The Frankenstein Factory (1975) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch was the King of Short Stories, the Man of a Thousand Tales of Mystery and Detection, but, during his five decade run, Hoch also wrote a handful of novel-length mysteries like The Shattered Raven (1969), The Blue Movie Murders (1973) and a three-novel series of science-fiction hybrid mysteries – generally known as the "Computer Cops" series. You read that right. They're the back tracing Cyber Police you were warned about!

Carl Crader and Earl Jazine work for the Computer Investigation Bureau, headquartered at the World Trade Center in New York, whose "investigations sometimes spill over into what might generally be called crimes of the new technology" in the 21st century. So the C.I.B. are the "experts on computers, lasers, holograms, cryosurgery" and "new technology" handling "crimes the regular police forces aren't equipped for." Crader is the head of the C.I.B. ("...reports directly to the President") and Jazine is his field agent. They appeared in only three novels, The Transvection Machine (1971), The Fellowship of the Hand (1973) and The Frankenstein Factory (1975).

This time, I've a good excuse/reason (take your pick) to unchronologically start at the end of the series. The Frankenstein Factory had been recommended several times over the years for its qualities as both a science-fiction mystery and clever pastiche of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). That and the first two novels appear to be more science-fiction thrillers than science-fiction mysteries. The Frankenstein Factory seemed the safest choice and perhaps a candidate for that future followup to "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Hybrid Mysteries."

First of all, I skipped the first two novels making it a bit confusing when, exactly, The Frankenstein Factory is supposed to take place. The first chapter refers to "these early years of the twenty-first century," but, early on in the story, there were several hints the story could take place during the 2010s or even early 2020s – based on a reference to the fading memories of "the renewed moon flights of the late 1990s." And the age of one of the characters who took part in one of those return missions. But it became a lot clearer during the second-half and home stretch that it takes place roughly twenty-five years after the mid-to late 1970s. So probably somewhere around 2004, give or take a year. It could also be a bit later based on a references to that "seventy-year-old mystery novel by the British writer Agatha Christie," but that would still place the story within the 2000s. Now with that out of the way, let's take a look at the story.

The Frankenstein Factory begins with Earl Jazine traveling by hovercraft to Horseshoe Island, somewhere off the coast of Baja California, under the guise of medical photographer. Jazine has come to the island to film and document an experimental operation.

Dr. Lawrence Hobbes is the head of International Cryogenics Institute who freeze and store people's bodies "against a future time when they could be revived," but this goes hand-in-hand with their research into operating techniques at low temperatures. So underneath the research facility is also a cold storage vault with frozen bodies inside sealed cylinders. Dr. Hobbes is ready to take the next step and revive a young man who died of a brain tumor in the 1970s, but the tumor did a lot of damage to the body and other organs. So needs several organ transplants, brain included, before they can reanimate him. Dr. Hobbes assembled a crack medical team to carry out this secret and experimental operation. Dr. Freddy O'Connor, a brain surgeon, who had great success with brain transplants in animals. Dr. Eric MacKenzie, "only military surgeon to set foot on the moon thus far," and Philip Whalen assist him. This team is rounded out by Tony Cooper, a bone specialist, and Vera Morgan, a research chemist, who only arrived the day before Jazine. There are two more people on the island, the elderly Miss Emily Watson whose money has made the whole operation possible and a maid/cook, Hilda. And, well, there's the patient, or "shell body," who they call Frank.

The operation is a success, "we have heartbeat and pulse," but, while Frank is sleeping and recovering in the operating room, things begin to happen on the island. Miss Watson goes missing from her bedroom, leaving only a smear of blood behind, but she, or her body, is not found following a thorough search of the buildings and island – she had vanished from the island. However, this is not an impossible disappearance as has been suggested elsewhere. Miss Watson simply disappeared, but not impossibly, as the murderer could have thrown her body into the sea or buried it somewhere. That's not the solution to the disappearance, but it's not an impossible crime. Just a somewhat baffling disappearance, considering the circumstances and apparent lack of motive. But then the murder strikes a second time!

This time, they find the body and the killer stops trying to hide future victims. Even worse, the group finds they have been cut off from the mainland and marooned on the island until new supplies arrive by hovercraft. Jazine takes charge until then, but body count continues to rise as survivors, suspects and supplies dwindle. All the while, the rapidly dwindling survivors become suspicious and frightened of Frank apparently still sleeping in the operating room ("Hell, I'd much rather believe that Frank down there did it than consider the possibility that I'm sitting at a table with a murderer"). So did they create a modern-day Frankenstein's monster or is there a human hand behind it all?

Before getting to the plot, the science-fiction elements deserve a mention. It goes without saying Hoch's depiction of the early 2000s in 1975 is very different from what actually happened. For one, the World Trade Center is still standing, but the most obvious difference is absence of the internet and cell phones despite characters remarking how "everything's miniaturized these days" and "almost everything's done by machine." Jazine explains late in the story the C.I.B. tackles mostly "computer frauds" such as "stock-market rigging, insurance swindles, even some gimmicking of the race-track computers," but no crimes related to, what could be called, an internet – which does not detract from the novel at all. Just interesting to compare Hoch's vision of the early 2000s to what actually happened. Hoch's version of the early 2000s appears to be a lot calmer than our early 2000s, but hints through out the story makes it clear the world outside the green, sunny island has some dystopian characteristics. Some countries promote suicide among the elderly, while other countries want to ship their criminals and surplus population to colonies on Venus ("...Venus colony is still a good many years away"). Somehow, someway, they took laser guns away from Americans shortly after their introduction in the mid '90s and cities are covered in a thick, hazy layer of ozone purifiers sprayed from helicopters. On the up side, there are the advances in medicine and plans to construct searails to span the oceans. So that's something.

The science-fiction of this hybrid science-fiction mystery, beside the cryogenic and reanimation, functions mostly as story dressing. However, it gives The Frankenstein Factory a retro-futuristic, alternate history quality that's fun to speculate about. My take is that the humans in this universe tend to be slightly more pragmatic or utilitarian, tick less sociable, which is why there more interested in Venus colonies, searails and reversing death than an internet or smart phones. Not wholly unimportant, it gave what would otherwise have been an average "trapped on an island with a killer" mystery a distinct character of its own. Not that The Frankenstein Factory is a bad whodunit. You can leave it to Hoch to pen a fair play mystery involving experimental surgery, a reanimated corpse and laser guns. It's just that without a science-fiction trappings, The Frankenstein Factory would have come across as a pale imitation of Christie's And Then There Were None.

So it's unfortunate Hoch never really integrated those science-fiction components with the story's detective plot, because that would have made The Frankenstein Factory something more than this strange, zany send-up of Christie. Hoch wrote a good, old-fashioned murder mystery and a tale of science-fiction horror taking place simultaneously with the same cast of characters. That's why I kept second guessing myself even when only two suspects remained, because expected the science-fiction elements would some part or role to play in the solution. I had reasons to believe Frank was not the first person to have been reanimated, which needed to be kept under wraps for the outside world (perhaps that person was a murderer like was suggested of the brain donor). I had one name in mind (ROT13: "...vg tnir ure gur ybbx bs n lbhat tvey sebz gur 1970f") as that person being revealed as both a reanimated person and the killer would give the story a double, morbid twist for the prize of one. No such genre crossing twists, or solution, as Hoch only roamed around the borders and never crossed the line into full-blown hybrid mystery territory. That's a missed opportunity.

The Frankenstein Factory is unlikely to secure a place on my list of best and favorite hybrid mysteries, because the bar for hybrid mysteries has been set astronomically high, but long-time Hoch fans should take note of this rare, novel-length mystery from his hands. Hoch's The Frankenstein Factory is intriguing and not unrewarding mystery as long as you don't expect a classic like Christie's And Then There Were None or Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1953/54).

Locked and Loaded, Part 7: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

So lately, I noticed an unaccountable, unacceptable dearth in locked room and impossible crime reviews which needed immediate correction to bring this blog back to its previous acceptable conditions, standards and core values – only one way to do it. There are actually two ways to do it, but the reprint of Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939) is not out for another six months. I decided to do another "Locked and Loaded" instead.

In 2020, I posted the first part of the extremely irregular "Locked and Loaded" series and have now compiled seven of them covering locked room and impossible crime stories covering a period of 118 years stretching from 1905 to 2023. You can read my reviews, not in chronological order, in "Locked and Loaded" part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. So let's start on part 7.

Fredric Brown's "The Djinn Murder," originally published in the January, 1944, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, begins when Professor John E. Trent, teaching Psychology IV (Abnormal), is approached by Harvey Glosterman – who really needs a specialist in the occult. Glosterman's retired brother, John Glosterman, collects "objects connected with primitive superstitions" like "old idols, spirit gongs, juju masks, voodoo drums" and recently brought a djinn bottle home from his travels. An earthenware bottle, "Seal of Solomon on the wax," supposedly emprisoning a very powerful, dangerous demon named Eydhebhe. John Glosterman foolishly broke the seal on the bottle and promptly vanished into thin air. However, the impossibility is not Glosterman's disappearance, but how he continued to communicate with his brother through "spirit rappings" coming from the study. Trent believes Glosterman was cleverly disposed and catches his killer by replicating the rapping sounds.

Now, ghostly tapping and other disembodied sounds tend be minor stuff when it comes to impossible crime fiction. Usually little more than small plot-thread or side issue explained away with variations of the same answers pulled from the spiritual medium's bag of tricks, but Brown offered an entirely new solution to the problem. Or, at least, one that's new to me. Still very minor stuff as both an impossible crime and detective story, but a very entertaining, pulp-style mystery.

Anthony Boucher's "The Anomaly of the Empty Man," first published in the April, 1952, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, tries to take a page from John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937) by presenting a puzzle with a logical and supernatural solution. "The Anomaly of the Empty Man" is told by a man named Lamb, but not sure if this the Martin Lamb from Boucher's The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937). Anyway, Inspector Abrahams calls Lamb to the apartment of James Stambaugh, collector of early operatic recordings and philanderer, who disappeared from the clothes he had been wearing ("...sucked dry of its fleshly tenant") – which is tighter impossibility than my description suggests ("...try slipping your foot out of a laced-up shoe and see if you can get that result"). What follows is a bit of a trip, but it boils down to Lamb being presented with two solutions to the problem. The supernatural solution comes from Dr. Verner believing the disappearance was caused by a haunted record from dead opera singer whom he believed carried The Death Wish ("men who knew her too well hungered no longer for life"). Inspector Abrahams found a much better, more convincing and really neat answer for how a man can be disappeared from inside his own suit of clothing. Needless to say, I prefer the inspector's solution over Dr. Verner's cursed record.

And no, the culprit was not a tall, green insect-like individual using his javelin-tipped tail as a sippy straw. If that had been Dr. Verner's alternative solution, I would have sided with him over Inspector Abrahams.

Joseph Commings "The Fraudulent Spirit" originally appeared in the September/October, 1960, issue of Mystery Digest (as by "Monte Craven") and reprinted in the anthology Wicked Spirits: Mysteries, Spine Chillers and Lost Tales of the Supernatural (2024). A few years before the story's opening, Mrs. Jasmine Leslie fell to her death from the outdoor terrace of her New York penthouse, twenty stories up, which the police dismissed as an unfortunate accident – because she had gardening gloves on and a a trowel was left on the terrace. Years later, Jasmine's widowed husband, Fergus Leslie, becomes engaged to Suzanne Dittner and falls under the spell of a spiritual medium, Mme. Olympe. She has done the usual routine with spirit writing appearing on the ceiling during a séance in a locked room, making objects drop out of thin air and claiming to have "greater levitation powers" than D.D. Home ("he floated in and outta upper windows of a house on Jermyn Street in London"). Mme. Olympe also needs money to start her own spiritualist movement and Leslie is willing to provide the funds, but only if she perform a truly convincing séance.

Suzanne Dittner turns to Lt. Barney Grant, of the NYPD, for help. Fortunately, Grant just so happens to have Senator Brooks U. Banner as a visitor. Banner is an old hand when it comes spiritual mediums and the fundamentally impossible, but, even better, Banner remembers Mme. Olympe when "she was dressed in a leopard-skin, leading a carnival parade on the biggest elephant at the Minnesota State Fair." So they attend the séance during which Jasmine's ghost appears on the terrace, disappears and reappears moments later on the terrace of the penthouse across the street! Not really an impossible situation involving levitation, but teleportation and not necessarily a bad one. Just a bit muddled in parts and that knocks it down a peg. "The Fraudulent Spirit" started out as a companion in miniature to Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but ended up being a kindred spirit of David Renwick's Jonathan Creek series (ROT13: yvxr gur hfr bs na haxabja nppbzcyvpr gb perngr gur vzcbffvoyr fvghngvba). So while not one for the best-of list, "The Fraudulent Spirit" should not fail to entertain fans of these type of impossible crime stories involving séances, fraudulent mediums and ghostly murders.

Jeffry Scott's "The Brick Overcoat," originally published in the December, 1990, issue of EQMM, slowly moves away from the recurring themes of the previous three short stories, but not entirely as one, of two, impossibilities whispered threats – coming from nowhere. Jenny is working on reviving the once derelict Malreward Theater, currently between productions, which has seen its fair share of tragedy over its hundred year history. But did it pick up a few ghosts along the way? Jenny confides in Detective-Sergeant Nick Flinders she has heard a disembodied voice whisper a chilling threat, "I'll make you a brick overcoat," when she was all alone in the empty, locked theater. Nick Flinders is a hardened skeptic ("half the theaters in England are supposed to be haunted"), but promises to investigate and begins to comb through the old theater, "an untidy labyrinth of grimy brick cells," for answers. Flinders finds an answer, but is it the correct answer? It's enough to reassure Jenny, but Flinders soon returns to the theater when his half-answer could be the key to another case. A case in which a package unaccountably disappeared from a locked room. While more of a modern crime story than a traditional, fair play mystery, "The Brick Overcoat" is not a bad story at all and appreciated its classical trimmings.

Simon Clark's "The Adventure of the Fallen Star" was originally written for Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997). I reviewed Clark's other Sherlock Holmes pastiche "The Climbing Man" (2015) back in 2021, which presented the Great Detective with a fresh corpse discovered inside a sealed, undisturbed 3000-year-old archaeological site – like it enough to track down this particular pastiche. Sherlock Holmes is asked a favor by Professor Charles Hardcastle, specialized in metallurgical sciences, who once helped him "lay to rest the matter of the golden bullet murders in King's Lynne." Professor Hardcastle is interested in "aerolites" (i.e. meteorites) and has a collection of them in his private laboratory at his home in Homestead. A particular meteorite had recently been taken from the locked laboratory and turned up again in his son's bedroom. Holmes is asked to look if there's something to the case, but, when he arrives with Watson, they find a half mad Hardcastle. The backstory of the meteorite reveals who's behind it all and why, but now how this person got through locked doors. And the answer to that question is a big meh.

Elizabeth Elwood's "The Chess Room," first published in the November/December, 2019, issue of EQMM, closes out this random selection on a high note. The first-half of the story introduces Chloe Helms, a cleaning lady, who works at the Hanover building owned by the wheelchair bound, octogenarian chess fanatic, Jacob Russell – who takes a liking to her. So "the Hanover grapevine buzzed with the rumor that she had become the latest threat to David's inheritance" and David, Jacob's son, is not amused ("the exact term he used was gold digger") causes nothing than misery for Chloe. This situation culminates with the pressure getting too much shooting himself inside his beloved chess room storing his collection of varied chess boards and pieces. Chloe was one of the people standing outside the door when the shot was heard and every other exit was either locked or under observation. The second-half takes a procedural approach to the locked room problem as Detective Constable Annie Blake and her team take charge. There's a part of the locked room-trick that hard, if not impossible, to anticipate, but loved the classically-styled twist.

So, all in all, not a spectacular haul, but not a thoroughly bad one either. When it comes to the locked rooms and impossible situations, only Boucher truly impressed and Brown scoring bonus points for originality. Elwood is a good, solid second. Commings' take on the miraculous levitation/transportation is fun, but too muddled to be really good. I enjoyed Scott's story more for its storytelling than its plotting and Clark's pastiche was meh. Let's hope that the next installment of randomly thrown together impossible crime stories uncovers a real gem, but next up is a classic locked room reprint.

The Ark (2022) by Haruo Yuki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich (2023) by P.J. Fitzsimmons

P.J. Fitzsimmons' The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich (2023) is the sixth entry in the Anthony "Anty" Boisjoly series of Wodehousian locked room mysteries, set in the late 1920s, which brings Anty and Vickers to the fictitious gorge of Glen Glennegie, Scotland – where he has to serve as judge in a whiskey competition. Kilcladdich and Kildrummy, dual villages divided by Glen Glennegie river ravine, which "supplies the icy clear hill water that balances the local magic." Namely whiskey. There are two master distillers, Lummy MacAlistair and Duncan MacAngus, whose respective clans have been feuding for generations. A feud dating back to a golf game from 1767 that "resulted in a rift between the families which has survived to this day." A long-standing feud with customs and traditions of their own.

Once every decade, there's a competition between the two distilleries for the right to label their whiskey "Glen Glennegie" for the next ten years. So, during the final stages, the master distillers locked themselves inside their distilleries in order to guard the secrets of the process. A jury of three decide the winner and Anty inherited the seat on the jury from his late father, but, when he arrives in the Scottish highland, trouble is not only brewing... it has already exploded!

Lummy MacAlistair was blown to pieces when his distillery exploded, likely an accident, but Anty is suspicious the accident happened right before the competition. Not to mention the apparent impossibility of it having been murder ("...what we have here is a locked room mystery"). However, the story doesn't plunge headfirst into classically-styled locked room case meticulously picking apart various (false) solutions to the impossibility like a few of my recent reads. The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich is primarily a comedy with detective interruptions with the first-half going over the territory, its history and characters populating the village – something that normally doesn't bode well for the quality of the plot. So it's very fortunate for this series Fitzsimmons is a funny writer who knows his way around one-liners, punchlines and absurd anecdotes. I'm no Wodehouse expert and have read bits and pieces of criticism from Wodehouse fans, but, when it comes to genre spoofing and satire, Fitzsimmons very much writes in the tongue-in-cheek tradition of Leo Bruce, Edmund Crispin and R.T. Campbell.

Fitzsimmons has always been upfront that he writes the Anty Boisjoly series "strictly for laughs" with result being "either an inexcusable offense to several beloved canons or a hilarious, fast-paced, manor house murder mystery." This series has also shown with The Case of the Ghost of Christmas Morning (2021) and Reckoning at the Riviera Royale (2022) what can be done when the laughs and chuckles are backed by a good, solid plots. The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich is mostly played for laughs and that can be frustrated when the plot had enough to match those two earlier novels.

First of all, the "impossible coincidence" of the two master distillers dying in apparent accidental explosions in their locked and barred distilleries. There's a third, very minor, locked room in miniature concerning ten bottles of whiskey added to a locked cabinet when the key was accounted for ("...nearest locksmith that can copy that key died in 1902"). Regrettably, The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich is not very impressive as a locked room mystery, comparable to the earlier The Tale of the Tenpenny Tontine (2021) and The Case of the Carnaby Castle Curse (2022), but the motive saved it from being just satire sporting a tartan deerstalker. The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich operates on its home brew of loopy logic and crooked rules, which Fitzsimmons cleverly employed to create a plot that could not have worked anywhere else except in Kilcladdich and Kildrummy ("we might be by Michael Innes"). So the digging into the history, characters and long-standing feud ended being more than a bantering exercise in exchanging barbs. I also enjoyed the scene in which Anty tries to explain to the Scottish policeman that America has gone dry ("you're saying that America has outlawed alcohol"). That needed some processing of its own.

So while I enjoyed The Case of the Case of Kilcladdich, it was more for the characters and humor than the plot and can only recommend it those already a fan of the series. I'll probably get to the next title, Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling (2023), before too long but hope to have something good from the Golden Age next. Stay tuned!

Bad Weather: "The Rainy-Day Bandit" (1970) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch's "The Rainy-Day Bandit," originally published in the May, 1970, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, begins three months into the crime spree of a modern-day highwayman, the Rainy-Day Bandit – who comes and goes with the rain. A bandit with a cloth mask and a shiny, nickel-plated revolver always striking in the daytime when its raining heavily.

This crime spree started simple enough with the stickup of a parking meter collector during a January rainstorm, but the Rainy-Day Bandit developed into a John Dillinger-type robber for his next few capers. Holding up a gas station, an insurance office, a branch of a big bank and recently "cleaned out six cash registers in a supermarket while fifty people watched" ("the guy's got guts..."). When a rich gambler was robbed of his deposit en route the bank, the papers begin to "treat him like a modern Robin Hood." Captain Leopold, head of the Violent Crimes Squad, tells Sergeant Fletcher "some day an eager citizen's going to jump him, and then we'll either have a captured bandit or a dead hero."

When a body is found in an alley with a gunshot wound, it appears the Rainy-Day Bandit claimed his first victim. The body is that of James Mercer, an insurance agent, who was making collections in the neighborhood. And, of course, the money is gone. Tommy Gibson, of Robbery, believes the murder is a Rainy-Day Bandit caper gone wrong, but Captain Leopold leaves all his options open. Leopold and Fletcher go down the list of collection stops. However, the Rainy-Day Bandit himself eventually turns up in their murder investigation adding an unexpected complication to the case. A complication hitting a little too close to home for Leopold.

"The Rainy-Day Bandit" is a showpiece of Hoch's ability at constructing short story plots with two different, but linked, plot-threads neatly tied up in a brief, fairly clued short story – packaged as a police procedural. I figured out the solution to both problems, but can only lay claim to a scrap of cleverness for identifying the Rainy-Day Bandit. I dumbly stumbled across the murderer by accident. You see, the name of one of the characters rang a bell in the dusty part of my brain storing obscure, mostly useless and arcane trivia as scraps of a phrase started floating to the surface. So looked it up and what I was trying to remember is the grim, now obsolete phrase (ROT13) "gnxr n evqr gb glohea." Only vaguagly similar to the name of that character, but that character turned out to be murderer. Hoch was not trying to be funny on the sly, but it would have been a funny clue disguised as an Easter egg had (SPOILER/ROT13) gur anzr bs gur zheqrere orra glohea vafgrnq bs glqvatf.

So, all in all, "The Rainy-Day Bandit" is another solid and competent showing from Hoch as Captain Leopold's slowly starting to become a personal favorite among Hoch's gallery of series-detectives. Leopold is probably not going to surpass Dr. Hawthorne and Ben Snow, but Simon Ark and Nick Velvet should be worried. You can expect more Hoch and Captain Leopold in the future. I'm toying with the idea to single review the short stories from Leopold's Way (1985) and compile those reviews in a single post/review of Leopold's Way. But we'll see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Masterclass: "Touch of a Vanish'd Hand" (2000) by Phil Mann

If you read my recent review of Fredric Brown's "Handbook for Homicide" (1943), you know the intention the intersperse the locked room reviews with reviews of non-impossible crime fiction, which is why I picked Brown's shortish novel as a followup to Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders (1935) and Newton Gayle's The Sentry-Box Murder (1935) – only for it to contain a trifling locked room element. So decided to take a look at Bertil Falk's Mind-Boggling Mysteries of a Missionary (2010), before dipping back into writers like Christopher Bush and Brian Flynn. That collection of short stories was not exactly "as described on tin." Now I really wanted a good locked room before mixing things up again.

I was tempted to go with Danro Kamosaki's third novel, stringing together eight impossible crimes, but decided to go with something shorter.

Phil Mann, an American attorney from Los Angeles, has authored textbooks, wrote film scripts and short fiction for magazines and anthologies. "Touch of a Vanish'd Hand," published in A Deadly Dozen: Tales of Murder from Los Angeles (2000), appears to have been Mann's only detective story and locked room mystery, but one that was overlooked by Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and not often referenced everywhere else – except for one place. Mike Grost briefly discussed "Touch of a Vanish'd Hand" on his website, calling it "a nicely done locked room short story" with a detective recalling some of John Dickson Carr's characters. So probably would have never known of this short story's existence without that brief notice. Thanks, Mike!

Horace Masters, a mathematics professor, is approached after a lecture by young man, Tony Reed, who has heard of the professor's "experience with locked rooms." Well, a murder inside a locked room happened at the mansion of his father, Martin Reed.

Martin Reed is a filmmaker of direct-to-DVD movies, "filled with large-breasted women running around with large guns," who had his casting agent, Conrad Armstrong, camping out in one of his room while working on a movie. Armstrong is not a particular likable person ("you've heard of the casting couch?") as "everything he did seemed to be calculated to degrade someone." And causes enough friction in the Reed household that ends up murdered in his makeshift office under bizarre, seemingly impossible circumstances. The body is spotted through the glass panel of the office door, which is locked from the inside by its broken key. So the door can only be locked and unlocked from the inside, but the glass has glazed artwork on it and breaking it to unlock the door is not an option. They have to break open one of the french doors on the other side of the house. Once inside the office, it becomes apparent they really dealing with an impossible murder inside a hermetically sealed room without a place for someone to hide. Horace Masters is only a visiting lecturer who only has a day, or so, to solve the case before flying back home.

Solving it, he does, in the grand old traditional way by gathering everyone involved for a classic drawing room revelation. Masters sums up all the facts and nebulous clues to show who murdered Armstrong, why and, most importantly, how the locked room-trick was done – which is definitely the story's strongest aspect. I think most seasoned armchair detectives will have their suspicions about the murderer, but not how it could have been done. Well, there's one obvious trick to do it under these circumstances, but Mann opted for something different. The principle of the locked room-trick is one impossible crime fanatics have seen before, but Mann found a different way to put it to use. So a new wrinkle on an old conceit, but a very well done one, scratching that impossible crime itch, that should have been picked up by Mike Ashley for The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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