The Leopard Died Too (1957) by Nigel Brent

"Nigel Brent," a pseudonym of Cecil Gordon Eugene Wimhurst, is one of those obscure, practically forgotten writers who published a dozen medium boiled mysteries between 1953 and 1960 – all starring his private investigator, Barney Hyde. Not much else known except that he wrote a slew of dog books under his own name and penned the odd short story over the decades. "Commando Weekend" appeared in the September, 1948, issue of Scramble, "The Stolen Landscape" was published in Boys' Fun #3 (1953) and finally "Murder in Jail" from Detective Thriller Library #1 (1960). But that's where the trail turns stone cold.

So, if Wimhurst is remembered or even read today, I hazard a guess it's probably for his dog books rather than the long out-of-print, now scarce Barney Hyde series of collectibles. I likely would have never heard or given any attention to Wimhurst's run as "Nigel Brent" had The Leopard Died Too (1957), the seventh Barney Hyde, not been an impossible crime novel warranting a mention in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). In my mind, The Leopard Died Too gave off some He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944) vibes, but is it anywhere near as good? Let's find out!

Barney Hyde, head of the British end of the trans-Atlantic Global Investigations, is hired by Mrs. Nicola Curlew to find the person who has been sending her husband, Dan Curlew, threatening letters.

Dan Curlew is a well-known, successful producer of animal films, "a queer kind of fella but he knows how to throw a nature film together," who has a private zoo and circus on his estate – called Witch Wood. Recently, Curlew has been receiving death threats with the last one promising "one more letter and then I shall execute you." Hyde accepts the case and travels to Witch Wood alongside his beautiful secretary Miss Emerald Dikes and his Alsatian police dog, Kurt. Finds what you would expect from a pulp-style mystery with a circus and zoo background. Curlew has hired Jag Macklon, a South African, to run his importing department supplying wild animals, but Jag and Nicola are obviously in love. Kara Jaeger is the animal trainer/lion tamer of the circus and daughter of the once famous Max Jaeger. Only animal trainer who did an act inside a mixed cage of lions, tigers, jackals and wolves, but now he's a drunk long since pass his prime. Osakombi, a West African of the Nankhanse tribe, who breeds N'gwa caterpillars for Curlew in the insect house, but is treated appallingly. Holloman Traves, a steel tycoon, is one of Curlew's oldest friends, but not really. Hyde even tells Curlew shortly after arriving that he's "surprised that you don't get your threatening letters delivered in a sack."

A striking scene of this first part leading up to the murder is Kurt, the Alsatian dog, nearly dying fighting an escaped leopard that launched itself at Emerald. Good boy!

When the last letter arrives, Hyde gets serious and decides to place Curlew inside a practically hermetically, sealed concrete room used to edit his films and has a special lock on the door – while every other door is also locked and guarded. Curlew is locked inside the room with his pet leopard, Aisha, but, when the time arrives, Hyde hears a scream from the outside. When they finally manage to break into the room, they find Curlew and Aisha dead. Apparently, they died from poison, but how? No container or syringe is found and how do you inject a leopard with poison in small, locked room without getting shredded? A problem that gets even worse if capsules were used. However, Hyde believes it was murder, not suicide, but how did the murderer poisoned them when the room was locked and guarded on every side? And not a trace of poison to be found anywhere!

I'll address the locked room element first as it constitutes the meat of the plot. The Leopard Died Too is, what I have come to call, Tough Nuts (...hard to crack). A hard-or medium boiled, often pulpy private eye mystery containing a locked room puzzle or other kind of impossible crime, which in a P.I. novel is either relatively simple or surprisingly tricky. Either way, the locked room element tends to what gives weight to these classic P.I. novel trying their hands at the impossible crime. The Leopard Die Too is no exception, but Brent did more with the locked room poisoning than the story and plot required of it. How the locked room was setup and presented suggested only two possible solutions to me: either the editing console or a strip of film had poison smeared on it or the leopard's fur had been coated with poison, which in turn would explain how the leopard died too. If the poison had been on the console/film strip, the poison was transferred from Curlew's hand onto the leopard when stroking the animal. What does any feline do after getting touched by a smelly, bipedal slug monkey? They begin to clean themselves. So both methods explain how the leopard died alongside with Curlew, but Brent came up with a third, slightly pulpy, but fairly clued, solution to explain the locked room poisoning. It should be noted that you can't really start putting those clues together properly, until Hyde receives the autopsy results. But I liked this third, somewhat hokey, solution as it fitted the story very well.

Not something I expected considering the second-half of The Leopard Died Too moved away from this intriguing impossible murder at a private zoo and circus to become a muddled, convoluted pulp thriller – employing the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink method. Safe crackers, communists agitators and spies, Secret Service agents, tribal rituals, exotic poisons, kidnapping, complimentary bombs etc. So basically everything Brent could think of got tossed into the plot and you almost have to praise Brent for holding it all together in the end, but it obviously took away from the good work done in the first-half and solution to Curlew's inexplicable murder. So, in the end, The Leopard Died Too is best summed up as one of those 1950s transitional mysteries that fell between the cracks of two eras when attempting to get footing on both sides. I suppose that holds true for Brent and the Hyde series as a whole.

I still enjoyed this "toughy," but, unless you collect hardcover mysteries or locked room mysteries, you shouldn't sell an arm or leg to get hold of a copy.

The Men Who Explained Miracles (1963) by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr's The Men Who Explained Miracles (1963) is a short story collection, comprising of half a dozen short stories and a novella, featuring his "famous 'tec trio" of Dr. Gideon Fell, Sir Henry Merrivale and Colonel March – who specialize in explaining so-called "miracles." Or, as they're known around these parts, impossible crimes and locked room mysteries. Additionally, the collection has two standalone short stories in which "espionage and assassins spark two tales of international intrigue." One of these "Secret Service Stories" is a historical mystery-thriller akin to Carr's stage-play "She Slept Lightly" (1945) and the novel Captain Cut-Throat (1955). So a bit of an eclectic melange of crime fiction, but a treat for fans of Carr and detective fiction in general.

The Men Who Explained Miracles begins with two short stories from "The Department of Queer Complaints" series, starring Colonel March, which weren't included in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940) collection. The first story hadn't been published yet and the second story possibly was left out because it used a similar murder method as a then recently published Sir Henry Merrivale novel. It would not be until March, Merrivale and Murder (1991) that the whole series appeared together in a single collection. Note that the Colonel March short stories and the H.M. novella were published under Carr's penname of "Carter Dickson."

"William Wilson's Racket," originally published in the February, 1941, issue of The Strand Magazine, brings Lady Patricia Mortlake, only daughter of the Earl of Cray, to Colonel March's Department D-3 of Scotland Yard. Lady Patricia has been baffled by the behavior of her fiancé, Right Hon. Francis Hale, who's "a man of almost painfully straitlaced life" with a spotless reputation, but lately, he has been acting out-of-character and obsessing over a newspaper add – simply stating "William and Wilhelmina Wilson, 250a, Piccadilly" ("nothing more"). Lady Patricia decided to investigate Mr. Wilson at his office, but what she found shocked her. Francis was sitting in Mr. Wilson's office with a redheaded woman sitting on his lap in a loving embrace. She turned around, left the room and, when she composed herself, returned to get answers, but Francis has disappeared. William and Wilhelmina Wilson claim they never heard of, or know, a Francis Hale. However, Lady Patricia spotted his coat and other personal items in the cloakroom. And he's still missing. So what happened?

Colonel March is seriously amused by what he has been told, but tells Lady Patricia to go home as he has a pretty shrewd idea about the true nature of "the profession of William and Wilhelmina Wilson." The splendidly clued answer lives up to its brilliantly presented premise. Admittedly, "Mr. Wilson's Racket" is relatively minor detective story, but a tremendously fun, cleverly crafted detective story hearkening back to the days of Conan Doyle and the best of Sherlock Holmes (e.g. "The Red-Headed League," 1891). So it's actually surprising Carr didn't rewrite it as "The Adventure of Mr. Wilson Racket" for The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954), co-written with Adrian Conan Doyle, because it would have been a perfect fit for that collection.

"The Empty Flat," first published in the May, 1939, issue of The Strand Magazine, is regrettably a marked stepped down from the previous story. Two rivaling academics, Douglas Chase and Miss Kathleen Mills, discover they live in the same building when the "detestable cacophony" of a radio going full blast distracts them from their studies. They discover the noise is coming from an empty flat, only one in the building, which Chase manages to enter through the service hatch. What he finds, beside a radio playing in a dark, empty flat, is the body of a man who had apparently died of fright. Colonel March is posed with two questions: why would a man afraid of the dark go ghost hunting after dark and how was he killed?

So a good, solid premise with enough intrigue abound to fill a novel, "find a way to kill someone by fright, and you can commit murder almost with impunity," which is exactly the problem. The short story form is simply too short for the plot to do the premise any justice and the disappointing combo of murderer/motive didn't help either. A rare miss by Carr.

"The Incautious Burglar," originally published in the October, 1940, issue of The Strand Magazine under the title "A Guest in the House," is the first of two short stories featuring Dr. Gideon Fell. This is a non-impossible crime short story, but therefore not any less brilliant. On the contrary, it's a gem of a Golden Age mystery and one of Carr's best short stories! The backdrop of the story is a house party at the home of Marcus Hunt, "the Colossus of Business," who has two Rembrandts and a Van Dyck "hanging in an unprotected downstairs room with French windows giving on a terrace." Hunt had even removed the burglar alarms as though he wanted the house to be burgled. That evening, a masked burglar enters Cranleigh Court, however, someone within the house caught him red handed and killed the burglar in the ensuing struggle – stabbing through the heart with a thin fruit knife. What looks like a botched burglary turns into a deep, contradictory mystery when the mask is removed from the body to reveal the face of Marcus Hunt. Why would a man burgle his own house to steal valuable paintings he refused to insure for even a penny? More importantly, who killed him?

Dr. Gideon Fell is asked to give the case a look and sees red hot, tell-tale clues where the police perceives only "negative evidence." Dr. Fell is not blinded by the central question why Hunt would try to steal his own, uninsured paintings ("don't become hypnotized by it") and focuses instead on finding the person who stabbed him. The perfectly reasoned solution Dr. Fell constructs out of the given clues is excellent demonstrating that the short story form is no excuse to forego fair play. A vintage whodunit from the master of the locked room mystery!

"Invisible Hands," originally published under the title "King Arthur's Chair" in the August, 1957, issue of Lilliput, is an odd impossible crime story of the no-footprints variety. Dan Fraser, "the luckiest man in London," is traveling to North Cornwall to see Brenda Lestrange ("...she had wanted him"), but is told upon arrival she had under tragic, inexplicable circumstances. She had gone down to the beach to swim and her strangled body was found later that morning lying in front of small, natural rock formation known as King Arthur's Chair. Impossibly, there weren't any footprints in the sand around the rock formation except Brenda's own!

A classic no-footprints situation, however, the trick employed is something most would probably associate or expect from the pulps or pulp-style mysteries – notably a particular item. It's something I have come across in the works of several, non-pulpy mystery writers and they got a lot of mileage and variety out of it. Carr used it before in one of his 1940s radio-plays to create an impossible disappearance and here it has a dual purpose (ROT13: n fvqr-rssrpg vf gung gur zheqrere hfrq gur fbhaq bs gur zheqre jrncba sbe na nyvov). So not exactly your standard no-footprints-in-the-sand puzzle and, plot-wise, it almost reads like a Paul Halter short story. Another thing making this a bit of an odd story in Carr's catalog is that the characterization is a tick sharper than the plotting. One more thing worth mentioning is Dr. Gideon Fell making one of his greatest entries into a case ever!

So, on a whole, "Invisible Hands" is a solid and logical detective story, despite its outre method, demonstrating that only one of the suspects could have done it.

"Strictly Diplomatic," originally published in the December, 1939, issue of The Strand Magazine, is the first of two standalone short stories of international intrigue. Andrew Dermot, an overworked barrister, is prescribed a holiday on the continent, "tension which tautened nerves in the rest of Europe did not exist in Ile St. Cathérine," where he promptly falls in love Betty Weatherill. She mysterious disappears from the arbor of their hotel. Dermot was standing at one end, watching her go inside, while a Dutch hotel guest was sitting at the other end. Dr. Henrik Vanderver, special diplomat for the Sylvanian Embassy, swears she didn't emerge from his end of the arbor. What's going on? A very minor espionage mystery with the reason for the disappearance being better and more interesting than how she vanished, which is a variation on a shopworn piece of misdirection. Still not a bad short story. Just not an especially memorable one.

"The Black Cabinet" first appeared 20 Great Tales of Murder (1951) and reprinted in the January, 1952, issue of Robert Arthur's The Mysterious Traveler Magazine. This story is a historical character piece full of adventure and revolution as a young woman, Nina, is determined to assassinate the French emperor Napoleon III. Aunt Maria, an ex-revolutionary, tries to change her mind and the story is largely a discussion between these two characters – until a mysterious gentleman appears on the scene. This mysterious man succeeds in foiling the assassination with his identity providing the story with an unexpected, but satisfying, historical twist. If you're not a fan of Carr's historical fiction, or historical fiction in general, "The Black Cabinet" is not going to do anything for you.

"All in a Maze," originally appeared under title "Ministry of Miracles" in the January, 1956, issue of The Housewife and reprinted in the March, 1956, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as "The Man Who Explained Miracles." It finally appeared under its generally accepted title, "All in a Maze," in this collection.

Arguably, "All in a Maze" is the most important story in The Men Who Explained Miracles giving a proper sendoff to Sir Henry Merrivale after his less than stellar performance in The Cavalier's Cup (1953). H.M. is back in Britain following his shenanigans adventures abroad, "you wrecked the subway at Grand Central Station and nabbed the right murderer on the wrong evidence," which got him into trouble upon his return. Mostly on account of having spent more money than he can account for. And in order to atone and payback for his sins, H.M. is put back in charge of the Central Office Eight of the Metropolitan Police. A quasi-official department that gets handed all the strange, rummy cases the ordinary police can't be bothered with, however, H.M. promises "anybody who calls it The Ministry of Miracles is going to get a thick ear" ("they had enough fun, curse 'em, with the late Ministry of Information"). Tom Lockwood, a journalist, presents H.M. with one of those strange, rummy cases. Lockwood bumped into a young woman, Jenny Holden, on the steps of St. Paul's. Obviously in distressed mumbling something about a voice coming "where no voice could have spoken" and some trying to kill her the previous night "by some miracle no one can understand."

So he drags her to a tea shop and get the whole story out of her. Firstly, the previous night someone had entered her bedroom and turned on the gas-tap, but the door and windows were securely locked and double bolted on the inside. Secondly, she heard a disembodied voice in the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul's cathedral telling her she was going to die. Lockwood urges her to go to H.M. with her story, because explaining miracles is his specialty, but Lockwood and H.M. have more to contend with than a disembodied voice and an attempted murder in a locked bedroom – they have to contend with Jenny's formidable aunt. Aunt Hester is determined to take Jenny back to Paris and marry her off to a successful businessman, Armand de Senneville. But they find an unexpected ally in De Sennevilla's hired spy who witnessed these so-called miracles. And realizes how close Jenny came to dying. Not everyone in this story is lucky enough to escape a trip to the morgue. It all makes for a pleasantly busy, engaging locked room mystery.

Well, the solution to the disembodied voice is as obvious and simple as it sounds, but, plot-wise, it served its purpose. The attempted gassing of Jenny in her locked room bedroom, on the other hand, is a gem of brilliant simplicity in both presentation and solution. All very neatly clued, tightly-drawn together and comes to an end in the famous maze at Hampton Court Palace. Only thing you can say against "All in a Maze" is that it can't hold a candle to first of only two H.M. novellas, "The House in Goblin Wood" (1947), which is an undisputed masterpiece in a miniature. In every other way, it's a finely crafted impossible crime story and a better swan song for H.M. than his last three or four novel-length outings. Highly recommended!

The Men Who Explained Miracles is a splendid, nicely balanced collection of Carr's older and some of his then somewhat more recent work. "The Empty Flat" is the only dud in the collection and "Strictly Diplomatic" a little bland, but "William Wilson's Racket," "The Incautious Burglar" and "All in a Maze" are first-rate with "Invisible Hands" and "The Black Cabinet" not all that far behind. So, all in all, a lot to recommend here to fans of John Dickson Carr and Golden Age (locked room) mysteries.

The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012) by E.X. Ferrars

"Elizabeth Ferrars" ("E.X. Ferrars") is the pseudonym of prolific, long-lived British mystery writer, Morna Brown, who wrote seventy-one detective novels and filled two short story collections over a period of half a century – between 1940 and 1995. I thought the last holdouts of the British Golden Age were Gladys Mitchell (The Crozier Pharaohs, 1984) and Michael Innes (Appleby and the Ospreys, 1986), but Ferrars still had enough gas in the tank to go another decade. In his blog-post “The Country Cottage Murders of Elizabeth Ferrars,” Curt Evans wrote that "had Ferrars not suddenly expired in 1995 at the age of 87, there's every reason to believe that she would have keep going with her writing, perhaps even into the 21st century" as "there's no sense of the steep mental slippage" marring the later works of so many of her contemporaries.

I only sampled a few of Ferrars' detective novels over the years, while Give a Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Death in Botanist's Bay (1941) and The March Hare Murders (1949) have not moved an inch towards the top of the big pile in years. Recently, the name Ferrars came back to my attention and decided to move her up the pile starting with her second short story collection.

The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012), published by Crippen & Landru and introduced by John Cooper, collects seventeen short-shorts and short stories. The first six short-shorts feature a retired private investigator, Jonas P. Jonas, who badgered the wife of his nephew, a professional writer, to put his past triumphs to paper – fitting considering their publication date. Cooper writes in his introduction the stories were published "during one week in 1958 from December 8 until December 13 in the London Evening Standard" ("...a pre-Christmas treat for the readers of this newspaper"). So a retired detective trying to get his memoirs written at the very tail-end of the late, late Golden Age is a great premise, but only the first two stories are noteworthy with the remaining four being little more than amusing anecdotes.

In "The Case of the Two Questions," Jonas tells the story of the time a woman came to him with two strange questions. Can a middle aged woman go out of room, grab a rifle, run a hundred yards to shoot a man and come back within five minutes "without puffing for breath or having a hair of her head disarranged"? And is it possible for "a car to be driven through a watersplash and back again, without its tires getting wet"? Ferrars spins a clever detective story out of these question covering less than a handful of pages and its short length is its only drawback. A slightly longer treatment of the plot-idea would have made for a first-rate howdunit bordering on an impossible crime.

The second story, "The Case of the Blue Bowl," is the short-short done to near perfection. Jonas recalls the first time he heard about how birds learned to poke through the tops of milk bottles left on doorsteps to get to the milky cream. This fact came to his attention while investigating the disappearance and subsequent murder of a village miser, Old Mrs. Toombs, who was supposed to have a small fortune sewn up in her mattress. Jonas shrewdly uses this knowledge in combination with the titular blue bowl left on the victim's doorstep to deliver her murderer to the hangman. A fine example of the detective short-short and even better as a miniature replication of the British village mysteries of the 1930s.

Not much can be said about the other four short-shorts as they're little more than thinly-plotted, mostly forgettable anecdotes. "The Case of the Auction Catalogue" finds Jonas aboard a train when a woman is found strangled in the end compartment and the first suspect is the passenger who hurriedly left the train at the previous stop, but Jonas demonstrates his innocence based on an auction catalogue the suspect left behind. "The Case of the Left Hand" has Jonas recall the time he had to go to a pub to identify a wanted criminal in disguise and only knows the suspect has a partially paralyzed left hand. Jonas helps an old woman in "Invitation to Murder – One the Party Line" who believes "she'd been listening to a murder being plotted on the telephone." The last story of this short-lived series, "A Lipstick Smear Points to the Killer," comes the closest to matching the first two stories and concerns an elderly man found dead sitting next to the fire with a cup of coffee on the arm of the chair – an inexplicable half-moon of lipstick on the rim. But in the end, too slight to match the first two stories.

So an enjoyable enough series of short-shorts and loved the premise of a retired detective trying to get his memoirs ("nostalgic memories of crime and criminals") committed to paper in 1958. I just wish all the stories were either as good as "The Case of the Blue Bowl" or came with a somewhat substantial plot like "The Case of the Two Questions" to make this series a little more than an amusing genre curio/footnote.

The other eleven mysteries in The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries are not classically-plotted detective stories, but darker, character-driven crime fiction of the modern school. So not every single story in this section is going to be to my taste, which you should keep in mind when I'm giving some of the stories a short shrift. I do like a good inverted mystery with a biting twist and this collection has a few of them.

The first of these stories is "Custody," originally published in A Suit of Diamonds (1990), which follows Ray Bagstock in tracking down his ex-wife and children to the small town of Dillingford. Ray is determined to take the children away from Lucille and move abroad, because she's a bad mother and a violent fight over this ended in a divorce with Lucille getting custody of their two children – which proves to be easier planned than executed. Particularly when becoming the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his landlady. And the care he took in covering his tracks in finding his ex-wife only makes him look even more suspicious. Surprisingly, the depressingly dark conclusion is more opportunistic than the carefully laid trap I expected, but somehow it worked. Even though it required the shocking incompetence of the police to get to there.

"The Trap" was published in the May, 1961, issue of My Home and is a throwback to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches." Miss Isobel Allen takes the position of an elderly, invalided woman, Mrs. Buckle, who lives remote cottage. Isobel was hired by Mrs. Buckle's sister, Jean Chantry, but she notices something is off as soon as she arrives and even gets an ominous warning, "if unkindness is all you encounter in this house, Miss Allen, you'll be lucky" ("you should prepare yourself for far worse things"). Things move on from there. All I can say about this story is that the ending doesn't feel like the cop-out it is and that's something of an accomplishment.

The next story, "Stop Thief," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 24 (1992) and concerns a married couple, Peter and Coralie Gates, who recently suffered a miscarriage and their lost has affected Coralie's mental health. She has begun to shoplift from the village stores and to Peter's absolute horror word is getting around the much more modern minded, sympathetic village community ("I don't want sympathy!"). I struggled to care about the story, characters or what appeared to pass for a plot, but, fair's fair, the ending pulled it together and delivered with a cruel twist.

"The Long Way Round," first published in Winter's Crimes 4 (1974), is exactly the type of inverted mystery I enjoy the most. A type of inverted mystery sometimes referred to as "A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard" stories in which a carefully laid crime or scheme falls apart based on a small, devilish detail – which the oblivious culprit overlooked. One of the best-known examples around these parts is William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" (1965) and John Sladek's "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National" (1968) deserves a nod. This story is an excellent take on the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Leo and Melanie are married antique dealers traveling to Cyprus to visit a troublesome relative, Uncle Ben, who undeservedly inherited a big sum from his sister without sharing a penny ("...he had merely said that at least he could now afford to take himself off their hands..."). Leo has a foolproof plan to rectify that mistake and inherit the money from his soon to be late uncle. Only for a very tiny, but very important, detail to upset his whole plan ("Oh, God, God!") with the setting being more than just story dressing. Maybe my favorite short story from this collection as a whole.

The next story, "Fly, Said the Spy," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 15 (1983) and is an odd, but compelling, mixture of espionage with domestic intrigue. A nuclear physicist working at a secret research institute has been spilling secret for the past ten years and getting paid for it, but now he has received a warning that the gig is up. So now he either has to bite down on a cyanide capsule or leave everything, including his wife, behind to start a new life under a new name provided by the people who paid him. Not exactly my thing, but not a bad story.

"Instrument of Justice," published in Winter's Crime 13 (1981), reads like a modern crime story, dark, grim and populated with flawed or unpleasant characters, but the story is cleverly-plotted full with unexpected twists and turns. The story begins with Frances Liley reading the obituary of Oliver Darnell, "a painter of very abstract pictures," who had been blackmailing Frances ("two thousand a year...") with salacious photographs, but relieve makes place for horror. She has to find the photographs before someone finds them and sets out to ensure an opportunity to search his studio. What should have been a relatively save, risk free undertaking becomes a complicated situation when a murder is put in her way. Cold, calculated manner ("she was not a nice person, she thought") in which she takes care of both the blackmail material and the murderer makes "Instrument of Justice" the standout story of this collection. A plot, no matter in what shape it's bend or twisted, can do wonder even for the darkest, grittiest of crime material.

The next two stories are not particularly interesting, nor memorable, short-shorts originally published in the Evening Standard. "Suicide" (1963) revolves around two questions: did the dead woman found in an old quarry take her own life or was she murdered and why would she or her killer leave on the car's headlights? "Look for Trouble" (1964) brings the police to a hair salon following a string of burglaries and a murder. Short, not bad and completely forgettable.

"Justice in My Own Hand," originally published in Winter's Crimes 20 (1988), reads like a patchwork of ideas and plot points from other stories in this collection without improving on any of them. So not much to say about this story, except that I didn't care about it. Fortunately, the last two stories end this collection on a high note.

"The Handbag," originally serialized in two-parts in July 2 and July 9, 1960, publication of The Star Weekly Magazine, is the exact opposite of the previous story. It reads like the Golden Age has recently passed away, but its presence (or spirit) is still lingering around the place. Dorothy Clare's father recently passed away when an old friend, Vivian Alford, appeared out of nowhere to take her away for a much deserved break from grieving, but their holiday destination turns out to be a small, grayish inn – somewhere in the bleak, rainy border country. Dorothy slowly begins to believe Vivian has an ulterior motive to drag her along to that place. A suspicion that becomes stronger when Vivian strong arms her into coming along on a sightseeing expedition of Harestone House ("it's hundreds of years old..."). A strange house tour conducted by the blind owner of the house, Mrs. Hunter, during which both Vivian and a priceless cup go missing. So what happened? A modern crime story with all the trappings of a classic country house mystery complete with slippery red herrings.

The collection closes out with a story that could have easily been rewritten as a slightly lengthier Jonas P. Jonas short story. "Sequence of Events," originally published in Winter's Crimes 9 (1977), brings the celebrated Evening Standard reporter Peter Hassall to the village of Newton St. Denis. Hassall is writing a series of articles on forgotten murders, but always ends up solving "the problems which, over the years, had baffled the police." This story reads like the first in a series tells of the first forgotten murder Bassall investigated. The murder of Dr. Joseph Armiger, a retired researcher, who several years ago was found beaten to death next to a letter box in the village and the main suspects were a gang of boys on motor-cycles ("...seen that evening driving wildly through the village"). But no case against them could be made. So, five years later, Bassall travels to the village to make inquiries, but found nothing new until speaking with a local mystery writer, Everard Crabbe. And he has a story to tell. Or, to use his own words, "all I'm telling you about is a sequence of events." A sequence of events centering on a neighborly feud Armiger and Albert Riddle over stolen coronations, vandalized gardens and threats. The ending presents the reader with two possible solution: a simple, sordid and uncomplicated explanation and a more complicated one echoing a very famous detective story. Needless to say, I prefer Crabbe's sequence-of-events interpretation of events, but, either way, a solid story to close out this collection.

So, all in all, The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries is a surprisingly good, nicely balanced selection of short stories considering how far most of the stories are outside of my wheelhouse, but, looking back over the review, I liked more of them than expected. Most of the short-shorts are flimsy and forgettable, except the first two featuring the titular detective, but only "Justice in My Own Hands" truly disappointed. And while I didn't care for the majority of the story, most of the time, I admired how Ferrars manage to turn me around right at the end ("Custody," "The Trap" and "Stop Thief"). More importantly, "The Long Way Round," "Instrument of Justice" and the last two stories are first-rate short crime-and detective stories which gave me something different to chew. A little different than what usually gets reviewed on this blog, but variation is the spice of life and this collection shows our genre has plenty of variety to offer.

I suppose the biggest takeaway from The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas is that Ferrars, who debuted in 1940, could just as easily turn her hands at modern crime fiction in all its gory, depressing grittiness as a good, old-fashioned whodunit. So I'll also bump Give a Corpse a Bad Name up a few places on the big pile.

Murder Breaks Trail (1943) by Eunice Mays Boyd

In 2022, I compiled a post, "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Detective Novels That Need to Be Reprinted," crammed with criminally obscure, out-of-print authors and novels that caught my attention over the years – all of which could use an infusion of fresh printer's ink. I hardly expected my list would have publishers rushing to prepare new editions of Reginald Davis' The Crowing Hen (1936) and Gardner Low's Invitation to Kill (1937), but hoped at least Anthony Berkeley's Top Storey Murder (1931) would have been available again and kept my fingers crossed for a reprint of Mignon G. Eberhart's From This Dark Stairway (1931). There are, however, two extremely obscure, then all but forgotten names on my list with reprint suggestions who have since made a remarkable return to print.

James Ronald is one of them and Eunice Mays Boyd is the other. During the 1940s, Boyd wrote three detective novels about a retired grocer and mystery reader turned amateur sleuth, F. Millard Smyth. All three novels take place in remote corners of the Alaskan wilderness with "its ghosttowns, its echoes of the rugged goldrush era and its eerie midnight sun." Anthony Boucher said of her work, "Mrs. Boyd has a pleasing detective and virgin territory" which are "full of Alaskan local color and as endless as a Northern night," but admitted she needed an editor with a blue pencil in order to "push her into the front rank." Nevertheless, the Alaskan setting of the series and book titles like Doom in the Midnight Sun (1944) and Murder Wears Mukluks (1945) intrigued me.

Regrettably, Boyd remained elusive and out-of-print, until recently, when her goddaughter, Elizabeth Reed Aden, not only began restoring her godmother's work back to print – she doubled the size of Boyd's original output. Aden discovered a number of previously unpublished manuscripts. Dune House (c. 1949), Slay Bells (c. 1957) and A Vacation to Kill For (c. 1968/70) were published between 2021 and 2023, but appear to be standalone mysteries. A fourth, previously unpublished F. Millard Smyth novel, One Paw Was Red (c. 1947), was found and currently being prepared for publication. Just no idea when it will be published as the website says the book is coming in either 2024 or 2027. You can read the backstory of these reprints and discoveries in the article "Publishing My Godmother's "Lost" Murder Mystery Manuscripts."

Murder Breaks Trail (1943) takes place in the fall of 1941 and is the first appearance of F. Millard Smyth, "a graying, insignificant grocer from Four Corners, Nebraska," who's on a small plane flying over Alaska. Smyth always wanted to see Alaska and had been invited along to, what was then still, the Alaska Territory on a work related trip with some important people.

The other passengers on the plane are a senator, Thomas Jefferson Lee, known in politics as 'Do-It-Now' Lee and accompanied by his daughter, Kilkenny Lee – who has the full attention Congressman Michael O'Hara. Tony Webber is the senator's secretary and Mayor Guy Fletcher, of Fairbluffs, rounds out the party. Lastly, there's the two-men crew comprising of Hope Mullen (radio operator) and Red Bailey (pilot). The reason behind this trip is an important mineral report ("who knows what treasure of essential minerals maybe hoarded in the vast, uncataloged store house of Alaska?") and get an idea how Alaskan prospectors live. Red announces an emergency landing to fix the radio, while the rest has lunch next to a lake. Then mysterious things begin to happen, before turning disastrous.

From his window, Smyth notices a thin, blue streak of smoke rising nearby the lake, but as the plane dipped towards the lake, it turned white and disappeared ("like someone put out the fire"). So who made and smothered the fire in the middle of nowhere of the Alaskan wilderness? When they land, they find an abandoned, turn-of-the-century ghost village of log cabins whose sod roofs rendered them invisible from the air ("...out of the sod grew dried weeds and tangled grass"). Why not do some urbexing the remnants of a long-forgotten, gold rush era settlement? As they poke around the cabins, they find everything from a dress dating back to the late 1800s ("it's all going to pieces in my hands") to "four hands of cards, lying every which way on the table" and the chairs pushed back – like a card game suddenly got interrupted. The discovery and first exploration of the abandoned settlement is the best and most memorable part of Murder Breaks Trail.

What made the original settlers abandon their village with all their possessions left behind like it was the Mary Celeste? More importantly, who's living there now? One of the cabins is tidy, comfortable with a still warm stove and an additional room stocked with enough supplies “to feed a man for a year.” But where is this mysterious occupant? Things get serious when the party returns to the plane and discovers the petrol has been drained, which effectively maroons them in Alaskan backwoods as King Winter approaches. Suddenly, Murder Breaks Trail becomes an entirely different type of detective story.

They assume, considering the important people aboard, they'll have every plane in the Territory out on a search and agree to wait it out until help arrives, but days turn into weeks with no plane in sight. So the party become the new residents of the abandoned village, living off on the supplies, foraging around the cabins to salvage whatever the original occupants left behind and dozen of little chores (shoveling snow, cutting wood etc.) to fill the days. Murder Breaks Trail turns into something of a Robinsonade-like detective story reminiscent at times of Robin Forsythe's Murder on Paradise Island (1937) and Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954). But in the snowy, frozen wilds of Alaska instead of a deserted island. The passage of time hardly improves their predicament as supplies need to be rationed, sickness strikes and someone ends up with a knife in their neck. Who wielded the knife? Was it someone from their own party or the unknown person prowling around the village on skis? Someone has to play detective to keep the situation and fraying nerves from entirely disintegrating.

F. Millard Smyth is a huge, life-long fan of detective stories, "I've been reading detective stories ever since I could read," carrying around a copy of a battered pulp magazine with a cover illustration and latest adventure of his favorite character, Flatfoot Flannagan – a character who's referenced constantly ("Flatfoot Flannagan had solved murders from nothing more than a smear of grease"). So as the only qualified person of the party, Smyth begins to investigate and takes great joy in finding such "time-tested clues" as "the stopped watch, the dropped handkerchief, the ravelings, and now the blotter" ("frowned upon lately by Flatfoot..."). Simply a sympathetic and likable amateur detective who at times appears to be out of his depth on his first outing. F. Millard Smyth is a detective character I can't help but see as a literary relative of Agatha Christie's Mr. Satterthwaite and Francis Duncan's Mordecai Tremaine. A romantic at heart who loves mysteries and never lost his boyhood hunger for adventure, which is what brought him to Alaska ("...the land he'd had to absorb from travel books and adventure magazines"). Sometimes shows he's not the cynical, hardbitten detective of popular fiction and warned by one of the party to take of his rose-tinted glasses and "get wise to what you're mixed up in." Sound advise, considering the circumstances.

So, as you can probably judge from the tone of this review, I didn't dislike Murder Breaks Trail, but the book has some undeniable, ruinous shortcomings and can see why Boucher wanted to let an editor loose on Boyd's work – even if it's only to improve the story's snail-like pacing. However, the snail-like pacing is not the most pressing problem of the book as for everything done right, two or three other things completely miss the mark.

Needless to say, the backdrop and historical mystery of the deserted village are the best part of Murder Breaks Trail. Very late in the story, they even uncover a dusty, forty-two year old "dying message," of sorts, which is always appreciated around here. Not to be forgotten, Boyd belongs to group of regionalist mystery writers that include S.H. Courtier, Todd Downing, Elspeth Huxley and Arthur W. Upfield whose best works feature crimes in foreign climes that feels native to that particular geographical/cultural location and period (e.g. Courtier's The Glass Spear, 1950). Boyd came close enough to writing exactly such a regional mystery, succeeding mostly with the historical plot-thread, but Boyd steadily diluted and cheapened her first detective story with an increasing amount of spy material. Even the historical plot-thread is not spared. Barely anything related to the espionage business is credible or convincing. I liked how the party had to lay a trap to capture the prowler and how that capture affected the second murder, but somewhat undermined when what they caught turns out to be caricature of a Nazi spy ("your own United States will come under our domination").

Worse of all, the plot is muddled, Smyth bluffs and guesses his way to the solution and the solution itself is nothing special or inspired. Murder Breaks Trail leans heavily on its snowy, evocatively presented setting, natural and historical, while the days shorten and "northern lights played a wild crack-the-whip in the sky." Not to mention an underdog detective you want to see prevail in the end (he's one of us, after all), but plot-wise, there's little to recommend outside of the historical mystery. Even the historical mystery comes with a caveat. So, after turning over the last page, I couldn't help but wonder what Murder Breaks Trail might have been in the hands of someone like Hake Talbot. Murder Breaks Trail has nearly everything to whip up a first-rate detective novel, but Boyd didn't succeed in extracting that first-rate mystery from her own ideas. And yet... I enjoyed Murder Breaks Trail and found it for the most part an engrossing read, especially the opening chapters. Not a great or even a good detective novel, in terms of plot, but neither terribly written or devoid of interest (as you can see from the length of this rambling review). Interesting enough to add Doom in the Midnight Sun to the big pile.

77 North (2023) by D.L. Marshall

Last year, I did my best Herodotus impression and wrote up "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years" tracking the changes of everyone's favorite subgenre over the past two decades – evolving into something of a revival. A revival whose seeds were planted by the reprint renaissance and translation wave, which started showing fruit towards the end of the last decade. So far, the harvest has been plentiful and growing.

Just in the past year, locked room and impossible crime fans were treated to James Scott Byrnside's Monkey See, Monkey Murder (2023), A. Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023), Anne van Doorn's Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023) and Tom Mead's The Murder Wheel (2023). J.L. Blackhurst's Three Card Murder (2023) and Gigi Pandian's Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022) and The Raven Thief (2023) are currently residing on the big pile. One of the more intriguing takes today on the traditional detective story and locked room mysteries comes from D.L. Marshall's John Tyler series.

Marshall smashed together the action-packed, 1980s movie thrillers and weaves deceivingly intricate plots throughout the gunfights, standoffs, hand-to-hand combat and betrayals. No matter where on the planet Tyles finds himself, the morally ambiguous mercenary is always confronted with killers who execute their victims under apparently inexplicable circumstances. Anthrax Island (2021) brings Tyler to the post-apocalyptic Gruinard Island contaminated with deadly anthrax spores where the first murder is committed in the locked and watched radio room. Black Run (2021) takes place on an old, rusty Soviet era transport ship filled with modern-day pirates, smugglers and assassins as Tyler's cargo (a prisoner) is knifed to death inside the sealed tank of the ship. Steve, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, called the series "the lovechild of Alistair Maclean and John Dickson Carr." While the impossible crime took a backseat in the second novel, it was still a cracking good read. And looked forward to the third title.

77 North (2023) concludes, what's hopefully, the initial trilogy and wraps up all the ongoing storylines and plot-threads in an unrelenting, action-packed survival thriller – a very clever plot lurking underneath it all. The ending suggests 77 North is not going to be Tyler's last appearance ("one last job"), but a lot happens between the opening and closing pages. Like a lot.

John Tyler is "dead in the eyes of the world" and so has the freedom to move around to extract revenge on the people responsible for killing his older brother, Justin. Tyler takes his bloody vengeance on a world tour as he goes from Rio and the coast of Croatia to Amsterdam to pick off a group of ex-special forces turned private military ("real close-knit team"), which was bound to get him noticed. Tyler is trapped by the man who helped him to die and stay dead. And he needs him to a job. There's a Russian arms dealer, Viktor Golubev, who has setup shop in one of the roughest, most inhospitable parts of Siberia. Somewhere deep into the Arctic Circle, Severnaya Zemlya, stands a Cold War era "hotel" where the KGB experimented with ESP, astral projection and telekinesis. So remote enough to conduct some shady, downright illegal business deals and sales, but Golubev attracted the attention of certain people when he got his hands on a small amount of bioweapons. Normally, those people are not interested in obsolete Soviet weapons, but they are interested in Golubev's bioweapons expert, Professor Balakin, who wants to get out. Professor Balakin is wiling to trade the name of "a Russian double-agent well-placed within NATO" in exchange for a white picket fence in the United States. Only they hit a snag. One of the two agents sent out there was killed under mysterious circumstances. Somehow, the professor knew John Tyler is alive, because he secretly requested Tyler to get him out of there.

This barely touches on all the intricate details, characters and plot-threads of the story's opening pages as Tyler takes the place of the dead undercover agent to get the intel and protect the second agent, Dr. Carr – a legit bioweapons expert. They went to the Arctic hotel undercover of checking out the goods on behalf of General Kayembe, dictator of the central African country Nambutu, who also happens to be a friend of Tyler. So no problem to go down there as the general's man on the ground, but getting to the hotel is an ordeal and sets the tone for the rest of the story. Tyler has to battle both the unforgiving climate ("the Arctic Circle wants you dead, and will try at any opportunity") and creeping, disappearing shape fleeting across the ice shooting at him and leaving behind a burned body. That's just before arriving at the isolated hotel of a Russian arms dealer with a private army who's hosting a who's who of terrorists, cartel members, killers and "probably just a few shady fuckers who wanted big guns."

First of all, the settings is one of the strongest and most attractive part of this mystery-thriller series. John Tyler can be placed in settings and circumstances in a setting that would be off-limits for a "normal" amateur detective or police inspector. For example, I can't imagine Carver's Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow setting foot on Gruinard Island or Byrnside's Rowan Manory getting a fee big enough to board the Tiburon. 77 North does not disappoint in that regard. The place is like a decaying time capsule of the 1970s with portraits of Brezhnev hanging askew on half-collapsed walls with peeling, mustard-yellow wallpaper where Golubev conducts his business. Strewn with relics of the period ("Urbexers or eBay profiteers would have a field day with the kitsch"). But the place also has a "destroyed wing." Decades ago, experiments where carried out there involving psychic and paranormal phenomena to create super soldiers, but one experiment reputedly lead to a deadly fire destroying half the building. This ruined section is sealed off from the rest of the building by a huge steel door ("the kind you'd see on a ship or submarine"). Underneath the old hotel is a nuclear bunker from the Cold War "designed to withstand a two megaton nuclear strike nearby." And with a history like that, the place acquired a ghostly resident. They call the ghost the White Demon or Pozharnyy, "Fire Man," who stalks its dilapidated corridors as a harbinger of doom, death and burned corpses. Great stuff!

The nuclear bunker underneath the hotel naturally becomes the scene for a locked room murder. Tyler is alone with two other people in the sealed bunker when one of them is burned to death, inside a locked section of the bunker, but the relatively small, hermetically bunker had been searched top to bottom – offering no hiding place or escape route for the murderer. And no source of ignition. No our mercenary has a problem with the ruthless arms dealer.

I'm not going to attempt to give you an idea about what happens next as this is only a mere fraction of what goes down during the first half of the story, which is interspersed with flashbacks to Tyler's first time on the job back in 1999 when he joined his brother in Nambutu. And everything is connected to everything.

77 North is first and foremost an first-rate thriller, as intricate as it's exciting, rarely letting up its relentless pace. So while a mystery-thriller, of sorts, it's not a tale of detection or deduction, because the punishing pace and pile-on of incidents, twists and turns simply won't allow for it. However, you're strongly advised to pay attention as the keen eyed armchair detective can pick up enough clues and hints to get a long way towards the correct solution. On top of that, Marshall wonderfully used the melee of the action thriller for some good, old-fashioned trickery and misdirection in a way that would difficult to pull-off in a garden variety murder case. More importantly, this series perfectly demonstrates why having a sound plot and some historical genre awareness is a rock-solid foundation for the characters and story to stand on (*). After all, if this series had been about Tyler simply shooting his way to the final chapter, I would never have bothered with it nor would the series have stood out from the raft of other action-oriented thrillers. Now they are something more than just action-thrillers or locked room mysteries. I suspect genre scholars and locked room fans of the future will look back with great interest to these first three John Tyler novels.

Hopefully, Tyler has enough fuel left in the tank to take on future assignments as I feel the series has not yet ran its course. So much more can be done with those specialized, usually off-limits settings. Something like a black site prison in some jungle outpost where prisoners are killed in locked and guarded cells or a prequel novel with Justin Tyler set during the Yugoslav Wars to give his younger brother a breather. Until then, the Tyler Trilogy comes highly recommended as a truly new and radically different take on the traditional locked room mystery.

*: see my review and comments on Pierre Siniac's Un assassin, ça va, ça vient (Death on Bastille Day, 1981).

The Adventures of the Puzzle Club (2022) by Ellery Queen and Josh Pachter

The New York cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee were the heart and brain behind one of the most important names in the American detective story, "Ellery Queen," whose contributions as writers, editors and founders of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine cannot be overstated – promoting and spreading the detective story across the world. Ellery Queen still enjoys popularity today in counties like Italy and Japan where they influenced such writers as Alice Arisugawa and Rintaro Norizuki. And while the English-speaking world has yet to produce someone who can lay claim to the Queen's mantle, the cousins have to this day a dedicated and active fanbase who continue to champion their work.

 

A group of radical royalists, called The West 87th Street Irregulars, "who collectively have committed themselves to the preservation and revival of Ellery Queen" with "the goal of making Ellery Queen once again a vibrant and recognized name in detective fiction." A queen's quorum of writers and editors who write pastiches, parodies and continuations concerning all things Elleryana and editing anthologies. In recent years, Dale C. Andrews and Josh Pachter compiled two EQ themed anthologies, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020), which in spite of their titles are glowing tributes to Ellery Queen. And not a single truly bad story between them!

Josh Pachter's most recent project, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club (2022), is dedicated to a largely forgotten passage from the tail-end of Dannay and Lee's writing career. During the 1960s and early '70s, they produced five short-short stories introducing Ellery Queen and his readers to the members of the Puzzle Club. A tiny group of puzzle enthusiasts comprising of Cyrus Syres ("multimillionaire oilman"), Emmy Wandermere ("the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet"), Dr. Vreeland ("noted psychiatrist"), Darnell ("celebrated criminal lawyer"), Dr. Arkavy ("the Nobel biochemist") and the famous detective novelist, Ellery Queen. The Puzzle Club convene regularly at Syres' Park Avenue penthouse to mystify each other, "in a sort of ritual adoration of the question mark," which originally covered five short-short stories published in two badges – two in 1965 and three in 1971. The series ended with Lee's passing in 1971. The stories were collected separately, in Queen's Experiments in Detection (1968) and The Tragedy of Errors (1999), but never appeared together as there simply were not enough of them to justify a collection.

Fortunately, Pachter had a pastiche, "a further adventure for Ellery and the Puzzle Club," published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 2019 and editor Janet Hutchings accepted the story with "the caveat that it would be a one-off, not the kick-off for a series of Puzzle Club pastiches." So he wrote four additionally Puzzle Club with Sherlockian-themed titles. Suddenly, the amount of material had doubled. Add introductions for each individual story and Pachter's four short stories about Tyson County’s Griffen family, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club was practically ready to go to the printers. Let's see how this collection turned out.

"The Little Spy" originally appeared in the January, 1965, issue of Cavalier and begins with Ellery Queen receiving an invitation to attend the next meeting of the Puzzle Club to be subjected to a membership test ("...if you fail to solve the puzzle we're going to throw at you tonight, you'll never be invited to try again"). The WWII-era problem he has to solve concerns an undistinguished ex-civil servant, "who came out of retirement to do his bit for Uncle Sam," but, shortly before D-Day, Intelligence received an important tip – accusing the undistinguished civil servant of being a German spy. So when he suddenly booked a priority airline passage to London, they yanked him off the plane and gave him "the most thorough search in the long and honorable history of spy-catching." It took them a while, but, in the end, they found the top-secret material. The question Ellery Queen has to answer is where the Intelligence people discovered the spy message. A clever little story that gives the central clue in the setup of the problem and then becomes a process of elimination as Ellery goes over every possible hiding place. Needless to say, Ellery passes the test to become the sixth regular member of the Puzzle Club.

 

"The President Regrets" first appeared in the September, 1965, issue of Diners Club Magazine and the Puzzle Club intended to welcome no less a figure than the President of the United States ("...known to be a devotee of mysteries in all lawful forms"), but the president had to cancel at the last minute. So it's up to Ellery to improvise a puzzle for his fellow club members and imagines the murder of a Hollywood starlet, Valetta van Buren, who had been threatened by one of her four suitors and had written to Ellery to ask for help. But the letter arrived too late. Valetta was murdered by the suitor who had threatened her without naming him, but she wrote in the letter "she had something in common with three of the four, and that the fourth was the one who had threatened her." Arguably, the most obvious and telegraphed solution ever devised by EQ.

"The Three Students," originally published in the March, 1971, issue of Playboy, centers on the problem of a ring taken from the office of a college president and "a delegation of three students who represent three dissident groups at the college" play the role of suspects. Only clue is a scrap of paper with a gibberish verse written on it. Unfortunately, the solution hinges on a specialized piece of knowledge. So practically unsolvable for most readers.

A note for the curious: the story is introduced by Martin Edwards and comments how extraordinary it seems that it was originally published in Playboy, which is a subject that came up not so long ago on this blog. Back in March, I reviewed Lawrence Block's "The Burglar Who Dropped In On Elvis" (1990) and "D," from Vintage Pop Fiction, commented, "Playboy published some excellent fiction because they could afford to pay writers real money."

"The Odd Man" originally appeared in the June, 1971, issue of Playboy and is the best of the original five Puzzle Club stories brilliantly playing on that EQ specialty, the multiple solutions. The Puzzle Club has concocted a riddle bound to confound their resident mystery writer and has to do with an undercover agent whose assignment it is to track down a dope supplier, which the agent narrowed down to three suspects who all live in the same building – a three-story house ("someday... instead of a three-story house, I shall make up a three-house story"). The undercover agent is murdered, but there was a clue in his last report referring to the drug supplier as "the odd man of the three." The Puzzle Club believe there's only one possible solution to the problem, but Queen points out there are two more solutions. All three solutions come back to the same person. A minor tour-de-force!

"The Honest Swindler" appeared in The Saturday Evening Post during the Summer of 1971 and relatively simple, straightforward problem of Old Pete who gathered funds to finance his hunt for uranium with the promise that "every last investor at least gets back his original investment" in case of failure. So how was Prospector Pete able to pack back everyone of his backers when he returned empty handed? A decent enough short-short, but unremarkable.

The next five stories, "The Pastiches," were penned by Pachter who brought the band back
together after nearly fifty years and aged the characters along. Syres is now a wiry, crippled old man in a wheelchair and Ellery takes an Uber to the Park Avenue skyscraper. Pachter's pastiches unapologetically revels in the typical EQ elements of dying messages, missing clues and the-three/four-suspects. So, in a way, Pachter succeeded in making his pastiches even more Queen-ish than the original five Puzzle Club stories.

"A Study in Scarlett," originally published in the May/June, 2019, issue of EQMM brings the club together for the first time in decades and they immediately place Ellery in the hot seat – known known as the "Problem Chair." The intellectual challenge of the meeting takes Ellery to the Sherbert Theater, on West 47th Street, where lead actress, Brooke Rivers, is found murdered in her dressing room. Rivers loved word games, "crosswords, cryptics, acrostics, word searches, logic problems," fittingly left a dying message. A hastily scrawled word, "FOUR." Even more fittingly, there are exactly four suspects who could have murdered the starlet. I suppose the dying message is solvable, but you probably should put the book away when you arrive at the challenge to the reader and mull it over. I didn't get this one.

"The Adventure of the Red Circles" first appeared in the January/February, 2020, issue of EQMM and the Puzzle Club have a tailor-made problem for Ellery: owner of a successful chain of grocery stores and a collector of first editions of Golden Age detective novels, Jeremiah "Red" Edwards, died in his (unlocked) library of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. On the desk, the police finds the proofs for next week's advertising circular and Edwards had circled photographs of four items on the page with cheeses ("...in true dying-message-story fashion"). The fun solution is something only an Ellery Queen fan can dream up and appreciate.

"The Adventure of the Black-and-Blue Carbuncle" was originally published in the November/December, 2020, issue of EQMM and the Puzzle Club have another dying message problem for Ellery, but found the premise and backdrop of the puzzle better than its execution. Professor Lee Dannay is a SETI researcher (The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) who's hunched over the controls of the radio telescope one night, when a gunman enters the observatory. The gunman forces the professor to write a suicide note and shoots him, but the professor hide a clue to the murderer's identity in the note. Ellery has to find it and correctly interpreter it to solve the puzzle. The problem is that the plot (deliberately) recycles the central idea from a previous story, which came with exactly the same limitation.

A note for the curious: the story is introduced by Kurt Sercu, founder of Ellery Queen: A Website On Deduction, who writes Pachter warned him that it might be impossible for him to beat Ellery to the solution, because Sercu's not American "born and bred." Funnily enough, both Pachter and Sercu speak Dutch. If you speak Dutch, you should be able to eliminate one of the three suspects.

"The Five Orange Pipes" was first published in the January/February, 2021, issue of EQMM and is the hardest story to describe. This time, Ellery challenges the other members of the Puzzle Club with a problem starved of details, but the central question is the proximate cause of death of two of the characters. The solution is one of those elbow-in-the-ribs jokes, but amusing enough. Somewhat like a lighthearted take on Edmund Crispin and Geoffrey Bush's "Who Killed Baker?" (1950). I learned that the term Sherlockian is used in the United States and Holmesian purely British. I always used them interchangeable. There's a lock in Sherlockian. So I'll stick with that one from now on.

"Their Last Bow," originally published in the January/February, 2022, issue of EQMM, is equally difficult to discuss. In his introduction, Pachter writes "I was determined not to write more about the Puzzle Club than Dannay and Lee did, I felt that I had to do something in the fifth story to make it clear that there would never be—could never be—another one." Ellery does not meet his Reichenbach, of course, but it's the end for the Puzzle Club. I think Dannay and Lee would have approved of the conclusion to this unfinished chapter of their writing career.

The collection ends with Pachter's four short stories about the eleven children of Inspector Ross Griffen, of the Tyson County Police Force, all of whom he named after famous detective characters. I previously reviewed "E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name" (1968) in The Misadventures of Ellery Queen and "E.Q. Griffin's Second Case" (1970) in The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen. So onto the third story.

"Sam Buried Caesar," originally published in the August, 1971, issue of EQMM, when Pachter was 18-years-old and, as I read the story, it went from a highlight of the collection to one of my all-time favorite detective parodies. The story tells the only recorded case of the youngest child of the Griffen family, Nero Wolfe Griffen, who runs a detective agency from the family garage with his best friend, Artie Goodman – who needs to keep reminding everyone his name Artie ("...not Archie Goodwin"). They charge fifteen cents, plus expenses, which is "nowhere near as profitable as a good paper route but lots more enjoyable." Their newest client is Sam Cabot whose dog, Caesar, has just been killed by a speeding car near a lonely and vacant field. Not knowing what to do and without any adults around, Sam decided to bury Caesar in a corner of the vacant field. But decided to go back to get Caesar's collar and tags as a memento. When he dug up the grave, Caesar's body was gone! So what happened? Just like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Artie has to do all the legwork and comes away with skinned arms, while N.W. Griffen never left the armchair in the garage. But at the end of the day, they both arrive at exactly the same conclusion. An incredibly amusing story and a strangely spot on parody of Rex Stout.

A note for the curious: Pachter mentions on his website that Stout "was still alive at the time the story appeared in print and I got a very nice not from him, telling me that he's enjoyed it."

"50" originally appeared in the November/December, 2018, issue of EQMM and written to mark the 50th anniversary of "E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name," which makes it as difficult to discuss as "Their Last Bow." The story is a reminiscence rather than a detective story in which Pachter seems to have merged himself with the now 66-year-old Professor E.Q. Griffen who teaches English literature at a small college. When the story opens, Griffen is preparing a lecture when his mind begins to wander to the past and reveals he wrote “E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name” as sixteen year old ("for the purposes of this, his first short story, young Ellery had expanded the family to eleven children..."). That brings him to an old and solved murder case as his father told him "not all crimes are mysteries," but reviewing his old, half-forgotten memories supplemented by a couple of Google searches proposes a new solution to the murder based on the victim's dying message. But what can be done five decades after the facts? A very odd, but weirdly effective, story to round out the collection. I really liked the blurring between author and character.

The Adventures of the Puzzle Club is an enjoyable collection and an even better tribute to an obscure passage from Ellery Queen's varied career, but comes with the proviso that the Puzzle Club stories are riddles and brainteasers in short-short story form. So the stories are just slightly more substantial than the radio episodes of Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries or the one-page shorts from How Good a Detective Are You? (1934). "The Odd Man" being the only real exception with its impressive triple solutions. Unless you're a fan of EQ, you have to approach this collection as something of an oddity, but if you're a fan or simply like EQ, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club is not to be missed.

 On a somewhat related and final note: I always wanted to see Timothy Hutton reprise his father's role from the 1975 TV-series of Ellery Queen, if only for a one-off, but it has pointed out that Hutton is getting a little too old to play Ellery. So why not adapt Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's pastiche "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery as the canonical ending to the original TV-series? You can age him up with makeup and he would like Jim Hutton's Ellery at age 100.