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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unicorn Murders (1935) by Carter Dickson

In May, the British Library Crime Classics series of reprints is releasing a brand new, long overdue edition of John Dickson Carr's fourth Sir Henry Merrivale novel, The Unicorn Murders (1935) – published as by "Carter Dickson." I actually wanted to revisit Poison in Jest (1932) and The Plague Court Murders (1934) next or get to one of those previous few, unread Carr's like The Nine Wrong Answers (1952) or Deadly Hall (1971). But when I heard the British Library was going to reprint The Unicorn Murders, I decided to give it a second read instead.

My memories of The Unicorn Murders is fragmented, like a highlight reel, remembering being impressed with how it conducted a three-way danse macabre between the turn-of-the-century thriller, the 1930s detective story and the impossible crime tale. So let's find out how those memories stand up to a refresher with the finer details filled back in.

The Unicorn Murders begins with Ken Blake, who had previously appeared in The Plague Court Murders, on holiday in France. A lazy holiday during which he paid no attention to screaming newspaper headlines nor the public chatter about two names, Flamande and Gasquet. Believing them to be either rivaling boxers or cabinet ministers, which they're not. And not knowing lands him in a spot of trouble. But his adventure really begins when he spots a familiar face, Evelyn Cheyne. She spots him and approaches him with lines from "The Lion and the Unicorn" nursery rhyme, which he finishes and she tells him she's glad H.M. had paired her with him on this assignment. Blake has no idea what she's talking about, but plays along and learns the mission concerns Sir George Ramsden, of the Foreign Office, who's bringing “the unicorn” from France to London – nobody exactly knows what it is. Only that has garnered the interest of the Great Flamande, "the most picturesque criminal France has sported for years," but Gasquet, the Chief Inspector of the Surete, is hot on his heels. Both the arch-criminal and master detective are known as masters of disguise whose true faces are known to practically nobody ("it's wild, it's fantastic, but it's true"). Flamande, as is customary for a gentlemen thief, publicly announces he would be on the airplane with Sir George before reaching its destination.

So a duel, of sorts, between the arch-criminal and master detective complicated by the dangerous possibility Flamande made the first kill in a career of mostly whimsical capers ("...pinched the clock out of the courtroom while that Commissaire was giving evidence..."). A wounded, dying man was found in a Marseilles park with a horrondous wound between his eyes that, according to the police surgeon, could have only been caused by "the long, sharp horn of an animal." And the last words the victim spoke was the word "unicorn." Pretty soon, they find themselves in the middle of a comedy of errors fueled, madcap chase that convinces Blake both of them should "shortly be the object of one of the biggest police-hunts since Landru." This madcap chase ends in a three-way collision when Blake and Cheyne bump into H.M. nearby Chateau de l'Ile where they witness an airplane make a forced landing. Yes, that airplane!

When the stranded party seek shelter at the chateau, they find the Comte d'Andrieu expected their arrival. Flamande asked him to prepare for their arrival with the promise of "a unicorn-hunt." So the problems go from bad to worse as the causeway is washed away, no phone and a great detective who's as big a mystery as the criminal he's pursuing. And then one of them is killed under seemingly baffling circumstances.

 

 

This impossible murder is undoubtedly one of Carr's most creative, original and trickiest take on the impossible crime, especially in the subcategory known as "invisible killers," but not another simple, disappointing redressing of G.K. Chesterton's "The Invisible Man" (1911) – on the contrary! Like the victim in Marseilles, the second victim ended up with a mysterious, inexplicable wound in his forehead, but this murder was witnessed by several people. In the gallery, they saw the victim grab his head, "something horrible was happening to his head," scream and tumble down two flight of stairs. When they examine the body, even a layman can see "something had been pulled out of that wound," but there simply was no time to pull out a weapon without being seen.

Or, to sum the situation up more accurately, "if he was killed at the top of the stairs, he was either stabbed by an invisible man" or "shot with a bullet which pulls itself out of the wound and flies away."

Carr created one of his densest impossible murders with multiple moving parts relaying on various aspects of the plot and the floor plan here is not merely ornamental. If anything, the story probably needed a few more floor plans of the chateau towards the end with the explanation demanding your full attention. Where a lesser writer would have killed, or bogged down, the ending with a long, tedious explanation in minute detail, Carr's talent to make the utterly fantastic and fanciful seem plausible shines throughout. Certainly helped Carr had a knack for wrapping clues, red herrings and a good dose foreshadowing in an appealing, unputdownable narrative keeping you glued to the pages. Even when it gets tricky or a bit technical. I liked how the nature of that strange, apparently invisible weapon was handled with some of Carr's patented brazen clues and foreshadowing you can only truly appreciate upon a second read.

I think the central impossible crime forms a solid foundation for the rest of the story to stand on, which is often even more fantastic with its dueling masters of disguise, impersonations and rivaling detectives, invisible unicorns with homicidal tendencies and bizarre incidents – like someone tossing his suitcase out of a window. The tightly-drawn, executed impossible crime not only did its parts in keeping this whole three-ring circus consistent, it also allowed the story to succeed as half parody, half serious detective story. Carr obviously intended The Unicorn Murders to be a parody, or homage, to the greats of the early French crime-and detective fiction, Maurice Leblanc and Gaston Leroux. Leblanc is mentioned in the story, but the story itself unmistakably was inspired by Leroux's Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907) and La parfum de la dame en noir (The Perfume of the Lady in Black, 1908). Rivaling detectives and impossible crime from the former and the one-man siege of a chateau from the latter.

So you can say Carr made things really difficult by trying to juggle the characters, rivaling detectives and criminals with an outlandish situation "straight out of a farce or a dream," while balancing between the thriller and a tricky, complicated detective story – while also balancing between farce and a serious detective story. Like I said, a lesser writer would have made a mess out of it, but Carr made it work because he took it seriously despite the humorous, often farcical tone. So, in many ways, The Unicorn Murder is almost more impressive a wire-walking act than The Three Coffins (1935) or the previously mentioned The Plague Court Murders. So a perfect vehicle for H.M. who's the only true rival to Gasquet and the doom of Flamande, but getting there is not without some dangerous and sometimes amusing obstacles. I really enjoyed Gasquet's false-solution putting part of the blame on H.M. ("...his senile dotage").

H.M. doesn't always have to be on page to be amusing. Blake recalled in the first chapter meeting H.M. at Whitehall, "lumbering along with his head down, shaking his fist and cursing certain government officials with an audible fluency which nearly got him mobbed as pro-German." When the times come, H.M. demonstrates he's very far from a comic relief sleuth, but no less an entertaining one!

The Unicorn Murders finds Carr and H.M. at the top of their game and at their most fun, however, it's also one of Carr's least plausible and realistic detective novels. Pure fantasy with all the logic of a mad dream, but you really have to put your mind in the right frame and go along in order to fully enjoy The Unicorn Murders. If that's no problem, I don't think I could recommend The Unicorn Murder more. Very glad I took this one off the shelf for refresher.

Note for the curious: other people have noted H.M. utters the phrase "oh, Archons of Athens," which is usually uttered by Carr's other famous creation, Dr. Gideon Fell. Some have wondered if this was a slip on Carr's part, but always suspected it was a hint. The Unicorn Murders was published when John Dickson Carr and Carter Dickson were two separate entities. It was speculated about, but not officially confirmed. Maybe it was a way to let the keen eyed readers know it was him writing the H.M. series.

Best Served Cold: Case Closed, vol. 96 by Gosho Aoyama

This is probably going to be a slightly shorter review than usual, because Gosho Aoyama's 96th volume of Case Closed only has one completed story, book-ended by the conclusion and setup to stories from the previous and next volume – which doesn't make for a great reading experience. Ho-Ling Wong noted the same problem in his 2019 review of vol. 96 ("...one of the worst volumes of the last decade or so"). The reader has been warned!

So this volume begins with the conclusion of the "The Female Officer Serial Murders" setup in the last two chapters of the previous volume. Normally, that's done in the opening chapter, but there three more chapters. Had it been tidied up in one, or two, chapters it would have been like any other volume in the series with one conclusion and two complete stories. Maybe even a one-chapter setup for the opening story of the next volume, but I'm padding now.

Yumi Miyamoto and Neako Miike, officer of the traffic department, get drag into the case when two of their colleagues are murdered. First victim was Sergeant Momosaki, found in a park, who "used her last moments to point at a swing set" as a dying message and killer struck again later that same day – throwing Lieutenant Shiori Yagi out of a building. She also used her last moments to give her colleagues a clue to the killer. But the killer left a calling card behind at both crime scenes: a bent 200-yen coin that has a depiction of cherry blossom ("...emblem of the Japanese police") engraved on it. So the murderer obviously has it out for female officers of the traffic department. There are three suspects who were involved in traffic incident, days before the murders, during which they had a heated argument with several female traffic officers. So pretty much one of those familiar who-of-the-three stories, but disliked how very similar, somewhat specific motive was tacked on all three suspects. On the other hand, I liked the idea how every cop in trouble, whether they died or survived, tried to transfer information to their colleagues in the form of a dying message. The meaning behind those dying messages form a pleasing thematic pattern, but an idea that needed a better, longer treatment than it received here. By the way, this story also provides a resolution for the Detective Chiba and Neako Miike story-arc going all the way back to vol. 75.

The first, only complete story in this volume is a self-parody of the Wile E. Coyote vs. the Road Runner feud between Jirokichi Sebastian and Kaito KID. I started out as a big fan of Jirokichi trying to ensnare KID with his elaborate, expensively baited and widely publicized traps. Their first few duels from volumes 44 and 61 were series highlights, but suppose they were hard acts to follow as their last few encounters have been a little underwhelming. So not a bad decision to go for a self-parody, because it would have been worst Jirokichi/KID caper to date. Jirokichi has new bait to tempt the KID, the Fairy's Lip, "one of the biggest conch pearls in the world," but how to present and protect it poses a problem. Fortunately, a familiar face turns up, Inspector Takaaki Morofushi, who advises to have the conch pearl exhibited frozen inside a block of ice and placed in a guarded, makeshift room of tempered glass. And some other high tech precautions that should prevent KID from getting out of the glass room with the pearl.

So far, a fairly typical setup for a Kaito KID caper, but this time you get to see KID at work and he's not disguised as Inspector Takaaki Morofushi. KID has hidden himself among the guards posted around the glass room with the block of ice, but is having second thoughts when notices "those two sleuths," Conan and Harley, "plus a cop who's not a total dummy," but an incident makes him decides to go ahead with the heist. From the start, KID is nearly caught out, but things get farcical when he takes the place of someone in Conan and Harley's group. You can see one scene coming from that very moment and this gag, sadly enough, carries the story. KID steals the ring and solution is OK-ish, but still no idea how he could have pulled it off, under those circumstances, within ten minutes. So fun enough, but nothing more than that.

The last story begins with Conan, Rachel, Sera, Serena and her boyfriend, Makoto, coming out of the theater having just watched The Avengers The Amazers movie when they stumble into a hostage situation. Makoto, a karate champion, jumps to the rescue only to discover he interrupted a shoot for the TV series 48 Detectives. And the gun toting criminal he kicked into next week was a stuntman. So now they need a stuntman and they immediately see potential in the karate champion, but Makoto's stint as a stand-in stuntman ends with two murders on set. And, according to tradition, will be concluded in the next volume.

So not much to say, except Sera trying to pry the truth out of Conan and even asks Rachel if she's ever seen Conan and Jimmy together. Very much to her surprise, Rachel tells Sera how Conan went to a school play Jimmy was in ("...Jimmy solved a mystery during the play, while the brat sat in the audience pouting"). I believe this is a reference to a story not reviewed on this blog and barely remember it, but how it's describe here makes it sound like a hilarious case of bi-location in close proximity, especially from Sera's perspective – who's convinced Conan is Jimmy ("...Conan and I picked Jimmy up from his house the next morning").

There's not much else to say about this volume, except how this series structures its serialized chapters and volumes worked against it. I simply recommend everyone reading this in the near of distant future to read volumes 95, 96 and 97 without big gaps of time between them.

Mission Impossible: "The Christmas Caper" (2022) by Gigi Pandian

Back in February, I reviewed the first novel from Gigi Pandian's "Secret Staircase" series, Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022), introducing a former magician, Tempest Raj, who exited the stage following a botched, nearly fatal escape trick – now works for her father's Secret Staircase Construction company. A far from ordinary construction company specialized in expanding their clients with “whimsical features” like “sliding bookcases that hid reading nooks” or “wardrobes that led not quite to Narnia but to secret gardens.” Under Lock & Skeleton Key needed to lay the groundwork for the series by introducing the various (recurring) characters, backstories and the main storyline concerning the disappearance of Tempest's mother. Something that came at the expense of the intriguingly-posed impossibility of a fresh corpse being discovered behind a decades-old brick wall.

The second title in the series, The Raven Thief (2023), reportedly is stronger on the locked room puzzle and investigation with a four-sided impossible crime during a séance. But between the first and second novel, Pandian wrote a special short story for the series entitled "The Christmas Caper" (2022). So decided to hold off on The Raven Thief until having read "The Christmas Caper."

Pandian's "The Christmas Caper," published as an ebook, brings Tempest Raj to the ancestral homeland of her Scottish grandmother, Morag, to revive an old family tradition – celebrating Christmas in Edinburgh. They rented an apartment in the building of Morag and Ashok's friend, Sabrina, who asks Tempest to help her save Christmas. Sabrina is a close friends Ronald Abernathy, curator of the Castle Rock Museum, which recently got robbed in spectacular fashion. The museum recently acquired a previously unknown landscape painting by Alexander Nasmyth that was placed in the skylight room, which has a slanted skylight "to give a view of the castle above." The thief cut a hole in the skylight, slid down a rope to take the painting and escaped by rappelling down the side of the building, but accidentally tripped an alarm when noticing people were watching. There was an event going at the castle and someone spotted the masked thief, dressed in climbing gear, on the museum. However, the thief still managed to get away with the painting.

So where's the impossibility in this elaborate smash-and-grab? The skylight room has floor censors and the police first assumed "the thief swung directly to the painting instead of touching down," but the painting was hanging on a wall "further than could be reached by rope without hitting the ground." Someway, somehow the thief took the painting without triggering the floor censors. Simply a question of figuring out how it was done. Tempest has found an answer to the seemingly impossible before and only too happy to help Sabrina saving Christmas for Abernathy.

"The Christmas Caper" is a locked room mystery at its most leisure ("she was only going to do armchair detecting anyway") investigated, and solved, between the other usual activities in the run up to Christmas like scarfing down "scrumptious treats" at the Christmas Market. And providing the story with recipes for Gingerbread Swirl Cookies and Spiced Hot Chocolate. So the story can feel a little too cozy at times and the plot is light enough it can be put together even if the clues aren't too thickly spread around, but nothing to detrimental enough to take the shine of this charming, fun and seasonal impossible crime story. A hearty recommendation for mystery fans who are always on the look out for Christmas mystery novels and short stories to read in December.

Locked and Loaded, Part 5: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

Every now and then, I do one of these "Locked and Loaded" posts to read and review mostly obscure, often uncollected short locked room mysteries and impossible crime stories covering nearly a century of miraculous crime fiction – stretching from Charles G. Booth's "One Shot" (1925) to James Scott Byrnside's "The Silent Steps of Murder" (2023). I discuss those two short stories, and everything in between, in Part 1, 2, 3 and 4. This fifth installment adds three more obscure, rarely reviewed short locked room mysteries and one magnificent impostor. So without further ado...

Christopher Anvil's "The Drop of a Pin," originally published in the April, 1974, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, is part of a short-lived, now forgotten series about a somewhat unusual detective. Richard Verner is not a detective, technically speaking, but a heuristician. It translated to someone specialized in solving problems or a troubleshooter.

Verner is called to "Grove's Lake Cabins" by the local sheriff to assist him on an apparently open-and-shut case that simply doesn't sit well with him ("...I don't believe the evidence"). The owner of the cabin park, Grove, was found with a knife sticking out of his chest behind the triple locked door of the cabin he shared with his niece, Ellen Grove. A large, spacious cabin has a large room and bath at each end separated by an insulated wall with no door in it, which divides the living quarters of niece and uncle. So when her uncle failed to emerge from his part of the cabin, Ellen grabbed an electric saw and cut a doorway into the insulated dividing wall as it would have been easier than to smash the door or one of the windows. Unfortunately, cutting a doorway into the dividing wall immediately elevated Ellen to the status of prime suspect as the only door on her uncle's side was locked, bolted and securely chained – similar to the door on her side of the cabin. So nobody could have sneaked out that way, once Ellen had cut through the wall and ventured inside to discover the body. And, of course, the windows were all securely locked as well.

A phenomenal locked room setup! One that today's crop of locked room specialists would probably get a lot of mileage out of and had the solution been more than an elaborate take on a familiar locked room-trick, it would have been a little more than merely a solid locked room howdunit. Nevertheless, I enjoyed "The Drop of a Pin," especially the whole setup, enough to keep an eye out for the other stories. Christopher Anvil and Richard Verner might be of interest to Crippen & Landru as there appear to be enough material for a short story collection.

Robert C. Schweik's "Imagine a Murder," originally published in the June, 1978, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is another story from an even shorter-lived, now forgotten series of detective stories. This series of three short stories stars an amateur detective of the old school, Professor Paul Engel, whose method is simply to analyze a problem, speculate on it and apply a dab of rich imagination – "just imagine what possibilities there are." So when his friend and bookseller, Harry, overhears the murder of his roommate over the telephone, Professor Engel is on his way to put his analytical mind and imagination to work. The victim, Markham, was an accountant working on a report that would place someone behind bars and called Harry to ask him to post a letter, which is when he got shot. Inexplicably, the place was locked and bolted from top to bottom ("...the entire apartment was buttoned down"). So how could the murderer and gun vanish from a thoroughly locked room with a crowd gathered in the hallway outside the locked door shortly after the gunshot rang out?

This story shares some outward similarities with Anvil's "The Drop of a Pin." Schweik created a pleasingly tight and baffling locked room scenario with the revelation of the murderer's identity adding a second, quasi-impossibility in the form of a cast-iron alibi. One hinging on the other. Just like the previous story, "Imagine a Murder" is an elaborate, pleasing and, in this case, fairly clued reworking of a classic locked room-technique/trick. So not a blistering original, cutting edge locked room mystery, but a solid, competently plotted impossible crime story. And not a bad one to help fill a future impossible crime themed anthology.

Jack Ritchie's "Cardula and the Locked Rooms," originally published in the March, 1982, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and collected in The Year's Best Mystery and Suspense Stories (1983), sailed pass me under a false flag and not a locked room mystery – nor any other kind of impossible crime. Nevertheless, I was pleased to have stumbled to it right after my previous read. "Cardula and the Locked Rooms" is eighth of nine comic private eye short stories about Cardula (Dracula) who "has been forced to leave his home country of Romania after being thrown out of his castle by communists" and moved to America to become a slick, nighttime private detective ("I am simply a night person"). Mike Grost praised the series for its many pleasant touches of "logical fantasy." Cardula is hired by a man named Thompson ("blood type B, I guessed") who bought a stolen Van Gogh years ago. The painting was his private pleasure for five years, but now it has been stolen from a private room. A simple case of breaking and entering, but who knew Thompson possessed a stolen Van Gogh?

Cardula is paid a handsome fee to locate and retrieve the painting, which is simple enough, but the theft of the painting and how it was stolen comes with a neat, well-done little twist worthy of Edward D. Hoch's best Nick Velvet stories. Of course, the fun and main draw of the story, and obviously the series as a whole, is Cardula's double role as detective and vampire. So another series of stories that needs further attention and looking into at some future date.

The last two short stories were nominated in the first round of voting for the "New Locked Room Library" and come from the same author, "Miŏgacu." Just like the previous review, I was gives copies of the short stories and told not to be smart ass who asks too many questions. So no background on the author nor stories except that "Miŏgacu" is a huge mystery fan who wrote the following two short stories as a homage to the Grandest Game in the World with the hope of having them properly published one day.

"Eggnog and the Cylinder" (2023) can be categorized as an impossible crime caper in the style of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and Gosho Aoyama's Kaito KID. A French millionaire by the name of M. Aristide Benguet bought "the largest purple sapphire in the world on a whim" and decided to keep The Feline of Somerset in a locked room at his country home, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, to be displayed at a fancy Christmas party – which caught the attention of a renaissance criminal. Phantom Thief Lenoir, "dashing and masked," has become the scourge of the rich and famous of Europe as a modern-day Robin Hood. M. Benguet is taking extreme measures to protect the sapphire by engaging four different detectives/security agents from across the world to guard the sapphire in the locked room during the party. There's a rotating system to allow the detectives to take a break ("...stretch your legs, empty your bladder, grab some champagne"), but three detectives will stay with the sapphire in the locked room at all time.

A fail proof security measure, however, when their assignment comes to an end, they discover the sapphire has been replaced with a fake! Somehow, someway, Phantom Thief Lenoir switcharoo'd The Feline of Somerset under the nose of four detectives inside a securely locked room.

This story comes with a short "Author's Postface" in which "Miŏgacu" explains the inspiration for "Eggnog and the Cylinder" came from reading a description of the locked room puzzle in Marcel Lanteaume's untranslated, frustratingly out-of-reach Trompe l'oeil (1946) – realized "there is a very simple solution." That very simple solution is actually the cleverest, wildly imaginative and most original locked room-trick of the stories discussed so far. A trick certainly in the spirit of Lanteaume "in which imagination leaps confidently over probability" and perhaps a trick that would be hard to swallow in a regular locked room mystery, but perfectly suited for "a Japanese-y phantom thief story." It's unexpected gems like this making the future of the traditional Western (locked room) mysteries look very bright indeed. Not to mention a story with the potential to age like fine wine, if it ever turns out "Miŏgacu" constructed to correct solution from a short description of Lanteaume's Trompe l'oeil locked room puzzle. And makes me want to overlook (ROT13) gur znffvir onyyf vg gbbx gb abzvangr uvf bja jbex sbe pbafvqrengvba.

The second story, "The First Meeting" (2017/23), is a homage to the Japanese shin honkaku mysteries (and a pastiche, of sorts) and particular to the teenage detectives of series such as Case Closed, The Kindaichi Case Files and Q.E.D. Niimoto Tadashi is the son of a typical, storybook detective, Tsukiko, who had to solve the Yellow Mask Mystery on her wedding day. Tadashi was never shielded from his mother's investigation, but "never knew corpses raining down upon him" like some other child detectives. So a relatively normal childhood, but, on his sixteenth birthday, Tadashi "made his first step to detectivehood." Tadashi got his own Watson, Zhenya, who's the son of a Russian scientist staying as a guest at the Niimoto home. Tadashi and Zhenya throw themselves at a local locked room murder.

On the morning January 18, 2005, the esteemed neurosurgeon, Furuta Fujio, was found stabbed to death in his stuffy, everyday working study with door locked from the inside and the key sticking out of the keyhole – windows either didn't open or looked over an obstacle. Such as a roaring river or locked garden gate. So the scene of the crime resembles "an impenetrable capsule," but trick is not nearly as good or even half as inspired as the brilliant solution to the previous story. An enormous step down, judged purely as an impossible crime story. On the other hand, simply as a homage to those meddling kid detectives of the manga/anime corner of the shin honkaku mysteries, "The First Meeting" is first class.

Not a bad harvest for a handful of, more or less, randomly selected short stories. Anvil's "The Drop of a Pin" and Schweik's "Imagine a Murder" didn't bring anything new or really innovative to the table, but showed some ingenuity in presentation and a solid hand in their solutions. Despite the misleading title, Ritchie's "Cardula and the Locked Rooms" is an unexpected treasure and it goes without saying "Eggnog and the Cylinder" is the standout with "The First Meeting" having charm and qualities outside of its locked room puzzle. I told you I would pick something good eventually. :)

Owl of Darkness (1942) by Max Afford

Owl of Darkness (1942), alternatively published as Fly by Night, is the fourth and penultimate novel in the Jeffrey Blackburn series by Australian playwright and mystery writer, Malcolm Afford – who wrote under the thinly veiled penname "Max Afford." This fourth outing for Jeffrey Blackburn and Chief Inspector Read differs from their previous cases in which they tackled the locked room slaying of a High Court judge (Blood On His Hands, 1936), a seemingly impossible murder staged at a BBC radio studio (The Dead Are Blind, 1937) and strange stabbings at an ancient stone chapel (Death's Mannikins, 1937). Owl of Darkness is a fairly conventional country house mystery, except that the country house of this detective story is being invaded by a pulp-style comic book villain.

Over a two-month period, a character going by the name of "The Owl" exploded into the newspaper headlines following a series of daring robberies. It's not merely the crimes or the "fantastic sobriquet" of The Owl that captured the imagination of both the public and every crime reporter in Britain.

The Owl is not your ordinary housebreaker, but a fully costumed, caped and masked arch-criminal wearing "the wings and false face of an owl" with "two pale, lidless eyes" blazing "above the cruel hooked beak of a nose" – who "could seemingly come and go at will." His arrival is preceded by the hooting of an owl and always leaves behind his calling card reading, "Fly by Night." The Owl's first claim of fame was an attempt to blow up the strong room of a well-known bank to get to a small fortune in bonds. However, the master thief succeeded in stealing Sir Charles Mortlake's famous Cellini Cup from his private museum and grabbed headlines when the Duchess of Doone's had a diamond "snatched from her throat as she sat in her darkened box at Covent Garden." The Owl's latest exploit opened Owl of Darkness as Lady Evelyn Harnett had a valuable necklace stolen after a house party and was nearly caught, but escaped by diving through a window ("...flew through that window... like a bird!").

Chief Inspector Read has everyone breathing down his neck and not amused when Blackburn finally decides to show up, but this reader was amused when Read sat Blackburn down to read him the editorials criticizing his performance ("I don't see you smiling, Mr. Blackburn"). A fun scene followed by the arrival of Miss Elizabeth "Betty" Blaire, "the newspaper woman connected with that murder at the B.B.C.," who has a possible lead on the robberies. Her brother, Edward, is a chemist and researcher who received a generous offer from Sir Anthony Atherton-Wayne to develop an anti-toxic gas. Edward was set up in a cottage on the grounds of Sir Anthony's home, Rookwood Towers, in the village of Tilling. During his experiments, Edward accidentally discovered "a perfect foolproof substitute for petrol" at about one-twentieth its price. Edward wants to sell the formula as his agreement with Sir Anthony is for the development of an anti-toxic gas. Not a petrol replacement. Elizabeth brought along her fiance, Robert Ashton, who's Sir Anthony's private secretary and confirms her story.

So the news of the formula attracts the attention of certain individuals. One shady individual who got wind of the new invention is The Owl and has been sending his visiting cards to Edward with a very clear warning. Give up the formula or die. The Owl has given Edward two more days coinciding with his birthday party. A birthday party extended into a tense, nearly two week siege of Rookwood Towers during which The Owl has a run of the place. And an increasingly harassed Reads insists on keeping everyone at the scene. More on that in a moment. Something else needs to be addressed first.

The Owl is not the only person coming to Rookwood Towers with the intention to get their hands on the formula, legally or otherwise. There's an American representative of an oil company, Charles Todhunter, but the other party bidding against Sir Anthony and Todhunter needs some explaining as it's bound to confuse history savvy readers. Dr. Heinrich Hautmann is a foreign service officer, working for the German Minister of War, who came with his daughter, Elsa, to purchase the petrol formula – which would have been treason in 1942. Just talking business without selling the formula to the German representatives would have been considered treasonous. I found that odd for a mystery published several years deep into World War II. A quick search revealed Owl by Darkness is a novelization of the radio-serial Fly by Night broadcast on Australian radio from April 14 to July 21, 1937. So the story takes place before WWII and explains other apparent irregularities like no mention of the war or Read casually suggesting to someone they take a holiday on the Continent (where, Portugal?). But it could have been stated clearer the story takes place before 1939 to prevent confusion. For example, the chapters all start with the date/day and it needed was adding the year to the date or simply change the nationality of the Hautmanns. Just make them Dutch (Herman Houtman).

Interestingly, the wikipedia page of the radio-serial has a quote from a contemporary critic calling Fly by Night "swift and forceful" with every other minute a new twist, turn of events or surprising developments. Afford carried this successfully over to the fast-paced novelization which dumps a whole bag of genre tropes out over the story. Some incredibly time-worn, but all put to good and effective use. There are one or two quasi-impossible situations like a kidnapping from a locked, top floor bedroom, but not substantial enough to use the "locked room mysteries" tag on this review. Surprisingly, I really enjoyed how Afford made use of the rabbit warren of secret passageways, hidden doors and underground burial vaults perfectly suited for exploration, shenanigans and staging a murder or two. Strange, disfigured hands open hidden panels to grab at people and not everyone might who they claim to be or willing to tell everything they know. Not to mention a dash of blackmail, a disappearing letter, romance and the dawning realization The Owl could possibly be a resident or guest of Rookwood Towers.

Blackburn himself observes it "smacked too much of melodrama," but the whole case is melodrama personified with its eccentric young inventor, revolutionary formula and a masked arch-criminal running around the place – unimpeded by the heavy police presence. So, as far as the plot-ingredients and tropes are concerned, Owl of Darkness is not terribly original outside of the main plot-thread of the titular criminal. That being said, it's impressive Afford carted out all these old, hoary tropes and squeezed a relentlessly amusing country house caper out of them. Unironically throwing a costumed super villain from the pulps and comics into the mix is just ballsy. A character so absurd in a 1940s Golden Age mystery, it normally would have reduced any other mystery to ranks of a genre curiosity. Afford got away with it and written something a little more than a genre curiosity. Owl of Darkness could even been a minor classic had the main plot-thread, namely the identity and motives of The Owl, not been one of the most telegraphed solutions I've come across in a classic mystery novel.

I wish it was just me being in rare form as an armchair detective as my razor sharp mind cut through the intricate design of the plot, like a katana through silk, but Afford banks on (SPOILER/ROT13) gur ernqre orvat anvir naq arire nfxvat gur boivbhf dhrfgvba: ubj yrtvg vf guvf fhccbfrq eribyhgvbanel sbezhyn sbe n purnc, rnfvyl cebqhprq fhofgvghgr sbe beqvanel crgeby. Bapr lbh xabj jurer, be engure gb jubz, gb ybbx, gur cybg cenpgvpnyyl haeniryf vgfrys. I was also suspicious (ROT13) Rqjneq jnf qrcvpgrq fbzrjung bjyvfu jvgu oyvaxvat rlrf oruvaq guvpx yrafrq fcrpgnpyrf naq fhfcrpgrq ur pubfr gur bjy crefban gb vapbecbengr uvf tynffrf vagb gur pbfghzr, but I obviously gave that aspect too much thought.

So not the best or most challenging detective novel written during the WWII years, but certainly one of the most striking country house mysteries of the Golden Age. More importantly, it's never boring as the characters and plot developments ensure there's never a dull moment between chapters. I think detective fans with a soft spot for the gentlemen thieves and colorful criminals of the rogue branch of the genre will get the most out of this, especially fans of the Kaito KID capers from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series. It's not everyday you such a character let loose in a vintage country house mystery.

The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1929) by Brian Flynn

I took a break from Brian Flynn after a string of disappointing novels, ranging from the awful The Sharp Quillet (1947) to the middling Reverse the Charges (1943) and The Swinging Death (1948), but the untimely death of Rupert Heath didn't, exactly, put me in the mood either – resulting in the temporary shuttering of Dean Street Press. Yes, temporary, because DSP is back in a limited capacity. DSP send out an email, back in May, announcing they have "now officially transitioned into Dean Street Press Limited" to continue their "legacy of uncovering and revitalizing good books." Recently, they reprinted Eleanor Farjeon's Miss Granby's Secret (1940) under their "Furrowed Middlebrow" banner.

As of this writing, nothing new has been added to their series of vintage mystery reprints, but surely, they at least want to finish up reprinting Flynn and Moray Dalton. Just not in the same quantity as before. Either way, a good time to finally return to Flynn and others resurrected by DSP.

The Creeping Jenny Mystery (1929), published in the US as The Crime at the Crossways, is the seventh title in the Anthony Bathurst series and not one that appealed to me at first. Bathurst is largely absent from the story and the plot description didn't capture my imagination at the time, but The Creeping Jenny Mystery is apparently a first-rate, 1920s detective novel ("...lines up four surprises as neat as a row of dominoes, and topples them with skill"). Steve Barge, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, who rediscovered Flynn called The Creeping Jenny Mystery as "a deeply satisfying mystery" with "no massive bells and whistles on it" ("no locked room, no unbreakable alibi"). So decided to store it away for my return to the series and having now read it, I have to disagree with Steve on The Creeping Jenny Mystery not having any massive bells or whistles.

If bells and whistles are defines as tropes like locked room murders, cast-iron alibis and dying messages, The Creeping Jenny Mystery plays on a trope not often explored in a Golden Age country house whodunit – namely the gentleman thief. Or perhaps, in this case, a gentlewoman cat burglar.

Over the course of six weeks, Creeping Jenny became a household name in the southern counties of England following a series of "daring robberies" from its stately homes. A calling card was left behind after each robbery reading, "With Creeping Jenny's compliments. She takes but one." Creeping Jenny pinched Sir Graeme Grantham's diamond tie-pin and Mrs. Stanley Medlicott's pearl necklace, but left "very much more valuable articles" untouched ("quite in accordance as it were with the terms of the visiting-card"). This places the character of Creeping Jenny firmly in the tradition of the gentle rogues from Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin and E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles to Edward D. Hoch's Nick Velvet and Gosho Aoyama's Kaitou KID. Henry Mordaunt, K.C., has read about the thefts in the newspaper and worryingly notices Creeping Jenny getting nearer to his own home, The Crossways. Not without reason. The local papers have reported extensively on the engagement of his youngest daughter, Margaret, to Captain Cyril Lorrimer. And she was to receive from her fiancé the famous "Lorrimer Sapphire" for her engagement ring. Mordaunt has a hunch that the famous is exactly the type of thing to attract the thief and upset the engagement party. Sure enough, Mordaunt receives a note from Creeping Jenny announcing the intention to visit the engagement party at The Crossways ("expect me some time after eleven o'clock to-night").

Nothing appears to have happened during or after the party, but, on the following morning, a body is found lying in "a huddled heap of horror" at the bottom of a disused well. By the way, bodies down the well is the DSP version of bodies in the library as they happen to have several vintage mysteries in their catalog in which a body is discovered at the bottom of an old, disused well. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, bodies-in-wells is not an overly used crime scene or premise, even in classic mysteries, but keep finding them in the DSP reprints. Just from the top of my head, you have Flynn's The Creeping Jenny Mystery, Moray Dalton's The Strange Case of Harriet Hall (1936), E.R. Punshon's Murder Abroad (1939), Francis Vivian's The Singing Masons (1950) and one, or two, other titles that escape me at the moment – probably something by Christopher Bush. But that as a side observation. After the shocking and brutal murder, they discover the sapphire is gone after all despite certain precautions and security measures. So the game is very much afoot.

Anthony Bathurst is, as noted above, is largely absent from the story and his place is taken by two other characters. Inspector Baddeley, of Scotland Yard, whose previous appearance was in The Billiard-Room Mystery (1927), and the lawyer Peter Daventry from The Case of the Black Twenty-Two (1928) and Invisible Death (1929). Daventry wants to call in Bathurst, "Sir Austin Kemble, the Commissioner of Police, simply swears by him," but Mordaunt doesn't want an amateur detective meddling in the case ("certainly not at this juncture"). Bathurst appears in name only, until "Chapter XVI" to answer Daventry's letter about the case. Even then it takes a while before he finally appears, in person, to tidy up the whole mess. Until that moment arrives, tagging along with Baddeley and Daventry is not a chore at all. Baddeley and Daventry tackle the case with competence and zest.

A case comprising not only of a stabbed body at the bottom of a well, the theft of the famous sapphire, the mysterious identity of Creeping Jenny and the role she, or he, played in this country house drama, but other issues muddying the solution – ranging from a stolen dagger to an extraordinary bet made regarding the sapphire. Flynn weaves all the different, apparently crossed and knotted, plot-threads together, before pulling them apart again, with equal skill. Flynn understood his genre tropes and knew how to find his way around a plot. That allowed him to sometimes get away with certain things that would have died a death in the hands of a less talented writer. For example (SPOILER-ISH/ROT13) gur zheqrere'f vqragvgl naq zbgvir ner obgu pyrireyl uvqqra sebz gur ernqre, ohg gur zheqre boivbhfyl cynl frpbaq svqqyr gb gur inevbhf cybg-guernqf yvaxrq gb Perrcvat Wraal zlfgrel. Ubjrire, Sylaa cerfragf vg va fhpu n jnl vg qbrfa'g srry yvxr vg cynlf frpbaq svqqyr nf vg'f tbbq rabhtu gb unir pneevrq n pbhagel ubhfr zlfgrel jvgubhg fgbyra trzf be png ohetynef. V nyfb rawblrq ubj boivbhf gur nafjre vf gb gur Ehffryy Fgerngsrvyq cybg-guernq, hayrff lbh'er hanjner gur nhgube jnf n znffvir Fureybpx Ubyzrf snaobl. But adds to the overall enjoyment either way.

So, on a whole, I think The Creeping Jenny Mystery shows the detective story was ready to leave the 1920s behind and enter its golden age, plot-wise, because the story itself reads like it was written 8-10 years earlier. It reads like the Roaring Twenties had just begun, instead of being on its last leg, with its country house setting, stolen jewels and a cast of bantering Bright Young Things. Only difference is that the scene of the murder is a disused well rather the customary private study or library. A slightly tighter plot, detection and storytelling could have pushed to the first-ranks of such earlier titles like The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye (1928) and The Orange Axe (1931). Other than that, The Creeping Jenny Mystery reads like a fond farewell to the 1920s detective story plotted with nearly all the ingenuity of the then coming golden decade. So more than a little recommended to fans of Flynn and Golden Age detective fiction.

Murder Most Monstrous: Case Closed, vol. 91 by Gosho Aoyama

The 91st volume of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series opens, traditionally, with the conclusion of the story that was setup, and closed out, the previous volume bringing Conan, Harley and the gang to the remote of village of Yadori – invited by the mayor to participate in a treasure hunt. They're not the only one who received an invitation to hunt for the legendary treasure at the abandoned hotel. A party comprising of a disgraced archaeologist, Michiki Tanzawa, a horror novelist, Fumie Masuko, a historian, Yasukatsu Someji and a young reporter, Hajime Tsurumi. Someji is killed under bizarre circumstances ("...killed by the legendary monster").

Yadori and surrounding area is the home of the legendary monster from Japanese folktales, the Nue. A creature with the head of a monkey, body of a tanuki, legs of a tiger and the tail of a snake. The previous volume ended with the Nue making an appearance.

When they arrived at the abandoned hotel, Rachel and Kazuha hear "this freaky cry" as the lawn around them catches fire. Next thing they see is the enormous monster coming around the corner of the hotel, "high as the second-floor windows," who sank its teeth into "DANGER, DO NOT ENTER" sign and pulled it out – before wandering back into the forest. The sign is found along the path the beast created with bite marks on it. Nearby the sign is the claw-marked body of the historian, Someji. Both the bite marks on the danger sign and claw marks on the victim's back are huge. This is only the beginning as this volume continues the story with a second, neatly-posed impossible crime.

The group is informed that the arrival of the police can take a while. So it's suggested everyone retreats to their rooms, until they arrive, but Conan, Harley and the Mayor remain behind on the lawn to discuss the case. Shortly thereafter, the people who retreated are hanging out of their windows to listen to their conversation or tell them to keep it down. While this little scene plays out, the strange cries are heard again, patches of grass started to catch fire and a scream is heard from the open, third-floor window of Tanzawa. Conan and Harley find Tanzawa dead from poisoning and "marks under his chin that looked like a snakebite," but the door was locked from the inside and the open window watched by Conan and Harley. So were the other suspects hanging out of their windows.

Needless to say, I enjoyed this despite one, or two, shortcomings. Firstly, the plot is a bit patchwork, which is not uncommon for this period in the series, but, this time, it didn't feel like a story written around a trick or plot-idea. Secondly, while it feels like a cohesively-plotted detective story, some parts work better than others. The poisoning in the locked room is the part that works the best and liked how (SPOILER/ROT13) gur gjb fhttrfgrq snyfr-fbyhgvbaf unir na ryrzrag bs gur gehgu. The appearance of the Nue in the story's opening-act certainly deserves points for its creative presentation and original solution, but not wholly convincing under these circumstances and the clueing is not as crisp as the story would like you to believe. So how the hulking, two-story high Nue appeared is not really solvable. But, visually, still a very appealing trick to see play out. Oh, and the last panel introduces a new character setting up a story-arc for Harley involving an obsessive fan/stalker. I've rambled on enough about this one story.

The second story marks the return of Jirokichi Sebastian, head of the Sebastian Conglomerate, who has been chasing Kaitou KID, a modern-day Arsène Lupin, since the events in vol. 44 and their rivalry has been the detective genre's version of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner – complete with ridiculously elaborate, baited traps. It's what help make Jirokichi my favorite recurring character for some time, but their rivalry perhaps peaked after vol. 61 as the quality of heists began to taper off with each subsequent appearance of the two. This story has not convinced me their rivalry has not run its course.

An elderly widow, Kimika Tomoyose, reaches out to Jirokichi with an antique puzzle box, called "The Wooden God," made by the legendary craftsman from the Bakumatsu era, Kichiemon. A historical, in-universe figure whose various, nineteenth century mechanical marvels appeared in previous stories like the Iron Tanuki (vol. 65) and the hungry store house (vol. 66). The puzzle box was left to her by her husband, but the instructions to open the box is hidden somewhere in his rare book collection. A collection counting over ten thousand books! Mrs. Tomoyose offers to donate the collection to the Sebastian Library on the condition Jirokichi finds the instructions. Inside the box is the world's largest moonstone, Luna Memoria, "one of the big gems sought by the Kaito KID." Jirokichi smells an opportunity to let KID figure out how to open the box and catch him at the same time. So a public challenge is issued to Kaitou KID as Jirokichi begins to prepare another fail proof, tightly secured trap with past experiences in mind.

However, the story is not really about how to open the puzzle box or moonstone, which become something of an after thought to the story, but three mini-puzzles, of sorts. Firstly, Conan's aware Kaitou KID is already in the building and likely disguised, but whose identity and face did the master of disguise "borrow" this time? After realizing KID is inside, Conan notes that everyone's "starting to look suspicious." This mini-puzzle has clearest clueing in this volume. Secondly, the location of the piece of paper with instructions on how to open the box, which is tied to the third, more personal memento left behind in the box. So, on a whole, the story is not a bad one, but feels very slight for one featuring both Jirokichi and KID. If you remove them, the story would have been one of those character-oriented, heart-shaped puzzles Motohiro Katou does so well in Q.E.D.

I've been looking forward to the third story of this volume for years. A new assistant teacher, named Rumi Wakasa, is introduced to the class of Conan, Anita and the Junior Detective League at Teitan Elementary School. Conan and company accompany Rumi to the old, creepy looking storage shed on the school grounds to get powdered limestone for the dodge ball court, which turns out to have a cellar. At the bottom of the cellar stairs, Conan finds a decayed skeleton in a pile of powdered lime. The police assumes the man died as the result of an unfortunate accident, but is there a link between the skeleton and a gang of burglars who disappeared with two-hundred million yen in gold bullion. And in the mean while, Conan and the Junior Detective League go to work on an old, coded message they discovered in the cellar. But the key to code is not as easily cracked as Conan first assumed. Japanese code cracking stories rarely translate into English as they were intended and this one is no different, but the main point of the story is to introduce a new character. She's naturally not who she seems to be, but a klutz who's not who she appears to be gave me déjà vu.

The last two chapters setup a story that will be concluded in the next volume in which Conan gets dragged by Rachel, Serena and Sera to the shopping mall to try on and buy swim suits ("this must be boring for you, Conan"). While shopping, they meet a thoroughly unpleasant costumer and Sera remarks, "just the type of person who's get offed in a mystery novel" ("you'll jinx things and make it come true"). That customer is found strangled to death in a dressing room moments later. Only clues are a smear of lipstick on the victim's thumb and a dying message. Not to be overlooked, Conan began to recall dim childhood memories of meeting Sera at the beach after seeing her in a bathing suit. That always does the trick when you need to jog your memory. Apparently, answers are forthcoming in the next volume.

So, on a whole, the stories in this collection are more entertaining than good and mainly served to setup new pieces of the on-going storyline than posing first-rate, standalone mysteries. Yes, the ending is not yet in sight as the Japanese releases have reached, as of this writing, volume 105. That makes me very curious what Viz is planning to do once they catch up with the original releases. Hopefully, it'll open the door to translations of other Conanian adjacent media/spin-offs/novels.

Cops & Robbers: "The Theft of Cinderella's Slipper" (1987), "The Murder in Room 1010" (1987) and "The Theft of Leopold's Badge" (1991) by Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch, the man of a thousand stories, was not only a prolific writer of short stories, who appeared in every issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1973 until his death in 2008, but a varied one as well – whose works covers detective stories of all stripes and varietals. Mike Grost correctly noted that "many of Hoch's series detectives tend to personify mystery subgenres" and "can shift to any of these genres simply by altering his series protagonist." For example, Dr. Sam Hawthorne exclusively deals with impossible crimes, Jeffery Rand is a code cracking spy, Captain Leopold series are modern police procedurals and Ben Snow is a gun-slinging sleuth from the Wild West. So the series all take a different approach to telling a detective story, whether it be the characters or setting, but the plots unmistakably identifies them as works from Hoch's hands.

Some cynics will simply call it a formula, but it gives a harmonizing quality to Hoch's many, vastly different series. More importantly, it allowed Hoch to bring different series-characters together for a crossover story! Hoch wrote three such crossovers during the early '90s.

The first of these crossover stories, "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee" (1990), has an aged Ben Snow visiting Dr. Sam Hawthorne in the 1930s to consult him on a case from the 1800s he was never able to solve. "The Spy and the Gypsy" (1991) is a crossover between Rand and the gypsy detective, Michael Vlado, which I'll get to eventually. Sandwiched in between is a short story bringing Nick Velvet and Sandra Paris to Captain Jules Leopold's city. That short story gave me the idea for this three-for-one review discussing two short stories, one from the Nick Velvet series and the other a Captain Leopold story, which I picked based on Grost's praise – calling them "some of Hoch's purest and most delightful impossible crime tales." And concluding with the crossover between the two series.

"The Theft of Cinderella's Slipper," originally published as "The Theft of the Lost Slipper" in the April, 1987, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, is the 54th short story to feature Nick Velvet. A thief-for-hire who only steals valueless things for a hefty fee (see The Thefts of Nick Velvet, 1978). This time, Velvet is approached by Gloria's brother, Arnie, who runs a Greenwich Village restaurant and normally wants nothing to do with Velvet or criminals in general. Velvet is surprised when Arnie asks him to steal a left shoe, "a woman's pump with a pink three-inch heel and pink straps," locked away in the safe of a fancy lawyer, Frederick Junis. The shoe in question belongs to a model the lawyer knew, Sophie Moment, but she ran away and left her shoe ("...sounds like Cinderella"). A complete pair is worth less than twenty-five dollars and so he accepts the assignment, but why is Arnie willing to pay him twenty-five thousand dollars to steal the shoe?

Velvet boldly goes to the office of Junis, located on the thirty-first floor of the Regal
Building on Wall Street, where he presents himself as a private investigator looking into the disappearance of Sophie Moment. What he eventually learns is surprising to say the least. Sophie Moment has disappeared under seemingly impossible circumstances just outside the office. Junis had caught Moment going through his files and fled through a private door, opening onto a short corridor with just two other doors, where she simply vanished into thin air – because the people behind those two doors swear nobody came out. During her disappearance-act from the corridor, Moment lost a shoe which Junis keeps in his office safe as evidence. So, once again, the thief has to turn detective to figure out what happened. Not only to the disappearance from the lawyer's office, but who killed the body Velvet stumbles across after wiggling out of a tight corner.

The strength of "The Theft of Cinderella's Slipper" is not in a single trick or a clever, somewhat original idea. The solution to the impossible disappearance is a redressing of an old trick and something the story itself acknowledges (ROT13: “Yvxr Purfgregba'f cbfgzna fur'q orpbzr vaivfvoyr”). Instead the strength is in the neat dovetailing of the plot, folding everything beautifully together, complemented by the setting with its "postcard view of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor" and "the twin-towered World Trade Center." So another good, solid short story from Hoch, but not nearly as good as the next story.

"The Murder in Room 1010" first appeared in the November, 1987, issue of EQMM and recently reprinted in the Crippen & Landru collection The Killer Everyone Knew and Other Captain Leopold Stories (2023) – introduced by Roland Lacourbe. Arguably, this is one of Hoch's better and more interesting locked room mysteries.

Captain Leopold and Lieutenant Fletcher are called to the staid old St. George Hotel, in the center of the city facing Veterans Park, where a dead man has been found in one of the rooms. The front desk received a report of a woman screaming in Room 1010, but a security guard who tried to go in with a pass key found it was also chain-locked. After cutting the chain, they find the body of a man with multiple stab wounds and "the screaming woman, barely conscious, next to the body of a murdered man" ("...maybe a little high on something"). The victim is a disgraced school teacher, Ken Armstrong, who turned to crime and the woman is identified as Anita Buckman. She claims to be innocent of the murder. Leopold finds an important clue, "a small, voice-activated tape recorder," in her handbag. An ex-colleague and private investigator, Max Hafner, had asked him about exactly such a recording device only days before. Hafner tells Leopold that Armstrong had been blackmailing Rudolph Buckman, "he'd had a fling with a prostitute and somebody took pictures," before trying to get more money from his wife Anita. Hafner advised her to record the transaction and use the recording as leverage to make him back off or the recording is handed over to the police. When she went to his hotel room to hand over the money, Anita blackouts and, somehow, a murderer entered and left the locked room. But how?

Just like "The Theft of Cinderella's Slipper," the strength of "The Murder in Room 1010" is in the masterly dovetailing of the various plot-strands to create a first-rate, classically-styled locked room mystery – presented as a police procedural. The locked room-trick itself is not terribly complicated, on the contrary, it's a great example of simplistic brilliance. More importantly, the way Hoch used the circumstances to create the locked room situation. If you're interested in Hoch or impossible crime fiction, I recommend reading Grost's short review (beware of spoilers) going over why Hoch's approach to the impossible crime in "The Murder in Room 1010" is "unusual in mystery fiction" and "harder to do" than your average locked room puzzle. And why it's a somewhat atypical story for Hoch. Something he didn't mention, demonstrating Hoch's experienced hand as a plotter, is how he quietly eliminated the possibility of shenanigans with the crack allowed by the chain-lock by dispatching Armstrong multiple stab wounds. That would have been a different story had he been found with a knife-handle sticking out of his back. So a small gem of an impossible crime story and even better Hoch short story. A shoe-in for the next update of my list of favorite impossible crime stories.

"The Theft of Leopold's Badge" was first published in the March, 1991, issue of EQMM and almost reads like a three-act play. Hoch created Sandra Paris, the White Queen, to be rival to Velvet and introduced her in the short story "The Theft of the White Queen's Menu" (1983). Paris modeled her crimes and persona on the White Queen from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871). So she only steals valuables before breakfast in seemingly impossible circumstances.

The opening of the story finds Sandra Paris backstage at "Breakfast with the Muses," a fancy fundraising event for the Parker Museum, where she has taken the place of one of the nine muses – whom she tied, gagged and stuffed into a closet. When the performance begins, Paris takes out a roadside flare, tossed it at a priceless Van Gogh painting and "watched it erupt in a flash of vivid flame." Naturally, the Van Gogh painting is not destroyed, but cleverly lifted by Paris. She nearly got away with it. Paris made a tiny, easily missed mistake, but she's in Captain Leopold's city. Leopold and Fletcher caught up with Paris and the stolen Van Gogh at the airport. Even worse, while Paris was stealing the Van Gogh, someone stole two more paintings and left a getaway car with a body in the parking lot. Paris asks for her one phone call and asks Nick Velvet to return an old favor ("...I got you out of jail once").

So the second-act, of sorts, is Velvet meeting Leopold and trying to get Paris released, which has that "worlds collide" feeling a crossover should have. Leopold immediately checked Velvet's background, "do people really hire you to steal items of little or no value?" ("there have been stories to that effect"), showing these characters come from very different series. Velvet is a charming criminal with a moral compass who's easily cheered on in his own series, but, in the eyes of Leopold, he's simply another criminal. So it's rather an odd choice Velvet gets to dictate the story from here on out. Leopold is not convinced Paris worked or could have done the job on her own and the murder is simply the result of thieves falling out. Velvet wants to prove Paris worked alone and had her hands full with stealing the Van Gogh by replicating its disappearance using Leopold's badge. Not to mention revealing who stole the other paintings and shot the man in the parking lot.

This messy description of the plot barely does justice how nicely Hoch layered it. From Paris' caper and the second theft/murder ("...someone took advantage of your presence to do a little work of their own") to the trick to make the painting/police badge vanish in front of several witnesses, which should please anyone who loves a bit of stage magic mixed with their mysteries. Not to forget characters from two entirely different series crossing paths and making it work. Hoch's approach to crossovers is an interesting one as one series-character always seems to have the upper hand over the other. In "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee," Snow needs Dr. Hawthorne to solve an impossible crime from the past. "The Theft of Leopold's Badge" begins with Leopold checkmating the White Queen, but then Velvet takes the lead and solves the case in the third and final act. I assume the same holds true for "The Spy and the Gypsy." So would liked to have seem more opposition from Leopold, but other than that, it's a rare and excellent crossover mystery. I loved Velvet's last line to Paris ("I think we'd both better stay out of his city in the future").

All in all, three really good short stories from Hoch! "The Murder in Room 1010" is obviously the best of the lot and "The Theft of Leopold's Badge" is a genuinely rare treat, if you love (good) crossovers. Only "The Theft of Cinderella's Slipper"
appears a bit average next to those two, but not one that'll disappoint fans of the series. So not bad and wish Hoch had continued pooling his series-characters. Just imagine the implications of Simon Ark casually turning up in a Dr. Hawthorne or Alexander Swift story!