The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012) by E.X. Ferrars

"Elizabeth Ferrars" ("E.X. Ferrars") is the pseudonym of prolific, long-lived British mystery writer, Morna Brown, who wrote seventy-one detective novels and filled two short story collections over a period of half a century – between 1940 and 1995. I thought the last holdouts of the British Golden Age were Gladys Mitchell (The Crozier Pharaohs, 1984) and Michael Innes (Appleby and the Ospreys, 1986), but Ferrars still had enough gas in the tank to go another decade. In his blog-post “The Country Cottage Murders of Elizabeth Ferrars,” Curt Evans wrote that "had Ferrars not suddenly expired in 1995 at the age of 87, there's every reason to believe that she would have keep going with her writing, perhaps even into the 21st century" as "there's no sense of the steep mental slippage" marring the later works of so many of her contemporaries.

I only sampled a few of Ferrars' detective novels over the years, while Give a Corpse a Bad Name (1940), Death in Botanist's Bay (1941) and The March Hare Murders (1949) have not moved an inch towards the top of the big pile in years. Recently, the name Ferrars came back to my attention and decided to move her up the pile starting with her second short story collection.

The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (2012), published by Crippen & Landru and introduced by John Cooper, collects seventeen short-shorts and short stories. The first six short-shorts feature a retired private investigator, Jonas P. Jonas, who badgered the wife of his nephew, a professional writer, to put his past triumphs to paper – fitting considering their publication date. Cooper writes in his introduction the stories were published "during one week in 1958 from December 8 until December 13 in the London Evening Standard" ("...a pre-Christmas treat for the readers of this newspaper"). So a retired detective trying to get his memoirs written at the very tail-end of the late, late Golden Age is a great premise, but only the first two stories are noteworthy with the remaining four being little more than amusing anecdotes.

In "The Case of the Two Questions," Jonas tells the story of the time a woman came to him with two strange questions. Can a middle aged woman go out of room, grab a rifle, run a hundred yards to shoot a man and come back within five minutes "without puffing for breath or having a hair of her head disarranged"? And is it possible for "a car to be driven through a watersplash and back again, without its tires getting wet"? Ferrars spins a clever detective story out of these question covering less than a handful of pages and its short length is its only drawback. A slightly longer treatment of the plot-idea would have made for a first-rate howdunit bordering on an impossible crime.

The second story, "The Case of the Blue Bowl," is the short-short done to near perfection. Jonas recalls the first time he heard about how birds learned to poke through the tops of milk bottles left on doorsteps to get to the milky cream. This fact came to his attention while investigating the disappearance and subsequent murder of a village miser, Old Mrs. Toombs, who was supposed to have a small fortune sewn up in her mattress. Jonas shrewdly uses this knowledge in combination with the titular blue bowl left on the victim's doorstep to deliver her murderer to the hangman. A fine example of the detective short-short and even better as a miniature replication of the British village mysteries of the 1930s.

Not much can be said about the other four short-shorts as they're little more than thinly-plotted, mostly forgettable anecdotes. "The Case of the Auction Catalogue" finds Jonas aboard a train when a woman is found strangled in the end compartment and the first suspect is the passenger who hurriedly left the train at the previous stop, but Jonas demonstrates his innocence based on an auction catalogue the suspect left behind. "The Case of the Left Hand" has Jonas recall the time he had to go to a pub to identify a wanted criminal in disguise and only knows the suspect has a partially paralyzed left hand. Jonas helps an old woman in "Invitation to Murder – One the Party Line" who believes "she'd been listening to a murder being plotted on the telephone." The last story of this short-lived series, "A Lipstick Smear Points to the Killer," comes the closest to matching the first two stories and concerns an elderly man found dead sitting next to the fire with a cup of coffee on the arm of the chair – an inexplicable half-moon of lipstick on the rim. But in the end, too slight to match the first two stories.

So an enjoyable enough series of short-shorts and loved the premise of a retired detective trying to get his memoirs ("nostalgic memories of crime and criminals") committed to paper in 1958. I just wish all the stories were either as good as "The Case of the Blue Bowl" or came with a somewhat substantial plot like "The Case of the Two Questions" to make this series a little more than an amusing genre curio/footnote.

The other eleven mysteries in The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries are not classically-plotted detective stories, but darker, character-driven crime fiction of the modern school. So not every single story in this section is going to be to my taste, which you should keep in mind when I'm giving some of the stories a short shrift. I do like a good inverted mystery with a biting twist and this collection has a few of them.

The first of these stories is "Custody," originally published in A Suit of Diamonds (1990), which follows Ray Bagstock in tracking down his ex-wife and children to the small town of Dillingford. Ray is determined to take the children away from Lucille and move abroad, because she's a bad mother and a violent fight over this ended in a divorce with Lucille getting custody of their two children – which proves to be easier planned than executed. Particularly when becoming the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his landlady. And the care he took in covering his tracks in finding his ex-wife only makes him look even more suspicious. Surprisingly, the depressingly dark conclusion is more opportunistic than the carefully laid trap I expected, but somehow it worked. Even though it required the shocking incompetence of the police to get to there.

"The Trap" was published in the May, 1961, issue of My Home and is a throwback to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches." Miss Isobel Allen takes the position of an elderly, invalided woman, Mrs. Buckle, who lives remote cottage. Isobel was hired by Mrs. Buckle's sister, Jean Chantry, but she notices something is off as soon as she arrives and even gets an ominous warning, "if unkindness is all you encounter in this house, Miss Allen, you'll be lucky" ("you should prepare yourself for far worse things"). Things move on from there. All I can say about this story is that the ending doesn't feel like the cop-out it is and that's something of an accomplishment.

The next story, "Stop Thief," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 24 (1992) and concerns a married couple, Peter and Coralie Gates, who recently suffered a miscarriage and their lost has affected Coralie's mental health. She has begun to shoplift from the village stores and to Peter's absolute horror word is getting around the much more modern minded, sympathetic village community ("I don't want sympathy!"). I struggled to care about the story, characters or what appeared to pass for a plot, but, fair's fair, the ending pulled it together and delivered with a cruel twist.

"The Long Way Round," first published in Winter's Crimes 4 (1974), is exactly the type of inverted mystery I enjoy the most. A type of inverted mystery sometimes referred to as "A-Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard" stories in which a carefully laid crime or scheme falls apart based on a small, devilish detail – which the oblivious culprit overlooked. One of the best-known examples around these parts is William Brittain's "The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr" (1965) and John Sladek's "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National" (1968) deserves a nod. This story is an excellent take on the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Leo and Melanie are married antique dealers traveling to Cyprus to visit a troublesome relative, Uncle Ben, who undeservedly inherited a big sum from his sister without sharing a penny ("...he had merely said that at least he could now afford to take himself off their hands..."). Leo has a foolproof plan to rectify that mistake and inherit the money from his soon to be late uncle. Only for a very tiny, but very important, detail to upset his whole plan ("Oh, God, God!") with the setting being more than just story dressing. Maybe my favorite short story from this collection as a whole.

The next story, "Fly, Said the Spy," originally appeared in Winter's Crimes 15 (1983) and is an odd, but compelling, mixture of espionage with domestic intrigue. A nuclear physicist working at a secret research institute has been spilling secret for the past ten years and getting paid for it, but now he has received a warning that the gig is up. So now he either has to bite down on a cyanide capsule or leave everything, including his wife, behind to start a new life under a new name provided by the people who paid him. Not exactly my thing, but not a bad story.

"Instrument of Justice," published in Winter's Crime 13 (1981), reads like a modern crime story, dark, grim and populated with flawed or unpleasant characters, but the story is cleverly-plotted full with unexpected twists and turns. The story begins with Frances Liley reading the obituary of Oliver Darnell, "a painter of very abstract pictures," who had been blackmailing Frances ("two thousand a year...") with salacious photographs, but relieve makes place for horror. She has to find the photographs before someone finds them and sets out to ensure an opportunity to search his studio. What should have been a relatively save, risk free undertaking becomes a complicated situation when a murder is put in her way. Cold, calculated manner ("she was not a nice person, she thought") in which she takes care of both the blackmail material and the murderer makes "Instrument of Justice" the standout story of this collection. A plot, no matter in what shape it's bend or twisted, can do wonder even for the darkest, grittiest of crime material.

The next two stories are not particularly interesting, nor memorable, short-shorts originally published in the Evening Standard. "Suicide" (1963) revolves around two questions: did the dead woman found in an old quarry take her own life or was she murdered and why would she or her killer leave on the car's headlights? "Look for Trouble" (1964) brings the police to a hair salon following a string of burglaries and a murder. Short, not bad and completely forgettable.

"Justice in My Own Hand," originally published in Winter's Crimes 20 (1988), reads like a patchwork of ideas and plot points from other stories in this collection without improving on any of them. So not much to say about this story, except that I didn't care about it. Fortunately, the last two stories end this collection on a high note.

"The Handbag," originally serialized in two-parts in July 2 and July 9, 1960, publication of The Star Weekly Magazine, is the exact opposite of the previous story. It reads like the Golden Age has recently passed away, but its presence (or spirit) is still lingering around the place. Dorothy Clare's father recently passed away when an old friend, Vivian Alford, appeared out of nowhere to take her away for a much deserved break from grieving, but their holiday destination turns out to be a small, grayish inn – somewhere in the bleak, rainy border country. Dorothy slowly begins to believe Vivian has an ulterior motive to drag her along to that place. A suspicion that becomes stronger when Vivian strong arms her into coming along on a sightseeing expedition of Harestone House ("it's hundreds of years old..."). A strange house tour conducted by the blind owner of the house, Mrs. Hunter, during which both Vivian and a priceless cup go missing. So what happened? A modern crime story with all the trappings of a classic country house mystery complete with slippery red herrings.

The collection closes out with a story that could have easily been rewritten as a slightly lengthier Jonas P. Jonas short story. "Sequence of Events," originally published in Winter's Crimes 9 (1977), brings the celebrated Evening Standard reporter Peter Hassall to the village of Newton St. Denis. Hassall is writing a series of articles on forgotten murders, but always ends up solving "the problems which, over the years, had baffled the police." This story reads like the first in a series tells of the first forgotten murder Bassall investigated. The murder of Dr. Joseph Armiger, a retired researcher, who several years ago was found beaten to death next to a letter box in the village and the main suspects were a gang of boys on motor-cycles ("...seen that evening driving wildly through the village"). But no case against them could be made. So, five years later, Bassall travels to the village to make inquiries, but found nothing new until speaking with a local mystery writer, Everard Crabbe. And he has a story to tell. Or, to use his own words, "all I'm telling you about is a sequence of events." A sequence of events centering on a neighborly feud Armiger and Albert Riddle over stolen coronations, vandalized gardens and threats. The ending presents the reader with two possible solution: a simple, sordid and uncomplicated explanation and a more complicated one echoing a very famous detective story. Needless to say, I prefer Crabbe's sequence-of-events interpretation of events, but, either way, a solid story to close out this collection.

So, all in all, The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries is a surprisingly good, nicely balanced selection of short stories considering how far most of the stories are outside of my wheelhouse, but, looking back over the review, I liked more of them than expected. Most of the short-shorts are flimsy and forgettable, except the first two featuring the titular detective, but only "Justice in My Own Hands" truly disappointed. And while I didn't care for the majority of the story, most of the time, I admired how Ferrars manage to turn me around right at the end ("Custody," "The Trap" and "Stop Thief"). More importantly, "The Long Way Round," "Instrument of Justice" and the last two stories are first-rate short crime-and detective stories which gave me something different to chew. A little different than what usually gets reviewed on this blog, but variation is the spice of life and this collection shows our genre has plenty of variety to offer.

I suppose the biggest takeaway from The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas is that Ferrars, who debuted in 1940, could just as easily turn her hands at modern crime fiction in all its gory, depressing grittiness as a good, old-fashioned whodunit. So I'll also bump Give a Corpse a Bad Name up a few places on the big pile.

Murder Breaks Trail (1943) by Eunice Mays Boyd

In 2022, I compiled a post, "Curiosity is Killing the Cat: Detective Novels That Need to Be Reprinted," crammed with criminally obscure, out-of-print authors and novels that caught my attention over the years – all of which could use an infusion of fresh printer's ink. I hardly expected my list would have publishers rushing to prepare new editions of Reginald Davis' The Crowing Hen (1936) and Gardner Low's Invitation to Kill (1937), but hoped at least Anthony Berkeley's Top Storey Murder (1931) would have been available again and kept my fingers crossed for a reprint of Mignon G. Eberhart's From This Dark Stairway (1931). There are, however, two extremely obscure, then all but forgotten names on my list with reprint suggestions who have since made a remarkable return to print.

James Ronald is one of them and Eunice Mays Boyd is the other. During the 1940s, Boyd wrote three detective novels about a retired grocer and mystery reader turned amateur sleuth, F. Millard Smyth. All three novels take place in remote corners of the Alaskan wilderness with "its ghosttowns, its echoes of the rugged goldrush era and its eerie midnight sun." Anthony Boucher said of her work, "Mrs. Boyd has a pleasing detective and virgin territory" which are "full of Alaskan local color and as endless as a Northern night," but admitted she needed an editor with a blue pencil in order to "push her into the front rank." Nevertheless, the Alaskan setting of the series and book titles like Doom in the Midnight Sun (1944) and Murder Wears Mukluks (1945) intrigued me.

Regrettably, Boyd remained elusive and out-of-print, until recently, when her goddaughter, Elizabeth Reed Aden, not only began restoring her godmother's work back to print – she doubled the size of Boyd's original output. Aden discovered a number of previously unpublished manuscripts. Dune House (c. 1949), Slay Bells (c. 1957) and A Vacation to Kill For (c. 1968/70) were published between 2021 and 2023, but appear to be standalone mysteries. A fourth, previously unpublished F. Millard Smyth novel, One Paw Was Red (c. 1947), was found and currently being prepared for publication. Just no idea when it will be published as the website says the book is coming in either 2024 or 2027. You can read the backstory of these reprints and discoveries in the article "Publishing My Godmother's "Lost" Murder Mystery Manuscripts."

Murder Breaks Trail (1943) takes place in the fall of 1941 and is the first appearance of F. Millard Smyth, "a graying, insignificant grocer from Four Corners, Nebraska," who's on a small plane flying over Alaska. Smyth always wanted to see Alaska and had been invited along to, what was then still, the Alaska Territory on a work related trip with some important people.

The other passengers on the plane are a senator, Thomas Jefferson Lee, known in politics as 'Do-It-Now' Lee and accompanied by his daughter, Kilkenny Lee – who has the full attention Congressman Michael O'Hara. Tony Webber is the senator's secretary and Mayor Guy Fletcher, of Fairbluffs, rounds out the party. Lastly, there's the two-men crew comprising of Hope Mullen (radio operator) and Red Bailey (pilot). The reason behind this trip is an important mineral report ("who knows what treasure of essential minerals maybe hoarded in the vast, uncataloged store house of Alaska?") and get an idea how Alaskan prospectors live. Red announces an emergency landing to fix the radio, while the rest has lunch next to a lake. Then mysterious things begin to happen, before turning disastrous.

From his window, Smyth notices a thin, blue streak of smoke rising nearby the lake, but as the plane dipped towards the lake, it turned white and disappeared ("like someone put out the fire"). So who made and smothered the fire in the middle of nowhere of the Alaskan wilderness? When they land, they find an abandoned, turn-of-the-century ghost village of log cabins whose sod roofs rendered them invisible from the air ("...out of the sod grew dried weeds and tangled grass"). Why not do some urbexing the remnants of a long-forgotten, gold rush era settlement? As they poke around the cabins, they find everything from a dress dating back to the late 1800s ("it's all going to pieces in my hands") to "four hands of cards, lying every which way on the table" and the chairs pushed back – like a card game suddenly got interrupted. The discovery and first exploration of the abandoned settlement is the best and most memorable part of Murder Breaks Trail.

What made the original settlers abandon their village with all their possessions left behind like it was the Mary Celeste? More importantly, who's living there now? One of the cabins is tidy, comfortable with a still warm stove and an additional room stocked with enough supplies “to feed a man for a year.” But where is this mysterious occupant? Things get serious when the party returns to the plane and discovers the petrol has been drained, which effectively maroons them in Alaskan backwoods as King Winter approaches. Suddenly, Murder Breaks Trail becomes an entirely different type of detective story.

They assume, considering the important people aboard, they'll have every plane in the Territory out on a search and agree to wait it out until help arrives, but days turn into weeks with no plane in sight. So the party become the new residents of the abandoned village, living off on the supplies, foraging around the cabins to salvage whatever the original occupants left behind and dozen of little chores (shoveling snow, cutting wood etc.) to fill the days. Murder Breaks Trail turns into something of a Robinsonade-like detective story reminiscent at times of Robin Forsythe's Murder on Paradise Island (1937) and Herbert Brean's The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954). But in the snowy, frozen wilds of Alaska instead of a deserted island. The passage of time hardly improves their predicament as supplies need to be rationed, sickness strikes and someone ends up with a knife in their neck. Who wielded the knife? Was it someone from their own party or the unknown person prowling around the village on skis? Someone has to play detective to keep the situation and fraying nerves from entirely disintegrating.

F. Millard Smyth is a huge, life-long fan of detective stories, "I've been reading detective stories ever since I could read," carrying around a copy of a battered pulp magazine with a cover illustration and latest adventure of his favorite character, Flatfoot Flannagan – a character who's referenced constantly ("Flatfoot Flannagan had solved murders from nothing more than a smear of grease"). So as the only qualified person of the party, Smyth begins to investigate and takes great joy in finding such "time-tested clues" as "the stopped watch, the dropped handkerchief, the ravelings, and now the blotter" ("frowned upon lately by Flatfoot..."). Simply a sympathetic and likable amateur detective who at times appears to be out of his depth on his first outing. F. Millard Smyth is a detective character I can't help but see as a literary relative of Agatha Christie's Mr. Satterthwaite and Francis Duncan's Mordecai Tremaine. A romantic at heart who loves mysteries and never lost his boyhood hunger for adventure, which is what brought him to Alaska ("...the land he'd had to absorb from travel books and adventure magazines"). Sometimes shows he's not the cynical, hardbitten detective of popular fiction and warned by one of the party to take of his rose-tinted glasses and "get wise to what you're mixed up in." Sound advise, considering the circumstances.

So, as you can probably judge from the tone of this review, I didn't dislike Murder Breaks Trail, but the book has some undeniable, ruinous shortcomings and can see why Boucher wanted to let an editor loose on Boyd's work – even if it's only to improve the story's snail-like pacing. However, the snail-like pacing is not the most pressing problem of the book as for everything done right, two or three other things completely miss the mark.

Needless to say, the backdrop and historical mystery of the deserted village are the best part of Murder Breaks Trail. Very late in the story, they even uncover a dusty, forty-two year old "dying message," of sorts, which is always appreciated around here. Not to be forgotten, Boyd belongs to group of regionalist mystery writers that include S.H. Courtier, Todd Downing, Elspeth Huxley and Arthur W. Upfield whose best works feature crimes in foreign climes that feels native to that particular geographical/cultural location and period (e.g. Courtier's The Glass Spear, 1950). Boyd came close enough to writing exactly such a regional mystery, succeeding mostly with the historical plot-thread, but Boyd steadily diluted and cheapened her first detective story with an increasing amount of spy material. Even the historical plot-thread is not spared. Barely anything related to the espionage business is credible or convincing. I liked how the party had to lay a trap to capture the prowler and how that capture affected the second murder, but somewhat undermined when what they caught turns out to be caricature of a Nazi spy ("your own United States will come under our domination").

Worse of all, the plot is muddled, Smyth bluffs and guesses his way to the solution and the solution itself is nothing special or inspired. Murder Breaks Trail leans heavily on its snowy, evocatively presented setting, natural and historical, while the days shorten and "northern lights played a wild crack-the-whip in the sky." Not to mention an underdog detective you want to see prevail in the end (he's one of us, after all), but plot-wise, there's little to recommend outside of the historical mystery. Even the historical mystery comes with a caveat. So, after turning over the last page, I couldn't help but wonder what Murder Breaks Trail might have been in the hands of someone like Hake Talbot. Murder Breaks Trail has nearly everything to whip up a first-rate detective novel, but Boyd didn't succeed in extracting that first-rate mystery from her own ideas. And yet... I enjoyed Murder Breaks Trail and found it for the most part an engrossing read, especially the opening chapters. Not a great or even a good detective novel, in terms of plot, but neither terribly written or devoid of interest (as you can see from the length of this rambling review). Interesting enough to add Doom in the Midnight Sun to the big pile.

77 North (2023) by D.L. Marshall

Last year, I did my best Herodotus impression and wrote up "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years" tracking the changes of everyone's favorite subgenre over the past two decades – evolving into something of a revival. A revival whose seeds were planted by the reprint renaissance and translation wave, which started showing fruit towards the end of the last decade. So far, the harvest has been plentiful and growing.

Just in the past year, locked room and impossible crime fans were treated to James Scott Byrnside's Monkey See, Monkey Murder (2023), A. Carver's The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023), Anne van Doorn's Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023) and Tom Mead's The Murder Wheel (2023). J.L. Blackhurst's Three Card Murder (2023) and Gigi Pandian's Under Lock & Skeleton Key (2022) and The Raven Thief (2023) are currently residing on the big pile. One of the more intriguing takes today on the traditional detective story and locked room mysteries comes from D.L. Marshall's John Tyler series.

Marshall smashed together the action-packed, 1980s movie thrillers and weaves deceivingly intricate plots throughout the gunfights, standoffs, hand-to-hand combat and betrayals. No matter where on the planet Tyles finds himself, the morally ambiguous mercenary is always confronted with killers who execute their victims under apparently inexplicable circumstances. Anthrax Island (2021) brings Tyler to the post-apocalyptic Gruinard Island contaminated with deadly anthrax spores where the first murder is committed in the locked and watched radio room. Black Run (2021) takes place on an old, rusty Soviet era transport ship filled with modern-day pirates, smugglers and assassins as Tyler's cargo (a prisoner) is knifed to death inside the sealed tank of the ship. Steve, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, called the series "the lovechild of Alistair Maclean and John Dickson Carr." While the impossible crime took a backseat in the second novel, it was still a cracking good read. And looked forward to the third title.

77 North (2023) concludes, what's hopefully, the initial trilogy and wraps up all the ongoing storylines and plot-threads in an unrelenting, action-packed survival thriller – a very clever plot lurking underneath it all. The ending suggests 77 North is not going to be Tyler's last appearance ("one last job"), but a lot happens between the opening and closing pages. Like a lot.

John Tyler is "dead in the eyes of the world" and so has the freedom to move around to extract revenge on the people responsible for killing his older brother, Justin. Tyler takes his bloody vengeance on a world tour as he goes from Rio and the coast of Croatia to Amsterdam to pick off a group of ex-special forces turned private military ("real close-knit team"), which was bound to get him noticed. Tyler is trapped by the man who helped him to die and stay dead. And he needs him to a job. There's a Russian arms dealer, Viktor Golubev, who has setup shop in one of the roughest, most inhospitable parts of Siberia. Somewhere deep into the Arctic Circle, Severnaya Zemlya, stands a Cold War era "hotel" where the KGB experimented with ESP, astral projection and telekinesis. So remote enough to conduct some shady, downright illegal business deals and sales, but Golubev attracted the attention of certain people when he got his hands on a small amount of bioweapons. Normally, those people are not interested in obsolete Soviet weapons, but they are interested in Golubev's bioweapons expert, Professor Balakin, who wants to get out. Professor Balakin is wiling to trade the name of "a Russian double-agent well-placed within NATO" in exchange for a white picket fence in the United States. Only they hit a snag. One of the two agents sent out there was killed under mysterious circumstances. Somehow, the professor knew John Tyler is alive, because he secretly requested Tyler to get him out of there.

This barely touches on all the intricate details, characters and plot-threads of the story's opening pages as Tyler takes the place of the dead undercover agent to get the intel and protect the second agent, Dr. Carr – a legit bioweapons expert. They went to the Arctic hotel undercover of checking out the goods on behalf of General Kayembe, dictator of the central African country Nambutu, who also happens to be a friend of Tyler. So no problem to go down there as the general's man on the ground, but getting to the hotel is an ordeal and sets the tone for the rest of the story. Tyler has to battle both the unforgiving climate ("the Arctic Circle wants you dead, and will try at any opportunity") and creeping, disappearing shape fleeting across the ice shooting at him and leaving behind a burned body. That's just before arriving at the isolated hotel of a Russian arms dealer with a private army who's hosting a who's who of terrorists, cartel members, killers and "probably just a few shady fuckers who wanted big guns."

First of all, the settings is one of the strongest and most attractive part of this mystery-thriller series. John Tyler can be placed in settings and circumstances in a setting that would be off-limits for a "normal" amateur detective or police inspector. For example, I can't imagine Carver's Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow setting foot on Gruinard Island or Byrnside's Rowan Manory getting a fee big enough to board the Tiburon. 77 North does not disappoint in that regard. The place is like a decaying time capsule of the 1970s with portraits of Brezhnev hanging askew on half-collapsed walls with peeling, mustard-yellow wallpaper where Golubev conducts his business. Strewn with relics of the period ("Urbexers or eBay profiteers would have a field day with the kitsch"). But the place also has a "destroyed wing." Decades ago, experiments where carried out there involving psychic and paranormal phenomena to create super soldiers, but one experiment reputedly lead to a deadly fire destroying half the building. This ruined section is sealed off from the rest of the building by a huge steel door ("the kind you'd see on a ship or submarine"). Underneath the old hotel is a nuclear bunker from the Cold War "designed to withstand a two megaton nuclear strike nearby." And with a history like that, the place acquired a ghostly resident. They call the ghost the White Demon or Pozharnyy, "Fire Man," who stalks its dilapidated corridors as a harbinger of doom, death and burned corpses. Great stuff!

The nuclear bunker underneath the hotel naturally becomes the scene for a locked room murder. Tyler is alone with two other people in the sealed bunker when one of them is burned to death, inside a locked section of the bunker, but the relatively small, hermetically bunker had been searched top to bottom – offering no hiding place or escape route for the murderer. And no source of ignition. No our mercenary has a problem with the ruthless arms dealer.

I'm not going to attempt to give you an idea about what happens next as this is only a mere fraction of what goes down during the first half of the story, which is interspersed with flashbacks to Tyler's first time on the job back in 1999 when he joined his brother in Nambutu. And everything is connected to everything.

77 North is first and foremost an first-rate thriller, as intricate as it's exciting, rarely letting up its relentless pace. So while a mystery-thriller, of sorts, it's not a tale of detection or deduction, because the punishing pace and pile-on of incidents, twists and turns simply won't allow for it. However, you're strongly advised to pay attention as the keen eyed armchair detective can pick up enough clues and hints to get a long way towards the correct solution. On top of that, Marshall wonderfully used the melee of the action thriller for some good, old-fashioned trickery and misdirection in a way that would difficult to pull-off in a garden variety murder case. More importantly, this series perfectly demonstrates why having a sound plot and some historical genre awareness is a rock-solid foundation for the characters and story to stand on (*). After all, if this series had been about Tyler simply shooting his way to the final chapter, I would never have bothered with it nor would the series have stood out from the raft of other action-oriented thrillers. Now they are something more than just action-thrillers or locked room mysteries. I suspect genre scholars and locked room fans of the future will look back with great interest to these first three John Tyler novels.

Hopefully, Tyler has enough fuel left in the tank to take on future assignments as I feel the series has not yet ran its course. So much more can be done with those specialized, usually off-limits settings. Something like a black site prison in some jungle outpost where prisoners are killed in locked and guarded cells or a prequel novel with Justin Tyler set during the Yugoslav Wars to give his younger brother a breather. Until then, the Tyler Trilogy comes highly recommended as a truly new and radically different take on the traditional locked room mystery.

*: see my review and comments on Pierre Siniac's Un assassin, ça va, ça vient (Death on Bastille Day, 1981).

The Adventures of the Puzzle Club (2022) by Ellery Queen and Josh Pachter

The New York cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee were the heart and brain behind one of the most important names in the American detective story, "Ellery Queen," whose contributions as writers, editors and founders of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine cannot be overstated – promoting and spreading the detective story across the world. Ellery Queen still enjoys popularity today in counties like Italy and Japan where they influenced such writers as Alice Arisugawa and Rintaro Norizuki. And while the English-speaking world has yet to produce someone who can lay claim to the Queen's mantle, the cousins have to this day a dedicated and active fanbase who continue to champion their work.

 

A group of radical royalists, called The West 87th Street Irregulars, "who collectively have committed themselves to the preservation and revival of Ellery Queen" with "the goal of making Ellery Queen once again a vibrant and recognized name in detective fiction." A queen's quorum of writers and editors who write pastiches, parodies and continuations concerning all things Elleryana and editing anthologies. In recent years, Dale C. Andrews and Josh Pachter compiled two EQ themed anthologies, The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020), which in spite of their titles are glowing tributes to Ellery Queen. And not a single truly bad story between them!

Josh Pachter's most recent project, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club (2022), is dedicated to a largely forgotten passage from the tail-end of Dannay and Lee's writing career. During the 1960s and early '70s, they produced five short-short stories introducing Ellery Queen and his readers to the members of the Puzzle Club. A tiny group of puzzle enthusiasts comprising of Cyrus Syres ("multimillionaire oilman"), Emmy Wandermere ("the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet"), Dr. Vreeland ("noted psychiatrist"), Darnell ("celebrated criminal lawyer"), Dr. Arkavy ("the Nobel biochemist") and the famous detective novelist, Ellery Queen. The Puzzle Club convene regularly at Syres' Park Avenue penthouse to mystify each other, "in a sort of ritual adoration of the question mark," which originally covered five short-short stories published in two badges – two in 1965 and three in 1971. The series ended with Lee's passing in 1971. The stories were collected separately, in Queen's Experiments in Detection (1968) and The Tragedy of Errors (1999), but never appeared together as there simply were not enough of them to justify a collection.

Fortunately, Pachter had a pastiche, "a further adventure for Ellery and the Puzzle Club," published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 2019 and editor Janet Hutchings accepted the story with "the caveat that it would be a one-off, not the kick-off for a series of Puzzle Club pastiches." So he wrote four additionally Puzzle Club with Sherlockian-themed titles. Suddenly, the amount of material had doubled. Add introductions for each individual story and Pachter's four short stories about Tyson County’s Griffen family, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club was practically ready to go to the printers. Let's see how this collection turned out.

"The Little Spy" originally appeared in the January, 1965, issue of Cavalier and begins with Ellery Queen receiving an invitation to attend the next meeting of the Puzzle Club to be subjected to a membership test ("...if you fail to solve the puzzle we're going to throw at you tonight, you'll never be invited to try again"). The WWII-era problem he has to solve concerns an undistinguished ex-civil servant, "who came out of retirement to do his bit for Uncle Sam," but, shortly before D-Day, Intelligence received an important tip – accusing the undistinguished civil servant of being a German spy. So when he suddenly booked a priority airline passage to London, they yanked him off the plane and gave him "the most thorough search in the long and honorable history of spy-catching." It took them a while, but, in the end, they found the top-secret material. The question Ellery Queen has to answer is where the Intelligence people discovered the spy message. A clever little story that gives the central clue in the setup of the problem and then becomes a process of elimination as Ellery goes over every possible hiding place. Needless to say, Ellery passes the test to become the sixth regular member of the Puzzle Club.

 

"The President Regrets" first appeared in the September, 1965, issue of Diners Club Magazine and the Puzzle Club intended to welcome no less a figure than the President of the United States ("...known to be a devotee of mysteries in all lawful forms"), but the president had to cancel at the last minute. So it's up to Ellery to improvise a puzzle for his fellow club members and imagines the murder of a Hollywood starlet, Valetta van Buren, who had been threatened by one of her four suitors and had written to Ellery to ask for help. But the letter arrived too late. Valetta was murdered by the suitor who had threatened her without naming him, but she wrote in the letter "she had something in common with three of the four, and that the fourth was the one who had threatened her." Arguably, the most obvious and telegraphed solution ever devised by EQ.

"The Three Students," originally published in the March, 1971, issue of Playboy, centers on the problem of a ring taken from the office of a college president and "a delegation of three students who represent three dissident groups at the college" play the role of suspects. Only clue is a scrap of paper with a gibberish verse written on it. Unfortunately, the solution hinges on a specialized piece of knowledge. So practically unsolvable for most readers.

A note for the curious: the story is introduced by Martin Edwards and comments how extraordinary it seems that it was originally published in Playboy, which is a subject that came up not so long ago on this blog. Back in March, I reviewed Lawrence Block's "The Burglar Who Dropped In On Elvis" (1990) and "D," from Vintage Pop Fiction, commented, "Playboy published some excellent fiction because they could afford to pay writers real money."

"The Odd Man" originally appeared in the June, 1971, issue of Playboy and is the best of the original five Puzzle Club stories brilliantly playing on that EQ specialty, the multiple solutions. The Puzzle Club has concocted a riddle bound to confound their resident mystery writer and has to do with an undercover agent whose assignment it is to track down a dope supplier, which the agent narrowed down to three suspects who all live in the same building – a three-story house ("someday... instead of a three-story house, I shall make up a three-house story"). The undercover agent is murdered, but there was a clue in his last report referring to the drug supplier as "the odd man of the three." The Puzzle Club believe there's only one possible solution to the problem, but Queen points out there are two more solutions. All three solutions come back to the same person. A minor tour-de-force!

"The Honest Swindler" appeared in The Saturday Evening Post during the Summer of 1971 and relatively simple, straightforward problem of Old Pete who gathered funds to finance his hunt for uranium with the promise that "every last investor at least gets back his original investment" in case of failure. So how was Prospector Pete able to pack back everyone of his backers when he returned empty handed? A decent enough short-short, but unremarkable.

The next five stories, "The Pastiches," were penned by Pachter who brought the band back
together after nearly fifty years and aged the characters along. Syres is now a wiry, crippled old man in a wheelchair and Ellery takes an Uber to the Park Avenue skyscraper. Pachter's pastiches unapologetically revels in the typical EQ elements of dying messages, missing clues and the-three/four-suspects. So, in a way, Pachter succeeded in making his pastiches even more Queen-ish than the original five Puzzle Club stories.

"A Study in Scarlett," originally published in the May/June, 2019, issue of EQMM brings the club together for the first time in decades and they immediately place Ellery in the hot seat – known known as the "Problem Chair." The intellectual challenge of the meeting takes Ellery to the Sherbert Theater, on West 47th Street, where lead actress, Brooke Rivers, is found murdered in her dressing room. Rivers loved word games, "crosswords, cryptics, acrostics, word searches, logic problems," fittingly left a dying message. A hastily scrawled word, "FOUR." Even more fittingly, there are exactly four suspects who could have murdered the starlet. I suppose the dying message is solvable, but you probably should put the book away when you arrive at the challenge to the reader and mull it over. I didn't get this one.

"The Adventure of the Red Circles" first appeared in the January/February, 2020, issue of EQMM and the Puzzle Club have a tailor-made problem for Ellery: owner of a successful chain of grocery stores and a collector of first editions of Golden Age detective novels, Jeremiah "Red" Edwards, died in his (unlocked) library of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. On the desk, the police finds the proofs for next week's advertising circular and Edwards had circled photographs of four items on the page with cheeses ("...in true dying-message-story fashion"). The fun solution is something only an Ellery Queen fan can dream up and appreciate.

"The Adventure of the Black-and-Blue Carbuncle" was originally published in the November/December, 2020, issue of EQMM and the Puzzle Club have another dying message problem for Ellery, but found the premise and backdrop of the puzzle better than its execution. Professor Lee Dannay is a SETI researcher (The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) who's hunched over the controls of the radio telescope one night, when a gunman enters the observatory. The gunman forces the professor to write a suicide note and shoots him, but the professor hide a clue to the murderer's identity in the note. Ellery has to find it and correctly interpreter it to solve the puzzle. The problem is that the plot (deliberately) recycles the central idea from a previous story, which came with exactly the same limitation.

A note for the curious: the story is introduced by Kurt Sercu, founder of Ellery Queen: A Website On Deduction, who writes Pachter warned him that it might be impossible for him to beat Ellery to the solution, because Sercu's not American "born and bred." Funnily enough, both Pachter and Sercu speak Dutch. If you speak Dutch, you should be able to eliminate one of the three suspects.

"The Five Orange Pipes" was first published in the January/February, 2021, issue of EQMM and is the hardest story to describe. This time, Ellery challenges the other members of the Puzzle Club with a problem starved of details, but the central question is the proximate cause of death of two of the characters. The solution is one of those elbow-in-the-ribs jokes, but amusing enough. Somewhat like a lighthearted take on Edmund Crispin and Geoffrey Bush's "Who Killed Baker?" (1950). I learned that the term Sherlockian is used in the United States and Holmesian purely British. I always used them interchangeable. There's a lock in Sherlockian. So I'll stick with that one from now on.

"Their Last Bow," originally published in the January/February, 2022, issue of EQMM, is equally difficult to discuss. In his introduction, Pachter writes "I was determined not to write more about the Puzzle Club than Dannay and Lee did, I felt that I had to do something in the fifth story to make it clear that there would never be—could never be—another one." Ellery does not meet his Reichenbach, of course, but it's the end for the Puzzle Club. I think Dannay and Lee would have approved of the conclusion to this unfinished chapter of their writing career.

The collection ends with Pachter's four short stories about the eleven children of Inspector Ross Griffen, of the Tyson County Police Force, all of whom he named after famous detective characters. I previously reviewed "E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name" (1968) in The Misadventures of Ellery Queen and "E.Q. Griffin's Second Case" (1970) in The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen. So onto the third story.

"Sam Buried Caesar," originally published in the August, 1971, issue of EQMM, when Pachter was 18-years-old and, as I read the story, it went from a highlight of the collection to one of my all-time favorite detective parodies. The story tells the only recorded case of the youngest child of the Griffen family, Nero Wolfe Griffen, who runs a detective agency from the family garage with his best friend, Artie Goodman – who needs to keep reminding everyone his name Artie ("...not Archie Goodwin"). They charge fifteen cents, plus expenses, which is "nowhere near as profitable as a good paper route but lots more enjoyable." Their newest client is Sam Cabot whose dog, Caesar, has just been killed by a speeding car near a lonely and vacant field. Not knowing what to do and without any adults around, Sam decided to bury Caesar in a corner of the vacant field. But decided to go back to get Caesar's collar and tags as a memento. When he dug up the grave, Caesar's body was gone! So what happened? Just like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Artie has to do all the legwork and comes away with skinned arms, while N.W. Griffen never left the armchair in the garage. But at the end of the day, they both arrive at exactly the same conclusion. An incredibly amusing story and a strangely spot on parody of Rex Stout.

A note for the curious: Pachter mentions on his website that Stout "was still alive at the time the story appeared in print and I got a very nice not from him, telling me that he's enjoyed it."

"50" originally appeared in the November/December, 2018, issue of EQMM and written to mark the 50th anniversary of "E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name," which makes it as difficult to discuss as "Their Last Bow." The story is a reminiscence rather than a detective story in which Pachter seems to have merged himself with the now 66-year-old Professor E.Q. Griffen who teaches English literature at a small college. When the story opens, Griffen is preparing a lecture when his mind begins to wander to the past and reveals he wrote “E.Q. Griffin Earns His Name” as sixteen year old ("for the purposes of this, his first short story, young Ellery had expanded the family to eleven children..."). That brings him to an old and solved murder case as his father told him "not all crimes are mysteries," but reviewing his old, half-forgotten memories supplemented by a couple of Google searches proposes a new solution to the murder based on the victim's dying message. But what can be done five decades after the facts? A very odd, but weirdly effective, story to round out the collection. I really liked the blurring between author and character.

The Adventures of the Puzzle Club is an enjoyable collection and an even better tribute to an obscure passage from Ellery Queen's varied career, but comes with the proviso that the Puzzle Club stories are riddles and brainteasers in short-short story form. So the stories are just slightly more substantial than the radio episodes of Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries or the one-page shorts from How Good a Detective Are You? (1934). "The Odd Man" being the only real exception with its impressive triple solutions. Unless you're a fan of EQ, you have to approach this collection as something of an oddity, but if you're a fan or simply like EQ, The Adventures of the Puzzle Club is not to be missed.

 On a somewhat related and final note: I always wanted to see Timothy Hutton reprise his father's role from the 1975 TV-series of Ellery Queen, if only for a one-off, but it has pointed out that Hutton is getting a little too old to play Ellery. So why not adapt Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's pastiche "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery as the canonical ending to the original TV-series? You can age him up with makeup and he would like Jim Hutton's Ellery at age 100.

Prague Fatale (2011) by Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr was a British author who garnered wide success with his World War II thriller series about Bernhard "Bernie" Gunther, Kriminal Commissar, which began as a trilogy and appeared to have been completed by 1991, but Kerr resurrected the series in 2006 – continued until his death in 2018. There were a total of 14 novels in the Bernie "Berlin Noir" series and the eighth title, Prague Fatale (2011), has been hovering in my peripheral ever since its publication. 

Prague Fatale is presented as a historical locked room thriller. Admittedly, the premise and backdrop is not without interest, or intrigue, but the book was published in 2011 and experience taught me not to expect too much from the more mainstream crime novels claiming to be homages to the classical locked room mystery ("worthy of Agatha Christie"). Particularly those written in the 2000s and early 2010s (e.g. Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, 2006). So never really bothered getting a copy, but recently, Prague Fatale somehow kept coming to my attention. It culminated with JJ listing the book among the greats of the genre, "A Locked Room Library – One Hundred Recommended Books," saying "the historical novel and the puzzle plot have rarely meshed so effectively." We'll see about that! 

Prague Fatale is the eighth title to feature Bernie Gunther, a patriotic German policeman, who Kerr described as "a gumshoe in the grand and seamy tradition of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade" with "the toughest beat in detective fiction" – a Germany under the complete control of the National Socialists. Only he's not one of them. Just like "most people who supported the old Republic," Bernie is neither a Nazi or a Communist, which is why he left his position with the Berlin police. When the Nazis took over, General Reinhard Heydrich ordered him back as Bernie "wasn't about to chalk someone up for a crime just because they were Jewish" and that was useful to Heydrich ("...from time to time I'm useful to him in the same way a toothpick might be useful to a cannibal"). So he often finds himself in precarious situations, getting kicked around or forced to dirty his hands. Such as commanding the firing squad that executed dozens of Russian POWs and delivering "the coup de grâce to at least ten of them as they lay groaning on the ground." He also lost his wife in the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 and never had any lasting luck in relationships since.

You can add Bernie to the long list of troubled cops that dominate the modern crime and thriller genre, but, as you probably gathered from this brief summation, he actually has a legitimate reason to be more than a little jaded. Bernie finds the thought of suicide “a real comfort” not because he's trapped in a deteriorating marriage with rebelling, teenage children and a fondness for the bottle, but because he's continuously forced to compromise everything he once believed by the very people he despises the most. Bernie's struggle and the situations he finds himself trapped in appear to be the main selling point of this non-linearly series as each novel takes place in different periods covering Hitler's rise to power, the war itself and the beginning of the Cold War. For example, the last posthumously published entry in the series, Metropolis (2019), is a prequel set in 1928. So with all that baggage out of the way, let's jump into this dark, gritty historical locked room mystery. 

Prague Fatale takes place in September and October, 1941, and the first-half gives readers new to the series a pretty good idea why it has been called "Berlin Noir" or "Nazi Noir." Bernie Gunther has returned from Ukraine, where he witnessed the horrors of the executions pits, to pick up his post as Kriminal Commissar and pretend to be a proper detective, but discovers upon his return he's not the only one who has chanced – as the was has also left its traces on Berlin. There was a shortage of everything from food and beer ("...only powdered milk and powdered eggs" which "tasted like the masonry dust shaken from our ceilings by RAF bombs") to clothing ("...coupons paid for an emperor's new clothes and not much else") and cigarettes. While everything around them was neglected, breaking down or kaput and the new law obliging Jews in Germany to wear a yellow star only added to the dystopian ambiance. Berliners were still killing each other with new motives for murder that "stemmed from the quaint new realities of Berlin life," while the blackouts provide a cover for some real violent crimes. These are the mean streets of World War II-era Berlin.

So during the first-half, Bernie investigates the brutal murder of a Dutch volunteer railway worker, Geert Vranken, whose mangled, torn asunder remains were found along the train track with his pockets turned inside out. When the coroner finds about half a dozen stab wounds on what remained of the torso, Bernie knows he has a murder on his hands, but not one his superiors are keen to give any attention at the moment ("...you think the Ministry is going to be happy to learn that there's another killer at work on the S-Bahn?"). But that's not all. One evening, Bernie saves a woman, named Arianne Tauber, who was assaulted in the streets and he chased off the assailant. But the next day, he's confronted with that assailant once again when his body turns up in the Heinrich von Kleist Park. Is there a connection between all these cases and incidents?

I don't think many of the regular readers of this blog will find much to enjoy about the bleak, sordid affairs making up the first-half of the story and Kerr does not shy away from describing the nauseating, gorier parts in graphic detail – like a hardboiled Paul Doherty. The story shifts gear during the second-half when Bernie receives an invitation he's simply not allowed to ignore.

General Reinhard Heydrich is promoted to Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia (Czechoslovakia) and planned a quiet weekend with friends to celebrate his appointment at the new place in Prague. The Lower Castle, "canary-yellow with a red roof, a square-tower portico painted white," is filled with "damned cauliflower." A reference to "the oak-leaf collar patches that distinguished SS generals, brigadiers, and colonels from lesser mortals." All of them important party members and close to the general. Bernie is informed he has been invited to the weekend party, because an attempt had been made to poison Heydrich and he wants Bernie to act as a detective and bodyguard. But then a murder is committed under seemingly impossible circumstances.

Hauptsturmführer Albert Kuttner, fourth adjutant to General Heydrich, is discovered dead in his first-floor bedroom with two bullet holes in his chest, but the door was locked from the inside with the key still in the lock and the windows securely bolted. There's no murder weapon inside the bedroom and a spent nine-millimeter Parabellum round is found on the floor down the corridor. Nobody heard a thing. So unless he was "shot by a man who could pass through solid walls," how could Kuttner have been killed inside a locked room? Heydrich tasks Bernie with investigating the murder and demands a solution, "before it can reach the ears of the Leader." No matter what impertinent questions he asked or whom he offended. And he expects his guests to fully cooperate with his investigation.

Even with the general's blessings, Bernie knows questioning some of the top brass of the Nazi party is not going to be as easy as in the books in which "a detective could turn up at a country house, question everyone, find some recognizable clues, and then arrest the butler over chilled cocktails in the library." However, the novella-length chapter covering the investigation and questioning most of the important suspects is the stuff of classics. The basic structure of this chapter is a good, old-fashioned whodunit with a locked room murder as its central puzzle, but considering the characters involved and the period, it required a flavor and atmosphere all of its own. Some of the suspects definitely find the questions to be impertinent and result in complaints, but Bernie deftly handles and turn the tables on all of them like a practiced snake charmer. While another much more talkative, easy-going suspect manages to surprise Bernie with a false-solution to the locked room puzzle of his own ("Why didn't I think of that?"). All in all, the best part of the book that makes me wish Kerr had written the whole series in a more conventional mold.

It has been remarked in other reviews that the locked room-trick is hardly original, which is absolutely true, but combined with the murderer's identity and a very good, original motive, elevated it to an outstanding historical mystery – comparable only to John Dickson Carr's underrated Captain Cut-Throat (1955). I'm just glad the key wasn't turned from the outside with a pair pliers, which is the modern-day equivalent of the secret passage. Anyway, Prague Fatale takes place in Nazi Germany and occupied Czechoslovakia, during the Second World War, which the ending rams home once the murder has been solved, but far from resolved. And any lingering illusions of the drawing room mystery is dissolved in the wink of an eye in the last couple of chapters. Brutally so.

So mystery readers of a more traditional bend will find the first-half of Prague Fatale rough going, but the second-half delivers a small, dark and memorable gem of the Golden Age-style country house mystery with a decidedly un-British backdrop and cast of characters. Prague Fatale might have been even better, bordering on a locked room classic, had the second-half been condensed into a novella, but that's mostly my own bias speaking. If you can take the gritty, historical noir and uncompromising depictions of the horrors of the Second World War with an unconventional, well-handled take on the traditional detective story, Kerr's Prague Fatale comes highly recommended as an excellent piece of historical fiction. 

A note for the curious: I had no idea where to fit this into the review, but Jim needs to know what he did. HUGE SPOILER/ROT13: V erpragyl erivrjrq nabgure bar bs Wvz'f erpbzzraqngvbaf, Jnygre F. Znfgrezna'f Gur Jebat Yrggre, juvpu hfrf rknpgyl gur fnzr ybpxrq ebbz-gevpx naq nyfb unq na vagrerfgvat pubvpr va vgf zheqrere. Shaavyl rabhtu, V gubhtug Gur Jebat Yrggre jnf gbb fubeg gb or gehyl rssrpgvir, juvyr Sngnyr Centhr pbhyq or fubegrarq sbe fvzvyne ernfbaf. Vg'f nyzbfg yvxr gurl'er sha ubhfr zveebe ersyrpgvbaf bs rnpu bgure naq fbzrubj gurfr jrer gur gjb gvgyrf V cvpxrq sebz Wvz'f ybpxrq ebbz yvfg gb fnzcyr. So, thankfully, they both turned out to be good detective stories in their own right or Jim would have some explaining to do.

The Student Body (1958) by Nigel FitzGerald

In the previous blog-post, I looked at Nigel FitzGerald's second of only two impossible crime and locked room mystery novels, Suffer a Witch (1958), which confirmed my suspicion that his last novel, Affairs of Death (1967), constitutes the scraps left at the bottom of the barrel – ending his run as a mystery writer on a whimper. However, in spite of the book's shortcomings, it couldn't disguise FitzGerald was a polished writer with a verve for characterization and local color. Not to mention trace evidence suggesting FitzGerald might have been a pretty decent plotter during the earlier stages of his career. While the plot would have worked better as a short story or novella, Suffer a Witch confirmed all my suspicions. 

So wanted to take a closer look at FitzGerald's second locked room mystery, The Student Body (1958). The description of the impossibility in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) sounded absolutely intriguing and comments promising "an extremely lively" tale of murder and intrigue. Sure enough, The Student Body is an explosive mixture of the Cold War spy-thriller, college-set detective story and a quasi-inverted mystery with hints of the police procedural and comedy of errors. A very weird, but very well-done and strangely effective concoction. 

The Student Body largely takes place at Christchurch College, Dublin, which was founded in 1557 and "there is no record of murder having been committed within its precincts until the fourth centenary year of its existence." There are two students, Jer Milne and Don Carton, who had a hand in bringing murder to the respectable college.

Jer and Don go to a local restaurant to celebrate passing an exam with a few drinks and two young repertory actresses, Rona and Peggy. Some ten days previously, Rona and Peggy had been in London where they visited a famous church, but they arrived at the moment a Hungarian Baroness, "a political exile in Britain," was murdered right as the service was beginning – a knife-handle protruding from her back. Rona and Peggy witnessed a small, swarthy blue-eyed man hurrying from the church as he stripped dark gloves from his hands as he went. They now spotted that very same man sitting at the corner of the bar "placidly completing the crossword puzzle in the Irish Times and taking occasional sips from a glass of dry sherry." Don proposes to ask advice from Aidan "Radish" Roberts, literary editor of the Dublin Observer, who also happens to be at the bar. The long and short of the opening chapters is that they take the only logical and rational course of action anyone would take in their situation. They kidnap the man and take them to their college rooms to be questioned. 

The Student Body is a mystery-thriller of hot, young and alcohol fueled Irish blood operating under Murphy's Law. So everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Firstly, their room is entered by a small group of party crashers lead by the lecturer in English language and literature, Dermot Gray, who's accompanied by his sister, Mrs. Nuala Norden. George Kerry, inter-varsity heavyweight champion, who brought a keg of beer. Secondly, this distraction caused a cat-and-mouse game between the mysterious, possibly red assassin and the heroes in which they constantly turn the tables on each other. Thirdly, the scrap ends with the man being tied and is locked behind two doors with a bicycle padlock on it for good measure. As an extra precaution talcum powder is scattered thickly over the approaches to the door on the landing. When returning from having a good meal and drinks, they find the locks and talcum powder undisturbed, but their captive has the handle of knife sticking out of his back. So what to do, except cover everything up and dump the body. Something that proves easier said than done.

The trickiness with some locked room murders and impossible crimes is that the method can expose a murderer too soon, which is kind of the case here. The locked room-trick itself is sound enough, but everyone who has read a decent amount of detective fiction will figure it out in no time. Even if you happen to suck at figuring out these locked room puzzles, FitzGerald hammers down all the clues and hints to ensure the solution is impossible to miss. I suspect FitzGerald intended to have the locked room puzzle crystal clear and practically all tidied up when he returned to it in the last chapters, because the second-act shifts gears as it becomes somewhat of an inverted mystery. Nevertheless, easy to solve as the trick may be, the locked room functions as a fun little side distraction to the overall plot and interesting FitzGerald developed a sudden, short-lived fascination for impossible crime fiction in 1958. Going by these lines, "the impossible situation: murder in a locked room which no one could have entered or left" and "a weapon which for obvious reasons could neither have been fired through the keyhole nor thrown through a window," he probably read some locked room mysteries at the time – which found expression in Suffer a Witch and The Student Body. And looking at the first-act of The Student Body, I wouldn't be surprised if Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Punch and Judy Murders (1936) were on his big book pile.

The second and final-act is a different story as Superintendent Patrick Duffy, of the Detective Branch of the Garda Siochana, enters the picture and the story becomes an undeclared inverted police procedural. The body had been dumped and fished out of a bay, which is why Superintendent Duffy is unaware he has an impossible murder on his hands and simply hopes to find the murderer by identifying and retracing the victim's steps. How very Freeman Wills Crofts of him! So, of course, Duffy pretty quickly uncovers a trail leading straight to Christchurch College and discovering the victim crossed paths with Radish and the college party numerous times. All the while, the reader is in the fortunate and rare position of knowing more than the detective and thus the second, last-minute murder is not very effective as a red herring. So, knowing more than Duffy, regrettably reinforces a dry, anti-climatic ending ("I can say now that there will almost certainly be further charges") to what's otherwise a lively and entertaining story. You have to tolerate the poor decisions making skills of the characters in order to enjoy it. 

The Student Body and Suffer a Witch show FitzGerald was a writer stuck between two distinctly different periods of the genre, a transitional period from the cerebral Golden Age detective stories to the darker, character-driven crime novels that came to dominate post-1950s, which tried to merge by picking and merging the best of both. So the murders, motives and subject material tend to be a little darker, grittier and uneasier than your average, 1930s detective novel, but there's always one or more puzzling components to the case. Such as the second murder from Affairs of Death, the impossible disappearance in Suffer a Witch and the locked room mystery here. FitzGerald can be clumsy, plot-wise, when it comes to ending a story, but he deserves to be acknowledged for an early writer who tried to adept the traditional detective story to the changing times. Not a perfect mystery writer or mystery series, but a valiant and much appreciated attempt to keep the detective story alive and relevant.