The Footprints of Satan (1950) by Norman Berrow

Last year, I reviewed the last two of Norman Berrow's locked room mystery novels, The Bishop's Sword (1948) and The Spaniard's Thumb (1949), featuring Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith of the Winchingham police – a small, rural community plagued by strange, seemingly impossible crimes. The Bishop's Sword ambitiously tried to string together numerous miraculous incidents and The Spaniard's Thumb centered on the legend of a giant, disembodied thumb angrily stamping around a sealed cellar in a homicidal rage. Regrettably, the locked room-tricks were prosaic at best and hackneyed at worst, which detracted from their other qualities as wildly imaginative Golden Age detective stories. If they had have been penned by a writer and storyteller of lesser talent and capabilities, they would have been extremely disappointing.

That being said, Berrow's was not inept when it came to handling locked room mysteries and produced two often overlooked classics of the form.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) is a crime caper in which respectively a man, a whole room and finally an entire street simply vanish as if they were wiped out of existence. The Footprints of Satan (1950) is his crowning achievement with one of the most enterprising treatments of the impossible footprints-in-the-snow. Both can stand comparisons with other locked room classics, but, until recently, you rarely heard or came across them on the many best-of and must-read lists – neither receiving a spot on the 1981 nor 2007 ranking (see John Pugmire's "A Locked Room Library"). Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) is an exception as it singled out The Footprints of Satan as "one of the surprisingly few stories to make use of the devil's-hoofprints case of early-nineteenth century Devon" and "probably Berrow's best effort." In 2005, Ramble House began to bring Berrow's back into print and The Footprints of Satan has since garnered some favorable reviews. And, finally, appeared on one or two best-of lists. So high time to revisit this old favorite.

The opening chapter suggests a conventional, typically British village mystery as the young, recently widowed Gregory Cushing arriving in Steeple Thelming, Winchingham, to stay with his uncle, Jake Popplewell – who's considered by some a character and by other "a blot on the town's escutcheon." An independently minded drunk who sneers at moderation ("the curse of the cultured classes") and women. Stating to his nephew that "never the breath nor the shrill complainin' voice of a woman shall poison the atmosphere" of "Jake Poplewell's castle." The castle being a small cottage stands at the foot of a small hill on the outskirts of Winchingham known as The Rise. On the other side of the road, up the Rise, stand the homes of well-to-do, mostly retired gentlefolk of the rural community. Old Jake shows his nephew around the neighborhood and who lives where. From the poor, bedridden Jacques who lives opposite of Jake, Farmer Silver and the Croxley's to the fancy homes of Lionel Maltravers and old Mrs. Pendlebury. And the later lives there together with her sister, Miss Emmy Forbes, who previously appeared in The Bishop's Sword. She hasn't changed a bit ("an old maid with funny ideas"). Lastly, there's a small county house where Montague Mason, a London business of ill-repute, occasionally stays.

So, like I said, The Footprints of Satan begins ordinarily enough and could have been the beginning of a Christopher Bush mystery (e.g. The Case of the Curious Client, 1947). One morning, after a night of heavy snowfall, the inhabitants awaken to discover a trail of hoof-marks that defies a natural explanation. All the evidence suggests the Devil, "or one of his imps," came down to Winchingham ("specifically to The Base and Steeple Thelming...") and it walked by night!

According to the physical evidence, a hoofed entity that "walked upright on two legs in a fashion unlike any creature known to man" landed at the foot of The Rise ("like a bird from flight"), casually walked up The Rise and entered various private gardens – always "turning away from the front doors of those people's houses." But it gets even weirder as the hoof-prints are found in physically inaccessible places. They are found on top of flimsy privet hedge, "which would not have supported a newly-born kitten" and across the top of a six-foot wall. Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith is called to investigate and follow the trail to its end, which become increasingly more impossible as it nears its end. Bafflingly, the creature apparently can walk through solid matter as it passed through Maltraver's garden pavilion and Pendlebury's boarded-up summerhouse, towards the Steeple Inn and Montague Mason's house. There the situation really begins to look otherworldly. Mason's house has a steep roof, "far too steep for almost anything other than a fly to retain a footing on it," but nobody present fails to notice that on that steep, snowy roof was "a ring of marks where something that had hooved had walked round and round in a wide circle." Another ring of hoof-marks circle the house, as if it was trying to enter the house, and a pair of prints are found on a window sill. The trail that began at the bottom of The Rise came to an end in the middle of a bare, empty paddock underneath a dead tree. Montague Mason was hanging from the lowest branch of the dead tree and the only traces where his bootprints going from the house into the paddock!

What an amazing and fantastic premise for an impossible crime story of the no-footprints variety. Surprisingly, like Adey said, perhaps the only detective novel to make use of the real-life, unexplained 1855 incident of the Devon hoof-marks. That case gets discussed complete with excerpts from The Times and the Illustrated London News, but also the 1840 report of similar hoof-marks on Kerguelen Island and the foot-marks found around the famously haunted Borley Rectory at Christmastime 1938. Miss Emmy Forbes who stimulates the discussion of alternative explanations for the strange hoof-marks in the snow. I enjoyed how Berrow's depicted the discovery of the hoof-marks with the yawning, sleepy-eyed people leaving their warm beds to study the line of prints, rampantly speculate and even taking some pictures. That small touch of simple humanity made those strange prints standout even more as something that intruded upon reality and left its traces.

However, Smith has more on his plate than just a dodgy suicide and a trail of footprints that appear to have cleared an obstacle course from hell without breaking a sweat.

The barren, empty paddock with the dead tree has a ghost story, the ghost of a reputed witch called the Blue Woman, who had been hanged in paddock centuries ago and now her ghost walks Steeple Thelming on certain nights, but the only one whoever sees her is Jake – always when he returns home drunk. Whoever, or whatever, left those impossible hoof-marks returns. This time, the hoofed creature left behind another dead body inside a circle of hoof-prints. Just like the first time, "the hoof-prints began from nowhere, ended in nothing." So not the usual questions of motive and opportunity, checking the soundness of alibis or even trying to solve a normal locked room-puzzle dominate the story, but trying to find a rational, down-to-earth explanation for the hoof-marks. Smith simply has to find an answer rather than admit "the phenomena transcended the bounds of physical interpretation" that would hurl them "back a thousand years to days of misty medieval thought and fearful belief in black magic and witchcraft."

Smith has been called a drab, colorless character. I would call him homely rather than colorless and, artistically, some might want to see a character like Dr. Gideon Fell or Rogan Kincaid the case of the devil's hoof-marks. There is, however, something to be said about having a normal, level-headed and logical detective on a case as extraordinary as this one. Smith explained it himself as follow: "I've got a simple mind! I don't make mysteries—only the complicated minds do that—I unravel them, or try to. My mind is too simple to believe what my eyes seem to tell me, so I look for the simple truth." Smith simply does not believe a demonic presence came down to Winchingham and methodically begins to examine every inch of the trail. Uncovering small inconsistencies along the way. And, inch by inch, print by print, Smith begins to slay his goblins and uncovering pieces of the puzzle. Pieces that slowly start to fall into their place with satisfying clicks.

The solution to the titular footprints is worthy of its ambitious premise. It would have been easy to simply say the murderer created the prints by walking on long stilts that allowed to reach the high places to make imprints by hands, but most of us would have tossed the book angry across the room had that been solution. Berrow's put some work into setting up and then explaining away this hellish obstacle course in the snow. Some stretches of the journey are better and more convincing than other parts, but, on a whole, admirably done and particular liked the tricks for apparently passing through the boarded-up summerhouse and the circle of prints on the steep roof. If the plot comes up short anywhere, it's all the attention and focus going into the impossible hoof-prints that allowed a small, really tiny flaw to be overlooked (ROT13: rira nsgre n phefbel rknzvangvba, gur qbpgbe fubhyq unir orra noyr gb gryy gung Znfba qvqa'g qvr va n unatvat cbfvgvba naq jnf abg unatrq hagvy frireny ubhef nsgre uvf qrngu onfrq ba gur yvibe zbegvf. Nsgre qrngu oybbq frggyrf va gur ybjre cbegvba bs gur obql, juvpu, jura unatrq, jbhyq unir orra uvf yrtf).

Other than that, The Footprints of Satan is a one-of-a-kind impossible crime novel that does something very special and out of the ordinary with the ever tricky problem of the miraculous footprints. I consider the impossible footprints to be the most difficult of all impossible crime scenarios to pull-off convincingly and satisfactory, which is why there are so few classics of it. So always admire any mystery writer who can do one, or two, successfully without relying on one of the basic tricks. Berrow's turned the impossible footprints-in-the-snow into an Olympic winter sport. Something that can only be compared in scope and originality to Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), James Scott Byrnside's The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) and maybe Kaito KID's mid-air walk from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 44. I hope John Dickson Carr got to read The Footprints of Satan as it's the kind of pick-me-up he sorely needed in 1950. So highly recommended to everyone hopelessly addicted to impossible crime fiction and Golden Age detectives in general.

The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) by Norman Berrow

I joked in the past that Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story, or rather gifted it a heartbeat, when secreting a spare heart from the horror genre under one of the floorboards of the locked room mystery and perhaps gave the traditional detective story its immortal quality – given how many times critics tried to sign its death certificate. So the detective story has, fittingly enough, unnatural blood and organ ties to the horror genre. You can spot the family resemblance every time the detective story evokes the supernatural or other worldly creatures. From the hell-beast roaming the foggy moors in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and the windigo from Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) that stalks it human prey from the sky to the living dead of Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017). Simply having a good, old haunted house or a cursed room that kills as a backdrop for murder. 

Norman Berrow's The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) takes the cake with its giant, disembodied centenarian thumb haunting a disused cellar and crushing anyone who dares to enter!

The empty, disused cellar is located underneath the old, original stone part of Falloway Hall and has an iron door with a barred opening at eye-level that has been locked for over half a century. And the key has been lost for years. What lurks behind the iron door is the proverbial skeleton in the closet of the Falloways. A 100 years ago, the third Sir Jeremy was the master of Falloway Hall who had imprisoned his wife's Spanish inamorato in the dark cellar where he taunted the gaunt, ragged prisoner for three long years – reminding him constantly he was completely under his thumb. When the prisoner was on death's doorstep, he told Sir Jeremy with his dying breath that "for hereafter and to all eternity, you will be under my thumb" and "you and your heirs and descendants shall live under it and die under it." So the family curse was born and several Falloways died under bizarre circumstances in the cellar. This went on until the last male Falloway passed away mysteriously and the estate passed onto the female line as the thing in the cellar quieted down.

Decades later, Mrs. Lavinia Falloway-Fairfax died childless and left the entire estate to her very surprised grandniece by marriage, Cherry Fairfax. She's accompanied to her new home by Aunt Margaret, "that good lady who had taken charge of Cherry when she had been orphaned," and the family lawyer, Mr. Champion, to show them around the place. Only smudge on the place appears to be general post-war malaise of rationing and shortages of everything from food and petrol to labor. So everything appeared to be peachy, a dream come true, until a week passed and some unnerving, midnight noises ("thud-thud-thud-thud-thud") began to emanate from the locked cellar ("it wasn't Jarvis, by any chance, doing some nocturnal carpentering?").

Aunt Margaret suggests to call upon Quentin Veil, "an investigator of psychic disturbances," while their next door neighbor, Stephen Kevin, fabricates a skeleton key from another period key. So the cellar can now be entered and properly investigated. Veil intends to catch whatever is making the disturbing sounds on photograph and rigs up an infrared camera, but things go horribly wrong during a second attempt to capture the source of that peculiar, rhythmic drumming. Veil and Kevin are brutally attacked when they go into the cellar. Kevin is struck with such force that "he was hurled out of the cellar and across the passage outside" to "split his skull open on the opposite wall," while Veil got "stamped or smashed" to death – simply squashed flat. Kevin caught a glimpse of what attacked them and described it as looking like "an enormous human thumb" that squashed Veil "like you'd squash an insect."

Falloway Hall stands in the small town of Winchingham and so the investigation falls onto Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith, who has dealt before with phantom rooms, psychic bodies, apparitions and vanishings, but "there was an element of comedy" to those capers – not something with "shades of Bram Stoker." John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, suggests The Spaniard's Thumb is parody of Horace Walpole's 18th century Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), in which a giant helmet crushes its victims to death. But that as an aside. The Spaniard's Thumb is a Golden Age detective novel and Smith has a dark, complicated intrigue to untangle as the victim poses an even bigger mystery than the circumstances under which he died. Why was the harmless ghost hunter murdered? Veil only entered the picture after the noises in the cellar had started. If the murderer is flesh-and-blood, why did the photograph Veil took only shows a long stretch of wall with a human murderer or an over-sized, aggressively territorial human thumb? And can the solution to "The Case of the Spaniard's Thumb" in a handwritten account titled The Secret History of Falloway Hall? Not before a second body is found in the locked cellar with "the only known key to it in the inspector's pocket."

However, I decided against using the "locked room mysteries" and "impossible crimes" tags on this review. Technically, the thumping sounds coming from behind a locked door and the second murder qualify as locked room mysteries, but found them to be marginal, disappointing in their resolution and detracting from everything else the story did right. It has been said that Berrow was better at stating his mysteries than explaining them, but he was a great storyteller who "found a way to eke out the uncunny in the everyday" that makes everything leading up to the conclusion so incredibly captivating and entertaining to read. Even if you can trim 20 or 30 pages from nearly all of his novels. The Spaniard's Thumb is a fine example of Berrow's talent and skills when it comes to characterization and telling a story.

The central conceit might evoke an 18th century Gothic novel, The Spaniard's Thumb takes place under a warm, lazy summer sun that casts Falloway Hall in a bright light. So it takes some time until not even the sunshine streaming in through the open windows or the singing of birds can not keep out the "fear and foreboding" that "enveloped Falloway Hall in an invisible pall." I can see how having two dead, mutilated bodies dragged from your supposedly haunted cellar can kill the mood around the dinner table, but a very well-done piece of storytelling as the frightening experiences keep getting dispelled by sunny mornings and long summer afternoons. This building to the point where the fear becomes palpable in the daylight is so much more effective than immediately going for thunderstorms or a white winter shroud to set the mood. Berrow also made more work than usually of the who-and why, which was neither too obvious nor too evasive, but could have been clued a bit stronger. The Spaniard's Thumb has a small cast of characters. So everyone who enters the picture is eyed suspiciously, but, this time, it took while for it to become apparent as important connecting clue is not given until the second-half of the story. One aspect of the misdirection regrettably demonstrated where Berrow comes up short as a plotter (ROT13: “...grfgvzbal bs jung unccrarq gura vf n snoevpngvba”).

And, yet, despite its shortcomings and Berrow rarely delivering on his wildly imaginative premises, I find it impossible to dislike The Spaniard's Thumb. I believe its link to the locked room mystery, albeit a very tenuous and disappointing one, overshadowed the fact The Spaniard's Thumb is an extremely well-written, decently plotted Golden Age detective yarn. And were it not for those minor, disappointing locked room elements, it might be better remembered today. If only for the imagery of giant, disembodied thumb squashing people like bugs.

So never let it be said I only care about tricks with no eye for atmosphere, characters and storytelling, but would like to know why Berrow decided to specialize in locked rooms and impossible crimes. Berrow had enough genre awareness to understand most of his solutions do not measure up their splendid premises. You can call them at best prosaic and at worst hackneyed. Only two exceptions to date are The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) and The Footprints of Satan (1950). So was it stylistic choice to pair fresh, original and out-of-this-world impossibilities with the simplest, down-to-earth answers or simply had no idea how to explain them? Either way, you'll most likely enjoy Berrow's work not expecting something that could have been plotted by John Dickson Carr or Paul Halter. I recommend to approach The Spaniard's Thumb as a non-impossible room that kills story like Carr's radio-play "The Devil's Saint" (1943) and Halter's La chambre du fou (The Madman's Room, 1990). 

A note for the curious: it has been a while since I tacked on one of my alternative, armchair solutions to a locked room problem. A possibility occurred to me how the cellar and the thing could be used for a legitimate locked room-trick, a trick as cockamamie as the idea of a murderous thumb angrily stamping around a cellar in the dead of night, but you have to complete alter the story and plot to make it work – like a turn-of-the-century style treasure hunt mystery. So hear me out. A long, long time ago, a treasure was buried or secreted somewhere in or around Falloway Hall. The then owner who buried the treasure also hid a clue to its location in the cellar, but had the iron door locked, sealed and the key destroyed. And decreed the cellar a time capsule not to be opened until a 100 or 150 years has passed (tasking the ghost of the giant thumb with protecting the secret). So how can the treasure hunter and murderer bypass the iron door to examine the room? Forcing it open would make too much noise. And looking through the opening only shows an empty, dusty cellar. Suggesting the clue is probably buried under the stone floor, carved in the walls right next to the door or maybe a hidden passage to the clue. The culprit has to take a gamble by having the door opened by some with a reason and authority to break open the door... like the police.

Lets suppose this person begins going down the cellar in the middle of the night to loosen the bars, one by one, on the eye-level opening until they can all be taken out and simply placed back in (source of the ghostly noises). Now suppose this treasure hunter had someone on hand who needed disposing anyway, bludgeons that person and tightly wraps the body inside a blanket or piece of tarp. He then places something long, thick and sturdy over the body (legless table top or plank?) and drives a car or small tractor over it to break all of the bones. It also makes it look as the victim was rubbed out by a giant thumb. This broken, mangled mess of a body and pulverized bones can be much more easily squashed through the opening, minus bars, of the iron door and shoved into the middle of the room with a pole. Yes, it would leave a trail in the dust, but adds to the illusion of someone getting rubbed out of existence by a giant, disembodied thumb. Only thing the murderer is super glue the bars back into place, wait for an opportune moment to discover the body and be one hand when the room is opened. The big, jokey twist (of course) would be that the clue to the treasure was always accessible as the stone floor is laid out like a map of the estate with a round stone, or something, marking the burial place. The iron door with the slightly bigger barred opening (a clue) was merely a psychological obstacle to mislead treasure hunters with gold fever who peeked through it hoping to get a glimmer of what kind of clue could be hidden in there. And completely missing the bigger picture right in front of their eyes.

So this little nugget of pulpy insanity bubbled up in my brain, while pondering the impossible possibilities of The Spaniard's Thumb and thought some of you might appreciate it. I know I'm not the only locked room loon around here.

The Bishop's Sword (1948) by Norman Berrow

Back in 2020, I reviewed The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) by Norman Berrow, a British-born New Zealand mystery writer, who together with Max Afford pushed the frontiers of the impossible crime story in the Antipodean region – producing about a dozen locked room novels and short stories between them. That may not sound like much, but Afford and Berrow crafted some very imaginative, original and outright fantastical impossible crime fiction that stand out even today. Although, it should be mentioned Berrow's homespun brand of impossible crime fiction has not unfairly been criticized for being better at stating the impossible mysteries than explaining them. Afford definitely was the better of the two when it came to explaining his sealed rooms like The Dead Are Blind (1937) and "The Vanishing Trick" (1948), but there's something insanely attractive about Berrow's ability to parade them around.

Berrow had an undeniable knack for dreaming up inventive and fanciful miracle problems involving vanishing landmarks, time-slips and the devil's hoof-marks trekking through an impossible obstacle course in the snow. 

The Three Tiers of Fantasy is a mystery caper anticipating Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) and Edward D. Hoch's "The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" (1983) as they all string together three impossible disappearances that include one or two large objects. Hoch's short story concerns the inexplicable taking of a roomful of furniture, while the homeowner had his back turned for a moment. Saunders found a way to lose a police van complete with occupants from a guarded stretch of road, but Berrow took things a step further in The Three Tiers of Fantasy by making a whole room vanish and apparently wiped an entire street out of existence. The balance between quantity and quality is always a thorny issue with these multiple impossible crime stories and the reason why they tend to be one-offs among a writer's work (*), but Berrow upped the ante in his next novel comprising of no less than four seemingly impossible incidents. I finally wanted to take a look at that novel after reading Wadsworth Camp's House of Fear (1916), which is one of the earliest mysteries to pile on locked rooms and impossible incidents. 

The Bishop's Sword (1948) is the second novel to feature Berrow's regrettably short-lived series-character, Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith, whose base of operation is the small, mountainous environs of a country town called Winchingham – described as "a fair sample of rural nomenclature." Miss Antonia “Toni” Meridew, a London girl, is a new arrival and came to Winchingham to take up the position of companion-secretary to Mrs. Miriam Pendlebury, "a vigorous-spoken woman woman of sixty with a determined chin and a pile of snow-white hair," at Hilltop House. Mrs. Pendlebury household consists of her son, Eric Pendlebury, who's not oblivious to Toni's good looks ("don't stare at Miss Meridew like that!") and her spinster sister, Miss Emmeline Forbes. Miss Forbes has a keen interest in esoteric matters and mysticism ("illusions, realities—what are they?"). Over dinner, Toni learns that the place houses two treasures, "a greater and lesser," of considerably monetary and historical value.

Firstly, there's the lesser treasure: a magnificent necklace gifted by Mrs. Pendlebury's late husband on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and which contained some of the finest pearls in the country. So worth a pretty packet. Secondly, the Bishop's Sword and is considered "more of a national institution than a private possession." A sword of the finest Toledo steel in a red velvet scabbard adorned with gold curlicues and gemstones, which belonged to a distant and infamous ancestor of the Pendleburys, Richard Buckstone, who was an ordained pirate. If the legend is to believed, Buckstone murdered a Spanish nobleman with his bare hands to get possession of the sword and a curse has rested on it ever since he died. Whoever draws the sword shall die very soon after and the last victim was Eric's great-uncle only sixty years ago. So the bedeviled weapon was sealed away inside a cunningly made, one-piece, casket of glass and steel hooked up to a loud burglar alarm. But its best protection is it's priceless reputation as no fence would dare touch it. Or so they reason.

So the stage is set when a nighttime prowler begins to poke around Hilltop House and provides the story with its first of four impossible situations. Toni is awakened in the middle of the night by sounds, creaking floorboards and shuffling footsteps as if someone is sneaking about in the hallway outside. When she goes to have a peek, Toni gasps when seeing the door of the empty room next to hers being closed and "caught a glimpse of a hand on the inside door knob drawing it shut." She rouses Eric from his bedroom without losing sight of the other door, but, upon entering the room together, they find it as empty and unoccupied as always – only exit is a window securely latched. So how did the intruder vanish from a locked and watched room as that person could not possibly have snicked over the catch after stepping out of the window. These nightly incidents come to the attention of Mrs. Pendlebury and that brings Detective Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith to Hilltop House as well as drawing another character into the case as Toni is not the only new arrival in town.

Matthew Strange is an Anglo-Tibetan mystic, or wizard, who has lived Tibet where he acquired "power and mastery of mind undreamt of in our materialistic hemisphere." Now he occupies a small, stone house practically next door of the Pendleburys and brought along six Chinese disciples. Who are known collectively as the Six Virtues. Strange becomes involved when the nighttime prowler returns to Hilltop House, but disturbs the sleeping Mrs. Pendlebury and flees from the house. The alarm is raised and the police constable posted nearby finds Eric and Strange standing not far from the body of the Pendlebury's gardener. Smith uncovers damning evidence at the scene incriminating Strange and arrests him for murder. So the string impossibilities all centering on the supposed supernatural abilities of Strange.

During the inquest, the magistrate tells Strange he will be given an opportunity to make a statement at the next hearing, but Strange tells the magistrate he'll be speaking to him at two o'clock the following morning at his house. While under lock, key and guard at the police station. That night, Strange apparently appears in the flesh to the magistrate and even forcibly restrains him. But when he makes his exit and a telephone goes out to the police station, the magistrate is informed Strange is still lying comfortably in his cell. A trick Strange repeats with the Chief Constable during which he tells him that the Bishop's Sword has been taken from its sealed, unbroken casket. When he calls the house to check, it's confirmed the casket is empty. Lastly, Strange impossibly disappears from inside the excavated cave, while the only entrance and exit was being observed. But how does it all stack up?

JJ, of The Invisible Event, noted in his review of Don't Go Out After Dark (1950) Berrow "really does deserve credit for how neatly he fits the unlikely into a small community, always knowing that base intent will be behind it somewhere." That's very much the case here as it begins as a small household thrown into turmoil by prowlers, murder and eastern mysticism, but The Bishop's Sword is arguably a better detective story than locked room mystery and the non-impossible plot-elements regrettably get a bit lost in the melee or miracles. For example, the missing, three-cornered murder weapon and the triangular indentation in the corner of the rose bed offer an intriguing little puzzle and how it linked up to another incident is quite clever and satisfying. Admittedly, the whole picture hinged on a big coincidence, but coincidences do happen from time to time as wires gets crossed. What holds the book back is actually the profusion of impossibilities, or rather, the lack of quality when it comes to the explanations.

First of all, the disappearing prowler from the watched and locked bedroom is the easiest one to solve. When the hand closed the door, I half-expected the situation would turn on a misunderstanding and Toni unknowingly caught a glimpse of the hand in a hallway mirror closing the door to another room. After all, she was new to the house and the incident happened in the middle of the night, but the subsequent investigation of the room left very little doubt the solution had to be one of the most routine locked room-tricks on record. The disappearance of the sword from its sealed casket poses as much of a challenge as the disappearing prowler once you learn how useless one of the security measures really is and the same goes for the vanishing act inside the cave, but enjoyed the scene in which Smith worked out the solution to the cave puzzle "on the floor of the living-room in his own home with a set of chessmen and ashtray" that represent the various characters and cave. While these three impossible problems were ridiculously easy to piece together, they were at least legitimate and proper locked room mysteries. Just not very challenging or impressive and recall the slightly underwhelming vanishings from Herbert Brean's Wilders Walk Away (1948). So had the story limited itself to those three disappearances, The Bishop's Sword would have emerged as a well-constructed, immensely entertaining and balanced second-string mystery novel that cleverly worked a trio of decent, but not especially challenging, locked room mysteries into the plot – which would have made for a perfectly serviceable and enjoyable detective story. What dragged The Bishop's Sword dangerously close to becoming a third-rate, pulp-style detective is the hackneyed answer to Strange's psychic projections while imprisoned. Berrow had enough genre awareness to know what he did is neither acceptable nor particular fair and to drag it out in 1948 is inexcusably stupid. It was inexcusably stupid and hopelessly out of date when Robert Brennan used it two decades previously in The Toledo Dagger (1927)!

And, yet, despite being slightly disgusted over the psychic projections and conflicted over the overall mixed quality of the plot, I really enjoyed The Bishop's Sword. Whatever shortcomings the complete picture has, Berrow definitely understood how to play a mysterious situation up to full effect and certainly was not inapt when it came to handling a complicated, multi-threaded plot full of moving parts that mostly played fair with the reader. The problem is that the story swings back and forth between the good, the bad and just plain average, which makes it hard to recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone except seasoned locked room and Golden Age mystery fans. So decide at your own discretion. Anyway, The Bishop's Sword was fun enough to move The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) to the top of my wishlist and plan to revisit The Footprints of Satan (1950) sometime later this year. So stay tuned! 

*: writers who have two or more multiple impossible crime (three or more) novels to their name appear to be a bit more common in the non-English speaking world and especially Japanese writers, ingenious as ever, have made the multiple impossible crime story their own. Their increasing availability is beginning to rub off on the Western locked room mysteries with such recent publications as James Scott Byrnside's The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020), A. Carver's The Author is Dead (2022) and Jim Noy's The Red Death Murders (2022). Some have a distinctly Japanese flavoring to their storytelling, plots and characters.

Sorry for this messy, choppy and rambling post, but foolishly started writing it right after reading the first few chapters and became progressively more conflicted forcing me to rewrite and move around parts of it. I'll try to be somewhat coherent next time.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) by Norman Berrow

Norman Berrow was, like Fergus Hume and Arthur W. Upfield, a British-born Antipodean mystery novelist whose parents settled down in Ngaio Marsh's hometown, Christchurch, New Zealand, where he became one of the country's foremost craftsman of the locked room mystery – only Max Afford nipped close at his heels. You can find an entire page worth filled with alluring descriptions of Berrow's original-sounding impossible crime fiction in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991).

The Bishop's Sword (1948) has no less than three impossible appearances and disappearances, which includes astral-projection and the theft of a sword from a hermetically sealed cabinet. A giant, disembodied thumb crushes a man to death in The Spaniard's Thumb (1949) and Don't Jump, Mr. Boland! (1954) has a body inexplicably vanishing from the bottom of a steep cliff, but my sole exposure to Berrow had been his ambitious take on the 1855 Devil's Hoof-marks of Devon, The Footprints of Satan (1950). An impossible crime novel that turned the footprints-in-the-snow gimmick into a wintry obstacle course.

So what has kept me from exploring Berrow's work further? Honestly, I've no idea. Somehow, Berrow simply slipped through the cracks, but my fellow blogger and locked room fanboy, "JJ" of The Invisible Event, has been praising his work for years and served as a reminder to, one of the days, return to Berrow – which brings us to the subject of today's review. Another one of Berrow's detective novels listed in Locked Room Murders with several fantastic-sounding impossibilities.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) is the first title in the Detective-Inspector Lancelot Carolus Smith series and has a plot comprising of three isolated, seemingly unconnected disappearance cases defying the laws of space and time.

Winchingham is "a pleasant, peaceful spot" with "an old-world, unhurried atmosphere" populated by "industrious, unassuming and law-abiding" people. A small, quiet town with "no vices," but the Winchingham became the stage of "a triple mystery" that disturbed "the cosmic calm of esoteric circles" in Great Britain and was eventually solved by "a prosaic police officer." An eerie, fantastic case of The Man Who Had No Existence, the Phantom Room and The Stolen Street!

The first fantastic tier begins with a woman, Miss Janet Soames, who lives with her "selfish, domineering old humbug" of a brother and golf was her only escape from the house. Miss Soames was on the verge of becoming a middle-aged spinster when, one day, out of nowhere, Prince Charming appears.

Philip Strong claims to have been in love with her for a long time and they begin each other, in secret, until they decide to elope under the cover of night. Philip brings her to the house of an old friend, Jimmy Melrose, who has become an ardent spiritualist in his old age and even his very own séance room, but Janet has an eerie, unsettling feeling before entering the house – like "a forerunner of the nightmare" that was about to engulf her. Janet witnesses how Philip cheerfully mounting a staircase and waited for the top board to utter its "protesting creak," but she only caught a very deep sigh and, just like that, Philip ceased to exist. Not only had he had vanished, like a popped soap bubble, but everyone denied he was ever there! A cabdriver and Mr. Melrose's butler, Porter, swear up and down Janet had arrived at the house alone. And the Philip Strong they knew had been dead for the past seven years!

The "invisible companion" had been brilliantly used by John Dickson Carr in his well-known radio-play, "Cabin B-13," which later received a highly original treatment at the hands of Edward D. Hoch with "The Problem of the Leather Man" (collected in All But Impossible: The Impossible Files of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 2017), but the solution was underwhelming and the premise clumsily handled. Giving too much away about the overarching scheme to the suspicious-minded armchair detective. There is, however, still so much to come!

In the Second Tier, the reader is introduced to an astute businessman and embezzler, Sherman Stokes, who's in the process of absconding with a modest fortune. But he's interrupted by his private-secretary, Miss Lana Booth. She knows what he has been up to and want to share in the spoils, which comes with an offer to become his "wife" and already has made arrangements. So without much of choice, Stokes agrees and they set-off for South America, but their car breaks down in Winchingham and are forced to stay the night at a haunted roadhouse, The Welcome Inn – which was once the property of an eccentric recluse whose hobby was dabbling in mysticism. Since he died at the turn of the century, the place has been haunted by a mischievous entity that has steadily chased away paying customers. So the place is closing down the following day. Stokes and Miss Booth can only get a room with no service, but what a room!

An old-looking, but royally furnished room, with a fireplace, french-windows, tapestry and huge, Queen-like bed with red, gold-flecked bedspread and "a Tibetan devil-mask" hanging on the wall – located on the second-floor. Only problem is that there's no such room at the inn. The place doesn't even have a second-floor! The phantom room has disappeared together with a valise full of embezzled money!

This second impossibility of a phantom room and a non-existent, second-floor is easily the best of the three with a more carefully handled presentation and a satisfying solution, which is not entirely original at its core. But the idea was very well executed. Coincidentally, the earlier mentioned Hoch collection, All But Impossible, has a short story, entitled "The Problem of the Phantom Parlor," working with the same idea and plot-elements. So did Hoch read The Three Tiers of Fantasy and thought he could improve on the first two impossibilities, because I can see how he saw possibilities for alternative, more original, solutions in the answers to the tier one and two.

Funnily enough, you can find a third story in All But Impossible, "The Problem of the Missing Roadhouse," which has an impossible disappearance that's a mixture of tier two and three. But not nearly as good as the other two stories or this novel.

The third and final tier is a direct ancestor of Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005) with an alleyway, haunted by visions of the long-ago past, which has recently began to disappear and reappear again. Mrs. Josephine Prattley has decided to spend the weekend at the house of a local artist, Darcy Cherrington, but, when they arrive at his home, he tells Mrs. Prattley to wait outside as he puts the car away and simply vanishes without a sound – prompting her to enter the garage. She walks straight into "an medieval drinking den" with "medieval-looking people," speaking Shakespearean English, where she sees two of those people being put to the sword. A horrendous crime that took place there in 1597! Mrs. Prattley flies the scene, but, when she returns with a policeman in tow, the whole passageway has vanished. Only to reappear a short while later!

The problem of the stolen street is, sadly, the least impressive, or imaginative, of the three miraculous vanishings and even Detective-Inspector Smith admits the explanation is "disappointingly simple." But, in the defense of the author, there's only so much you can do to make a street disappear and the solution provided an entirely new answer to the problem. So there's that.

Detective-Inspector Smith makes short appearances in each tier to discuss and comment on these fantastic problems, but finally stirs to life in the fourth act, "The Toppling of the Tiers," in which he methodically reconstructs and demolishes the supernatural events that have plagued Winchingham. And there were more than those three apparently supernatural disappearances. The locked séance room of Mr. Melrose is ransacked by an evil, otherworldly, entity and a road barricade proved to have an illusory quality. Framed pictures were flying off the wall and a lift was operated by invisible hands at the inn. A man who left no fingerprints and a hat and coat go missing without anyone having been near them before they disappeared.

One by one, Smith strips them of their unearthly quality to reveal "the underlying sordid, mercenary motive" and, as an impossible crime, fanboy it was joy to read these chapters. You can figure out pretty much everything before you get to these explanatory chapters, but loved how these plot-strands were intertwined and knotted together at the end. Some other, non-impossible aspects of the solution were a bit cliché, but, honestly, I have never seen them put to better use than here.

The Three Tiers of Fantasy has a plot brimming with ghostly activities, supernatural occurrences and inexplicable disappearances, which makes it tempting to draw a comparison with Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but story was not packed a dark, doom-laden atmosphere – more in the spirit of a spirited, pulp-style caper (c.f. Hilary St. George Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus, 1951). Or perhaps a better comparison would be some of the later "Carter Dickson" titles in which Carr experimented with murderless detective novels about impossible disappearances, such as Lord of the Sorcerers (1945) and A Graveyard to Let (1949), but written with the vigor of Herbert Brean (e.g. Hardly a Man is Now Alive, 1950).

So, to cut a long, rambling review short, The Three Tiers of Fantasy only failed to tax the brains of the armchair detective, but, in every other aspect, it was a thoroughly entertaining mystery caper crammed with impossible situations and locked room puzzles! Highly recommended, if your taste runs in that direction.