Blackstone Fell (2022) by Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards' Blackstone Fell (2022), alternatively published as The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge, is the third title in the Rachel Savernake series that can best be described as historical, pulp-style retro-thrillers with elaborately-webbed, tangled puzzle plots hidden underneath – comparable only to Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series. A technique known as webwork plotting ("...the art of creating a single story out of random multiple narrative threads") and Edwards cleverly exploited to write one series that satisfies two different groups of readers. Those who enjoy a dark, eventful thriller with characters and those who want their crime fiction supported by a good, solid plot.

I belong to the latter and definitely appreciated the first two Savernake retro-pulp novels, Gallows Court (2018) and Mortmain Hall (2022), which combined the best of the detective story and thriller. Edwards ended both with a "Cluefinder" referring back to the pages and lines where the clues and hints to the solution were hidden in plain sight. Something I can always appreciate, but particularly looked forward to getting to Blackstone Fell as it contains not one, but two, impossible disappearances!

Back in 2022, Edwards wrote on his blog that he had been rewatching "the complete run of episodes of David Renwick's Jonathan Creek," as well as “working on John Dickson Carr titles for the British Library," while Blackstone Fell was still in its conceptional phase – deciding "it would be fun to have a genuine locked room mystery in the book." Edwards has written short impossible crime stories before, "Waiting for Godstow" (2000) and "The House of the Red Candle" (2004), but Blackstone Fell is his first novel-length locked room mystery. Just like it's two predecessors, Blackstone Fell has a plot resembling a deep, densely-webbed structure with maze-like properties. And like the previous novel, this third title in the series has a body count Paul Doherty would approve of.

Blackstone Fell is set in October, 1930, beginning with the arrival of the investigative journalist Nell Fagan in the small, remote Yorkshire village of Blackstone Fell "masquerading as a photographer named Grace" – trying to worm information from the locals about the local sanatorium. Vernon Murray contacted Nell to ask her help to bring whoever murdered his mother to justice, Ursula Murray. A widow who remarried a young, virtually unknown playwright, Thomas Baker ("no, none of the theatre critics have heard of him, either"), who packed her off to Blackstone Sanatorium to recover from a "nervous collapse." There she died from supposedly natural causes, but Vernon refuses to accept that verdict. And, out of desperation, turned to the crime reporter.

Nell took the tenancy of the historical, long vacant Blackstone Lodge as Cornelia Grace and tried poking around, but the close-knit community is not very keen on nosy outsiders and simply refuse to open up ("certainly not to an ungainly Londoner who reeked of tobacco and gin..."). However, Nell's prying disturbed someone as she's almost killed coming down the Fell by a boulder. Realizing she needs help, Nell reaches out to Rachel Savernake through Jacob Flint, because Nell is a persona non grata in Gaunt House. So she has to bait the hook with an offer for Jacob and an enticing mystery for Rachel. A historical locked room mystery centering on the gatehouse known as Blackstone Lodge!

Blackstone Lodge is a damp, drafty gatehouse dating back to the 17th century standing on the grounds of the now crumbling, overgrown Blackstone Tower estate of Harold Lejeune – whose family built and lived in the Tower for centuries. The tower gatehouse stood vacant for nearly as long on account of its dark history of inexplicable disappearances. In 1606, Edmund Mellor was the first guest to be welcomed at the recently completed Blackstone Tower and, one day, was seen by the rector entering the gatehouse, locking the door behind and "not a living soul ever clapped eyes on him again." Mellor had not only vanished into thin air from a locked gatehouse, but a locked gatehouse under observation as "the rector was adamant that he never budged from the spot." Three centuries later, it happened again 1914 when Alfred Lejeune, older brother of Harold, disappeared under similar circumstances from the gatehouse. Never to be seen again and declared dead in 1921. So coupled with the possibility that a killer is on the loose in the village, "perhaps more than one," makes for a pretty mystery to offer to Rachel as a peace offering, but she also had to give Jacob something.

Jacob editor is on a crusade against spiritualism, mediums and other supposedly supernatural mumbo-jumbo, which include "London's most renowned medium," but Ottilie Curle is not easily exposed as she conducted her sessions one-on-one – only to the credulous or the converted. Skeptics and the press are kept at a distance. Nell can arrange a place for Jacob at Curle's séance table under false pretenses, which is too good to turn down and the third main plot-thread of Blackstone Fell. This is only the beginning as people begin to die, left and right, before Rachel can begin her investigation in earnest. An investigation that brings even more deaths from the past to light.

Similar to Gallows Court and Mortmain Hall, you can't really discuss the unfolding events past the setup as things tend to become complicated really fast. Just like the first two books, the complicated web of characters, maze-like plot and potential motives are expertly handled. And beautifully tied together.

First of all, I knew Edwards intended the historical locked room puzzle of Blackstone Lodge to "a sub-ploy rather than the mainspring of the story," but couldn't help being a little disappointed my initial idea proved to be correct. I hoped Edwards' first novel-length locked room mystery would give me something to write about, even only as a minor subplot. The other two plot-threads are better handled with the deaths linked to the sanatorium being retro-pulp at its best ("...n fvtacbfg cbvagvat cebfcrpgvir zheqreref gb Oynpxfgbar Sryy"), while Ottilie Curle's storyline diverges from the usual involving spiritual mediums and dodgy séances. Edwards saved the best for last and concludes with a masterstroke (ROT13) erirnyvat gur guerr, vagrepbaarpgrq pnfrf ner n onpxqebc sbe n sbhegu, zbfgyl snve TNQ-fglyr jubqhavg uvqvat va cynva fvtug. Bravo! It's exactly what I hope to find in a modern mystery styled after the classics of yesteryear.

Just one little nitpick. I was completely satisfied with the ending and immediately turned over to the "Cluefinder," which "enjoyed a vogue during 'the Golden Age of murder' between the world wars" and Edwards decided to resurrect it for this series. It worked wonders for the previous two novels, but not in this case as it showed the clues ("a selection of pointers to the solution of the various mysteries") are not as strong as my impression was from the concluding chapters. Aside from that nagging, fanboyish bit of nitpicking, Blackstone Fell is another page-turner with a captivating, complicated plot and an immersive story that never stop moving. It's a worthy and excellent addition to both this series and the Golden Age revival. I just hope we'll get a genuine novel-length, John Dickson Carr-style locked room mystery from Edwards in the future. Until then, I have Sepulchre Street (2023) awaiting on the big pile.

Mortmain Hall (2020) by Martin Edwards

An enjoyable, underrated luxury of being hooked on Golden Age mysteries in the 21st century is the opportunity the reprint renaissance created to practically pick and choose, which is made even easier by the episodic structure of the most long-running series from the period – like giving an addict access to a pharmacy's supply of prescription drugs. One side-effect of this cherry picking habit is that it made me chronologically-challenged over time. Reading a series in order? That's too retro even for me. Funnily enough, the first flickers of a burgeoning, second Golden Age is slowly breaking that habit. Now we have to wait a year on average for these emerging, traditionally-minded mystery writers to finish their next novel instead of sampling their best, most celebrated or influential detective novels. That's a luxury future fans can take for granted.

However, I'm a little behind on recent releases and developments, which has offered opportunities for a relapse. Last year, I read Gallows Court (2018) by the Nestor of the Golden Age Renaissance, Martin Edwards, which is the first of currently four novels in the Rachel Savernake series. The temptation was there to begin with the third novel, Blackstone Fell (2022), because it featured two seemingly impossible vanishings from a locked gatehouse. I decided to learn from past experiences and start at the beginning of the series, which proved to be a good decision. A notable difference between the greats of the past and this new wave is that their novels tend to be slightly less episodic in nature and feature detectives with a backstory that gets intertwined with the plots.

Gallows Court introduces the reader to Rachel Savernake, "the daughter of a sadistic judge," who was notorious during his lifetime as a hanging judge, but "retired from the bench after his mind had begun to fail and he'd attempted suicide" – spending his remaining years on a small, isolated island with his daughter. Rachel endured a bleak, lonely childhood on the island as her father descended "deeper and deeper into a dark pit of madness." When the old judge finally passed away, Rachel inherited his fortune and returned to London with her loyal retinue ("...Trueman family supported her with extraordinary devotion"). There she's spending a solitary existence collecting surrealists paintings and the study of crime, "murder obsessed her," but her involvement in murder cases is not always, exactly, on the up-and-up ("she danced to her own tune"). This eventually attracts the attention the Clarion's roving crime reporter, Jacob Flint, when she gets involved in a string of bizarre murders.

So it sets up everything and likely would not have fully appreciated Blackstone Fell without it. Why not stick with this whole reading things in order with this series.

Mortmain Hall (2020) is the second novel in the series and as difficult to pigeonhole as the retro-GAD, pulp-style thriller Gallows Court, but suppose "a what-the-hell-is-going-on-here" is a good description. The opening of Mortmain Hall opens outside the private station of the London Necropolis Company, in 1930, as Rachel Savernake boards the funeral train to warn a "ghost." Gilbert Payne is the ghost in question, traveling under the name Betram Jones, who faked his own death and fled to Tangiers. Only returned to see his mother buried. Rachel warns Payne that if she knows he's back in Britain, others will know as well. And offers an opportunity to not end up getting murdered simply by trusting her. Unfortunately, Payne turns her down and falls out of the funeral train on the return journey ("run over by one train after being thrown out of another"). So, once again, Rachel and the Truemans are up to their necks in a dark, murky affair, but, what exactly, is not immediately clear.

Jacob Flint also returns in this second novel and finds him in court to cover the sensational trial of Clive Danskin. The man standing trial is accused of the torch-murder of an unidentified victim in order to pass the body off as his own and escape a costly divorce, numerous mistresses and countless creditors – a strong motive with a weak, unsupported alibi. Flint watches on as all the damning, circumstantial evidence and testimonies begins to form a chain, "chain strong enough to drag him to the gallows," but a surprise witness saved him neck. Clive Danskin is not the last one to appear in this story who escaped an early morning appointment with the hangman. And those murder cases appear to be modeled on famous cases from the past. For example, the Wirral Bungalow murder is unmistakably patterned after the Wallace Case that captured the imagination of so many Golden Age writers (e.g. The Detection Club's The Anatomy of Murder, 1936).

A person who appears to take a great deal of interests in these supposed and freed murderers is "one of England's foremost criminologists," Leonora Dobell, who writes under the name Leo Slaterbeck. When she spots Flint in court, she asks him to pass on a message to Rachel. Pretty soon, Flint is dragged into another dangerous, godless adventure straight from the pulps bringing him to the shady Clandestine Club and becoming the target of an attempted frame job. It takes a while before everyone ends up at the titular hall and it's hard to describe much of what happens before or after that ("...it's impossible to be clear who is doing what") without giving anything away. And the less you know, the better.

So while the plot can't really be discussed, Edwards delivered another oddly compelling, not always easy to define, take on yesteryear's crime fiction. I've seen this series described as mystery-thrillers, combining the best of both, but traditional detective novels masquerading as retro-pulp would fit as well. What matters most is that it simply works. No matter how strange the emerging patterns become or turns of events take, Mortmain Hall has an intricate, fair play plot hiding underneath what appears to be a pulpy retro-thriller. It even has a "Cluefinder" at the end of the book pointing out "thirty clues in the narrative to the principal strands of the plot."

I only wished Mortmain Hall allowed for a longer, more detailed ramble, but I'm sure Blackstone Fell is going to give me exactly that opportunity with two impossible disappearances centuries apart. I intend to get to that one presently, but until then, this series comes highly recommended as a fresh and engrossing take on the popular detective stories and pulp-thrillers of the 1920s and '30s.

Gallows Court (2018) by Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards is a British solicitor turned award-winning crime writer and anthologist who debuted with All the Lonely People (1991), introducing his first series-character Harry Devlin, but, over the past ten years, Edwards has been tirelessly championing the classics – assuming the role of Nestor of the Golden Age Renaissance. Edwards published well-timed genre studies, The Golden Age of Murder (2015) and The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books (2017), right when the reprint renaissance gained some serious momentum. Serving as companion pieces and introductory guides to the swelling flood of reprints. Edwards has also been working overtime as he compiled over twenty anthologies, beginning with Capital Crimes (2015), published under the British Library Crime Classics banner. A noteworthy entry in the British Library anthology series is the locked room-themed Miraculous Mysteries (2017).

That's merely a small sampling of Edwards' contributions to the genre, classic and contemporary, but I've only read two of his short stories, "Waiting for Godstow" (2000) and "The House of the Red Candle" (2004), to date. So about time I tried one of his novels. Where better to begin than with the 1930s historical retro-GAD series Edwards created five years ago?

Gallows Court (2018) is the first of currently four novels in the Rachel Savernake series and had been warned that the novel is incredibly difficult to discuss and properly review. Holy shit, the reviews were not kidding! Gallows Court is an intricately-plotted, pulp-style thriller that can be best summed up as cloak-and-daggers in a dark labyrinth, surrounded by a dense hedge maze, rigged with traps, explosives and secret passageways – bodies around every corner the story takes. All the chaos and mayhem served one purpose: introducing and establishing the character of Rachel Savernake.

Rachel Savernake is the daughter of a wealthy and notorious hanging judge, "Savernake of the Scaffold, people called him," who was forced to retire after attempting to slash his wrists at the Old Bailey. So the old judge returned and Rachel returned to Savernake Hall, situated on an island called Gaunt, which is "as isolated as anywhere in the kingdom." Rachel spend her childhood in that lonely, isolated place with a demented father and some retainers reading every volume of criminal history in the judge's private library ("...no place for a child to grow up"). But when the old judge finally passed away, the now twenty-some Rachel returned to London as a fabulously rich woman while retaining her reclusive habits. She bought a mansion, rechristened Gaunt Hall, turned it into "a luxurious fortress" and generally shunned publicity. However, Rachel apparently has been playing amateur detective as she solved the Chorus Girl Murder and is currently on the trail of the Headless Torso Killer, but the murderers conveniently committed suicide. One took enough strychnine to put down a horse and the other swallowed a bullet inside a locked room.

Gallows Court makes it abundantly clear Rachel and her own faithful retainers had a hand in their suicides, but to what extend? You always have to take certain narrative tricks into consideration. The story is interspersed with old diary entries from Rachel's distant cousin, Juliet Brentano, who lived at Savernake Hall at the time of the Spanish flu pandemic and the diary entries do not paint a very flattering picture of the then 14-year-old Rachel – a child as "mad as the old brute who fathered her." Now she appears to be all tied in a spate of violent murders and dodgy suicides.

That unavoidably begins to attract unwanted attention. Firstly, there's the Clarion reporter, Jacob Flint, whose chief crime correspondent, Thomas Betts, was run over and is now on his death bed. Betts heard rumors of Rachel ferreting out the culprit behind the Chorus Girl Murder, but everyone refused to talk on the record. And then he got run over. So, recognizing a good story and wanting to tell Rachel's story, Flint dives head first into a very deep and dangerous rabbit hole, but realizes too late that everyone even remotely connected to the case has to fear for their lives. To say that there are a lot of murder would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that Gallows Court has the Paul Doherty amount of bodies. Flint does not emerge from his horrific ordeal entirely unscathed.

Now all of this still sounds relatively straightforward and comprehensible for a historical, pulp-style thriller, but the further the story progresses, the deeper it descends into pulp and thriller territory – really out there kind of pulp. Gallows Court reads like a modern descendant of the pulp-style mystery thrillers by John Russell Fearn (The Rattenbury Mystery, 1955) and Gerald Verner (They Walk in Darkness, 1947), but dialed all the way up. So with new plot developments, twists and turns every other chapter, the plot of Gallows Court is next to impossible to boil down. It's quite the journey. What can be said is mystery readers looking for a more traditionally treatment of the 1930s detective story will be disappointed as the story is essentially a thriller clad like a Golden Age detective, but it has a very good reason to take this route.

I noted earlier the plot serves to introduce and establish the character of Rachel Savernake, while peeling away the layers of her backstory. I think most people who read this blog can anticipate one of the main plot-twists concerning Rachel's character, but what counts is how it sets-up the series and the implications of Rachel appearing on the scene of an ordinary-looking murder. Rachel Savernake reminds me in that regard of younger version of Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley. You can draw a comparison between Rachel's debut and Mrs. Bradley's first appearance in Speedy Death (1929), but, like everything else in Gallows Court, the character of Rachel is dialed up to eleven. So its fortunate I listened to my inner voice of reason this time around and not immediately skipped to the third novel in the series (Blackstone Fell, 2022), because it has two impossible disappearances from a locked gatehouse and a clue-finder! So it was very tempting to start with the locked room title, but Gallows Court is clearly an essential piece needed to understand and fully appreciate what comes next. Look at me being chronological all of a sudden.

So while the thriller is not always the game I enjoy, I can enjoy a good, pulp-style thriller every now and then. Edwards wrote engrossing and absorbing historical thriller that keeps you turn the pages to see what's going to explode in your face next. Mortmain Hall (2020) and Blackstone Fell have been moved up the big pile. To be continued...

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018) edited by Martin Edwards

The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018) is the third, wintry-themed anthology published in the British Library Crime Classics series, edited by Martin Edwards, collecting eleven festive stories about "unexplained disturbances in the fresh snow" and "the darkness that lurks beneath the sparkling decorations" – wrapped and presented to the reader like "a seasonal assortment box." This collection presents a wide variety of merry mayhem from the pens of some very well-known mystery writers to a few names who have only recently been rediscovered. But none of the stories have been, what you could call, anthologized to death. So let's pig on this suspicious looking, crime sprinkled Christmas pudding, shall we? Hmm, smells like bitter almonds! 

The collections opens with Baroness Orczy's "A Christmas Tragedy," originally published in the December, 1909, issue of Cassell's Magazine, which has a Christmas Eve party keeping an ear out for "the sound of a cart being driven at unusual speed." A sound that has lately become associated with a series of "dastardly outrages against innocent animals" in the neighborhood of Clevere Hall. So everyone is very keen to put a stop to these cattle-maiming outrages and the cart is heard that night, but this time it was followed by a terrible cry, "Murder! Help! Help!" Major Ceely, host of the party, is found on the garden steps with a knife wound between his shoulder blades. The local police gladly accepts the assistance of Lady Molly, of Scotland Yard, whose success or failure will decide the fate of an innocent man. Not a bad story for the time, but not one of my personal favorites. 

Selwyn Jepson's "By the Sword" first appeared in the December, 1930, issue of Cassell's Magazine and has claimed a place among my favorite seasonal mysteries. Alfred Caithness is spending Christmas with his cousin, Judge Herbert Caithness, who has an idyllic home life with a wife, Barbara, who's twenty-eight years his junior and a five-year-old son, Robert – who loves playing with his toy soldiers. So the perfect setting for an old-fashioned Christmas party, but Alfred has reasons to be more than a little envious of his cousin. He has loved Barbara ever since attending their wedding and sorely needs the kind of money Herbert has aplenty, which is why he decides his cousin has to go when he denies him another loan. So, inspired by the family legend saying that "a Caithness always dies by the sword," Alfred begins to plot the perfect murder with all the evidence pointing to an outsider. However, the entire universe, or the Ghosts of Christmas, appear to be against him as even the best-laid plans can go awry. A fantastic inverted mystery from the hoist-on-their-petards category.

John Pringle is perhaps best remembered today by his principle pseudonym, "Gerald Verner," who prolifically produced pulp-style detective and thriller novels during his lifetime. "The Christmas Card Crime," published as by “Donald Stuart,” originally appeared in the December, 1934, publication of Detective Weekly (No. 96). Trevor Lowe, a well-known dramatist and amateur detective, who you might remember from my reviews of Terror Tower (1935) and The Clue of the Green Candle (1938) is en route with his secretary Arnold White and Detective Inspector Shadgold to spend Christmas with a friend in a small Cornish village, but their train becomes stranded when the heavy snowfall blocks the line. So they have to walk back to the previous station along with seven other passengers, six men and a woman, but they have to go from the empty station to an old, gloomy inn of ill-repute. During the night, two people are murdered in short succession with the thick, undisturbed carpet of snow indicating "no one came from outside and no one has left from within." The only real clue Lowe has to work with is a torn Christmas card. A good and fun piece of Christmas pulp, but more memorable for its mise-en-scène than its plot. However, I have to give props for turning the last words of the second victim in a kind of dying message sort of pointing to the murderer.

The next two stories have been previously reviewed on this blog, here and here, but, needless to say, Carter Dickson's "Blind Man's Hood" (1937) and Ronald A. Knox's "The Motive" (1937) can be counted among the best stories in the collection. Both come highly recommended! 

Francis Durbridge's "Paul Temple's White Christmas" first appeared in Radio Times on December 20, 1946, but reads more like vignette than a proper short-short story. Paul Temple's dream of a white Christmas in Switzerland is granted when he's asked to go there to identify the main suspect in that Luxembourg counterfeit business he had help to smash. So not much to say about this one with only half a dozen pages and a razor thin plot. 

Cyril Hare's "Sister Bessie or Your Old Leech" was originally published in the Evening Standard on December 23, 1949, which is another one of my personal favorites from this collection. Timothy Trent was brought up by his step family, the Grigsons, but Timothy was the only "one of that clinging, grasping clan" who "got on in the world" and made money – someone from that family has been annually blackmailing him. Every year, around Christmas time, he receives a payment notice signed by "From your old Leech." Timothy was actually surprised by the latest demand, because he assumed he had gotten rid of Leech last February. But here he was again. Or was it a she? Timothy goes to the Grigson family party determined to smoke out the blackmailer, but, once again, even the best-laid plans can go awry and here it comes with a particular dark, poisonous sting in the tail. An excellent crime story demonstrating why Hare was admired by both his contemporary brethren and modern crime writers like P.D. James and Martin Edwards. 

E.C.R. Lorac's "A Bit of Wire-Pulling" originally appeared under the title "Death at the Bridge Table" in the Evening Standard on October 11, 1950, which is another short-short. Inspector Lang, the old C.I.D. man, tells the story of the time he had to protect an important industrialist, Sir Charles Leighton, who received threatening letters promising he will be dead before the old year's out. So he accompanies him, incognito, to a New Year's Eve bridge party where's shot to death in front of Lang's eyes and the murderer apparently managed to escape. However, the sharp-eyed detective quickly begins to pick up the bits and pieces that tell an entirely different story. More importantly, he trusts the men he has personally trained. Lorac was somewhat of a female John Rhode, as she was very keen on technical trickery, but you can't help but feel the murderer was doomed from the start by employing such a ballsy method. A pretty decent short-short. Not especially memorable, but not bad either. 

John Bude's "Pattern of Revenge," another short-short, was first published in The London Mystery Magazine (No. 21) in 1954 and surprisingly turned out to be an impossible crime story set in Norway. The story is a retrospective of a rivalry between two men, Thord Jensen and Olaf Kinck, who vy for the attention of a beautiful woman, Karen Garborg, but one morning she found dead on the doorstep of her cottage – stabbed through the heart. There was "only one set of tracks in the fresh-fallen snow," single footprints alternating with deep pock-marks, "characteristic of the imprint left by a wooden leg." Olaf has a wooden leg and his fingerprints were on the knife. So he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but a deathbed confession shed new light on the murder and attempts to right a wrong. A very well done short-short and a truly pleasant surprise to come across this unusual take on the footprints-in-the-snow impossible crime. 

John Bingham's "Crime at Lark Cottage" was originally published in the 1954 Christmas edition of The Illustrated London News and brings a slice of domestic suspense to the family Christmas table. John Bradley gets lost on a dark, snowy evening while his car is on the verge of breaking down and ends up at a lonely cottage. There he finds a woman with her small daughter and asks to use the phone, but is offered to stay the night as there's not garage around who would come out to the cottage at that time of night in foul weather. But she appears to be frightened. And it looks like someone is prowling around the cottage. A very well done piece of crime fiction that would have served perfectly as a radio-play for Suspense.

The last story to round out this seasonal anthology is Julian Symons' "'Twix the Cup and Lip," but nothing he wrote interests me and skipped it. That brings me to the end of this collection.

So, on a whole, The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories is a splendidly balanced anthology with Dickson, Hare, Jepson, Knox and Stuart delivering the standout stories of the collection with the other entries being a little too short or dated to leave an indelible impression on the reader. But not a single real dud or over anthologized story to be found. Two things that tend to be obligatory for these types of short story collections. Definitely recommended for those cold, shortening days of December.

A Dickens of a Crime: "The House of the Red Candle" (2004) by Martin Edwards

One of the luxury problems facing connoisseurs of the traditional detective story today, which is enjoying a veritable renaissance, is the unending avalanche of reprints and translations of once hard-to-find, completely out-of-reach authors, novels and short stories – transforming manageable TBR-piles into mountainous monstrosities. Some of the authors and novels on my pile, like the bodies dotting Mount Everest, seemed to be doomed to be stuck there forever. 

Every now and then, I try to bring one down, but my taste for the obscure and crippling impossible crime addiction tends to take precedence. There is, however, no bullshit excuse why I didn't get to Martin Edwards sooner. An award-winning crime novelist, anthologist, genre historian and a leading light of the current reprint renaissance. So where better to start than with one of his locked room mysteries. 

"The House of the Red Candle" was written for Death by Dickens (2004), an anthology of original stories based on Charles Dickens' work, but Edwards' contribution made Dickens the detective and is accompanied by his drinking buddy and budding novelist, Wilkie Collins – who acts as the Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. Story begins with Collins telling the reader that he could have "woven a triple-decker novel of sensation" from "the macabre features" of the murder of Thaddeus Whiteacre. Dickens had told him "the case must never be solved" and Collins had honored that wish, but enough time had passed "to permit the truth to be revealed."

A story that begins in a crowded, Greenwich tavern where Dickens is acting mysteriously and asks Collins to come with him to the House of the Red Candle. A house of ill repute where he wants him to meet a woman, Bella, but asks him not to ask too many questions until then and to completely trust him. Dickens promises his friend that he "will not readily forget tonight."

When they arrive at the house, Dickens handily convinces the fat brothel-keeper, Mrs. Jugg, they're proper gentlemen with a handful of banknotes, but Bella is locked inside her room with another customer. Only then Mrs. Jugg notices Thaddeus Whiteacre had not paid her enough to have Bella for the better part of an hour, but their knocking is answered with a cry for help. So the door is smashed open and discover Whiteacre, dead and naked, tied with his wrists to the bedstead. Bella is nowhere to be found. She vanished from the locked and bolted room "as if she never existed."

A cracking premise for a historical locked room story with an adequately clued solution, which is more than sufficient to put all the pieces together yourself. The who-and why take precedent over the how as the latter is a direct result of the former with a nice peppering of the general cussedness of things. So it's not a terribly complicated detective story, but, to be fair to Edwards, "The House of the Red Candle" was commissioned as a Dickensian crime story and in that the story succeeded admirably – particular the historical shading of the story was very well done. Purely as a historical (locked room) mystery, Edwards' "The House of the Red Candle" can be compared and stand with Paul Doherty's historical mysteries (c.f. the locked brothel mystery in The Herald of Hell, 2015) as neither sanitized and dolled-up the less romantic, dirty and smudged pages of history. And that makes it all the more interesting when they're used as the setting for a classically-styled detective story. Only difference is that Edwards looks to be more character-driven than Doherty.

So, in closing, Edwards' "The House of the Red Candle" is not the most challenging, or puzzling, of detective stories, but still comes recommended as a well-written and realized historical mystery with a Dickens of a crime.

Wanton Wonders

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, 1890)

Martin Edwards is a decorated crime novelist, genre-historian and author of the award-winning The Golden Age of Murder (2015), which I still haven't read, but currently he's also engaged as the resident anthologist of the British Library – compiling such themed anthologies as Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015) and Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries (2016). Last week, the greatest title in the series yet rolled off the printing presses.

Yes, that's my personal, opinionated bias bleeding through. I love locked room mysteries. Deal with it.

Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017) gathered sixteen short stories that were never, or rarely, collected in similar themed anthologies. A good portion of the stories came from the hands of such luminaries as Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers, but Edwards complemented their work with several obscure, long-overlooked impossible crime tales by Grenville Robbins, Christopher St. John Sprigg and E. Charles Vivian – resulting in a pleasantly balanced collection of short stories. So let's take a closer look at the content of this newest anthology of miracle crimes.

However, I gave the following handful of stories a pass, because I didn't feel like re-reading them or discussed them previously on this blog: Conan Doyle's "The Lost Special," William Hope Hodgson's "The Thing Invisible," R. Austin Freeman's "The Aluminium Dagger," Nicholas Olde's "The Invisible Weapon" and Michael Innes' "The Sands of Thyme." Even with these stories eliminated from the line-up, this is still going to be one of those bloated blog-posts that grows at the same speed as Erle Stanley Gardner's bibliography. Strap in, everyone. This is going to be a long ride!

So that makes the first story under examination Sax Rohmer's "The Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room," originally published in the April 1913 issue of The New Magazine, which starred one of his obscure, short-lived series-character, Moris Klaw – whose cases were collected in The Dream Detective (1920). Klaw is an antique dealer and an occult detective who prefers to spend the night at the scene of a crime, which reproduces clue-like images of the victim's last thoughts in his dreams (hence the book-title). Scene of the crime in this series-opener is the Greek Room of the Menzies Museum.

A night attendant got his neck broken in the Greek Room, but how an outsider could've entered and left the premise is a complete mystery. There are only two entrances to the room, a public and a private one, which were both securely locked and the windows were fitted with iron bars. And there was no place where even "a mouse could find shelter." Klaw is allowed to camp out in the room and received a psychic photograph "a woman dressed all in white," but also got the impression the night watchman had a "great fear for the Athenean Harp" - a gemstone in the museum's collection. Honestly, I did not expect too much from this story, but, while dated, the plot was fairly decent and well-put together. Granted, some of the finer details about the exact cause of death and murder method were as ridiculous as they were dated.

However, as much as some aspects of the explanation stretches credulity, they were still surprisingly down to earth for a detective story from an occult mystery series. I also have to earmark the impossible problem, and its solution, as an early example of a particular type of impossibility that would turn up again in the works of John Dickson Carr, Ken Greenwald and David Renwick.

The next entry is one of favorite stories from G.K. Chesterton's celebrated Father Brown series, "The Miracle of Moon Crescent," which came from a collection of short stories saturated with impossible crime material – aptly titled The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). I've always been fond of this story on account of the originality and brilliance of its locked room problem.

A problem concerning the miraculous disappearance of an American philanthropist, Warren Wynd, who vanished from a watched room on the fourteenth floor of the apartment complex called Moon Crescent. Equally inexplicable is his reappearance at the end of a rope in the garden below. Luckily, Father Brown is at hand to alleviate the minds of the baffled, "hard-shelled materialists" that were present outside of Wynd's room and explain this apparent miracle. The priest based his explanation on a madman he had seen firing a blank at the building, which told him how the philanthropist was whisked away from a closely observed room and why he was found hanging from a tree branch. Absolutely ingenious! Only weakness of the plot is the rather silly, far-fetched motive, but even that was somewhat original.

Marten Cumberland's "The Diary of Death" was first published in The Strand Magazine of January, 1928, which has a premise that should've been explored at novel length: a once popular musical singer, Lilian Hope, had disappeared from the spotlight into "obscurity and direst poverty" - where "she died in a miserable garret." During her waning years, Hope kept a diary in which she poured out "vindictive and bitter accusations" against her former friends. Naming everyone who she felt had abandoned her and refused any kind of help. Someone got a hold of this diary and begins to extract revenge on everyone mentioned in it. Leaving behind a torn page from the diary after every murder.

So the police have their hands full with the "Death Diary Murders," but the one who gets an opportunity to put a stop to the killings is an amateur criminologist, Loreto Santos. At a house party, Santos is approached by the person who's "next on the list," Sir George Frame. He used be a friend of Hope, but the money he mailed to the poor woman was intercepted by his wife. So she never received an answer or a penny and dedicated some bitter words to Sir George in her diary. And now he has received a torn page in the mail.

Sadly, Santos is unable to avert Sir George's impending doom, because the following morning they've to batter down the locked-and bolted door of his bedroom door with a Crusader's mace and they find his body in the middle of the room – a knife-handle protruding from his back. A story with an intriguing and solid premise, however, its resolution was a bit too simplistic. I easily spotted the murderer and the problem of the locked room hinged on an old trick (c.f. "The Locked Room Lecture" from Carr's The Hollow Man, 1935), but still found it an enjoyable story.

Grenville Robbins' "The Broadcast Murder," originally published in Pearson's Magazine of July, 1928, which is one of the earliest examples of a detective story set in the world of radio. I think the story also demonstrate that mystery writers from the first half of the twentieth century had no problem incorporating new technologies into their plot. In this case, hundreds of thousands listeners heard how the radio announcer suddenly yelled "help!" followed by "the lights have gone out" and "someone's trying to strangle me," but the fate of the announcer remains unknown – since his body disappeared from "a hermetically sealed studio." The trick is relatively simple one, using old-fashioned misdirection, but the reason for staging such an illusion at a radio studio shows the Golden Age was about to go in full bloom.

Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) lists a second short story by Robbins, "The Broadcast Body," which was published in the June, 1934, issue of 20-Story Magazine and deals with a professor who vanished from a guarded room "in which he was carrying out a matter-transference experiment." So that might be a potential candidate for inclusion in a future anthology of this kind.

The next story, "The Music Room," was lifted from the pages of the pseudonymous Sapper's Ask for Ronald Standish (1936), which reportedly collects some of his more detective-orientated crime-fiction and features his second-string sleuth, Standish.

Standish is a guest at a, sort of, house warming party during which the host, Sir John Crawsham, entertains the party by telling about an unsolved mystery that came with the property. Nearly half a century ago, the then lodge-keeper found the body of an unknown man in the music-room, "lower part of his face had literally been battered into a pulp," but the real mystery is how his assailant could have entered or left the room – because the door had to be broken open and the key was on the inside of the door. As to be expected, someone else dies inside the locked music-room, crushed by a chandelier, before too long. 

However, the explanation is hardly inventive and even a bit disappointing, but appreciated how the potential presence of a hidden passage was used. Otherwise, it's not really a remarkable story at all.

Back in 2015, Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of an Airman (1935) was republished as a British Library Crime Classic and this brand new edition was as well received as the original edition. So readers might be glad to know that this anthology contains one of his obscure short stories.

"Death at 8:30" was salvaged from the pages of the May 25, 1935, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly and can be classified as a sensationalist thriller with a mild puzzle plot, similar to Anthony Berkeley's Death in the House (1939), but superior in every way imaginable – one of them being is that this story does not overstay its welcome. A murderous blackmailer, known only as "X.K.," demanded exorbitant sums of money in exchange to be left alone, but, when a victim refused, they would be swiftly dispatched to the Great Hereafter. There were three men who refused to comply with the demands and they were all murdered under mysterious circumstances. The fourth person who refuses to pay is no less a figure than the Home Secretary, Sir Richard Jauntley, which demands extreme and extraordinary security precautions.

The vaults of the Bank of England was put at their disposal and the Home Secretary was encased in "a cell of thick bullet-proof glass," surrounded by armed men, but, at the time announced by “X.K.,” the Home Secretary began to writhe in agony and died within mere seconds – poisoned! However, there were no apparent ways of how the poison could have been introduced inside the sealed, bullet-proof and air-filtered glass tube. One that was located in a sealed and heavily guarded bank vault. I suppose I've been reading too many impossible crime stories, because I immediately spotted the tale-tell clue that told me how it was done. But how the murderer was dealt with was something else all together. So, yes, not bad for a sensational thriller story.

G.D.H. and Margaret Cole's "Too Clever by Half" was included in The Detection Club's Detection Medley (1939) and is a semi-inverted mystery, in which the narrator, Dr. Benjamin Tancred, tells about a clever murderer he once met. 

Samuel Bennett was the brainy licensee of the "Golden Eagle," an inn in the remote Willis Hill, where he was in the process of murdering his brother-in-law when Dr. Tancred turned up. The victim was found in an upstairs bedroom, locked from the inside, with a bullet-hole in his head. On the surface, it looks like a simple case of suicide, but Dr. Tancred suspects murder based on the inn-keepers behavior, a lighted keyhole, the angle of the fatal bullet and the smell of gun powder in the corridor.

This is not really a story that allows you to puzzle along with the detective, but it's fun to watch the detective dismantle, what could have been, a clever and near perfect murder without breaking a sweat.

E. Charles Vivian's "Locked In," originally collected in My Best Mystery Story (1939), was a disappointing and forgettable tale of a supposed suicide in a locked room. I did not care for it. Moving on...

Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Haunted Policeman" was first published in the February, 1938, issue of Harper's Bazaar and was posthumously collected in Striding Folly (1971), but remains one of her most criminally underrated pieces of fiction. The story represents one of her most imaginative and strongest puzzle-plot, which could easily have been a Carter Dickson yarn in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940)!

The story opens on the night when Lord Peter Wimsey's first son is born and, shortly thereafter, meets a confused policeman. One who has a very interesting ghost story to tell. P.C. Alfred Burt was pounding pavement in Merriman's End, "a long cul-de-sac," where his eye fell upon "a rough-looking fellow" in "a baggy old coat" was lurking suspicious in the shadow, but when he was about to ask the character what he was doing when someone yelled bloody murder – which seemed to come from Number 13. Nobody answered the door. But the policeman did take a peek through the letter-flap and saw a man laying the hall with a carving-knife in his throat. However, when he returned, alongside a colleague, all of the houses in the street have even numbers. There's no number 13! And none of the house they visited have an interior that resembles what he observed through the letter-flap. The house, alongside the body, vanished into the dark of the night.

The explanation for this apparent impossibility is as satisfying as it's cleverly simple. And, as noted here above, the plot of the story is very Carrish in nature and could have easily been a case for Colonel March of Department D-3. After all, he handled a similar kind of problem in "The Crime in Nobody's Room."

The next story is Edmund Crispin's "Beware of the Trains," originally published in The London Evening Standard in 1949, which has Gervase Fen assisting his policeman friend, Detective-Inspector Humbleby, when a motorman disappeared from a moving train. At the same time, the police had surrounded the small station to collar a burglary. So nobody could have slipped out unobserved. A well-known and competent enough story, but hardly one of Crispin's best impossible crime stories. There are a pair of lesser-known, but far stronger, locked room stories in Crispin's repertoire, namely "A Country to Sell" and "Death Behind Bars," which appeared in a posthumous collection – entitled Fen Country: Twenty-Six Stories (1979). Hopefully, one of them will be considered for a future anthology of locked room mysteries.

Finally, we have the youngest story in the collection, Margery Allingham's "The Villa Marie Celeste," which was first published in the October, 1960, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Personally, I'm not really a big fan of Allingham, but this has to be one of the niftiest domestic mysteries I ever came across. A young couple, married for three years, disappeared from their comely home in Chestnut Grove. They apparent vacated a half-eaten breakfast on a washing-day, took some sheets and vanished "like a stain under a bleach." Technically, this story does not really qualify as an impossible crime, but the quality of the story makes that a forgivable offense.

Some of you might want to know that the unusual, but original, motive makes it a close relative of a genuine locked room mystery from the 1980s, "The Locked Bathroom" by H.R.F. Keating, which I reviewed here. Funnily enough, both stories have a solution that involves laundry.

Mercifully, that brings us at the end of this bloated, drawn out and badly written review!

All in all, the short stories collected in Miraculous Mysteries were very consistent in quality. There were only two real stinkers, Freeman (ripped off a well-known story) and Innes (completely ridiculous), but skipped those two and that left only one (minor) disappointment (i.e. Vivian). All of the other entries were either decent, good or historically interesting. So no real complaints about the overall quality of the collection. 

However, it was a small let down that this anthology did not collect any new sparkling classics that were completely unknown to me, but that's the price one pays for consuming ridiculous amounts of impossible crime-fiction. That being said, this anthology is a welcome addition to the slowly growing row of locked room themed short story collections of which there can never, ever, be enough.

So, despite my annoying nitpicking, I do hope this will not be the last locked room anthology Edwards will compile for the British Library, because I really do love impossible crime stories. And I'm only, like, halfway through all of the novels and short stories listed by Adey in Locked Room Murders. I really, really need more anthologies to complete that task and reach full enlightenment. 

And, as always, I'll try to keep my next review a whole lot shorter.  

Dark Are the Days of Winter

"There is, at Christmas, a spirit of goodwill. It is, as you say, "the thing to do." Old quarrels are patched up, those who have disagreed consent to agree once more, even if it is only temporarily."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Murder for Christmas, 1938)

Back in May, I reviewed Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries (2015), edited by Martin Edwards, who is known as an award-winning crime novelist, genre-historian and the author of The Golden Age of Murder (2015), but now Edwards is building a reputation as the resident anthologist of the British Library Crime Classics – compiling a rapidly growing number of themed mystery anthologies for them.

Thus far, the stack includes Capital Crimes: London Mysteries (2015), Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries (2016) and Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes (2016), but potentially the best collection of short stories is still in the pipeline: Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017). But that anthology won't be released for another six or seven months. So, for the moment, I will have to make do with what has already been published, which brings us to the subject of today's blog-post.

Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries (2016) is an offering of "vintage crime stories set in winter" and a sequel, of sorts, to Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries (2015), which became "one of the UK's fastest-selling crime anthologies" and this lead to the commission of a second compendium of wintry tales – as there's "no denying that the supposed season of goodwill" is "a time of year that lends itself to detective fiction." Edwards succeeded in cobbling together a collection of rare, interesting and often excellent detective stories breathing the spirit of Yuletide. Let's take these stories down from the top.

Fergus Hume's "The Ghost’s Touch," culled from the pages of The Dancer in Red (1906), acts as this collection's curtain-raiser and some aspects of the plot anticipates John Dickson Carr's other famous radio-play, "The Devil’s Saint," which has several versions – two of them I discussed here and here. Hume's story is narrated by Dr. Lascelles, who relates the terrible Christmas of 1893, when he accompanied a friend, Percy Ringan, to his ancestral home. Percy's father accumulated wealth as a gold prospector in Australia, but his poorer cousin, Frank, inherited the family title and estate. So their relationship is both familial and mutually beneficial.

Frank invited both of them to spend Christmas at the Ringan estate, Ringshaw Grange, which resembles "the labyrinth of Daedalus" and has a cursed chamber, the Blue Room, haunted by the ghost of Lady Joan – who reputedly touches occupants of the room "who were foredoomed to death." As to be expected, one of the cousins decide to sleep in the Blue Room, but Dr. Lascelles intervenes in their plans and effectively demonstrates the mortality of the accursed ghost of the room. Not really a rug puller of a detective story, but a good, solid example from "The Room That Kills" category (i.e. a ghost story with a logical explanation).

The second story comes from "The King Kong of the Thriller," Edgar Wallace, whose predilection for lurid sensationalism and hoary dramatics has a repellent effect on me, but the few short stories I read seem to contradict his reputation as a writer of dated melodrama – which is certainly true for "The Chopham Affair." 

Originally, the story was published in one of Wallace's own collections, The Woman from the East (1934), and can be described as a crime story with a twist: one of the main characters of the tale is an old-fashioned rogue, "Alphonse or Alphonso Riebiera," who passes himself off as a Spaniard, but has a passport from one of those shady South American republics. Riebiera eked out a living as a blackmailer of women of rich husbands and turned this in "a well-organized business," but one day, the husband of one of his victims accidentally receives a blackmail note. As a result, the husband decides (as Sherlock Holmes would call it) to extract some private revenge. However, this result in an unusual and hard to explain situation: the blackmailer is found in the snow, shot through the head, alongside the body of a car thief. How this situation came about is the twist in the tail of the story. I liked it and should try one of his full-length novels in the not so distant future.

Margery Allingham's "The Man with the Sack" was first published as "The Case of the Man with the Sack" in a 1936 issue of the illustrious Strand Magazine, which plays a familiar tune on the theme of stolen jewels during a Christmas house party. Reluctantly, Mr. Albert Campion accepts Lady Turrett's invitation to come to Pharaoh's Court on Christmas Eve, because she fears one of her guests, Ada Welkin, is in danger of being relieved from her valuables. Campion is, however, unable to prevent the place from being burglarized, but promptly identifies the guilty person and finds the place where this person stowed away the loot. It's not one of the most original short stories in this anthology, but good and competent enough for what it is.

S.C. Roberts was a renowned publisher and a distinguished Sherlockian, who once played a round of golf with Conan Doyle, which was enough to brag about as a fanboy, but Roberts also wrote and published several pastiches – one of those stories, "The Case of the Megatherium Thefts," is apparently very good. However, the Sherlockian pastiche that's collected here is a short stage-play, "Christmas Eve," in which a problem is brought to Holmes and Watson by Miss Violet de Vinne. She acted as a secretary to Lady Barton, "the owner of a very wonderful pearl necklace," but the pearls have gone missing. Holmes immediately sees there’s a second story hidden beneath her account and cleverly ferrets the truth out of her.

The resolution of the case tore a page from "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), which also happened to be a Christmas-time story about a lost gemstone. As a matter of fact, I think that story may very well be the arch-type of these festive tales about stolen and/or lost stones.

One of the main reasons for jumping on this anthology is the next novella-length story: Victor Gunn's "Death in December," originally published in Ironsides Sees Red (1948), which is an impossible crime tale set in a snowbound castle during Christmas – solved by a wonderful character in the mold of Sir Henry Merrivale, Andy Dalziel and Arthur Bryant.

Chief Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell, or simply "Old Iron," is a grumpy character who is dragged by his highborn subordinate, Johnny Lister, to the ancestral seat of his family. A place as dark and gloomy as the past, named Cloon Castle, perched on the top of desolate mountain in the Peak District. So "Old Iron" had enough material to grumble for the entire length of the journey, but, upon their arrival, the holiday is slowly turning into a busman's holiday for the two. On the driveway of the castle, they saw "an extraordinary figure," garbed in a dark cloak, stumbling across a snowy field and vanish, but the figure failed to leave any footprints in his wake. And this would not be the only apparently supernatural event at the castle.

Cloon Castle has one of those haunted rooms, known as the Death Room, but the head of family, General Lister, refuses to tell the back-story of the room to his guests. However, this fails to dampen the enthusiasm of the house party and one of them ends up sleeping in the haunted room. As is pointed out in the story, these experiments usually end with the house party finding "the occupant of the haunted room stretched out cold and stark on the floor," but this time around the events take a different turn: a blood-spattered corpse appears inside the room in the middle of the night. But when everyone goes back to check, the body has vanished and not a trace of blood is found on the floor! This cannot be tagged as a locked room, but how the bloodstains vanished can be marked as an impossible situation.

The subsequent investigation by "Old Iron" was quite fun, which lead from the Death Room to "a cold, gloomy, family crypt" and back to his bedroom where a nasty surprise was waiting, but I have a bone to pick about the impossible situation regarding the footprints. I do not believe the trick would leave behind a spotless field of unbroken snow and it would be very easy to make a slipup in its execution, which would ruin the whole effect. All in all, I liked this novella and have written Victor Gunn down as a person of interest for the near future.

Christopher Bush's "Murder at Christmas" was first published in 1951, in The Illustrated London News, under the title "The Holly Bears a Berry," which features his series-character, Ludovic Travers, who is spending Christmas-weekend as the house guest of the Chief Constable of Worbury – which is usually a quiet, peaceful place. However, one of the neighboring inhabitants is a rather notorious characters and an ex-convict, named John Block Brewse, who was "the last of the line of financial swindlers." So hardly surprising when someone strangles him to death in the nearby woods and Travers solves the case by smashing the murderer's alibi to pieces, but I always wonder if these alibi-tricks work when you have to manually strangle the victim. Otherwise, a fairly good short-short detective story.

The next entry in this anthology is also a fairly short-short story, but one that quickly became a favorite of mine, "Off the Tiles" by Ianthe Jerrold, who also authored the magnificent Dead Man's Quarry (1930) and the splendid There May Be Danger (1948). Jerrold has undergone a personal renaissance, after all four of her mystery novels were reissued by the Dean Street Press, which were supplemented during the 1950s with a handful of short detective stories in The London Mystery Magazine.

This one is a great showcase of her talent as a writer, as well as a demonstration of her cleverness, as Inspector James Quy investigates the deadly fall of a woman from a roof onto the street below. Was it an accident or a cleverly contrived murder? The plot that Quy uncovers is fairly original and one that could be considered both a success as well as an abject failure. So I really hope all of Jerrold's short stories gets gathered in a single volume. I would love to read more from her.  

Macdonald Hastings' "Mr. Cork's Secret" was printed in the December, 1952 issue of the monthly magazine of Lilliput magazine, which was offered as a Christmas competition and promised a reward of 150 pounds to everyone who could deduce the titular secret. The solution and winners were announced several months later. Interestingly, Edwards posted the answer to the secret at the end of the book. So you can try and challenge yourself. Plot-wise, this twist in the tail turned this fairly ordinary crime story into one of the best and most original Christmas stories about stolen jewelry. A genuinely clever piece that involves bloodied corpse in a hotel room, several famous thespians, a newspaper reporter and a well-mannered burglar. A very fun and eventually clever story.

Unfortunately, I did not care all that much for the next pair of stories, Julian Symons' "The Santa Claus Club" and Michael Gilbert "Deep and Crisp and Even," which is convenient excuse to skip them and not further bloat this blog-post.

Finally, the last entry, Josephine Bell's "The Carol Singers," was first published in Murder Under the Mistletoe (1992) and the story ends this collection on a fairly dark, grim and sad note – even for a collection of detective stories about bloody murder and thievery. Old Mrs. Fairlands occupies the ground floor flat of a converted Victorian family home, which once housed her entirely family and a domestic staff, but this became untenable by the late 1940s. So the house was converted and the floors rented out as apartments. The reader is also told how old age is catching up with the poor woman, who needs a solid hour to get dressed and sometimes too tired to make supper, which leaves her faint and thirsty, but the worst is yet to come.

Circumstances lead her to be all alone in the large house on Christmas, which provided an opportunity to a small group of home-invaders, pretending to be carol singers, to overtake Mrs. Fairlands. She was tied to a chair and gagged. And there she was left and eventually take her last, labored breathe after being completely "exhausted by pain, hunger and cold." It's even sadder when you realize the carol singers who did this were children! However, the ending showed Bell was not willing to plunge the reader in an all-encompassing darkness and provided a cop-out ending, but it remains a well-written, powerful and chilling story. In particular the part up until her death.

So, all in all, Crimson Snow is a nicely balanced collection of holiday-themed detective-and thriller stories, which managed to avoid all of the usual suspects and consists almost entirely of rarely anthologized short stories – even a couple of genuine rarities. And that's always a plus for these kind of short story collections. I really enjoyed breezing through all of these stories and will have to take a look at some of these other collections. I just hope I haven't breezed through this review too fast. By the end, it was basically just banging on the keyboard. 

Well, that's it for this blog-post and I'll try to lay-off the Christmas/wintry mysteries for now, because last year it actually burned me out.