Murder Around the World: A Review of Five Short Detective Stories

Exactly a year ago, I reviewed a collection of short stories, The Zanzibar Shirt Mystery and Other Stories (2018) by James Holding, which gathered all ten short stories about two mystery writers, Martin Leroy and King Danforth, who play armchair detectives with their wives during a world cruise – which were originally published between 1960 and 1972 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Obviously, this series is hugely indebted to Ellery Queen falling somewhere between Queen's International Case Book (1964) and the Puzzle Club stories from Queen's Experiments in Deduction (1968). But with story-title structure of the early international series (e.g. The Greek Coffin Mystery, 1932).

So, I was a little surprise to learn that the man behind Wildside Press, John Gregory Betancourt, penned a brand new "Leroy King" story. You read that correctly. Betancourt wrote a pastiche of a pastiche!

"The Jamaican Ice Mystery" was originally published in Malice Domestic 13: Murder Most Geographical (2018) and reissued earlier this year, in ebook format, as a separate short story, in which Martin Leroy and King Danforth are reappear as two octogenarians – adding another layer of EQ lore to the "Leroy King" series. You see, Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu wrote a superb pastiche, entitled "The Book Case," in which a 100-year-old Ellery Queen solves the murder of a collector of detective novels in 2007. This story is collected in a recent Wildside Press anthology, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018).

The story opens during one of the yearly cruises of Martin Leroy and King Danforth, accompanied by their wives, Carol and Helen, who are enjoying the Caribbean sun on the deck of the Jamaica Queen. There are complaints about how the bartender doesn't know how to mix a gimlet and their disastrous Netflix miniseries. They reminiscence about "the unsettled '60s" and observe that they didn't have "a decent murder to solve in decades." And as on cue, a porter informs them a woman had been murdered and robbed in the suite next to the Danforths.

Obviously, Betancourt was having too much fun with resettling the characters into a contemporary setting, which came at the expense of the plot. They're using smartphones, Google and Twitter, but the plot is paper-thin and the two problems, a poisoning and theft of a necklace, pose no challenge to the reader whatsoever – especially when the borrowed ice bucket is mentioned. So, purely as a detective story, I can't really recommend it, but, if you're a fan of the original series, you might want to pick it up to see how Martin and King are doing.

The second story comes from one of the founding members of the shin honkaku school of detective fiction in Japan, Takemaru Abiko, who debuted last year in English with a translation of Shinsoban 8 no satsujin (The 8 Mansion Murders, 1989). A funny and clever impossible crime novel translated by Ho-Ling Wong and published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International. This time, they ferried a short story across the language barrier with a practically unique detective-character.

The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu

Ho-Ling Wong called "Ningyou wa tent de suiri suru" ("The Puppet Deduces in the Tent") quite good as a locked room mystery and deemed it the best of four short stories from Abiko's Ningyou wa kotatsu de suiri suru (The Puppet Deduces from the Kotatsu, 1990). The translation changed the story-title to "A Smart Dummy in the Tent" and can be found in this years double June/July issue of EQMM.

The detective of the story, or to be more precise, the vessel for the detective is a young, shy ventriloquist, Yoshio Tomonaga, whose puppet-character is the more outspoken Mario Marikōji, but this is more than merely a ventriloquist act – because Tomonaga has a split personality. And that other personality expresses itself through the puppet, Mario. Was this series the inspiration for that atrocious anime detective-series, Karakurizōshi ayatsuri Sakon (Doll Puppeteer Sakon)?

"A Smart Dummy in the Tent" takes place on the opening day of carnival, among the colored tents on large vacant lot, where Tomonaga performs in the big circus tent with Mario, but the festivities are canceled when one of the performers is found murdered. Panda Gotanda was a "slapstick magician," like Tommy Cooper, who was found beaten to death in one of the partitioned dressing rooms on the western end of the tent. The entrance to the dressing room was "under observation," until the body was found, while the hemline of the tent fabric is secured to the ground with metal anchor pins. You need a special instrument to pull them out. So this leaves the police with only a single viable suspect, Mutsuki Seno'o, who's a friend of Tomonaga. And one of the few people who know about his split personality. She encourages him to help the police solve the locked-tent murder.

The solution to the locked-tent is excellent and entirely original, which makes you wonder why nobody else came up with it before. My only complaint is the unnecessary final twist in the story's tail, but suppose it fits Abiko's tongue-in-cheek approach. Other than that, "A Smart Dummy in the Tent" is a welcome addition to the steady growing pile of shin honkaku detective stories and novels.

By the way, Abiko made a reference to "the protagonist from that famous comic by the legendary Osamu Tezuka," Jack Black, which must have pleased Ho-Ling to no end.

The next story is Paul Halter's "Le loup de Fenrir" ("The Wolf of Fenrir"), published in the double March/April, 2015, issue of EQMM, which was ranked by JJ as Halter's eighth best short story back in February – placing it above "The Abominable Snowman" and "The Robber's Grave." See, JJ, this is exactly why we had four Anglo-Dutch wars.

"The Wolf of Fenrir" opens in the winter of 1912 in the comfortable flat of Owen Burns, in St. James's Square, where he tells Achilles Stock the story of woman who was attacked and killed by a wolf in France. She was all alone in a cabin, in the wood, which was surrounded by snow and the only prints in the snow belonged to the victim and the animal she believed had been tamed. Naturally, this turns out to be a deviously contrived murder, but the solution turns out to be two very basic locked room-tricks spliced together. So not very impressive. However, the no-footprints scenario is arguably the hardest type of impossibility to plot and even harder to be original. And the rest of the plot was pretty solid.

So, on a whole, "The Wolf of Fenrir" is not a bad detective story, but Halter has written better ones. Some of those stories appeared were ranked lower by JJ.

Luckily, Halter and JJ redeemed themselves with the excellent "Le livre jaune" ("The Yellow Book"), published in the July/August, 2017, issue of EQMM and coming in third on JJ's best-of list of Halter short stories – beaten only by "La nuit du loup" ("The Night of the Wolf") and the unrivaled "La hache" ("The Cleaver"). Seriously, "The Cleaver" is one of the best impossible crime short stories ever written!

"The Yellow Book" takes place during the winter of 1938 in a small village on the outskirts of Verdun, Malenmort, where a group of people meet once or twice a month at the home of Daniel Raskin "to invoke the spirits of the dear departed." When the story opens, the group receives a message from the spirits that one of them has been murdered and they discover "the sacrificial obsidian knife in the glass-fronted bookcase" has been stolen, but nobody at the gathering has been murdered. However, one of the regular members, Captain Marc Santerre, had called earlier in the day to excuse himself. And he lives in "a small, isolated house, less than five minutes' walk" from Raskin's house.

Captain Santerre is found beaten and stabbed to death in "a chalet locked from the inside" and "surrounded by virgin snow," which had been revealed by the spirits, who accused one of the people linking hands at the table. An inexplicable crime, if there ever was one. Luckily, Dr. Alan Twist happens to be in the neighborhood and unravels this tangled skein without leaving his armchair. I love these kind of armchair detective stories!

When the yellow book and mental state of the victim was brought up, I was afraid this was going to be house-of-monkeys-style shenanigans and wanted to tar-and-feather JJ, but the explanation took a decidedly different turn with an excellent variation on a locked room-trick from an earlier Halter novel – which worked even better as a short story. So, yeah, this is without doubt one of Halter's better short stories. Highly recommended!

"The Corpse That Went For a Walk"

Finally, I have a short story from my own country: "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" ("The Corpse That Went For a Walk," 2019) by "Anne van Doorn," a penname of M.P.O. Books, who can be credited with having penned one of the best Dutch detective novels, De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011).

Several years ago, Books abandoned Inspector Bram Petersen of District Heuvelrug and introduced two new series-characters in 2017, Robbie Corbijn and Lowina de Jong, who are particuliere onderzoekers (private investigators) specialized in cold cases. This series succeeded admirably in marrying the traditional detective story to the modern misdaadroman (crime novel) and littered with impossible crimes. One of my favorite stories is the locked room mystery "Het huis dat ongeluk bracht" ("The House That Brought Bad Luck," 2018). "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" is not an impossible crime tale, or even an old-fashioned whodunit, but the setting makes it somewhat of a standout in the series.

Recherchebureau Corbijn – Research & Discover is located on the fifth floor of a residential tower, the Kolos van Cronesteyn, standing on the outskirts of Leiden, South-Holland. One evening, the woman living next door, Lettie Kreft, comes to them with the astonishing story that she found a body of woman, in the hallway of an apartment, on the thirteenth floor. A knife was sticking from her back. The apartment belongs to a sleazy, womanizing artist, Hans Molica, but when they arrive the body has disappeared! So what happened the body, if there was a body? And how do you dispose of a body on one of the top floors of a residential tower?

"The Corpse That Went For a Walk" is a relatively minor story, compared to some of the other entries in the series, but loved the idea of a murder-without-a-body problem with the Kolos van Cronesteyn as a backdrop. So, plot-wise, not one of the top Corbijn and De Jong stories, but still found it to be a good and fun read.

On a final note, I've some good news for all you non-Dutch speaking mystery readers: the very first Corbijn and De Jong short story, "De dichter die zichzelf opsloot" ("The Poet Who Locked Himself In," 2017), has been translated into English and will be published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – either later this year or sometime in early 2020. Hopefully, this will kick open the door to get Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013) and "The House That Brought Bad Luck" translated.

The 8 Mansion Murders (1989) by Takemaru Abiko

Takemaru Abiko is a founding member of the shin honkaku movement in Japan and one of the mystery writers who emerged from the ranks of the Kyoto University Mystery Club.

During the 1980s, members of the Mystery Club would gather in the living room of the man who would later launch the neo-orthodox movement in Japan with Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987), Yukito Ayatsuji, to discuss plot-ideas for honkaku-style detective stories and have "lively discussions about the mystery genre in general" – one of the members who almost always there was Abiko. So it was only a matter of time before John Pugmire of Locked Room International peddled one of his impossible crime novels across the language barrier.

Shinsoban 8 no satsujin (The 8 Mansion Murders, 1989) marked Akibo's debut and the book was, as usually, translated by our very own Ho-Ling Wong and introduced by the doyen of shin honkaku, Soji Shimada. Shimada noted in his introduction that, if you listened to them back in the days, you could have mistaken the bantering members of the Mystery Club for aspiring comedy writers, but "comedy is a trademark of Abiko" and debuted with a humorous, lighthearted homage to John Dickson Carr that even comes with the obligatory locked room lecture concentrating on quasi-locked rooms – which is "a space which might not be physically sealed." Such as rooms under observation or an unbroken field of snow.

The 8 Mansion Murders takes place in the home of Kikuo Hachisuka, President of Hachisuka Construction, which is a three-story mansion with an inner courtyard on the ground floor. The first and second floor have covered galleries connecting the east and west hallways. When viewed from the sky, the mansion looks exactly like the number eight and this is why the place is commonly referred to as the 8 Mansion.

This bizarre mansion was "designed without any consideration for efficient use of space or ease of living," but "the layout of this very mansion" provided the murderer with a fully prepared stage for a deadly magic trick. We see the unknown murderer pouring over the diagram of 8 Mansion in the prologue.

The 8 Mansion Murders begins one early, sleepless morning in the room of Hachisuka's granddaughter, Yukie Hachisuka, who has company from her sign language teacher, Mitsuka Kawamura, when they hear someone in the gallery and looking out of the window they're surprised to see Yukie's father, Kikuichirō Hachisuka – who's the Vice-President of Hachisuka Construction. Suddenly, an arrow cuts through the air and strikes Kikuichirō down. Yukie and Mitsuka are knocked unconscious when they run out to help Kikuichirō. When they regained consciousness, Yukie and Mitsuka discover that the body has been moved.

A baffling and dastardly murder, but where, you ask, is the impossibility? Well, Yukie and Mitsuka saw the room from which the murderer loosened the deadly arrow, but the problem is that the room in question belongs to the son of the family caretaker, Yūsaku Yano, who claims to have been asleep at the time of the murder with the door locked on the inside – immediately making him the number one suspect. Yūsaku's situation does not improve when the police learns he owns a crossbow that has gone missing.

Enter Inspector Hayami Kyōzō of the Metropolitan Police Department, Criminal Investigation Division 1 (Homicide), accompanied by his subordinate, Kinoshita, who provide some of the comedy in this story. Sometimes their comedic bits bordered on old-fashioned slapstick. Hayami takes pleasure in placing his subordinate in harm's way and Kinoshita emerges from this whole ordeal resembling a battered, battle-scarred warhorse ("obviously immortal"), but Hayami does not escape unscathed himself. Hayami has a younger brother and sister, Shinji and Ichio, who love detective stories and teasing their older brother. Ho-Ling said in his 2012 review of The 8 Mansion Murders that "Abiko really likes teasing his characters" and placing them in "awkward situations" to "see them suffer." This is definitely true when it comes to poor Kinoshita. He had his human rights violated here. I still smiled though.

However, it's not Hayami who solves the crossbow murders at the 8 Mansion, but his younger brother, Shinji, who normally runs a coffee shop and even delivers a solid locked room lecture, but not before one of the witnesses is murdered under seemingly impossible circumstances – nailed to a locked door with an arrow. There's an open window in the room. Only problem with this scenario is that the window could only serve as an entrance, or exit, if the murderer has the ability to "fly around freely anywhere in the house." I actually liked this second impossibility, minor as it is, much more than the central murder. A simple, believable and original play on the Merrivalean cussedness of things in general. As if "John Dickson Carr’s ghost himself had been behind it all." I do think this locked room trick would have been better suited for a short story, but appreciated its inclusion here nonetheless.

On the other hand, the central puzzle of the impossible murder in the gallery and the arrow shot from a locked and occupied room was a mixed bag of tricks.

I immediately understood how the locked room trick was worked, but only because the principle behind the illusion is as old as Rome. I have come across countless variations on this trick. So the impossibility itself can hardly be called original, but this age-old trick was very well handled by Abiko. I found it very inventive that the problem here is not how a man could have vanished from a locked room, but how two witnesses could have seen "a person inside a room he couldn't have entered" or why the murderer had to move the body around in the gallery – showing a young mystery novelist full of promise. Abiko also has an impeccable taste in detective stories going by the references to other mystery writers and detective characters. Particularly Carr!

I think The 8 Mansion Murders goes hand-in-glove with the impossible crime novels of other admirers and followers of the master of the locked room problem, such as John Russell Fearn, Paul Halter, Derek Smith and David Renwick, but you have to be a little familiar with Carr's work to fully appreciate Abiko's homage. Just like Jean-Paul Török's tribute to Carr, L'enigme du Monte Verita (The Riddle of Monte Verita, 2007), which has also been translated and published by Pugmire. Nevertheless, in spite of these obvious ties to Carr's work, I thought The 8 Mansion Murders was much closer, in spirit, to Leo Bruce's locked room parody Case for Three Detectives (1936). The 8 Mansion Murders is not a parody of Carr, but the humorous tone of the story and the interaction between the detectives struck me as closer to Bruce than anything Carr wrote. Yes, Carr wrote mysteries with slapstick comedy (e.g. The Skeleton in the Clock, 1948), but even they felt very different from what Abiko did here. But that's only an observation.

So, in closing, The 8 Mansion Murders is a fast, fun read with two impossible crimes and an amusing cast of detectives, which comes especially recommended to locked room enthusiasts and fans of Carr. They'll get the most enjoyment out of the plot and story.

Oh, just one more thing. I hope you don't have any personal plans this summer, Ho-Ling. The Hungry Goblins demand more of this! :)