Locked and Loaded, Part 7: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

So lately, I noticed an unaccountable, unacceptable dearth in locked room and impossible crime reviews which needed immediate correction to bring this blog back to its previous acceptable conditions, standards and core values – only one way to do it. There are actually two ways to do it, but the reprint of Pierre Boileau's Six crimes sans assassin (Six Crimes Without a Murderer, 1939) is not out for another six months. I decided to do another "Locked and Loaded" instead.

In 2020, I posted the first part of the extremely irregular "Locked and Loaded" series and have now compiled seven of them covering locked room and impossible crime stories covering a period of 118 years stretching from 1905 to 2023. You can read my reviews, not in chronological order, in "Locked and Loaded" part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. So let's start on part 7.

Fredric Brown's "The Djinn Murder," originally published in the January, 1944, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, begins when Professor John E. Trent, teaching Psychology IV (Abnormal), is approached by Harvey Glosterman – who really needs a specialist in the occult. Glosterman's retired brother, John Glosterman, collects "objects connected with primitive superstitions" like "old idols, spirit gongs, juju masks, voodoo drums" and recently brought a djinn bottle home from his travels. An earthenware bottle, "Seal of Solomon on the wax," supposedly emprisoning a very powerful, dangerous demon named Eydhebhe. John Glosterman foolishly broke the seal on the bottle and promptly vanished into thin air. However, the impossibility is not Glosterman's disappearance, but how he continued to communicate with his brother through "spirit rappings" coming from the study. Trent believes Glosterman was cleverly disposed and catches his killer by replicating the rapping sounds.

Now, ghostly tapping and other disembodied sounds tend be minor stuff when it comes to impossible crime fiction. Usually little more than small plot-thread or side issue explained away with variations of the same answers pulled from the spiritual medium's bag of tricks, but Brown offered an entirely new solution to the problem. Or, at least, one that's new to me. Still very minor stuff as both an impossible crime and detective story, but a very entertaining, pulp-style mystery.

Anthony Boucher's "The Anomaly of the Empty Man," first published in the April, 1952, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, tries to take a page from John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937) by presenting a puzzle with a logical and supernatural solution. "The Anomaly of the Empty Man" is told by a man named Lamb, but not sure if this the Martin Lamb from Boucher's The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937). Anyway, Inspector Abrahams calls Lamb to the apartment of James Stambaugh, collector of early operatic recordings and philanderer, who disappeared from the clothes he had been wearing ("...sucked dry of its fleshly tenant") – which is tighter impossibility than my description suggests ("...try slipping your foot out of a laced-up shoe and see if you can get that result"). What follows is a bit of a trip, but it boils down to Lamb being presented with two solutions to the problem. The supernatural solution comes from Dr. Verner believing the disappearance was caused by a haunted record from dead opera singer whom he believed carried The Death Wish ("men who knew her too well hungered no longer for life"). Inspector Abrahams found a much better, more convincing and really neat answer for how a man can be disappeared from inside his own suit of clothing. Needless to say, I prefer the inspector's solution over Dr. Verner's cursed record.

And no, the culprit was not a tall, green insect-like individual using his javelin-tipped tail as a sippy straw. If that had been Dr. Verner's alternative solution, I would have sided with him over Inspector Abrahams.

Joseph Commings "The Fraudulent Spirit" originally appeared in the September/October, 1960, issue of Mystery Digest (as by "Monte Craven") and reprinted in the anthology Wicked Spirits: Mysteries, Spine Chillers and Lost Tales of the Supernatural (2024). A few years before the story's opening, Mrs. Jasmine Leslie fell to her death from the outdoor terrace of her New York penthouse, twenty stories up, which the police dismissed as an unfortunate accident – because she had gardening gloves on and a a trowel was left on the terrace. Years later, Jasmine's widowed husband, Fergus Leslie, becomes engaged to Suzanne Dittner and falls under the spell of a spiritual medium, Mme. Olympe. She has done the usual routine with spirit writing appearing on the ceiling during a séance in a locked room, making objects drop out of thin air and claiming to have "greater levitation powers" than D.D. Home ("he floated in and outta upper windows of a house on Jermyn Street in London"). Mme. Olympe also needs money to start her own spiritualist movement and Leslie is willing to provide the funds, but only if she perform a truly convincing séance.

Suzanne Dittner turns to Lt. Barney Grant, of the NYPD, for help. Fortunately, Grant just so happens to have Senator Brooks U. Banner as a visitor. Banner is an old hand when it comes spiritual mediums and the fundamentally impossible, but, even better, Banner remembers Mme. Olympe when "she was dressed in a leopard-skin, leading a carnival parade on the biggest elephant at the Minnesota State Fair." So they attend the séance during which Jasmine's ghost appears on the terrace, disappears and reappears moments later on the terrace of the penthouse across the street! Not really an impossible situation involving levitation, but teleportation and not necessarily a bad one. Just a bit muddled in parts and that knocks it down a peg. "The Fraudulent Spirit" started out as a companion in miniature to Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944), but ended up being a kindred spirit of David Renwick's Jonathan Creek series (ROT13: yvxr gur hfr bs na haxabja nppbzcyvpr gb perngr gur vzcbffvoyr fvghngvba). So while not one for the best-of list, "The Fraudulent Spirit" should not fail to entertain fans of these type of impossible crime stories involving séances, fraudulent mediums and ghostly murders.

Jeffry Scott's "The Brick Overcoat," originally published in the December, 1990, issue of EQMM, slowly moves away from the recurring themes of the previous three short stories, but not entirely as one, of two, impossibilities whispered threats – coming from nowhere. Jenny is working on reviving the once derelict Malreward Theater, currently between productions, which has seen its fair share of tragedy over its hundred year history. But did it pick up a few ghosts along the way? Jenny confides in Detective-Sergeant Nick Flinders she has heard a disembodied voice whisper a chilling threat, "I'll make you a brick overcoat," when she was all alone in the empty, locked theater. Nick Flinders is a hardened skeptic ("half the theaters in England are supposed to be haunted"), but promises to investigate and begins to comb through the old theater, "an untidy labyrinth of grimy brick cells," for answers. Flinders finds an answer, but is it the correct answer? It's enough to reassure Jenny, but Flinders soon returns to the theater when his half-answer could be the key to another case. A case in which a package unaccountably disappeared from a locked room. While more of a modern crime story than a traditional, fair play mystery, "The Brick Overcoat" is not a bad story at all and appreciated its classical trimmings.

Simon Clark's "The Adventure of the Fallen Star" was originally written for Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997). I reviewed Clark's other Sherlock Holmes pastiche "The Climbing Man" (2015) back in 2021, which presented the Great Detective with a fresh corpse discovered inside a sealed, undisturbed 3000-year-old archaeological site – like it enough to track down this particular pastiche. Sherlock Holmes is asked a favor by Professor Charles Hardcastle, specialized in metallurgical sciences, who once helped him "lay to rest the matter of the golden bullet murders in King's Lynne." Professor Hardcastle is interested in "aerolites" (i.e. meteorites) and has a collection of them in his private laboratory at his home in Homestead. A particular meteorite had recently been taken from the locked laboratory and turned up again in his son's bedroom. Holmes is asked to look if there's something to the case, but, when he arrives with Watson, they find a half mad Hardcastle. The backstory of the meteorite reveals who's behind it all and why, but now how this person got through locked doors. And the answer to that question is a big meh.

Elizabeth Elwood's "The Chess Room," first published in the November/December, 2019, issue of EQMM, closes out this random selection on a high note. The first-half of the story introduces Chloe Helms, a cleaning lady, who works at the Hanover building owned by the wheelchair bound, octogenarian chess fanatic, Jacob Russell – who takes a liking to her. So "the Hanover grapevine buzzed with the rumor that she had become the latest threat to David's inheritance" and David, Jacob's son, is not amused ("the exact term he used was gold digger") causes nothing than misery for Chloe. This situation culminates with the pressure getting too much shooting himself inside his beloved chess room storing his collection of varied chess boards and pieces. Chloe was one of the people standing outside the door when the shot was heard and every other exit was either locked or under observation. The second-half takes a procedural approach to the locked room problem as Detective Constable Annie Blake and her team take charge. There's a part of the locked room-trick that hard, if not impossible, to anticipate, but loved the classically-styled twist.

So, all in all, not a spectacular haul, but not a thoroughly bad one either. When it comes to the locked rooms and impossible situations, only Boucher truly impressed and Brown scoring bonus points for originality. Elwood is a good, solid second. Commings' take on the miraculous levitation/transportation is fun, but too muddled to be really good. I enjoyed Scott's story more for its storytelling than its plotting and Clark's pastiche was meh. Let's hope that the next installment of randomly thrown together impossible crime stories uncovers a real gem, but next up is a classic locked room reprint.

The Stars Spell Murder: "Handbook for Homicide" (1943) by Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown's "Handbook for Homicide," originally published in the March, 1943, issue of Detective Tales, can be described as either a longish short story or a short, very short, novel comprising eight chapters – all short and snappy. I was in the mood for something short, snappy and to the point. And remembered reading "Handbook for Homicide" is one of Brown's more conventional pieces of detective fiction in the Van Dinean traditional.

Bill Wunderly, an accountant, is braving a dangerous, winding mountain road during a worsening storm to see his love, Annabel Burke, who's a mathematician with "the astronomy bug." She works as an assistant at "the most isolated and inaccessible observatory in the country," Einar Observatory. During his drive up the mountain road, Bill meets a Native American, Charlie Lightfoot, who's transporting crates with rattlesnakes on his donkey, Archimedes. I should warn animal lovers poor Archimedes doesn't survive the trip and Bill gives Charlie, along with his snakes, a ride to the observatory.

Einar Observatory houses a small group of scientists. There are three astronomers, Abel Lecky, Fergus Fillmore and Darius Hill, who each have an assistant, Paul Bailey, Eric Andressen and Annabel. Additionally, the observatory has a staff consisting of an electrician, Rex Parker, Otto the Janitor, a handy man and a small household staff – rounded out by Bill and Charlie. Like I said, "Handbook for Homicide" is a longish short story that's short, snappy and wastes no time in getting to the murder after their arrival. Elsie Willis, the maid, is found dead in an upstairs room with a cracked skull. I should note here that this first murder is, technically speaking, a locked room mystery as she's found dead behind a bolted door. I had no idea this story qualified as an impossible crime story and one of the reasons for picking this story was to break up the locked room reviews. However, it's such a small, trifling plot detail that's solved practically immediately with a routine trick and never mentioned again, a recurring problem with this story, that I decided not to tag this review as a locked room mystery.

The murderer is not done yet and even pries open a crate with rattlesnakes, which has fatal consequences and, even worse, they're cutoff from the outside when the bridge collapses. And, of course, the phone lines are down as well. So they're trapped at the mountain top observatory with a murderer, rattlesnakes crawling outside and no way out for at least another day or two. One interesting aspect of the story between the murder and solution is Bill learning the foppish Darius Hill is something of an amateur criminologist who's working on a manuscript, The Murderer's Guide. While reading the manuscript, Bill starts getting some ideas about the murders at the observatory. What I also found interesting is that the characters speculate Hill might suffer from necrophobia, "fear of death, fear of the dead," which would make for a fascinating alibi, but nothing is really done with it. That's emblematic of this story.

Brown crammed "The Handbook for Homicide" with plenty of good ideas, bursting with potential, but only mentions them without doing anything with them. I already mentioned the simplistic, somewhat unnecessary, locked room angle and the necrophobia bit. A better example would be the character of Charlie Lightfoot who first appeared as one of those dated, poorly-aged characters, but dropped "the Big Chief Wahoo accent" the moment trouble started on the mountain road and Brown sketched out an interesting background story for him. Like when Bill mentioned Charlie seems to be very familiar with the layout of the observatory and Charlie answers, "I designed it." Nothing is done with it or mentioned again. So everything feels underdeveloped and thus a bit disappointing in the end, especially the genuinely good bits like the ingenious alibi-trick behind the first murder and the question of motives – which all needed more room to breath and be developed into their full potential. Now it reads like an early outline or draft of unfinished, unpolished manuscript not unlike the published plot outline Jack Vance's third Joe Bain novel "The Genesee Slough Murders" (1966).

So I think "Handbook for Homicide" would have fared better had Brown taken the time to flesh out the characters, plot and background into a novel-length mystery.

Note for the curious: as the resident locked room fanboy and impossible crime fanatic, I couldn't help but notice the ingenious alibi-trick could have doubled as a way to (accidentally) create a locked room scenario. So... (SPOILERS/ROT13) gur zheqrere hfrq yvdhrsvrq nve sebz n QrJne synfx gb serrmr gur ivpgvz'f yrtf, cebc gur obql hc va n pbeare naq yrsg gur ebbz gb perngr na nyvov fbzrjurer ryfr. Jura gur yrtf gunjrq, gur obql sryy naq gur crbcyr qbjafgnvef jrer nggenpgrq ol gur guhq. Jul obgure cynlvat nebhaq jvgu jverf gb znavchyngr gur obyg, jura gur obql pbhyq unir orra cynprq ntnvafg gur jnyy pybfre gb gur qbbe. Jura gur obql svanyyl sryy, vg raqrq hc oybpxvat gur qbbe naq nccneragyl phggvat bss gur zheqrere'f rkvg. Gur zheqrere pna fvzcyl ybpx gur qbbe oruvaq uvz jvgu n fcner xrl. Nsgre nyy, vg'f gur obql oybpxvat gur qbbe, abg gur ybpx be qenj-obyg. Uryy, lbh pna cebonoyl hfr gur yvdhrsvrq nve gb serrmr gur qbbe va cynpr gb znxr vg nccrne ybpxrq.

The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022) by Lawrence Block

Once upon a time, I was quite the priggish, fundamentally-minded purist who viewed the post-WWII landscape of the crime-and detective genre as an arid, desolate wasteland and despises everything that was not like John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen – who were to me the only measuring sticks for good detective fiction. An attitude that was not without its hypocrisy as modern authors like A.C. Baantjer and M.P.O. Books were exempt from scorn. It took some years for my personal taste and preferences to mature and get fine-tuned. Not that they became "respectable" or anything of the sort. God forbid that ever happens! I simply learned over the years good detective fiction is not bound to a time or place and has everything to do with who's doing the writing and plotting. Whenever they may be.

There were a handful of so-called modernists who helped nudge me in that direction beginning with William L. DeAndrea, Christopher Fowler and eventually Bill Pronzini and Herbert Resnicow. But there was another writer who has been shamefully neglected on this blog.

Lawrence Block is an American crime writer best known for his private eye series about a reformed alcoholic, Matthew Scudder, but I really enjoyed his creation of a modern-day, gentleman thief, Bernie Rhodenbarr. A series that was recommended to me following my enthusiastic discovery of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin. The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (1983) and The Burglar in the Library (1997) were among the highlights of the series. You can find The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (1994) and the short story "The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke" (1997) on "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." I kind of forgot about Block and Rhodenbarr after finishing the series and had completely missed the releases of The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons (2013) and the short story collection The Burglar in Short Order (2020). This would have likely continued, if the universe had not decided to be weird and bring the series back to my attention.

Ever since the English publications of Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), the subject of the largely unexplored, genre-warping hybrid mysteries has come up around these parts a couple of times – particularly their untapped potential as the genre's next frontier. The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of hybrid mysteries is a detective story with a science-fiction (Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, 1954) or fantasy (Randall Garrett's Too Many Magicians, 1966) setting, but a hybrid mystery can also take place a lot closer to home. Like a parallel universe or an alternate timeline. It strikes me as teeming with potential for cleverly-twisted, dual narrative trickery and removed difficult customers like robots and sorcerers while maintaining that otherworldly quality of a science-fiction or fantasy mystery hybrid (see some of my old comments here and here).

So was a little surprised when learning last year that Lawrence Block had not only published a brand new Bernie Rhodenbarr novel, but one in which Bernie is hurled headfirst into a parallel universe. Well, I know when to take a hint. 

The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown (2022) is the thirteenth outing for Bernie Rhodenbarr, owner of a secondhand bookstore in Greenwich Village, New York, who moonlights as a burglar with his best friend and partner in crime, Carolyn Kaiser – who runs a dog grooming salon near his bookshop. They have been getting into trouble throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, but the world has dramatically altered since he began selling books and burglarizing houses. Both have seen a downturn in the new millennium. Nowadays, the only people browsing his bookstore "were looking for a preview of something they could subsequently order online" and his sign reading "please wait until you have exited the premises before ordering the book from Amazon" was either overlooked or ignored. It simply was "infinitely easier and more efficient, not to mention cheaper, to do your book hunting at your computer." The simple burglary business is not much better as Bernie's lock-picking skills entirely useless when pitted against electronic locks. Not to mention that security cameras are now everywhere ("...and started the old rant about security cameras and electronic locks").

The world couldn't have picked a worst time to dabble in a little dystopianism as "one of the most contemptible human beings on the planet," Orrin Vandenbrinck, who plunked down a cool sixty million dollars ("plus Sotheby's ten percent bidder's premium") for the Kloppmann Diamond. Maddeningly, Vandenbrinck announced to the world he's keeping the famous diamond at his New York apartment. So close, yet so far away, as the up-to-date security places the diamond far out of his reach. 

After ranting to Carolyn about it, Bernie retires to bed with Fredric Brown's 1949 science-fiction novel What Mad Universe. A story in which the protagonist is thrown into an alternate universe. When he wakes up, Bernie slowly begins to realize he, somehow, slipped into a different reality while he was asleep. Bernie first notices some small, but hard to miss, differences like how his orange-and-blue Metrocard is now a green-and-white SubwayCard. There are no security cameras anywhere, buildings that had been torn down have returned and the internet still exists with Google, YouTube and Wikipedia – except no Amazon or eBay ("What's that, Pig Latin?"). I can only imagine that would be possible in a universe where severe restrictions were placed on internet retailers in order to protect brick-and-mortar stores and shopping malls, but the story never really addresses this. Nevertheless, it means customers have returned to Bernie's bookstore and the Kloppmann Diamond is now behind locks he can pick open without security cameras looking over his shoulders.

Bernie is the only one who ended up in this somewhat familiar looking, but strange, parallel universe. Carolyn is right there with him and believes it was Bernie who shuttled them into a different universe as it appears to be a "tailor-made world." It has and lacks everything to make both of his vocations a whole lot easier. I should note here that The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown is a character piece exploring the long-standing relationship of two "best friends who had this unconscious and unacknowledged itch," which got scratched, but at the expense of a criminally underutilized setting and plot.

Firstly, the setting is not, to quote Carolyn, "some horseshit dream" or sprung into existence, but had already been there with its own versions of Bernie Rhodenbarr and Carolyn Kaiser. The actions of that universe's Bernie will go on to pose a problem for the visiting Bernie as he has no memory of a burglary he committed before arriving in that universe. Regrettably, that's about the most interesting thing the story pulled off with its alternate universe setting and not for a lack of possibilities. Bernie and Carolyn discuss the possibility being stuck there forever or the chance of another unexpected somersault that would throw them back into their own universe. Why not have them effortlessly break into the building and the moment Bernie lays his hands on the diamond, they get pulled back into their own reality. Now they find themselves holding a sixty million dollar diamond on the top floor penthouse of a high rise building secured with cameras, electronic locks, bodyguards and a desk attendant in the lobby. It would have made for a much more exciting ending as they try to escape from the 29th floor without getting caught or leave trail leading right up to their doorstep. Bernie's unexplained ability to tumble into another universe can be used for later books with him preparing burglaries of places out of his reach in his own universe, but easily accessible in the other. Whenever he finds himself in the other universe, all he has to do is set his plans into motion. There even some fascinating possibilities that can be done with the characters. What if Bernie found himself alone on one of his trips and had to work together with the alternate Carolyn who has no idea this Bernie is not hers. The alternate universe setting here is only to give the story and character-arc a slightly off-world feeling. Secondly, the plot is trivial to the point of irrelevance.

One thing that remained unaltered in this universe is Bernie's ability, whenever he tries to peacefully breaking and entering a place, to attract a murder or two and places him in the cross hairs of "the best cop money can buy," Ray Kirschmann – forcing him to occasionally don the deerstalker ("...if you just focus on certain episodes in your life, you're a detective"). This time is no different. Regrettably, there's no real (satisfying) resolutions to the problems they encountered in the other universe and had a sort of “not my universe, not my problem” hand waving about it. There's even a line that entirely undermined the little bit of intriguing world-building that was done (SPOILER/ROT13: “Ohg gur havirefr jr pbawherq vagb rkvfgrapr znqr guvatf hc nf vg jrag nybat, naq gurl qvqa’g unir gb znxr frafr”) and seemingly contradicted (ROT13) gur zbarl gurl oebhtug onpx sebz gur nygreangr havirefr.

So the story ended up being somewhat disappointing and muddled in the details, plot-wise, but enjoyed returning to the characters and appreciated the attempt to do something with an alternate universe in a crime novel. Even if didn't go much beyond having an alternate, slightly off universe. The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown is simply a character-piece that I can only recommend to dedicated fans of the series or readers with a specialized interest in hybrid mysteries. 

Note for the curious: yes, this is one of those trailing, lukewarm reviews, but please keep in mind that there was a time I would have angrily tossed The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown aside, denounced its author as a hack and officially declared the modern crime genre a landfill. I would never have taken and judged the book on its own terms. All that would have mattered at the time is that the ending breaks with the sacred traditions of the great detective stories of the past and therefore heretical. I think I've been fair to The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown and regret it didn't turn out to be as good as The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams or The Burglar in the Library.

There's No Such Animal: "Miracle on Vine Street" (1941) and "The Sematic Crocodile" (1941) by Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown was a wildly imaginative pulp writer of science-fiction and detective stories who was not averse to cross pollinating seemingly incompatible genres, "stretching the boundaries of any given genre" into his very own "strange, private geography" – giving us such wonderful oddities as The Bloody Moonlight (1949) and Night of the Jabberwock (1951). Recently, I stumbled across two of his little-known, somewhat anomalous, short stories differing greatly in tone and presentation from his more hardboiled, science-fiction tinged mysteries.

During the early 1940s, Brown penned two short stories for The Layman's Magazine, a periodical of the Episcopal Church, in which Rev. Roger L. Young, Doctor of Divinity, solves two so-called "slice of life" mysteries.

"No esoteric mumbo-jumbo could fool that fellow. Lord, no! His two feet were solidly planted on God's good earth."

The first of these stories, entitled "Miracle on Vine Street," was published in the January, 1941, issue of The Layman's Magazine and presents "the young Doctor Young," as he's known to his parishioners, with an honest to God impossible problem! Doctor Young learns a miracle has taken place on his street when his wife, Martha, asks him how a cat could have walked across a ceiling. One of their neighbors, Mr. Weatherby, had been painting and papering a new nursery the previous day, but, on the following morning, there was a track of paw prints on the ceiling – a track of prints made in pink paint! Before he went to bed, Mr. Weatherby had called his wife into the nursery to have a look at it and they both looked up at the ceiling, which they're "absolutely positively sure" was bare of any cat tracks. So how did they get up there?

Doctor Young tells his wife that he has no problem with people believing that "cats walk across ceilings" or that "the devil makes them do it," but when parishioners blame God, well, that's something else altogether. And he's determined to "take that cat off the ceiling" and "put it on the floor where it belongs."

"Miracle on Vine Street" is a very short story with a relatively simplistic plot, but not everything is shared with the reader and this will prevent you from working out the finer details of the solution. Nonetheless, it's still a fun, sweet little mystery with a likable and lively detective who has more than a touch of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. Particularly his personal outlook on what constitutes a miracle, which is not something as cheap as mere paw prints on a ceiling. I enjoyed it.

The second and final story, "The Sematic Crocodile," was published in the February, 1941, issue of The Layman's Magazine and is a cross between a juvenile mystery and a slice of life story. Something along the lines of Theodore Roscoe's "I Was the Kid with the Drum" (collected in The Argosy Library: Four Corners, 2015) and John Russell Fearn's "The Thief of Claygate Farm" (collected in The Haunted Gallery, 2011), but without any serious crimes.

Doctor Young is told by Sheriff Rance Clayton that his five-year-old son, Tommy, came home that morning with "a real whopper." Tommy had been playing outside when he came dashing home with the story that he had been chased by "an enormous crocodile" with "big red eyes," but the stream is only a foot deep. So his father finds it hard to believe he was chased by a fifteen foot crocodile and grounded him for the rest of the day. However, Doctor Young believes there's a kernel of truth to the boy's story and demonstrates there was something very human underneath the monstrous appearance at the stream.

"The Sematic Crocodile" is a minor, but charming, story with the kind of solution you would expect from one of Robert Arthur and William Arden's The Three Investigators mysteries. I enjoyed reading this one as well.

So, yeah, these stories are absolute lightweight mysteries, but showed a unexpectedly different side of Brown with surprisingly down-to-earth plots and homely characters that are the polar opposite of those usually found in his darker, grittier and more hardboiled detective fiction – which makes them standout among his work. You can read these stories in The Layman's Magazine of the Living Church, Numbers 1-20, on Google Books. Enjoy!

The Bloody Moonlight (1949) by Fredric Brown

Fredric Brown was an American pulp writer who "crossed genres like a demon, plotted like a madman" and "continually stretched the boundaries of any given genre," such as in the phantasmagorical Night of the Jobberwock (1951) and the tongue-in-cheek Martians, Go Home (1955), which are mostly standalone works. However, Brown also created a popular pair of private-detectives, Ed and Am Hunter, who are an uncle-and-nephew team appearing in seven novels and two short stories.

Ambrose "Am" Hunter is a former carnival barker turned private-eye, working for the Starlock Detective Agency, who became a mentor to his young, inexperienced nephew, Ed Hunter, when his father was murdered on his way home from work – which is a story Brown told in the often praised The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947). So that's quite an origin story for a detective-character!

I've only read two Am and Ed Hunter novels, The Dead Ringer (1948) and Death Has Many Doors (1951), but they were good enough to keep the remaining titles on the big pile. Not to the mention the delightfully bizarre short impossible crime story "The Spherical Ghoul" (collected in Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories, 1987).

The Bloody Moonlight (1949) is their third outing and John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, recommended it as "an innovative blending of science-fiction, horror and detective novel plot devices" with a "subtle twist." I agree!

The story begins when a wealthy client of Ben Starlock, Justine Haberman, engages his agency to figure out whether or not "a new gadget" is worth a five-thousand dollar investment and he puts the Hunters on the case – telling them to keep expenses at a tidy twenty-five bucks. But this assignment has a peculiar angle from the start that rapidly begin to multiply involving "strange signals" and werewolves!

Stephen Amory is Justine Haberman's half uncle and an inventor with a steady income from things he has invented and patented. Lately, he has been tinkering with a new device that can receive signals, which has been picking inexplicable clicks. A repeated series of four clicks. So could these signals be coming from the fourth planet, Mars? Amory has said the signals probably aren't coming from one of our neighboring planets, but then why has he been trying to buy a star globe and borrowing books from the library on astronomy?

I know of two mystery writers who used a radio to make their characters believe they were listening to voices from beyond the grave (i.e. EVP). John Rhode's The House on Tollard Ridge (1929) and Agatha Christie's short story "Wireless" (collected in The Hound of Death and Other Stories, 1933), but an "interplanetary radio" receiving possible signals from Mars is a new one to me, which is why I loved it when they come down from the stars to visit the detective story – because they often bring something unusual or innovative to the table. Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) is a classic example of this.

Anyway, Am and Ed Hunter travel down to the small town of Tremont, where Amory lives, but Am immediately recedes into the background of the story as Ed takes the lead. You can say that The Bloody Moonlight is a hardboiled coming-of-age, or a baptism by fire, for the twenty-one year old detective who has been on the job for less than three days. And, before too long, he's finds himself neck deep in a murder case.

On his way to Amory's home, Ed is stopped dead in his tracks by the growl of an animal, "a bestial, vicious, murderous sound," which came from the edge of a thick underbush to his right and caught a glimpse of a white, oval face – standing man-high and growling like an animal. Something that "straight out of a horror program on the radio." 

So he hightailed it out of there, but when he got to a bend in the road he saw a man lying in a ditch between the road and an orchard. His throat had been torn out. But this is still only the beginning of his troubles in Tremont.

Sheriff Jack Kingman hates Chicago hoodlums and the only thing he hates even more is "a Chicago private dick."

So he's not exactly enamored with Ed Hunter when he reported the murder only to discover that the body has disappeared without a trace. Not even a drop of blood is found in the ditch! Sheriff Kingman is not amused and works over the rookie detective in the privacy of his own office, which results in cracked ribs and Ed left the police station a changed man. To use his own words, "the first time you're ever beaten up, especially when it's unjustly and through no fault of your own, does something to you. It's like when your parents die; it's like the first time you ever sleep with a woman. It does something to you; you aren't quite the same after that." Ed is determined to settle this business with the sheriff before leaving the town or part of him would be left lying on the floor of the police station.

A second distraction comes in the form of a beautiful librarian, Molly, who makes Ed feel a little weak in the knees, but this plot-thread comes to unexpected and slightly embarrassing end. I told you this was a hardboiled coming-of-age story of a young detective. Justine Haberman even commented that he appeared to have matured a good three years since the last time they talked, because Haberman had the idea she had been talking with an eighteen year old that time.

Ed still has to determine the veracity of the interplanetary radio and Amory's opinion on the radio signals he has been receiving is even more fascinating than the rumors that he's been listening in on a Martian civilization. Not to mention the werewolf murder.

John noted in his previously mentioned review that this story is one of those rare detective novels that treats lycanthropy "as a mental illness," rather than "relying on the usual mythology and legends found in werewolf movies that threat the phenomenon as real," which is actually more terrifying – because the criminally insane exist outside of the printed page. Unfortunately, the answer to the werewolf is not exactly, what you call, a rug-puller. However, every single plot-thread is dovetailed so beautifully that you can't possibly be left disappointed when you turn over the final page.

If there's anything to complain about, it's that Brown completely overlooked the possibility to blow his readers away with a tragic and devastating epilogue.

It's not a spoiler to say that the signals didn't emanate from Mars, or any other celestial body, but what if an epilogue had been added taking place on that planet. A scene depicting an elderly Martian overlooking his devastated and dying planet, which used to be the home of a great civilization, but a disaster has reduced them to a small, dwindling nomadic tribe traveling from one shallow watering hole to another. Just trying to survive in this extremely hostile environment. This elderly Martian looks up to the stars and wonders if they could have been saved, if they had the means to send out a distress signal to that blue planet where an advanced species had slowly began to emerge when a comet had ended theirs. Admit it. This would have been a great note to end the book on.

So, all of that being said, The Bloody Moonlight is still a pretty good, hardboiled detective story with a stacked plot, chuck-full of eerie and blood-curdling murders, which doubled as a tough coming-of-age story. I recommend it!

Carnival of Corpses

"It doesn't matter whether this world is crazy or not. It doesn’t matter if this absurdity is real. It doesn't matter how messed up this place may be… I want to survive!"

- Ganta Igarashi (Deadman Wonderland).

Fredric Brown's The Dead Ringer (1948) is the second chapter in the casebook of the nephew-and-uncle detective team of Ed and Ambrose Hunter, which followed in the wake of the Edgar Award winning novel The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947). I have, unfortunately, not read that particular book, but I know it has an 18-year-old Ed Hunter roaming the mean streets of Chicago for the man who mugged and killed his father. It was very well received at the time and Bill Pronzini labeled it as "unquestionable more than just another hard-boiled detective tale," but that’s a book for another day and the only reason I bring it up is to provide myself with a springboard into this review.

When his father was slugged and rolled into a grubby alley, Ed also brings his father's only other living relative back into the picture, a carnival barker and one-time private investigator named Ambrose "Am" Hunter, eventually becoming business partners when they set themselves up as licensed investigators, but at the opening of The Dead Ringer they run a ball game stand together – as part of a traveling carnival. The carnival life appears to agree with Ed Hunter, even though Brown's depiction of backstage gambling and drinking blew the stardust of the place, but hey, when a gorgeous woman from the posing show is making eyes at the now 19-year-old man romanticism has pretty much become a moot thing. Well, the fun has to stop at some point – even at the carnival! 

A body of a naked midget becomes, briefly, the unwanted star attraction of the fair, but it's not their own midget, who's in a terrible funk and eventually flees for his life, followed up by the drowning and resurrection of a terminally ill monkey. This provides the story with two excellent and evocative scenes, in which the earth-caked face of an undead monkey stares with glassy eyes through a window at Ed and the exhumation of its grave in a dark forest at the dead of night. Excellent stuff! The last murder is that of a kid who tap-danced under the stage name "Jigaboo" and was found naked at the side of a road. Run over by a car. Yeah. Brown was not a mystery writer who attended classes at The Realist School of Detective Fiction.

It's admirable how Brown turned this patchwork of unusual incidents and bizarre murders into a logical, coherent sequence of events and it could've been a minor masterpiece if it had been written more as a detective story. There was only one real clue (and an obscure one at that) that could give you an inkling of the truth, if you're lucky enough to catch it, but, other wise, you're groping around in the dark until the final chapter – and that bothered me to no end with this book because the solution was both original and imaginative. If this had been better handled, it would've easily conquered a spot on my list of favorite detective stories, but, as things are as they are, I could only really recommend The Dead Ringer for it's "wonderful 'carnie' atmosphere" – as the late "Grobius Shortling" described it.

I have to bring one more thing up about this book and that's its reverse take-on the meddling of amateur detectives in murder cases. After the third murder, Ed and Am have an argument over whether or not they should've acted sooner as they may've prevented more murders from happening. Uncle Am gives a few arguments in favor of the letting the police handle the case themselves, while a slightly guilty Ed prefers to take matters into his own hand. I found this interesting because (additional) deaths are usually caused by the amateurs interference and not by them sitting on their hands (e.g. Ellery Queen's guilt-trip in Cat of Many Tails, 1949).

Oh, just one more thing! Fellow locked room aficionado Mousoukyoku, who blogs On the Threshold of Chaos, has reviewed two Herbert Resnicow novels, The Gold Solution (1983) and The Gold Deadline (1984), and our opinions align and I feel confident that I have made a convert! You can read all my scribbles on Resnicow by clicking here. He also posted a favorable review of Paul Halter's The Fourth Door (1987). You can read all my scribbles on Halter by clicking here. 

Martians, Go Home!

“We have your satellite if you want it back send 20 billion in Martian money. No funny business or you will never see it again.”

- Reportedly seen on a wall in a hall at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, after losing contact with the Mars Polar Lander, 1999.

Malevolent ghosts emerging from their molding mausoleums, rooms which kills those left alone in them, vampires who dead awaken from their day-time slumber and vindictive curses hacking away at the branches of an ancient family tree had their respective turns as stage props for the locked room mystery in order to provide a backdrop harking back to the ink induced nightmares of Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. James. Some of them have since become tropes, but in the hands of a skillful writer they are still effective embellishments for the impossible crime story. Not so familiar are the, unfortunately, rare occasions when a visitor from the outer regions (read: SF-genre) wrote a locked room story festooned with the unknown horrors from the uncharted regions of outer space. Well, that's not quite true. The ones I have read were light-hearted and almost playful. 

Mack Reynold's The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) is an oddball private eye novel, in which an even odder group of SF-fans hire a run-down, failed detective to investigate the presence of alien life forms on Earth, who are taking shots at them with ray guns or throwing them from their flying saucers – one of them taking a hit while at a costumed science-fiction and fantasy convention. I thought this was far more engaging, funnier and better plotted than Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942), which had one of the most disappointing locked room tricks and it's only redeeming quality as a novel was its depiction of the 1940s SF-community, and even that was done better by Reynolds. All the same, I did grin at one of the characters take on the genre, stating that the fourth dimension takes the problem out of a locked room for science fiction writers, but, as a detective story, it never really left the launching pad. Yes, The Case of the Little Green Men should be added to my list of favorite impossible crime stories.

The American science-fiction writer Fredric Brown, who regularly descended back into the atmosphere for his second profession as a mystery novelist, gave us another specimen in Death Has Many Doors (1951) – in which his nephew-uncle team of private detectives, Ed and Ambrose Hunter, attempt to help a weak-hearted woman who's being menaced by Martians!

It's an unlikely story, to say the least, but Ed is determined to restore Sally Doerr's disturbed peace of mind, convincing her to spend the money she had scrapped together to hire a detective on a psychiatrist instead and plants himself on her couch for the night to stand guard against any threats – terrestrial, extraterrestrial or imagined. Unfortunately, being a good detective does not necessarily mean that you are a reliable bodyguard or an alert watch dog (c.f. Martin Méroy) and at the dawning of a new day he finds Sally dead in her bed. Her heart had simply stopped beating. 

Everything indicates a natural death: a medical history and the fact nobody could've gotten to her. The apartment door was locked from the inside, the windows were fastened and the dust of the day lay undisturbed on the windowsill, Ed was flat on the couch standing guard and the roof was recently tarred – leaving it soft and unmarked by any footprints. But an unknown voice on the phone, claiming to be a Martian, retains the services of the Hunters to investigate her death and spirits a crisp $1000 note into their office as a retainer. Sally's sister, Dorothy, also turns up with premonitions of her own impending doom and Ed decides to take her out town and sticks to her like a shadow, but is unable to prevent another death. You could consider this second murder an impossible one, but the solution is a flat-out cheat and Ed's moronic behavior only made it worst.

Death Has Many Doors has a lot of the elements in common with the marvelous Night of the Jabberwock (1951), in which a small town newspaper editor tumbles down the rabbit's hole, and the short locked mortuary story "The Spherical Ghoul," combining the intelligence of the ratiocinative detective school with the exterior of the hardboiled private eyes – except not as good. Sally's idée fixe isn’t developed into anything more than the delusions of a confused young woman and that their source of her fancies is obviously from fairly early on they hold no horrors whatsoever. If this book had been written by John Dickson Carr, we would’ve at least got a terrifying account of an encounter with these Martians and their possible involvement in the death of Sally would’ve been played up a lot more.

The idea of the first locked room trick was not bad, but it's not terrific, either, as you can easily guess the raw method of the solution (have seem them too many times) and the finer details require a bit of technical knowledge. Death Has Many Doors comes up a bit short as a detective story, but I would lie if I said I did not enjoy the ride in spite of its imperfections. Still, I would not recommend this book to readers who are new to Fredric Brown and advice to start out with Night of the Jabberwock.

Isn't funny that my biggest exposure to science-fiction comes from detective stories?