The Summer of the Ubume (1994) by Natsuhiko Kyogoku

Natsuhiko Kyogoku is a graphic designer, yokai researcher and mystery writer whose debut, Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume, 1994), is credited together with MORI Hiroshi's Subete ga F ni naru (Everything Turns to F: The Perfect Insider, 1996) with the starting the second shin honkaku wave – couching its traditionally-styled plots in specialized backgrounds or subject matters. The Perfect Insider takes place at what, in 1996, must have appeared as a futuristic IT research institute and The Summer of the Ubume draws on Kyogoku's research of Japanese folklore.

The Summer of the Ubume is the first in a series of nine novels and a handful of short story collections, known as the Kyogokudo series, which combine the detective story with Japanese folklore, myths and urban legends. Ho-Ling Wong called it "a wordy mystery with deep conversations on a wide variety of topics and a somewhat strange locked room mystery" that's "actually available in English." Sort of.

In 2009, Vertical published an English-language edition translated by Alexander O. Smith. A name you might recognize from the Keigo Higashino translations. Speaking of Higashino, the translation of The Summer of the Ubume was published before Higashino's Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005) became an international bestseller in 2011 and Ho-Ling's 2015 translation of Yukito Ayatsuji's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) for LRI started the translation wave – largely went unnoticed by mystery fans. But through no fault of our own. The Summer of the Ubume was not really presented as a shin honkaku locked room mystery, but something closer to the horror genre or supernatural fiction with a rational and skeptical bend. It didn't help that translation silently went out-of-print around the time Japanese detective fiction started to get momentum. Since then, Vertigo ceased to be and was consolidated into Kodansha USA.

So that pretty much put a brake on a possible second printing or a translation of the second, award-winning novel, Moryo no hako (Box of Goblins, 1995), ended there for the time being. And used copies have become insultingly pricey. Like you're buying rare coins or something. But, every now and then, you get a lucky break. Let's finally take a look at this overlooked translation of a second wave shin hokaku mystery reputedly even more unusual than Hiroshi's The Perfect Insider.

First of all, the Kyogokudo books form a series of historical mysteries set in post-World War II Tokyo, Japan. The Summer of the Ubume takes place during its titular month of 1952 and marks the first appearance of the proprietor of a used bookstore, Akihiko Chuzenji, but everyone has to the habit to call him by the name of his bookstore, Kyogokudo. A ferocious reader and bookseller who moonlights as a priest and faith healer specialized in curing possessions and exorcising evil spirits "modified to fit the beliefs of the particular sect to which each customer belonged." You see, Kyogokudo is not a believer who looks out on a world filled with ghosts, monsters and other creatures from Japan's folklore, but acknowledges their existence as social and cultural constructs – which can have very real effects on the people who believe in them or have fallen under their spell. So the bookseller and part time exorcist is prone to hold "arcane lectures" that eat into the page-count of the book. Case in point: the opening chapter that runs for roughly one-hundred pages.

The Summer of the Ubume is narrated by Kyogokudo's long-time friend and freelance journalist, Tatsumi Sekiguchi, who traveled to the bookstore to ask his friend a very unusual question. Is it possible for a woman to be pregnant for twenty months? This question gets bogged down in the first lecture covering everything from ghosts, quantum mechanics and the perception of reality to folklore and the ubume ("...if they die in childbirth, their regrets come back to walk the earth..."). So it takes a while before the problem becomes evident, but it comes down to this: Sekiguchi has gotten wind of a rumor that a woman by the name of Kyoko Kuonji has been pregnant for twenty months with the salient detail that her husband, Makio Kuonji, vanished from a locked and watched room at the Kuonji Clinic in Zoshigaya. A clinic the family has run for generations. Kyogokudo tells Sekiguchi to get into contact with Reijiro Enokizu, "a member of a rare breed, a genuine professional detective," to investigate the case. However, it takes them a while to get to the clinic, because the introduction Enokizu takes some time.

Reijiro Enokizu is a childhood friend of the two and one of two reasons why this review has the "hybrid mysteries" tag. Enokizu is someone who can see other people's memories ("...Enokizu doesn't read people's memories, he sees them"), which makes him a very unusual sort of private eye ("I don't do investigations. I do conclusions"). So kind of like a short cut detective that has gotten him trouble in the past, but a handy gift when tackling a case in which someone "vanished from a sealed room like a puff of smoke" and a woman pregnant for twenty months. Somewhere halfway through the story, they finally arrive at the clinic that would have been a fantastic setting for a more traditional shin honkaku mystery. A writer like Seimaru Amagi could have done something with the largely abandoned building that went from a fully staffed hospital to only doing obstetrics and gynecology as the war depleted their staff and American air raids destroying part of the clinic ("wow, they really did a number on this place, didn't they?"). Enokizu quickly bows out of the case and tells Sekiguchi to call on their friend, Detective Shutaro Kiba of the Tokyo Police. Yes, it takes a while for them to return to the clinic, but the parts with Kiba are actually fun. And feel like the story was starting to get back on track. I was wrong.

All the slow, meandering developments and lectures eventually culminate with Kyogokudo going to the clinic to gather everyone around Kyoko Kuonji's sickbed for the expected denouement – dressed up and presented as an exorcism. Only for Natsuhiko Kyogoku to take a page from Edogawa Rampo's playbook of grotesque body horror, which admittedly is used quite effectively to deliver a scene as unexpected as it's unsettling. Regrettably, this memorable scene didn't signal the end of the story as Kyogokudo's lengthy explanation gobbles up the final quarter of this wordy, rambling and overlong book. I love detective stories soaked in the bizarre or arcane, but a writer has to eventually deliver something on those ideas. Particularly if you keep dragging and delaying things. That was unfortunately not the case here.

Going by what has been translated up until now, The Summer of the Ubume stands as a poor specimen of the Japanese detective story. Even if you want to be generous and only compare it to other hybrid mysteries.

First of all, the vanishing from the locked room is an important part to the overall plot and what, exactly, makes a good locked room-trick is still being debated today, but what Kyogoku pulled here is simply infuriating. A suggestion that was mocked a century ago (ROT13: n punenpgre sebz T.X. Purfgregba'f “Gur Zvenpyr bs Zbba Perfprag” fhttrfgf gung gur zheqrere tbg va, naq bhg, bs n pybfryl jngpurq ebbz ol gvcgbrvat npebff cflpubybtvpny oyvaq fcbgf bs gur bofreiref gb juvpu nabgure erfcbaqf, “nppbeqvat gb lbh, n jubyr cebprffvba bs Vevfuzra pneelvat oyhaqreohffrf znl unir jnyxrq guebhtu guvf ebbz juvyr jr jrer gnyxvat, fb ybat nf gurl gbbx pner gb gernq ba gur oyvaq fcbgf va bhe zvaqf.” Kyogoku thought that was a good idea to explain the disappearance from a locked room (ROT13: ur arire qvfnccrnerq sebz gur ybpxrq ebbz. N cflpubybtvpny oybpx ceriragrq crbcyr, vapyhqvat gur aneengbe, sebz frrvat gur obql naq gura jrag n fgrc shegure ol univat gur obql ghea vagb n jnk-zhzzl haqre irel fcrpvny, uvtuyl hayvxryl pvephzfgnaprf. And, no, Kyogokudo saying "I'm no statistician, but I'd say you're looking at chances close to zero" doesn't make it any better. I should note here Ho-Ling pointed out in his review that while not being a fan of the locked room-trick, it does work in conjunction with the themes of the story like a thematic device. Fair enough. But still rubbish. Nothing else about the plot, motives, missing babies and morbid psychology, justified its length either. So if you're looking for one of those ingeniously-plotted, delightfully subversive shin honkaku locked room mysteries, The Summer of the Ubume is going to disappoint and severely test your patience.

The Summer of the Ubume has one, very small redeeming quality. Historically, it's a fascinating read. I mentioned last year how the translation wave has largely ignored the Japanese mystery novels from the 1990s and especially that second wave of shin honkaku authors. Hiroshi's The Perfect Insider was very enlightening in that regard and The Summer of the Ubume is very similar as they both show their influence on writers like Motohiro Katou and "NisiOisiN." Even more interesting, The Summer of the Ubume might have even influenced H.M. Faust's Gospel of V (2023). It might just be one of those coincidences, but, having read both unintentionally back-to-back, I can't help but see some trace similarities. For example, the two unusual private detectives or the solution to the vanishing skeleton from the locked collection room. It's like a solution Faust came up while reading the book and decided to use it for his own locked room mystery. Rightfully so, if that's what happened! Read that one instead.

So, yeah, to cut a long story short, The Summer of the Ubume simply didn't do it for me. A historical, not unimportant curiosity, but a curiosity nonetheless. The reader has been warned! Next up, back to the Golden Age!

The Lake of the Dead (1942) by André Bjerke

André Bjerke was a Norwegian poet, translator, television host and writer who debuted as a mystery novelist with Nattmennesket (The Night Person, 1941), published as by "Bernhard Borge," which appeared when he was only 23 and introduced his sleuth of four novels, Kai Bugge – a Freudian psycho-analyst like Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley and Helen McCloy's Dr. Basil Willing. De dødes tjern (The Lake of the Dead, 1942) appeared next and the book became an enduring Norwegian classic over the decades. It won a 2001 poll "to determine the all-time best Norwegian crime novel" and has never ranked lower than third in subsequent polls. So a non-English classic of the genre that has stood the test of time. 

Back in February, Valancourt Books published an English edition of The Lake of the Dead, translated by James D. Jenkins, who also provided a must-read introduction. I really recommend the plot-oriented readers of this blog to go over the introduction before plunging into the story. 

The Lake of the Dead is not only more of a thriller than a detective story, but Bjerke also explored "the possibilities of fusing crime and horror," which earned it a comparison to John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). The former offers "a controversial twist ending that suggested a supernatural solution," while the latter "reads for all the world like a supernatural horror novel until a rational explanation is finally presented." Bjerke tried to fuse and cement those two different approaches, but did he succeed? Let's find out! 

The Lake of the Dead opens with Bernhard Borge and his wife, Sonja, moving into their new apartment and, to celebrate the occasion, they decide to throw a little house party to their friends – six of whom would figure in a haunting drama. Firstly, there's the psycho-analyst detective, Kai Bugge. Gabriel Mørk, a literary critic, who edits a magazine called The Scourge and "sees it as his mission in life to slander as many writers as possible and smite the sewers of intellectual life like God's cleansing thunderbolt." Harald Gran is a lawyer whose hobby is criminology and he's "been busy writing a long criminological thesis." Bjørn Werner is a former theology student turned atheist and "the conveniently timed death of a rich uncle" provided him with "the luxury of being a slacker." His sister, Lilian, is a typically young modern woman ("a little too nervous and a little too erotic") who's best friends with Sonja and engaged to Harald.

During the party, Borge reveals to his friends that he has "nothing left to write about" and his imagination is "as empty as the fleshpots of our time." Simply put, he has a severe case of writer's block and, to keep his family out of the poorhouse, asks his guests to give him a plot. Harald has a ghost of a story for him to elaborate on. More than a hundred years ago, a man named Tore Gruvik built a cabin in the woods in Østerdalen, "one of the gloomiest and most godforsaken parts of the country," where the only trace of civilization is a small hamlet two hours from the cabin. Gruvik was hopelessly devoted to his sister and would not tolerate any man near her, but, one day, she run away with a farmhand with her enraged brother in pursuit. And he caught up with them at his cabin. There he beheaded them with an ax and threw the bodies in nearby, stagnant body of water called Blue Lake, but "that deed was too great a strain even for a tough guy like Tore Gruvik." So, after several days of wandering around the woods, he drowned himself in the lake. Blue Lake is "said to be bottomless" and the bodies were never retrieved, which gave rise to stories of curses, demonic possessions and mysterious drownings.

According to local legends, "a curse has hung over the cabin ever since Gruvik's death" and whoever stays at the cabin becomes possessed by his malevolent spirit, "like a terrible force sucking at their souls," drawing his victim to him – sucking "them all down with him into the lake." So the little nature retreat acquired the ominous moniker Dead Man's Cabin. Bjørn Werner has bought that very cabin, curse, ghost and enchanted lake included, where he intends to spend some solitary weeks with his books and dog. Three weeks pass when his friends receive the news he has committed suicide at the cabin. District Sheriff Einar Bråten had been summoned to the cabin by Werner, but, when he arrived, noticed a single line of footprints leading to the edge of the lake. Werner's hat, shotgun and the body of his dog were lying nearby "the last footprint clearly shows he must have taken the plunge and thrown himself in." A diary recounts how he spiraled into madness during his short stay at the haunted cabin.

So it must have been suicide, because a murderer could not have carried the body to the lake, dump it into the water and then "leap up in the air and disappear thereafter," but Harald believes it was murder ("a murder, plain and simple"). They decide to take an expedition, or holiday, to the cabin to see what's been going on there. The book partially earned its classic status on its setting with the cabin, "massive and hulking," peeking over the trees of the dense, eerie and shadow haunted forest like an enchanted castle in a dark fairy tale. The mysterious lake with its odds way how its surface reflected reflected the moonlight as though "the blue-white, shimmering reflection originated from a secret light source down in the depths" like "an underwater fire." And it has a mesmerizing effect on those who have gathered at the cabin. If that isn't enough, the sheriff informs them a manhunt is underway for an escaped killer roaming the woods of Østerdalen in the dark of night.

What follows is a string of incidents and discussions involving "an invisible phantom that screams and leaves footprints," sleepwalking and dream analysis, discussions of handwriting and hypnosis, nighttime intrusions and one of them eventually becoming "the second victim of Blue Lake's pull." But was it murder or a supernaturally induced suicide? Only that thing can be said for certain is that there's a troubled soul at the back of it.

John Norris reviewed The Lake of the Dead last March and he evoked various mystery writers, ranging from John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot ("eerie atmosphere and use of grisly legends") to the Freudian psychology of McCloy's Dr. Willing and Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley – even Sax Rohmer's The Dream Detective (1920) gets a passing mention. While these comparisons are not inaccurate, they feel like they on fit on the surface. You see, The Lake of the Dead is a little too self-aware as its status as a novel. Chapter 7 opens with an apology to the reader, because they're on page 75 and "so far only a single person has met his end." So the author "certainly understand how the audience must feel cheated" as any "thriller costing four kroner must under no circumstances contain fewer than four murders." Carr subtly broke the fourth wall in The Three Coffins (1935) and The Crooked Hinge (1938), but how Bjerke did it is more in line with Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. So you get an unusual contrast between what's happening in the story and how it's retrospectively told to the reader. My impression was much more of tongue-in-cheek homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). And that detracted a little from the atmosphere. However, the jovial tone began to dissipate as the story neared its ending.

So we come to question whether, or not, Bjelke succeeded in fusing the detective and horror genres? Kind of. Technically speaking, yes, he did succeed, but not quite in the way I imagined he would do. There are some genuine detective components to the plot and one, or two, were quite clever (ROT13: jul gur qbt ernyyl unq gb tb), but the driving force behind the plot is something different all together. I can only describe it as trying to explain something supernatural as a purely natural phenomenon and initially hated it, but Bugge's explanation and pointing out all the fairly planted, psychological clues pulled me back in. So, yeah, technically it kind of works as a detective story and you have to appreciate the effort made to make it work, but that aberrant element was a little too loose and esoteric for my taste. I simply expected the whole thing would turn out to be a staged murder plot until the killer is dragged down into the lake by his victims at the end, which I would have liked a lot more as it would have meant an intact detective story with the supernatural horrors only coming into play to take care of the murderer.

As you can judge from my ramblings, the second-half and ending left me in two minds. I honestly appreciated the heartfelt attempt to create a true hybrid between the detective and horror genres, which is even more impressive when you consider "Norway is one of the only Western European countries with essentially no tradition of horror fiction." I'm sure that's another reason why the book became a homegrown classic. But the Freudian psychology, supernatural elements and particular the motive (as dark as Scandinavian Noir) didn't entirely work for me. Or were wholly convincing. Because, you know, I'm what you can call somewhat of a genre purist. However, I would probably have a little more positive had my previous three reads not been Robert A. Simon's The Week-End Mystery (1926), Nigel FitzGerald's Affairs of Death (1967) and MORI Hiroshi's Seven Stories (2016). All unconventional detective novels and all have one curious plot-element, or another, in common with The Lake of the Dead. I hoped to find a little more conventional detective story (blame John's comparison to Carr) or kindred spirit of Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017). This was not it.

So to cut an overlong, lukewarm and mess of a review short, if you're personal taste runs in a similar direction as mine, you might want to approach The Lake of the Dead cautiously. But, if you don't mind an experimental piece of genre fiction every now and then, you might as well pick up this Norwegian classic.

I'll try to pick something more conventional for my next review and, what do you know, my copy of the latest volume from Case Closed has finally arrived. Stay tuned!

Dislodged from Fiction

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—"
- Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, 1845)

In my previous post, "The Reader is Warned," I compiled a list of the worst locked room-and impossible crime novels read to date and I confessed it was nothing more than a filler post, but there was a serious plan to follow it up with a regular review.

Well, that plan was doomed to fail when I decided to read a 1965 reprint of a revised edition from the 1940s of Rupert T. Gould's Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (1929), which aligns this reviews with the series of (filler) posts I made on real-life, "domesticated" locked room mysteries. You can find the five-part series here: I, II, III, IV and V. The extraordinary events, occurrences and problems described by Gould in Oddities took place on a far grander scale than the cutesy impossibilities, resembling a detective story, I collected from around the web.

However, I have to begin with the author himself, who, judging by the introduction written by Leslie Shepard, was somewhat of a character himself. Shepard described Gould as "a remarkably talented and versatile man," whose interests where as varied as it was impressive. Gould served in the Royal Navy, was a nautical and mechanical expert, dabbled in broadcasting and wrote books. It's also mentioned Gould spend twelve years on the cleaning and restoration of four historic marine chronometers made by John Harrison in the 18th century. Oh, and he had a room filled with ancient machines and a notice on the door reading: "HOME OF REST FOR AGED AND DECAYED TYPEWRITERS" and "NO DESERVING CASE EVER REFUSED ADMISSION." The research done in sourcing the origin of the stories, verifying statements from decades ago and fishing for documents in dusty, disarrayed archives is something to be admired when you realize it was done in a time historians in the distant future will simply refer to as B.G. (Before Google). There is, however, one downside: footnotes that can gobble up a good portion of the page and slow down your reading.

Anyhow, the Oddities collected in Gould's books differ from events and person still known today, especially among connoisseurs of the impossible crime story, while others were completely forgotten even at the time when the book was written – which is a shame. The legends and myths of 18th-and 19th century pop-culture were quite interesting, and how they were being discussed really didn’t differ all that much from how it goes today. Take this comment for example: "The Illustrated London News... took the question, and opened it columns to what proved to be quite an extensive correspondence," which Gould quoted extensively in the first chapter that looks at the devil's hoof-marks that appeared in 1855 after a heavy snowfall.

It Walks By Night!

The tracks appeared in several places and covered 40 to 100 miles. Even more curiously, the footprints appeared in the most of impossible and inaccessible of places, "on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open field." While the locals where convinced the devil was walking among them, the newspapers allowed their readers to speculate on the nature of the beast. The popular opinion was the footprints were made by an animal, but nobody could quite agree on what kind of animals could've made the tracks and how. Suggestions ranged from birds, badgers and even an escaped kangaroo, because a hoax perpetrated on such a scale seems even more preposterous – and which would've been a minor miracle in its own right. The only solution I have to offer can be found in The Footprints of Satan (1950) by Norman Berrow, whose treatment of the Devonshire footprints resemble an obstacle course from hell, nevertheless, it's acceptable enough considering the scale of the problem. Well, I have one other solution, but that would only work in a smaller environment and explaining it would make this post an even longer drag to read that it already is. And did I mention the chapters are littered with maps, diagrams and sketches? There are chapters that actually read like a detective story, but without a proper and satisfying conclusion.

The next chapter is dedicated to the Chase Vault in the cemetery of Christ Church, located on the island of Barbados, which gained an unsavory reputation for the "restless coffins" that were stored inside the sealed crypt. In the early 1800s, the vault became the property of the Chase family and the first to be interred was a two-year-old girl on February 22, 1808 and four years later she was accompanied by her older sister – who reputedly suffered great abuse at the hands of her father, Colonel Thomas Chase. The problems began a month later with the suicide Colonel Chase and the vault had to be reopened again, which showed the coffins had been thrown about the place. It still took a couple of years and repeats of this event for the story to gain some traction, but the precautions taken to prevent trickery came straight out of a locked room mystery. The floor was covered with sand, the place searched for hidden entrances and the governor of Barbados, Lord Combermere, stamped the fresh concrete slab with his seal and "several witnesses added private marks of their own," but upon reopening the crypt the coffins had been thrown around again. Gould quotes from several personal accounts and letters, some found in family archives, and cited three more accounts of dancing coffins in England and the Baltic.

John Dickson Carr attempted to explain this phenomena in The Sleeping Sphinx (1947) and Paul Halter's take can be found in a short story, "The Dead Dance at Night," collected in The Night of the Wolf (2007), of which the former has the most convincing explanation. The popular opinion of today is apparently that the story is "historically dubious," but allows me to offer an alternative explanation. By all accounts, Colonel Chase wasn't a beloved man, who may've been (morally) responsible for his daughter's death and it's not unimaginable the idea of payback in combination with too much time can make a person very creative. Of course, this person couldn't have anticipated Chase would die before the big reveal. This person could've kept the legend for going just for the sake of it and I think having fun is a good enough motive in the Barbados of the early 1800s.

Oh, and the seal, private markings and the sand covered floor are worthless, if the vault isn't constantly guarded. There were months, sometimes even years, between opening and resealing the place, and the markings were pressed in a wet surface – making it possible to cast replicas with plaster for a new concrete slab. I admit it would probably take a craftsman and a handful of accomplishes to do the heavy work, but Chase probably wasn't too popular with the slaves either, considering how he treated his own children.

The fascinating title of the third chapter, "The Ships Seen on the Ice," recounts the aftermath of the ill-fated Artic expedition of Sir John Franklin in 1845 and the disappearance of the Erebus and Terror – alongside with their crew. However, the disappearance of both ships isn't the mystery, but whether or not they were observed a few years later. In April 1851, an English brig fell in with a very large ice-floe, off the Newfoundland Banks, and "on the floe were seen two tree-misted ships, not far apart, one heeled over and the other upright," but were they the abandoned Erebus and Terror? Gould again loads this chapter with passages from documents and witnesses' statements, but the search for both ships continues till this day. Interestingly, Erebus and Terror play a minor part in a latter chapter on unconfirmed or vanished islands. 

Gould's short write-up on the "Berbalangs of Cagayan Sulu" can be used by mystery writers as a plot outline for a Theodore Roscoe-style locked room mystery and who wouldn't want to read an impossible crime story that would begin thus: "It is not generally known (and I do not state it as a fact) that certain American citizens possess the ability to quite their bodies for a short period and to travel about in the form of fire-flies for the purpose of assaulting their neighbors." There's a footnote explaining the American citizen/Filipinos line (read it yourself). Berbalangs are ghouls who need to feed on human flesh in order to survive and you can only protect yourself with cocoanut pearl, limejuice and slashing at it with a Kris – graves of loved ones can be protected with similar items. Gould recounts a story found in an article by Mr. Ethelbert Forbes Skertchley, published in the 1896 journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, about a visit to Cagayan Sulu and encountering the fire-fly spirits after visiting their village, but the kicker comes when he pokes around the isolated house were moaning of Berbalangs grew fainter. This is what the text says: "...I tried the door, but found it fastened... putting my shoulder to the door, I gave a good push and it fell in." Yes, there’s a body in the locked house. If you'll pardon my pun, but all this needs is some fleshing out and a good solution, and you have an anthology staple! I have no solution to offer here, because I can't make bricks without clay.

There's another, genuine and confirmed locked room situation in the following chapter, "Orffyreus' Wheel," which was a self-moving wheel invented by Johann Bessler and first exhibited in 1712. The idea of "perpetual motion" in the 18th century seems even more unlikely today than it probably did back than, but, if Bessler was a charlatan (very likely), "he must have been an illusionist far superior to Buatier da Kolta or J.N. Maskelyne." And the greatest trick Orffyreus ever played was a grand locked room illusion! On November 12, 1717, the largest of the wheels so far was constructed in a room in Weissenstein Castle, Hesse-Kassel, "where there were no walls contiguous to it, and where one might go freely round it on every side." The wheel was thoroughly inspected and the room closed, secured and sealed, but every time the room was opened the seals were found intact and "wheel revolving with its accustomed regularity" – repeated over a period of several months. Bessler's detractors were many, calling shenanigans and questioned his sanity, and his maid even run away and confessed to have been one of the people who manually operated the wheel. Whatever may have been the case, I have taken a liking to Bessler. He never gained anything from his demonstrations, refusing to share the secret and destroying the machines, but it's admirable how many people he managed to piss off by simply making a wheel spin. The closest example from mystery fiction I can come up with is the self-playing harp in the locked music room from Paul Gallico's Too Many Ghosts (1961).

The Beast Must Die

Oddities officially enters the Twilight Zone in the chapter "Crosse’s Acari," which is the story of a British amateur scientist, Andrew Crosse, who, in 1836, conducted an experiment "looking for silicious formations, and acari appeared instead." Crosse named them Acarus electricus and they are six-and eight legged insects (depending on the size), which ruined the name of their creator, because playing god or something. They were eventually dismissed as mites/cross contamination, but it was still an engrossing piece and learned that there’s such a thing as True Sci-Fi. Well, at the very least, Crosse and the Acari were able to foil the plans of Professor Googengrime.

There remaining chapters deal with the previous mentioned islands, numbers and Nostradamus, but the only one that really captured my attention was the one about "The Wizard of Mauritius," the beacon-keeper of the Isle of France, "who saw in the air the vessels bound to the island long before they appeared in the offing," which is a story Gould excavated after coming across a throw-away line. The wizard managed to do this in 1784, but the exact method behind the new science of nauscopie has been lost. Almost forgot: there's the chapter about an unknown, lost planet, named Vulcan, which still remains a planet of fiction to this day.

All in all, Oddities is a fun and often-intriguing compendium of the kind of weird stories you'd expect from a planet like ours, even if it were somewhat dated. I also liked the many historical characters popping up, such as Conan Doyle and Jean-Paul Marat, and other historical tidbits. Gould plays the role of impartial auditor very well as he tests these stories on their merit and brings more sanity to them there reasonably should be.  

Crowded with Ghosts

Paul Gallico's Too Many Ghosts (1961), a novel with a plot filled to the brim with impossible situations, was one of the most unexpectant surprises I had in some time – and therefore will not bother with a cutesy introduction and cut right to the review:

Too Much Deviltry

"When the harp strings quiver and you hear the ghostly air, let the Paradines beware! Let the Paradines beware!"

The sands of time have not been kind to the once well-to-do Paradine family. Their vault has been drained of its wealth by modern taxes and heavy death duties, and to maintain a standard of living, their family had for generations, the poverty-stricken bluebloods turned one of the wings of their ancestral home, the illustrious Paradine Hall, into an exclusive country club – where they entertain wearisome and snooty guests, but not all of them have jotted down their names in the registry. Some of them are unregistered and more vexatious than some of the other stuck-up invitees, who, at least, have a pulse. 

These other-worldly visitors try to enliven the place by making an armchair, in front of a dozen witnesses during dinner, shuffle across the floor on its own accord or strike a soulfully tune on a harp, as if the strings were being plucked by invisible hands, in the locked music room – and these are just some of the more innocent escapades of the many ghosts that haven taken up their resident at Paradine Hall. But determined to get rid of all the capricious poltergeists and the unnerving, dematerializing nun, who's the family's harbinger of ill-luck, infesting the old mansion a friend of the family turns to one of his old chums, Alexander Hero, who has made a career out of de-haunting houses and exposing frauds.

Alexander Hero is a likeable and fun character, who, despite being a skeptic, wants to believe in the supernatural, but finds that whenever he arrives at the scene of a haunting the ghosts become very reticent and he never failed in duplicating any of their tricks, making him a literary descendant of two other famous paranormal investigators and debunkers, John Bell and Thomas Carnacki.

L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898) was one of the first short story collections of seemingly impossible crimes, in which John Bell, a professional ghost breaker, tackles cases involving rooms and tunnels that kill, ancient family curses and talking statues. But unlike Hero, Bell has a strict naturalistic worldview and doesn't believe that there are supernatural agencies that intervene in human affairs – and proves his point by exposing the trickery or natural causes behind apparent supernatural events.

The occult detective Thomas Carnacki, a creation of the noted British fantasy writer William Hope Hodgson, is quite a different paranormal sleuth all together and the entries in his casebook vary from cleverly executed hoaxes to brushes with genuine supernatural forces – usually resulting in a dangerous and exhaustive exorcism to vanquish them from our plain of existence. But despite these clashes, Carnacki remains skeptical of ghosts and demons until every possible natural explanation has been eliminated, thereby paying homage, in a slightly topsy-turvy way, to Conan Doyle: "when you eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" – even if that what remains is impossible! Nice, eh? 

These unique exploits are collected in a slender volume entitled, Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (1913).

But Alexander Hero is a much nicer and more rounded character than his forbearers, who's not always sure of his case and with all his knowledge on frauds and spooks gropes, at times, as much in the dark as the reader – which makes you feel a lot a closer to thim than to a detective who says, after only thirty or forty pages, "Aha! I know how this simple parlor trick was perpetrated, and only a novice or a dunce could fail to see the obvious, but I’m not going to divulge the solution until the final chapter." Even so, in the end he vindicates himself, as one of those old fashioned Great Detective of yore, by expertly explaining all the apparent supernatural phenomena, from moving chairs, self-extinguishing candles and a harp playing in a locked room (the books main event), to the apparitions of the nun and all the poltergeist activity, and neatly ties up all the loose ends in a classic drawing room scene.

The book, however, does have its fair share of problems, like its strange lack of atmosphere (the dinner scene is the sole exception). But I'm not entirely sure if that should be put done as a fault on the authors part, as he seems to have done so on purpose. He makes one of his characters observe that the lushly green grass, heavenly blue sky and the gray crumbling walls hardly evokes the horrors one expects of a massive haunting like the one going on at Paradine Hall. There are also some fair play issues, since Hero does not fairly share all his information with the reader, which somewhat mares the overall quality of the book, but again, I'm not sure if that should really count as a weakness – not in this special case, anyway.

I think the only real problem the book has, is that's neither a detective story nor a ghost yarn, but a novel about a quaint collection of mostly British characters, who just happen to have to deal with a series of inexplicable events – that are eventually solved by someone who just happens to be a detective of sorts.

It's exactly like Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), which wasn't written as a detective story but bears all the hallmarks of a traditional locked room mystery. That's how Too Many Ghosts came across to me. It has all the features of a detective story, but at heart it felt very differently.

Still, this is a book that should definitely be read by locked room enthusiasts, since the he locked room, involving the phantom harpist, offers a fairly good and original solution that would've not shamed the pages of a story by Carr, Talbot, Commings or Rawson.

Finally, special thanks have to be given to Patrick for alerting the mystery community at large about the existence of this book. Against expectations, I really enjoyed the story and the conclusion was better than I had dared to hope.