Locked and Loaded, Part 6: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

For some reason, I thought the previous "Locked and Loaded" was posted earlier this year, somewhere around March, but “Locked and Loaded, Part 5” was posted last November and forgetting to do another one of these wasn't for a lack of choice – more a lack of availability of some of the choosier items. There are still of a ton of rarely reprinted, mostly uncollected short stories eluding me. Stories such as Brandon Fleming's "The Case of the Armour Figure" (1922), Arlton Eadie's "The Clue from Mars" (1924), Vincent Cornier's "The Dust of Lions" (1933) and Victor Maxwell's "The Siege at 2242" (1933).

Despite some elusive obscurities and rarities, I think I hoarded an interesting medley of short stories over these half dozen "Locked and Loaded" reviews covering a period of 118 years. Not all masterpieces or outright classics, but a diverse, imaginative lot of short stories, published between 1905 and 2023, taking on the locked room and impossible crime problem in their own way. Surprisingly few duds and stinkers considering the randomness when raking one of these patchy reviews together. Let's see if I can keep up this hot streak of moderate success.

B. Fletcher Robinson's "The Vanished Billionaire" first appeared in the February, 1905, issue of the American edition of Pearson's Magazine, which is a slightly altered version of "The Vanished Millionaire" from Robinson's The Chronicles of Addington Peace (1905). For some reason, the name of Robinson's detective was changed from Addington Peace to Inspector Hartley, of Scotland Yard, for the American publications among other minor alterations – like change from millionaire to billionaire. Even though the first modern-day billionaires wouldn't come around until the late 1910s, early '20s. I should also note Robinson collaborated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and foolishly declined to be credited as a co-author. It has been suggested had he been credited as not only the co-author of The Hound of the Baskervilles, but as the person who helped to bring Sherlock Holmes back, Robinson's own detective fiction would not been so thoroughly forgotten today. Would they be remembered on their own merit or riding the coattails of an inverness cape? Time to find out!

Silas J. Ford, billionaire of the title, "established a business reputation in America that had made him a celebrity in England" and, according to the tradition of the American self-made man, he kept his name in the papers ("...full of praise and blame, of puffs and denunciations"). Ford gave the newspaper something to write about when he disappeared on dark, snowy night in December under seemingly impossible circumstances. During the night, Ford had left his bed to venture outside and a trail of his distinct boot prints that ended in the middle of a field of smooth, unbroken snow twenty feet from the wall surrounding the property ("apparently he had stepped into space")! Inspector Hartley is dispatched to the scene of the disappearance and foreshadows that this case is going to be more about the why than the how. The core plot and motive for why Ford had to disappear wasn't bad, not for a detective story from 1905, but explanation for the no-footprints is dumb even for 1905. I would have taken one of the routine solutions over (SPOILER/ROT13) “ur gvrq ba gur obbgf va erirefr snfuvba” naq gura ohatyrq vg, juvpu yrsg oruvaq gur “fgenatr rivqrapr.” Lbh nyzbfg qrfreir gb or sybttrq qbja n frperg cnffntr sbe rira qnevat gb fhttrfg fhpu n fbyhgvba. A shame as the presentation of the no-footprints was very well done for the time and one of the earliest no-footprints impossible crimes on record. So it's also one of those rare duds in this series of blog-posts, judged solely on its merits as an impossible crime story.

Stuart Palmer's "The Monkey Murder," originally published in the January, 1947, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, has to be one of the oddest, most bizarre short stories in the Miss Hildegarde Withers series. Halfway between an inverted detective story and a very bizarre locked room murder. Inspector Oscar Piper tells Miss Withers about George Wayland, "the wife-strangler, blast him," whom he believes got away with murdering his wife by dressing her death up with "a phony religious-cult background." Janet Wayland body was found in the back bedroom lying tied, hand and foot, on a sort of sacrificial altar overlooked by the idol of big, ugly monkey god – whose tail was tightened around her throat. The whole scene, behind a bolted door, looked like "looked like the nightmare of a Hollywood set-designer for B-budget horror pictures." Piper has a pretty good idea how the bolted door was worked, but unable to get evidence that sticks. So they had to let Wayland go.

There's something else about the technically unsolved case bothering Piper. Wayland is, beside the spousal murder, the personification of "Mister Average American" and "the average citizen commits the average murder." So where did the plain, unimaginative Wayland got the idea to strangle Janet with the tail of the tail of an East-Indian monkey-god and stage it as an outlandish cult killing ("that, plus the locked-room thing..."). An out-of-character murder. Miss Withers decides to take a crack at the case herself, however, she gets exactly the same result as the New York police: Wayland laughing in her face. So she's forced to set a baited, legally dubious trap proving Wayland is a hall of fame idiot after all. Palmer neatly weaved several plot-threads, big and small, together into this very well-done short story. And while a fairly minor locked room mystery, Miss Withers' explanation added a small twist to the locked room-trick with a detail Piper had overlooked. Miss Withers, Inspector Piper and Palmer seldom disappoint and "The Monkey Murder" is no exception.

Bill Pronzini's "The Methodical Cop," originally published in the July, 1973, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, appears to be one of Pronzini's least known, overlooked short impossible crime stories – mentioned in neither Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). The story is both good and amusing. Detective-Sergeant Renzo Di Lucca, "a dedicated, patient and observant cop," who always gets paired with rookies. Something he sees as a chore as "there were problems with every rookie." The problem with his latest assignment, Tim Corcoran, is that he has too much imagination that turned every routine case into "puzzles of magnitude." So when they're called to the scene of a murder that has many of the tropes from classic detective fiction, Corcoran's imagination begins to run wild.

Simon Warren is shot and fatally wounded behind the locked door of his private library. When the door is broken down, Warren's whispers to his butler the cryptic words, "pick up sticks," before dying. That and the murder weapon apparently evaporated alongside the murderer from the locked library. Corcoran is ecstatic that he not only gets to investigate a real locked room murder, but a locked room with a dying message tucked inside. Di Lucca constantly has to serve as an anchor for his rookie assignment, which came down to shooting down Corcoran's false-solutions. I really liked Corcoran's false-solution, wrong as it may be, because it showed more imagination than the old dodge the murder actually used. However, everything from the shooting, vanished gun, dying message and locked room-trick were skillfully tied together to provide an overall satisfying short story. So it's odd "The Methodical Cop" is not better known (at least among his own impossible crime work) even if its a classic case of the false-solution outshining the correct answer.

Note for the curious: Pronzini reworked the plot of "The Methodical Cop" into the Carpenter & Quincannon short story "Pick Up Sticks" (2021), which was combined with the short story "Quincannon in Paradise" (2005) and reworked into the final, novel-length Carpenter & Quincannon The Paradise Affair (2021).

Bill Crider's "See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have," originally written for the anthology Partners in Crime (1994), is yet another minor affair when it comes to the miracle problem, but a fun enough short story for fans of Ellery Queen. Bo Wagner and Janice Langtry are the co-authors of the Sam Fernando mysteries, "one of the most promising series of detective novels the 1950s had yet seen," which he plots and she writes. They specialize in locked room murders and other impossible crimes under every imaginable circumstance and variation. So when one of their friends and avid collector of detective novels is shot in his library, the police asks their help as authorities on storybook murders and locked room-tricks. Because every exit from the house was either locked, bolted or under observation ("...like something from one of our books"). So a fun enough short story for its character rather than its plot which would have been perfect for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020) anthologies.

So, yeah, the selection of the short stories, so far, is fairly solid, story-and character-wise, but not terribly inspiring when it comes to their locked room and impossible crime plots and tricks. Get ready for a surprise, because the best one of the lot comes from a writer of techno-thrillers!

James H. Cobb's "Over the Edge," originally printed in the July, 2007, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, stars Kevin Pulaski, "four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month deputy sheriff," who debuted in the novel West on 66 (1999) – appeared in a handful of short stories. This story begins with Pulaski taking his lover, Princess, along to meet a teenage informant on a lookout moonlighting as a daytime lover's lane. So they decide to stick around, fool around and enjoy what looks like lovers' tiff in another car ("all we needed was a bag of popcorn"). When the man drives away, the woman stays behind in her own car and she stays put. They ignore her, however, Pulaski becomes suspicious after a while and wants to see if everything is right. At that the moment, the woman "slowly and deliberately drove her car off the edge of the overlook" into the canyon below. The police believe it was a clear case of suicide, but Pulaski believes it was murder and they wish the deputy good luck with his investigation.

There's no mystery about who engineered her murder, but since the man had driven away and secured an alibi, before she drove over the edge, Pulaski is faced with an impossible crime. This time, the trick is not based on an old locked room dodge, but entirely original and not impossible to figure out. Pulaski even thanks the murderer, "in a world of plain old day-in day-out mayhem, this is the first time I've ever worked one of these fancy, set-up killings like Ellery Queen writes about." Although I have come to associate these kind of inverted howdunits with those type of tricks with Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series. Needless to say, I enjoyed Cobb's "Over the Edge" and is the standout here. A candidate to be included on the future revision of my locked room/impossible crime lineup of favorites.

Finally, Maria Hudgins' "Murder on the London Eye," published in the December, 2007, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has only two distinguishing features. Firstly, the staging of an impossible strangling of an elderly, wealthy American tourist traveling alone in a glass capsule on the London Eye. Secondly, it was published in the same year as Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery (2007). But other than that, the story simply redresses an old locked room-trick in modern garb. It's not a bad story, but I didn't like it. By the way, wasn't there a another short story from the same period about an impossible crime on the London Eye?

So, not the strongest of randomly picked stories from the "Locked and Loaded" franchise, but a fairly decent line-up. Robinson's “The Vanished Billionaire” was a dud. Palmer's "The Monkey Murder" is fun, but, even with the twist in the tail, a minor locked room piece. I greatly enjoyed Pronzini's "The Methodical Cop" and was firmly on Tim Corcoran's side, but pretty minor stuff with a better false-solution than correct answer. And, again, Crider's "See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have" is a fun short story, but not to be recommended for its locked room plot. Hudgins' "Murder on the London Eye" has a good setting and nothing more than that. Cobb's "Over the Edge" looms largely over them as the best of the lot.

Bughouse Chess: "The Pawns of Death" (1974) by Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann

Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann's "The Pawns of Death" originally appeared in the August, 1974, issue of the short-lived, quarterly publication Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine under a shared pseudonym "Robert Hart Davis" – a house name of Renown Publications. Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine was apparently Renown Publication's attempt to mine past glory and licensed the character to carry their new quarterly. Each issue has a "brand new" Charlie Chan novella as its marque, but "an idea whose time had probably passed by then" and the magazine got discontinued after only four issues.

"The Pawns of Death" is the fourth and last of these newly written Charlie Chan pasticheWhile I enjoyed Earl Derr Biggers' original novels, especially Behind That Curtain (1928) and Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), the pastiches would have passed under my radar had it not been pointed out by one of the usual suspects, Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Even then I didn't immediately connect "The Pawns of Death" by Robert Hart Davis in Adey with Pronzini and Wallmann's "The Pawns of Death" reprinted by Wildside Press. But eventually the penny dropped. And someone, somewhere, a long time ago recommended it as an excellent pastiche.

I've aired my general skepticism about detective pastiches in the past, because trying to write a good, convincing or even a passable pastiche always struck me as walking through a minefield – situated in the middle of a field of rakes. A pastiche either fails miserably to measure up to the original or so bad it stains it or being a pastiche detracts from a writer's own qualities. Good ideas or writing whose qualities get lessened or overlooked, because they're presented as imitations. For example, I think the titular novella from Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories (1998) could have been more than a curio or another Sherlock Holmes imitation had Roy Templeman created his own detective-character. There have, of course, been writers who absolutely nailed a detective pastiche. Jill Paton Walsh's completion of Dorothy L. Sayers' last Lord Peter Wimsey novel (Thrones, Dominations, 1998) and continuation of the series (A Presumption of Death, 2002) are prime example of excellent pastiches. Dale C. Andrew and Kurt Sercu's "The Book Case" (2007), starring a 100-year-old Ellery Queen, is personal favorite that added to the EQ canon and lore.

However, finding that Goldilocks zone for pastiches appears to be an incredibly difficult and tricky thing to do. It seems much more success is to be gained with original homages (James Scott Byrnside's Goodnight Irene, 2018), outright parodies (Barry Ergang's "The Audiophile Murder Case," 1982) or a measured combination of a homage, parody and pastiche (Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives, 1936). So that brings us to the all important question to be answered: were Pronzini and Wallmann successful in finding and landing "The Pawns of Death" in the Goldilocks zone? Let's find out!

Charlie Chan is in Paris, France, to attend the Transcontinental Chess Tournament at the "luxurious and Gallic" Hotel Frontenac ("his interest in, and love of, the intricate game was well known throughout the chess world"). Chan is accompanied by his friend and Parisian lawman, Prefect Claude DeBevre. While their attendance is purely a pleasure trip, there are rising tensions and hostilities between the defending champion and his young challenger. Roger Mountbatten is the reigning, three-time Transcon champion who accuses his American challenger, Grant Powell, of cheating during their first few of potential twenty-four games ("...continue to meet head-to-head until one of them acquired a total of 12-1/2 points and was crowned the new champion of Transcon chess"). They do not much to hide their mutual animosity.

When Powell wins another match, Mountbatten refuses to shake hands, "yet another example of unethical if not downright illegal chess to boot," before storming off angrily. Powell takes childish joy in publicly needling Mountbatten ("we're in the presence of the soon-to-be dethroned Transcon champion in all his bitter, whining glory"). Even their respective entourage get in on the action and make very public scenes in the hotel. Charlie Chan is a keen student of the human condition and knows "harsh emotions such as those which had been displayed could all too easily erupt into violence." There's a scene to which neither Chan nor Claude DeBevre are privy, except the reader, which shows someone at the hotel already tried to commit cold blooded murder.

Only problem is that the gun refused to work. So the would-be-assassin decides on a more sophisticated method befitting the world's most cerebral game. Something like "a locked-room death to puzzle the police completely" ("chess and a baffling murder what a beautifully ironic combination").

Surely enough, it does not take long before a body, shot to death, is discovered in a hotel room with the windows securely latched and the door locked from the inside, but the sheer impossibility of the murder is not only mystery. Firstly, the victim is not who you would expect from the premise. Secondly, the odd "bullet" the police digs out of the mattress. This is not the last murder at the hotel. A mortally wounded man is discovered in another locked hotel room who mutters with his dying breath a last, cryptic remark ("another murder, this time with an enigmatic dying message"). The whole situation has Claude DeBevre perplexed, "a gun that will not fire, bullets that cannot work, not one but two locked-room murders," but Chan has a pretty good how the murder was committed. And narrows down his suspects to only two names. But who? Chan baits a little trap to lure out and ensnare the killer.

So where does "The Pawns of Death" fall as a pastiche? I say it falls just within the Goldilocks zone. First of all, Pronzini and Wallmann's portrayal of Charlie Chan is no smudge or stain on the original. I've never seen any of the movies, but understand they didn't do the legacy of the character any long-term good. This incarnation is not an exact one-on-one copy of the Charlie Chan who appeared in the six original novels, however, the character is treated respectfully and made me want to revisit Behind That Curtain or Charlie Chan Carries On. So, on that account alone, "The Pawns of Death" is a reasonably successful pastiche of the character. But what about the plot? Well, the plot is a bit rough around the edges and the characters, setting and story obviously written around the locked room-trick and dying message idea. That helped in piecing everything together long before the murderer walks into Chan's trap. I had completely solved it by the end of Chapter X and that was before the second murder with the dying message clue. The discovery and nature of the strange bullet, sort of, gives away what type of trick must have been used, which is not one that always enjoys great popularity among impossible crime fanatics (SPOILER/ROT13: n uvqqra qrivpr) and the second murder hardly qualifies as a proper locked room puzzle (SPOILER/ROT13: n qhcyvpngr xrl). So the rough, unpolished plot is what pushed this novella to the outer edge of the so-called Goldilocks zone. Regardless, I tremendously enjoyed reading this continuation of the Charlie Chan series and interesting considering how relatively early it came in Pronzini's career.

Reportedly, Pronzini "doesn't seem to think much of this early effort," but it contains some ideas he would return to later and improve. Such as the trick to the first murder or the dying message inside a locked room, of which the classic Nameless Detective short story "The Pulp Connection" (1979) is the best example. A locked room dying message also features in the more recent The Paradise Affair (2021). The characters and plot would actually translate very well to a Carpenter and Quincannon novel, because there so much to expand upon (the chess feud, investigating the cheating accusations, the first attempt and locked rooms and dying message) with the added benefit of a charming historical setting. All it needs is a better solution to the first locked room murder and second impossibility can be easily fixed by having the scared, dying victim lock the door to keep the murderer from coming back ("...the workings of a dying man's fevered mind") – consequently locked out any form of immediate life saving help. Yes, a routine locked room-trick, or solution, but allowable for a second, or third, additional locked room. I'm rambling and flogging my hobby horse again.

So, yes, "The Pawns of Death" is not a groundbreaking locked room mystery, but it's a perfectly serviceable and thoroughly entertaining pastiche. And piqued my interest in the other three Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine novellas as they were written by Dennis Lynds/Michael Collins. Who has been frequently discussed on this blog under his "William Arden" penname and reviewed his short story "The Bizarre Case Expert" (1970) a few years ago. "The Silent Corpse" honestly sounds like a cracking yarn. I also plan on tracking down Pronzini's other, earlier locked room short stories like "The Perfect Crime" (1968), "A Killing in Xanadu" (1980), "Cat's Paw" (1986) and "Ace in the Hole" (1986), but I'm flogging that poor hobby horse again. And you get the idea by now. You can expect a future review of "The Silent Corpse," before I decide whether "Walk Softly, Strangler" (1973) and "The Temple of the Golden Horde" (1974) are worth it. To be continued...

A (final) note for the curious: Pronzini and Wallmann collaborated on another short locked room mystery, "The Half-Invisible Man" (1974), which stands out not for its plot machinations, but its detective character. Sadly, the story is Patrolman Fred Gallagher's only appearance.

Oh, just one last thing: I really went on, bloating this review, but didn't even touch upon how the curious murder weapon dated the setting of the story as no earlier than the 1950s, but likely somewhere around the late 1960s or early '70s. Charlie Chan made his first appearance in The House Without a Key (1925) and if this novella takes place close to its publication date, Chan has barely aged a day in nearly fifty years!

The Paradise Affair (2021) by Bill Pronzini

In 2005, Bill Pronzini revived his two historical gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, who sold their professional detective services in San Francisco at the turn-of-the-century – when the Old West was coming to an end. This new run of short stories appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine starting with "Quincannon in Paradise" (collected in Quincannon's Game: A Western Quartet, 2005) and seems to have ended with "Pick Up Sticks" (2021). During the 2010s, Pronzini started to rework the Quincannon and Carpenter short stories into novel-length mysteries with his wife, Marcia Muller. The series began with the delightful The Bughouse Affair (2013) and some have called it the novel that rebooted the series, but it's more of a continuation of Quincannon (1985) and Beyond the Grave (1986) merging and streamlining the short stories with the original 1980s novels.

The Paradise Affair (2021) is the ninth and, as of this writing, seemingly last entry in the series based on the short stories "Quincannon in Paradise" and "Pick Up Sticks." A whole lot has changed since the days of The Bughouse Affair.

John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter finally tied the marital knot, "their future together was bright," but Quincannon, "the most accomplished detective in the western United States," suffered an affront to his pride and skills – allowing two slippery criminals to escape his clutches. Jackson "Lonesome Jack" Vereen ("an ironical moniker, for he was a libertine of gargantuan appetites") and E.B. "Nevada Ned" Nagle ("whose primary vice was the opium derivative morphine") are con artists who graduated over their lengthy career from bait-and-switch trickery to swindling people with phony stocks. Their latest mark and Quincannon's current client, R.W. Anderson, not only bought two-thousand dollars of bogus stock in a nonexistent silver mine, but the two swindlers seized upon an opportune to make off with his portfolio of stock certificates and bearer bonds. Anderson hired Quincannon to bring the two to justice and hopefully recover the stolen portfolio. However, two weeks of exhaustive detective work gets thrown out of the window when Quincannon learns his quarries booked a passage for for Honolulu, Hawaii.

Sabina spots an opportunity for a second, busman's honeymoon ("we deserve a vacation, even if it is a working one") and convinces both her husband and their client to follow Lonesome Jack and Nevada Ned to Honolulu.

The Paradise Affair takes place during the first-half of 1898, "the Sandwich Islands Kingdom was overthrown and Queen Lili'uokalani's reign ended in January of '93, five years ago," but before the United States annexed the then independent Republic of Hawaii – which happened later that year on August 12, 1898. So the story is drenched in local and historical color. The impending annexation is a popular conversational topic ("...if Japan doesn't invade and annex it first, as they have threatened to do"), while the Spanish-American war and increased U.S. military presence hover in the background (Admiral Dewey's Asiatic Squadron swarm Honolulu Harbor). However, the best and most evocative part is Quincannon riding a donkey pass the rugged coastline, fishing villages, lava tubes and spouting blowholes as he tracks down his elusive quarries. It takes Quincannon's resigned Scottish pessimism ("no boats, no horses, naught but wagons and asses! What other handicaps did these island gardens of delight hold in store?") a while to acclimate, before his feelings towards the islands begin to mellow. And while her husband is hunting down a pair of swindlers, Sabina gets a case of her own practically thrown in her lap.

During their voyage, the Quincannon's befriended the Prichards, Lyman and Margaret, who are traveling homeward and invited them to stay at their Waikiki home. So stays with their new friends when her husband is roaming the islands for Lonesome Jack and Nevada Ned, but one particular hot, stuffy night, Sabina ventures out into garden when "an explosive report broke the quiet" – a gunshot coming from the house next door. Gordon Pettibone, owner of the neighboring property, had apparently had locked himself in the study with a loaded gun and opinions differ on how he got shot. The local police believes it was suicide, but Philip Oakes insists his uncle had been fiddling with the gun and accidentally shot himself. A twenty thousand dollar insurance policy with a nonpayment clause in case of suicide depends on it. Oakes heard Sabina is a detective and asks her to prove his uncle's death was due to an accidental misfire, but she has the sneaking suspicion Pettibone might have been cleverly murdered. Sabina thought she a shadowy shape close to the back wall shortly after hearing the gunshot and than there's those three, strange words Pettibone spoke before he died, "pick up sticks." Like the old nursery rhyme ("One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, knock on the door. Five, six, pick up sticks").

Ah, yes, an Ellery Queen-style dying message inside a John Dickson Carr-like locked room mystery. The detective story's take on the riddle wrapped inside an enigma and Sabina's knows dying messages and impossible murders is Quincannon's bread and butter ("conundrums of this sort intrigued him"), but "she had, after all, been instrumental in solving a few conundrums herself." Sabina makes short work of the locked room and dying message puzzles with the latter having a clever answer to the criticism often leveled at the dying message. Why would a mortally injured and dying person come up with a cryptic clue on the spot instead of outright naming the murderer? This dying message is even more damning than simply naming the murderer. The locked room-trick is a nicely-done variation on an impossible crime technique that always fascinated me (ROT13: haybpxrq qbbef naq jvaqbjf gung nccrne gb or ybpxrq naq obygrq sebz gur vafvqr). So both quickly, and neatly, wrap up their respective investigations with days left to spare to enjoy that second, well deserved honeymoon.

The Paradise Affair is a relatively short, but tightly written and plotted locked room mystery full of local and historical color, which certainly makes it a standout of the series. More importantly, it provided a satisfying closure to the character-arcs of John and Sabina Quincannon. John Quincannon was introduced as a broken ex-Secret Service operative haunted by the gun battle in which his ricocheting bullet killed a pregnant woman ("the burden of responsibility for the loss of two innocent lives had been unbearable"). Everything changed when he met Sabina, then a "Pink Rose" of the Pinkerton Agency, who had lost her husband in the line of duty. Their first collaboration allowed both of them to move on and create Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. So, if The Paradise Affair really is their last outing, they got a happy sendoff that retrospectively brightened Beyond the Grave. A crossover across time between this series and Muller's short-lived series-character Elena Oliverez, which takes place in 1894 and 1986. The 1986 portion of the story makes it very clear Carpenter and Quincannon are long gone. Either way, this is not the last you have seen of them on this blog. I still have The Bags of Tricks Affair (2018), which I overlooked and forgot about. The stories collected in Quincannon's Game warrant a second look as three of the four stories are locked room mysteries. Why not end where the series began, Quincannon, because that would be on theme for this blog.

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) by Bill Pronzini

Last year, I posted a short story review under the title "The Nameless Detective: "The Hills of Homicide" (1949) by Louis L'Amour," which is best described as a western-flavored, hardboiled locked room mystery solved by a Los Angeles private eye – whose name is never revealed. So labeled the story as a curious ancestor of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" series, but recently stumbled across a much more fascinating link with Pronzini's historical private eye novels. I'm not talking about the handful of Carpenter and Quincannon short stories that originally appeared in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine during the mid-1990s. 

"The Hills of Homicide" mentioned in passing miners, or high-graders, smuggling gold ore out of a mine under seemingly impossible circumstances, but it was an anecdote without an answer. I closed out the review with my own solution to the problem of the pilfering miners. Not a bad solution, if I say so myself. However, I was less pleased with past Tom's cleverness when coming across an identical impossible situation in one of the latest Carpenter and Quincannon novels. Did I inadvertently spoil a locked room mystery by coming up with the best possible explanation for a rather one-of-a-kind locked room problem? Only one way to find out! 

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) is the eight, of currently nine, novels about John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, Professional Detective Services, who operate in 1890s San Francisco when the glory days of the Old West began to wane and fade – as a new century dawned. A time when the line between the American frontier and the settled states blurred and motorcars, or horseless carriages, began to replace "horse-drawn conveyances as the primary method of transportation." One of the constants in this ever-changing world is the always adaptable criminal.

John Quincannon is summoned by one of the city's wealthiest businessmen, Everett Hoxley, to his social club to discuss a particular vexing and costly problem.

Hoxley is the head of a large mining corporation that "owned several gold and silver mines in northern California and Nevada," but the production of high-quality ore in the Monarch Mine has dropped noticeably and there have been rumors of high-grading. So he wants Quincannon to go undercover as a newly hired timberman to "identify the individuals responsible for an insidious high-grading operation" and "to put a satisfactory end to their activities," which comes with a generous fee, expensive and a possible bonus. Only obstacle is that it's likely a four-week assignment and his marriage to Sabina Carpenter is planned three weeks from then. But that's the life of a detective.

Quincannon arrives in the small mining settlement of Patch Creek, northeast of Marysville, under the alias J.F. Quinn where's confronted with multiple, quasi-impossible crimes and a full-blown "locked room" murder – twelve-hundred feet underground! Firstly, he not only has to identify the gang of high-graders, but figure out how they were refining gold-bearing ore to produce pure gold dust in "a mine operating with mostly full crews twenty-four hours a day." Secondly, the method used to smuggle the gold out of the mine. Thirdly, he has to do all that while doing eight-hour of backbreaking, mining labor in "the dangerous bowels of the earth." A place where cave-ins, premature detonations, rock gas and runaway cages or tramcars were greater threats to his health than "the actions of a gang of gold thieves." Quincannon believes there's "no better detective in the Western states" and gets some quick results, but, having stumbled across an important piece of evidence, he is knocked out in a abandoned, dead-end crosscut. He's awakened by the sound of a pistol shot and is found next to a dead body. There's only one way in and out of crosscut, which was in sight of several miners when the shot sounded. Nobody else entered or left the crosscut. So "as pretty a frame as ever had been set around an innocent man."

The passages of the story that takes place in the mine are the best part of the book, but the solutions to the various problems vary enormously in quality. The locked room-trick used for the shooting is good and simple, which nicely fitted both the underground conditions and the circumstances in that crosscut. Indubitably, the best plot-strand of the Monarch Mine case. Quincannon more or less stumbles across the refining process, but a clever little criminal operation nonetheless. Regrettably, the method used to the smuggle out the gold was a huge letdown, because I expected something a little more ingenious rather than a gross oversight on the part of the shift inspectors. But they remain the best and most memorable parts of the whole book.

So, while Quincannon is playing the Sherlock Holmes of Agartha in the Earth's crust, Sabina is holding down the fort, but the detective business experiences one of its slack periods and only has two minor cases on her hands.

Firstly, Sabina is doing a background check on an unsavory character who turned up in Quincannon's case and how to get that information to him, because Patch Creek didn't have a Western Union office. Secondly, she unofficially and unethically ended "the criminal careers of a confidence man and an embezzler" without a paying client or earning "so much as one thin dime," which is a cardinal sin – to "John's way of thinking." They meet up again in the last quarter to hunt down the last high-grader as the story becomes a charming, well written period railway mystery with an impossible disappearance as their quarry vanishes from a moving train without a trace.

One thing to remember is that the novels in this series are rewrites and expansions of the short Carpenter and Quincannon stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Louis L'Amour Western Magazine from 1994 to 2018. The Stolen Gold Affair is an expansion of "The Desert Limited" (LLWM, Nov. 1995) and "The Gold Stealers" (EQMM, Sep/Oct. 2014), but had previously only read "The Desert Limited" in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Servives (1998) and hoped the solution would be better in a novel-length treatment. There are some clever touches to it (how Sabina solved it and why Quincannon missed it), but not everything holds up. I thought (ROT13) Zbetna hfvat “fbzr fbeg bs ehfr gb trg gur onttntr znfgre gb bcra hc” was a cop-out answer and too easily glossed over. That was suppose to be a legitimate obstacle in closed, moving locked room and presenting it as "an educated guest" doesn't make it any less unfair.

That being said, my opinion of the short story at the time is that the whole trick and setting would probably work better in a visual medium, which is also true for its expanded version in The Stolen Gold Affair. I believe this series, particular its novel-length treatments, would make perfect source material for a television series as it has everything on the ready. A beautiful, striking period backdrop during a time of great change with two great, memorable lead-characters who came with their own personal, and intertwined, storylines – culminating in their marriage. There's also the ongoing storyline with the crackpot Sherlock that ran through multiple novels (beginning with The Bughouse Affair, 2013) and ready-made plots that are neither overly complicated or insultingly simplistic. Some of the impossibilities from this series would translate beautifully to the small screen like the ghostly apparitions in The Spook Lights Affair (2013). Not to mention Pronzini and Marcia Muller's time-crossing crossover, Beyond the Grave (1986), can be adapted to give such a TV-series a strong and memorable ending.

So, on a whole, I did enjoy my time with The Stolen Gold Affair with the chapters that take place underground and the impossible shooting in the crosscut standing out, but the problem is that they were noticeably better done than the other plot-strands. So it's the Monarch Mine case that's the main attraction of The Stolen Gold Affair and comes particular recommended to locked room readers as there are not that many impossible crime stories that use the woefully underutilized mine setting. Pronzini demonstrated what you can do with a deeply buried, rock-solid locked room situation. Just one question remains... did that throwaway anecdote from "The Hills of Homicide" gave Pronzini the idea for the "The Gold Stealers" or was it Clyde B. Clason's Blind Drifts (1937)? An impossible crime novel with a mine setting Pronzini fanboyed all over it.

Room 103: "The Half-Invisible Man" (1974) by Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann

Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallman's "The Half-Invisible Man" was originally published in the May, 1974, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and reprinted in Cop Cade (1978), but the story never made an appearance in any of the locked room-themed anthologies and there's more than enough here to merits its inclusion in a future anthology – not merely for its locked room-trick. "The Half-Invisible Man" has one of the most memorable, one-shot detective characters.

Patrolman Fred Gallagher is the half-invisible man of the story. A 50-year-old, 27-year veteran of the force, but he was "a quiet, passive, deferential individual by nature" with "the kind of mind which did not easily assimilate academic knowledge." So he never got promoted and this turned him into an "uninvolved, perpetually detached observer" who feels like he has done little more during his career than standing guard at crime scenes. Where he glimpses through doorways "every conceivable type of crime man could perpetrate against his fellowman." A half-invisible man.

"The Half-Invisible Man" opens with Gallagher posted outside the open door of Room 103, in the fashionable Whitewater Motel, listening to his superiors discussing the murder Aaron Maddox. A hotel guest who had been shot ten minutes after he had checked in, but every door (two) and window was securely locked, or bolted, from the inside and the gun was found outside, on the terrace, the locked glass door – wiped clean. An impossible crime if there ever was one!

There are, however, some suspects to consider. The occupant of the two room adjacent, Gordon Severin in 105 and Ralph Oakley in 101, who are partners in a small New York investment counseling firm. Maddox was the third partner and he had placed Severin and Oakley in enviable position by siphoning money from their clients and firm, which brought one of their clients to the hotel to confront the trio. So more than enough suspects with a motive, but they first have to figure out how the murderer got out of that locked motel room.

While his superiors go over all the details, Gallagher begins to see a pattern and, when he has a moment alone, he gets an opportunity to confirm his suspicions and presents Lieutenant Conroy and Captain Fabian with a complete solution to the locked room problem upon their return. A very good, fairly clued explanation offering a new variation on an old, somewhat famous trick, but the story is so much more than a well executed detective and locked room story – because there's a surprisingly deep and satisfying layered feeling to this short story. There's the inversion on the armchair detective reminiscent of Henry from Isaac Asimov's The Black Widowers series. An armchair detective who stands, waits and listens quietly as he puts together the pieces in his mind, which worked just as well with a patrolman as with a waiter. Secondly, there's the rather tragic character of Gallagher himself. Even with his short-lived moment of glory, "The Half-Invisible Man" is a synopsis of his past, present and future. A half-invisible man who was looked at without being seen and destined to one day completely vanish. And that also makes it one of the best takes on G.K. Chesterton's "The Invisible Man" (collected The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911). A depressing take, sure, but seldom done better.

"The Half-Invisible Man" is a fine example of how the traditional, plot-oriented detective story/locked room mystery can be merged with the modern, more character-driven police procedural and they can compliment each other in the right hands. Definitely recommended. Hopefully, it will turn up in some future locked room anthology for my fellow impossible crime junkies to enjoy.

The Flimflam Affair (2019) by Bill Pronzini

The Flimflam Affair (2019) is the seventh, full-length historical mystery novel in the John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter series, a pair of private-investigators from San Francisco of the 1890s, which were originally penned by the husband-and-wife writing tandem of Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller – a collaboration that ended with The Dangerous Ladies Affair (2017). Pronzini has continued the series on his own beginning with The Bags of Tricks Affair (2018).

On a side note, three years ago, I reviewed The Plague of Thieves Affair (2016) under the blog-title "A Stuffed Bag of Tricks" and this made me assume I had already read The Bags of Tricks Affair. Yes, I'm an imbecile.

The plot of The Flamflim Affair is an amalgamation of two short stories originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, "Medium Rare" (1998) and "Burglarproof" (2010), expanded with two personal plot-threads concerning John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter. Their relationship had been "strictly professional," but Quincannon has been spending the past five years convincing Sabina that his intentions were honorable and has "finally worn down her resistance" – admitting to herself that John was more than just a business partner and friend. A second plot-thread brings back a ghost from the past, but first, they have to clear up two cases that were brought to Carpenter & Quincannon: Professional Detective Services.

Sierra Railway Company has engaged Quincannon to track down "a considerable sum" in gold dust and bullion, stolen from the express office of the Tuttletown depot, but the audacious thieves didn't simply crack the safe. Oh, no! They carried off "a four-hundred-pound burglarproof safe," filled with gold, in the middle of the night. A dairy farmer finds the opened and looted safe in a field, but this discovery turned a burglary into an impossible problem.

The black, circular door of the safe was partially detached, hanging by "a single bolt from a bent hinge," showing "the door had clearly been forced somehow," but there are no powder marks or other evidence of explosives having been used – which makes this a highly unusual impossible crime. Quincannon demonstrates here why he thinks he's "the best detective west of the Mississippi" as he follows such clues as blood, dried putty, a piece of straw and the cold, damp interior of the safe to the doorstep of the culprits.

However, the best part of Quincannon's case is undeniably the method the thieves employed to wrench open a reputedly burglarproof safe. Something you normally would expect to find in a scientific impossible crime story by Arthur Porges.

Sabina Carpenter receives an assignment from a rich investment broker, Winthrop Buckley, whose daughter was "a childhood victim of diphtheria," but his wife, Margaret, has never been able to accept her death. Margaret believes she can "obtain an audience" with the ghost of their daughter, Bernice, with the help of Professor Abraham Vargas of the Unified College of the Attuned Impulses. Buckley is a skeptic and believes Vargas to be a fraud, but he needs hard, cast-iron evidence in order to convince his wife. Sabina goes undercover as "Dorothy Milford" with a fabricated story about a dead brother and discovers Vargas to be "a philandering flimflammer" who "preys on vulnerable women" and grieving families, which is painfully demonstrated during the fatal séance when he manufactured the disembodied voice of Bernice – making her grief-stricken mommy and daddy promise to come again. Vargas more than deserved to have that ornamental dagger shoved down his neck.

Coming in 2020

This is exactly what happened in the pitch-black séance room: Vargas is stabbed from behind, twice, while everyone around the table was holding hands and the only door was locked from the inside. The locked room-trick here is the proverbial mixed bag of tricks. I appreciated how much of the trick was tied to the tools of the trade of fraudulent mediums, but disliked how the murderer managed to get pass the locked door, which is something of a cheat. Still a good example of the murder-during-a-seance locked room mystery.

The problems posed by Vargas takes up the lion's share of The Flimflim Affair, as Quincannon only needed five chapters to bring the burglary case to an end, but the murder of Vargas is solved with ten chapters left to go. 

This portion of the story concerns "a notorious counterfeiter," Long Dick Darrow, who had a fatal encounter with Quincannon during his tenure as an operative of the Secret Service. But he appears to have risen from his watery grave and has brought his distinctive counterfeit one-hundred dollar bills back into circulation. I didn't really care about this last plot-thread and felt tacked on to the plot in order to pad out the book to a novel-length story.

The Flimflam Affair is a patchwork mystery novel of old and new material, which can make the story feel a little disjointed at times, but on a whole, it was vast improvement over the very minor The Plague of Thieves Affair and the overtly political The Dangerous Ladies Affair (2017) – hearkening back (quality-wise) to the earlier The Bughouse Affair (2013) and The Spook Lights Affair (2013).

The next entry in this series, The Stolen Gold Affair (2020), is scheduled for next year and has the best cover-art of the whole series! I hope it means we'll be getting an impossible crime inside a sealed mine shaft.

Two Shooter

"Locked rooms and mysterious disappearances smack of deliberate subterfuge."

- Sabina Carpenter (Bill Pronzini's "Gunpowder Alley," a 2012 uncollected short story)

Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Dangerous Ladies Affair (2017) is the fifth in their recent series of historical locked room mysteries about a pair of private-investigators, namely John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, who operate in the San Francisco of the late 1890s, but their first recorded case dates back more than thirty years – beginning with the eponymously titled Quincannon (1985). The characters would go on to appear in the splendid Beyond the Grave (1986) and a whole slew of short stories. Some of them were collected (e.g. Quincannon's Game, 2005), but the most recent ones are, as of now, uncollected.

Several years ago, the stories about Carpenter and Quincannon were, sort of, rebooted as a series of full-length detective novels and sometimes materials from the short stories were expanded upon. Such as "The Bughouse Caper," from Quincannon's Game, which was taken apart and used as the basis for ongoing story-line about a scattered-brain figure, who claimed to be Sherlock Holmes, that began with The Bughouse Affair (2013) – finally concluding two novels later in The Body Snatchers Affair (2015). That last title was also an expansion of a short story, "The Highbinders," which was originally published in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998).

I bring this up because The Dangerous Ladies Affair consists of two separate, non-overlapping investigations and Quincannon's case is an expansive rewrite of two short stories, but still managed to be my favorite part of the book.

Quincannon is engaged by the President of the Woolworth National Bank, Titus Wrixton, concerning "a matter of some delicacy that demands considerable discretion." Someone is trying to extort money from the bank president and the blackmail material is related to a personal indiscretion. And he already coughed up five thousand dollars! As to be expected, there's another demand for money and now Wrixton wants Quincannon to retrieve the indiscreet letters he wrote, which gave the latter an idea.

Wrixton handed over the money to "an emissary" of his blackmailer, a short, hooked nose person, who'll probably be at the bar of the Hotel Grant to receive the second payment and Quincannon is determined to follow him back to the person behind the blackmail scheme – except that what he finds is of those "seemingly impossible conundrums." The name of the emissary turns out to be Raymond Sonderberg and he owns a small cigar store in Gunpowder Alley, but when Quincannon arrives shots ring out from the locked store.

After two doors are broken down, Quincannon and a passing patrolman find the body of Sonderberg with two bullet holes in the chest, but how did the murderer manage to vanish from what is, essentially, a double locked room? Sonderberg's body was found in a bolted room with the only window latched from the inside and the front door of the shop was also locked from the inside. So how did the murderer enter and leave the premise?

The locked room part of Quincannon's case had an earlier life as "Gunpowder Alley," originally published in a 2012 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which made the explanation not as big a surprise as it could have been. However, this is still a nice little section that focuses on the how of the crime, because the murderer never makes an appearance in the first half of this case, but the observant reader can probably make an educated guess out of which direction the wind is blowing – as well as working out the locked room trick based on a thud and a description of something at the crime-scene.

Where it all began

Second half is basically a chase tale in which Quincannon is trying to bring the cheeky murderer to earth and the source material of this part is "Burgade's Crossing," which came from the pages of a 1993 issue Louis L'Amour Western Magazine and was collected in the aforementioned 1998 short story collection. So lot's of old material was reused for this case, but, as said above, it's still my favorite part of this novel.

Meanwhile, Sabina Carpenter is consumed by an entirely different kind of problem: she has been participating member of the Golden Gate Ladies' Bicycle Club for several weeks and she did so at the encouragement of her new friend, Amity Wellman – who's the head of an organization dedicated to getting women the right to vote in California. Lately, she has been getting religiously tinged letters that could be perceived as a threat and she has a fair share of potential enemies. Such as the leader of the anti-progressive Solidarity Party, named Nathaniel Dobbs, but there's also a man with whom she briefly had an extramarital affair, Fenton Egan. A married man with a very jealous wife, Prudence.

So there was more than enough plot-material for an interesting case, especially after an attempt on Wellman's life, but practically the entire story consists of Sabina poking a stick in Wellman's opposition. A murder is committed towards the end of this story-line, but one that's solved almost as quickly as it was presented and only seemed to be introduced to give the story a morally ambiguous ending when Sabine covers up the murderer's guilt.

I found it increasingly difficult to get into this part of the book and even became annoyed at times by Sabina's partisan behavior. Such as when she decided to play apologetics on behalf of her friend at the home of the Egans. Sure, Prudence is a vengeful woman with her own dirty linen, but saying that Wellman's work as a woman's activist makes her especially "entitled to understanding and forgiveness" is not an argument. She was basically asking Prudence why she was such a sour puss about Wellman sleeping with her husband when she was doing such a good job as suffragette. Hey, I borrowed your car for a week or two without you knowing, but don't be mad, I also feed the needy and homeless at the soup kitchen.

So, plot-and storywise, I feel very divided about The Dangerous Ladies Affair and would not rank it as high as, say, the first two entries in this series, but still very much enjoyed the case and chase handled by Quincannon. I always liked him as a character and consider him to be one of the great detective-characters who emerged in the modern era. So the ending of this novel is a much deserved one. And also showed that, perhaps, the series is winding down and drawing to a close.

Well, that was my rambling for this blog-post and not sure what will be next, but it might be a re-read. Because, you know, that TBR-pile does not really need any continued and sustained trimming or anything. ;)