Terrarium Nine: "Murder in the Urth Degree" (1989) by Edward Wellen

Earlier this month, I revisited the short-lived Dr. Wendell Urth series of short stories, "Earth is An Armchair: The Wendell Urth Quartet by Isaac Asimov," which was brought back to my attention by two anonymous comments left on The Caves of Steel (1953/54) review – recommending the Edward Wellen pastiche "Murder in the Urth Degree" ("...which has perturbed me ever since"). "Murder in the Urth Degree" is a pastiche specially written for Foundation's Friends, Stories in Honor of Isaac Asimov (1989) with short stories set in Asimov's universe. I'll admit right off the bat this is a good short story and pastiche, but not for the reason you might think.

Terrarium Nine is one of a dozen hydroponics in near-earth orbit comprising of six concentric spheres with a pseudo black hole at the center to provide Earth-gravity for the innermost sphere. In this future, there are laws in place "against releasing genetically altered plants and animals into the terrestrial environment." So experiments have to be done off-place and the Terrariums in near-earth orbit were created for exactly that purpose.

Keith Flammersfeld, "the lone experimenter aboard Terrarium Nine," is hard worker and only occasionally takes a break to enjoy an interactive video. When the story opens, Flammersfeld is enjoying an interactive video of Through the Looking Glass, but, shortly after plugging out, discovers "someone had entered his system and infected it with rabid doggerel" ("who will win the Red Queen's race?"). A computer virus? A very elusive stowaway who suddenly made its presence known to Flammersfeld? The answer, or part of the answer, is found in the disturbance, uprooted soil of a cabbage patch in Buck Two. Flammersfeld "knew perfectly well what had grown at this particular spot, what should still be growing here, what seemed now on the loose" – stalking and targeting him ("how could he not have seen its intelligence waken, its hate turn on him?"). And he does not survive the encounter.

Now you might think I've revealed too much or Wellen tipped his hand too early, which is not the case. Wellen just managed expectations very well by not being too mysterious about what exactly was running loose in Buck Two of Terrarium Nine. It just needed a lot of horrifying details filled in.

That brings Inspector H. Seton Davenport, of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation, to the extraterrologists' extraterrologist, Dr. Wendell Urth. From the point of the view of the investigators, the death of Flammersfeld presents something of an impossible crime ("we can't call it accident, we can't call it murder, and we're not ready to call it suicide”) on a isolated space station with an array of bizarre clues and facts. Flammersfeld died from a poison-tipped dart, "a weird kind of curare crudely prepared," of which the remnants were found in a walnut shell along with a crude, toy-like catapult and winch ("...contraptions looked as if a child might have put them together"). And a decomposed cabbage! So had the story not been a quasi-inverted mystery showing from the beginning the murderer is non-human, the ending would have been something of a letdown. Well, not to its purely science-fiction audience, but the visiting detective fan certainly would have been disappointed. Now "Murder in the Urth Degree" stands as the most striking of the Wendell Urth short stories. An imitation outshining the original!

However, "Murder in the Urth Degree" is perhaps closer to a science-fiction/horror hybrid seasoned with a pinch of existential dread than an actual science-fiction mystery, but a great short story regardless. I enjoyed it. Thanks for the recommendation, Anon!

Earth is An Armchair: The Wendell Urth Quartet by Isaac Asimov

During the early 1950s, Isaac Asimov observed "one would think that science fiction would blend easily with the mystery," but, oddly enough, "it was the mystery form that seemed most difficult to amalgamate with science fiction" – hybrid mysteries were little more than novelties at the time. There were some early, well-intended attempts to blend the detective story with science-fiction, which were clunky at best (Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet, 1942) and poorly conceived at worst (David V. Reed's Murder in Space, 1944). Anthony Boucher arguably produced the only good hybrid mystery of the period, the time travel short story "Elsewhen" (1946).

Asimov saw a practically untapped reservoir of potential, "science itself is so nearly a mystery and the research scientist so nearly a Sherlock Holmes," prompting him to write his own science-fiction mystery, The Caves of Steel (1953/54). I reread it last year and remained of the opinion that it's one of the most important detective novels of the previous century. A truly futuristic, fair play detective novel demolishing the future argument that advancements in science and technology made the traditionally-plotted detective story obsolete. The Caves of Steel played the Grandest Game in the World inside a dystopian hellhole with humanoid-looking robots, mind probes and high-tech, breakaway civilizations. Asimov wrote a sequel, The Naked Sun (1956/57), "just to show that the first book wasn't an accident" in addition to "several short stories intended to prove that science fiction mysteries could be written in all lengths."

A personal favorite of these short stories is the standalone "Obituary" (1959), another criminal time travel story horribly gone wrong, but Asimov also created a short-lived series-character, Dr. Wendell Urth, who, "if the judgment of experts counted for anything, was Earth's most outstanding extraterrologist" – "on any subject outside Earth men came to him." However, Dr. Urth is an earthbound space sleuth who visited any of the planets nor strayed further than a few miles from his rooms. So basically a space detective who reasons from the largest and most comfortable armchair in our Solar System, Earth.

I read the four stories in the collection Asimov's Mysteries (1968) and thought the character was a great and original take on the armchair detective, but found the plots to be lacking. An anonymous comment brought up this short-lived series and noted "Edward Wellen also wrote a Wendell Urth mystery in Foundation's Friends which has perturbed me ever since." That just sounded like a good excuse to revisit this series. After all, I wanted to probe deeper into the hybrid mystery following the publication of Yamaguchi Masaya and Masahiro Imamura's two zombie mysteries, but there's simply not much out there to probe. So why not take another look at this series to see how they stand up.

"The Singing Bell," originally published in the January, 1955, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is an inverted mystery involving the "first murder on the Moon." Louis Peyton is asked by Albert Cornwell, "small-time retailer of stolen things," to help him get a cache of moon rocks, so-called "Singing Bells," from a crater on the Lunar surface ("...enough there to enable you and me to retire in affluence"). Singing Bells make heavenly sounds when struck correctly, which makes them expensive collector's items ("a supply of Bells would be worth murder"). After securing the cache, Peyton shoots Cornwell with a blaster and hastily beats a return to Earth to destroy evidence where rigged up a clever, counter intuitive non-alibi – reasoning that nothing is "so conducive to an appearance of innocence as the triumphant lack of an alibi." Peyton has a long-standing habit to seclude himself every August inside his remote house in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, protected with a force field fence ("no one saw him, no one could reach him"). Inspector Davenport, of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation, knows Peyton was on the Moon and shot Cornwell, but difficult to prove without an apparently rock solid alibi ("if he had an alibi, I could crack it somehow, because it would be a false one"). And he first needs to prove Peyton was on the Moon, before he can subject him to a psychoprobe. So turns Dr. Wendell Urth to help him nail the man on the Moon for murder.

A fairly good and amusing short story with an intriguing enough premise and a clever take on the unbreakable alibi, but it all begged for something better, slightly more ambitious than a simple "ha, gotcha" solution.

"The Talking Stone" originally appeared in the October, 1955, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and is rightfully the best-known of the Wendell Urth stories. The titular stone is a silicon based life form, a silicony, which are ovoid-shaped creature with smooth, oily skin with two sets of appendages – six "legs" below and rabbit-like "ears" on its back. Siliconeus asteroidea exist on asteroids who "get their energy by the direct absorption of gamma rays" and Dr. Wendell Urth argued "there isn't enough gamma radiation on any asteroid to support siliconies more than an inch or two long." When a spaceship, Robert Q, docks at Station Five in the asteroid belt for emergency repairs, the attendant notices the captain has a bigger than usual silicony aboard. And figures the creature must have come from an uranium rich asteroid ("...one great big fat chunk of uranium ore like nobody on Earth saw..."). So sees an opportunity for promotion, but everything goes horrible wrong when the Robert Q collides with an asteroid. The human crew of uranium died in the crash and the silicony is dying.

Only the dying silicony knows where the human crew hid, or wrote down, the coordinates to the uranium asteroid, which are nowhere to be found. Fortunately, the silicony have "rudimentary telepathic powers" that allows it to read minds and talk to humans. Although not much help as the last words of the silicony, "on the asteroid," proved to be very little help. Why write the coordinates on the asteroid ("that's like locking a key inside the cabinet it's meant to open"). So they turn to Earth's most celebrated extraterrologist, Dr. Wendell Urth, to decipher the silicony's dying message.

This is an excellent blend of science-fiction and mystery as having a detective decipher a dying message from an alien creature is a great idea. Due to the short length and some clueing, the problem is actually a solvable one. All you need is to add a bit of creative thinking and the solution should not be too difficult to spot, which is incidentally its only weak spot. Not because it's solvable, but because cracking an alien dying message should be a lot harder to do. And perhaps "The Talking Stone" should have been a novel-length science-fiction mystery. Nevertheless, it's a rock solid hybrid mystery.

The last two stories are both longer and poorer, much poorer, detective stories beginning with "The Dying Night," published in the July, 1956, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which centers on a class reunion of four scientists – three of whom recently returned to Earth. Edward Talliaferro worked on the Lunar Observatory, Stanley Kaunas on the Mercury Observatory and Battersley Ryger and the distant Ceres Observatory. Romano Villiers, "the most brilliant of the four," became sick and was unable to leave Earth. Something that ate away at him and eventually unbalanced his mind, but, during the reunion, Villiers announces he's "discovered a practical method of mass transference through space." But then he dies in his hotel room. And papers goes missing. Most curious of all is the particular, illogical hiding place of a certain object. Dr. Wendell Urth is asked to shine his light on this little mystery among scientists.

Asimov wrote in his afterword that "this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events" and (jokingly) wishes "astronomers would get things right to begin with," because he refused to "to change the story to suit their whims." That's all fine and funny, if "The Dying Night" had just been dated science-fiction short story, but it also tries to be a fair play detective story requiring knowledge of astronomy in order to solve the problem. So, purely as a detective story, it has aged very poorly and became less fair overtime. Still better than the last story in the series.

"The Key" first appeared in the October, 1966, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and takes the series back to the Moon. Karl Jennings and James Strauss are conducting the first ever, privately funded selenographic expedition to land on the Lunar surface and they make a momentous discovery. A ragged, nearly amorphous piece of metal and the spectrograph identifies it as artificial, "titanium-steel, essentially, with a hint of cobalt and molybdenum," but no records exist of a spaceship ever landing or crashing on that part of the Moon – suggesting it "to be of ancient and non-human manufacture" ("an artifact of some ship wrecked eons ago"). Something they're able to confirm when they find something Jennings calls the Device. A strange piece of technology that allows for mind reading and it reveals to Jennings that Strauss is an Ultra. A group of radicals who want to reduce the six billion people of Earth down to roughly five million.

So the aftermath of this revelation is Jennings' body being found on a skim boat with a stab wound and Strauss was alive but in delirium. What happened to the Device? A dying Jennings hid it somewhere on the Moon and left behind a coded message addressed to his old teacher, Dr. Wendell Urth, who naturally manages to decode it. A very disappointing story as it completely ignored the fascinating mystery of what and who crash landed on the Moon ages ago. Why bring in a mind reading device when Dr. Urth could have been presented with the ultimate case for an extraterrologist! Something that could very well have forced him to break his habit of never leaving his neighborhood, which would have been fitting for his final outing and a puzzle of such a enormous magnitude. This is just dumb, stupid and unworthy of Asimov.

Well, it seems a second reading only confirmed my first, dimly remembered impression that the first two were definitely better than the last two and the best part being the character of Dr. Wendell Urth. There's something very pleasing about an earthbound extraterrologist and armchair detective who uses the planet as his armchair to ponder the mysteries of the universe, but Dr. Wendell Urth deserved to have better, much more cases to his credit. Perhaps even his own science-fiction mystery novel as there's more in the character and series than Asimov got out of it. So I'll definitely going to track down Edward Wellen's pastiche "Murder in the Urth Degree" (1989) to see what he managed to do with the character.

The Caves of Steel (1953/54) by Isaac Asimov

Once upon a time, in the 1950s, the detective genre received a distinguished visitor from outer space, Isaac Asimov, who came as an ambassador from a space-faring fandom bearing a truly priceless gift, The Caves of Steel (1953/54) – one of the most important detective novels of the 20th century. The Caves of Steel is not the first attempt to fuse the detective and science-fiction genres on an atomic level, but it's the first to do it successfully. More importantly, Asimov demonstrated that advancements in forensic science and technology poses no obstacle to writing and plotting a legitimate detective story. Asimov managed to craft a fair play, Golden Age-style detective novel that takes place in a dystopian future replete with humanoid-looking robots, force barriers, mind probes ("cerebroanalysis"), energy blasters and breakaway civilizations. First a short detour.

The hybrid mystery has always been somewhat of a novelty in the peripheral of mostly established writers. John Dickson Carr injected time travel into some of his historical mysteries and Anthony Boucher wrote the best-known time travel (locked room) mystery, but Carr's historical novels never received the same acclaim as his regular work and "Elsewhen" (1946) is Boucher's only real hybrid mystery – representing two of the more successful attempts. There are also far less impressive hybrid mysteries like Manly Wade Wellman's nonetheless interesting Devil's Planet (1942), David V. Reed's poorly conceived Murder in Space (1944) and John Russell Fearn tried his hands at a couple science-fiction mysteries with generally mediocre results. The Master Must Die (1953) is the only somewhat decent hybrid mystery Fearn produced and tended to keep himself to one genre at the time.

You can find more of these short-lived, often one-off experiments like Christopher St. John Sprigg's alternate history mysteries Fatality in Fleet Street (1933) and Death of a Queen (1935). Moray Dalton's tantalizingly sounding, long out-of-print apocalyptic whodunit, The Black Death (1934). Theodore Roscoe's speculative I'll Grind Their Bones (1937) must have read like a science-fiction mystery when it was first published, but sadly turned out to be a prophetic image of the then coming war. However, the only two writers who appear to have made serious work of the hybrid mystery were Isaac Asimov and Randall Garrett. Consequently, they delivered the only high profile, even iconic hybrid mysteries, The Caves of Steel and Too Many Magicians (1966). Yes, I famously dislike Too Many Magicians, but you all decided it's a genre classic. I was not consulted nor signed off on that decision, however, that's a discussion for another time.

So until the relatively recent translations 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 hybrid mystery seldom came up – unless in reference to Asimov or Randall. Masaya and Imamura served fans a reminder of the still largely untapped plotting and storytelling potential that comes with mixing genres as long as it has an internal logic and consistency as an overlay for the detective story's fair play rules. Ever since, the hybrid mystery has come up more often around these parts, but a lack of available (quality) material prevented a deep dive into the subject. Pickings are slim in the West and most of the Japanese more recent takes on the hybrid mystery currently reside behind a language barrier. I remember Asimov did exactly the same thing with science-fiction in The Caves of Steel as Masaya and Imamura did with the living dead in their detective classics. I decided to toss Asimov's famous science-fiction mystery hybrid on the reread list.

The Caves of Steel was originally serialized from October to December 1953 in Galaxy magazine and published in hardcover the following year. The story takes place 3000 years into the future when Earth's population has 8 billion and counting. So over a period of millennia, the people retreated deep inside windowless, metallic mega cities ("the Cities") housing tens of millions of people. Practically nobody lives or even dares to venture outside the Cities, "outside was the wilderness, the open sky that few men could face with anything like equanimity," except for robots working the yeast fields, farms and mines for food and resources. The City was "the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants" as "it asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control." This came with a credit score system and each ranking came with special privileges ("a seat on the expressway in the rush hour, not just from ten to four. Higher up on the list-of-choice at the Section kitchens. Maybe even a chance at a better apartment and a quota ticket to the Solarium levels"). One of the worst things that could happen in this world is "the prospect of the desperate minimum involved in declassification" stripping an individual of all special privileges making existence somewhat endurable.

So, under these conditions, built-up inhibitions sometimes explode, but twenty-five years ago, the Spacers returned to their ancestral home world and not without some dire consequences.

Centuries before Earth buried itself in its Cities, humanity experienced a true Golden Age as mankind expanded to the stars and colonized fifty different worlds, all under Earth's control, but there was a hard break between Earth and the so-called Outer Worlds – a break in more ways than one. Spacers not only made themselves "independent of the mother planet," but "had bred disease out of their societies" and "avoided, as far as possible, contact with disease-riddled Earthmen." So they kept their birthrate down, immigrants from teeming Earth out and enjoyed the luxury of underpopulated, robot-serviced worlds and an average life expectancy of 350 years. Twenty-five years ago, the Spacers returned to Earth in gleaming cruisers to "sent down their soldiers into Washington, New York and Moscow to collect what they claimed was theirs." Ever since their arrival, the Spacers had a permanent presence, or enclave, on the planet.

Spacetown is situated in the Newark Section of New York City, larger than Los Angeles and more populous than Shanghai, which is "spread over two thousand square miles and at the last census its population was well over twenty million." ("what was called Yeast-town in popular speech was, to the Post Office, merely the boroughs of Newark, New Brunswick and Trenton"). Naturally, access to Spacetown is as restricted to Earth people as the Outer Worlds themselves. That has caused problems ever since Spacetown was established ("...remembered the Barrier Riots") as it has become the target of anti-robot sentiments. Spacers try to get the robots out of the mines and off the farms and integrate them into the Cities. An integrated human/robot society they call "a C/Fe culture." Something that comes at an additional cost as robots began taking away jobs, "creating a growing group of displaced and declassified men." There's growing resentment fawning the flames of "the thing called Medievalism" whose rallying cry is "back to the soil." So things get very tricky when a well-known Spacer is brutally murdered right inside the limits of Spacetown.

Roj Nemennuh Sarton, a sociologist specialized in robotics, planned to make a drastic, last ditch effort to penetrate the psychology of the City societies rather than dismissing their attitude as being part of the make-up of "the unchanging Earth" – or else Spacetown will go down as a failure. But he never gets that far. Someone, somehow managed to enter Spacetown and kill the sociologist ("He died of a missing chest. Someone had used a blaster on him"). Spacetown is under New York jurisdiction and Spacers have agreed to leave the investigation in their hands, but under the condition one of their agents assists their policeman. Plainclothes Man Elijah "Lije" Baley, Police Department, City of New York, Rating C-5, gets partnered with R. Daneel Olivaw. R stands for robot. The latest, most advanced model in Spacer robotics barely distinguishable from real humans. The keyword is barely which will spell no end of trouble for Baley and his family in a crammed, tightly-packed City rife with anti-robot and Spacer sentiments.

The Caves of Steel begins closer to a science-fiction novel than a detective story as Asimov does a lot of world-building and some characterization, but don't make the mistake to skim over these parts to get to the "good parts." Asimov is doing so much than world-building as he carefully places all the pieces of the detective story on the board. What you're being told about this world and the information Baley learns a crucial building blocks of the plot, which excellently demonstrated in Chapter 8 ("Debate Over a Robot") and 9 ("Elucidation by a Spacer"). Baley takes everything that has been learned and absorbed up to that point to present a very convincingly (theoretically speaking) argued solution largely based on the apparent impossibility of a robot dying the First Law of Robotics ("a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"). The end of that chapter and the next one neatly demolished Baley's theory. A false-solution in the tradition of the best from Anthony Berkeley, Leo Bruce and Ellery Queen! So back to the drawing board. And as they continued their investigating, Baley learned enough new things and information for a second false-solution.

Most ingenious of all, the two false-solutions show how extremely well Asimov fused the science-fiction genre with the Golden Age-style detective novel as the solutions are based on pure science-fiction, while simultaneously being completely logical and fair. All could have been done within the clearly stated boundaries of this fictitious world to the point where it actually like The Caves of Steel could be detective story written during in that time and place. However, did Asimov avoided the pitfall of the false-solutions outshining the real solution? Yes! More on that in a minute. First I want to briefly return to the world-building.

Since good hybrid mysteries have been short supply, I've been dipping into Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict series. A science-fiction series often sporting strong mystery, or puzzle, elements to the plot, but always appreciated the small details to its world-building that makes it feel like it's populated and colonized by human beings. Littering the galactic culture with our little customs, stories, myths and legends. 

Asimov never gives the reader an extensive history lesson on how his future Earth and the Outer Worlds came about. Just how everything works and giving a sense of time-and place, but does it very well and enjoyed the faux historical and cultural references as much as the real ones from the classics – even giving some character and homeliness to the "imprisoning caves of steel." For example, there's a chase scene across the accelerating strips of the Cities densely crowded, rapid transit system. Baley draws on his experience as a teenager who used to play a game called Running the Strips ("its object is to get from point A to point B via the City's rapid transit system in such a way that the "leader" manages to lose as many of his followers as possible"). A handful of players get killed every year playing the game, dozens more get injured and the police persecutes them relentlessly, but the strip-running gangs remain. Because a successful, well-known leader is "cock-of-the-walk." Another example is a reference to a fictional short story that began as a crime story and ended as a ghost story that "lost the attributes of ordinary fiction and had entered the realm of folklore" ("the Wandering Londoner had become a familiar phrase to all the world").

The Caves of Steel is not a pleasant place to live, or thrive, where a good, even exciting day is taking your kid to the zoo to gawk at cats, dogs and sparrows or getting to pick what kind of grub you get served in the community kitchen. These small, human touches provided a few bright spots to its bleak, desolate and dystoptian surroundings. It's what humans would do even under those circumstances. However, Asimov does provide a small flicker of hope and seamlessly wove it all together with the question who murdered Dr. Sarton. And why. Or how. So back to Baley's third and correct solution.

Firstly, I somewhat reluctantly tagged the review as a locked room, because The Caves of Steel is generally considered to be a locked room mystery. Technically, the problem of the murder weapon disappearing from a thoroughly searched crime scene, "yet it could not have vanished like smoke," qualifies as an impossible crime, but it wouldn't be fair to present it as an impossible crime. The Caves of Steel is an excellent whodunit with a good how-was-it-done pull masterly playing on the least-likely-suspect gambit. Secondly, Asimov played the game scrupulously fair with the reader, dropping clues and planting red herrings, while explaining how everything worked and fitted together in his world. Just as impressive is how the correct solution contrasted with the two false-solutions. The false-solutions have a certain artificiality to them, while the third solution brings everything back to human proportions by offering that hopeful flicker of light. And not at the cost of the correct solution turning out to be less ingenious or satisfying than the false-solutions. Everything from the far-flung future settings and its own unique array of troubles to the politically sensitive murder of an elite Spacer, everything simply came and fitted together effortlessly to form one of the best and most important detective novels of the 20th century! A double masterpiece and deservedly the most celebrated hybrid mystery novel on this side of the planet.

In short, Asimov's The Caves of Steel is a strange, exotic material not originally from our timeline that sometimes receives strange signals from Ganymede and comes recommended without a single reservation.

The Logic of Lunacy: Ronald A. Knox's "The Motive" (1937) and Isaac Asimov's "The Obvious Factor" (1973)

It seems that today Father Ronald A. Knox is mostly remembered as someone who helped shape the genre, codifying "The Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction" (1929) and becoming "a pioneer of Sherlockian criticism," whose only well-known piece of detective fiction is a short story, "Solved by Inspection" (1931) – collected in The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (1990). This does Knox a great disservice as a not untalented mystery writer in his own right. The Three Taps (1927) can testify to this. A sparkling novel full with rivaling detectives, false-solutions and clues that possibly had a bigger hand in shaping the British detective story of the 1930s than it has received credit for over the decades. 

So I wanted to return to Knox's detective fiction before too long, but, before delving into his novel-length mysteries, I wanted to tale a look at his second, practically forgotten, short story. A satirical story-within-a-story published at the height of the genre's Golden Age. 

"The Motive" first appeared in The Illustrated London News, November 17, 1937, which was subsequently reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, MacKill's Mystery Magazine and The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (2018). Story begins in the Senior Common Room, or the smoking-room, of Simon Magus college where a "boorishly argumentative" drama critic, Penkridge, contrived to put Sir Leonard Huntercombe on his own defense. Sir Leonard is a defense lawyer and "probably responsible for more scoundrels being at large than any other man in England," which he considers to be "a kind of artistic gift" as you need to be imaginative "to throw yourself into the business of picturing the story happening as you want it to have happened" – always figuring a completely innocent client. So he tells them the story of a former client by the name of Westmacott.

Westmacott is a middle aged, restless and unhealthy looking man who retired early with more money than he knew what to do with and surprised his friends when he decides to spend Christmas holiday at "one of those filthy great luxury hotels in Cornwall." A place that attracts a modern, cosmopolitan and rather Bohemian crowd. Such as a modern novelist with a penchant for scandal, Smith, whose work "looked as if it was meant to be seized by the police." So not exactly the kind of holiday destination you expect someone to pick who's "well known to be old-fashioned in his views and conservative in his opinions." There's certainly something out-of-character about what happens next.

During the Christmas celebration, Westmacott suggests to play blind man's buff in the hotel swimming pool, but Smith and Westmacott eventually stayed behind to settle an argument with "a practical try-out and a bet." Westmacott argued that you couldn't know what direction you were swimming in when you were blindfolded, while Smith bragged it was perfectly easy. Smith is blindfolded and has "to swim ten lengths in the bath each way, touching the ends every time, but never touching the sides." So, when Smith did his ten lengths, he tried to touch the handrail, but it wasn't there! The whole place was dark and he pretty quickly figures out a lot of water had been let out of the pool, which effectively trapped and left him to drown when he got too exhausted to swim. A very observant night watchman saved him from potentially drowning over night. This naturally landed Westmacott in some hot water, but the lack of motive, the difficulty of proving he had tampered with the water supply and a handsome compensation ensured the case was hushed up. Sir Leonard had not seen the last of his curious client.

Less than a week later, "a seedy-looking fellow calling himself Robinson" became a regular visitor of Westmacott's home, always wearing dark spectacles, who evidently "got a hold of some kind over Westmacott" that frightened the wits out of him – arming himself with a revolver and even poison. Robinson even accompanies Westmacott on a train trip to his friends to celebrate the New Year, but Robinson mysteriously disappears from his (locked) sleeper compartment with the only entrance being the communicating door in Westmacott's compartment. Yes, this is kind of a locked room mystery. Sir Leonard has to defend Westmacott on an actual murder charge this time and he both confesses and denies to have murdered Robinson, but his motivation and behavior remain murky and incomprehensible. This is where the story becomes a minor gem!

You can easily poke through the locked room-trick in the sleeper compartment, but leaves you with an even bigger question of Chestertonian proportions! Why? Why in the hell would anyone do something like that? It makes no sense whatsoever. Sir Leonard explains "the logic of lunacy," which sounded perfectly logical, behind these two lunatic schemes. Only to pull the rug underneath the reader's feet with a very brazen, final twist. A twist that was beautifully clued and foreshadowed. I'm just left with one question: why, in God's name, did I neglect Knox for all these years?

I originally intended to only review Knox's "The Motive," but its final twist reminded me of another detective story, written more than thirty years later, which tried to do something very similar. So decided to pull my copy of Isaac Asimov's The Return of the Black Widowers (2003) from the shelf to reread that somewhat controversial impossible crime story. 

"The Obvious Factor" was originally published in the May, 1973, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and first collected in Tales of the Black Widowers (1974). Story is the sixth recorded meeting of an exclusive, men-only dinning club, the Black Widowers, who meet once a month in a private dinner room of an Italian restaurant in New York – discussing various subjects, solving puzzles and grilling the guest. Each month, one of the members brings along a guest who's always pestered with the same question, "how do you justify your existence?" However, this question always reveals that the guest has a problem or puzzle to solve, but it's always their personal waiter and honorary Black Widower, Henry, who comes up with the solution. Henry is the only armchair detective in fiction who never sits down as he works out a problem.

Thomas Trumbull is the host of "The Obvious Factor" and his guest of the evening is Dr. Voss Eldridge, Associate Professor of Abnormal Psychology, which turns the conversation from pulp magazines and Roger Halsted writing "a limerick for every book of the Iliad" to parapsychological phenomena. Dr. Eldridge tries to shine a light on telepathy, precognition and even ghosts. Not a month goes by without something crossing his desk that he can't explain, but the club of rationalists are naturally more than a little skeptical. Dr. Eldridge decides to tell them "a story that defies the principle of cause and effect" and thereby "the concept of the irreversible forward flow of time," which is "the very foundation stone on which all science is built."

Dr. Eldridge tells of young woman, Mary, who never finished school and worked behind the counter of a department store, but despite her odd, anti-social behavior, she kept her job. Mary has an uncanny knack to spot shoplifters and "losses quickly dropped to virtually nothing in that particular five-and-ten" despite being in a bad neighborhood. She eventually came to the attention of Dr. Eldridge and discovers "the background of her mind is a constant flickering of frightful images," occasionally lit up "as though by a momentary lightening flash," allowing her to see near future. During one particular session, Mary had a particular eerie premonition as she began to scream about a fire. And the details match a deadly house fire in San Francisco. Even more eerie, "the fire broke out at just about the minute Mary's fit died down" in New York.

Dr. Eldridge tells the Black Widowers that "a few minutes is as good as a century" as "cause and effect is violated and the flow of time is reversed," but the Black Widowers refuse to accept precognition as an answer. So they try to poke holes in the story, but every reasonable, logical answer is eliminated and the club members find themselves backed into a corner. If it wasn't precognition, what was it? Henry quickly comes to their rescue and explains what really happened as effortlessly as flashing a smile. The most obvious solution of all!

If I remember the comments on the old, now defunct Yahoo GAD list correctly, not everyone was particular charmed, or amused, with Asimov's solution/twist. I found it amusing enough to go along with it, however, there's an important and notable difference in quality between Asimov and Knox's stories. Knox's "The Motive" can still stand on its own, as a detective story, without that last, delicious twist, but Asimov's "The Obvious Factor" slyly used a very similar twist for somewhat of a cop out ending – which can strike some as lazy plotting or just plain unfair. But decide for yourself.

So, all in all, I very much enjoyed "The Motive," a glittering specimen of the short British detective story, which toyed with the same idea as "The Obvious Factor," but they came away being vastly different detective stories. It was a pretty good idea to read them back-to-back.

A Puzzle for Dessert: "The Recipe" (1990) by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov is a monument of the Science-Fiction genre and was a ferocious mystery reader who, together with Anthony Boucher, became one of the most important "Visitors from Science-Fiction" to the detective story – penning the stellar The Caves of Steel (1953). A novel that demolished the argument that modern forensics and emerging technologies have made clever, intricate plotting absolute decades before it was made. An undisputed top 100 mystery novel!

Asimov proved to have a versatile hand when handling the detective story format and wrote hybrids (Asimov's Mysteries, 1968), juvenile mysteries (The Key Word and Other Mysteries, 1977) and regular detective novels (Murder at the ABA, 1976), but my personal favorite will always remains his series of short armchair detective stories.

The Black Widowers is a men-only dinner club, who meet once a month, comprising of Geoffrey Avalon (patent lawyer), James Drake (chemist), Mario Gonzalo (artist), Roger Halsted (mathematics teacher), Emmanuel Rubin (novelist) and Thomas Trumbull (cryptography expert). Every month, they come together in a private-room at an Italian restaurant, Milano, and one of them has to bring a along an interesting guest.

Traditionally, the guest is grilled, all in good humor, which includes the question how the guest justifies his existence, but every time it turns out that the guest has an unsolved mystery for them answer – usually these problems falls into the category of "Everyday Life Mysteries." They occasionally get to discuss a murder (e.g. "Early Sunday Morning" from Tales of the Black Widowers, 1974), but, more often than not, they're those minor mysteries everyone can encounter in their day-to-day life. A good example of this is the missing umbrella from "Lost in a Space Warp" from The Return of the Black Widowers (2003).

However, the person who solves all of these mysteries is their waiter and honorary club member, Henry Jackson, who closely listens to the stories and false solutions proposed by the Black Widowers. And from this he reasons the one and only correct explanation for any given problem.

The Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990) is the penultimate collection in this series and the last story, "The Recipe," was the final new Black Widowers story to be published during Asimov's lifetime.

Interestingly, "The Recipe" is homage to everyone's favorite mystery novelist and the master of the locked room puzzle, John Dickson Carr. In his afterword, Asimov wrote that he was inspired to write the story after reading The Third Bullet (1953) and was at "once overwhelmed with a desire" to craft a locked room puzzle, but was faced with the seemingly impossibility of thinking up "a new gimmick" – Carr had simply done it all. Nevertheless, an idea occurred to him and sat down to put the idea to paper in one sitting. Asimov was a notorious writing machine.

Note for the curious: Asimov said in the same afterword that he had never written "a Black Widowers story involving a locked-room," but this is not entirely true. "The Redhead" from Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984) is a genuine locked room story about a miraculous disappearance. If I remember correctly, "Ph As in Phony" and "The Obvious Factor" from Tales of the Black Widowers are borderline impossible crimes.

"The Recipe" begins with a discussion of Carr and locked room mysteries in general after Trumbull casually mentioned he had just read The Third Bullet. However, I think many of us, particular my fellow locked room readers, would take exception to the opinions spouted by the Black Widowers here!

Carr's writing is criticized as being overly melodramatic so that "the reader is always uncomfortably aware that he is reading fiction." Personally, I love Carr's Baghdad-on-the-Thames or Grand Guignol novels and his ability to create tense, terror-filled atmosphere is one of the most attractive aspects of his detective fiction. However, that's completely subjective. 

But they also criticize his plotting: Carr's locked room solution take an average of twenty pages to explain, which are "so intricate that the reader can't follow it without reading it several times," but this is not entirely true – because The Third Bullet is one of those elegantly simple impossible crime. Sure, Carr has dreamed up some ridiculous, overly complex locked room tricks (e.g. The Problem of the Wire Cage, 1939). But what about The Judas Window (1938), She Died a Lady (1943), He Who Whispers (1946) and Captain Cut-Throat (1955)? These are some of his best and most popular works with good, but easy to explain, locked room tricks.

Rubin is a mystery novelist and tells the group he never tried his hand at a locked room novel, because he claims Carr "killed the market for them." And he couldn't think of "a new variation." This reminded Gonzalo of the What's the Greatest Not By. So "what's the greatest locked-room mystery story not written by John Dickson Carr?" Nobody had an answer! Nobody! I'm an unapologetic JDC fanboy, but even I can throw out numerous examples that can rival the master: W. Shepard Pleasants' The Stingaree Murders (1932), Christianna Brand's Death of Jezebel (1948), Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954), Helen McCloy's Mr. Splitfoot (1968), Herbert Resnicow's The Dead Room (1987) and Paul Halter's La ruelle fantôme (The Phantom Passage, 2005). Just to name but a few.

After the banquet and discussion, the guest of the evening, Myron Dynest, tells the Black Widowers he has a real-life example of a locked house mystery.

Dynest used to be plumber and moved from the city to suburbs where his wife, an old-fashioned country woman, has come back to life as she spends her time organizing church socials, picnics and neighborhood activities – as well as putting her talents as a cook to good use. Ginny is an excellent cook and someone suggested she should bundle all of her recipes into a cookbook. However, Ginny is reluctant to part with the recipe of her famous blueberry muffins and only briefly wrote down the recipe. Before she destroyed it. This happened when Ginny was babysitting a bunch of five-year-old children and the house had been completely locked at the time. Nobody had entered or left the house in the brief period between the time the recipe was written down and destroyed, but the recipe was stolen and the next day the recipe was posted on the church bulletin board. A word for word copy as she had written it. So who stole the recipe and, more importantly, how was it done?

The solution to the problem of the locked house is fairly clued, but the answer to the trick is not exactly original. I've seen variations on this trick before, which usually turn out to be incredibly carny, however, Asimov deserves credit for delivering the most believable and acceptable version of this locked room idea – which alone makes this story potential material for a future locked room anthology. I do think that the solution, especially the identity of the culprit, shows Asimov's admiration for Agatha Christie.

All things considered, "The Recipe" was a minor, but amusing, locked room story and a reminder I have to return one of these days to the Black Widowers.

Ghost in the Light

"...there is evil everywhere under the sun."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun, 1941)

During the 1950s, the celebrated and incredibly prolific science-fiction author, Isaac Asimov, wrote "a series of six derring-do novels" about the ace investigator of the Council of Science, David "Lucky" Starr, which is a gig that brought him to every world in our Solar System – all of them colonized and inhabited by humans. As they should be!

The stories fall into the category of juvenile fiction and were initially published under a pseudonym, "Paul French," but the name was dropped when plans for a television series fell through. So the series always impressed me as an action/adventure stories in a science-fiction surrounding, but, according to Mike Grost, there's one Lucky Starr title offering "a fully fair play mystery." One that has clues and "a dying message delivered by a non-human character," which should give the observant reader a couple of strong hints as to who the culprit is. So how could I possibly resist?

Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury (1956) is the third book in the series and brings David "Lucky" Starr and his small, Martian-born sidekick, John Bigman Jones, to the smallest and innermost planet of the Solar System – a two-faced celestial body called Mercury. Since the planet is the next door neighbor of our Sun, it's not the most hospitable place for permanent human settlement. However, the planet had been mined in the past for precious metals, such as silver and platinum, and recently became the location of an expensive research project.

At the Solar Observatory at the Mercurial North Pole, they're testing a completely new branch of science, called Sub-etheric Optics, which would allow them to intercept sunlight, guide it through hyperspace, and spread it evenly over the Earth – effectively giving them full control over the seasons. The "distribution of sunlight" would turn the Earth into a "conditioned paradise," but, recently, the project is plagued by a series of accidents. And they're taking a toll on the engineer in charge of Project Light, Scott Mindes.

Upon their arrival on Mercury, Mindes tells Lucky and Bigman there are "two-legged ghosts" on the Sun-side of the planet. Mindes has been scouting the Sun-side in a small rocket-scooter and observed "something that moved under the sun," something wearing a metallic spacesuit, who was seen standing still in the Sun for minutes at a time – as though it didn't care "a thing for the heat and radiation." Something that would be even ill-advised to do in a special insulated spacesuit.

So is the metal-clad ghost a fragment of the engineer's unstable imagination? An unknown Mercurian life-form? Or a saboteur from the Sirius star system?

After the opening chapters, the red-thread running through the plot splits into several sub-threads, which are still tightly connected to one another, but allows for some of the spotlight to be shown on Starr's right-hand man. Bigman got himself into a feud with Jonathan Urteil, a "roving investigator" for Senator Swenson, who stands in opposition to the Council of Science. A dispute that would eventually lead to a duel fought in low-gravity to make up for the weight difference between both men and resulted in a simple, but original, murder involving a gravity lock.

However, the murder is committed relatively late into the story and before they dueled in low-gravity, Bigman and Urteil had a close brush with death in the dark, disused mines that has a backstory that could be used as the premise of a science-fiction horror movie.

Bigman and Lucky Starr

The mines were slowly being abandoned fifty years ago, when the observatory was constructed, but the only thing that never died down were the stories the miners left behind for the astronomers. Stories about miners who were inexplicably frozen to death in the shafts. In those days, the mine shafts were fairly well heated and the power units of their suits functioned normally, but miners kept dying from an inexplicable and intense cold – eventually only entered into the main shafts in gangs. Bigman and Urteil stumble across the answer to "the freezing death in the mines," but the answer in question is pure science-fiction. However, the problem gave the book some nice and imaginative scenes.

Yes, I realize this is the third mystery in row about a mine, having previously reviewed Tyline Perry's The Owner Lies Dead (1930) and M.V. Carey's The Mystery of Death Trap Mine (1976), but was unaware Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury had a sub-plot about an old, abandoned mine when picking the book from the big pile.

Meanwhile, Lucky is exploring the Sun-side of Mercury with an ergometer and comes across the tall, metallic figure glanced by Mindes, but all I can really say about this plot-thread is that Asimov had really stopped hiding his identity at this point in the series. Something is revealed in these chapters that makes no bones about the fact that these books take place in the same universe as (some) of his other science-fiction/mystery stories. And this figure gives Starr an incomprehensible dying message, "er—er," when asked who was behind the acts of sabotage.

It's a rudimentary and simplistic dying message, but one that makes perfect sense when explained and beautifully complements the other clues pointing the murderer/saboteur. Asimov really showed his then brand new credentials as a part-time mystery novelist. Granted, the story does not translate into a genre-classic, or even one of Asimov's best hybrid mysteries, but the plot was sound and all of the plot-threads tied up satisfactorily. And the Mercurial backdrop was great.

Even though Asimov had to admit in his introduction, written for Fawcett editions, that "the advance of science can outdate even the most conscientious science-fiction," because his "astronomical descriptions are longer accurate in all respects." But that will only annoy readers who are well versed in astronomy, I suppose.

On a last, semi-related note: Ho-Ling, JJ and yours truly appear to be the only who occasionally review these science-fiction mysteries and thought a list of all these hybrid-mysteries, reviewed between the three of us, would be a nice way to pad out this blog-post.

My list: Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942), David Reed's Murder in Space (1944), John Russell Fearn's The Lonely Astronomer (1954) and James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977).

Short stories: Miriam Allen Deford's Space, Time and Crime (1964; anthology) Isaac Asimov's "Mirror Image"(1972) Timothy Zahn's "Red Thoughts at Morning" (1988).

Ho-Ling's list: Poul Anderson's After Doomsday (1962) Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954), The Naked Sun (1957), The Robots of Dawn (1983) and James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977).

Short stories: Sonoda Shuuichirou's "Dakara dare mo inaku natta" ("And That's Why There Were None").

Audio drama: Hiroshi Mori's "Meikyuu hyakunen no suima" ("Labyrinth in the Arm of Morpheus").

JJ's list: Peter F. Hamilton's A Quantum Murder (1994), Adam Roberts' Jack Glass (2012) and James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977).

As you can see, we all love Hogan's book!