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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim MacNab Seeks a Story (1937) by Marten Toonder

The concept of "lost media" is something of an obsession on parts of the internet and touched upon the subject myself, "Top 10 Works of Detective Fiction That Have Been Lost to History," covering everything from Jacques Futrelle going down with the Titanic to the lost collaboration between John Dickson Carr and J.B. Priestley – between a maddening number of unpublished, presumably destroyed manuscripts. Most famously Hake Talbot's third Rogan Kincaid novel The Affair of the Half-Witness and Joseph Commings' four novel-length Senator Brooks U. Banner mysteries. So the detective story, especially the classics, has had its fair share of lost media as well as number of recently recovered novels and short stories from the likes of Christianna Brand, E.C.R. Lorac and Anthony Berkeley.

There has even been a recovered, previously unpublished, detective novel here in the Netherlands from the hands of one of the most celebrated Dutch comic book artists, Marten Toonder.

Marten Toonder created the beloved characters Tom Poes and Olivier B. Bommel, Tom Puss and Oliver B. Bumble in English, who appeared in the long-running Tom Poes series. A series praised for enriching the Dutch language with new words and playful phrases, which reportedly made Toonder's work tricky to translate into different languages, als je begrijpt wat ik bedoel. Toonder died, aged 93, in 2005. During his centenary, seven years later, it was revealed a loose-leaf, typescript manuscript was discovered in the Toonder archive of a never before published detective novel, Tim MacNab zoekt copy (Tim MacNab Seeks a Story) – originally written in 1937. It's unclear why the manuscript was shelved, but finally appeared in a limited print run of 1500 copies when publisher De Bezige Bij distributed the manuscript, "curiosum in facsimile," as a 2013 New Year's gift. Tim MacNab Seeks a Story received a proper publication in 2017, under the slightly modernized title Tim MacNab zoekt kopij, which came with a foreword from Dutch thriller author Tomas Ross ("a unique gem") and afterword from Toonder's grandson, Irwin M. Toonder.

I had heard of it before and jotted it down for future reference, but forgot all about it until receiving the gift wrapped facsimile edition last December. If you want to get the real feeling of reading a lost detective story, the facsimile of a typescript complete with handwriting corrections gets that job done. On the downside, the first three chapters have a lot of faded, hard to read pages of text, which fortunately improved to make it as readable as intended. How does it stack up as a detective story written during the Golden Age's golden window, the years 1935 to 1937? Let's dive in and find out!

Tim MacNab Seeks a Story is narrated by Captain Sixma, of the S.S. Wega, ferrying a cargo of "characters" from Rotterdam to Montevideo and Buenos Aires. There's the jovial, roving reporter from Chicago, Tim MacNab, who takes on the duties of shipboard sleuth. Otto Braun, a German stockbroker, gladly taking on the role of murderable murderee. Further more, there are William Jones, a fat cat from London, Juanita Lloret, a dancer from Vienna, Father Dominicus, a missionary from South Africa, Dr. Johan van der Steen, a sea sick botanist, Mrs. Wijers, a Dutch invalided widow and her private nurse, Tilly van Doorne. Finally, Gustav and Lotte Herchel from Zurich, Switzerland. So a nice, neatly packed cast of characters for an intimate shipboard mystery with Otto Braun setting himself as prospective victim. Not long after lifting anchor, Braun is shot through the head in his cabin while making notes in his diary.

Tim MacNab rises to the occasion, positioning himself as the detective, but Captain Sixma is a responsible, sensible down-to-earth Dutchman – who sees trouble ahead. Reasoning "a person who has committed one murder can very easily commit a second one." That fatal failure would be his responsibility as captain. Regrettably, Captain Sixma's prediction comes true when a second person is killed leaving MacNab and Captain Sixma to chase a murderer who left two bodies behind and littered the ship with clues and red herrings. Like the torn pages from a diary, a scrap of old newspaper, a rosary bead, a whiff of perfume, a dying message and an astonishing lack of alibis.

This all makes for a well-paced, entertaining enough whodunit and I'm sure you can breeze through the 2017 edition (i.e. finished product) within an hour or two, which is Tim MacNab Seeks a Story greatest strength as a story and greatest weakness as a detective story. Technically, the plot holds together well enough, but the plot is very prosaic and unimaginative. When the murderer was revealed, my response was, "oh, that fits, I guess." I would have been more impressed had it been written in 1927, because its brief experiments with false-solutions and a dying message would have made it somewhat prescient en route to the 1930s. What's more, once everything was revealed, all I could see was a better alternative solution than the one presented.

I still very much enjoyed reading Tim MacNab Seeks a Story, but that doesn't take away it's pretty basic and average for a 1930s detective novel. I genuinely wish it had been better than it turned out to be, because all my attempts to find another good, classic Dutch detective author like Cor Docter or Ton Vervoort has been less than inspiring. So, historically, Tim MacNab Seeks a Story is an interesting curiosity for sure, but not very satisfying as a detective story originally written in 1937. The reader has been warned.

Anyone interested in me re-reviewing Docter's trio of Daan Vissering mysteries or do you want to stubbornly go on, until finding something really good again? Let me know below.

Note for the curious: in case your curious about that better, more satisfying alternative solution (MILD SPOILERS/ROT13): fb gur svefg ivpgvz jnf gur hacyrnfnag Bggb Oenha jub jnf abg nobir n fcbg oynpxznvy, juvyr gur frpbaq ivpgvz vf Thfgni Urepury. Gung bcraf gur qbbe gb gur rgreany gevnatyr. Ybggr Urepury unf n frperg ybire naq vf orvat oynpxznvyrq ol Oenha. Fb gurl qrpvqr gb xvyy gjb oveqf jvgu bar fgbar ol xvyyvat obgu ure uhfonaq naq gurve oynpxznvyre qhevat gur gevc, juvpu jbhyq serr gurz hc va zber guna bar jnl. Lbh pna onfvpnyyl cvpx rirelbar nf ure frperg ybire/pb-zheqrere qrcraqvat jung xvaq bs fhecevfr lbh jnag gb tb sbe. Vqrnyyl, vg fubhyq or rvgure gur pncgnva (haeryvnoyr aneengbe) be gur ercbegre uvzfrys, ohg bar bs gur perj zrzoref jub'f nyjnlf va gur onpxtebhaq jbhyq nyfb jbex. Lrf, vg'f abg terng cybggvat vs lbh pna fybg nal ahzore bs punenpgref vagb gur ebyr bs zheqrere, ohg urer vg pbhyq unir jbexrq.

After typing that out, I realized Tim MacNab Seeks a Story is Deck Dorval's Een jacht vaart uit (A Yacht Sets Sail, 1947) all over again. I'll try to pick something substantially better next. I have something on the pile that'll do the trick. A locked room-trick!

The Ring of Innocent (1952) by Brian Flynn

Brian Flynn's The Ring of Innocent (1952), the fortieth title in the Anthony Bathurst series, begins with Martin Scudamore going to see a flick and getting the good, old-fashioned cinema experience – two men sitting behind him talking. The conversation he overhears raises an eyebrow.

Scudamore heard the two men, "the big fellow" and "the little bloke," talk about four rings and how "the colours were confirmed, too" ("green, blue, red and yellow"). Several names are mentioned and a muttered comment about proving somebody's innocence, but what unsettled Scudamore was hearing the big fellow saying he was ready to remove a human obstacle ("...if Lovelace stands in my way I'll slit his throat") in combination with a place called Loveridge. Scudamore happens to be friends with someone named Lovelace who lives in Loveridge. So he goes with this story to Helen Repton, of Scotland Yard, who in turns brings him to Anthony Bathurst.

Anthony Bathurst listens to the story and suspects trouble is afoot, which is why he immediately wants to go the Lovelace's home, Cherry Fair, but they arrived too late. They're greeted by a police sergeant telling them that Lovelace "was set upon last night very savagely," found dying from head wound in the library, moved to the local hospital – where he died that morning. Before dying, the doctors heard Lovelace saying the words innocent or innocence and teaspoon. Bathurst asks the sergeant to contact Chief Detective-Inspector MacMorran, of the Yard, and simply takes charge of the investigation. However, this is not a simple case of interrogating suspects and witnesses, digging for motives and checking alibis. Simply because there really aren't any at first. Bathurst has to find them first by playing psycho-analyst, of sorts.

What can be called clues, or semi-clues, comprise of little more than the whispered conversation overheard in the cinema, Lovelace's cryptic dying message and the cryptic doodles discovered on his blotting pad. So the opening part of the investigation is more in the spirit of word association games and rebus puzzles. Following the possible answers to those word-and picture puzzles leads Bathurst to a respectable antique store, a funeral parlor and the home of a writer who published a book on the long, storied history of Lovelace's twelfth century house. And a second body. This is, of course, only a small selection of leads, dead ends and other complications Bathurst and MacMorran have to clear up along the way towards the solution. So, as to be expected from Flynn, The Ring of Innocent is a detective story that doesn't always move along traditional lines.

I think that speaks very well for Flynn as a detective novelist. Even after a quarter of a century and forty books, Flynn refused to phone it in and kept trying to give his readers something worth their time and money. Flynn was a mystery writer who wanted to surprise his readers in more ways than one, which is way going through his body of work is like a tour of the early 20th century detective-and thriller story – going from whodunits and impossible crimes to courtroom dramas and serial killers. Or, like here, simply finding a different route to tell a detective story. On the downside, it can make his work a little uneven at times. The Ring of Innocent is at its best in its opening and closing parts with the middle portion sometimes lacking some urgency, but, on a whole, a solid, late-period entry in the series.

Best Served Cold: Case Closed, vol. 96 by Gosho Aoyama

This is probably going to be a slightly shorter review than usual, because Gosho Aoyama's 96th volume of Case Closed only has one completed story, book-ended by the conclusion and setup to stories from the previous and next volume – which doesn't make for a great reading experience. Ho-Ling Wong noted the same problem in his 2019 review of vol. 96 ("...one of the worst volumes of the last decade or so"). The reader has been warned!

So this volume begins with the conclusion of the "The Female Officer Serial Murders" setup in the last two chapters of the previous volume. Normally, that's done in the opening chapter, but there three more chapters. Had it been tidied up in one, or two, chapters it would have been like any other volume in the series with one conclusion and two complete stories. Maybe even a one-chapter setup for the opening story of the next volume, but I'm padding now.

Yumi Miyamoto and Neako Miike, officer of the traffic department, get drag into the case when two of their colleagues are murdered. First victim was Sergeant Momosaki, found in a park, who "used her last moments to point at a swing set" as a dying message and killer struck again later that same day – throwing Lieutenant Shiori Yagi out of a building. She also used her last moments to give her colleagues a clue to the killer. But the killer left a calling card behind at both crime scenes: a bent 200-yen coin that has a depiction of cherry blossom ("...emblem of the Japanese police") engraved on it. So the murderer obviously has it out for female officers of the traffic department. There are three suspects who were involved in traffic incident, days before the murders, during which they had a heated argument with several female traffic officers. So pretty much one of those familiar who-of-the-three stories, but disliked how very similar, somewhat specific motive was tacked on all three suspects. On the other hand, I liked the idea how every cop in trouble, whether they died or survived, tried to transfer information to their colleagues in the form of a dying message. The meaning behind those dying messages form a pleasing thematic pattern, but an idea that needed a better, longer treatment than it received here. By the way, this story also provides a resolution for the Detective Chiba and Neako Miike story-arc going all the way back to vol. 75.

The first, only complete story in this volume is a self-parody of the Wile E. Coyote vs. the Road Runner feud between Jirokichi Sebastian and Kaito KID. I started out as a big fan of Jirokichi trying to ensnare KID with his elaborate, expensively baited and widely publicized traps. Their first few duels from volumes 44 and 61 were series highlights, but suppose they were hard acts to follow as their last few encounters have been a little underwhelming. So not a bad decision to go for a self-parody, because it would have been worst Jirokichi/KID caper to date. Jirokichi has new bait to tempt the KID, the Fairy's Lip, "one of the biggest conch pearls in the world," but how to present and protect it poses a problem. Fortunately, a familiar face turns up, Inspector Takaaki Morofushi, who advises to have the conch pearl exhibited frozen inside a block of ice and placed in a guarded, makeshift room of tempered glass. And some other high tech precautions that should prevent KID from getting out of the glass room with the pearl.

So far, a fairly typical setup for a Kaito KID caper, but this time you get to see KID at work and he's not disguised as Inspector Takaaki Morofushi. KID has hidden himself among the guards posted around the glass room with the block of ice, but is having second thoughts when notices "those two sleuths," Conan and Harley, "plus a cop who's not a total dummy," but an incident makes him decides to go ahead with the heist. From the start, KID is nearly caught out, but things get farcical when he takes the place of someone in Conan and Harley's group. You can see one scene coming from that very moment and this gag, sadly enough, carries the story. KID steals the ring and solution is OK-ish, but still no idea how he could have pulled it off, under those circumstances, within ten minutes. So fun enough, but nothing more than that.

The last story begins with Conan, Rachel, Sera, Serena and her boyfriend, Makoto, coming out of the theater having just watched The Avengers The Amazers movie when they stumble into a hostage situation. Makoto, a karate champion, jumps to the rescue only to discover he interrupted a shoot for the TV series 48 Detectives. And the gun toting criminal he kicked into next week was a stuntman. So now they need a stuntman and they immediately see potential in the karate champion, but Makoto's stint as a stand-in stuntman ends with two murders on set. And, according to tradition, will be concluded in the next volume.

So not much to say, except Sera trying to pry the truth out of Conan and even asks Rachel if she's ever seen Conan and Jimmy together. Very much to her surprise, Rachel tells Sera how Conan went to a school play Jimmy was in ("...Jimmy solved a mystery during the play, while the brat sat in the audience pouting"). I believe this is a reference to a story not reviewed on this blog and barely remember it, but how it's describe here makes it sound like a hilarious case of bi-location in close proximity, especially from Sera's perspective – who's convinced Conan is Jimmy ("...Conan and I picked Jimmy up from his house the next morning").

There's not much else to say about this volume, except how this series structures its serialized chapters and volumes worked against it. I simply recommend everyone reading this in the near of distant future to read volumes 95, 96 and 97 without big gaps of time between them.

The Nature of Things: C.M.B. vol. 7-8 by Motohiro Katou

Following a short hiatus, I returned to the work of Motohiro Katou back in September with a review of C.M.B. vol. 5-6 and the intention was to have gone through the first ten volumes, before the end of the year, but just noticed I forgot to do C.M.B. vol. 7-8 last month – having reviewed Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 95 in October. So guess you can call that a return to tradition.

Katou's C.M.B. vol. 7 differs from previous volumes in both the C.M.B. and Q.E.D. series, which normally contain two longish stories or occasionally a single long story (e.g. C.M.B. Vol. 4), but Katou this time tried his hands at four shorter stories. So the plots and storytelling tend to be smaller in complexity and scope than the longer stories. The result's as mixed and varied as the stories themselves.

"Locust" is the first of these four shorter stories and best described as an ecological mystery-thriller, of sorts, which takes place in one of those remote, mountainous villages named Yamanomizu – plagued and torn by several divisive issues. First of all, the village is divided over the plans to build a road to bring government money to the village and province, but half the village opposed the plans because they "feared that the forest would be torn down." Secondly, the province where the village is located has a plague of locusts and in three days, "the village and their crops will be attacked by the locusts." So the villagers in favor of the road want to spray everything from the fields to the forest with insecticide ("...going to be torn down anyways"). Thirdly, local children spotted a rare, beautiful bird in the forest, "never seen before," but nobody believes them. One of the kids heard of Sakaki Shinra, curator of Shinra's Museum of Antiquities, who takes Nanase Tatsuki to Yamanomizu. Shinra has a pretty good idea about the bird, but seems more interested in the locusts and, of course, someone tries to protect money making road project to give the story a mild touch of the thrillers. Not much of a detective story, plotwise, but the backdrop allowed for a few good, nicely drawn scenes towards the end.

The second story, "Iron Door," is a different story altogether! Mau Sugal, the black market broker, returns to the Museum of Antiquities to take Sakaki Shinra and Nanase Tatsuki along on an unusual treasure hunt. She brings them to an abandoned factory with a once buried, now excavated bunker doubling as an army research laboratory during the Second World War. This leads to a long, dark passageway with a huge, heavy steel door at the end. A door that used to be opened with a motor, but the motor was destroyed when the place was closed and sealed. So now it takes the combined effort of three, or more, people to open it. Mau believes "there's some treasure behind this door," but she needs the other two to help her pry it open. When they do, they find an empty storeroom with the fresh corpse of an elderly man inside, 81-year-old Gomoku Shigetsuga. He turned up shortly after the place was excavated and unsealed to claim the place couldn't possibly be empty.

So while "Iron Door" is as long, or short, as "Locusts," it's a much denser story with a packed, nestling doll-like plot – stacking mystery upon mystery. Who trapped and killed the old man? How did the murderer opened, and closed, the door without help? What did the victim know about the wartime secrets buried in the bunker? And what happened to those secrets? Is there still something hidden in the bunker that the police overlooked? How does Mau figure in this case and why did she leave cartoon smoke after discovering the body? The answers to all these questions nicely dovetail together with the unusual impossible crime situation making it standout, but even better than the original, quasi-inverted take on the locked room mystery is the clearly written, cleverly hidden dying message. Maybe the best use of the hidden dying message since the Columbo episode Try and Catch Me (1977). The best story of the volume!

The third story, "In the Civic Pool," is not necessarily bad, but it has a threadbare plot and a very forgettable story. Tatsuki takes Shinra and some of her classmates to the public swimming pool where they become entangled in a series of mini-mysteries involving missing concert tickets, a water beetle supposedly "extinct in Tokyo" and figure in the swimming pool who disappears like a ghost when looking in its direction. All very simple mysteries with simple, straightforward answers. Only thing that really stood out is Shinra taking care of the water beetle, but other than that, Katou still has to figure out how to translate his trademark character-driven, slice-of-life puzzles to the one-chapter story format.

This volume ends on a high note with a pleasingly conventional mystery, “The Turk,” which is the famous chess playing automaton that toured and enraptured Europe in the 18th century. A replica of the Turk is currently part of Tagame Tatsuo's collection of antique “mechanized puppets” and Shinra, holder of the "C," "M," and "B" rings, has full access to the collection for his research – even gets to play to play the celebrated automaton. During their round of chess, the automaton fails while a robber smashes a display and gets away with three valuable puppets. Shinra promises to get back the antiques in exchange for the replica of the Turk. So the solution appears to entirely hinge on breaking down the alibi of the person who operated the automaton. Shinra reminds everyone the Turk is "not a mechanized puppet," but "more of a magic trick." Like I said, a pleasingly conventional detective story.

By the way, I liked Tatsuki's false-solution infusing the 18th century illusion of the chess playing automaton with modern technology.

Katou's C.M.B. vol. 8 continues the format of vol. 7 with four shorter, one-chapter stories and the first story is “One Hundred and Thirty Million Victims.” Detective Inspector Takeshi receives a picture of an ant-lion accompanied by threatening letter promising that, "on November 6th, at 6 PM, I will enact my revenge. The 130 million people of Japan will be the victims." Takeshi goes to Shinra to use him as a soundboard and, pretty soon, a lead presents itself. A man by the name Yoshikawa Masahisa was arrested and convicted for a disgusting crime: robbing a young mother and kicking over the baby carriage, which injured the baby. So the media and public came down like a ton of bricks on him and his family. However, the real culprit was found years later and Yoshikawa Masahisa was released from prison without a word of apology from the media and public. The story is about trying to prevent someone from taking revenge, however, the ending showed that not everything is as it seems. A prescient ending at that for a story originally published in 2008 (likely had a magazine appearance in 2007). A good opening act!

"A Meteorite" is the second and my personal favorite story from this volume. Shinra travels to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian operated spaceport in Kazakhstan, where "something cumbersome" crashed nearby and created a giant crater – a large meteorite. There are, however, two problems. Firstly, the representatives of Kazakhstan and Russia both stake claim the meteorite. Secondly, the meteorite itself has impossibly disappeared without a trace. Not only the meteorite has disappeared, but they couldn't find a bit of debris or single fragment of it at the impact site. Someone, somehow, cleaned out the entire site in a mere three days. And, given the circumstances, that's a Herculean task. What a great and original premise! Shinra also has to take a well-known meteorite hunter and the locals into consideration when answering these questions and arbitrate the outcome. Yes, the explanation how the impact site was cleaned out is as clever as it's cheeky. Simply a good, fun and original mystery.

The third story of this volume, "A Strange Tale from Kushino Mura," gets a little experimental. This story finds Shinra and Tatsuki on a skiing holiday, but, where the ski resort stands today, once stood a mountain settlement, Kushino Village. Shinra naturally gets interested in the backstory of this forgotten village and an old man tells them to visit the shrine, if they want to know more. A shrine dedicated to the cats that once saved the village and a faded backstory, barely legible, written on the wall mentioning demonic possessions, deaths within three days and a husband and wife ("...one of them died"). A short time later, Shinra and Tatsuki get caught in a blinding snow storm, on the advanced trail, that somehow flings them back into the past. On the day when Kushino Village was born into tragedy. So they have to figure out the source of the original tragedy to prevent another, but what gave the story a real chill is when Shinra realizes the truth behind their time-slip adventure (ROT13: n gvzr-ybbc va juvpu crbcyr “ercrngrqyl qvr, sberire”). Not exactly a classically-styled detective story, but this one is more about storytelling than laying out an elaborate plot. I enjoyed it.

On a side note, "A Strange Tale from Kushino Mura" is not the first time-slip mystery to feature in Katou's detective fiction. "The Legacy of the Sage," from Q.E.D. vol. 19, transports Kana Mizuhara from 2004 to 1927 where she meets Sou Touma's historical double.

"The Statue of a Male Goat" is the fourth, and final, story from this volume. Shinra is drawing plans, in class, to redo the layout of his museum and he has the resources to do it ("...already hired a moving company"). Meanwhile, the owner of small, struggling moving company is offered a big sum of money to swap the titular statue from the museum's collection for a replica, but stealing from Shinra is not as easy as taking candy from a baby. Another fairly minor story, but always welcome a return to Shinra's museum.

So these eight stories from C.M.B. vol. 7 and 8 present the proverbial mixed bag of tricks. "Iron Door" is the obvious standout and my favorite for boringly predictable reasons with "The Turk" and "A Meteorite" following close behind. I liked "A Strange Tale from Kushino Mura," but more as a historical flight of fancy with criminal intent than as a proper detective story and "One Hundred and Thirty Million Victims" has a memorable conclusion. "Locusts" is mostly scenery, "In the Civic Pool" and "The Statue of a Male Goat" give little to comment on. Not bad, on a whole, considering Katou switched from longer to shorter stories as none of the stories are bad, but some work still needs to be done. I'm curious to see how Katou is going to continue these short, one-chapter stories in C.M.B. vol. 9 and 10 next year.

Cracking Nuts: "The Murder of Santa Claus" (1952) by Tage la Cour

Tage la Cour's "Mordet pa julemanden" ("The Murder of Santa Claus," 1952), a parody-pastiche, originally appeared in a Danish crime anthology, Mord til jul (Murder for Christmas, 1952), before a translation was privately printed a year later and La Cour gifted a copy to Frederic Dannay – who's one half of the "Ellery Queen" partnership. Dannay was charmed enough by La Cour's "The Murder of Santa Claus" to have it published in the January, 1957, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

La Cour wrote "The Murder of Santa Claus" as a "sincere homage to the inimitable Agatha Christie" and EQMM presented to the story to their readers as "the cleverest parody of Hercule Poirot we have ever read." Let's find out.

"The Murder of Santa Claus" finds M. Hercules Poire and his biographer lazying around on Christmas Day with the radio softly playing Holy Night, Silent Night in the background. It appeared there would be no seasonal murders that Christmas "accompanied by the tunes of church and sleigh bells," until an urgent telegram arrives from Lady Gwendolyn: "AN ATROCIOUS MURDER COMMITTED TONIGHT AT DRUNKARD CASTLE. COME AT ONCE."

Lord Drunkard had been dressing himself up as Santa Claus in the library when he stabbed in the back with the obligatory, oriental-looking dagger and lived long enough to leave an unfinished, not very helpful dying message – reading "I'm being murdered today by—." Upon arrival at Drunkard Castle, Poire finds everyone with "exception of the corpse" gathered in the hall. I mean everyone. Every stock character is present from the son who had a bone to pick with his father and daughter in need of money to marry an Italian count to family from Australia and the police arrested a passing tramp. So finding the murderer should be easy enough for the Great Detective, but "no cases are quite that simple" when M. Poire as demonstrated by his solution.

Tage la Cour's "The Murder of Santa Claus" is best summed up as a short, but wonderful, piece of Grade-A nonsense in the spirit of Robert L. Fish's Schlock Homes series and Arthur Porges' Celery Green stories. A fun little story for the holiday. However, the best parody-pastiche of Hercule Poirot is still Amer Picon from Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936).

Notes for the curious: Somehow, I forgot to mention "The Murder of Santa Claus" appeared in that Danish anthology under the penname "Donald McGuire." From what I've been able to find online, Murder for Christmas is collection six short stories of which five are Danish translations of British authors. So my guess educated guess is that the editor, Tage la Cour, sneaked in his own, homegrown story under a foreign flag. I also forgot to mention that this story was translated into English by Poul Ib Liebe and the privately published edition came with illustrations from Lars Bo.

As if By Magic: Locked Room Mysteries and Other Miraculous Crimes (2025) edited by Martin Edwards

If you regularly check in on this blog, you probably noticed my all encompassing, all consuming addiction undying love for impossible crime fiction and it tends to dominate the blog, despite trying to keep everything varied and interesting – only to keep slipping into a brown study of locked room mysteries. After the galore of miracle murders from the previous three reviews, I elected to pick an anthology of short stories next that reflects the scope and richness of the traditional detective story. I picked Martin Edwards' latest anthology from the British Library Crime Classics series, As if By Magic: Locked Room Mysteries and Other Miraculous Crimes (2025). And, yes, I'm well aware it's an anthology of locked room and impossible crime short stories, but that's just a coincidence/unimportant detail/you being needlessly difficult. You can pick your excuse today!

As if By Magic is the second impossible crime-themed anthology Edwards has put together following Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017). So a followup was long overdue and knew this second anthology was coming, but tempered my expectations until I knew its content. I had some mixed results with locked room anthologies over year, which is partially my own fault.

I have been fishing in the pool of uncollected, rarely anthologized short impossible crime stories for years and even have an irregular blog-series "Locked and Loaded" (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6) dedicated to them. So when an anthology appears, like David Stuart Davies' Classic Locked Room Mysteries (2016) or Otto Penzler's Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022), the selection of stories can underwhelming with very little new to offer. Well, an early and promising review on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel confirmed As if By Magic collected a host of obscure, rarely reprinted stories alongside a number of the usual suspects – like "THE FINEST SHORT STORY EVER WRITTEN!" (Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood," 1947). So immediately ordered a copy!

Martin Edwards' As if By Magic collects sixteen short stories of which the following eight have been read and reviewed on this blog before: L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "The Warder of the Door" (1898), James Ronald's "Too Many Motives" (1930), John Dickson Carr's "The Wrong Problem" (1936), Margery Allingham's "The Border-Line Case" (1937), Vincent Cornier's "The Shot That Waited" (1947), Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood" (reviewed with "The Wrong Problem"), Julian Symons' "As if By Magic" (1961) and Christianna Brand's "Murder Game" (1968). So, for the sake of brevity, I'll be skipping those seven stories and go over the remaining Eight. Eight out of sixteen for a modern locked room anthology is not a bad score for me. My only real complaint is that Edwards opted for "The Wrong Problem" and "The Shot That Waited" instead of Carr's "The Diamond Pentacle" (1939) and Cornier's "Dust of Lions" (1933). One day, one day...

So that makes the first story under examination E.C. Bentley's "The Ordinary Hairpins," originally published in the October, 1916, issue of the Strand Magazine, in which Philip Trent is commissioned to paint a portrait of Lord Aviemore. Trent had previously done a sketch of Lord Aviemore's late sister-in-law, Lillemor Wergeland, who disappeared from a ship following the death of her husband and son – written off as a suicide by drowning. Or was it murder? Trent becomes interested in the cold case and, over the course of months, slowly follows the trail to an obvious conclusion. Better written than plotted and a weak pick for an impossible crime anthology. Fortunately, the next one is a minor gem that has been on my wishlist for ages.

Will Scott's "The Vanishing House" was culled from a "highly-regarded," but out-of-print collection of short stories entitled Giglamps (1924). Douglas G. Greene, co-founder of Crippen & Landru, praised this "collection of short stories about a tramp who sometimes act as detective runs afoul of the law himself" – saying "I have seldom enjoyed a book more than Giglamps." This particular short story has been on my wishlist ever since coming across it in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Where the impossibility is concerned, "The Vanishing House" didn't disappoint. A story that follows Giglamps on a very strange night when he goes to sleep in an old, abandoned barn and wakes up to find that someone has swapped his worn, dirty boots with brand new ones. Not wanting to stick around, Giglamps flees the barn and stumbles through the dark, until spotting a lighted window several hours later. However, Giglamps overhears a conversation, "if yer catch anythin' listenin', shoot it," convincing him to trod on, but has to return to the house when someone is killed on its doorstep. So goes off to fetch a policeman.

When he returns to the house with a village constable in tow, the scene appears to have impossibly altered. There's no body in front of the house, but a body is found half a mile away. So it appears someone moved the body between Giglamps witnessing the murder and returning with the police, but the victim is still clutching a clump of grass ("...if they move him it tears away"). That suggests the house that stood there was either miraculously vanished or moved without leaving traces ("cottages can't walk, my lad—not in these parts"). The solution not only makes "The Vanishing House" a gem of the 1920s impossible crime story, but for me a highlight of this anthology. I hope Martin Edwards is pestering the British Library to get Giglamps reprinted.

Anthony Wynne's "The Gold of Tso-Fu," originally published in the February, 1926, issue of Flynn's Magazine, begins with nerve specialist and amateur detective Dr. Eustace Hailey dropping by at the China Bank offices of Sir Thomas Evans – who had asked him to come to discuss an urgent matter. Barely arrived, Dr. Hailey is informed something terrible has happened and is brought to ornately-decorated, almost surrealistic room in the bank building dominated by "a huge effigy in freshly gilded wood" of "some oriental deity seated on his throne." Underneath the throne was the body of Mr. Harrier, one of the bank directors, who had been stabbed to death. However, the door of the room had been under constant observation from the time Harrier had entered the room to the moment the murder was discovered. Nobody was seen going, or coming out, during that time. Even stranger, Sir Thomas begins to act unhinged from admitting to having committed the murder and challenging Dr. Hailey ("I have set you a puzzle to solve") to drawing a gun. So a very promising and puzzling opening, but Wynne's unable to sustain this is in the second-half of the story as the plot succumbs to its pulp trappings with a very gimmicky, time-worn locked room-trick and solution. That while there's a much better, much more elegant possibility staring you in the face. Not one of Wynne's finest locked room mysteries.

Hal Pink's "The Two Flaws," a six-page short short, was syndicated in numerous newspapers in 1934 and has Inspector Wenshall explaining to Superintendent Carson how the murder of Clive Burgess is a simple, open-and-shut case – everything points to Marriott, victim's business, as the culprit. Burgess was found seated behind his desk of his locked office with key lying on the table with the other two keys belonging to Marriott and the landlord ("...he is in Germany"). Burgess also left an unfinished dying message on the writing pad reading "M-A-R" ("what more do you want?"). Superintendent Carson, along with the reader, spots the locked room-trick that was evidently employed and exposes the two fatal flaws to ensnare the murderer. So not the most original locked room mystery, but competent and good enough for a short short. I found it interesting that the locked room scenario was used to frame an innocent man without locking him inside the office with the victim.

Ernest Dudley's "The Case of the Man Who Was Too Clever," first published in Meet Dr. Morelle (1943) and reprinted in Dr. Morelle Elucidates (2010), brings Dr. Morelle and his secretary, Miss Frayle, to a block of flats to visit a friend, but screams coming from the next door flap draws him into a murder case. They find a Mr. Collins banging on the locked door of his bathroom, calling to his wife, but she doesn't answer and so they break down the door. What they find is Diana Collins dead from an overdose of laudanum. Dr. Morelle looks straight through the suicide setup and makes short work of Collins. Even though the explanation of how Collins worked the locked bathroom setup is dull and unimaginative, it could have been tremendously improved with an honest story title. Something like "The Case of the Man Who Was Really Stupid" or "The Case of the Dumb Murderer," because Collins really wanted that meet and greet with Albert Pierrepoint.

Grenville Robbins' "The Broadcast Body," originally published in the June, 1936, issue of The 20-Story Magazine, should have been the standout of this anthology. The premise is fantastic in every sense of the word! Professor John Manfred invites his nephew to attend a private experiment with a revolutionary invention that's going to change the world forever, the Body Broadcaster. Professor Manfred is going to broadcast his bodily self from his laboratory at Hampstead to his brother's laboratory at Dulwich. A machine that can "actually broadcast solid bodies through the ether" and "goods can be broadcast as easily as men and women." An epoch-making, history altering invention, but, of course, something goes wrong during the test run. The professor climbs inside a sealed box, crammed with machinery, gadgets and a transmitter, which is followed by an explosion and the professor has disappeared – an explosion happened simultaneously at the laboratory at Dulwich. Only without him emerging before his brother as intended. So was he now "wandering in a disembodied state in some curious fourth dimension" or is there a natural, much more mundane explanation? In this case, the answer, unfortunately, is yes. The solution is simply dropped into the nephew's lap and how the professor escaped from the room just feels like a cheat. A real pity as the setup is fantastic, but liked the historical snippet mentioning television.

Funnily enough, "The Broadcast Body" was published in the same year as E.R. Punshon's The Bath Mysteries (1936) that also mentions and shows an early and experimental television set.

Michael Gilbert's "The Coulman Handicap," originally appearing in the April, 1958, issue of Argosy, takes a procedural approach to the problem poses by a seemingly impossible, inexplicable vanishing act. Detective Sergeant Petrella is part of a twenty-four men team observing, tailing and hopefully trapping a notoriously slippery go-between thieves and fences, Mrs. Coulman. And keeps a cut as a service fee ("just like a literary agent"). Petrella is close on her heels when she slips inside a bar with only entrance/exit and disappears into thin air. Gilbert gave me a little hope by apparently eliminating the obvious, disappointing type of explanation for these kind of vanishing acts, only to reveal it's just a variation on that type of solution. Other than the uninspiring ending, the opening was very good and liked the idea of an impossible disappearance disrupting, what should have been, a routine police operation.

This anthology ends, for me, on a high note with the next story. Geoffrey Bush, son of Christopher Bush, was a composer, musical scholar and a member of the Carr Society who famously gave Edmund Crispin the idea for the most famous of all short shorts, "Who Killed Baker?" (1950). "The Last Meeting of the Butlers Club," published in the March, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is Bush's hilarious take on the glorious of the detective story of yesteryear and "the wave of weekend country-house murders that swept over England in the '20s and '30s." What is to become the last meeting of the Butlers Club is attended by a handful of the last, aging members of ex-butlers who pooled their modest inheritances from their generous employers to get a taste of the good life. So they begin to reminiscence about the good, old days and the times they were nearly arrested for murdering their generous employers. But every time the policeman wanted to put on the handcuffs, a gifted amateur detective appeared scoffing at the idea that the butler did it. Whether it was Dr. John Thorndyke and Philo Vance to Lord Peter Wimsey and Father Brown, they always appeared to bail out the butler with a ludicrous solutions. A marvelous piece of genre parody that can be compared to other locked room satires like Morton Wolson's "The Glass Room" (1957), John Sladek's "The Locked Room" (1972) and, of course, Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936).

So, as always, As if By Magic is a mixed bag of tricks with Scott's "The Vanishing House" and Bush's "The Last Meeting of the Butlers Club" being my personal favorites and liked Pink's "The Two Flows," as a competent obscurity, but found the remaining short stories lacking – especially when it comes to the locked rooms/impossible crimes. That's where this anthology, as an anthology of locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, comes up short. However, I only read half of the stories and skipped some of the better picks by Allingham, Brand, Carr and Cornier which would have balanced out the overall quality of the selection. And maybe I'm demanding of these types of locked room anthologies, because (ROT13) qvfthvfrf, fgrccvat bhg (gevpx) jvaqbjf naq xavsr-fcvggvat fgnghrf isn't doing it for me. Well, that should teach me not to write the introduction before finishing the book.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (2024) by Benjamin Stevenson

Benjamin Stevenson, an Australian stand-up comedian and mystery author, delivered two highlights of the current Golden Age revival, Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone (2022) and Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (2023), but had to wait with third Ernest Cunningham novel on account of it being a "Christmas Special" – springtime was too early (or too late) to read/review a Christmas mystery. I was tempted to put up a review of Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (2024) during the summer, but decided to wait until the days started to shorten.

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is also a bit shorter in length than the previous two novels. Practically a novella padded with decorated pages and others as white as every Christmas Day should be, but fair's fair, it makes the hardcover edition a very wraptable present to give over the holidays. More importantly, it's as good as the first two despite being much smaller in scope and introduced a completely new, seasonally-themed gimmick. There are twenty-four chapters and twenty-three end with an illustration of a small, opened door or window revealing the clue from that chapter. So like an advent calendar of clues!

Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret begins a week before Christmas and Ernest is busy with Juliette planning their wedding when Ernest receives a plea for help from his ex-wife, Erin, who's been arrested on suspicion of murdering her new partner, Lyle Pearse – an ex-Hollywood actor turned philanthropist. Erin had woken up that morning to discover she was covered in blood, a bloody knife at the top of the stairs and Pearse lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. A dying message, "CHRISTMAS," scrawled on the floor with a bloody finger. So, having solved two murder sprees, Ernest travels to Katoomba to try prove Erin's innocence, but that's not as easy as she "stuck with the worst version of the story." That version involves first, of two, impossible situations Ernest encounters on his third case. Erin listens to white noise to fall asleep, "Tokyo Railway in the Rain," but she remains a very light sleeper. So, if the murder was a frame job, how could the murderer have dumped blood on Erin without waking her up? Admittedly, the impossibility is not as self apparent as described, kept wondering why Ernest called it an impossible murder, but the ending made it very apparent it can be counted as an impossible crime. And not a bad one, either! Just not as clearly stated as it could have been, however, the best is yet to come.

Lyle Pearse's abandoned his acting career and returned to Australia following the death of his brother, overdosed on bad drugs, which drove him to create a foundation to help ex-addicts get back on their feet – creating "long-lasting reform" by igniting passion. So many of the foundation's graduates of the program ended up working in theaters build by the foundation like The Pearse Theater in Katoomba. Every year, they have a tour with all of their success stories ending with a black-tie Christmas finale in Katoomba.

This year, the tour finale, now memorial, is headlined by the victim's friend and stage magician, Rylan Blaze. The big illusion of the night is a combination of the guillotine and bullet-catch trick. But by that time, Ernest has picked up enough bits and pieces of what could be clues that he believes the wax bullet had been swapped for a real bullet. And rushes the stage causing absolute pandemonium. Blaze is effectively trapped inside the guillotine, because the gun with presumably a live round has a laser trigger activated by movement. When the timer hits zero and the blade drops, Blaze's head rolled over the stage! Something that should be impossible, because the dangerous looking blade is nothing more than "flimsy paper." Ernest has his work cutout with two murders, two impossible crimes, a bloody dying messages, stockings worth of clues and a cast of suspects comprising of the magician's assistant, a stagehand, a hypnotist, twins and even a dead guy.

Now this probably doesn't sound a whole lot smaller in scope, or shorter, than the previous two novels, but it really is about the half shorter. Stevenson simply spun a great deal of complexity out of an ultimately simple case with skill and humor. Not just depending on the two impossible situation to give weight and bulk to the plot.

Firstly, there are the everyone and secrets from the book title. A festive, tinseled web of secrets complicating everything and beautifully making use of Christmas traditions, old and new. Secondly, gimmicky as it sounds, the advent calendar guarantees a richly-clued, fair play detective story with the clues forming, as John Dickson Carr described it, a pattern of evidence that, when put together, reveals the whole design – which is the hallmark of great detective fiction. So the advent calendar gimmick made the clueing even better. Not to mention Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret fulfills its obligation to actually do something with the story's holiday theme and found a way to use some Christmas traditions, old and new, to tell a detective story. And, yes, the solution to the impossible decapitation on stage is grand. Not terribly complicated or disappointingly simple and fairly original when it comes to inexplicable beheadings topped off with a memorable denouement when Ernest begins to eliminate his suspects, until the murderer remains. Where and how it happens is what makes it memorable. That poor guy is starting to look like a battered warhorse!

So as a modern, retro-GAD detective novel, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is a treat for the holidays with nothing to complain or nitpick about. Beside the story and an excellent plot, the main attraction of the series remains Ernest Cunningham as the narrator ("reliable narrator here"). Well, that and the return to the plotting standards of the Golden Age, but have taken a real liking to Ernest's narrative style. Like giving spoilers of what's ahead in the story, but his spoilers have all the quality of a wish granted by a monkey's paw. There's always a catch or twist. So to say I enjoyed Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret would be an understatement and had I read it last year, it would have easily made "The Naughty List: Top 12 Favorite Christmas Mystery Novels & Short Stories." If reading Christmas mysteries is one of your December traditions, Stevenson's Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is as good as they come. I very much look forward to Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026).

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.