Flower O' the Peach (1916) by W.A. Mackenzie

W.A. Mackenzie was a Scottish poet, journalist, illustrator, editor and writer who served in Belgium, France and Italy during the First World War, where he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery in combat, but committed himself to humanitarian causes when the war ended – serving as Secretary-General of Save the Children International from 1920 to 1939. Mackenzie even acted as the Pope's representative on the British Save the Children Council. Not a bad resume at all. Just as important as Mackenzie's war record and humanitarian work, if not more so, was his contribution to the early, pre-Golden Age detective story of the early 20th century.

From 1903 to 1916, Mackenzie produced eight novels of crime, detection and mystery of which four feature Sir Nigel Lacaita, K.C.B., of Scotland Yard. This series comprises of The Drexel Dream (1904), His Majesty's Peacock (1904), The Black Butterfly (1907) and The Bite of the Leech (1914), while The Glittering Road (1903), In the House of the Eye (1907), The Red Star of Night (1911) and Flower O' the Peach (1916) appear to be non-series, standalone titles. All eight are obscure, out-of-print mysteries that even in the public domain (Mackenzie died in 1942) stubbornly remain obscure and out-of-print. Somewhat annoying as Mackenzie last novel has been on my wishlist ever since reading about in Robert Adey's introduction to Locked Room Murders (1991).

Adey made special note of Mackenzie's Flower O' the Peach on account of its memorable detective, "the rather common, aitch-dropping "Slow and Sure" Jackson," but also noted the book's connection to an untranslated, 19th century French short impossible crime story, "Le verrou" ("The Bolt," 18XX) – written by poet and author Armand Sylvestre. Well, my interest was piqued! Not merely because it's one of those tantalizingly obscure, out-of-print and reach locked room mysteries, which helps, but it's also one of those all too rare, World War I era mysteries. So was very surprised, and very pleased, when Serling Lake suddenly reprinted it back in February. I snapped up a copy faster than an old school pulp writer could crank out a short story.

Just one more thing, before getting to the story. I tried to find out if Mackenzie wrote Flower O' the Peach prior to the outbreak of WWI or between soldiering on the continent, but without result. I wondered as there's no mention of the war or allusions to a war anywhere in the story. On the contrary, Mackenzie wrote a piece of pure escapism blending crime, mystery and Ruritanian romance with all the flourishes of a French popular novel from the then turn-of-the-century ("we Britishers live on French literature today..."). So even though the story evidently takes place around the time it was published ("ain't you never h'ard of Flyin' Machines?"), it should be taken as an alternative cloud cuckoo 1916 where bad things do happen, but nothing as devastating as a global war. I wanted that cleared up as its status as a WWI era mystery was one of the reasons it attracted my attention. So... with that out of the way, let's get to the case at hand.

Flower O' the Peach begins on a pleasant, sunny May afternoon in Pall Mall as Sir Jacinth Coke ("K.C.B., K.C.V.O., etc, etc.") wanders into the Ambassadors' Club and spots an old friend, Baron Eskilstuna, who's former representative of the King of Gothland at the Court of Saint James. Baron Eskilstuna has come to London with a mission: to look for a wife. Not a wife for himself, but a wife for the youngest brother of the current King of Gothland, the Duke of Dalecarlia. A year previously, the Duke was in Brittany to visit Sainte Anne d'Auray when he saw the love of his life, but, before she vanished into the crowd, took a picture and has done everything within his power to put a name to that face as he intends to marry her – having already secured permission from his brother ("...the King is willing to permit a marriage"). That's not as easy a task as it would be today and the Duke finally commissioned Baron Eskilstuna to find her, but the Baron has about as much success as the Duke.

Sir Jacinth comes to the rescue as he recognizes the woman in the photograph. The woman is Brenda, daughter of his oldest friend Udo Dapifer, who can "show even better birth than your Duke." Udo Dapifer is currently staying at Dawling Hall and Sir Jacinth is prepared to introduce Baron Eskilstuna, but, while "the matchmakers were plotting and planning," Udo Dapifer died without knowing "a Prince of Blood Royal was seeking in marriage the hand of his beloved daughter." Shortly following Udo's death, his son and heir, Captain Godwin Dapifer is murdered in his bedroom "door bolted, window ditto." But the doctor dispels the possibility of suicide. So it's murder.

This is the point where Olaf, Prince of Gothland, Duke of Delacarlia enters the picture under the name of "Mr. Goodman" to place his services entirely at the disposal of Brenda ("I shall fight for her in this affair... and in the fighting I shall win her"). And, as Mr. Goodman, he mainly tries to get hold of a green, blood smeared ribbon and green dress belonging to Brenda rather than a proper detective in a country house whodunit investigating a locked room murder. But then again, that type of detective story was still very much in its infancy in 1916. So it really isn't worth mentioning the few other characters involved in this dance around the dress, ribbon and solution to murder, except the previously mentioned "Slow and Sure" Jackson.

Jackson is the local jack-of-all-trade who does everything from digging graves, gardening and delivering milk bottles to selling insurances and now grabbing the opportunity to play a "rural Sherlock Holmes." Or, as he calls it, "clim' the greasy pole of mystery an' bring down the leg o' mutton of truth." Jackson gets ridiculed for trying to outsmart both the police and a killer, "you have made yourself ridiculous, Henry Jackson, by interfering in your blundering way with the affairs of your better," but it's Jackson who finds an explanation for the problem of the bolted door – which honestly left me in two minds. The locked room-trick belongs to one of the categories of basic tricks from John Dickson Carr's "Locked Room Lecture" from The Three Coffins (1935), but with a small, stylistic difference. Normally, this trick is considered crude and not terribly imaginative. A trick usually suggested as a simple, throwaway false-solution, but here the trick appeared as smooth as French silk. I suppose that part of the trick is what Mackenzie found so attractive in Armand Sylvestre's short story "The Bolt."

I'm not a fan of copy/pasting other people's work, but fair's fair, Mackenzie gave Sylvestre all the credit for this version of the trick in a story-within-a-story, of sorts, sequence. Jackson finds an old news paper report about a murder trial in France where the murderer used Sylvestre's idea to leave a body locked away behind a bolted door, but a copy of the book was found in the killer's room resulting in an arrest and trial. Mackenzie praises Sylvestre through this newspaper report and even included a translated paragraph from "The Bolt" demonstrating how to work the trick as smoothly as possible ("...gently, oh! so gently"). While not entirely new, it made Flower O' the Peach feel somewhat ahead of its time as a locked room mystery with a solution that comes across as far more sophisticated than was still customary for the time. I really appreciated Mackenzie gave Sylvestre his credit, because it would been very unlikely we would have ever known.

Finally, I should mention the unusual and memorable ending without spoiling too much. Fittingly, Mackenzie gave Flower O' the Peach a fairy tale-like ending, but, like most European fairy tales, it's not without grimness. Believe me, those last two pages are a trip! It can even be argued it's the only time the war shows its influence over the story, but with the happy ending the real world never got. Like I said, Flower O' the Peach is pure escapism.

So, other than the neat, if ultimately simple, locked room angle and the character of “Slow and Sure” Jackson, Mackenzie's Flower O' the Peach is closer to the mysterious flight of fancies of Gaston Leroux and Maurice Leblanc than the impossible crimes of Carr or the early detective stories of Sherlock Holmes. I can only recommend it, if you're in the mood for something light, off the beaten track on a lazy afternoon. I very much look forward what long forgotten, out-of-print treasure Serling Lake is going to reprint next.

As if By Magic: Locked Room Mysteries and Other Miraculous Crimes (2025) edited by Martin Edwards

If you regularly check in on this blog, you probably noticed my all encompassing, all consuming addiction undying love for impossible crime fiction and it tends to dominate the blog, despite trying to keep everything varied and interesting – only to keep slipping into a brown study of locked room mysteries. After the galore of miracle murders from the previous three reviews, I elected to pick an anthology of short stories next that reflects the scope and richness of the traditional detective story. I picked Martin Edwards' latest anthology from the British Library Crime Classics series, As if By Magic: Locked Room Mysteries and Other Miraculous Crimes (2025). And, yes, I'm well aware it's an anthology of locked room and impossible crime short stories, but that's just a coincidence/unimportant detail/you being needlessly difficult. You can pick your excuse today!

As if By Magic is the second impossible crime-themed anthology Edwards has put together following Miraculous Mysteries: Locked Room Murders and Impossible Crimes (2017). So a followup was long overdue and knew this second anthology was coming, but tempered my expectations until I knew its content. I had some mixed results with locked room anthologies over year, which is partially my own fault.

I have been fishing in the pool of uncollected, rarely anthologized short impossible crime stories for years and even have an irregular blog-series "Locked and Loaded" (part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6) dedicated to them. So when an anthology appears, like David Stuart Davies' Classic Locked Room Mysteries (2016) or Otto Penzler's Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022), the selection of stories can underwhelming with very little new to offer. Well, an early and promising review on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel confirmed As if By Magic collected a host of obscure, rarely reprinted stories alongside a number of the usual suspects – like "THE FINEST SHORT STORY EVER WRITTEN!" (Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood," 1947). So immediately ordered a copy!

Martin Edwards' As if By Magic collects sixteen short stories of which the following eight have been read and reviewed on this blog before: L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's "The Warder of the Door" (1898), James Ronald's "Too Many Motives" (1930), John Dickson Carr's "The Wrong Problem" (1936), Margery Allingham's "The Border-Line Case" (1937), Vincent Cornier's "The Shot That Waited" (1947), Carter Dickson's "The House in Goblin Wood" (reviewed with "The Wrong Problem"), Julian Symons' "As if By Magic" (1961) and Christianna Brand's "Murder Game" (1968). So, for the sake of brevity, I'll be skipping those seven stories and go over the remaining Eight. Eight out of sixteen for a modern locked room anthology is not a bad score for me. My only real complaint is that Edwards opted for "The Wrong Problem" and "The Shot That Waited" instead of Carr's "The Diamond Pentacle" (1939) and Cornier's "Dust of Lions" (1933). One day, one day...

So that makes the first story under examination E.C. Bentley's "The Ordinary Hairpins," originally published in the October, 1916, issue of the Strand Magazine, in which Philip Trent is commissioned to paint a portrait of Lord Aviemore. Trent had previously done a sketch of Lord Aviemore's late sister-in-law, Lillemor Wergeland, who disappeared from a ship following the death of her husband and son – written off as a suicide by drowning. Or was it murder? Trent becomes interested in the cold case and, over the course of months, slowly follows the trail to an obvious conclusion. Better written than plotted and a weak pick for an impossible crime anthology. Fortunately, the next one is a minor gem that has been on my wishlist for ages.

Will Scott's "The Vanishing House" was culled from a "highly-regarded," but out-of-print collection of short stories entitled Giglamps (1924). Douglas G. Greene, co-founder of Crippen & Landru, praised this "collection of short stories about a tramp who sometimes act as detective runs afoul of the law himself" – saying "I have seldom enjoyed a book more than Giglamps." This particular short story has been on my wishlist ever since coming across it in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Where the impossibility is concerned, "The Vanishing House" didn't disappoint. A story that follows Giglamps on a very strange night when he goes to sleep in an old, abandoned barn and wakes up to find that someone has swapped his worn, dirty boots with brand new ones. Not wanting to stick around, Giglamps flees the barn and stumbles through the dark, until spotting a lighted window several hours later. However, Giglamps overhears a conversation, "if yer catch anythin' listenin', shoot it," convincing him to trod on, but has to return to the house when someone is killed on its doorstep. So goes off to fetch a policeman.

When he returns to the house with a village constable in tow, the scene appears to have impossibly altered. There's no body in front of the house, but a body is found half a mile away. So it appears someone moved the body between Giglamps witnessing the murder and returning with the police, but the victim is still clutching a clump of grass ("...if they move him it tears away"). That suggests the house that stood there was either miraculously vanished or moved without leaving traces ("cottages can't walk, my lad—not in these parts"). The solution not only makes "The Vanishing House" a gem of the 1920s impossible crime story, but for me a highlight of this anthology. I hope Martin Edwards is pestering the British Library to get Giglamps reprinted.

Anthony Wynne's "The Gold of Tso-Fu," originally published in the February, 1926, issue of Flynn's Magazine, begins with nerve specialist and amateur detective Dr. Eustace Hailey dropping by at the China Bank offices of Sir Thomas Evans – who had asked him to come to discuss an urgent matter. Barely arrived, Dr. Hailey is informed something terrible has happened and is brought to ornately-decorated, almost surrealistic room in the bank building dominated by "a huge effigy in freshly gilded wood" of "some oriental deity seated on his throne." Underneath the throne was the body of Mr. Harrier, one of the bank directors, who had been stabbed to death. However, the door of the room had been under constant observation from the time Harrier had entered the room to the moment the murder was discovered. Nobody was seen going, or coming out, during that time. Even stranger, Sir Thomas begins to act unhinged from admitting to having committed the murder and challenging Dr. Hailey ("I have set you a puzzle to solve") to drawing a gun. So a very promising and puzzling opening, but Wynne's unable to sustain this is in the second-half of the story as the plot succumbs to its pulp trappings with a very gimmicky, time-worn locked room-trick and solution. That while there's a much better, much more elegant possibility staring you in the face. Not one of Wynne's finest locked room mysteries.

Hal Pink's "The Two Flaws," a six-page short short, was syndicated in numerous newspapers in 1934 and has Inspector Wenshall explaining to Superintendent Carson how the murder of Clive Burgess is a simple, open-and-shut case – everything points to Marriott, victim's business, as the culprit. Burgess was found seated behind his desk of his locked office with key lying on the table with the other two keys belonging to Marriott and the landlord ("...he is in Germany"). Burgess also left an unfinished dying message on the writing pad reading "M-A-R" ("what more do you want?"). Superintendent Carson, along with the reader, spots the locked room-trick that was evidently employed and exposes the two fatal flaws to ensnare the murderer. So not the most original locked room mystery, but competent and good enough for a short short. I found it interesting that the locked room scenario was used to frame an innocent man without locking him inside the office with the victim.

Ernest Dudley's "The Case of the Man Who Was Too Clever," first published in Meet Dr. Morelle (1943) and reprinted in Dr. Morelle Elucidates (2010), brings Dr. Morelle and his secretary, Miss Frayle, to a block of flats to visit a friend, but screams coming from the next door flap draws him into a murder case. They find a Mr. Collins banging on the locked door of his bathroom, calling to his wife, but she doesn't answer and so they break down the door. What they find is Diana Collins dead from an overdose of laudanum. Dr. Morelle looks straight through the suicide setup and makes short work of Collins. Even though the explanation of how Collins worked the locked bathroom setup is dull and unimaginative, it could have been tremendously improved with an honest story title. Something like "The Case of the Man Who Was Really Stupid" or "The Case of the Dumb Murderer," because Collins really wanted that meet and greet with Albert Pierrepoint.

Grenville Robbins' "The Broadcast Body," originally published in the June, 1936, issue of The 20-Story Magazine, should have been the standout of this anthology. The premise is fantastic in every sense of the word! Professor John Manfred invites his nephew to attend a private experiment with a revolutionary invention that's going to change the world forever, the Body Broadcaster. Professor Manfred is going to broadcast his bodily self from his laboratory at Hampstead to his brother's laboratory at Dulwich. A machine that can "actually broadcast solid bodies through the ether" and "goods can be broadcast as easily as men and women." An epoch-making, history altering invention, but, of course, something goes wrong during the test run. The professor climbs inside a sealed box, crammed with machinery, gadgets and a transmitter, which is followed by an explosion and the professor has disappeared – an explosion happened simultaneously at the laboratory at Dulwich. Only without him emerging before his brother as intended. So was he now "wandering in a disembodied state in some curious fourth dimension" or is there a natural, much more mundane explanation? In this case, the answer, unfortunately, is yes. The solution is simply dropped into the nephew's lap and how the professor escaped from the room just feels like a cheat. A real pity as the setup is fantastic, but liked the historical snippet mentioning television.

Funnily enough, "The Broadcast Body" was published in the same year as E.R. Punshon's The Bath Mysteries (1936) that also mentions and shows an early and experimental television set.

Michael Gilbert's "The Coulman Handicap," originally appearing in the April, 1958, issue of Argosy, takes a procedural approach to the problem poses by a seemingly impossible, inexplicable vanishing act. Detective Sergeant Petrella is part of a twenty-four men team observing, tailing and hopefully trapping a notoriously slippery go-between thieves and fences, Mrs. Coulman. And keeps a cut as a service fee ("just like a literary agent"). Petrella is close on her heels when she slips inside a bar with only entrance/exit and disappears into thin air. Gilbert gave me a little hope by apparently eliminating the obvious, disappointing type of explanation for these kind of vanishing acts, only to reveal it's just a variation on that type of solution. Other than the uninspiring ending, the opening was very good and liked the idea of an impossible disappearance disrupting, what should have been, a routine police operation.

This anthology ends, for me, on a high note with the next story. Geoffrey Bush, son of Christopher Bush, was a composer, musical scholar and a member of the Carr Society who famously gave Edmund Crispin the idea for the most famous of all short shorts, "Who Killed Baker?" (1950). "The Last Meeting of the Butlers Club," published in the March, 1980, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is Bush's hilarious take on the glorious of the detective story of yesteryear and "the wave of weekend country-house murders that swept over England in the '20s and '30s." What is to become the last meeting of the Butlers Club is attended by a handful of the last, aging members of ex-butlers who pooled their modest inheritances from their generous employers to get a taste of the good life. So they begin to reminiscence about the good, old days and the times they were nearly arrested for murdering their generous employers. But every time the policeman wanted to put on the handcuffs, a gifted amateur detective appeared scoffing at the idea that the butler did it. Whether it was Dr. John Thorndyke and Philo Vance to Lord Peter Wimsey and Father Brown, they always appeared to bail out the butler with a ludicrous solutions. A marvelous piece of genre parody that can be compared to other locked room satires like Morton Wolson's "The Glass Room" (1957), John Sladek's "The Locked Room" (1972) and, of course, Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936).

So, as always, As if By Magic is a mixed bag of tricks with Scott's "The Vanishing House" and Bush's "The Last Meeting of the Butlers Club" being my personal favorites and liked Pink's "The Two Flows," as a competent obscurity, but found the remaining short stories lacking – especially when it comes to the locked rooms/impossible crimes. That's where this anthology, as an anthology of locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, comes up short. However, I only read half of the stories and skipped some of the better picks by Allingham, Brand, Carr and Cornier which would have balanced out the overall quality of the selection. And maybe I'm demanding of these types of locked room anthologies, because (ROT13) qvfthvfrf, fgrccvat bhg (gevpx) jvaqbjf naq xavsr-fcvggvat fgnghrf isn't doing it for me. Well, that should teach me not to write the introduction before finishing the book.

Locked and Loaded, Part 6: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

For some reason, I thought the previous "Locked and Loaded" was posted earlier this year, somewhere around March, but “Locked and Loaded, Part 5” was posted last November and forgetting to do another one of these wasn't for a lack of choice – more a lack of availability of some of the choosier items. There are still of a ton of rarely reprinted, mostly uncollected short stories eluding me. Stories such as Brandon Fleming's "The Case of the Armour Figure" (1922), Arlton Eadie's "The Clue from Mars" (1924), Vincent Cornier's "The Dust of Lions" (1933) and Victor Maxwell's "The Siege at 2242" (1933).

Despite some elusive obscurities and rarities, I think I hoarded an interesting medley of short stories over these half dozen "Locked and Loaded" reviews covering a period of 118 years. Not all masterpieces or outright classics, but a diverse, imaginative lot of short stories, published between 1905 and 2023, taking on the locked room and impossible crime problem in their own way. Surprisingly few duds and stinkers considering the randomness when raking one of these patchy reviews together. Let's see if I can keep up this hot streak of moderate success.

B. Fletcher Robinson's "The Vanished Billionaire" first appeared in the February, 1905, issue of the American edition of Pearson's Magazine, which is a slightly altered version of "The Vanished Millionaire" from Robinson's The Chronicles of Addington Peace (1905). For some reason, the name of Robinson's detective was changed from Addington Peace to Inspector Hartley, of Scotland Yard, for the American publications among other minor alterations – like change from millionaire to billionaire. Even though the first modern-day billionaires wouldn't come around until the late 1910s, early '20s. I should also note Robinson collaborated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and foolishly declined to be credited as a co-author. It has been suggested had he been credited as not only the co-author of The Hound of the Baskervilles, but as the person who helped to bring Sherlock Holmes back, Robinson's own detective fiction would not been so thoroughly forgotten today. Would they be remembered on their own merit or riding the coattails of an inverness cape? Time to find out!

Silas J. Ford, billionaire of the title, "established a business reputation in America that had made him a celebrity in England" and, according to the tradition of the American self-made man, he kept his name in the papers ("...full of praise and blame, of puffs and denunciations"). Ford gave the newspaper something to write about when he disappeared on dark, snowy night in December under seemingly impossible circumstances. During the night, Ford had left his bed to venture outside and a trail of his distinct boot prints that ended in the middle of a field of smooth, unbroken snow twenty feet from the wall surrounding the property ("apparently he had stepped into space")! Inspector Hartley is dispatched to the scene of the disappearance and foreshadows that this case is going to be more about the why than the how. The core plot and motive for why Ford had to disappear wasn't bad, not for a detective story from 1905, but explanation for the no-footprints is dumb even for 1905. I would have taken one of the routine solutions over (SPOILER/ROT13) “ur gvrq ba gur obbgf va erirefr snfuvba” naq gura ohatyrq vg, juvpu yrsg oruvaq gur “fgenatr rivqrapr.” Lbh nyzbfg qrfreir gb or sybttrq qbja n frperg cnffntr sbe rira qnevat gb fhttrfg fhpu n fbyhgvba. A shame as the presentation of the no-footprints was very well done for the time and one of the earliest no-footprints impossible crimes on record. So it's also one of those rare duds in this series of blog-posts, judged solely on its merits as an impossible crime story.

Stuart Palmer's "The Monkey Murder," originally published in the January, 1947, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, has to be one of the oddest, most bizarre short stories in the Miss Hildegarde Withers series. Halfway between an inverted detective story and a very bizarre locked room murder. Inspector Oscar Piper tells Miss Withers about George Wayland, "the wife-strangler, blast him," whom he believes got away with murdering his wife by dressing her death up with "a phony religious-cult background." Janet Wayland body was found in the back bedroom lying tied, hand and foot, on a sort of sacrificial altar overlooked by the idol of big, ugly monkey god – whose tail was tightened around her throat. The whole scene, behind a bolted door, looked like "looked like the nightmare of a Hollywood set-designer for B-budget horror pictures." Piper has a pretty good idea how the bolted door was worked, but unable to get evidence that sticks. So they had to let Wayland go.

There's something else about the technically unsolved case bothering Piper. Wayland is, beside the spousal murder, the personification of "Mister Average American" and "the average citizen commits the average murder." So where did the plain, unimaginative Wayland got the idea to strangle Janet with the tail of the tail of an East-Indian monkey-god and stage it as an outlandish cult killing ("that, plus the locked-room thing..."). An out-of-character murder. Miss Withers decides to take a crack at the case herself, however, she gets exactly the same result as the New York police: Wayland laughing in her face. So she's forced to set a baited, legally dubious trap proving Wayland is a hall of fame idiot after all. Palmer neatly weaved several plot-threads, big and small, together into this very well-done short story. And while a fairly minor locked room mystery, Miss Withers' explanation added a small twist to the locked room-trick with a detail Piper had overlooked. Miss Withers, Inspector Piper and Palmer seldom disappoint and "The Monkey Murder" is no exception.

Bill Pronzini's "The Methodical Cop," originally published in the July, 1973, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, appears to be one of Pronzini's least known, overlooked short impossible crime stories – mentioned in neither Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). The story is both good and amusing. Detective-Sergeant Renzo Di Lucca, "a dedicated, patient and observant cop," who always gets paired with rookies. Something he sees as a chore as "there were problems with every rookie." The problem with his latest assignment, Tim Corcoran, is that he has too much imagination that turned every routine case into "puzzles of magnitude." So when they're called to the scene of a murder that has many of the tropes from classic detective fiction, Corcoran's imagination begins to run wild.

Simon Warren is shot and fatally wounded behind the locked door of his private library. When the door is broken down, Warren's whispers to his butler the cryptic words, "pick up sticks," before dying. That and the murder weapon apparently evaporated alongside the murderer from the locked library. Corcoran is ecstatic that he not only gets to investigate a real locked room murder, but a locked room with a dying message tucked inside. Di Lucca constantly has to serve as an anchor for his rookie assignment, which came down to shooting down Corcoran's false-solutions. I really liked Corcoran's false-solution, wrong as it may be, because it showed more imagination than the old dodge the murder actually used. However, everything from the shooting, vanished gun, dying message and locked room-trick were skillfully tied together to provide an overall satisfying short story. So it's odd "The Methodical Cop" is not better known (at least among his own impossible crime work) even if its a classic case of the false-solution outshining the correct answer.

Note for the curious: Pronzini reworked the plot of "The Methodical Cop" into the Carpenter & Quincannon short story "Pick Up Sticks" (2021), which was combined with the short story "Quincannon in Paradise" (2005) and reworked into the final, novel-length Carpenter & Quincannon The Paradise Affair (2021).

Bill Crider's "See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have," originally written for the anthology Partners in Crime (1994), is yet another minor affair when it comes to the miracle problem, but a fun enough short story for fans of Ellery Queen. Bo Wagner and Janice Langtry are the co-authors of the Sam Fernando mysteries, "one of the most promising series of detective novels the 1950s had yet seen," which he plots and she writes. They specialize in locked room murders and other impossible crimes under every imaginable circumstance and variation. So when one of their friends and avid collector of detective novels is shot in his library, the police asks their help as authorities on storybook murders and locked room-tricks. Because every exit from the house was either locked, bolted or under observation ("...like something from one of our books"). So a fun enough short story for its character rather than its plot which would have been perfect for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020) anthologies.

So, yeah, the selection of the short stories, so far, is fairly solid, story-and character-wise, but not terribly inspiring when it comes to their locked room and impossible crime plots and tricks. Get ready for a surprise, because the best one of the lot comes from a writer of techno-thrillers!

James H. Cobb's "Over the Edge," originally printed in the July, 2007, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, stars Kevin Pulaski, "four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month deputy sheriff," who debuted in the novel West on 66 (1999) – appeared in a handful of short stories. This story begins with Pulaski taking his lover, Princess, along to meet a teenage informant on a lookout moonlighting as a daytime lover's lane. So they decide to stick around, fool around and enjoy what looks like lovers' tiff in another car ("all we needed was a bag of popcorn"). When the man drives away, the woman stays behind in her own car and she stays put. They ignore her, however, Pulaski becomes suspicious after a while and wants to see if everything is right. At that the moment, the woman "slowly and deliberately drove her car off the edge of the overlook" into the canyon below. The police believe it was a clear case of suicide, but Pulaski believes it was murder and they wish the deputy good luck with his investigation.

There's no mystery about who engineered her murder, but since the man had driven away and secured an alibi, before she drove over the edge, Pulaski is faced with an impossible crime. This time, the trick is not based on an old locked room dodge, but entirely original and not impossible to figure out. Pulaski even thanks the murderer, "in a world of plain old day-in day-out mayhem, this is the first time I've ever worked one of these fancy, set-up killings like Ellery Queen writes about." Although I have come to associate these kind of inverted howdunits with those type of tricks with Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series. Needless to say, I enjoyed Cobb's "Over the Edge" and is the standout here. A candidate to be included on the future revision of my locked room/impossible crime lineup of favorites.

Finally, Maria Hudgins' "Murder on the London Eye," published in the December, 2007, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has only two distinguishing features. Firstly, the staging of an impossible strangling of an elderly, wealthy American tourist traveling alone in a glass capsule on the London Eye. Secondly, it was published in the same year as Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery (2007). But other than that, the story simply redresses an old locked room-trick in modern garb. It's not a bad story, but I didn't like it. By the way, wasn't there a another short story from the same period about an impossible crime on the London Eye?

So, not the strongest of randomly picked stories from the "Locked and Loaded" franchise, but a fairly decent line-up. Robinson's “The Vanished Billionaire” was a dud. Palmer's "The Monkey Murder" is fun, but, even with the twist in the tail, a minor locked room piece. I greatly enjoyed Pronzini's "The Methodical Cop" and was firmly on Tim Corcoran's side, but pretty minor stuff with a better false-solution than correct answer. And, again, Crider's "See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have" is a fun short story, but not to be recommended for its locked room plot. Hudgins' "Murder on the London Eye" has a good setting and nothing more than that. Cobb's "Over the Edge" looms largely over them as the best of the lot.

Tales of a Steam Hotel: "The Looting of the Specie-Room" (1900) by Cutcliffe Hyne

C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne was a British writer who was "one of the most prolific and successful producers of early magazine SF" and novels like The Lost Continent (1899), but also wrote short stories of action, adventure and mystery – like his once popular Captain Kettle series in Pearson's Magazine. So a fictioneer in the tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who himself had a series of pirate stories published in Pearson's Magazine and authored the famous science-fiction novel, The Lost World (1912).

Fittingly, Hyne contributed one of those so-called, turn-of-the-century "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" in "one of the artfullest pursers in all the Western Ocean passenger trade," Mr. Horrocks.

Mr. Horrocks appeared in a short series of six short stories, "Tales of a Steam Hotel," published between July and December 1900 in, where else, Pearson's Magazine. "The Looting of the Specie-Room" is the first story and introduces Horrocks as the experienced purser on the Liverpool-New York line of the Town S.S. Company. A purser, Horrocks reminds the reader, is not only the man for passengers to throw complaints at or tell them stories of the sea at dinner, but "answerable for a sight more than any Captain that ever wore uniform" – whose latest responsibility is 1.25 million dollars in gold bullion. A precious cargo stored in the ship's specie-room, tucked away under the saloon, walls, floor and roof made of steel plates and an unpickable lock on the door. So "nothing short of dynamite would open that specie-room to a man who hadn't a key." And the person in possession of the only key to the specie-room is Horrocks.

That becomes something of problem when half of the gold bullion disappears from the supposedly securely locked specie-room. So the assumption is Horrocks had been careless enough with the key to allow someone to make an impression of the key and make a duplicate, which places his job in peril. But not to his personal detriment.

"The Looting of the Specie-Room" is very much a first in a series and gives Horrocks a sketchy backstory. Horrocks is a bachelor who was bequeathed a considerable sum from a late uncle, "his wants were small, and his private income covered them easily," who uses his income as a purser to secretly finance a personal charity project. Horrocks created a false identity, Mr. Rocks of Rocks' Orphanage, to provide a home for "those wretched children of the slums." It's their "maintenance and relief" that's really at stake. However, Horrocks is not an entirely saintly character as it's made very clear he supplemented his income on the side by "various well-recognized methods" of the passenger trade.

Another troublesome aspect confusing the matter is the Chief Officer of the Birmingham, Godfrey Clayton, who desperately needed a large sum of money. Horrocks had teased him about the shipment of gold in the specie-room. But when Clayton gets arrested, Horrocks receives a letter begging him to clear up the case or get killed when he gets released.

The solution, or the key towards the solution, is more or less dropped in Horrocks lap. Simply works out the whole scheme from there. You have to keep in mind this short story was published a 124 years ago and barely resembles the traditional, fair play detective story that would emerge over the next twenty, thirty years – an acceptable enough excuse for breaking a few cardinal rules. That being said, I enjoyed Horrocks mildly toying with the idea of false-solutions as he considered and rejected the idea of having been hypnotized or chloroformed in order to make an impression of the key as absurd. No duplicate key was employed in the theft of the gold nor the parcel of diamonds that disappeared under similar circumstances during the voyage to New York.

Not that the actual locked room-trick is blistering original, but how it was done, and where, certainly counts for something this early in the game. The specie-room (SPOILER/ROT13) jnf oernpurq ol perngvat n qbbejnl sebz na nqwnprag pnova hfvat fhpu zbqrea tnqtrgf nf na bkl-ulqebtra synzr srq ol tnf sebz fgrry plyvaqref. Guvf qbbejnl jnf perngrq va n funqbjl cneg bs gur fcrpvr-ebbz naq na nppbzcyvpr (“n pyrire pnecragre”) jbexrq njnl gur genprf yngre jvgu serfu cnaryvat naq cnvag. Lrf, gur fbyhgvba vf cerggl zhpu n frperg rkvg, ohg abg n cer-rkvfgvat bar. Vg unq gb or znqr naq pybfrq ntnva. Fb vg pbzovarq gur neg bs ubhfroernxvat, fnsr penpxvat naq fzhttyvat gb perngr n ybpxrq ebbz gursg naq vzcbffvoyr qvfnccrnenapr bs unys n zvyyvba va tbyq sebz n fuvc. That's not bad at all for a short, borderline detective story about an impossible theft from 1900. You can read story here and judge for yourself.

A note for the curious: "The Looting of the Specie-Room" was adapted for the 1970s TV-series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, but not collected in any of the Rival-themed anthologies. I wonder how this obscure came to their attention. Anyway, "The Looting of the Specie-Room" was collected together with the other five stories in Mr. Horrocks, Purser (1902).

The Communicating Door and Other Stories (1923) by Wadsworth Camp

Wadsworth Camp was an American reporter, playwright and a noteworthy, often overlooked mystery writer from the 1910s, when the genre began to gradually move away from the Doylean era and rivals of Sherlock Holmes, who wrote most of his detective novels during the First World War – which were lean years for the genre. During those war years, Camp produced several, what can be called, proto-Golden Age mysteries. Similar to Frederic Arnold Kummer's The Green God (1911) and Isabel Ostrander's The Clue in the Air (1917), Camp's House of Fear (1916) and The Abandoned Room (1917) are in many ways ahead of their time, but, in other ways, hopelessly chained to their period. A reminder that the detective story, as we have come to know it today, was still very much a work-in-progress during the 1910s and '20s.

However, the best of these early, transitional mysteries (not penned by G.K. Chesterton or R. Austin Freeman) aren't without (historical) interest or completely lacking as detective novels. Camp is one of those fascinating, early pre-GAD mystery writers whose work read like a direct ancestor of John Dickson Carr, Hake Talbot and Paul Halter.

House of Fear takes place in an abandoned, decaying and reputedly haunted theater where the resident ghost of a dead actor prefers to play his part to empty seats, but gets disturbed when a theatrical producer wants to revive it – starting a procession impossible incidents and unnatural deaths. The Abandoned Room is thick with atmosphere reminiscent of Talbot's The Hangman's Handyman (1942) and Rim of the Pit (1944) with the dead ceasing to be dead upon being touched and other apparently supernatural happenings. Camp, of course, never reached their heights as a mystery writer, but liked them enough to seek out more. Camp was not the most prolific of mystery writers with choices being limited to Sinister Island (1915) and a collection of short stories.

The Communicating Door and Other Stories (1923) is listed online as a collection of seven ghost stories and the reason why I didn't give it much attention, until a reliable source identified them as detective stories. Several sounded promising enough. So on the big pile it went.

Just one more thing before delving into this collection... it takes a few stories to get to the really good stuff. So bear with me.

The collections opens with "The Communicating Door," originally published in the September 15, 1913, publication of The Popular Magazine, which can probably be blamed for getting the collection tagged as a bundle of ghost stories. Dawson Roberts, a young lawyer, is determined to rescue Evangeline Ashley from her husband, John Ashley, but he has tucked her away in Ashley House – a large, rambling place in the remote parts of northern Florida. Roberts is not deterred and travels to Florida to find a pallid, haggard and ghost haunted Evangeline at Ashley House. She only want to go with him, if he can proves she has only been imagining things ("...find a natural explanation"). This involves a ghost story surrounding one of her husbands long-dead ancestors and a communicating door locked, and rusted, shut for the better part of a century. "The Communicating Door" reads like the setup of one of Camp's locked room novels and concludes with several seemingly impossible incidents and an unnatural death. Camp impressively gives answers in short order, "everything can be normally explained," but leaves it up to the reader to decide whether the events have a natural or supernatural explanation. A short story with timely charm, even if it was already a good decade out-of-date by 1913.

A note for the curious: "The Communicating Door" is another example of Camp's detective fiction being a direct ancestor of Carr. Carr himself successfully stitched together the detective and ghost story in his short story "Blind Man's Hood" (1934) and the standalone novel The Burning Court (1937).

"Hate," originally published in the April 3, 1920, publication of Collier's and is a departure from Camp's usual murders in old, decaying haunted building to tell a crime story of the Roaring Twenties. David Hume and Edward Felton, "rival proprietors of secret and luxurious gambling houses," having being going at it over a beautiful chores girl, Baby Lennox. The so-called "politer underworld" agreed one would inevitably put the other out of the way. Hume fires the first proverbial shots by pulling a dirty trick on Felton placing him in jail, but bail is posted and Felton is determined to kill Hume. Camp's series-detective, Jim Garth, is present to see the first attempt fail and hear Hume promise, "when you get too much for me I won't try any cheap gun play" ("the cops will only wonder at the beautiful floral offering I'll send for your funeral..."). Felton thinks that's a splendid idea and Hume is found the next day gassed to death in his room. A murder-disguised-as-suicide with a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing towards Felton, but the courtroom wizardry of a young, hungry prosecutor secured a conviction – sending Felton to the death house to be electrocuted. After the verdict, the prosecutor begins to second guess himself and begs Garth to find out if he send the right man to the chair.

Right up until the end, "Hate" is not a bad 1920s crime story with a reverse take on the locked room mystery ("...suicides by gas, as a rule, lock their doors and are content without such extras as chloroform") and some courtroom dramatics, but the conclusion is a muddled, open-ended mess. The whole story is concerned with getting a confession from Felton, whether he's guilty or not and never bothers with the truth. Did he kill Hume or was it somebody else? Camp never gives an answer while an obvious solution is staring everyone in the face. Hume was already dying from an incurable disease. Everything suggested to me Hume killed himself and left behind evidence of murder to frame Felton, but botched it as the evidence under normal circumstances would never have resulted in a guilty verdict or even get to trial. Only a young, hungry prosecutor determined to make a name for himself ensured the plan worked. That would given the story a pitch-black ending as the prosecution hammered on "this revolting idea of the murder of a dying man to satisfy an evil vengeance before nature could interfere." So this story can be filed under "Missed Opportunities."

"The Dangerous Tavern," originally published in the July 24, 1920, publication of Collier's, hands Jim Garth "one of the queerest cases" of his career. A young, barefoot, half-dressed woman was found nearly frozen to death on a country road near a place called Newtown. The trail leads Garth to a remote, deserted and inhospitable tavern where he engages in a nighttime battle of cat-and-mouse with several dangerous criminals who don't shy away from murder. A fun, lively gangster story, but not really my thing.

"The Haunted House," originally published in the January 8, 1921, publication of Collier's, is the first truly good story from this collection. Jim Garth is asked by Simon Allen, an ex-poet, to come to the lonely village of Ardell to prove he's not the victim of self-hallucination. Simon lost his wife three years ago and, ever since, "the house has been full of Helen" and her presence is beginning to take a toll on his sister – who lives in the house with their invalided father. Simon knew Helen was unhappy in Ardell and longed for the city, which is why he's guilt ridden over her death and refuses to live in the house. Whenever he has to stay the night, Helen never fails to put in a ghostly appearance. So what's behind these haunting, domestic events? Garth has to take on the role of John Bell instead of Sherlock Holmes to get to the bottom of this case, which leads him down the dark, gloomy family vault. A very nicely-done, well-handled surprise is waiting for both Garth and the reader. Not to mention a good, not wholly unoriginal solution that wouldn't be out-of-place in a detective story from 1931.

So an excellent short story all around and, together with House of Fear and a short story later in this collection, Camp's best to the early Golden Age detective story. "The Haunted House" is another example of how Camp reminds of Carr. This time, the story recalled my favorite radio-play by Carr, "The Dead Sleep Lightly" (1942), which has one of my favorite lines, "but the dead sleep lightly... and they can be lonely too." Camp is a bit more wordy than Carr, but "Helen's only lonely... she wants company" ("it's wicked of you to be afraid of her") and "you wouldn't let her go when she was alive, Simon, you can't be cross with her for staying now that she's dead" landed just the same. I don't think Camp has ever been mentioned as a possible influence before, but wouldn't be surprised if a young Carr had read Camp's novels and short stories.

For example, "Defiance," published in the December 24, 1921, publication of Collier's, is another short story full with Carrian vibes and the damned cussedness of all things general – especially the setup. Dr. Jimmy Wilmot is visited one evening Stacy Baldwin, a young scoundrel, who has a bullet wound and a strange story to tell. When he arrived home that evening, someone was hiding behind the curtains with a revolver and fired a shot, but Baldwin carries a loaded cane and struck the arm behind the flash ("...if I didn't break a bone I gave a beastly bruise"). So he'll be on the look out for anyone with his arm in a sling. At the same time another patient arrives. A veiled woman with a beastly bruise on her arm and circumstances lead the doctor to discovering her identity, Anna Baldwin. The wife of Stacy Baldwin. What's worse, Dr. Wilmost has always loved Anna. Now he had unwittingly "delivered her helpless into the hands of her vicious husband." I don't Camp pulls it off as good as Carr would have done, but still a pretty solid, early Golden Age detective story from a writer who often appears to belong to a different era.

No original publication date or magazine appearance is known for the next story, "Open Evidence" (1923?), which could mean it was previously published under a different title or this is its first appearance in print. But whatever the case may be, it's unjustly forgotten, overlooked short story. Camp's best piece of detective fiction. A fully-fledged, Golden Age locked room mystery complete with false-solutions and a detective anticipating both Philo Vance and Ellery Queen. More importantly, the solution might be a first. I'll get to that in a minute.

The story takes place not in an old, dark and decaying building, but on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue office building where a writer, named Hudson, is kept from his work by the telephone ringing in the doctor's office next door. And it has been going on for twenty minutes. So goes to the janitor to complain, but, when he looks through the mail slot, they start to break down the door. They find the doctor lying on the floor, stabbed with one of his own scalpels, but the door is locked and bolted on the inside. However, the connecting door opens into Hudson's tiny workroom and only he knows nobody left through that door. Something that looks very suspicious and immediately calls in the help of a private investigator, Parsons, who looks more like a dandy than a private detective. Parsons draws up two dummy cases before revealing the real murderer and locked room-trick ("I will show you a more obvious exit"). That locked room-trick has, as of now, some historical significance (SPOILER/ROT13): n dhrfgvba nebfr fbzr lrnef ntb ubj bevtvany gur fbyhgvba gb gur frpbaq vzcbffvoyr zheqre va serrzna jvyyf pebsgf fhqqra qrngu jnf va avargrra guvegl-gjb, juvpu unf fvapr orpbzr fbzrguvat bs na byq qbqtr. Vg srryf yvxr vg zhfg unir orra hfrq orsber fhqqra qrngu, ohg abobql pbhyq pbzr hc jvgu na rneyvre rknzcyr. Ubjrire, V abgrq ng gur gvzr na rneyvre rknzcyr, be gjb, cebonoyl rkvfgf va na bofpher fubeg fgbel sebz gur gjragvrf. V guvax guvf bar dhnyvsvrf. Gur gevpx vf nqzvggrqyl n ybat-jnl-ebhaq irefvba bs gur gevpx, ohg abg gbb qvssrerag naq npuvrirf gur fnzr rssrpg (zheqrere fghzoyvat vagb gur ebbz nsgre gur ybpxrq qbbe vf oebxra bcra). So, you anthologists out there, take note of this unjustly overlooked locked room treasure from the early Golden Age. Same goes for Max Rittenberg's "The Invisible Bullet" (1914) and Laurence Clarke's "Flashlights" (1918).

The seventh and final story, "The Obscure Move," was originally published in the May, 1915, issue of Adventure and is a fun, lighthearted and warm story of crime and adventure. Morgan is a successful private detective, "commonsense and a sense of humor were his own stock in trade," who specialized in tracking down swindlers. The latest crook he's hunting down is a man named Duncan, of the Duncan Investment Company, who had fled with large sums of investment money. Duncan "revealed the attributes of an eel" as he keeps dodging Morgan, while the pursuing Morgan forces Duncan to turn in his tracks several times. A cat-and-mouse chase leading to a logging camp in Florida where they both get lost in the swamps. So they have to survive together, until they can find their way back to the camp. Such an ordeal allows for some misplaced sympathy to grow on Margon's part for someone who ruined numerous people, but not a bad story to round out this collection.

The Communicating Door and Other Stories is the mixed bag of tricks to be expected from an obscure, 1920s collection of only seven short stories, but here it can be put down to personal taste. Not a the lack of quality. "The Haunted House" and "Open Evidence" are the standouts of the collection and my personal favorites with "Defiance" following behind at a distance. "The Dangerous Tavern" and "The Obscure Move" are both well written, but not for me. Only the first two stories, "The Communicating Door" and "Hate," came up short, but even they had their moments. Not to be overlooked, the best stories showed Camp was not hopelessly shackled to the turn-of-the-century period of the genre and could write fully-fledged, Golden Age mysteries. And had he continued to write stories like "Open Evidence," Camp would not have been half as obscure as he's today. Very much worth a look!

The Clue in the Air (1917) by Isabel Ostrander

Isabel Ostrander was an American socialite from a well-to-do New York family, of Dutch descent, who traveled and lived all over the world at various times, but she disappointed her parents when she decided to study drama and married a Broadway songwriter – before embarking on a writing career. Not without success! Ostrander prolifically wrote short stories and serial novels for the early (pulp) magazines, which widely read and made her something of a household name. You might not have read any of her stories or even heard of her name, but you have likely read Agatha Christie's short story collection Partners in Crime (1929). One of the short stories, "Finessing the King" (1924), parodies Ostrander's McCarty and Riordan series. A parody blunted by Ostrander's plunge into obscurity, but it goes to show how well-known her work was in the 1910s and '20s. More importantly, she was something of a trailblazer.

Ostrander created one of the first blind detectives, Damon Gaunt, preceded only by Clinton H. Stagg's Thornley Colton and Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados. Ashes to Ashes (1919) is credited with being one of the first inverted crime novels predating Anthony Berkeley's "Francis Iles" crime novels by a dozen years. The Clue in the Air (1917), today's subject, has been known to me as a proto-1930s detective novel listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) for ages. Somehow, The Clue in the Air proved to be remarkable difficult to find for a book that should have been in the public domain for the past twenty or thirty years.

So it was a welcome surprise to learn The Clue in the Air finally got a proper, long overdue reprint as part of "Otto Penzler's Locked Room Library" series. A new, hopefully long-running series with a so far unusual, but interesting, selection of titles – mostly covering relatively obscure titles from the 1920s. This first badge comprises of Anna Katharine Green's Miss Hurd: An Enigma (1894), Eden Phillpotts' The Grey Room (1921), Arthur J. Rees' The Moon Rock (1922), Louis Tracy's The Passing of Charles Lanson (1924), W. Adolphe Roberts' The Haunting Hand (1926), Ronald A. Knox's The Three Taps (1927) and Ostrander's The Clue in the Air. They are in the public domain, but that doesn't always mean they're readily available or undeserving of a proper edition. If this is the route this reprint series is taking, I can only hope obscure, hard-to-find public domain locked room mysteries like Fred M. White's serial "Who Killed James Trent" (1901), W.A. Mackenzie's Flower O' the Peach (1916), Charles Chadwick's The Cactus (1925) and Ostrander's Above Suspicion (1923), published as by "Robert Orr Chipperfield," are next in line to be reprinted. In the meantime, I'll pick and choose from this first round of reprints from Penzler's Locked Room Library.

The Clue in the Air introduces Ostrander's series-detective, ex-roundsman Timothy McCarty, who resigned from the police force when "the death of a prosperous, saloon-keeping uncle had made him financially independent" to become a prosperous landed proprietor and gentleman of leisure – which proved empty and monotonous. That all changed one sultry, summer evening when McCarty is out for a stroll in the city and bumps into an old colleague, Cunliffe, out on patrol. They chat a little how nothing ever happens in that quiet district of the city, but McCarty reminds him that, when he was still on the force, "all the brawls in the tough wards put together didn't give us half the trouble of one crime pulled off in a residential section." A remark thick with foreshadowing!

McCarty continued his leisurely stroll when he hears "a sharp, choking cry from somewhere overhead" and "a swift rush of air as something hurtled down and fell with a hideous crashing impact on the pavement at his feet." What crashed on the sidewalk of an apartment building is the quivering, broken body of a dying woman uttering the cryptic words, "the—flying—man," through smashed lips and broken teeth. A dying message!

I already noted Ostrander was something of a trailblazer in the 1910s, creating a blind detective and experimenting with the inverted crime, which can be extended to The Clue in the Air. The story is a prototype, or premonition, of things yet to come. A Van Dine-Queen detective novel written a decade before either S.S. van Dine or Ellery Queen arrived on the scene and has the added distinction of being the first detective novel known to use the "dying message" device. Only example preceding it is "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891) from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891). That would have been impressive enough for a surprisingly fresh, very readable mystery novel written/published in 1917, but the deadly fall is eventually revealed to be a locked room problem and the ex-roundsman has to contend with a Sherlockian rival sleuth. So someone gets to play the fallible detective and provide the story with a false-solution, of sorts. The Clue in the Air probably deserves more credit for its part in shaping the American detective story of the 1920s and '30s, but more on that in a moment.

Inspector Druet, officially leading the investigations, asks McCarty to come back to the force in some capacity, but tries to resist the urge to get involved without much success ("I'm not able to get the thing out of my mind at all since the poor thing fell at my feet") considering the whole situation is festooned with question marks – starting with the identity of the victim, Marion Rowntree. She's stepdaughter of the noted banker, Stephen Quimby, who's the executor of the estate left her by her mother until she became of age. In two weeks time, Marion would have turned twenty-one and her stepfather would have been compelled to turn everything over to her. And that might have been a problem for obvious reasons. However, Quimby apparently has an alibi. There are other questions: What was Marion doing at the apartment building? Where was she pushed from? What's the meaning of her dying words? Who else in the apartment building could have pushed her? "Was it the blonde lady on the third floor, or the seemingly frank and straightforward young inventor, or the bizarre couple who were his immediate neighbors?" Or was it perhaps someone else ("match wits with Ellery Queen and see if you guess whodunit").

So, as the soon to be Special Officer becomes more involved, McCarty enlists his lifelong friend and (here, anyway) armchair Watson, Dennis Riordan. A city firefighter and enjoyed their little chats at the firehouse, but otherwise, Riordan's role in the story is very limited compared to the previously mentioned rival detective, Wade Terhune, "the renowned crime specialist" who's "record of success is unique in the annals of criminal investigation." Terhune is a parody of Sherlock Holmes with all the “charm” of Philo Vance and all the "scientific facilities" of Dr. John Thorndyke or Craig Kennedy. McCarty is speechless the Great Detective and subjects him to a series of observation, which turn out to be spot on ("mere observation once more, and a little deduction"), but even more interesting are Terhune's scientific gadgets. Mostly notably, Terhune hooks all the suspects to a lie-detector to scientifically measure their responses to a series of pictures ("...you have each irrefutably recorded your emotions by the pulse beats in your wrists, in pressing upon the pneumatic cushion"). Terhune and his gadgets sometimes push the story dangerous close to science-fiction and a hybrid mystery ("I have adjusted a vibratometer, a small apparatus which, as the subject sits facing the hearth, will measure the vibration of his breath"), but McCarty's ordinary, everyday common sense prevails over Terhune's spyglasses, tape measures and "machines with jaw-breaking names." So... about that ending.

Ostrander was certainly ahead of the curve and perhaps knew in which direction the detective story, and novel, was slowly headed. The Clue in the Air is an early example of the direction in which the detective novel was slowly taking, but it simply wasn't there yet. Not even close! Ostrander evidently had an idea how it would look and feel like, but the last quarter of the story and ending throws all of that out of the window. Nick Fuller said it best, "impressive because it is ahead of its time, disappointing because fair play is still in the future." However, the twist preceding this change is actually somewhat clued and something you should be able to anticipate, because it has been done before and beaten like a dead horse since.

After this point, The Clue in the Air goes from the ancestral mother of the American detective story to just another pulp story littering the popular magazines of the day. And it finally reveals why the book secured a spot in Adey's Locked Room Murders. But don't expect anything grandiose, unless you have a taste for dated, pulp-style impossible crimes. I can enjoy a bizarre, pulpy take on the locked room mystery, but this needed to be more than just pulp. This is like watching a runner collapse with the finish line in sight.

That being said, the high rise building and period setting helped to punch up the locked room angle and scenes. If only Marion's dying message had been (ROT13) "gur—fcvqre—zna," which is more accurate and funny today, but unfair to expect the book to be a complete conduit into the future. Ostrander was farsighted, not clairvoyant. The Clue in the Air is admirably enough as a premonition of the American detective novel of the coming decades. Likely served as a blueprint for some of those writers that would emerge in the coming decades, even though Ostrander is largely forgotten today. So recommended as a not unimportant genre curiosity.

A note for the curious: Isabel Ostrander died a little over a century ago, aged 40, on April 26, 1924, of "heart failure after an illness of several weeks." She was only 40 when she died in 1924 and would have been in her early fifties when the Golden Age was in full swing in the mid-1930s. I now wonder what Ostrander might have written had she seen what others can do with a detective novel like The Clue in the Air.

Through Three Rooms (1907) by Sven Elvestad (a.k.a. Stein Riverton)

Sven Elvestad, "sybarite extraordinaire," was a Norwegian journalist, essayist and an industrious mystery writer who penned over a hundred detective novels, novellas, short stories and newspaper serials – published in Norway and Sweden under the penname "Stein Riverton." Elvestad can be regarded as Norway's answer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with his series-detective, Asbjørn Krag, falling squarely into the "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" category.

Back in 2018, I reviewed a then newly released translation of Elvestad's most well-known, justly celebrated mystery novel, Jernvogner (The Iron Chariot, 1909), but without further translations lost track of him. Fortunately, this has changed in the past few years. Not only for Elvestad!

Kabaty Press is a self-described micro-press of translated fiction and non-fiction with a small, but growing, catalog of early Scandinavian crime-and detective novels and short stories. Earlier this year, Kabaty Press published an English translation of Elvestad's Gjennem de tre værelser (Through Three Rooms, 1907). Through Three Rooms is novella, originally serialized in a Norwegian newspaper and published as a book under the title Dødens finger (The Finger of Death) in 1915. This edition is translated by Lucy Moffatt and comes with a lengthy, informative introduction from one of Norway's leading crime fiction experts, Nils Nordberg – who also gave his voice to the Norwegian audiobooks of Elvestad's work. Nordberg's introduction is very much worth a read as it paints a fascinating picture of the author and some interesting bits of genre history. Most notably, it unearthed that "an obscure British monthly magazine, Tip Top Stories of Adventure and Mystery, printed a slightly shortened translation of The Iron Chariot in its April 1924 issue." Several years before a rather a well-known detective novel was published. So there's a remote possibility The Iron Chariot stealthily influenced the British Golden Age detective story. However, it's more likely Anthony Berkeley can be credited with introducing the idea to the English-language detective story. And made really famous by someone else. So with all of that out of the way, let's get to the story at hand.

Through Three Rooms begins with Asbjørn Krag, comfortably seated in an armchair, receiving and listening to the plight of an old school friend, Dr. Karl Rasch, who has a practice in Smaalenene County. One of his patients is a rich Swedish-American, John Aakerholm, who arrived in the district five years ago and bought the famous Kvamberg Manor ("...the largest and best-known estates in the country"). While an eccentric old man, Aakerholm lived lavishly, threw house parties and acquired a large circle of friends. Even getting engaged to the Widow Hjelm. A popular figure newcomer in the community who entertained with marvelous stories of his adventurous "on the prairies and in the gold-mining districts." But a change came over old Aakerholm. And the parties came to a stop. Ever since he has been nervous wreck teetering on the edge. Rasch was called upon as a doctor at all hours, day and night, who found his patient on more than occasion completely out of his wits. That's not all.

John Aakerholm sleeps alone at night and has forbidden anyone to come even near his bedroom during the nighttime, which he ensured with elaborate precaution. To reach his bedroom, "one must pass through two rooms and three doors" and "once the clock has struck twelve and the old man has gone to bed, no one may enter any of the rooms" – which he locks with the only key. Rasch knows Aakerholm has to be frightened of someone, or something, as he has heard whisper, "is he a devil or a man?" And saw him hurl a heavy fruit bowl through an antique mirror. So what's eating away at his patient? Asbjørn Krag is delighted to help his old school friend, but, when they arrive at the manor house, a new development has taken place. Somebody tried to shoot Aakerholm and disappeared from a pavilion. This is the point where Krag remarks to Rasch that the case "no longer has any connection to the three rooms" and they have "emerged from one mystery only to find ourselves embroiled in another." Before too long, a body is found on the snowy grounds surrounding Kvamberg Manor.

So how well does this little novella from 1909 stand after more than a century? First of all, Through Three Rooms is not, really, a locked room mystery as you might expect from its premise. The three rooms and double-locked doors do pose a puzzle, but not one of the seemingly impossible variety. Secondly, the disappearance from the pavilion can be regarded as an impossible crime, "there were no tracks in the snow leading away from the pavilion," but hardly worthy of the "locked room mysteries" toe-tag. Through Three Rooms is an old-fashioned, Doylean-style suspense yarn about the mysterious, inexplicable character change of the lord of the manor that were not yet pass their expiration date in 1909. So there are barely any clues or very many suspects, but instead it's about what happened and how to solve it. Asbjørn Krag is not a detective who detects and deduces, but an all-knowing strategist who's always several steps ahead and maneuvers everyone towards the solution. Something more along the lines of a chess game than a detective story. Krag effortlessly checkmates the villains. A typical pulp hero of the period. However, the all-important answer to Aakerholm's personality change and why locked himself away behind two doors is not bad at all. Something simple and straight forward, but with a glimmer of the coming Golden Age. A shame most of Elvestad's detective stories were "breezily composed at restaurant tables and in hotel rooms," because more could have been done with the idea.

Through Three Rooms is not a Golden Age detective story hailing from a country with a different language and genre-history of its own, which would make it unfair to compare it to its Anglo counterparts. So, taking that into consideration, Through Three Rooms is a quick, fun read that would not be out-of-place in The International Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and comes especially recommended to the fans of the Great Detective. If only just to see what the influence of their favorite detective has wrought in other parts of the world.