The Ark (2022) by Haruo Yuki

When compiling and cobbling together "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Hybrid Mysteries," I mulled over including a disaster-themed detective novel, but was not entirely sure whether disaster detectives counted as hybrid mysteries or not – decided not to include one. It only dilutes the concept if every detective story in which a mine explodes or a submarine is sunk with survivors aboard. Not to mention the knock-on effect of wartime novels suddenly qualifying as hybrid mysteries.

However, there are disaster detectives, rare as they are, in which the disaster is central to the story rushing along the plot. I suppose Ellery Queen's The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933) is a good, early example of the disaster detective hybrid and it's impossible to ignore Nevada Barr's Firestorm (1996). So this issue needed further probing and why I looked forward to two translations Pushkin Vertigo announced last year as forthcoming.

Akane Araki's Konoyo no hate no satsujin (Murder at the End of the World, 2022) takes place during humanity's last three months as a civilization ending meteor hurls towards our planet, which should be out around late July or early August. Haruo Yuki's Hakobune (The Ark, 2022), translated by Jim Rion, had been out for a few months now and merges the classically-styled, closed circle whodunit with a survival thriller – arrival of my copy coincided with an interesting review. Countdown John reviewed Yuki's The Ark right after it was published and observed, "I think this qualifies as a hybrid mystery, in this case a cross between a classic mystery and a disaster movie." Agreed! The Ark is exactly the kind of disaster detective/thriller that works as a hybrid mystery, but let's start at the beginning.

The Ark begins when a group of former students and members of their university's hiking club reunite two years after graduating. Firstly, there's Shuichi Koshino, a system engineer, who narrates the story. Shuichi brought along his smartly dressed cousin, Shotaro, who's going to be Ellery Queen-like detective and not the infallible version. Other friends from the old hiking club are Sayaka Nouchi, a yoga teacher, Hana Takatsu, an office worker, Yuya Nishimura, vaguely doing something with fashion, Ryuhei and Mai Itoyama. They got married shortly after graduating. Yuya has hiked in the area before and had discovered an underground building in the mountains. A three floor, subterranean steel structure into a huge cavern with the whole structure following "the shape of a naturally occurring cave" giving it the form of an ark ("...like in the Old Testament?"). The place has a murky past possibly involving militant groups, cults and criminals. Yuya suggests they go explore The Ark, but has trouble finding the entrance to the tunnel. So it quite late when they finally find the entrance and bump into a family of three, the Yazakis, who were out hunting mushrooms when they got lost. They have to camp for the night inside The Ark.

During the night, the mountain is rocked by an earthquake that set the barricade boulder rolling and blocking the exit. The earthquake also caused the trickle of water that had already claimed the bottom floor to increase. So they were trapped for the time being, because there's a way out that comes with a huge moral dilemma: the boulder can be moved, but it would trap the person working the winch to be trapped alone inside a small, cavern-like room – no guarantee the rest can return in time with help. Who has to be sacrificed? Before they can even think about it, one of them is found strangled to death in a storeroom! So now they not only have to deal with being trapped, while the water is slowly rising, but one of them unquestionably being a murderer. Even more baffling is why commit murder under these dire circumstances, especially after finding out they need a sacrifice to escape?

What they need to do is find the killer and force that person to make the sacrifice, because they're going to be hanged for murder anyway. Fortunately, the Ark has a working generator with a weeks worth of fuel giving them some time to find the murderer and that's my sole gripe with The Ark. A detective story can be too much driven by coincidence, but The Ark is the only detective story driven entirely by convenience. The situation inside the Ark would have played out completely different had their been no lights or a way to keep their smartphones charges. Not to mention the left over supplies and tools scattered across the numerous room or the old, outdated, but still working security camera system guarding the blocked entrance and exit. However, convenient as the situation may for the purpose of the plot, Haruo Yuki used those plot conveniences to their full potential to tell this story.

So with about a week until fuel runs out and the water reaches them, Shuichi and Shotaro set out to find the murderer, but the first murder is just a plain murder. The storeroom "had not been locked from the inside, no article of clothing was missing for unexplained reasons, nothing in the room had been inexplicably turned upside down" and "no dying message." Only the baffling question why the murderer picked this moment to strike. While the first murder was "almost disappointingly free of puzzles," the second murder is a typical, gruesome shin honkaku slaying. Every action to killer took to be "simply mystifying." Why stab and decapitate a corpse? What happened to the head? Why dispose of the victim's belonging? And why kill when being trapped underground? Merely a few of the puzzling questions surrounding this second and third, arguably even stranger murder.

Haruo Yuki delivered some devilish clever answers to those questions, like why cut off the head of the second victim, but even better is the role the character's smartphones played though out their ordeal. I mentioned in the past how much I dislike the claim how advances in forensic science and technology in generally had made the traditionally-plotted, Golden Age-style detective novel obsolete. An argument Isaac Asimov demolished in the granddaddy of hybrid mysteries, The Caves of Steel (1953/54), but The Ark provides several practical and ingenious examples for our time. If you ever wondered what the greats from the Golden Age could have done with today's technology, The Ark should give you a pretty good idea. Where the plot and story excels is when the time has come to put everything together as Shotaro reveals the murder through an Ellery Queen-style chain of reasoning and deductions by going over identifiable action and step the killer took from the first to third murder. But then it's time to get out.

Anyone somewhat familiar with Japanese authors penchant for dark, bleak endings and tragic twists can feel something coming in the epilogue. I expected something normal and mundane. Something like the survivors emerging from the Ark to discover the earthquakes were caused by an apocalyptic event like a nuclear war or an asteroid strike, but I didn't see that twist coming. A cruel, beautiful twist making for an unforgettable ending. Even more impressive, the revelation in the epilogue serves as the finishing touch of perfection as it revealed the crimes to have been truly unique to that place and harrowing week inside the Ark. There was no other time or place where the motive for these murder could have arising except among that group of people trapped inside. So, yes, I enjoyed this one very much.

Haruo Yuki's The Ark is simply a plot-technical marvel of the 21st century detective novel with a time-honored approach to the age-old question of whodunit? Highly recommended!

I plan to do "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Translations from Pushkin Vertigo" sometime in the future, but picking just ten is, fittingly enough, going to be a bloodbath.

Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine (2026) by P. Dieudonné

Recently, E-Pulp published the 14th title in P. Dieudonné's Rotterdam Police series, Rechercheur De Klerck en tranen om Valentijn (Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine, 2026), which has a different tread on its plot than previous entries – centering on a series of disappearances instead of murder. This series oscillates between the modern police procedural/crime fiction and the more traditionally-styled detective stories. Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine squarely falls into the modern category, but the story is a bit of roller coaster with an unexpected, satisfying conclusion. I'm getting ahead of the story.

Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine begins with a panicky phone call to the police. Dorette Vroom is frightened and scared that something has happened to her boyfriend, Bart Biervliet, who went out to confront the man who has been bothering his seven-year-old daughter. The last drop was a Valentine card send to the girl. Bart Biervliet "was determined to teach that pervert a lesson," taking along a hockey stick, but never returned and doesn't answer his call. Inspectors Lucien de Klerck and Ruben Klaver answer the call, only to find out the case is not as straightforward as it first appeared.

First of all, the man suspected of trying to contact Biervliet's daughter, Nico Pelsmaeker, appears to have nothing to do with what he has been accused of. So De Klerck wonders if the Valentine card was bait to lure Biervliet to a secluded place, but who and why? And what happened to the body? A possibility that begins to gain traction as Biervliet's complicated private and professional life begin to stir their investigation by throwing up complications, one after another, as the people involved either go on the run or disappear themselves – always under somewhat similar circumstances ("...lured away to a lonely place..."). What really adds interest to the story, considering how it started, is Biervliet's background as editor-in-chief of an opinion magazine, Vrij Onverveerd Vaderland (Free Undaunted Fatherland). More importantly, his past work and association with De Spanningsgids (Suspense Guide).

Dieudonné opened Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine with a short preface thanking "the friendly people at the publisher who recounted their experiences with the darker sides of the book trade" and "allowed to make full use of their recorded experiences" for the book. If you have read my previous reviews of Dutch detective novels, classics and modern, you probably picked up on the fact that the Netherlands is a hostile place for not only traditionally-inclined detective fiction ("those sourpusses thought that detective novels should actually be thrillers"), but independent publisher and basically everything that's not proper crime fiction. For example, Dieudonné notes in the preface that you can't find his novels in the majority of bookstores in the country, "there are even provinces where practically no bookstore participates in the sale," wanted to explain why that is through this story. Oh, boy, did he ever!

When they start digging into the shenanigans of De Spanningsgids, De Klerck and Klaver uncover everything ranging from bullying and gatekeeping to biased or malicious reviews. M.P.O. Books, better known to some of you as "Anne van Doorn," can tell you what a malicious review can do when you're an author with a small publisher. So that put a very different spin and tone on the story from where it started, but then everything began to dovetail in its final stretch and ending. Now, like I said, Inspector De Klerck and Tears for Valentine is very much from in the modern, not classical, tradition and most of you would probably sneer at the murderer's identity – which can be taken as a cheat. However, there was a hint, or two, for the observant reader to spot. Yes, I spotted it and figured out the identity of the extremely well-hidden culprit, but that's not what made the ending so satisfying. That goes to the solution revealing what ultimately happened to the men who went missing without a trace. De Klerck rightfully called it "a unique case."

My personal taste and bias, of course, favors more detective story-like titles such as Rechercheur De Klerck en de ongrijpbare dood (Inspector De Klerck and the Elusive Death, 2020), Rechercheur De Klerck en moord in scène (Inspector De Klerck and Murder on the Scene, 2021) and Rechercheur De Klerck en de dode weldoener (Inspector De Klerck and the Dead Philanthropist, 2025), but wouldn't want to have missed that ending for the world! Never knowing, exactly, what type of crime/detective next novel will turn out to be is part of the fun. It can be a straightforward politieroman like Rechercheur De Klerck en het duistere web (Inspector De Klerck and the Dark Web, 2022) or something much weirder like Rechercheur De Klerck en een dodelijk pact (Inspector De Klerck and a Deadly Pact, 2022). Whatever the next novel turns out to be, I'm looking forward to it.

The Hit List: 10 More Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated

In 2023, I posted "The Hit List: Top 10 Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated" going down a list of ten classic, or classically-styled, non-English detective novels from four different continents written in six different languages – not just French and Japanese titles. It would be very easy to compile a wishlist comprising of mostly Japanese and French mystery novels. All I need to do is link to Ho-Ling Wong's blog and John Pugmire's "A Locked Room Library." That would have been too easy. I think I scraped together a decently varied, alluring selection of potentially first-rate detective fiction waiting to be ferried across the language barrier.

That list was originally intended as a follow-up to the 2022 blog-post "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Detective Novels That Need to Be Reprinted," but decided it worked better as an ordered top 10 list and wanted to do a part 2. I needed more than can be found online or in certain reference works and asked for suggestions to be left in the comments. My blog is visited by detective fanatics from across the world and figured if even my country produce writers like Cor Docter, Ton Vervoort, M.P.O. Books and P. Dieudonné, surely other countries must have some gems practically unknown outside their borders. The harvest was not great and gave up on the idea of doing a follow-up, until a minor miracle occurred.

Pushkin Vertigo is publishing a long-awaited translation of Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939), which was one of my two or three premium picks alongside Rafeal Bernal's Un muerto en la tumba (A Dead Man in the Tomb, 1946) and Hajime Tsukatou's John Dickson Carr no saishuu teiri (John Dickson Carr's Last Theorem, 2020). Boileau's Six Crimes Without a Murderer was also one of the least likely titles on the list to get translated, because that snooty French upstart of a locked room extravaganza has resisted getting translated since the 1940s – even producing a lost manuscript. At the end of Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), there's the often overlooked section "Foreign-Language Books." It has a lengthy note for Six Crimes Without a Murderer. A translation was advertised in 1949 by Sampson Low as forthcoming, however, "the publishers themselves disappeared about that time and all efforts to trace a proof" or "a draft of the translation, or the translator, one Eric Sutton, have proved entirely unrewarding." The late John Pugmire, of Locked Room International, tried to get a translation published, but the current copyright holder refused to work small, independent or print-on-demand publishers. Pushkin Vertigo came true and caught the one that kept getting away for nearly eighth years.

So decided to take another look at that follow-up, dug around a bit and finally managed to gather enough to do another list without leaning entirely on French and Japanese titles with a smattering of Dutch mysteries. I tried to have the list not entirely dominated by locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, but somehow, they tend to be easier to find. So they have, as usually, a strong presence, but marvel at my impartiality.

Le testament de Basil Crookes (The Testament of Basil Crookes, 1930) by Pierre Véry

The obvious pick here would have been Pierre Véry's vaunted impossible crime novel, Les quatre vipères (The Four Vipers, 1934), but, to keep up appearances, I went with The Testament of Basil Crookes – "a pastiche of the English detective novel." The Testament of Basil Crookes is Véry's debut and appears to be a madcap chase mystery in which an unpublished manuscript, tossed from one train onto another train, is the key to securing a large inheritance. A madcap race with a three year time limit during which genre conventions are turned upside down. Véry's first stab at the detective story not only sounds like a fun, tongue-in-cheek mystery, anticipating Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin, but one of those early meta-fictional mysteries that started to appear around this time. And that type of mystery is now appreciated more than ever before.

L'antro dei filosofi (The Philosophers' Den, 1942) by Giorgio Scerbanenco

Giorgio Scerbanenco is one of the writers Igor Longo wrote about in his short essay "The Italian Detective Story" from the English translation of Franco Vailati's Il mistero dell'idrovolante (The Flying Boat Mystery, 1935). Scerbanenco belonged to the Van Dine-Queen School and even had an American series-detective, Arthur Jelling, who's "a Reeder-like archivist in the Boston Police Department." Longo highlighted The Philosophers' Den, "a very moody and bleak murder story in a very Queenesque eccentric family, possibly related to the Hatters of the Tragedy of Y," in which he praised Scerbanenco's effective use of "the Queenesque negative clue." The Philosophers' Den apparently is not the only notable Jelling case in addition to "a very famous Noir series with unfrocked and disbarred surgeon Duca Lamberti" written during the 1960s. And, of course, four of the Lamberti novels have been translated into English.

Diferentes razones tiene la muerte (Death Has Different Reasons, 1947) by María Elvira Bermúdez

María Elvira Bermúdez was according to Latin American Mystery Writers: An A to Z Guide (2004) "one of the founders of the Mexican detective story" and "one of the most innovative practitioners of the genre in Mexico," while also making a name as "one of its most perceptive critics." Death Has Different Reasons was "the most ambitious detective up to that time in Mexico" introducing her series-detective, Armando H. Zozaya, who's "modeled after the American sleuth Ellery Queen." Zozaya's solves his first case, a double murder, by sticking to conventions and traditions of the fair play, Golden Age-style detective novels. If that's not enticing enough for publishers, Bermúdez was "one of the most prolific female detective fiction author in the Spanish-speaking world" and "for 50 years a unique voice in Spanish-American detective fiction and criticism."

A morte no envelope (Death in an Envelope, 1957) by Lopes Coelho

This entry also comes from Latin American Mystery Writers. According to that insightful guide, Lopes Coelho was a driving force in the creation of "a uniquely Brazilian brand of detective fiction" by creating the first truly Brazilian detective character, Doctor Leite, whose cases filled three collections of short stories – published between 1957 and '68. The stories are classic whodunits and other type of puzzle stories, "solved by applying principles of logic and deductive reasoning," including two locked room mysteries, "A morte no envelope" ("Death in an Envelope") and "Só o crime estava na biblioteca" ("Only Crime Was in the Library"). So more than enough reasons to want a translation of at least the first collection.

Ălkistan (The Eel Cage, 1967) by Jan Ekström

When it comes to crime fiction, Sweden is known for their dark, dreary police procedural, psychological thrillers and cold, character-driven noir fiction. There's an exception to nearly everything and one of the exceptions here was Jan Ekström, "the Swedish John Dickson Carr," who wrote several locked room mysteries. Ekström's best known impossible crime novel, Ättestupan (Deadly Reunion, 1975), received an English translation decades ago, but nothing else outside of a short story in an obscure anthology. Adey's Locked Room Murders, under "Foreign-Language Books," lists several titles like The Eel Cage. From what I've been able to gather, The Eel Cage is Ekström's best regarded detective novel taking place in a small, rural fishing village where a body inexplicably turns up inside a jealously guarded eel chest, locked from the inside, but the key is found in the victim's pocket! Can you blame me for being intrigued?

Kyuukon no misshitsu (The Locked Room of the Suitors, 1978) by Sasazawa Saho

Like I said above, it would be really easy to fill out a list with just titles Ho-Ling has reviewed over the years. Just one list would not even scratch the surface of my honkaku and shin honkaku wishlist, but some titles stand out more than others. Sasazawa Saho's The Locked Room of the Suitors has for some reason always intrigued me. It was reportedly nearly forgotten about, until Alice Arisugawa included The Locked Room of the Suitors in An Illustrated Guide to the Locked Room 1891-1998 examining forty impossible crime novels from across the world. The plot concerns a double murder, plus dying message, behind the padlocked door of an old storage cellar. Ho-Ling says in his review, "the locked room mystery and the build-up towards the solution are quite good" with "both the fake murder theory and the final solution are built on clever clues." More importantly, "the locked room mystery itself is also quite memorable."

Mord & orkidéer (Murder & Orchids, 1996) by Bertil Falk

Back in February, I reviewed Bertil Falk's collection of short stories Mind-boggling Mysteries of a Missionary (2010) and mentioned he had authored two novel-length, untranslated detective novels beginning with Den maskerade ligachefen (The Masked Gangleader, 1954) – written and published when he was twenty years old. Murder & Orchids followed four decades later and appears to be a better, maturer novel combining the formal detective story with the travel thriller to create a tricky plot turning accepted cliches and conventions on its head. So very much a mystery in the spirit of the first entry on this list.

 

Jinrojo no kyofu (The Terror of Werewolf Castle, 1996/98) by Nikaido Reito

I mentioned Nikaido Reito's The Terror of Werewolf Castle in "Top 10 Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated" as not having very good odds at ever getting translated. The Terror of Werewolf Castle is, as Ho-Ling pointed out, "a monument in Japanese detective writing," comprising of four separate books averaging around 700 pages each. So it's not very realistic to expect a publisher today to translate a four volume, 2800 page behemoth, but on the other hand, we're paying customers with a The Terror of Werewolf Castle-shaped gap on our shelves. So, you know, chop, chop!

Le voyageur du passé (The Traveler from the Past, 2012) by Paul Halter

The death of John Pugmire in 2024 ended both Locked Room International and his regular Paul Halter translations, which consisted at his passing of nearly twenty novels, several short story collections and a few uncollected short stories. Tom Mead is currently doing fresh translations of previously published Halter translations, but nothing new so far. There are still quite a few untranslated Paul Halter titles on my wishlist like Le crime de Dédale (The Crime of Daedalus, 1997), Le douze crimes d'Hercule (The Twelve Crimes of Hercules, 2001) and Le tigre borgne (The One-Eyed Tiger, 2004), but The Traveler from the Past intrigued me ever since reading Patrick Ohl's 2012 review. A young man who went missing in 1905 turns up in 1955 without having aged a day, only to be tragically killed in a subway accident. But his identity appears to check out. What follows is no less impossible! Patrick described the book as "utterly fantastic" and "chillingly bizarre" with a plot that springs "a genuine surprise in the dénouement." Fingers crossed Mead eventually turns his hands to the Halter novels Pugmire didn't get to translate with The Traveler from the Past being at the top of that pile.

Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023) by “Anne van Doorn” (a.k.a. M.P.O. Books)

This is the first entry in the New York Cop series by "Anne van Doorn," open penname of M.P.O. Books, which follows Detectives Krell and Merrilee Hopper, of the 16th Precinct, whose first recorded case involves an impossible murder on the seventy-second floor of a high-rise tower on West 33rd Street – committed when the building was swaying in a storm. You can view this series as an homage to other New York detective writers and series like Van Dine, Queen and Ed McBain's 87th Precinct, but flavored like a Dutch politieroman (police novel). The sequel is titled Het legpuzzel mysterie (The Jigsaw Puzzle Mystery, 2026) and scheduled for release later this year. And here's the kicker... The Delft Blue Mystery has already been translated into English complete with blurbs from David Dean and Tom Mead, but holding up its publication is the search for a literary agent and publisher in the United States. No news on that front, yet, but you can at least look forward to my review of The Jigsaw Puzzle Mystery when it gets released.

The Snake of Luvercy (1926/27) by Maurice Renard

John Pugmire passed away in 2024 and his death not only meant the end of Locked Room International, but also ended the steady stream of translations of Paul Halter and other, often obscure, French mystery writers – none of whom would have gotten translated without him. Just the translation of Michel Herbert and Eugène Wyl's La maison interdite (The Forbidden House, 1932) alone is as big a contribution to the genre as introducing Halter to a global audience. So, when it comes to translations of French (locked room) mystery novels, not much has been published for the past two years.

Tom Mead translated Pierre Véry's Les veillées de la Tour Pointue (The Secret of the Pointed Tower, 1937) for Crippen & Landru and currently is doing some fresh translations of previously published Paul Halter novels. So was considering to finally give Émile Gaboriau a shot or revisit Gaston Leroux's Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907) when I got fantastic news. Pushkin Vertigo is going to publish a long wished for and overdue translation of Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939) in November! I guess the people at Pushkin Vertigo have read "The Hit List: Top 10 Non-English Detective Novels That Need to Be Translated." Maybe a translation of Rafeal Bernal's Un muerto en la tumba (A Dead Man in the Tomb, 1946) next year?

Earlier this year, Serling Lake reprinted Maurice Renard's ? Lui ? Histoire d'un mystère (Him? The Story of a Mystery, 1926/27), which appeared in English under the title The Snake of Luvercy – translated by Florence Crewe-Jones and published by E.P. Dutton & Co in 1930. Renard is best remembered today as one of the pioneering French science-fiction writers, even creating his own subgenre dubbed "Scientific Marvel Fiction," but Renard also tried his hands at detective fiction. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, is a fan who called The Snake of Luvercy "an excellent, fast paced thriller" containing "a murder in a locked bathroom with a bizarre solution involving a baroque murder means." John also praised Renard's Les mains d'Orlac (The Hands of Orlac, 1920) for being "a brilliantly fashioned detective novel wherein a series of impossible crimes are made to appear to be the work of supernatural agencies and a spectral being." So picked up the recent reprint of The Snake of Luvercy and hunting for a copy of The Hands of Orlac, because that's what John Pugmire would have wanted.

In 1926, The Snake of Luvercy was serialized in L'Intransigeant and published as a novel the following year. So a typical French roman-feuilleton full with sensational twists, turns and spins. You can say the story as a flexible as the titular snake driven entirely by a small, tightly-knit cast of characters.

Firstly, there are Miss Gilberta Laval and her dashing fiancé, Jean Mareuil, who's a rich dilettante who collects antique keys and old lamps. This match made in heaven spells trouble for Gilberta's aunt and cousin, Mme. de Prasse and her only son, Lionel. Mme. de Prasse plan had been for Lionel to marry Gilberta, secure the family fortune and cover up a slight financial irregularity ("...well, your gambling debts, Lionel, you know..."). Mme. de Prasse is Gilberta's legal guardian, but refreshingly, she doesn't hold the same power over her ward like her American and British counterparts ("armed with the Code, she could get rid of me and demand an accounting of her affairs..."). So they have to keep up appearances while plotting and carefully making their moves, which means acting as detectives, shadowing and poking around Jean Mareuil's private affairs hoping to find scandal and skeleton – anything to break them up. They enlist the help of the Lavals ex-butler, Aubry, who has a score to settle with Gilberta for sacking him.

While on shadowing duty, Aubry and Lionel discover a secret that could be a potential engagement breaker. Jean Mareuil moonlights as a snake charmer, Charlot the Adder, who's is an entertainment act in the dark cabarets of the Parisian underworld. But are they dealing with a double identity or dual personality? There's also a locked room murder lurking in the background of the story.

Five years ago, Guy Laval, an explorer, brought back "a number of rare serpents" from Central Africa to their home, Luvercy, but one of the deadly snakes escaped and found its way into Jeanne Laval's "almost hermetically closed" bedroom. The open windows were shuttered, however, each shutter is "pierced with a little heart-shaped opening cut in the wood for ventilation" big enough for a viper to slither through. Jeanne Laval was bitten while asleep and died. The guilt of having caused this accident killed her husband and left their daughter an orphan in the hands of her aunt, but could it have been murder? But who did it and how? The snake that killed Jeanne was never found leaving a Gilberta traumatized determined to never return to Luvercy. Getting her to return to Luvercy to confront the past becomes an ever increasing important plot point towards the end.

The Snake of Luvercy is what can be expected from a pulp-style, roman-feuilleton in the spirit of Gaston Leroux, Maurice Leblanc and a dash of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. So hardly an orthodox, traditionally-plotted and clued detective novel, but credit where credit's due, the story is better written and handled than expected going by the first-half. The murderer is surprisingly well-hidden with enough nudges and hints to make a fairly educated guess, while the locked room-trick is not as open to educated guesswork. However, the method to create the locked room perfectly fitted the story's pulpy, sensationalist aesthetics and put to excellent use to help reveal, and dispose, of that murderer. I suspect that scene was also meant as a sly wink to a very famous short detective story involving a murderous snake. So, while not exactly what I'm looking for when hunting for impossible crime classics, neither left it me disappointed. On the contrary, I admired how Renard handled and controlled a story involving dual identities, an impossible snake bite and snake charmers without resorting to second-and third-rate cliches and tropes like a long-lost twin, secret passages or strange poisons. You know, unlike some writers at the time.

So, in closing, Renard simply wrote a tremendously entertaining, fast-paced flight of fancy done in the unmistakable, reality-be-damned Gallic style from Leroux's era. If you enjoyed the quality, pulp-style (locked room) mysteries by James Ronald, Noël Vindry and Alexis Gensoul and Charles Grenier, The Snake of Luvercy should be right up your alley. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward with curiosity what Serling Lake is going reprint next.

The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks (2024) by Danro Kamosaki

Last year, I discovered Danro Kamosaki's "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" series, translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmmiicnana," which aims to push the limits of the impossible crime story by pumping it full of performance enhancing substances – results didn't disappoint. That is, if you're addicted to locked room mysteries to the point it has family and friends worried. But if you're a locked room addict, the premise of this series is a dream come true.

A suspect on trial for Japan's first ever, real-life locked room murder was acquitted, because the prosecution could not provide a solution or theory explaining the locked room. So, "if the scene is a perfect locked room, it's the same as the culprit having a perfect alibi," became a legal precedent over night as impossible crimes started to dominate Japan's crime statistics ("...a third of all murders..."). Along with the rise of locked room murders came a whole new industry of experts ranging from detectives and criminals specialized in impossible crimes to appraisal companies checking houses for secret passages or hidden rooms.

Kasumi Kuzishiro, an 18-year-old high school student, often feels like he's involved in half of all locked room murders plaguing Japan. Usually, Kuzishiro is dragged along by his childhood friend, Yozuki Asahina, to go hunt for UMA (Unidentified Mysterious Animal) in a remote, isolated place that becomes the scene of a series of impossible murders. Misshitsu ougon jidai no satsujin – Yuko no yakata to muttsu no tricks (Murder in the Age of Locked Rooms – The House of Snow and the Six Tricks, 2022) brought them to the former house of a famous mystery novelist hosting half a dozen locked room murder, which is incidentally also the most conventional of the three. The second title in the series, Misshitsu kyouran jidai no satsujin – Zekkai no katou to nanatsu no trick (Murder in the Age of Locked Room Mania – The Solitary Island in the Distant Sea and the Seven Tricks, 2022), takes the isolated island trope, understandably popular in Japan, to the extreme and adds an extra impossibility to the tally – while maintaining a decent balance between quality and quantity. So every single one is a winner, but most show imagination, originality and some are so good they could have solo carried a locked room mystery novel. Even if they can be a little outlandish at times. Danro Kamosaki evidently wrote this series for the love of the game and the game here is a locked room extravaganza. The third title in the series is no exception.

Misshitsu henai jidaino satsujim – Tozasareto mura to yattsu no trick (Murder in the Age of Locked Room Fetishism – The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks, 2024) begins with Yozuki dragging Kasumi on another UMA hunt, but they get lost and end up in strange, remote village just in time to get embroiled in what came to be called "Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case."

Japanese detective fiction is littered with these strange, fictitious and isolated villages with their own unique history and customs. Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998) is always my go-to example, but Yatsuwako Village takes that concept and takes it to another extreme. Yatsuwako Village is tucked away inside a vast limestone cavern, "twenty times the size of the Tokyo Dome," shaped like a giant square with a massive fissure, dividing the village into east and west halves, connected by a bridge – where five hundred villagers lived and worked for generations. Stranger yet is its architecture and folklore. Every building in the village is a white, box shaped structure with steel doors and fixed windows. They're all plastered over until they're airtight. This is done to keep the kazeitachi, "a beast of the winds that can transform its body into air and infiltrate a house through the tiniest gap," out of their homes. Beside a wind yokai, Yatsuwako Village is also the home of a family of mystery writers dominating the locked room genre in Japan.

Zerohiko Monokaki, family patriarch, multimillionaire, all-purpose genius and occasional mystery writer, whose children would go on to dominate the Japanese mystery scene by combining the locked room puzzle with their own specialized subgenre/category of detective fiction. Ryouichirou Monokaki (social school), Kyoujirou Monokaki (hardboiled), Isaburou Monokaki (forensic/medical), Tabishirou Monokaki (travel mysteries), Fuika Monokaki (sci-fi mysteries), Funika Monokaki (YA mysteries), Fumika Monokaki (historicals), Mei Monokaki (Gothic). There's also Camembert Monokaki, the fifth son of the family, who's not a genius mystery novelist ("...just a pretty face"). Lastly, Fuichirou Monokaki, eldest son of Zerohiko and former head of the family, considered to be greatest locked room artist the country produced and passed away several months before the story's opening. So the Monokaki family dominated the ranking of publications like This Locked Room Mystery is Amazing! for years, but not wholly unopposed. Teika Ojou, the Young Empress of Japanese Mystery, took the #1 spot several times during their reign ("...state of locked room mysteries was a battle between the Monokaki Family and Teika Ojou").

Curiously, Teika Ojou is currently staying at the Monokaki mansion to dodge one of those pesky deadlines. The impossible crime lore of the village doesn't end there. The Eight Locked Room Masters of the Showa Era were "eight genius mystery novelists who appeared one after the other in the 1940s" and a collaboration between them was announced in 1953, which brought them to the village. And, of course, they were brutally murdered. A collection of their best locked room-tricks disappeared never to be found. So, in order to appease their spirits following a string of deaths and misfortunes, the murdered authors were enshrined as "a composite deity under the name Yazuwako Myojin" – dedicating a yearly festival to it. This festival is about to start when Kasumi and Yozuki wander into the village, just in time for the killing to begin. It starts out in a borderline cartoon-ish way.

During the festival, in the middle of a crowd, someone dressed as the kazeitachi, black cloak and a mask of a weasel, shoots Fuika Monokaki in the head, throws a smoke bomb and disappears alongside the body. However, this first murder is not the first impossibility of the story. That comes next! Nobody is allowed to enter or leave the village during the week long celebration and "anyone who violates this taboo will be killed by the curse of Yatsuwako Myojin" ("...the pain the curse inflicts as you die is beyond imagining"). Considering they have a shooting on their hands and murderer on the loose, they try to get out only to find the sole entrance cut-off. And then one of the villages, before bright red flames started streaming from his mouth and bursting into "an enormous pillar of fire." The man had burst into flames with nobody standing near him! From that point onward, Kasumi and Yozuki are confronted with apparently never ending series of locked room murders of various complexities.

There are more of them than the book title suggests. So the impossible crimes, like in the previous novel, are divided in more digestible lumps with the first five dominating the first-half. I already mentioned the spontaneous human combustion in the tunnel entrance, but soon they get confronted with four gruesome murders they dubbed "The Locked Villa," "The Locked Storehouse," "Locked Room of the Spiderwebs" and "Bloodstained Japanese Locked Room" – executed in both sections of the village. Kasumi and Yozuki briefly get separated when the bridge linking both parts goes down stranding Kasumi on the east side and leaving Yozuki on the west side. There some unusual detectives arise to give the first, mostly false-solutions to the locked room killings. You can argue this first badge of locked room murders can be paired, thematically speaking.

First of all, the murders in the villa (east village) and the spiderweb room (west village), which are first explained (independently) by a twin-switch trick. You see, three of the Monokaki daughters are triplets. While I normally detest "twin magic," the way they were used for the false-solutions here are perfectly fine or horrifyingly brilliant. Preferable to the correct solutions, especially the solution to spiderweb room. By the way, the spiderwebs refer to the spiderwebs blocking a secret passageway and provides a double-layered (false) solution. One with the kind of horror (concerning the body) you almost expect from Japanese mystery writers and the other feels like it belongs in a cozy mystery (involving the spiderwebs). The correct solution to the locked villa is certainly an inventive, very involved trick, but found it to be the least impressive trick of the bunch. My reaction to learning the answer was pretty much the same as Kasumi, "of course they did."

The murders in the locked storage room and Japanese room are examples of that shin honkaku specialty, the corpse-puzzle. The locked storehouse involves a mutilated body found hanging in a curious position, unlikely in hangings, but somehow the murderer had evaded being caught on the security footage. This is perhaps the easiest one to solve, but a nicely done locked room puzzle and a typical example of the corpse-puzzle and what can be done with it. However, the murder in the Japanese room is a highlight of the book! A decapitated body is found inside a so-called Japanese room with sliding doors, doors without locks, but "an extremely unique locked room" is created by the spray of blood from the decapitation. The spray of blood splattered on the sliding doors, where the doors touched, "dried to the consistency of dry oil paint." So how could the murderer have left the room after the murderer without disturbing the blood pattern on the door? The visual image the solution conjures up is pure, undiluted nightmare fuel that makes grisly scene of the murder itself seem warm and cozy. It almost feels wasted in a novel crowded with elaborate, often technical locked room murders and impossible crimes.

Yes, this is a very densely-plotted mystery that's all about tricks and locked room obsessed characters, but there was a short, too short, reflection on the impact of locked room murders becoming a major social issue on the character-driven, realism obsessed social school of crime fiction – whose writers struggled with their new reality. Basically, "the positions of locked room authors and social school authors had been completely reversed." I thought it was an interesting side effect on society and culture from locked room murders becoming an everyday reality. Back to the onslaught of locked room murders.

At this point, another friend of Kasumi turns up to assume the role of detective and solve the case, Shitsuri Mitsumura, who was to nobody's surprise in the village all along. She's one of those locked room obsessed character with a talent for seeing right through every trick. Kasumi calls her "an apostle of the locked room," because "if there was a God of Locked Rooms in this world, and that God had to pick one person from Earth to be his messenger, she would definitely be the one he'd choose." Once she destroyed the false-solutions and resolved the previously discussed murders, the process begins with a whole new array of stranger, more elaborate locked room murders. These are "The Locked Temple," "Locked Room of Four Color Boxes" and "Locked Underground Maze."

The locked temple is the least complicated, most straightforward of this badge, conventional even, but the next few get really bizarre and progressively larger in scale. Like the body they found in a room crammed with boxes of various sizes and colors blocking the door opening inwards, which looks like a game of Tetris was interrupted when a body materialized. A locked room premise that tickles the imagination and liked the explanation, but, at this point, the plot gets a crammed while the story needs to hurry on – lessening the impact of the tricks a little. Same goes for the murder in a massive, watched indoors maze giving away Danro Kamosaki is a Yukito Ayatsuji fan, but it honestly needed its own novel in combination with the bonus content. Why stop at eight? As the plot unravels further, it's revealed there's a ninth and tenth locked room mystery hiding in the Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case. The ninth locked room, a truly gargantuan locked room, shows the advantages of a customized setting designed to host a series of impossible crimes.

So, once all the locked room-tricks have been revealed, there only a few characters left standing who could have perpetrated this small scale massacre. It's not the murderer's identity that makes the solution memorable, but the motive behind the murders and locked room trickery. A unique motive that could have only emerged in this strange, locked room obsessed world.

Danro Kamosaki created a plot technical marvel in the impossible crime genre with his three "Murder in the Golden Age of Locked Rooms" novels, but, crazy as it may sounds, this series is not done yet! There's still the unresolved, ongoing storyline involving Kasumi Kuzishiro, Shitsuri Mitsumura and Japan's first unexplained locked room murder that started the locked room craze. So a fourth book is probably in the works, but no idea where Kamosaki could go from here. Maybe a locked room serial killer terrorizing an entire city or a trail of impossible crimes scattered across a hundred year period. Either way, I hope to get to read it. Let's tidy up this messy, overlong rambling review.

Like I said, The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks is overflowing with clever, often wildly original locked room-tricks and a buffet for impossible crime fanatics who want to read about ingenious locked room murders without storytelling and characterization distractions. However, the amount of tricks and ideas crammed into this novel is perhaps too much and came at the cost of the latter, much more elaborate and sometimes interconnected tricks – which needed more space to fully do them justice. That would have doubled the size of the book, but I would have taken a two volume treatment of the Yatsuwako Village Octuple Locked Room Murder Case. This simply packed too much in too short a novel making it harder to keep track of everything and detect along. Regardless, The Locked Village and the Eight Tricks is still a mind boggling achievement, technically speaking, even when compared to the previous novels. I stated in the past four impossibilities is magical number, or sweet spot, because you start running into quality control problems when trying to juggle five, six or more. You can't possibly deliver good, satisfying or even original solutions for each of them. Danro Kamosaki proved me wrong with this series. While overdoing it just a bit, I really shouldn't complain about a mystery giving me nearly half a dozen locked room murders littered with floor plans, diagrams and time tables.

Highly recommended for locked room fanatics, but to be avoided, like the plague, by everyone with a low tolerance for locked room and impossible crime fiction.

Note for the curious: here's my idea about what could be behind the first locked room murder that kicked off the locked room craze. Having now read all three, there's an increasing madness surrounding the locked room phenomena. From the rise in crime in the first novel to the religious sect in the second and finally descending into real madness in the third. An obsession manifesting in complex physical and technical locked room-tricks. So wouldn't it be ironic if that was first locked room murder was a non-impossible crime disguised and made to look like a locked room murder from fiction. A disguise protecting it from the then most well-known solution from fiction and forcing the police, prosecution and any amateur detective to chase a phantom trick. Not sure how it was done and, technically, it would count as a locked room-trick, but one subtle enough be overlooked in this universe obsessed with physical and technical, science-based tricks.

By the way, the phrase "phantom library" is used in reference to a fictitious library said to contain "every locked room mystery ever written" ("...2,628,000 locked room mysteries...").

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!

Mind-boggling Mysteries of a Missionary (2010) by Bertil Falk

Bertil Falk was a Swedish newspaper reporter, TV journalist, magazine editor, translator, writer and something of a pop-fiction historian who published a three volume science-fiction history – Faktasin: den svenskspråkiga science-fiction litteraturens historia (Faktasin: the History of the Swedish-language science-fiction literature, 2020). Falk also wrote a well received biography of Feroze: The Forgotten Gandhi (2016) and completed a 60 year translation project of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939) before his death, aged 90, in 2023.

Beside science-fiction, Falk was a fan of detective fiction and published his first detective novel, Den maskerade ligachefen (The Masked Gangleader, 1954), when he was twenty years old. A second detective novel, Mord & orkidéer (Murder & Orchids, 1996), appeared decades later, but neither received translations. So us non-Swedish mystery fans primarily know Falk as the translator of Ulf Durling's Gammal ost (Hard Cheese, 1971) and Locked Rooms and Open Spaces: An Anthology of 150 years of Swedish Crime & Mystery Fiction of the Impossible Sort (2007). What has been surprisingly overlooked is a volume with Falk's own crime and detective fiction published over fifteen years ago.

Falk's Mind-boggling Mysteries of a Missionary (2010) was published by Lighthouse Publishing. Yes, the same publisher that put out one of the three bellwethers of the then coming Golden Age revival, Dean White's The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (2008). So was both pleasantly surprised and a bit baffled to stumble across another such volume in their catalog from a highly regarded writer, translator and genre historian, because nobody has discussed this collection or even mentioned it – aside from a few mentions on Swedish websites. Even stranger, Mind-boggling Mysteries of a Missionary is presented as a collection of impossible crime stories ("...feature the kind of impossible crime that the missionary is facing..."). Not exactly as advertised as only a few of the stories can be counted as impossible crime fiction, some borderline cases and impossible crime adjacent stories. And some non-impossible crime stories.

The main character in these nine short stories is a retired, unnamed missionary who now lives on an island, in the archipelago of Stockholm, where he either tells or listens to stories from the past. Stories about strange crimes and bizarre incidents, but for few exceptions, they're armchair fiction rather than armchair detective stories. Not bad armchair fiction. However, if you pick up this collection expecting traditional armchair detective stories littered with locked room puzzles, you're going to be disappointed. So adjust your expectations for your own enjoyment.

Just one more thing, before delving into this collection, I normally add original titles and publication dates when reviewing translated mysteries, but have been unable to find if any of these stories first appeared in Swedish. So have to do with their English publication history. Now with that out of the way, let's dig in!

"There Are No Pockets in Our Grave Clothes," first published in the Sept/Oct. 2004 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and reprinted in Passport to Crime (2007), serves as an introduction as the missionary tells his neighbor about an incident from a decade ago. The elderly, dying and widowed Mrs. Laura Svensson is on her death bed and her family is hovering around her fortune like vultures – telling him "soon the brats will have their way." And laments "there are no pockets in the cerements," so she could take it all to the other side. One of her possessions is uncut diamond, "a piece of uncut coal that is worth a fortune," which she keeps at her bedside. When she died three days later, the case with the uncut diamond has vanished. The house is turned upside down and they go as far as performing a clandestine autopsy without result. So how could a frail, dying woman disappear an uncut diamond from her deathbed? The missionary discovers the solution rather than deducing it, however, the astute reader should be able to make an educated guess how she did it.

"The Multicolored Herring," first appearing in the Sept/Oct. 2006, issue Crime Spree Magazine, brings an old friend of the missionary to the island. Roland Franzén is a retired police inspector and had previously appeared, as a teenager, in Falk's The Masked Gangleader helping to expose a spy ring. Franzén tells the missionary about a case from before he was placed in charge of homicide in southern Sweden, which he solved by mistaking a red herring for clue.

A wheelchair bound woman, Kristina Larsson, reported that her husband had gone missing longer than usual ("he goes to other women because of my ill-health"). It takes a while before the police apparatus starts moving, but, when they start looking into his disappearance, the police finds the husband had been doing more than just philandering. However, the trail pretty quickly leads back to his own doorstep and the story becomes a how-did-she-do-it? Kristina Larsson spends most of her time weaving rag carpets at her modified handloom. Franzén perceived a clue in the color scheme of one of her rag carpets and deduced the correct solution from what proved to be the titular, multicolored herring. I liked the idea of a wrong clue that's not misleading, but, on a whole, it needed more than the 15 pages it got.

"Accrued Murder Prevented" appears to be original to this collections in which the missionary returns the favor by telling Franzén a story that happened in New Jersey. A story related to him by one George Gonzales, a family man, who had been innocently convicted of murdering his business partner, Edward King – because nobody else could have pulled the trigger. Nobody with a viable motive. So he was convicted and released after seven years, but still claiming to be innocent, promises to hunt down the real killer and tells the promise society now owes him a murder. When an original, missing piece of evidence resurfaces, it throws a new perspective on the situation and possible solution. So more of a crime story with human interest than a detective story proper. Only part I found interesting was Gonzales' notion that going to jail innocently should "accrue the right to kill" that came from "a science-fiction story he's once read" without mentioning the title or name of the writer.

"The Hit of a Marksman," originally published in Bewildering Stories #256 (2007) and reprinted in the anthology Crime – the Swedish Way (2008), is not at all the spectacular miraculous crime described on the back cover, but a simple anecdote based around a bit of trivia. The missionary tells a story about his time in Kenya when a man named George, a white farmer, was shot by his rival in love, Cornelius – a young Dutch surgeon and marksman. Cornelius shot George straight in the heart. Not only did George survive the shooting, but no bullet penetrated his heart. You don't have to be Father Brown to dispel this miracle.

"The Apostolic Destruction," first published in Bewildering Stories #318 (2008), is an improvement over the previous story and an actual, if minor, impossible crime story. This time, the missionary tells his neighbor about the Apostolic Succession and its significance to some Christians. He also tells her how a mischievous Swedish bishop introduced the Apostolic Succession into the Danish National Church during the consecration of a Danish bishop, which lead to the murder of the Danish bishop some time later. The Danish bishop was murdered, presumably from drinking poisoned wine received at Communion, but the bishops who sipped the wine before and after him were unharmed. So why poisoned the bishop, why and how? Like I said, it's fairly minor as an impossible crime story, but it was a welcome change to see the missionary act as a detective.

"Don't Judge a Strangler by the Hair," published in the anthology (?) Darkest Before the Dawn (2009), regrettably is together with the last story the worst of the lot. A dull, uninteresting and predictable story about a woman who has two men vowing for her attention. One of the men ends up dead, strangled, but problem with the murder weapon, sort of, gives away the murderer.

"The Vicar Who Went Up in Smoke," original to this collection, is an impossible crime story. The missionary is entertaining Eva Lundström, the new bishop of the Swedish Church, and her husband, Herbert ("...a heathen"). So he tells them the story of the vanished vicar which he got to observe close at hand. The vicar in question on the foggy seashore with other pleasure anglers when he vanished into thin air. An angler had seen it happen through a gap in the fog, "one moment he was standing there, the other moment he was gone." This should have been the best story in the collection had the murderer and method not stood out like (ROT13) n Ivxvat va gur Jvyq Jrfg. You'll get it when you read the story.

"A Touch of Truth," first published in Bewildering Stories #371 (2010), is not only the grimmest story of the collection, but also its longest and it shows! It's the collection's most substantially-plotted story.

The missionary is asked by his neighbor why he became a missionary, instead of a private detective. Missionary tells her about the time he was mistaken for a private investigator and asked to kill a man who preyed on children. This man ends up dead in a murder-disguised-as-suicide with deliberate flaws to clue the police in that it was murder. But why? I'm not going to reveal any more details, but it was nice to see Falk making a spirited, not wholly unsuccessful, stab to plot a genuine detective story. Just be warned that the details of the "victim's" crimes are a bit gross. He was even reading a Nancy Drew novel when he was shot and apparently collected vintage girl books. A bullet well spent!

"An Impossible Equation," original to this collections, ended Mind-boggling Mysteries of a Missionary on a sour note. This time, the readers travels alongside the missionary to Los Angeles to attend a consecration, but then a member of the congregation is shot dead in her home. Neighbors had seen her son, Harold Burns, arrive and leave shortly before the murder was discovered. However, Harold was Sydney when his mother was shot. No worries, because Harold has a twin brother, Henry, but Henry lived and worked in Tokyo for many years. So both twins have an unshakable alibi. You can probably anticipate the so-called surprise twist coming (ROT13), lrf, gur nafjre vf gevcyrgf. Unebyq naq Urael ragrerq vagb n pbafcvenpl jvgu gurve ybat-ybfg guveq gjva gb xvyy gurve nohfvir zbgure, orpnhfr abobql xarj nobhg gur guveq oebgure jub unq ercbegrqyl orra fgvyyobea. Just terrible!

So, like I said, the stories in Mind-boggling Mysteries of a Missionary are mostly armchair fiction rather than armchair detective stories, which makes it difficult to recommend to the purists who tend to frequent this blog. I liked "There Are No Pockets in Our Grave Clothes," "The Multicolored Herring" and "The Apostolic Destruction," but "A Touch of Truth" is the only one that cut it as a satisfying detective story. So disappointing this was not an overlooked treasure trove of impossible crime fiction hiding in plain sight, but now I know and at least you breeze through this modern curiosity in no time. If you're still interested, Mind-boggling Mysteries of a Missionary is (as of this writing) still in print. I'll try to pick something good for the next one.