The Aluminum Turtle (1960) by Baynard Kendrick

Baynard Kendrick's The Aluminum Turtle (1960), alternatively titled The Spear Gun Murders, is the eleventh, and penultimate, novel in the Captain Duncan Maclain series published early in the post-Golden Age era of the genre – which tries to keep up with the rapidly changing times. An old school detective story with a new class of criminals and attitudes to crime. It's not only the ever-changing times that makes The Aluminum Turtle distinctly different from the 1930s and '40s novels taking place in a darker, pulpier version of New York City. The Aluminum Turtle brings Captain Maclain and his entire entourage to the sunnier climes of Florida. Captain Maclain has a good reason to return to Florida.

Seven years ago, Ronald Dayland was brutally killed in a presumably robbery gone wrong somewhere between Tampa Airport and Courtney Campbell Parkway. Dayland had been battered with "almost maniacal ferocity" and his wallet had been emptied, but why didn't robber take a valuable gold watch and a diamond ring? Sheriff Dave Riker, of Poinsettia County, doesn't believe this is a simple robbery gone wrong and turned his attention to a club of teenage delinquents calling themselves the Water Rovers. They started out as an outlet for bored teenagers, boat races and skin divers, before broadening their activities to drinking parties, drag racing with the family car and eventually small, costly crime sprees. Everything from rowboats, cruisers and outboard motors to anchors, tools and other gear were "slickly stolen." But did they extend their activities to robbery and murder? Sheriff Riker never got the proof and the unsolved murder had terrible consequences for Dayland's then twelve year old son, Ronnie.

Dayland is the owner of the successful Dayland Fruit Company, which ensured his wife and son had everything they wanted, but the emotionally neglected Ronnie has always craved the attention of his parents and went out of his way to get it – like arson and crashing a boat. In the years following his father's murder and second marriage of his mother, Ronnie went "down the sliding board from marihuana to pills and the needle" to become "an expert snowbird and doomed entirely."

Captain Maclain is an old friend of the Daylands whose work in New York and the lack of an official invitation prevented him from probing the murder of his old, long-time friend. Ronnie intends to use their fishing trip to ask Captain Maclain for help with his addiction, because it was easier to ask someone "who couldn't see the terror in his face" or "read the truth of his weakness." Very different to how Kendrick handled the "funny cigarettes" in The Last Express (1937) decades earlier. Their one-on-one aboard Ronnie's fishing boat, the A-bomb, sets the tone and pieces for the overall story.

Firstly, Ronnie's plan to ask for help is shelved when he fishes up a curious looking object: an aluminum turtle with rubber flippers, head and tail. Ronnie believes he had "lucked on to an underwater buoy that marked some sunken treasure." Something that's going to propel to plot later on. Secondly, Captain Maclain is firmly in fallible detective mode. Not only for neglecting the murder of his friend for seven years ("wasn't it more of an obligation to do his best to solve the murder of a friend... than to take a fee to investigate the murder of some person he had never known?"), but trying to understand Ronnie and his generation ("their jargon is as uncomprehensible as their music") and generally getting older. That's why he's unsure what's happening half of the time ("there were undercurrents he couldn't fathom") with the developing case rubbing it in his face how depended he still is on Sybella, Spud Savage, Rena and his two dogs, Schnucke and Dreist.

The developing case comes to a head when Captain Maclain joins the boating party returning to the spot where Ronnie discovered the aluminum turtle. Ronnie dives into the water with an hour's supply of air, but never resurfaces and ninety minutes later they call the coast guard. Not long thereafter his body is recovered, but Ronnie didn't drown. He was shot with a spear gun. Suddenly, the sea is crawling with potential suspects. Two members of the Water Rovers were spotted nearby with one entering the water carrying a spear gun and boat that recovered the body is manned by cut-throat treasure hunters. Not to mention a fleet of shrimpers, run by an ex-mobster, known to be a cover for a huge smuggling operation. There are more spear gun killings, past and present, discovered and committed along the way.

However, the plot of The Aluminum Turtle lacks the puzzling complexity of earlier novels like The Whistling Hangman (1937) and Blind Man's Bluff (1943). The murder method has echoes of those two novels (ROT13: perngvat gur vyyhfvba bs qvfgnapr orgjrra zheqrere naq ivpgvz), but nothing is done with it, plot-wise, before being explained away between a few sentences. Only real plot-complexity, to speak of, is the school of red herrings trying to obscure a routine plot and rather obviously murderer. So the focus of The Aluminum Turtle is not on the traditional who, why and how, but how Captain Maclain grapples with this case and himself. If you have only read the pre-1950s novels, The Aluminum Turtle feels like a threadbare affair with too much drama and not enough plot. More like Brett Halliday than Ellery Queen. Fortunately, I really like Captain Maclain and appreciated what Kendrick attempted to do here, which I think fans of the character will agree with. But, purely as a detective novel, The Aluminum Turtle is a far cry from the first five, or so, novels. I highly recommend you start there before skipping this far ahead.

That being said, The Aluminum Turtle has made me curious about the last title in the series, Frankincense and Murder (1961), which sounds like a hyper conventional drawing room mystery. The kind of drawing room mystery most of Kendrick's contemporaries debuted with in the '20s and '30s. You might see a review of that one before too long.

Memory Fail: Q.E.D. vol. 47-49 by Motohiro Katou

The first, of two, stories from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. vol. 47, "The Sun is Still Blazing," takes place at a secret and highly secured NSA research on a remote, isolated island near Indonesia – where an important file with research data went missing. And ended up destroyed. Only problem is that the research facility is tightly secured and closely scrutinized suggesting an inside job.

Was it the somewhat eccentric head researcher and "world-renowned expert in math and logic," Kurt Gidel? Or one of three members of his research staff, Carlos Balma, Walter Chapman and Judith Grey? Considering the stolen and destroyed data included sensitive, classified information, it was decided to hold an internal investigation in order to close the case as soon as possible. Sou Touma was asked to act as an independent investigator with Kana Mizuhara tagging along to the remote Indonesian island.

The theft of the file is something of an impossible crime. It apparently went missing in the meeting room, tightly secured, where Gidel and his staff gather to discuss ideas and work out problems on a blackboard. Gidel was sitting next to the backboard to listen to his staff members and judge their ideas, while the file rested on the blackboard's ledge. During their last meeting, the black book file was somehow swapped with a dummy file, miraculously smuggled out of the institute and destroyed – even though everyone was thoroughly searched. Another complication to the case is Gidel himself. A genius who only wanted "to sit back and relax at a beautiful island" to solve complicated math problems from a beach chair. He also provides a couple of confusing false-solutions and asks Touma if they were useful. Kana is ready to throttle him when answering, "yes, it was." What's most surprising is how simple, unvarnished and straight forward this story. No grand tricks. Touma's chain of deductions simply answers the three main questions: how was the file swapped, how was it stolen and whodunit with even the equally simple and unvarnished motive being a clue to the culprit's identity. A simple, straightforward, but good and effective little detective story.

Second story of Q.E.D. vol. 47, "The Slope," is surprisingly a Kana Mizuhara-centric story hearkening back to her middle school days when she stood for a bullied classmate, Utagawa Aki. She returned to their first middle school reunion having become a promising young model with rising profile, but she always wanted to know why Kana trusted her unconditionally. Particularly during an embarrassing incident when a stolen video game was found in her desk. Kana was the only one believed in her innocence and stuck up for her, which saved her neck with the teacher. But why? Kana can't remember why she believed her. When Kana goes with a few other old classmates to her apartment an envelope with household money disappears, possibly mislaid by accident. But a thorough search of place turns up exactly nothing.

Kana calls Touma for help and advises her to search the apartment again, but, this time, she has to "search with the assumption that someone has hidden it deliberately" – not simply gotten lost or misplaced. Finding the missing money raises more questions than answers. However, the missing money is only a vehicle to tell Utagawa's backstory and why Kana believed her. A decent enough story, but not nearly as good or memorable as that other Kana Mizuhara-centric story, "Summer Time Capsule," from vol. 26. So, on a whole, these two stories aren't standouts of the series, but put together, they form a pretty solid volume.

The first story from Q.E.D. vol. 48, "The Representative," begins with a police report of a
break-in at an empty house. When the police came to investigate, they discovered a bizarre scene: the body of man, partially wrapped in tarp, lying in the middle of a room next to an unfinished, half-dug hole in the floor. The victim is Kabuto Shigeki, a representative for authors, who worked for the Orange Copyright Agency. His most well-known client is a reclusive, bestselling author, Semi Ichika, whose Crater Bungee sold over a million copies. Kabuto Shigeki was about to receive the finished manuscript for his next book. Orange Copyright Agency, pressured by his publisher, is eager to get their hands on the manuscript, but Ichika is notoriously difficult to work with. And dislikes most of their staff members ("I tried too hard to impress him..."). So the new, young and completely inexperienced Tento Seiko gets to job of trying to handle and appease Ichika. She's friends with Mizuhara and Sou Touma eventually follows to "solve this series of unfortunate events," but not before another body is added to the tally.

"The Representative" is a really good detective story, nearly an inverted mystery, but there's a pleasing, craftily applied a nearly invisible layer to the whodunit. So to truly solve this story, the armchair detective has to find answer to all the questions. From the murky motive and behavior of the author to the condition in which the first victim was discovered. A possible contender to be included in part two "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Cases from Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D."

The next story, "Fahya's Drawing Book," is undoubtedly a crime/detective story of today's age. It centers on a poor Moroccan child, Fahya, who's teenage cousin, Hamdan, has heard their uncle made a lot of money working in Spain and wants to join him – boarding a ship to smuggle him and others into Europe. Fahya's joins him as a stowaway, where she witnesses a murder from her hiding place, before the ship runs into the coast guard. That confrontation quickly dissolves into a shoot out killing seventeen people aboard the ship, but Fahya an Hamdan made it to the shore. Fahya disappearing from her home and the smuggling vessel has not gone unnoticed.

Alan Blade, the CEO of Alansoft, last appeared in "Disaster Man's Wedding" (vol. 34) when he got married to his secretary, Ellie, who founded a joined charity as part of their wedding gift. They wanted to provide a poor child from Africa with a scholarship to guarantee them an education and Ellie picked (surprise, surprise) Fahya. Alan brings Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara into the case to help find the little girl, but they're not the only ones looking for her. So an interesting enough premise for modern mystery, but nothing truly interesting emerges from it and feels more like a curiosity than anything else. Although I doubt that was the intention considering it tackles human trafficking, missing children and a shoot out on a boat with nearly twenty casualties. I was especially reminded of, what's perhaps, Edward D. Hoch's worst short story, "The Starkworth Atrocity" (1998), which tried to do something similar with even less impressive results. Sadly, this volume ends with one of the weakest stories in the series.

Regrettably, Q.E.D. vol. 49 is rather weak on a whole, but the first story, "Unrelated Cases," has its moments. Stanley Lau and Sammy Chow are the leaders of two opposing criminal organizations who have decided to meet at a dinner in Hong Kong, but the place is shot up and their bodyguards immediately form a human shield around the two mob bosses. Someone, somehow, shot Sammy Chow through the heart while surrounded by his bodyguards. The shot came from a deserted, dead end alleyway. Some time later in Japan, Tomashino Kyohei, a college student, is roped by his criminally optimistic friend, Sasaki Tatsuoka, to take some money from his workplace to help them along. When the arrive on the 21st floor of a dark, empty building, they discover Lau and his men torturing and killing a man. They managed to escape from the building, but now they have band of gangsters after them. Tomashino Kyohei's younger brother, Haruhiko, asks his school friends, Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara, to help them out.

I said this story has it's moments and there are exactly two. Firstly, the impossible shooting of Sammy Chow in Hong Kong. It's a fine demonstration of the advantages a visual medium like manga (comics) has over prose when dealing with locked room murders, impossible crimes and complicated tricks, because it's just fun to see the murder being carried out during the flashback – fun enough to almost overlook how preposterous the trick really is. I think the trick would have worked better in a less risky, more controlled environment like a theatrical stage or movie set. Secondly, the final confrontation between Touma and Lau. Hardboiled brains, indeed! So not the best story in the series, nor anywhere near the bottom.

"Love Story" closes out Q.E.D. vol. 49 and is another heart-shaped, character-driven puzzles, but not an especially memorable one and struggled to remember anything about it as soon as I finished it. The main gist of the story is an unfinished, 45-year-old movie shot by the movie club of a private college starring a college student who's spitting image of Kana Mizuhara. How very Gosho Aoyama of you, Katou. Nearly half a century, two of the since then married, now elderly club members bump into Kana and the urge is immediately there to finish the movie. Only for the man to die of a heart attack while editing the movie. And he leaves behind some questions. This one just didn't capture my attention. Katou has done these human puzzle stories better before.

So an unfortunate weak ending to the penultimate volume in the series. Even more unfortunate, the overall quality of these three volumes is fairly weak. Only good two stories are "The Sun is Still Blazing" and "The Representative." "The Slope" is a fairly decent character piece and "Unrelated Cases" has, as said before, its moments. But the same can't be said of "Fahya's Drawing Book" or "Love Story." Let's hope I can end this series on an optimistic note with the coming review of Q.E.D. vol. 50.

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).

Shadowed Sunlight (1945) by Christianna Brand

Last time, I discussed Christianna Brand's Death in High Heels (1941), very much an apprentice work full with undeveloped potential and promise, but for a detective story from the forties, it has aged remarkably well – closer a police procedural from the 1980s or '90s than a Golden Age mystery. So even when she's not pulling a Carr or Christie, Brand's can deliver a detective story not devoid of merit of interest. However, it didn't quite scratch that itch and decided to go right back to Brand. And with good reason.

I rambled on about lost manuscripts and other extraordinarily obscure detective fiction not so long ago, but what I neglected to mention in those laments is that efforts are being made to salvage what has been lost. In the past, I recounted Philip Harbottle's Herculean labors to restore the works of John Russell Fearn and Gerald Verner to print, which include some superb, previously unpublished, novels (e.g. Fearn's Pattern of Murder, 2006). Three years ago, the British Library published E.C.R. Lorac's Two-Way Murder (c. 1958), originally written shortly before she died, but not published until 2021. Then there's Tony Medawar's Bodies from the Library anthology series dedicated to "bring into the daylight the forgotten, the lost and the unknown" from the Golden Age of Detection.

An annual series collecting obscure, rarely reprinted short stories, previously unpublished work and even plays from a who's who of classic mystery writers – covering both American and British writers. So you get rare or unpublished stories from the likes of Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Boucher and Clayton Rawson. The Bodies from the Library series has proven to be a small treasure trove of previous unpublished work for fans of Christianna Brand. A big regret of her fans is that "she didn't write enough," but "new" material has been added in recent years to Brand's bibliography.

"Cyanide in the Sun" (1958) and "Bank Holiday Murder" (19??) had not been reprinted since their original appearance in The Daily Sketch ("a British newspaper which folded fifty years ago"), but respectively reprinted in The Realm of the Impossible (2017) and the Sept/Oct, 2017, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The never before published "The Rum Punch" appeared in the first Bodies from the Library (2018) anthology ("the highlight of the collection and an impossible mystery at that") and Bodies from the Library 4 (2021) contains an entire, long overlooked and nearly forgotten (short-ish) novel! There's still that planned Crippen & Landru collection (The Dead Hold Fast and Other Stories) and the unpublished impossible crime novel The Chinese Puzzle. Someone, like James Scott Byrnside, could complete the unfinished Cat Among the Pigeons. Anyway...

The subject of today's review is Shadowed Sunlight, originally serialized in Woman from July to August 1945, but was somehow forgotten about until it returned to print in Bodies from the Libraries 4. I don't remember ever hearing or reading about Shadowed Sunlight, before it was finally reprinted a few years ago. I was aware the unpublished The Chinese Puzzle and "The Dead Hold Fast," but never noticed even the briefest of mentions of this small, typical Brandian gem completely with a tight-drawn cast of characters and a seemingly impossible murder – only Cockrill and Charlesworth are absent. More on that in a moment.

Shadowed Sunlight takes place as the Second World War came to an end and "it was 'Britain is Grateful Week' for returning heroes," which means charity events to collect donations, war bonds and to welcome back the boys. Edgar "Thom-Thom" Thom is a successful ex-businessman who had his retirement cut short by the war to serve his country, as Director of Anthracite Production, but now intends to combine charity work with pleasure. Thom has taken his beloved racing cutter Cariad out of storage to "give those kids up at the naval school a run for their money" and to collect some money for the savings campaign. So brings together a small group of friends and young people to celebrate and enjoy the sailing.

Firstly, there's Gloria and her second husband, Geoffrey Winson, and their 7-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who's simply called "Tiggy." Jenny Sendall is Gloria's 19-year-old daughter from her first marriage. She brought along her boyfriend, Roy Silver, who's the "Silver Voice of Radio." Tiggy is looked after by the overworked, underpaid nursemaid, Miss Pye. She's not always on the best of term with her employers. Truda Dean and her boyfriend, Julian Messenger, get invited on their way to Trudy's grandmother, Lady Audian, to tell her of their intention to get married. Lastly, there's Thom's personal secretary, Evan Stone, who helped to arrange the boating party. But then things begin to get awkward really fast.

Julian Messenger used to be engaged to Jenny Sendall, but, when returning home from war, Julian asked Jenny to release him from his promise to marry her – because he wanted to marry Trudy. Jenny agreed to his request, "she was awfully sweet and nice about breaking off our engagement," but not her cash-strapped parents. Gloria and Geoffrey learn about this right before a day before the boating party. So they force her to promise to take action against Julian for breach of promise. Things don't end there. A day before the race, the group attends Miss Templeton's dance party ending with the mysterious theft of their host's emerald pendant in platinum setting. An ill-omen, indeed, but nothing compared to what awaits them the next day.

Midday, the next day, they have a picnic aboard, "just a rough, homely picnic," where everyone handles, eats and drinks the same things, but only one of them dies from cyanide poisoning. Somehow, or other, the murderer had poisoned something the victim ate or drink, mere minutes before, which appears to be an utter impossibility. Nobody could have administered the poison. An impossible poisoning aboard a racing yacht with a small, intimate circle of potential suspects.

I mentioned in the review of Death in High Heels that the book ends with Charlesworth getting assigned to a new case, "a murder in a racing yacht," wondering whether it could be the story told in the so far unpublished novella The Dead Hold Fast. Well, Shadowed Sunlight certainly ticks the murder-in-a-racing-yacht box, but Charlesworth is not the one who Scotland Yard sends to clear up the murder. Detective Inspector Dickinson, "a university pup with very little experience," because "a straightforward poisoning in a yacht, where, of necessity, the suspects must be few and the solution merely a matter of motive and opportunity, had seemed, to the simple hearts of his superiors, a cinch" – putting him on his first solo case. However, the murder proves far from straightforward from the apparent impossibility of administrating the poison, a mass drugging on the previous evening and stolen poison to the theft of the emerald and the death of Gloria's first husband. All tied up in a complicated tangle of relationships, emotions and possible motives with Tiggy both helping and hampering Dickinson's investigation. I agree with Jim when he said Tiggy can be added "alongside the Carstairs clan to the pantheon of Perfectly Realised Young People in GAD fiction." The characters, their interactions and complicated relationships really is the story's strong point.

Shadowed Sunlight is very much a character-driven mystery novel in the tradition of the Golden Age Crime Queen with twisty, psychological touches rather than a John Dickson Carr-style impossible crime tale. Brand's skillful hand at measuring out emotions is on full display, which she always beautifully balanced and seldom done in shades of a single color. For example (Minor SPOILERS/ROT13), gur Jvafbaf ner gehyl n cnve bs ercryyrag punenpgref, ohg Gvttl frrvat ure sngure nyy bs n fhqqra qvr sebz cbvfbavat naq pelvat bhg (“qnqql, jnxr hc, jnxr hc—!”) znxrf vg ernyyl harnfl gb purre fbzrbar ba jub, ol gur raq, vf cebira gb or bar bs gubfr qrfreivat ivpgvzf bs qrgrpgvir svpgvba. Be gur jrqtr bs fhfcvpvba guerngravat gb qevir n, huz, jrqtr orgjrra Whyvna naq Gehql.

Brand wasn't half-bad when it came to creating an engaging set of characters and knew how to insert genuine drama or an emotional monkey into a detective story without turning it into a cheap, gaudy melodrama. She often knew how to exploit it to deliver an emotional gut punch ending that made genre classics out of so many of her novels. Shadowed Sunlight certainly has a somewhat mixed ending, where the fates of the characters are concerned and you can't help feeling a little sorry for the murderer, but not the wrenching conclusion of a Green for Danger (1944) or London Particular (1952). However, it would be a unfair to hold this shorter, originally serialized and character-driven, novel up against those towering examples of Golden Age ingenuity and plotting. Brand evidently intended Shadowed Sunlight to be on a lighter note than something like Green for Danger and is to Brand's work what Peril at End House (1932) is to Christie. An excellent detective novel in its own right, but one that will always be overshadowed by its author's even better and more popular works.

So what about the actual meat of the plot? And, more specifically, the impossible poisoning? The plot is lighter and more character-oriented than Brand's other novels, but, on a whole, not bad with the only disappointing plot-thread being the stolen emerald pendant. I figured that part out pretty quickly and not up to Brand usual standards, but everything else was simply solid. Particularly the neat poisoning-trick that explained the impossible murder. I have come to associate this kind of impossible poisoning and solution with Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series, which often feature similar impossibly poisoned food/drink in public/open places. So coming across one every now and then in a Golden Age detective story only adds interest. If there's anything to complain about is that Shadowed Sunlight was reprinted as part of an anthology instead of published as a separate novel. It would need a lengthy introduction, bibliography and extra short story ("Cyanide in the Sun") to pad out the page-count, but a “new” Brand novel deserves nothing less, especially when it's as good as Shadowed Sunlight.

Cutting this long, rambling and quasi-coherent shitty scribbling short, I really, really enjoyed Shadowed Sunlight. It was exactly what I was hoping to find when I picked up Death in High Heels: a lighter-plotted, but still unmistakably, Brandian detective story. While the story nor characters and plot soared to the same heights as Green for Danger or London Particular, it's restoration to print is cause for celebration. The fulfillment of a seemingly impossible wish of seeing Brand's all-too-small body of work miraculously expand. I suspect James got hold of a Monkey's Paw. Next up is probably going to be a review of one of Brand's short stories to complete the hat trick.

London's Glory (2015) by Christopher Fowler

Christopher Fowler was a British author of some fifty novels and short story collections, covering everything from fantasy, horror and science-fiction to none-fiction, but what he'll be remembered for the most is the creating the first "Great Detective" series of the 21st century – recounting "the adventures of the two Golden Age detectives investigating impossible, modern London crimes." The two detective detectives in question are the nonagenarian Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. A specialist police team created after the outbreak of the Second World War to ease the heavily burdened, overstretched Metropolitan Police Force originally intended to investigate sensitive cases that could cause scandal or public unrest. However, the "peculiar" in Peculiar Crimes Unit often brought problems to their desk of a decidedly odder, weirder and sometimes outright impossible nature. Just as odd, weird and impossible are Britain's weird and forgotten who worked for the PCU over the decades with Bryant and May as the unit's never-changing constants.

This series together with writers like Lawrence Block, William L. DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini helped thawing out my fundamentally-minded purist mindset that viewed everything published after the Golden Age as irredeemable trash. I enjoyed the first half dozen novels, but On the Loose (2009) and Off the Rails (2010) lost me. I briefly returned to the series in 2016 with a review of the excellent locked room mystery, The Memory of Blood (2011), but the burgeoning reprint renaissance and translation wave distracted my attention away from the PCU series. So had half-forgotten about the series when the tragic broke earlier this year that Fowler had passed away after battling cancer for three years. After mentioning the PCU series in "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years," I decided a return was in order before the end of the year. Why not reacquaint myself with the series through one of the two short story collections?

London's Glory (2015) collects ten short stories, a bonus story, a lengthy introduction, introductions to the stories and some other extras – like an illustration of the PCU HQ and "Arthur Bryant's Secret Library." So quite the must-have volume for fans. Before the going over the stories, I should note that the short story format is perhaps a little too crammed and narrow for this particular series to thrive. A lot of the stories have great hooks and fantastic setups, but feel like they ended just a few paces after leaving the starting plot. Such as the first short story.

"Bryant & May and the Secret Santa"

Bryant and May are called to the Selfridges department store where a strange, potentially suspicious fatal accident occurred. An 11-year-old boy was brought to the department store by his mother to get a picture with Santa Claus and get an early Christmas present. After the picture was taken and the present received, the boy was seen in the store "holding the torn-open box in his hand and appeared to be in a state of distress." And then ran out into the street "where he was his by a number 53 bus." So the first question is what the kid found inside the box, but the odd part is that the box was found to be completely empty. This leads the two nonagenarian detectives to the St. Crispin's School for Boys and its culture of persistent bullying among the first-year students. But then the story just ends when the solution falls into their lap. This story feels like the initial idea for a novel-length mystery with the accident bringing the PCU to St. Crispin's School to bring clarity to the dark doings among the students and teachers. Just as a short story, it feels undeveloped and rushed.

"Bryant & May in the Field"

John May is given an opportunity to get Arthur Bryant out of the "musty deathtrap" doubling as the offices of the Peculiar Crimes Unit with the promise of a good, old-fashioned impossible crime. The body of Marsha Kastopolis is found on Primrose Hill with her throat cut ("a real vicious sweep") with “just her footprints leading out to the middle of the hillslope and nothing else" ("not a mark in any direction that he could see"). Phantasos Kastopolis is not to cut up about his wife's murder ("she was getting as fat as a pig") and already under scrutiny by the authorities over his real estate shenanigans, tax schemes and health-and-safety violations, but did he kill his wife or someone else? And how was it done? Well, the trick is a tricky one and difficult enough to present convincingly in a modern setting, but the complete lack of any kind of clue or even a ghost of a hint (whfg fubj fbzrbar sylvat n xvgr ba gur uvyyfybcr) made it a disappointing impossible crime story. A fun enough short story in other regards, but nothing more than that.

"Bryant & May on the Beat"

Something of a short-short: Bryant and May investigate the death of William Warren, a part-time musician, who ran a stall in Camden Market where sold homemade woolly hats and music instruments – apparently died of anthrax in his closely-shut apartment. A rather good short-short with something resembling fair play and the first one from this collection I liked. Interestingly, this and the previous story stand closer to the impossible crime fiction from L.T. Meade (A Master of Mysteries, 1898), Max Rittenberg (The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases, 2016) and Keikichi Osaka (The Ginza Ghost, 2017) rather than G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr.

"Bryant & May in the Soup"

This is the first short story in the collection drawing on the long, ramshackle history of the PCU, "Arthur Bryant's memoirs are unreliable in the extreme, especially when it comes to dates," stretching from World War II to the first decades of the 21st century – taking the reader this time to the days of the Great Smog of London. A lethal smog that descended on the city from December 5 to December 9, 1952. There were thousands of fatalities, "the young and the elderly died from respiratory problems," while staining "London's buildings black for fifty years." An already sick coach driver, Harry Whitworth, braves the deadly fog to go to work, but, shortly after arriving, climbed up into the driver's seat of the nearest coach. Placed his hands on the wheel, sighed and died. Bryant and May have to figure whether it was the fog that killed him or whether there was some other, more nefarious cause. The murder method is undeniably clever, but another instance of a potentially excellent detective novel wasted on a short story. Those five days are the perfect backdrop for a dark, moody detective novel with an atmosphere and plot as a thick as the fog that clings to the streets and buildings.

"Bryant & May and the Nameless Woman"

The introduction names Margery Allingham as one of Fowler's favorite Golden Age writers, praising The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) as "a dark, strange read that leaves its mark," which rang some alarm bells. Allingham wrote a couple of solid short stories, but I'm not a fan of her novel-length mysteries. So imagine my surprise when having to conclude "The Nameless Woman" turned out to be the standout of London's Glory. A woman, who refuses to give her name, comes to John May to tell him that she intends to kill a man, Joel Madden, nothing he can say or do will change her mind. So why bother coming and expose her murderous intentions? She figured the police would come for her regardless. Just a week later, May learns that a Joel Madden had been found dead, drowned, in the rooftop swimming pool of an exclusive city club and the mysterious woman was picked up on the building's CCTV. What follows is May interrogating the woman interspersed with flashbacks to murderer with puzzle consisting of anticipating the exact murder method and the name of the nameless woman. An excellent, quasi-inverted mystery ending on a surprisingly lighter, typically PCU note.

A note for the curious: the strange swimming pool drowning recalls similar problems from Ronald Knox's "The Motive" (1937) and Joseph B. Commings' "Murder of a Mermaid" (1982), but Fowler came up with an entirely different method.

"Bryant & May and the Seven Points"

This short story is simply modern-day pulp thriller. Bryant and May are called upon to investigate the disappearance of Michael Portheim, "an MI5 officer and mathematician specializing in codes," who was caught on CCTV entering a park – no footage of him coming back out again. A subsequent investigation turned up nothing and the authorities began to fear Portheim was either murdered or kidnapped. So without any further leads forthcoming, they began to clutch at straws and turned to the PCU. Bryant and May pick up a trail ("...as part of his training he also learned circus skills") that brings them to a sideshow revival of the old freak shows, which has been reinvented as a magic show of body horror ('You'll Be Jolted by Electra the 30,000-Volt Girl," "Nothing Can Prepare You for Lucio the Human Pin-Cushion," and "Prepare to Be Horrified by Marvo the Caterpillar Boy"). Lording over this Arcade of Abnormalities is a villainous Russian dwarf with bright-red horns surgically mounted to his skull. This story almost reaches comic book levels of villainy, but it's a fun story and has a really good, truly horrifying explanation for what happened to Portheim. I wonder if Fowler read Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933).

"Bryant & May on the Cards"

This is another modern-day, pulp-style thriller, but less darker and more fun than the previous story. Ian McFarland is a down on his luck, complete broke man whose wife unceremoniously and cruelly left him ("his life, over at the ripe old age of twenty-nine"). One day, McFarland finds a fancy looking credit card with a phone number and passcode to activate the card. Evidently a mistake, but he calls the number anyway and learns they offer a very particular service, "we could kill your wife." Mandy McFarland is shot death behind the reception desk of the posh restaurant The Water House by a masked man and her murder puts the PCU on the trail of a sinister figure who setup a so-called Elimination Bureau. A very fun, old-fashioned pulp-thriller resettled in today's London. Fowler was really good at these "new pulp" stories.

Regrettably, the remaining four short stories are all fairly minor and not especially interesting. "Bryant & May Ahoy!" has Bryant and May going on a long overdue, shipboard holiday in Southern Turkey, but Bryant eyes his fellow passengers suspiciously and eventually has to solve an attempted poisoning. "Bryant & May and the Blind Spot" is a Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright story recounting her disastrous, short-lived stint as part of Adrian Dunwoody's security detail. "Bryant & May and the Bells of Westminster" is the second historical taking place in the 1960s as Bryant and May investigate the classically-styled murder of Simon Montfleury, stabbed in the library of Bayham Abbey, but somehow, this story simply didn't do it for me. Finally, "Bryant & May's Mystery Tour" is a fun short-short in which Bryant takes May aboard a double-decker bus to go and meet a murderer, but it's obvious in which direction the solution is headed.

So, all in all, London's Glory is like most short story collections a mixed bag of tricks. Surprisingly, it's the least traditional stories like "The Nameless Woman," "The Seven Points" and "On the Cards" that stole the show. However, they served their purpose in refreshing my memory and will return to the novels next year. I just have to decide whether I'll pick up where I left with The Invisible Code (2012) or first dip into a novel like The Bleeding Heart (2014) or Wild Chamber (2017).

Black Run (2021) by D.L. Marshall

D.L. Marshall's Anthrax Island (2021) was one of last year's standouts, a hybridization of the action thriller, espionage and the classically-styled detective story, which introduced his lead-character, John Tyler – a sort of black opts mercenary. Anthrax Island takes him to Gruinard Island where experiments were carried out to weaponize anthrax spores during the Second World War that had rendered the island inhospitable for humans and animals alike. Only pocket of habitability is a sealed research outpost. A small cluster of ten, bright orange cabins on stilts forming a U shape and connected by narrow, plastic tunnels. Tyler is dispatched to the island to help the scientific research team trapped inside the base, but claustrophobic setting and post-apocalyptic aesthetics soon become the backdrop for a good, old-fashioned locked room murder.

Normally, the book cover of Anthrax Island would have been enough to never give the book or author a second glance as it screamed out everything that makes the modern thriller so unappealing to me. I would never haven given it a shot, if Steve Barge had not praised it as "one of the best modern mysteries" and picked it as his 2021 Book of the Year. Toss in an impossible crime and you grabbed my attention. And he was not wrong. Marshall wrote an immersive thriller that worked equally well as a locked room mystery and the quarantined setting, deadly contagion and even a Russian treat makes it the mystery-thriller encapsulating the early 2020s. I'm sure genre historians of the future will have a field day with Marshall's Anthrax Island. So it easily secured a place on this blog's yearly roundup of 2022 as well as an eventual place on "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." Whenever I'll get around to updating it again.

Steve also reviewed the John Tyler novel, Black Run (2021), praising it as an "absolute top-draw twisty thriller" and very exciting read, but admitted the locked room ("...the room is very, very locked") murder "seemed more of an afterthought" – which is not the reason why I hesitated to immediately pick it up. I like detective stories that use a strong, evocative and perhaps even unique settings dripping with atmosphere to full effect. Black Run has a pretty tall wave to climb in order to live up to its predecessor. Honestly, I was a little skeptical if this second title could pull it off. But was I right? Well, let's find out!

Marshall's Black Run reads like a novelization of a bullet pumping, blood spurting 1980s style action movie switches back and forth between different timelines of the same story.

Firstly, John Tyler is hired to extract (i.e. kidnap) a target ("a traitorous, murdering scumbag") from the French Alps and transport him back to England, but the target surrounds himself with armed bodyguards. These interspersed chapters tell the story of how Tyler eventually captures the target and countdown to the current, second-half of the story ("Twelve days previously," "Eleven days previously," etc). Secondly, the second-half of the story concerns with the transportation of the target to England and the troublesome, blood-drenched voyage to reach that safe harbor. Tyler goes to an old contact, Captain Miller, who smuggles "pretty much anything else UPS won't carry" on his old, rusty Cold War era transport ship. Tiburon is undeniably a great setting. A dark, grimy old ship with passageways of "damp, dimly lit tunnels of pipes and metal" and "faded Nineties neon paint ran down the walls" like "a ghost train of badly painted Simpsons characters and Sharpied quotes in German" – strange, otherworldly looking "in the flickering light and red emergency lighting." Just one problem: Captain Miller does not smuggle people. So when the crew of modern-day pirates discover Tyler's team brought a captive aboard and somebody issues a one million euro bounty on their “cargo,” the proverbial shit starts hitting the fan... hard. The bodies begin to drop fast and hard in both narratives, but the one of importance is the murder of Tyler prisoner under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Tyler stowed away his prisoner in the old center tank, tied to a chair and a sack over his head, right beneath his cabin. The hatch is the only entrance to the sealed tomb below and covered by a bed, which had to be moved aside to open the hatch. Tyler also put a smartwatch on the prisoner to monitor his heartbeat, but, when he notices on his app that the prisoner's heartbeat has flatlined, he goes inside the sealed room. And finds a body with a knife sticking out of his chest! The data from the smartwatch eventually hands him incontestable proof someone had stabbed his prisoner while he "was lying across the only entrance."

A good, neatly posed locked room problem and liked how it incorporated the evidence of the smartwatch and heartbeat monitor, but the solution to how it was done is immediately obvious. This is the kind of locked room-trick that once you know how it was done, you'll know who did it and probably why as there's only way to do it under the given circumstances. And the main principle behind the trick is almost as old as the genre itself. Not so long ago, I reviewed a mystery with a very similar locked room setup and trick. However, it's something that will only somewhat bother people on deeply entrenched on this side of the fandom rather than those who want to read a nail-biting, action packed thriller. So probably a good decision to treat the locked room here as a minor side-puzzle as it would not have carried the plot. I still appreciated the locked room mystery got to play a small part in what is essentially a hard thriller. Even if the bit part is that of a simple stowaway.

At this point, I began to fear there was nothing left to discuss as the past and present narratives is a twisted thriller crammed with double-crosses, counter-plots, shootouts and Michael Slade levels of gruesome violence – leaving little doubt Tyler is a little more than a morally ambiguous mercenary. Then the story did something that caught me by surprise as it concerns something I tend to dismiss in detective stories.

I've mentioned before how kidnap stories lend themselves poorly to any type of traditional detective story and, to my knowledge, has never produced a classic or writer whose name became synonymous with it. There have been some halfhearted attempts and Gosho Aoyama tries his hands at one every now and then in the Case Closed series with varying degrees of success (e.g. vol. 72), but never a genuine masterpiece like there have been with locked rooms, dying messages, multiple-solutions and least-likely-suspects. It's always a sub-plot or complication to the larger plot. So why expected anything more from a thriller? Well, Black Run might have actually accomplished the impossible by delivering a great, nigh classic, kidnap tale 182 years after Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story by placing a spare heart of the horror genre underneath the floorboards of the locked room in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). Yes, it was stuffed deep within a modern, heavily leaded thriller, but the end dovetailed everything from the two narratives together to great effect. And since the series has one foot firmly in the traditionalists camp with its impossible murders, isolated locations and surprise twists, it counts as a detective story as well. Parts of it anyway. More importantly, it narrowed

And while hidden deep inside a heavily leaded thriller, it beautifully dovetailed everything from the two narratives together. Yes, it was stuffed deeply within a heavily leaded thriller, but, since the series has one foot firmly in the traditionalists camp with its impossible murders and surprise twists, it counts. More importantly, it narrowed what appeared to be a large, yawning gap between Anthrax Island and Black Run. Not quite there on the same level as Anthrax Island, but it pulled through in the end and left me excited to see in what kind of godforsaken hellhole Tyler ends up next. So much can be done with the premise of mystery-thrillers in dangerous, isolated locations. I can imagine Tyler getting locked up in some outpost prison with a serial killer who leaves bodies in locked cells or having to provide protection to an archaeological excavation that comes under siege. Either way, a third Tyler novel is apparently in the work and my basic pattern recognition tells me the title will probably begin with a C (Close Quarters?).

So to cut this long, quasi-coherent ramble short, I recommend starting with Anthrax Island before tackling Black Run, but, let the reader be warned, the latter depicts death and violence with all the subtlety of an old LiveLeak video. Up next... returning to the Golden Age with my favorite mystery writer, John Dickson Carr.

Beached (2018) by Micki Browning

Micki Browning's debut novel, Adrift (2017), introduced marine biologist and dive instructor in the Florida Keys, Dr. Meredith "Mer" Cavallo, who's forced by circumstances to play amateur detective when divers begin to disappear around a haunted shipwreck – miraculously reappearing miles away against the current. It earned the book a spot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) and likely would have given it a pass without that mention or knew it even existed. Adrift appears a bit too modernistic on the surface and billed as a suspense thriller, but the fast, character-driven storytelling had a traditional bend and had all the promise of a diamond-in-the-rough. So the second and so far last entry in the series, Beached (2018), was added to the wishlist. A story that plunges Mer into the murky, watery world of deep sea treasure hunters and nautical archaeology.

Having now read both Adrift and Beached, I can say this series is closer related to the adventure genre (Indiana Jones and Lara Croft get mentioned in passing) that either the traditional detective story or modern crime novel.

Browning seems to have little interest in murders as the body figuring in Adrift is in the peripheral of the plot that mainly focuses on the haunted shipwreck and Beached is basically a treasure hunt fraught with serious dangers. These both read like Young Adult mysteries with hints of The Three Investigators (The Secret of Skeleton Island, 1966), Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! ("A Clue for Scooby-Doo," 1969) and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest ("The Darkest Fathoms," 1996), but written for an adult audience as Mer's personal life and issues hold as much sway over the story as the almost innocent, adventure-style plots. There's the thriller-like opening of Beached that would have been hitting a little too hard in a The Three Investigators novel. 

Beached opens on a quiet, sunny day on the deck of the LunaSea during off season, "today a family of four made up the entirety of the LunaSea's manifest," when spots a dark shape in the water. Mer is still pretty new to the Keys and Captain Leroy Penninichols tells her the dark shape is probably a so-called square grouper, a plastic wrapped bale of marijuana, but the package turns out to contain duct taped bricks of cocaine, a 300-year-old gold contain and some serious trouble – a GPS tracker. And, pretty soon, they got company. So they have to race to get the family out of the water, warn the coast guard and get the hell out of there. Whomever is after them, they are shooting at the fleeing charter boat until a patrol boat could escort them to safety. The square grouper was lost in the chase, but Mer later finds the coin aboard the LunaSea.

A gold coin dated 1733 and inscribed, "Initium sapientiæ timor domini" ("Wisdom begins with the fear of God"), which turns out to be a Spanish escudos, a "portrait dollar," sometimes referred to as a doubloon ("pieces of eight"). A very rare, valuable coin linked to the legend of the Thirteenth Galleon ("...an old legend that tells of cursed gold"). In 1733, a Spanish treasure left the port of Havana, Cuba, to voyage home, but the fleet was caught in a hurricane and "most of the ships ran aground on the reefs dotting the Keys." Supposedly, rumors and legends tell of a thirteenth ship filled with gold had joined the fleet as pirates mostly targeted solitary ships.

The 1733 gold coin proves there's more history than legend to the story of the Thirteenth Galleon and Mer gets caught between two unsavory, dangerous characters. A modern-day treasure hunter, Winslet Chase, who has been bound to a wheelchair ever since an accident during a rogue diving operation and a modern-day pirate/smuggler, Bart Kingston. Mer is not the only person who's caught between them. A Cuban immigrant and ex-archivist from Havana, Oscar, worked in a government archive and found "the coin, the manifest and a note hidden in the binding of an old ship log."

After the high-speed chase scene in the opening chapter and finding the coin aboard the LunaSea, the pace of the story slows down as Mer begins to research the coin to dealing with the two treasure hunters. Not a very pleasant experience. Over the period of a week, Mer goes from being scared to being extremely pissed ("what a difference a week made"). She scraped together a team to find the shipwreck before Chase and Kingston. What follows in the last leg of the story is a cat-and-mouse game above and under the dark, deep blue. There are some good underwater scenes and particular likes the scene in which Mer ("...did most of my research in the Arctic, studying the biogeography of Arctic cephalopods") has a moment with an octopus as she explores its den. But that's about it. Beached is as simple and straightforward as two opposing parties trying to find a sunken treasure and completely lacked the detective pull of Adrift. It really is like a novel from The Three Investigators series written for adults as the opening, ending and some of the characterization is certainly not something you'll read in any juvenile mystery.

However, it's an interesting direction to take in a series presented as modern mystery-thrillers and without the necessity of a murder plot, the stories can focus and workout plot-ideas that would have been merely secondary plot-threads in an ordinary crime or detective novel. I also liked the balance between Mer's "Pandora-sized curiosity" and scientific training, which often lands her in trouble when applied outside of the controlled conditions of an experiment. Something that's also reflected in how a sense of realism is applied to the scrappy, adventure-style plots and how fast things can go south. So would like to have seen this series develop further and, if you follow the theme of the book titles, the fourth book would very likely have been titled Derelict and that can only be a take on the mystery of the Mary Celeste – which would be the perfect mystery for this series. Browning appears to have either put the series on hiatus or abandoned it entirely as she has started a new, more serious series under the name "M.E. Browning." So what began as a precarious swan dive for lost treasure could very well have been Mer's swan song.

So not sure whom to recommend Beached, because readers of this blog will likely find it nothing more than a contemporary curiosity with too many modern intrusions. Adrift is much better in that regards and both remain an interesting take on the thriller/mysteries of today.

Crucified (2008) by Michael Slade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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