In Plain Sight: Arthur Porges' "The Invisible Tomb" (1967) and Edward D. Hoch's "The Flying Fiend" (1982)

I've not done as many single, or uncollected, short story reviews in 2020 as in the previous two years and, consequently, the number of short stories, mostly locked room mysteries, on my to-be-read list has swelled considerably – which means I'll probably do another anthology post towards the end of the year. But for now, I bring you two stories from two masters of the short detective story, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges.

Porges' "The Invisible Tomb" was first published in the February, 1967, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and is one of only four stories in the short-lived Julius Morse Trowbridge series.

Trowbridge physically resembles "a dissipated gnome badly hungover from too much fermented toadstool juice" with a vast, pallid face, but "inside the big, bullet-shaped head was a remarkable brain" – packed with "esoteric knowledge instantly available on call." Once he had been a child prodigy, graduating from Harvard at fourteen, until he broke down and fled the academic world. Now he lived as a 50-year-old man in "a ramshackle house," crammed with books, "where he acted as a kind of neighborhood Solomon" by handing out free and usually quite good advice "to all those who asked for it."

One of the people who regularly consults him is a policeman, Captain Gregg, who's often confronted with "seemingly impossible puzzles" involving "tricky hiding places."

This time, Captain Gregg is stumped by the inexplicable disappearance of a woman, or rather the disappearance of her body, because he knows her husband killed her. Neighbors heard them fighting again, before everything went eerily quiet. He claimed she had simply walked out of the house, but nobody had seen her leave and he had no opportunity to bury, or dispose, of the body around the house – a roomy suburb with miles of tidy lawns. So the body had to be somewhere in the house, but the police had searched the place for hours without finding anything. And they returned several times to see if they could catch the whiff of a decomposing body. But even that was missing.

"The Invisible Tomb" is only five pages long, closer to a short-short than a short story, but there are enough clues and hints to enable the reader to make an educated guess where the titular tomb is located. Not a classic of its kind, but a good and solid story that's perfect for its short length. I've always loved these type of impossible crime tales about invisible hiding places, phantom pathways and Judas windows that can only be used by criminals and detected by detectives.

On a related side note: I recommend everyone who's new to Porges to read the article "A Talent to Burn: A Guide to the Mystery Fiction of Arthur Porges" by Richard Simms. Porges was a massively underrated mystery writer who deserves to be rediscovered!

"The Flying Fiend" was originally published in the mid-July, 1982, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and is part of Hoch's short-lived series of lighthearted tributes to the Great Detectives of the Golden Age, embodied by Sir Gideon Parrot (pronounced parroe), whose name recalls two of the all-time great detective characters – John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. Two of the five stories in the series are full-blown homages to the impossible crime story.

"The Flying Fiend" finds Sir Gideon Parrot on holiday on a small island retreat in the Strait of Georgia, on the American-Canadian border, where he learns upon arrival that a maniac is terrorizing the cluster of islands. Several weeks ago, the body of a young man was found on the beach with his throat cut, but there were no footprints except his own leading up to the spot. So everyone figured the sleeping man had been attacked by a buzzard, "believing he was dead." This was only the beginning.

Some time later, a sunbather was killed under identical circumstances and she was immediately found by her husband, who heard her scream, but, when he arrived, there was nobody else in sight – no other footprints but the victim's own. Another man is killed, on one of the Canadian islands, while all alone on the beach. Sir Gideon arrived in time to be there when the fourth murder is announced. And this time, the murderer left a calling card.

I didn't know exactly what to expect from "The Flying Fiend" going into it and the opening pages suggested that uncovering a hidden link between the victims was going to be more important than the impossibilities. The names of some of the victims, such as King and Quinn, were very suggestive. I began to half suspect that the murderer was in a boat and used a fishing took (like a steel-gaff hook) to kill, but the story proved to be more interesting as an impossible crime story than as a who-or whydunit. Hoch used something here that has turned up in other impossible crime stories from the 1970s and '80s. Amazingly, they all managed to get something completely different out of it, in presentation and solution, with Hoch's contribution being the most conventional of the lot.

So a good and fun detective story for most readers, but an item of interest for locked room and impossible crime fiends!

Fiendish Flattery: A Review of Three Detective Pastiches

One of the many titles listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) that has always fascinated me is a short story docketed as entry #1361, Thomas Narcejac's "L'orchideé rouge" ("The Red Orchid," 1947), which is part of a series of pastiches he wrote during the late '40s and were collected a decade later in Usurpation d'identity (Identity Theft, 1959) – published as by Boileau-Narcejac. "The Red Orchid" is, as you might expect from the title, a pastiche of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

The story was originally translated into an English by Lawrence G. Blochman, published in the January, 1961, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but a new translation was commissioned for its inclusion in The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (2020; edited by Josh Pachter). Rebecca Jones previously translated Narcejac's "Le mystère des ballons" ("The Mystery of the Red Balloons," 1947) for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018; edited by Pachter and Dale C. Andrews).

I'll come back to The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe some time later this year, but now, I want to concentrate on "The Red Orchid." A story that, peculiarly enough, gives Archie and Wolfe an impossible crime to annoy each other with. I believe the closest Stout ever came to the locked room genre was in Champagne for One (1958) and The Doorbell Rang (1965). But that combination is probably what attracted me to the story.

Isabella Tyndall is the niece of an inventor and savant, Sir Lawrence Tyndall, who has been experimenting in "absolute secrecy" with ultrasound and has developed "a simple machine that allows the user to stop engines from miles away," but, around the same time, the attacks began – a bullet grazed his head in the park and there was poison in his herbal tea. These attacks coincided with the disappearance from the house of a bottle of sherry, a ham and a Cheshire cheese. And worst of all, the press smells a story and the place is now "besieged by a crowd of journalists." Sir Lawrence can't work anymore and wants a private detective to clear up the case, but someone predicted Wolfe would refuse the case because he rarely goes out.

Nero Wolfe is "more sedentary than the Empire State Building" and has to be bribed and prepared, like an over-sized child, with a big fee, promise of food and a rare orchid. One of Sir Lawrence discoveries is a way to influence the development and coloring of flowers, which resulted in a red Coelogyne pandurata. Wolfe has tried for two years to breed one in red and refuses to believe it was done outside of his rooftop greenhouse.

Archie finally succeeds in getting Wolfe out of the house and on the road to an earning an easy fee, but when they arrive, the orchid has been stolen and the potato masher has disappeared. During the night, Archie discovers various members of the household, relatives and boarders, sneaking around the place and the next morning they have to break down the door of Sir Lawrence's bedroom – behind it they find his body. Sir Lawrence, clad in pajamas, lay collapsed against the wall with a disfigured face suggesting a nasty dose of poison. The way in which the locked room-trick worked was surprisingly inventive, even if it required a bit of luck, but something you would never associate with Stout. Same goes for the clueing, which was not always one of Stout's strong suits. But the way in which Archie and Wolfe tackled the case was typically Stout. Wolfe reasons the answer while laying in bed and tests Archie's patience when he uses him to test his deductions ("Listen, boss, I'm a patient guy, but..."). So, yeah, I enjoyed it.

Even with the out-of-place locked room poisoning, Narcejac's "The Red Orchid" is a good and well done pastiche of Archie, Wolfe and Stout. One that can even be enjoyed and appreciated by barbarians readers who don't like Archie, Wolfe and Stout.

Well, since "The Red Orchid" is a pastiche, I decided to use it as an excuse to expend this review with two more pastiches that have been lingering on my to-be-read pile for ages.

Edward D. Hoch's "The Wrightsville Carnival" has only appeared in the Sep/Oct, 2005, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and brings an elderly Ellery Queen to an altered, modernized Wrightsville. The corner store now occupied the entire block and the local ice cream parlor was turned into a Starbucks, while many of the old inhabitants had either passed away or moved elsewhere.

Police Chief Anselm Newby made his debut in Ellery Queen's "The Death of Don Juan," collected in Queen's Full (1965), who recognizes Ellery and tells him about the new editor of the Wrightsville Record, Polly Watkins. Ellery learns through Polly about the town's bad boy, Sam Nation, who's the reason why Janice Collins left her husband and Polly had used the newspaper to hound him out of the town, but there was a baby and Janice put it up for adoption – which infuriated Sam when he found out. And demanded to know where his son was. Sam has returned to Wrightsville working as a roustabout at the carnival, which comes to the town every year in August.

So he naturally becomes the primary suspect when Janice is found bludgeoned to death in her home, but Ellery effortlessly deduces the correct solution and escapes the clutches of an enraged murderer with "only minor bruising."

Hoch's "The Wrightsville Carnival" has something curious in common with Narcejac's "The Red Orchid." Character-wise, the detectives echo their originals incarnations, but the plots are a little uncharacteristic. Stout barely touched the locked room mystery, but "The Red Orchid" has Wolfe solving an honest to God locked room murder. "The Wrightsville Carnival" lacked any of the usual Ellery Queen tropes. No dying, or coded, message. No ingenious false-solution or multi-faceted clues. Not even a challenge to the reader. Just an alibi that has be destroyed. It's not exactly an alibi-trick that will fool many seasoned and suspicious-minded armchair detective, but I suppose the novelty of this story comes from seeing Ellery interact with the modern, ever-changing world. And the many references to the original stories.

So a more than decent pastiche with some sense of continuity, but not even close to being one of Hoch's best detective stories.

The last of these three pastiches is a short-short by Arthur Porges, "In Compartment 813," which was originally published in the June, 1966, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and has a double-layered solution with the final twist being the true identity of one of the characters – somewhat reminiscent of John Dickson Carr's "The Gentleman from Paris" (collected in The Third Bullet, 1954). You can probably guess by the title of the story who's playing detective, but we'll pretend it's not Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin.

The story opens with a young and an old man sharing Compartment 813, of the Cote d'Azur Express, when the old man, Monsieur Sernine, recognizes the younger man as the grandson of an old friend, Bertrand de Monsoreau. Sernine asks Bertrand to kill the time and tell him about the night he attended one of Baron Duclaux's dinner parties. During the party, Baron Duclaux showed his guests the Tiger's Heart, "a fabulous ruby," which he had just bought for two million francs. The ruby "was passed from hand to hand" and, all at once, "no one had the ruby." Nobody had left the room when the police arrived, but nobody had the ruby on them and it was not found anywhere in the room. The ruby had "utterly vanished."

Considering the short length of the story (barely 4 pages), I suspected the good old camouflage-trick with the ruby having been secreted in a glass of wine or hidden in the chandelier, but Porges came up with an unexpectedly different kind of solution. A good trick that would have been better had there been room to drop some clues and more hint. Yes, even in this short-short, Porges was able to foreshadow the solution. Porges was such a good and underrated mystery writer!

These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie (2018) by Arthur Porges

Back in September, 2017, I reviewed Arthur Porges' No Killer Has Wings: The Casebook of Dr. Joel Hoffman (2017), a slim, 86-page volume comprising half a dozen short detective stories, which were first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine during the early 1960s and finally brought back into print by Richard Simms – who runs The Arthur Porges Fan Site and Richard Simms Publications. I closed my review with the comment that, hopefully, the next collection would gather the stories from the Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie series.

Simms posted in the comment-section that he was seriously considering doing such a collection and eventually received an email from him telling me that he was working on another volume, entitled These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie (2018), which was released in early September.

So that was surprisingly fast considering there was less than a year between my suggestion and publication, but very much appreciated.

The series consists of eleven stories and were mostly published in the previously mentioned Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, from 1962 to 1964, with only two of them appearing in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and This Week – a Sunday magazine supplement to The Los Angeles Times, The Salt Lake Tribune and The Cincinnati Enquirer. A final story was published more than a decade later in the May, 1975, issue of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Mystery Magazine. This is the first time they appear in print together.

Prof. Ulysses Price Middlebie is a retired Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Science. A keen ornithologist and devout naturalist who began to apply his scientific knowledge in the field of criminology when a former pupil, Detective Sergeant Black, asked his advice in a disappearance case and he has kept coming back ever since – usually with a seemingly impossible problem. I should mention that not every story in this collection is, strictly speaking, an impossible crime or locked room story. They're all howdunits with seven, or so, qualifying as (quasi) impossible crime stories. So a nice little feast for fans of the pure, puzzle-driven detective story.

The opening story, "These Daisies Told," introduces the reader to Prof. Middlebie and how "his universal grasp of nature" helped him to acquire "his niche as consultant in crime" when a former pupil turned up on his doorstep with a tantalizing problem.

Detective Sergeant Black knows Dale Corsi murdered his wife, who has been gone for a week, but is unable to locate the body. A problem exacerbated by the fact that they lived on a small ranch quite off the main highway. So there are more than enough place where Corse could have secreted the body, but Middlebie's mind houses a rich depository of knowledge about the natural world and this helped him spot the hidden location of the body without too much trouble – revealing a truly clever way to dispose of a body. Apparently, Porges thought this was "one of his cleverest ideas" and you can hardly disagree with him. My only complaint is that the central clue required specialized knowledge to get an inkling of the solution. Still a good opening to a solid collection.

The second story, "The Unguarded Path," has a unique premise for a locked room mystery: Middlebie is not asked to help his one-time pupil, Detective Sergeant Black, to solve an impossible crime, but to prevent one from happening. An angle that had never been used before.

Franklin Devoe was the lawyer for the Syndicate and knows "where all the bodies are buried," which makes his ex-employers very nervous, because Devoe is ready to talk and they sicked their best contract killer on him. Joe Vasta is described by Black as "a kind of criminal Professor Middlebie" with a habit of sending "a whole series of letters to the man he's after" and is behind a string of mob hits that "left the police flatfooted" – now he has been sending letters to Devoe promising he'll be dead before he can appear before the Grand Jury. The police has Devoe "covered the way they watched Khrushchev when he came to New York" and his estate is a locked up as tight as a drum with guards patrolling the grounds.

So Black asks his former professor to help prevent a murder that could not possibly happen and Middlebie uses his scientific knowledge to show him "an unguarded path for murder" that "most houses have." The idea of this unguarded path is almost on par with the idea of the Judas window from Carter Dickson's homonymously titled The Judas Window (1938). Easily one of my favorite stories from this collection!

The next story is "The Missing Bow" and the plot is odd one that doesn't really work for me. Howard Cole used to manage a sporting goods store, but more importantly, he was "an expert archer." He even did all trick shots for a Robin Hood TV-series. That all ended when Victor Borden rammed his car into Cole's that killed his wife and 8-year-old daughter. Cole lost an arm and was so mangled below the waist he can only hobble around now, however, he somehow managed to fire an arrow into Borden, but was practically caught in the act in a blind alley and here the problem begins – no weapon, like a bow or crossbow, was found on him. And there was no place or time to hide one. Not to mention the physical impossibility of loosening an arrow with one arm.

Middlebie finds the solution to this conundrum in an old, dusty tome from 1903 and the explanation is legitimate, but unconvincing and Porges must have realized this, because a lot of emphasize is placed on the motive. This is a trick requiring a very dedicated and driven murderer. So it might work for some readers, but I was not impressed by it.

The fourth entry is a short-short, "Small, Round Man from Texas," which reminded me of the shorter works and radio-plays by Ellery Queen. Black and Middlebie assist a French policeman, Inspector Paul Hermite Rameau, to capture a master thief, Cauchy Fourier Boussinesq, who's internationally known as the Chameleon. A man of six feet five inches tall, but has a talent for illusions to make himself unnoticeable and this short-short is a demonstration of his talent. And, no, Porges didn't copy-paste the solution from John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge (1938). So, this was really short, but fun, little story.

The next story is another short-short, "Blood Will Tell," in which Black poses an impossible challenge to Middlebie: a multi murderer is about to go off scot-free unless they can get a blood sample, but the suspect simply refuses to give them a sample and has claimed everything from religious objections to the Fifth Amendment. So the courts has warned Black not "to touch his sacred veins" or else. Middlebie has a trick up his sleeve to get a blood sample and this makes for yet another very short, but incredibly fun, short-short story. As an aside, I think "Blood Without Violence" would have been better title for this impossible challenge.

The next story is one of Porges' best locked room stories, entitled "Coffee Break," which ranks alongside "No Killer Has Wings" and reviewed it separately back in April. So I'll skip it to keep this post as brief as possible. However, one thing I'll note here is that this story finds Middlebie with a taped ankle and this injury forces him to act as an armchair detective in the next couple of stories. And there are numerous comparisons to Mycroft Holmes in them.

The seventh story, "A Model Crime," is minor one and deals with the theft of eight ounces of custom-built transistors from the heavily guarded and secured premises of Morton Electronics, which are worth about twenty-one thousand dollars – "quite a haul." Only a handful of dependable engineers had access to the locked room where the transistors are being kept and taking them from the plant is next to impossible, because the place is run like Fort Knox or Area 51. The method is actually not bad and very practical, given the circumstances, but not as impressive in 2018 as it probably was in 1964.

Next up is "To Barbecue a White Elephant" and the problem of the story is somewhat reminiscent of "The Scientist and the Time Bomb" from The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009).

Black brings a baffling case or arson to Middlebie: a man has inherited a house, or white elephant, which is highly taxed and comes with barely any income. The house is tied to the estate and, if he abandons it, he forfeits the annuity and other benefits. So the man goes on a two-month holiday to Mexico City, a thousand miles from the house, while the place is locked up and closely watched by a security company. After six weeks, "a fire of unknown origin levels the building." Middlebie is tasked with finding out whether there's something like an incendiary device with a six week delayed time-fuse. A clever, scientific detective story with nifty gimmick that's not as insane as the fifteen year fuse from "Time Bomb." You really have to read that Grey story to believe it.

The following story is titled "The Puny Giant" and has an unusual impossible problem. A woman was found dead in the middle of large lawn battered to death by "a broken chunk of solid concrete" that weighed over ninety pounds. Only problem is that Black's primary suspect is her scrawny, sixteen-year-old adopted son who could not have lifted the chunk of concrete to deliver the deadly blows. However, I figured out this trick when his hobbies were mentioned. Still a pretty good yarn with a couple of slightly unsettling final lines.

The next story is "The Symmetrical Murder" and concerns the death of Howard Davis Valind, "a cancer-quack" or "mass-murderer," who preyed on the fatally ill, but was justly murdered when staying at a seaside hotel. He was killed when standing on the balcony to feed the birds when he was smacked in the head by "something moderately heavy and fast-moving" or "something massive," but a lot slower moving. However, the balcony was roofed and the hotel room had been locked from the inside. So how was he killed? I actually figured out the method based on the story-title and remembering a locked room novella with almost exactly the same impossible situation and explanation. I'm sure this is merely a coincidence, because you would expect a writer of scientific mysteries to hit upon a trick like this one.

On a side note, why do so many detective stories force the reader root for the murderer? I try to be a good boy, I really do, but even Middlebie here called the victim a swine who preyed on "the most pitifully helpless human beings." And told Black he would not cry if he failed to build a court case against the murderer.

Finally, this volume ends with the 1975 story, "Fire for Peace," in which Black and Middlebie is confronted the bad combination of "fire and fanaticism." A chemical plant full of inflammable material is working on a nerve gas, but the place is targeted by an arsonist who, inexplicable, has started a dozen fires on the premise and has been sending letters taunting them – all signed "Committee of One, for Peace." The solution here, like "The Missing Bow" is taken from history, but this one was a lot easier to swallow. A good story and decent ending to this altogether too short a series.

On a whole, These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie proved to be an excellent collection of short stories and showed Porges was a genuine maverick when it came to dreaming up miraculous crimes with often very original explanations. Something that's exemplified by such stories as "The Unguarded Path" and "Coffee Break."

Personally, I can't wait the for the upcoming entries in this ongoing series and the next volume is titled The Price of a Princess: Hardboiled Crime Fiction (2019), which I hope will be of the same quality as Edmund Crispin's surprisingly hardboiled short story, "The Pencil," from Fen Country: Twenty-Six Stories (1979). After that, there's a good chance Simm will compile a volume with the four Julian Morse Trowbridge impossible crime stories with the eleven uncollected, standalone locked room stories. And that would give us an almost complete collection of Porges' locked room fiction. The key word there is almost. I hope that Simms will also consider re-reprinting Eight Problems in Space: The Ensign De Ruyter Stories (2008) and The Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn (2008).

So we have potentially a lot to look forward to on the Porges front!

A Locked Tight Alibi: "Coffee Break" (1964) by Arthur Porges

Several weeks ago, Christian Henriksson of Mysteries, Short and Sweet published a blog-post, titled "What's Missing? Wishes and Hopes," which went over several hypothetical short story collections he would like to see published – preferably "in the near future." One particular item on his wish list was a collection of impossible crime stories by Arthur Porges.

I mentioned in the comment-section that Richard Simms, who runs the Arthur Porges Fan Site and Richard Simms Publications, commented on my review of No Killer Has Wings: The Casebook of Dr. Joel Hoffman (2017) that he was considering doing a volume of Ulysses Price Middlebie stories. A relatively short-lived series consisting of eleven short stories, published between 1962 and 1975, of which nine or ten are locked room mysteries.

Less than a week later, I found an email in my inbox from Simms with the announcement that he was "working on another volume of Arthur Porges stories," entitled These Daisies Told: The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie (2018), which gathers all eleven Middlebie stories and one of them is rarity – as it only appeared in "a supplement of The Los Angeles Times" called This Week. Simms is aiming to release the book in August.

So, in anticipation of this upcoming collection of impossible crime stories, I decided to re-read the only easily accessible tale from this series.

"Coffee Break" was originally published in the July 1964 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and collected by Jack Adrian and Robert Adey in their locked room anthology Murder Impossible: An Extravaganza of Miraculous Murders, Fantastic Felonies & Incredible Criminals (1990). Adey accurately described Porges many series-characters not as traditional detectives characters, but simply as problem-solvers, who tend to be “quiet little men with academic backgrounds" to "whom the perplexed and pressured police officers brought apparently unsolvable problems." A description fitting two of Porges' most well-known creations, Cyriack Skinner Grey and Dr. Joel Hoffman, but also fits the lesser-known, often overlooked Professor Middlebie.

Ulysses Price Middlebie is a Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Science and "a sometime crime consultant" to Sergeant Black, who's daily workload appear to consist of inexplicable or even impossible cases, which is why he regularly picks the brain of Professor Middlebie – such as in the case of Cyrus Denning's apparent suicide. However, the police sergeant suspects this to be a case of murder, but the only problem is that murder is a double-edged impossibility involving a bolted room and an unimpeachable alibi.

Denning was a bachelor of sixty-two, who "fancies himself a scientist and inventor," and had converted a lakeside cabin into a workroom with a laboratory. He supposedly poisoned himself with a cyanide inside this converted cabin when the only door, which tightly fitted into its frame, was secured from the inside with "a heavy brass bolt." And the only window in the room had been nailed shut for years and the putty around the window panes was old, crumbly, dry and hard. What drives home the idea of suicide is that nobody had been near him for at least half an hour before his death in combination with two items found besides the dead man: a poisoned cup of piping-hot coffee and a burning cigarette on the edge of an ashtray.

So nobody could have entered the cabin, poisoned the coffee, and left again either physically or within the frame of time, because the door had also been under constant observation.

"Coffee Break," AHMM, Jul. 1964

The nephew of the victim, Jerry Doss, is obviously guilty as hell and, after he left his uncle, he chatted with a boats man and asked him to keep an eye on the front door, which smelled fishy to Sgt. Black – as "the boy was obviously setting up an alibi." So the bolted front door, the nailed down window and the witness provided the young man with an apparently unbreakable alibi.

A year ago, Dan of The Reader is Warned published a blog-post, "But is it a locked room mystery? The case of the impossible alibi," asking when an alibi-trick qualifies as an impossible crime. I commented that a cast-iron alibi can only be considered an impossibility under one condition: the alibi should not merely rely on witnesses (who can be manipulated) or train tickets (which can be misinterpreted), but the murderer should appear to have been physically unable to have carried out the crime. The TV-series Monk had a couple of good examples of an impossible alibi (e.g. Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect, 2003) and I think "Coffee Break" qualifies.

Yes, there's a witness who kept the cabin under observation, but the explanation for the bolted door is not what demolished the murderer's cleverly constructed alibi. After all, the locked room trick does not explain how a cigarette was lit and hot coffee was made, in a locked room, half an hour after Doss left his uncle. So, in order to logically explain this impossible poisoning, Middlebie had to come up with not one, but two, explanations that had to be stitched together.

So is it any wonder Adey ranked "Coffee Break" as one of Porges' cleverest, well-clued locked room stories? Not as great, in my opinion, as the classic "No Killer Has Wings," but definitely deserving of a spot in the top ranks. And now, more than before, I'm eagerly looking forward to the publication of The Casebook of Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie, which has such delightfully tantalizing impossible crime stories like "The Puny Giant," "The Missing Bow" and "To Barbecue a White Elephant."

I have just one question... how long do we have to wait now before we can start nagging Simms about the uncollected Julian Morse Throwbridge stories and the non-series impossible crime tales? Because they would form a very nifty volume of locked room stories. I'm just saying.

The Problems of Dr. Joel Hoffman

"I know it's impossible, but impossible things have happened... before this. I should know—I'm becoming something of an expert on them."

- Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Edward D. Hoch's Diagnosis: Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 1996)

Arthur Porges was an American mathematics teacher, assistant professor and an author of hundreds of short stories, covering a wide breadth of genres, but most impressively is that he was one of the most productive writers of locked room mysteries in the detective genre – eclipsed only John Dickson Carr and Edward D. Hoch. I assume Bill Pronzini and Paul Halter have, in recent years, come close or even surpassed the number of impossible crime stories written by Porges.

However, even more impressive than having written forty-five locked room stories is the sheer originality of the problems and solutions, which demonstrated Porges was a clever and inventive writer. A writer who possessed a first-rate brain. Yes, in my world a writer of top-drawer locked room mysteries qualifies as a genius.

The impossible crime fiction of Porges is scattered across a handful of series, and a number of standalone stories, which were published in such periodicals as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, but only a couple of them reappeared in (locked room) anthologies – only two series were book-formed as short story collections in recent history. Richard Simms of the Arthur Porges Fan Site, as Richard Simms Publications, has been collaborating with the estate of Porges to bring as many of his short stories back into the print as possible.

So far, these reprints have mainly consisted or work from other fields of popular fiction, such as science-fiction and fantasy, but also includes a now almost ten-year-old collection of truly excellent detective stories.

The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009) is an almost complete collection of short stories about the titular, wheelchair-bound, character whose extraordinary scientific-mind is often consulted when the police is faced with a seemingly impossible crime. And as great as the plots are the (supporting) characters. Particularly, the genius, but good humored, teenage son of Grey who does most of the legwork for his father. The stories made you yearn for more, but we had to patiently wait for nearly a decade before we were being treated for a second volume of Porges' impossible crime fiction.

No Killer Has Wings: The Casebook of Dr. Joel Hoffman (2017) is an incredibly slender, almost booklet-like, volume of only 86-pages and gathered all six short stories in the short-lived Dr. Joel Hoffman series – which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine from 1959 to 1963. So one of the stories was actually published during the twilight years of the genre's Golden Age.

Dr. Joel Hoffman is the Chief Pathologist at Pasteur Hospital, situated on the Californian coast, where he acts as "a one-man crime lab" and consultant to his personal friend, Lieutenant Ader, who can't always rely on the local coroner because he's "a political hack." As a result, Dr. Hoffman is called in as an unofficial consultant on all the interesting, seemingly inexplicable, cases in the district. And five of the six of his recorded cases qualify as impossible crimes. So let's start digging into them!

The first story in the collection, "Dead Drunk," is absolutely excellent from start to finish, which opens with Dr. Hoffman and Lt. Ader being on the spot of deadly roadside accident.

A drunk driver killed an eight-year-old boys, who was standing with his mother at the crossroad, but the driver is "a playboy of fifty plus," Gordon Vance Whitman III, who has used his millions and diabetes as a Get Out Of Jail Free Card in previous automobile accidents – collisions that have left several people seriously maimed. However, this is the first time he left a body in his wake. But, once again, he appeared to have gotten away with it. As the courts only suspended his driving privileges.

One year later, Dr. Hoffman is requested by Lt. Ader to perform an autopsy on the body of a man who was found inside "a locked, third-floor apartment." The name of the victim is Gordon Whitman and he had been on "a long binge behind a bolted door," but Ader has his suspicious and the postmortem examinations reveals a surprising cause of death. Someone had directly introduced phosgene gas into the lung's of the victim! So this is not merely a locked room puzzle, but also a scientific conundrum and the explanation deftly combines a practical locked room gimmick with a first-rate scientific trick.

What really makes this an excellent story is the murderer's fate. A character who, no doubt, will have the sympathy of most readers.

The second story, "Horse-Collar Homicide," has arguably the most gruesome murder method in this collection and begins with "the mysterious death of Leonard Bugg Lakewood," which initially looks like a stroke. Lt. Ader doesn't like "the overall smell of the situation" and decided to consult his old friend, Dr. Hoffman.

Lakewood was a not so benevolent family tyrant, in his sixties, with a deep rooted pride in the family history and, once a year, he would throw "a family party in the old style." During these parties, the old man loved to revive "ancient diversions" and bully his "long-suffering relatives into participating for prizes." So these parties were only pleasant for one person, but that changed during the last gathering with an 18th century May Day celebration theme. One of the old-fashioned games "the rural sport of grinning through a horse-collar," but when Lakewood stuck his head inside the horse-collar he immediately had an epileptic fit and fell to the ground – deader than "a salted mackerel."

A second-rate hack would have explained this sudden and inexplicable death with a charge of electricity or a well-timed dose of some sort of obscure poison, but Porges was not a hack. Oh no. The murderous trick he imagined is the stuff of nightmares and, while fast-working, must have really, really hurt like hell. I winced in admiration when I read the solution. A great story that is, perhaps, more of an howdunit than a proper impossible crime story, but perfectly demonstrates that Porges, above all else, was a true original when it came to plotting detective stories.

The next story, "Circle in the Dust," is a non-impossible crime story and tagged by Richard Simms as his personal favorite. As a rabid locked room fanboy, I can forgive Simms for preferring this charming crime story over the brilliant classic that is "No Killer Has Wings." Anway...

Lt. Ader brings Dr. Hoffman "a simple murder" involving "the traditional blunt instrument." The victim is a harmless old lady, Mrs. Valerie Antoine, who lives in a mortgaged house stuffed with trashy furniture, junk and bric-a-brac. Only the termites eat three meals a day there. So who would want to cave in the head of an old, inoffensive widow with barely a penny to her name? Obviously, there was something of value in the house, but the only clues they have to go on is a circular outline in the dust and a sun-blasted shape on the wall opposite from where this object was taken.

An object that turns out to be a genuine rare item that would appear to be completely worthless to everyone except a particular kind of expert. Very clever. So, yes, a good and solid crime story, but somewhat out of place in this series.

"No Killer Has Wings," AHMM, Jan. 1961

The fourth story, "No Killer Has Wings," is a shimmering gem of an impossible crime tale and arguably the best no-footprints story ever penned within the locked room sub-genre. This brilliant story opens with Lt. Ader taking his niece, Dana, to Dr. Hoffman and ask him to help them clear the name of her fiance, Larry Channing, who's neck-deep in trouble and currently being held "on a first degree murder charge" by the lieutenant – since only he was in a position to kill his uncle, Colonel McCabe.

Colonel McCabe was bludgeoned to death, while dozing, on his private beach and the physical evidence points an accusatory finger at his twenty-four year old nephew, Larry. On the beach, there were prints of the victim going from the stairs to the water and back to the blanket where he lay down when he was assaulted. A second track of prints, belonging to Larry, lead from the stairs to the body and back again. There are no other prints except those belonging to the victim's dog and the beach is accessible only from the house and the sea.

So that leaves the primary suspect, Larry, in a very tight spot. Luckily, Dr. Hoffman comes up with a devilish clever explanation based on the murder weapon with blood and hair on the wrong spot! You have to read this one for yourself, but take my word for it, the problem of the impossible absence of footprints have never been played better than in this story. And that includes the work by Carr and Hoch!

The fifth story, "A Puzzle in Sand," is a sequel to the previous entry in this collection and even takes place "on that very same stretch of sand" as where Colonel McCabe was beaten to death. Once again, the murder could very well be "another impossible stinker."

After the previous story, the house and private beach were let to Myron Crane. The new tenant was a banker, philanthropist and a church elder, but this respectable pillar of the community has a secret in his past and this made him blackmail material. A man, known as Garrison, was overheard having a violent quarrel with the victim and the murder weapon, "a P-38 war souvenir," was found in his possession, but what appeared to clinch the matter is that only his footprints lead to the body and back. However, Garrison claims he was framed and Lt. Ader is inclined to believe him.

The solution to the impossibility surrounding the murderer's lack of footprints on the beach sand is not as original as in the previous story. As a matter of fact, the solution here is a variation on a rather disappointing, time-worn, ploy that rarely satisfied when used in an impossible crime scenario, because the answer comes across as a cop-out and is soul-crushingly disappointingly. So this story deserves praise for how it handled this particular ploy without disappointing the reader or giving the idea you were cheated. Once again, Porges knew how to write a detective story even when it wasn't as original as his top-drawer work.

Arthur Porges (1915-2006)

Finally, the collections ends with, somewhat, of a whimper, titled "Birds of One Feather," but the problem lay more with me than with the story.

Dr. Hoffman is asked to explain how a man and his pet bird, which was always perched on his shoulder, could simultaneously expire from cyanide poisoning while the victim was simply changing a flat tire – a problem complicated by the fact that not a trace of the poison was found in the stomach content. I immediately figured out how the poison-trick was accomplished, but this had very little to do with my own cleverness. The clue of the poisoned bird reminded me of an episode from the 1975 Ellery Queen TV-series, which had a similar kind of problem that involved a dead bird. I would not at all be surprised if the scenarist of that specific episode had been aware of this story, originally published in AHMM in 1963, and reworked the main gist of the trick when he wrote the episode.

So, all in all, No Killer Has Wings: The Casebook of Dr. Joel Hoffman is a very short, but excellent, collection of detective stories with four of the six entries being top-notch examples of either the locked room mystery or the pure howdunit – such as "Dead Drunk," "Horse-Collar Homicide" and the superb "No Killer Has Wings." These stories alone is what makes this volume a must have for (locked room) readers like myself. Only real downside is that these half dozen stories constitutes the entirety of the Dr. Hoffman series. And that's hardly enough.

On the upside, the next collection in this series by Richard Simm might gather some, or all, of the impossible crime stories in the equally neglected Professor Ulysses Middlebie series. I would love to be able to finally read such tantalizing-sounding short stories like "The Puny Giant," "These Daisies Told" and "Blood Will Tell." So here's hoping!