detective story or novel? It seems like an untapped reservoir of potential for creative mystery writers to play around in. Just think of all the bizarre motives and potential tricks that could spring forth from that strange, back then closed world of wrestling. Anyway, moving on!

Regrettably, the last three stories are not anywhere near as good as the previous seven stories and partly mired in the territory of the pulp-thriller, which was not for the best here. 

"Good-bye, Good-bye" (1946) started captivating with a very well-done, dizzying scene in which a young woman is clinging to the ledge twenty-two stories above the pavement. Malone manages to get her inside and learns she has a history of attempted suicides, but she claims someone tried to kill her. The story definitely has its moments, but the ending turned on a curious, complicated will and inheritance that felt a little trite. "The Bad Luck Murders" (1943) is another story that began very promising as Malone tries to help a client find her criminal, no good brother among the lost youth and homeless men who roam the city shelters and two-bit flop houses. Only thing that adds any interest to the story as Malone uncovers a ridiculous, needlessly complicated and risky murder plot. That's coming from the mouth of someone who fanboys all over impossible crime, dying messages and unbreakable alibis! "The End of Fear' (1953) begins as a chase thriller as a rich heiress apparently killed two men and went on the run "carrying a briefcase full of narcotics," but the echoing gunshot immediately clues you which direction the story is heading once Malone enters the picture halfway through. Not one of Rice's best or most inspired detective stories and only notable for Helene making an appearance.

It's a pity the last three stories dragged down the overall quality of The Name is Malone, because the seven stories preceding them were great examples of Rice's ability to combine complex plot patterns with vivid, borderline surrealistic storytelling to create her own unique brand of detective fiction. Some worked slightly better than others and personally liked the more tightly-plotted, fairly-clued stories like "His Heart Could Break," "Goodbye Forever" and "And the Birds Still Sing," but, on a whole, the collection was a pleasant reminder why John J. Malone is my favorite dodgy lawyer-detective. Definitely recommended with the only caveat being that fans who know Malone primarily from his novel-length outings will miss the all-out, boozy madcap antics, screwball comedy and the general pell-mell. There's still some of that in the short stories, but done with a bit of restraint... except for the excessive drinking.

Shot Down: "The Case of the Musical Bullet" (1974) by Edward D. Hoch

Between 1973 and 1984, Edward D. Hoch wrote fourteen short stories about two agents from Interpol, Sebastian Blue and Laura Charme, who specialized in airline related crimes and work from a top floor office at the Interpol headquarter in Saint-Cloud, Paris – collectively known as the Interpol series. Back in 2019, I reviewed the third story in the series, "The Case of the Modern Medusa" (1973), which immediately became a personal favorite. "The Case of the Modern Medusa" is easily one of the best and most original locked room mysteries Hoch devised over his five-decades spanning career. So was very curious about the second and last impossible crime from this series that Robert Adey listed in Locked Room Murders (1991).

Hoch's "The Case of the Musical Bullet" has, to my knowledge, only appeared in the March,1974, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and presents the two Interpol agents with a case of potential international complications.

Pierre Brider is a civil servant "holding a somewhat unique position in the French government" as "he acted as the liaison man with various foreign governments arranging joint space shots and satellite launchings." Brider is fatally shot on an Air France flight waiting to depart from Paris to Shanghai and the French government refuses to discuss his assignment, but it's assumed it was to negotiate a joint French-Chinese space project. However, the circumstances in which Brider was shot and killed presented the authorities with something of an impossible crime.

No gun could have been taken aboard as every passenger and all carry-on baggage is searched or checked with a metal detector. The stewardess "swears the seat next to him was unoccupied all the time they were taxiing for take off" and "how do you shoot someone on an airliner without anyone knowing it” or hearing something? So the French government asks Interpol to investigate and specifically ask for Sebastian Blue to lead the investigation. Blue and Charme have their investigation kneecapped from the beginning as passengers were transferred to another plane, "they were searched, of course, but no weapon was found," and "scattered over half the world." But they're not entirely bereft of clues. Brider was dictating into a tape recorder moments before he was shot, "perhaps the tape recorder is rigged to fire a bullet," but the recorder had not been gimmicked and listening back to the recording, they hear Brider being interrupted mid-sentence by "a series of musical tones" punctuated by a grunt and silence – like he had been shot with "a musical bullet." How very Carr-like of Hoch to link the clue of the titular bullet to the clue of the chiming clock in the victim's office showing Blue what really happened on that grounded Air France flight.

However, the explanation to the who-and why behind the murder is far better than the how, which is a variation on a type of trick not particular popular among locked room and impossible crime aficionados. Hoch's variation of the trick is, of course, marginally more acceptable than others examples (ROT13: sbe bar, gur zheqrere ersenvarq sebz oernxvat gur jrncba ncneg naq fjnyybjvat gur cvrprf), but not by much. I think most readers can make a pretty good guess how Brider was shot and find it to be more or less in line with the solution. So, purely as a detective story, "The Case of the Musical Bullet" is typical Hoch, simply a good and decent job, but, as a locked room mystery, the story is not a patch on the preceding "The Case of the Modern Medusa." Not one I would recommend for inclusion in a future locked room/impossible crime anthology, but would love to see Crippen & Landru collect all fourteen Blue and Charme stories in a single volume. It sounds like a fun, relatively consistent, but overlooked, series with such intriguing titled stories like "The Case of the Flying Graveyard" (1976), "The Case of the Five Coffins" (1978) and "The Case of the Drowned Coroner" (1984). Either way, I'll definitely return to this series at some time in the future.

Crucified (2008) by Michael Slade

In the previous post, I discussed the twelfth entry in the Bobby Owen series, Suspects—Nine (1939), which is E.R. Punshon's homage to those refined, witty and character-driven novel of manners mystery pioneered during the 1930s by the alternative Queens of Crime – like Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Moray Dalton. So I thought it would be fun to pick something next that is the complete opposite of a classy, satirical 1930s manners mystery novel. Something crude, brutal and horrifying with all the subtlety of a rickety, old chainsaw hacking through guts and bones. Preferably published during the past twenty years. There was only one name on the big pile who fitted the bill. 

"Michael Slade" is the collective penname of Jay Clarke, a Canadian trial lawyer, who collaborated with Rebecca Clarke, Richard Covell and Richard Banks on the "Special X" series. A branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police specialized in hunting down extremely dangerous, completely deranged, criminals and serial killers. Special X series has a not undeserved reputation for its, um, liberal depiction of guts, gore and grisly killings that could teach '80s slasher films a thing or two.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed Crucified (2008) back in 2019 and called the book sadistic retro pulp and Slade "a torture porn maven." I don't think John very much approved of me nonchalantly shrugging at the torrent of bloods and guts in Ripper (1994), but, in my defense, the whole story from beginning to end screamed '90s edginess – deliberately trying to be as shocking and stomach-churning as possible. Ripper struck me at times as trying to bait Americans from crushing the head of a critical reviewer with head clamps to evoking the name of Aleister Crowley. So took Ripper about as seriously as a horror flick that tried too hard to be shocking, but appreciated the attempt to give the gore galore a traditional slant with several impossible crimes in a mechanized death-trap house on Deadman's Island. In fact, there are three of Slade novels listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) loaded with locked rooms, impossible crimes and even dying messages of which Crucified sounded the most fascinating. A book that threw everything from archaeology, arcane history and conspiracies to locked rooms, impossible crimes and a secret crusade into the blender to create a mush better than expected.

If Ripper is a product of the '90s, Crucified is clearly a child of the 2000s. The decade of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Passion of the Christ (2004) and conspiracy theories thriving on the internet. Yet, the book is surprisingly tame compared to Ripper. Sure, there's a little bit of disembowelment and exploding skulls scattered, here and there, throughout the story, but no worse than Philip Kerr's recently reviewed Prague Fatal (2011) or your average, dark historical mystery from Paul Doherty. They're more like violent vignettes closely entangled with an increasingly complicated and engrossing narrative that moves around between the past and present. And the many arcane historical puzzles make up the lion's share of the story. So it should be a bit more palpable than Ripper which had skinned corpses dangling from a suspension bridge on meat hooks. 

Crucified begins with a short prologue, of sorts, depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in 33 A.D. as the Roman guard look up at the cross and says, "just as your shadow has vanished from the face of the earth, so you will be forgotten." But history ordained otherwise.

The story than begins to move between those long, grim years of World War II and the present-day with the former revolving around the many mysteries surrounding a long-lost Allied bomber, the Ace of Clubs, which was shot down in March 1944 over Germany – while flying a top-secret mission to bomb a specific location. The crew were ordered "to break away from the main bomber stream and fly a solitary run to an isolated target of no apparent value," but got shot down by a lone wolf fighter. So they had to bail and all but three of the crewmen were captured. Lt. Fletch "Wrath" Hannah (pilot), Sgt. Dick "Ack-Ack" DuBoulay and Sgt. Trent "Jonesy" Jones vanished that night without a trace. The impact of the crash destabilized a slope, "causing a landslide to crumble down and bury the plane" and "with bombs dropping night and day, churned-up dirt was the rule, not the exception." So the bomber lay buried and undisturbed for sixty-odd years until its wreck was discovered during road construction. A discovery that brings more to light than merely the answer to an unsolved question from the war.

In 1944, Hitler gave a mysterious individual who tried to betray him the codename "Judas" and "the rumor is that Judas conspired with Churchill to smuggle a package to Britain in the hands of a secret agent who'd been parachuted into the Reich." The Ace of Clubs was downed on "the same night that a Junkers 88 was given extraordinary orders to cripple an RAF Halifax on a solitary run in a way that would kill no crewmen except the rear gunner." So is there's a link between Hitler's Judas and the downed bomber? But there's more. Beside containing something that could topple Hitler, the Judas package includes ancient religious artifacts recovered from the Middle East. If "the resurrected bomber yields a map to the Judas package, Christendom might be rocked to its two-thousand-year-old foundations" and "the fatal nail in the Vatican's coffin."

A secret, modern-day Inquisitor, "the Secret Cardinal," has to stop the Judas relics coming to light at all costs and dispatches a crusader, the Legionary of Christ – who's either insane or possessed by the devil. The Legionary holds some decidedly old-worlds views on how death should be administrated.

The person caught between the long-buried secrets of the past and the increasing bloodshed in the present is a historian, lawyer and writer, Wyatt Rook, who writes historical expose's bringing long-kept secrets to light – earning him the reputation of muckraker and conspiracy theorist. Rook's reputation brings Liz Hannah, granddaughter of the missing pilot, to his doorstep to ask him to help her uncover what happened to her grandfather with the Judas puzzle and herself as a lure. But then one of the last surviving crewman, Mick "Balls' Balsdon, who put together an archive is horrifically tortured to death. And long-buried, apparently impossible murder is discovered inside the wreck of the Ace of Clubs.

Ack-Ack's decayed skeleton is found on the seat of the small, cage-like rear turret with its torso sprawled forward between the guns, but it's not bullets from a Junkers 88 that killed the rear gunner. Someone had stabbed him in the back three times, which appears to be impossible as everyone was in their battle stations and "remained in their combat positions until they bailed out." Slade drove home how hazardously these planes and bombing raids were and how any shot at surviving depended on teamwork over the plane's intercom. So nobody appears to have had an opportunity to stab the rear gunner. This not, strictly speaking, a proper locked room mystery, but an alibi-puzzle that works as a locked room mystery, of sorts, recalling the tangle of alibis that formed a quasi-impossible crime from Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962). Whatever you choose to categorize it as, an unbreakable alibi or impossible crime, Slade's absorbing storytelling turned it the best, most captivating and memorable parts of the plot and story. The circumstances of the murder, a bomber under attack above enemy territory, did wonders in itself for the trick employed. A trick that would not have impressed as much had it been pulled off in an ordinary setting under normal circumstances. This is not the only the historical locked room mystery Wyatt Rook comes across ("Am I being haunted by the ghost of John Dickson Carr?").

The trail leads to a U-boat called the Black Devil that had been on a test run as the first Elektroboot in the North Sea, between Hamburg and Scotland, but run into a destroyer and a fight ensued. Slade's depiction of what went on in that enclosed and sealed submarine as they got destroyed by a depth-charge barrage. It's as good as what happened aboard the Ace of Clubs, but the Black Devil only comes into play during the second-half and the impossibility is not discovered until towards the end. Something was being smuggled to England aboard the Black Devil, but, when the Royal Navy pried open the hatches and searched the submarine inside out, nothing was recovered. So "do you sneak a sardine out of a tin can that's sealed and remains sealed after the sardine is gone?" This one takes only a short while to be solved, but, needless to say, I really liked what it added to the overall story.

It's the historical puzzles and biblical mysteries that take precedent in Crucified with the present-day murders ending up only playing a secondary role. Admittedly, whenever the Legionary makes an appearance, it's not a pretty picture to behold and the double murder of a married couple is downright revolting, but, as said previously, they act like gory vignettes – which can be skipped without missing anything really important. The way in which the Legionary is disposed of shows how unimportant he and his murders were in the end to the story. What matters are the historical plot-threads. Who killed the rear gunner and how? What happened to the three missing crewmen? How were the items removed from a dead, submerged submarine? Who was Hitler's Judas? Who his secret agent and what happened to him? What, exactly, is the nature of the Judas relics and are they, as feared, "a biblical earthshaker?" The answers to all these questions neatly twists together fact and fiction into engrossing, cleverly plotted historical mystery with the last line being a stroke of genius a stupid joke that made me snicker. What a stupidly brilliant way to close out the story. 10/10!

So, all in all, Slade's Crucified turned out to be unexpectedly great. I half jokingly picked it as stark contrast to Punshon's über civilized Suspects—Nine and expected an all-out gore fest with a slightly traditionally-slanted plot, like Ripper, but the excellently executed historical plot-threads and the scenes aboard the bomber and submarine made it so much more than a mere mystery-thriller. Add to this two, archaeological locked room mysteries and a boatload of arcane and historical lectures and bits of knowledge, you have a serious candidate to be included on the third iteration "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." Recommended with some reservations for those who really can't stand gore. 

A note for the curious: I forgot to mention Crucified is not a part of the Special X series and appears to be a standalone, which might explain why it doesn't all out with the blood-and-guts-to-the-wall killing. Not as frequently as in Ripper. It makes me want to look at some others moderns on the big pile like Micki Browning, Martin Edwards, D.L. Marshall and Slade's Red Snow (2010), but first I need to get to that landmark volume of Case Closed.

Death in the Clouds (1935) by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is, to this day, considered to be the uncontested Queen of Crime as she understood better than most mystery writers, past or present, what makes a plot tick like a Swiss timepiece and turned the surprise twist into an art form – paradoxically transforming the least-likely-suspect into the least-likely-suspect. Christie is commonly associated with the closed-circle of suspects, iron-clad alibis and the surprise ending, but not the locked room mystery and impossible crime. Surprisingly, she wrote more of them than most realize. 

Mike Grost calls Christie "a major contributor to the form," in "quality and quantity," which discusses and breaks down most of those contributions on his website's Agatha Christie page under "Impossible Crimes." When you go over them, you begin to understand why Christie's name is not inextricably-linked to the locked room and impossible crime fiction. She was very covert about it. Brad, of Ah, Sweet Mystery, observed in 2018 blog-post, "Pondering the Impossible, Christie-style," that "most of the examples we find in Christie are not labeled impossible crimes," because "she does not wish to call attention to these situations." Usually done to obscure the murderer's identity without drawing undue attention to her carefully planted clues and red herrings with a glaring impossible situation. That's how some of her mysteries have largely gone unacknowledged, or unrecognized, as impossible crimes. Sometimes, the locked room is only a minor element (Hercule Poirot's Christmas, 1938) or simply a mere afterthought to the plot (Curtain, 1975). Every now and then, Christie declared her colors. You can find most of clearly defined impossible crimes in her short stories, like "The Blue Geranium" (1929) and "The Dream" (1937), but there's one novel in which she drew full attention to the locked room and impossible crime elements of the plot. 

Death in the Clouds (1935), alternatively published Death in the Air, marked the twelfth novel-length appearance of Hercule Poirot and the first time I read it in English. I originally read a Dutch translation with a cover that spoiled the solution by putting two clues together. So my second reading was much more rewarding than my first as I realized Death in the Clouds is very John Dickson Carr-like, but not in the way you might think. More on that in a minute.

So the book opens on a hot, sun-drenched September afternoon at Le Bourget aerodrome as Hercule Poirot climbs aboard the Prometheus, to fly from Paris to Croydon, in the company of ten other passengers – who occupy the plane's rear compartment. Miss Jane Gray, a hairdresser's assistant, who won a hundred pounds in the Irish Sweep and took a holiday abroad where she met a handsome-looking man, Norman Gale. A dentist who also aboard to fly back to England. Armand and Jean Dupont are a French father-and-son archaeological team and board the plane discussing the dating of prehistoric pottery. There's the beautiful, but haughty, Countess of Horbury and her friend, the Hon. Venetia Kerr. Daniel Clancy is a writer Edgar Wallace-style thrillers and boards the plane "absorbed in the perfectioning of his cross-Europe alibi" for his next novel. James Ryder is the managing director of a cement company returning home and a specialist on diseases of the ear and throat, Dr. Roger Bryant. The last passenger is "one of the best-known moneylenders in Paris," Madame Giselle. Everyone was handling something or moving around, which all seems innocently enough on a normal flight. But, as they near Croydon, a steward discovers Madame Giselle is no longer alive!

Madame Giselle apparently died of an heart attack or had an adverse reaction to a wasp sting, which buzzed around the cabin before it got squashed. Hercule Poirot makes a startling discovery. On the floor there's "a little knot of teased fluffy silk, orange and black, attached to a long, peculiar-looking thorn with a discoloured tip." A poisonous torn, shot from a blowpipe, which had recently been dipped in the venom of the boomslang (tree snake). So how could someone have shot "a poisoned dart out of a blowpipe in a car full of people" without being spotted by either the other passengers or one of the stewards. Inspector Japp, of Scotland Yard, enters the case muttering "blowpipes and poisoned darts in an aeroplane" insults one's intelligence ("it's an insult—that's what this murder is—an insult"). And he's not the only one professing their disbelieve that a dime thriller has come to life in front of their eyes. That reminded me even more of Carr than the impossible crime element.

Carr often exaggerated to clarify by whittling something utterly fantastic or otherworldly back down to human proportions. You can get a picture of what I mean by comparing The Unicorn Murders (1935; as by "Carter Dickson") with John Rhode's Invisible Weapons (1938). The impossibilities are somewhat related, but Carr's a thrill-filled extravaganza, while Rhode took a more low key approach. Normally, Christie leans more towards how Rhode's handled his locked room mysteries, but here she pulled a John Dickson Carr. Only notable difference is that, instead of invoking the supernatural, Christie presented her impossible crime as the pulpiest of pulp murders. Something so extraordinary that it even left the thriller writer lost for words.

So the little grey cells get to work to try and make sense out of something of "unparalleled audacity" flying in the face of everything logical and sensible. Christie is at the top of her game here when it comes to planting clues and dropping red herrings. A particular highlight is Poirot going over a list cataloging the content of the baggage of all the suspects ("down to the minutest detail") and boldly declare that "it seems to point very plainly to one person as having committed the crime," but can't "see why, or even how." Remembering parts of the solution, I once again couldn't help but admire how Christie could simultaneously spell out the truth to reader and pool the wool over their eyes. She hammers this down in the final quarter of the story as Poirot points out and names the three central clues, which are all excellent and brilliant when dovetailed together – revealing a solution as practical as its presentation was maddening. A solution showing once more just how big of an influence G.K. Chesterton had on the plotting technique of the Golden Age generation. Only imperfection that keeps Death in the Clouds from a place among Christie's best detective novels is the contrived, gracelessly planted motive. It really felt like Christie placed a crowbar between the murderer and victim to create as much distance between them as possible, which made it harder to justify committing the murder under such fantastical and risky conditions.

Nonetheless, a second-tier Christie is still top-tier detective novel and would be considered a top-tier novel had another name been on the cover. If Stuart Palmer had written Death in the Clouds instead of The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933), it would have been a permanent resident on most specialized locked room lists. So, even while the motive lacked strength, I have very little to complain about as the story was better than I remembered. It was simply fun to see Christie enjoying herself with the characters and plot. One of my favorite scenes is Poirot visiting the messy home of Clancy and is told he's going to write "the whole thing exactly as it happened" with "perfect pen portraits of all the passengers," which carries the title The Air Mail Mystery. And to dodge any libel charges, Clancy dreamed up "an entirely unexpected solution" normally found in only the murkiest of pulp magazines. What a shame Clancy never got to meet Ariadne Oliver. He could have easily replaced Superintendent Battle or Colonel Race in Cards on the Table (1936). 

Death in the Clouds is a strangely overlooked impossible crime novel written by nobody less than the Queen of Crime herself and deserves to be acknowledged as a mostly very well done locked room mystery. More importantly, it's a tremendously fun and entertaining detective story that gently pokes fun at its exotic, pulpier cousins, the thriller. A showcase why the 1930s were the Golden Decade of the Golden Age. 

Notes for the curious: Hercule Poirot has been accused of having been in a position to have prevented the second murder discovered in the first-class carriage of a boat train, but I can't see how. Even if he told Japp about his suspicions, he could not have acted upon it without something more substantial to go on. Poirot admitted he had no idea how this person could have done it or why. I don't think Japp would have wanted to make the murderer aware of their suspicions. Poirot was as surprised as anyone else when this person entered the picture ("why did no one mention this before?"). Only the reader was really aware. By the time Poirot begins to catch on, the wheels of the second murder was already set in motion. So you can't really pin that second murder on his conscious. There is, however, some hilarious, unintended foreshadowing to Curtain (ROT13: “zba nzv... jura V pbzzvg n zheqre vg jvyy abg or jvgu gur neebj cbvfba bs gur Fbhgu Nzrevpna Vaqvnaf”). Another interesting footnote is that a character appears in the story named Jules Perrot. I thought it was interesting as Frank Howel Evans short stories about a retired French detective, Jules Poiret, is often cited as an inspiration for Hercule Poirot.

A Tough One to Lose (1972) by Tony Kenrick

Tony Kenrick is an Australian author who started out in advertising and worked as a copywriter in America, Britain and Canada, but abandoned his career in advertising in 1972 to become a full-time writer specialized in comedic capers and heist thrillers – which earned him a favorable comparison to the work of Donald E. Westlake. A number of his novels were optioned or bought by Hollywood with only Faraday's Flower (1985) making it to the big screen as Shanghai Surprise (1986). 

So not a likely writer to wash up on this blog, but Kenrick's A Tough One to Lose (1972) is listed and highlighted in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Praising it as "a pacey, often humorous novel in which the author successfully de-and re-materialized a Jumbo Jet full of passengers." If memory serves me correctly, I have come across a vanishing aircraft only once before in Richard Forrest's Death Through the Looking Glass (1978). When a copy came my way, I snapped it up to see what it's all about.

First of all, Kenrick completely subverted my expectation of how the story would play out. I expected an all out, blockbuster-like heist thriller with the lives of 360 missing passengers and a multi-million dollar ransom at stake, but the story turned out to be surprisingly small scale, almost a traditional detective story, reminiscent of the comedic mysteries by Kelley Roos – like you're following around two side-characters away from the action. There's also this weird balance between the darker, thriller-ish aspects mixed in with the shenanigans of the two protagonists. Somehow, it worked better than it should have done.

William Verecker is a down on his luck lawyer who had been a junior partner in an old, conservative established firm until an embarrassing incident with a society hostess ended up in the paper. The "firm hadn't accepted the explanation and neither had his wife," Annie, who thought Verecker was a better boss than husband. So she came back to work as his secretary in his newly established law firm and mostly spend her working day "being sweet to the many people they owed money to and tough with the handful who owed them." This all changed when Verecker is contacted by an old Air Force buddy, Phil Rinlaub, who now works as a troubleshooter for one of the domestic airline giants, Calair. Rinlaub wants him to identity a pair cuff links belonging to a client of his. A client who's one of more than three hundred passengers caught up in the crime of the century, which is kept under tight wrap by the authorities.

Rinlaud tells Verecker in confidence that "Friday night somebody pulled a stunt that makes the Brink's job look like kid stuff" and called it "the Great Plane Robbery." A 747 Jumbo Jet going from San Francisco to New York vanished from radar about thirty minutes after the flight took off and the authorities quick began to suspect something was up. They couldn't get the passenger list out of the computer, duplicates of the tickets were missing and all the copies of the flight manifest had disappeared, which meant there's "a missing airplane full of people" they "had no record of" – a situation that went from bad to worse. Calair receives a package with items belonging to some of the passengers and a ransom demand of $25 million in uncut diamonds! How do you hide something the size of a Jumbo Jet and where do you store over three hundred hostages? The disappearance of the plane seems like an insoluble problem, but Verecker sees an opportunity to net a huge reward from the insurance company that would solve all their money problem. Verecker unwittingly has a clue in possession that the authorities are unaware of.

On the morning of Rinlaud's visit, Verecker played golf with a client and there was a row of holes on the fairway with burnt-out fireworks at the bottom, but, going back to the golf course to have a second look, he discovers a dozen holes set at ten-yard intervals. Like a makeshift landing strip with flares for a small airplane. A suspicion confirmed by the discovery of twin ruts and an oil slick. Excitedly, Verecker returns to Annie with a branch ("Wonderful. We can use it to beat off creditors") which he uses to make a clever deduction how they can figure out who landed there. So they have an inside track the authorities are unaware of. But don't expect a serious thriller.

William and Annie Verecker begin to follow up on their lead and get caught up absurd, sometimes hilarious situations throughout their investigation. Verecker's discovery at a supposedly empty school would not have been out of place in an episode of Jonathan Creek, while Annie's attempt at an undercover operation would have made Haila Troy proud. Their shenanigans are interspersed with the introductions of the hijackers who are referred to as "The Skycap," "The Bookie," "The Pilot," "The Stewardess" and two baggage men, but there's also a dark horse lurking in the background, "The Bomber." A character who deserved his own novel, because he has a very novel motive. Whenever they appear, together or alone, the story becomes more serious in tone. Such as some of their background stories or when they feel drastic action have to be taken against that meddling lawyer and his ex-wife/secretary, which should have struck a jarring note with the comedic stylings of the Vereckers. But didn't.

So what about the plot? That's a mixed bag of nuts and bolts. Firstly, Kenrick came up with a good solution how (theoretically) a giant airplane with more than three hundred people aboard can disappear and stay hidden, while everyone from the FBI to the insurance investigators are combing the state with a fine tooth-comb, but a few details of the plan were a little hard to swallow – mostly to do with numbers. However, it was something different from what you might expect, because there's only so much you can do to explain away vanishing rooms, houses, streets, trains and airplanes. I appreciate the Vereckers were bouncing false-solutions back and forth throughout the story. Some were more seriously than others ("a 747 was too big to disguise as a diner"), but I thought the half-serious suggestion the hijackers "dug a hole in the desert big enough to take a 747" was as interesting as it was impractical. And the one with a foreign hijacker being flown in to disguise a mass murder as a skyjacking/kidnapping was as practical as it was dark. That trick would probably have worked better (especially in 1972) than the one they settled on.

So that's something the more traditionally-minded mystery reader can enjoy, but don't expect too much from everything surrounding the mystery of the vanishing airplane. Not every detail is fully explained, one plot-thread is left unresolved and the fascinating clues that were introduced during the second-half turned out to be of little relevance to the solution. But, then again, A Tough One to Lose was not written and plotted like a full-blown, traditional detective novel. Kenrick wrote a crime caper that went for both laughs and thrills. In addition to the impossible crime at the center of the plot with all its false-solutions certainly makes it an item of interest to obsessed fans of locked room and impossible crime fiction.

The Flying Boat Mystery (1935) by Franco Vailati

Leo Wollenborg Jr. was the son of a German-born Italian economist and a journalist, who moved to the United States in response to the introduction of the leggi razziali (racial laws) in 1938, but he left behind, what some have called, one of the most beautifully imagined Italian locked room mysteries, Il mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935) – published as by "Franco Vailati." So it was only a matter of time before The Flying Boat Mystery appeared on the radar of John Pugmire's Locked Room International.

The Flying Boat Mystery opens on the surface of the water basins of Ostia Airport, near Rome, where a flying boat is ready to depart for Palermo.

The passenger list comprises of three country tradesmen, Giuseppi Sabelli, Giovanni Marchetti and Pagelli-Bertieri. A middle-class, middle-aged couple, Augusto and Maria Martelli. A fascinating lady dressed in red, named Vanna Sandrelli, who carries "a lizard-green bag" which clashes horrendously with her clothes. Somewhat of a crime in Italy, I imagine. A plucky journalist of the La Gazzetta, Giorgio Vallesi, who only had eyes for another female passenger, Marcella Arteni. The last passenger of the list was supposed to be an Italian-born Greek banker, Francesco Agliati, but a bank-teller, Larini, arrived when the plane was full and ready to go – which forced him to part with a packet of lire to get the mechanics seat in the cockpit. And the mechanic traveled, cushioned with money, in the luggage compartment.

So this was suppose to be a routine, ninety-minutes flight from Ostia to Naples, but, during the flight, Agliati "decided suddenly to retire his large, bulky figure into the small toilet." Agliati never returned to his seat nor did he respond to repeated calls and knocking.

When the flying boat landed, the door was broken down and, to everyone's surprise, the small toilet was completely empty! The door had been locked on the inside and the only possible exit is a small skylight in the roof of the toilet, but its dimensions makes it absurdly impossible for the large, bulky man to have passed through and what reason could he have had for such "an absurd acrobatic exploit" in mid-flight? This eliminates the options of accident, suicide and murder. So what happened?

Vice Questore (Assistant Commissioner) Luigi Renzi reads in the newspaper that his old college friend, Giorgio Vallesi, was on board of the hydroplane when the banker inexplicably vanished and decides to insert himself into the investigation, but the impossible disappearance is swathed in complications – such as finding out everyone's reason for traveling on that plane. And, as to be expected, every single one of them is holding something back from the investigators. But that's not all.

A second, more grisly, problem presents itself when the head and arms of a person, who was on that miraculous plane ride, are found crammed in a suitcase that was left in a train compartment. This adds a complex little puzzle involving a dismembered corpse and suitcases with mysterious numbers written on the inside. Why not? Why settle on just an impossible disappearance from a locked toilet in mid-flight, when you can throw a little corpse-puzzle in the mix. However, the locked room problem, premise and solution, is the high point of the plot.

I figured out an essential part of the vanishing-trick, but only because the locked room situation resembled, in some ways, a unique aspect of a short story that was written in the past twenty-five years. I doubt the writer in question was aware of this Italian mystery novel, but found it interesting to see how they found two very different applications for exactly the same idea. What makes The Flying Boat Mystery such a joy is that Franco Vailati didn't stop there.

Once you figured out the basic principle behind the trick, the problem is still far from solved and you can even say that it becomes more complicated. Vailati showed the craftsmanship of a Golden Age writer with a beautifully done, partially false-solution to explain the second part of the vanishing-trick before Renzi shows the reader what really happened with a simple diagram – destroying a well-hidden alibi in the process. What a shame this was Vailati's only detective novel!

The Flying Boat Mystery was translated by Igor Longo and he wrote an article, "The Italian Mystery Novel," that ended the book and some parts hit a little close to home. Longo mentions that one of the reasons why the traditional detective story is in such a poor state, in Italy, was "the disapproving eye of dons, newspaper critics and other Arbiter Elegantiarum" unduly "praising the tosh written by their own pets" and "the locked room murder was laughed about" – used "only for epitomizing what the "good writer" was called to destroy." You can unfortunately say the same of my country. Where even the traditional detective fiction that had been written have rarely, if ever, been reprinted and have pretty much been forgotten about today or have even become lost altogether.

And to make it even more painful, Longo goes over a whole list of notable Italian writers of traditional detective stories and locked room mysteries! Most of them untranslated! I've a feeling JJ will lose his goddamn mind when he learns there's "a sort of minor Italian Rupert Penny" who's entirely out of his reach. Pugmire really has to make these Italian mystery writers part of the LRI family.

So, all in all, The Flying Boat Mystery is a very short, but fun, novel with a busy plot, good setting, an original vanishing-trick and an interesting use of the partially false-solution, which should satisfy the fanatical locked room reader.

The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003) by Helen McCloy

Helen McCloy's The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing (2003) is a collection of short stories, originally assembled by Crippen & Landru, reprinted in 2013 as an ebook by The Murder Room and gathered all ten short stories about McCloy's series-detective, Dr. Basil Willing – a psychiatric consultant of the district attorney's office. This volume has all ten short stories, including eight previously uncollected stories, that were written about Dr. Basil Willing. A splendid collections demonstrating McCloy's versatility as both a writer and plotter.

There are stories littered with the conventions of the traditional detective, such as locked room puzzles, impossible crimes and unbreakable alibis, but the post-1940s stories show a willingness to adept to a new world. Resulting in some unusual plots or subject matters. Well, unusual when it comes from a writer so closely associated with the genre's Golden Age.

Most notably, there are not one, but two, stories in this collection dealing with a crime rarely touched upon by classic mystery writers: mass murder. Fascinatingly, there's an extraterrestrial element in both stories and they were penned exactly thirty years apart. So it was interesting to see McCloy revisit these ideas so late in her career and wrote a completely different story around them, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's take down these stories from the top.

"Through a Glass, Darkly" is the opener of this collection, originally published in the September, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM), but this novella has already been discussed in my 2011 review of All But Impossible! An Anthology of Locked Room and Impossible Crime Stories by Members of the Mystery Writers of America (1981). So moving on!

The second novella of the collection, "The Singing Diamonds," was first printed in the October, 1949, issue of EQMM and is a quasi-impossible crime story plotted around the UFO phenomena. There are entire shelves of detective stories with supposedly malevolent ghosts, family curses and rooms that kill, but not that many have handled the topic of alien visitations. McCloy here mixed a flurry of UFO sightings with mass murder, possible espionage and government conspiracies.

Mathilde Verworn was one of the eyewitnesses who saw the flat, elongated squares, "like the pips on a nine of diamonds," flying in V-formation at a great height, emanating "a strange resonance" like the humming or singing of "a high-tension wire in the wind," but in the last fortnight three witnesses have unexpected died – which is why she decided to consult a specialist, Dr. Basil Willing. The plot he exposes is a clever, well executed interpretation of a trick as classic as it's pure evil. But the story as a whole was marvelous. From the premise of the flying diamonds and dying witnesses to Dr. Willing getting "a lesson in the manufacture of public opinion" as a high-placed Naval Intelligence officer shows him how they manipulated and distorted the press reports on the flying diamonds. Easily one of the better and more memorable stories in this collection.

"The Case of the Duplicate Door" is a completely overlooked locked room mystery with an unusual publishing history, which when it was released, in 1949, as a separately printed story in the Mystery of the Month series of jigsaw puzzles. You had to put together a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle and the completed picture was a clue to the solution. This is probably why even Robert Adey missed it when he was compiling Locked Room Murders (1991). However, the story was reprinted in the February, 1965, issue of EQMM under alternative title, "Into Thin Air," with an added paragraph to replace the jigsaw clue.

This is the EQMM version of the story with its original title restored and a reduced, black-and-white reproduction of the assembled jigsaw puzzle. Purely as a locked room story, this is a curiosity that put a false solution to good use.

Matthew Rex, President of the Conservative Trust, has absconded with $80,000 in cash and $300,000 in bearer bonds, but he sends a panicky radio gram from Bermuda that he can "explain everything" and that he'll return the following day by private-plane – police is waiting for him when he lands. But when they storm the plane, they only find a fedora, a pair of gloves and a shot glass half filled with brandy. Nobody had left the plane after it landed and the pilot swears his boss had been aboard, but Matthew Rex had inexplicably disappeared along with a briefcase that had been chained to his wrist. This is the point where the story does something that's as clever as it's frustrating.

A perfectly logical, but incorrect, solution is proposed that turned the inexplicable disappearance into an unfortunate accident. An accident is not the most desirable explanation to a seemingly impossible situation, no matter how bizarre the circumstances, but this was a genuinely good, reasonable and acceptable answer – directly linked to the actual solution. A weak, uninspired solution that looked much better than it was, because it was backed up by the false solution. Dr. Willing figured out the trick when he spotted the flaw in this perfectly acceptable explanation.

So this is an uneven, but interesting, curiosity and the only reason why it never made any of the locked room anthologies is its obscurity. Hey, it would be an excuse to put McCloy's name on the cover and you can't keep reprinting "Through a Glass, Darkly."

The next story, "Thy Brother Death," was culled from a 1955 issue of This Week and begins when Dr. Willing is consulted by an acquaintance. Dick Blount found an anonymous letter, addressed to his wife, in the morning mail with ominous-sounding lines of poetry from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Suspicion has fallen on a village girl, who had worked for them as a maid, but was dismissed after a diamond brooch went missing. Dr. Willing wants a sample of her handwriting and accompanies Blount to his private office to get some canceled checks she had endorsed, but, when they arrive, the telephone is ringing. The caller was his desperate wife, Clara, who called to say "someone was prowling outside the house" followed by scream and a gunshot. And then silence.

A good, old-fashioned detective story with more emphasis on the how, rather than the who, which hinged on a clever, but ultimately simple, alibi-trick reminiscent of Christopher Bush. A note of warning: the solution is harder to anticipate for readers today, because the hinge of the alibi-trick is specific to that period in time.

"Murder Stops the Music" was first published in This Week in 1957 and Dr. Willing is tasked with solving the murder of a famous concert pianist, Gertrude Ehrenthal, who was stabbed to death during a village square dance for local charity when the place was suddenly plunged in darkness. I think murderer moved around a little too easily in a pitch-black room with people standing around, but the double-clue of the ill-mannered dog was smartly handled. A good, but minor, story.

"The Pleasant Assassin" was originally published in the December, 1970, issue of EQMM and Dr. Willing is consulted by Captain Aloysius Grogan, of the Boston Police Department, who needs his help with ensnaring a respected academic, Professor Jeremiah Pitcairn. Apparently, the professor is deeply involved in the drug trade and capturing involves a quasi-locked room problem of a warning message being transmitted from a closely observed space (c.f. Edmund Crispin's "A Country to Sell," 1955). However, the plot is paper-thin to the point that it barely exists, but stands out for its open, liberally-minded opinion on marijuana and Captain Grogan even endorsed its legalization ("as long as marijuana is illegal it brings young people it brings young people into contact with the criminal world"). Not what you would expect from a Golden Age mystery writer, but good to see McCloy tried to keep up with the times.

"Murder Ad Lib" was originally published in the November, 1964, issue of EQMM and is an unusual poorly plotted detective story. Dr. Willing is only present as a sharp-eyed, quick-witted spectator. Lt. Carson Dawes, of the Los Angeles Police, knows the murderer's identity and that his alibi has crumbled to pieces, but the murderer is blissfully unaware of these development. So all the police lieutenant has to do is sit back and "let him talk himself into the gas chamber," but he allowed a close friend of the suspect to be present and this person managed to give him a warning message. Dawes is the only one who misses the moment when this happened. The reader can only spot this painfully obvious moment, but decoding the message is impossible. So this is the practically inescapable dud you come across in nearly every short story collection.

"A Case of Innocent Eavesdropping" was originally published in the March, 1978, issue of EQMM and is more of a domestic crime than a puzzle detective story.

Mrs. Jessie Markel is an elderly lady who moves in with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson, but her daughter-in-law, Maggie, exploits her from all sides. Maggie has taken full control of her income and has her "scrubbing all the pots and pans that can't go into the dishwasher," running the vacuum cleaner, polishing the silver and babysitting her grandson – which gives her little time or energy for anything else. Maggie tells her friends Mrs. Markel needs this work "to recover her identity." There is, however, something sinister going on the Markel household and Mrs. Markel learns a terrifying secret that ends in murder.

However, the only thing Dr. Willing has to do here is exonerate an innocent man by destroying a lie from a cantankerous, dishonest eyewitness. I didn't dislike this story, but hardly one of McCloy's best works.

"Murphy's Law" is another minor, but enjoyable, story originally published in the May, 1979, issue of EQMM and the structure of the plot recalls Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his thief-for-hire, Nick Velvet. The story begins with Gerald Murphy and Professor Allerton plotting to steal "a small album" of ten ancient Greek coins from a notorious collector, Sammy Bork, which have an estimated value of half a million dollars. Naturally, everything goes wrong and Dr. Willing has to exonerate one of them from a potential murder charge. A good short story with multiple, intertwined plot-threads.

This collection ends strongly with the unnerving "The Bug That's Going Around," originally printed in the August, 1979, issue of EQMM and opens with a covert challenge to the reader. In most of Dr. Willing's murder cases, "the essential clue has been some scrap of rare information," but this time, he solved it with common "scraps of knowledge" accessible "to everybody who bothered to read newspapers." The extraordinary problem here is another quasi-impossible puzzle of a scientific nature and the story is in more than way related to "The Singing Diamonds."

The backdrop of the story is a convention of microbiologists at the Forum Hotel, but an inexplicable epidemic has left five people dead and even Dr. Willing's five-year-old grandson has fallen ill. A bizarre micro-organism has been found in the bodies of everyone who died or fell ill at the hotel, but the problem is that the micro-organism appears to be "a new species," violating all "the laws of evolution by appearing too suddenly," which makes the thing a monster – something literally out of this world! So are these micro-organisms "silent, invisible micro-astronauts," who don't need spaceships, because they can survive "all extremes of heat, cold and distance." An alien killer! And if this is the case, how did they get in the air-conditioning system of a Boston hotel?

Dr. Willing finds a logical and rational explanation for "an impossible micro-organism," which he deduced from a doodle on a telephone pad found at the scene of a murder. A genuinely good, slightly unnerving story of mass murder and a potential extraterrestrial threat. A great closer to a great collection!

So, on a whole, The Pleasant Assassin and Other Cases of Dr. Basil Willing is an outstanding collection of McCloy's short fiction that opened strongly with an all-time classic, a highly original novella, a virtually unknown locked room mystery and good alibi story. After these four excellent stories, the quality tapered off a little bit and had one dud, but McCloy returned to form in the last two stories. Highly recommended!