Crucified (2008) by Michael Slade

In the previous post, I discussed the twelfth entry in the Bobby Owen series, Suspects—Nine (1939), which is E.R. Punshon's homage to those refined, witty and character-driven novel of manners mystery pioneered during the 1930s by the alternative Queens of Crime – like Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Moray Dalton. So I thought it would be fun to pick something next that is the complete opposite of a classy, satirical 1930s manners mystery novel. Something crude, brutal and horrifying with all the subtlety of a rickety, old chainsaw hacking through guts and bones. Preferably published during the past twenty years. There was only one name on the big pile who fitted the bill. 

"Michael Slade" is the collective penname of Jay Clarke, a Canadian trial lawyer, who collaborated with Rebecca Clarke, Richard Covell and Richard Banks on the "Special X" series. A branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police specialized in hunting down extremely dangerous, completely deranged, criminals and serial killers. Special X series has a not undeserved reputation for its, um, liberal depiction of guts, gore and grisly killings that could teach '80s slasher films a thing or two.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed Crucified (2008) back in 2019 and called the book sadistic retro pulp and Slade "a torture porn maven." I don't think John very much approved of me nonchalantly shrugging at the torrent of bloods and guts in Ripper (1994), but, in my defense, the whole story from beginning to end screamed '90s edginess – deliberately trying to be as shocking and stomach-churning as possible. Ripper struck me at times as trying to bait Americans from crushing the head of a critical reviewer with head clamps to evoking the name of Aleister Crowley. So took Ripper about as seriously as a horror flick that tried too hard to be shocking, but appreciated the attempt to give the gore galore a traditional slant with several impossible crimes in a mechanized death-trap house on Deadman's Island. In fact, there are three of Slade novels listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) loaded with locked rooms, impossible crimes and even dying messages of which Crucified sounded the most fascinating. A book that threw everything from archaeology, arcane history and conspiracies to locked rooms, impossible crimes and a secret crusade into the blender to create a mush better than expected.

If Ripper is a product of the '90s, Crucified is clearly a child of the 2000s. The decade of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Passion of the Christ (2004) and conspiracy theories thriving on the internet. Yet, the book is surprisingly tame compared to Ripper. Sure, there's a little bit of disembowelment and exploding skulls scattered, here and there, throughout the story, but no worse than Philip Kerr's recently reviewed Prague Fatal (2011) or your average, dark historical mystery from Paul Doherty. They're more like violent vignettes closely entangled with an increasingly complicated and engrossing narrative that moves around between the past and present. And the many arcane historical puzzles make up the lion's share of the story. So it should be a bit more palpable than Ripper which had skinned corpses dangling from a suspension bridge on meat hooks. 

Crucified begins with a short prologue, of sorts, depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in 33 A.D. as the Roman guard look up at the cross and says, "just as your shadow has vanished from the face of the earth, so you will be forgotten." But history ordained otherwise.

The story than begins to move between those long, grim years of World War II and the present-day with the former revolving around the many mysteries surrounding a long-lost Allied bomber, the Ace of Clubs, which was shot down in March 1944 over Germany – while flying a top-secret mission to bomb a specific location. The crew were ordered "to break away from the main bomber stream and fly a solitary run to an isolated target of no apparent value," but got shot down by a lone wolf fighter. So they had to bail and all but three of the crewmen were captured. Lt. Fletch "Wrath" Hannah (pilot), Sgt. Dick "Ack-Ack" DuBoulay and Sgt. Trent "Jonesy" Jones vanished that night without a trace. The impact of the crash destabilized a slope, "causing a landslide to crumble down and bury the plane" and "with bombs dropping night and day, churned-up dirt was the rule, not the exception." So the bomber lay buried and undisturbed for sixty-odd years until its wreck was discovered during road construction. A discovery that brings more to light than merely the answer to an unsolved question from the war.

In 1944, Hitler gave a mysterious individual who tried to betray him the codename "Judas" and "the rumor is that Judas conspired with Churchill to smuggle a package to Britain in the hands of a secret agent who'd been parachuted into the Reich." The Ace of Clubs was downed on "the same night that a Junkers 88 was given extraordinary orders to cripple an RAF Halifax on a solitary run in a way that would kill no crewmen except the rear gunner." So is there's a link between Hitler's Judas and the downed bomber? But there's more. Beside containing something that could topple Hitler, the Judas package includes ancient religious artifacts recovered from the Middle East. If "the resurrected bomber yields a map to the Judas package, Christendom might be rocked to its two-thousand-year-old foundations" and "the fatal nail in the Vatican's coffin."

A secret, modern-day Inquisitor, "the Secret Cardinal," has to stop the Judas relics coming to light at all costs and dispatches a crusader, the Legionary of Christ – who's either insane or possessed by the devil. The Legionary holds some decidedly old-worlds views on how death should be administrated.

The person caught between the long-buried secrets of the past and the increasing bloodshed in the present is a historian, lawyer and writer, Wyatt Rook, who writes historical expose's bringing long-kept secrets to light – earning him the reputation of muckraker and conspiracy theorist. Rook's reputation brings Liz Hannah, granddaughter of the missing pilot, to his doorstep to ask him to help her uncover what happened to her grandfather with the Judas puzzle and herself as a lure. But then one of the last surviving crewman, Mick "Balls' Balsdon, who put together an archive is horrifically tortured to death. And long-buried, apparently impossible murder is discovered inside the wreck of the Ace of Clubs.

Ack-Ack's decayed skeleton is found on the seat of the small, cage-like rear turret with its torso sprawled forward between the guns, but it's not bullets from a Junkers 88 that killed the rear gunner. Someone had stabbed him in the back three times, which appears to be impossible as everyone was in their battle stations and "remained in their combat positions until they bailed out." Slade drove home how hazardously these planes and bombing raids were and how any shot at surviving depended on teamwork over the plane's intercom. So nobody appears to have had an opportunity to stab the rear gunner. This not, strictly speaking, a proper locked room mystery, but an alibi-puzzle that works as a locked room mystery, of sorts, recalling the tangle of alibis that formed a quasi-impossible crime from Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962). Whatever you choose to categorize it as, an unbreakable alibi or impossible crime, Slade's absorbing storytelling turned it the best, most captivating and memorable parts of the plot and story. The circumstances of the murder, a bomber under attack above enemy territory, did wonders in itself for the trick employed. A trick that would not have impressed as much had it been pulled off in an ordinary setting under normal circumstances. This is not the only the historical locked room mystery Wyatt Rook comes across ("Am I being haunted by the ghost of John Dickson Carr?").

The trail leads to a U-boat called the Black Devil that had been on a test run as the first Elektroboot in the North Sea, between Hamburg and Scotland, but run into a destroyer and a fight ensued. Slade's depiction of what went on in that enclosed and sealed submarine as they got destroyed by a depth-charge barrage. It's as good as what happened aboard the Ace of Clubs, but the Black Devil only comes into play during the second-half and the impossibility is not discovered until towards the end. Something was being smuggled to England aboard the Black Devil, but, when the Royal Navy pried open the hatches and searched the submarine inside out, nothing was recovered. So "do you sneak a sardine out of a tin can that's sealed and remains sealed after the sardine is gone?" This one takes only a short while to be solved, but, needless to say, I really liked what it added to the overall story.

It's the historical puzzles and biblical mysteries that take precedent in Crucified with the present-day murders ending up only playing a secondary role. Admittedly, whenever the Legionary makes an appearance, it's not a pretty picture to behold and the double murder of a married couple is downright revolting, but, as said previously, they act like gory vignettes – which can be skipped without missing anything really important. The way in which the Legionary is disposed of shows how unimportant he and his murders were in the end to the story. What matters are the historical plot-threads. Who killed the rear gunner and how? What happened to the three missing crewmen? How were the items removed from a dead, submerged submarine? Who was Hitler's Judas? Who his secret agent and what happened to him? What, exactly, is the nature of the Judas relics and are they, as feared, "a biblical earthshaker?" The answers to all these questions neatly twists together fact and fiction into engrossing, cleverly plotted historical mystery with the last line being a stroke of genius a stupid joke that made me snicker. What a stupidly brilliant way to close out the story. 10/10!

So, all in all, Slade's Crucified turned out to be unexpectedly great. I half jokingly picked it as stark contrast to Punshon's über civilized Suspects—Nine and expected an all-out gore fest with a slightly traditionally-slanted plot, like Ripper, but the excellently executed historical plot-threads and the scenes aboard the bomber and submarine made it so much more than a mere mystery-thriller. Add to this two, archaeological locked room mysteries and a boatload of arcane and historical lectures and bits of knowledge, you have a serious candidate to be included on the third iteration "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." Recommended with some reservations for those who really can't stand gore. 

A note for the curious: I forgot to mention Crucified is not a part of the Special X series and appears to be a standalone, which might explain why it doesn't all out with the blood-and-guts-to-the-wall killing. Not as frequently as in Ripper. It makes me want to look at some others moderns on the big pile like Micki Browning, Martin Edwards, D.L. Marshall and Slade's Red Snow (2010), but first I need to get to that landmark volume of Case Closed.

Ripper (1994) by Michael Slade

Jay Clarke is a Canadian lawyer specialized in criminal insanity and a novelist who writes under the pseudonym of "Michael Slade," a penname he has shared with Rebecca Clarke, John Banks and Richard Covell, who collaborated on fourteen novels about the Special X division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – published between 1984 and 2010. I understand that the series is written on three concentric levels: who-and howdunit form the core of each story that's wrapped in psychological horror tinged with supernatural elements. The outer layer, or outward appearance, is that of a modern-day police procedural. Stories are stuffed with gore. Lots of gore.

So you're probably wondering why a gentleman of taste and a connoisseur of the traditional detective story, like yours truly, is doing with a gory serial killer thriller from the 1990s.

The Special X series was lauded by John Dickson Carr's grandson, Wooda H. McNiven, who praised Ripper (1994) as "a fair play whodunit" in "the Grand Guignol tradition" with one seemingly impossible, ultra-gruesome killing taking place after another and the story is littered with references to the master of the locked room conundrum – who, according to McNiven, would probably have given the book "two thumbs up." Apparently, Carr was an enormous influence on the series and there are two additional titles crammed with impossible crimes.

Crucified (2008) has impossible murders committed on an airborne bomber and a submerged U-boat, while Red Snow (2010) has two locked room puzzles and a dying message. Ellery Queen is another writer who greatly influenced the series. I was tempted to begin with Crucified, but settled on Ripper as it seemed to be one of the more highly regarded titles in the series.

Firstly, I have to say that the writing, structuring and background of Ripper reminded me of Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series, because the plot is steeped in the lore of Jack the Ripper, Aleister Crowley, Tarot cards and Satanism. I suppose the similarities are not entirely coincidental as Fowler started out as a horror writer who has since dabbled in the locked room sub-genre when he began writing the PCU books. Only drawback is that the background material, concerning the shenanigans of Jack the Ripper and Crowley, tend to read like textbook excerpts, which is not something every reader can appreciate, but it didn't bother me at all here – even helping to give to story itself a (sort of) personality. But let's take a closer look at the plot of the story.

The plot of Ripper consists of two, intertwining plot-threads beginning with the gruesome killing of a prominent American feminist, named Brigid Marsh, who was "strangled, stabbed, skinned and strung up like a piece of meat." She was dangling by a hooked chain, spiked into the base of her skull, from the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge. A homeless witness below saw the body come over the bridge and heard the footfalls of two people on the bridge. 

 

Corporal Nicholas Craven of the Mounted Police is the police-detective in charge of the investigation, but, since the victim is a citizen of the United States, he has to contact the Commander of the Special External Section of the Mounted Police (Special X), Robert DeClercq – whose unit handles criminal cases in Canada with a foreign link. This specialized police unit, "staffed by those who'd once spied for the now-defunct Security Service," is another aspect that reminded of me of Fowler's PCU series.

Craven and DeClercq work (more or less) together on the case and their attention is soon drawn to a recently, independently published horror novel, entitled Jolly Roger, which was written by "Skull & Crossbones." Only problem is that the murder preceded the publication of the book. So the book is a direct link to the murderers, but the small-time publisher, Fly-By-Night Press, have no idea who the author, or authors, really are. The only line of contact between the publisher and writer is through a Vancouver postbox. As an interesting side-note: a minor sub-plot of the story is the torture and murder of a Publishers Weekly reviewer, Chas Fowler, who had described Jolly Roger as "the nadir of horror fiction" and an "argument for censorship" – which ended with him getting his head squeezed by mechanical plates until his face split in two and the skull collapsed in on itself. I would really like to know if Slade had a particular reviewer in mind when he wrote that passage.

A second, interesting aspect, of this first plot-thread that should be mentioned is that entomology plays an important role in tracking down the killer. The first victim had been stabbed numerous time in the abdominal region and lice were found there that are normally only found on animals, which are eventually identified as having come from a very specific and endangered animals. This kind of foreshadowed the CSI craze of 2000s and shows how much Slade liked to blur the borders between different (sub) genres.

During this investigation, which takes up half of the book, we get the setup of the second plot-thread.

A woman by the name of Elvira Franklen lives with a gang of cats, all of them named after fictional detectives and mystery writers, and she has been writing "interactive mysteries" since the 1930, but none of them prompted a response like Shivers, Shudders and Shakes: Seance With a Killer – which had been purchased by an unknown buyer and this person had given her strict instructions. A select group of people were to be gathered and brought to Castle Crag on Deadman's Island. Only thing they needed for the charity event was "a real sleuth" and DeClercq had promised Franklen he would provide them one.

Inspector Zinc Chandler was a member of Special X, but he had been shot through the head during the events described in Cutthroat (1992) and, as a consequence, had been sidelined for several years. Unfortunately, the powers that be are reluctant to bring him back into the fold. So DeClercq asks him to go the charity event on Deadman's Island. However, shortly after his arrival there, he quickly stumbles to the conclusion that he has walked into a veritable death-trap as people die left and right in what can only be described as a wholesale slaughter. And several of these killings are of the impossible variety.

A deadly crossbow bolt is fired from a nook in the dining room, where the dust and cobwebs were undisturbed, which has a secondary impossibility of how the antique crossbow could have been fired. As it would have fired itself immediately had it been cocked, loaded and then replaced, because "the heavier weight of the crossbow squeezed the handle toward the stock." There's even an illustration of the crossbow explaining how to operate it. The explanation for this impossibility is deadly simple and finds a new use for a classic locked room technique.

A second impossibility occurs when Chandler witnesses someone entering the Turkish bath, but when he enters only a moment later this person is laying on the floor with his throat cut and a "Y" had been drawn in blood on the tiled-floor – a dying message. Unfortunately, the dying message was rather weak, because it was left unfinished, but the locked room-trick itself was acceptable enough. And these are only two of the murders that took place there over a short period of time. Nearly all of those murders are the result of ingenious and psychotic booby traps that have been rigged up all around the castle.

Japanese edition

A good example of these booby traps is when two of the guests, while having sex in a canopy bed, are trapped inside a net with together venomous baby snakes. Why baby snakes, you ask? The reason given in the book is that adult snakes conserve venom by giving dry bites, but young one (of every species) are barbarians. So, a baby snake, who is frightened by humans, "will empty their poison glands."

So, as you can probably guess, my favorite part of Ripper was the Grand Guignol-style massacre at Castle Crag and this portion of the story reminded me of the mechanical, death-trap house from John Russell Fearn's Account Settled (1949) – which also featured a number of seemingly impossible murders. Only difference is that the murders in Fearn's novel were very clean in comparison the slaughter perpetrated between the pages of Ripper.

Anyway, the Jolly Roger murders and the brutal killings on Deadman's Island turn out to be inextricably linked, which were tied together better than you'd expect from a slasher, with an ending that took its cue from The Burning Court (1937). One of the last lines ("the Hollow Man was hollow no more") really drove home that the author likes Carr.

This has left me in two minds. On the one hand, the graphic serial killer story is not my genre at all, but on the other, the plot was better than it has any right to be. Sure, this is not exactly a neo-Golden Age detective novel, but Slade effectively demonstrated here that even a guts-and-gore-type of thriller can have a degree of logic to it and this is something I really appreciated about Ripper. And the impossible crimes were the cherries that topped this pile of mutilated corpses.

On a whole, I was not entirely blown away by Ripper, but, as a genre classicist, I appreciated Slade's more traditional slant on the contemporary serial killer novel and his obvious love and respect for Carr's work. So you can expect reviews of his other locked room thrillers sometime in the future.