Owl of Darkness (1942) by Max Afford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death's Mannikins (1937) by Max Afford

Malcolm Afford was an Australian newspaper reporter, playwright and radio scenarist, "considered somewhat of a pioneer of the whodunit in radio broadcasting," who had a brief as a mystery novelist during the 1930s and '40s – producing half a dozen novels and a few short stories under the name "Max Afford." Afford's novels and short stories were clearly aligned to Van Dine-Queen School with his series-detectives, Jeffery Blackburn and Chief Inspector William Read, closely resembling Ellery Queen and Inspector Richard Queen. Particularly during the first couple of novels. More importantly, the series is peppered with locked room murders and quasi-impossible crime material with The Dead Are Blind (1937) and his two short stories standing as his most notable contributions to the locked room sub-genre. So it was high time to return to Afford, Blackburn and Read. 

Death's Mannikins (1937), alternatively published as The Dolls of Death, is the second title in the series and carries the long subtitle, "being a sober account of certain diabolical happenings, not untinged with the odour of Brimstone, which befell a respectable family at Exmoor in this present year."

Jeffery Blackburn is a mathematician who had "relinquished the Chair of Higher Mathematics at Greymaster University in favour of the more fascinating pastime of criminology," which gave him a rising reputation as an amateur detective specialized in puzzling cases. One day, Blackburn meets an old friend, Rollo Morgan, in the lounge of the Akimbo Club. Morgan is the private secretary of Professor Cornelius Rochester, a demonology scholar, who lives with his family in an ancient, medieval looking house situated in a lonely, isolated valley – where "all the fogs in the world seem to roll up from the Bristol Channel." A three-story house complete with battlemented tower, a miniature observatory left by the previous cockamamie owner and a small, timeworn chapel on the grounds. The widowed Professor Rochester lives there with his two sons and daughter, Roger, Owen and Jan, who were taken care off by their aunt, Beatrice Rochester. Aunt Beatrice has "a bitter tongue" and "an almost uncanny faculty of prying into other people's business," but also the beating heart of the household as "she managed the business affairs, handled all finances, paid the bills, and acted as parent, housekeeper, and general adviser to the household." And at the time of the diabolical happenings, there are three guests staying at Rochester House. A journalist by the name of Philip Barrett and two of Jan's friends, Dr. Brian Austin and his fiancee, Camilla Ward.

Morgan tells Blackburn "there's been a death in the family," Aunt Beatrice, who tumbled down a flight of stairs and broke her neck, but strange incidents have occurred right before and after her death.

A year ago, a wood-carving friend of Professor Rochester presented him with six hand-carved miniatures of him, his family and the butler, Michael Prater. A set of six wooden dolls, which were placed in a box and forgotten about, but nearly a year later the box had vanished. Nobody knew what happened to the box or the dolls. And nobody claims responsibility when Aunt Beatrice receives a parcel with her replica in it, which is dismissed as a practical joke and ignored. Several days after the funeral, Roger receives a parcel containing his replica with "a thin, sharp spike" driven through the doll's back and now there's a private detective, Trevor Pimlott of the Argus Detective Agency, to guard and follow Roger around like a shadow – which turned the atmosphere in the house "rather turgid." Morgan has the feeling there's something ugly behind it all and came to London to pursued Blackburn to come back with him to Rochester House. But things have already been happening when they arrive.

Roger has gone missing and is not found until the following morning when the stone chapel is unlocked for the Sunday morning service. Roger lays sprawled in front of the altar with a knife thrust up to the hilt in his chest, but the details surrounding his death and the crime scene raises a ton of questions. 

Death's Mannikins is listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) and described the murder as "death by invisible agency," which is a fair description, but, plot-technically speaking, it's not an impossible crime. The murder of Roger Rochester is very reminiscent to the central murder from Rupert Penny's Policeman in Armour (1937) in which the scene of the crime wasn't locked or under close observation, but resembled an obstacle course that made murder appear like an impossible one. The obstacles in Death's Mannikins consists of "a patch of soggy clay some six inches deep" at the chapel entrance and Roger wearing slippers without a trace of mud. The availability of the chapel key in combination with the time of death and an unholy downpour on the night of the murder, which marooned a few members of the household in the nearby village. The murder weapon was taken from the professor's private museum of medieval weapons and the black arts, which is kept locked. And the powerful thrust needed to sink the knife up to the hilt into the body.

So, while not a proper locked room mystery, or impossible crime, there's definitely a touch of John Dickson Carr to the plot. However, I think that touch is much more notable in how the second murder is presented to the reader. The house has an unusual timepiece ("baroque ornamentation") with mechanical features and tiny figures popping out as it strikes away the hours. This clock is effectively put to use to announce the second murder as it strikes midnight. More often than not, Carr depicted clocks as harbingers of death or associates of the Grim Reaper. Death Watch (1935) and The Skeleton in the Clock (1948) come to mind, but there's also the shop window clock and church bells in The Three Coffins (1935) and the clock handle from the psychological experiment in The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939). So a very well done Carr-like scene and even better is how it was used (ROT13) ol gur zheqrere gb perngr n pnfg-veba nyvov gung jbhyq abg unir orra bhg-bs-cynpr va n Puevfgbcure Ohfu abiry.

Despite the comparisons to Carr, Penny and Queen, Death's Mannikins is not merely an imitation of the author's favorite mystery novels and detective characters. Afford tried to do something with the premise and cast of characters whom proved themselves to be one of the unwilling group of suspects and witnesses from a 1930s detective novel. Jeffery Blackburn realizes after while that "the people with whom he was dealing would yield more to the influence of the iron hand rather than the velvet glove." You can't imagine 1930s Ellery Queen heavy-handedly dragging the truth out of his suspects. Sgt. Velie? Yes. But not EQ. Or how the second murder generated a new puzzling question regarding the first murder. Why was Roger stabbed in the chest and the second victim in the back? I appreciated how the murderer managed to obtain the key to museum (clever and simple) and the last-minute attempt to throw sand in the eyes of the reader. So, while not batting in the same league as Carr or Queen, Death's Mannikins is not without some merit of its own.

Only reason why it failed to translate into a minor classic is Afford's shortcomings as a second-stringer. One of the better, more inspired and capable second-stringers of the period, but a second-stringer nonetheless. So the murder of Roger is not half as mysterious as he tried to present it (e.g. the knife wound) nor is the murderer as cleverly hidden as the solution likes you to believe. Death's Mannikins is an entertaining, spirited, but unmistakably second-string, detective novel that tried to live up to the greats of the genre. While it didn't success, plot-wise, the book succeeded in being a kindred spirit of Carr and Queen. And, to quote Jim, of The Invisible Event, to have your second detective novel "held favourably with those grand old men of the genre is no small feat." What do you know... he was right for once!

An Eye for An Eye

"You’ll forgive me for being skeptical."

- Dr. Sam Hawthorne (Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Revival Tent," collected in More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 2006)  

Only last month, I reviewed The Dead Are Blind (1937) by Max Afford and I had not planned on returning to him so soon, but JJ, who blogs at The Invisible Event, wrote a very enticing review of Death's Mannikens (1937). So I'll be using that review as a convenient excuse for yet another blog-post about a locked room mystery, because there have only been about two hundred of them on this blog. 

Blood On His Hands (1936) was Afford's debut as a mystery novelist and introduced a brace of characters, Jeffery Blackburn and Chief Inspector Read, who would fulfill the roles of detectives in four additional novels and several short stories – two of which were collected in Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn (2008).

Chief Inspector William Read is introduced as a well-dressed man with a military bearing and bristling mustache stuck on a ruddy face, while Jeffery Blackburn is presented as a clean-shaven man in his mid-thirties with "the face of a scholar" and "a pair of gray eyes that twinkled humorously." The way in which Read took Blackburn by the arm and how the latter's long fingers clasped around a walking stick was very reminiscent of the way Inspector Queen and Ellery Queen wandered onto the scene of the crime in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), which was their first recorded case. However, JJ made a similar observation about the resemblances between both duos and even Read's habit of referring to people as "son" ("what do you mean, son?").

The scene of the crime in Blood On His Hands is Carnavon Chambers, a new block of city apartments, where Judge Sheldon had a private rooms, but, evidently, the place was unable to guarantee his personal safety – since his body is found slumped behind a desk inside an inner room of the apartment complex. He has been stabbed with a peculiar blade and his right ear has been sliced off!

It's only to be expected of a High Court judge to have made an enemy or two, but, in the judge’s private life, Blackburn and Read uncover an infestation of motives that had the potential of leading to murder.

Judge Sheldon treated his poor wife, Lady Sheldon, abysmally, which is why he kept a private dwelling place. A place where he received a score of women. Sometimes as many as "half a dozen in a week," which was not exactly a well-kept secret. As a result, Lady Sheldon retreated in an emotional sanctuary and convinced herself that her first husband, "believed to be dead in the war," was still alive and would eventually return to her – which became an obsession to her. This supplied the daughter from that first marriage, Miss Valerie Sheldon, with a valid reason to hate her stepfather and she had "already begun to make a name for herself" with "her brilliant detective novels." On paper, she's considered "an expert at the perfect murder theory," but did she put one of her theoretical plots into practice?

Alternative title/edition

There are additional suspects uncovered: Miss Gloria Grey, "a former musical-comedy actress," who became addicted to heroine tablets and her regular supplier was, what you would call, the least-likely-suspect in polite society. She had recently joined a Gospel Tent Mission, which was inaugurated by black-bearded man named Alfred Torrance. He was "erroneously reported dead in the war" and lost "his memory in an air-raid upon London." Yes, there were German air raids on London during World War I. It's just not as well remembered, because those raids paled in comparison to the hellfire that rained down on London in the next war.

Anyway, there are enough people surrounding the judge who did not mourn his passing, but that only covers possible answers to who and why and not the how aspect, which concerns the locked room angle of the murder. Judge Sheldon is found in a room on the eight floor of the apartment building with windows, locked from the inside, looking out on tiny balconies "hanging over a sheer drop of ninety feet to the ground." The door is locked from the inside as well and "the only existing key to the apartment" is "found in the dead man’s top-waistcoat pocket."

It's an intriguing, classically styled set-up for a proper locked room murder, but the explanation is essentially an old, simple, but elaborately presented, gimmick that only worked because police methods aren't always up to snuff in detective stories. Later on in the series, Afford would show he had a crafty and original mind for devising impossible crime plots, but that was not the case with his first throw at one.

There is, however, a second locked room in the book, which was slightly better, but not as clever or inspired as those from The Dead Are Blind, "Poison Can Be Puzzling" and "The Vanishing Trick," which involved an apparently unrelated murder of a shopkeeper.

A green grocer is slaughtered in his shop, stabbed multiple times and his right hand cut-off, but the only entrance, a side door, was locked from the inside and the front of the shop was under constant observation by an innocent witness – who swears nobody entered or left the building while she was watching. The method for this locked room trick has a rather simple and pragmatic explanation, workmanlike rather than inspired, but it did the trick and had a semblance of originality. It's the kind of gambit you'd expect to find in a Dr. Sam Hawthorne story by Edward D. Hoch.

Well, I guess I have to give a debuting Afford some props for twisting the unusual prologue, a pair of locked room killings and an additional murder together into a coherent narrative, but the final explanation was covered with the bloody paw-prints of the sensationalist novel/thriller – which, surprisingly, shared some plot similarities with John Rhode's The Murders in Praed Street (1928). So I experienced Blood On His Hands as a very uneven novel and a troublesome one to write a proper review about, because I wanted to like the book more than I did by the end. Everything else I read by Afford was excellent, but I’m afraid this one simply did not do it for me.

Hopefully, I'll pick something better for my next review, but, in the meantime, you can read my enthusiastic prattling about Gladys Mitchell's Late, Late in the Evening (1976), which was the book I previously reviewed on here. So stay tuned!

Dead Air

"...an engineered death is merely a polite euphemism for murder!"

- Jeffery Blackburn (Max Afford's "Poison Can Be Puzzling," collected in Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn, 2008)

Max Afford was an Australian playwright and novelist who was previously discussed on this blog when I reviewed a slender volume of short fiction, Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn (2008), which included a pair of stories featuring his series characters – a genius amateur, named Jeffery Blackburn, and the laconic Inspector Read.

Blackburn and Read appeared in roughly half a dozen full-length novels and four of them were catalogued by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). You'd assume that would make Afford's work of special interest to devotees of impossible crime fiction, but even now that they're readily available again, they continue to be fairly obscure and overlooked by locked room enthusiasts. So let's change that and take one of them for a test-ride. 

The Dead Are Blind (1937) is the third entry in the Blackburn series and Afford drew on his own experience as a producer and writer of radio-plays, which furnished the plot of the story with an interesting backdrop. The story begins with Jeffery Blackburn reflecting how the evenings have become rather dull, because "all the super-criminals appear to have turned their nefarious attentions to dinner-hour radio thrillers." Luckily, Read was supplied with invitations for the opening of a new subsidiary studio of BBC.

A radio-play will be performed during opening night, entitled Darkness is Danger, which is produced by a former talkie-director, Carl von Bethke, who brought an innovative perspective from the big screen to the radio studio – innovations that nearly provided a cover for an almost perfect crime. Near perfect is a key phrase that perfectly sums up the events preceding the opening of the studio: a technical break-down occurs between the special effects room in the basement and the dramatic studio, which means that the effect will have to be done in the same studio as the artists. Just as it was "in the early days of broadcasting."

However, one of the stars of the show, Olga Lusinska, raises proper Hell over these improvisations and refuses to "act among brooms and buckets and mops," but these are minor snags compared to what happened during the live broadcast.

There's a scene in the radio-play in which the characters are "plunged in darkness" and in order to strengthen the effect the lights are dimmed in the studio, but when they come back on there’s somewhat of a problem: the twisted body of one of the actresses, Mary Marlowe, lay on the floor of the studio. The key to the door of the dramatic studio is firmly clasped in one of her cold, stiffened hands, which prevented anyone from entering or leaving the room.

A doctor pronounces the death of Mary Marlowe to be "one of the best authenticated cases of heart failure" he had "ever seen," but there are several dissenting voices who suggest they might be looking at the end results of an audacious crime – which include Blackburn and a close-friend of the victim. Initially, Blackburn suspects the cause of death might be one of those forbidden and untraceable poisons, but a long and intensive post-mortem examinations yields surprising results.

Slowly, but surely, the layers covering up the method are peeled away and the plot begins to resemble a proper, classically structured locked room mystery. Showing how the murder was a locked room killing actually answered the question of how it was carried out, which is an unusual, but clever and original, approach to the locked room problem. Never seen that route taken before that I can remember. The idea behind the explanation anticipates one of John Dickson Carr's locked room novels and is tangibly related to a non-impossible crime mystery I reviewed very recently on here, which was helpful in gauging the nature of the method.

The set-up of this well disguised locked room murder, subsequent investigations and eventual explanation covers the first six and best chapters of the book.

What follows is digging around in the past of the victim, which involved a fatal fire, dope smuggling, coded messages and two more murders that reeked of offal to pad-out the story, but Afford redeemed himself in the end – since they stuck to the main plot better than I expected from their presentation.

The method for the second murder could've easily been presented as a quasi-impossible crime, if done in a public place with lots of eyewitnesses, and was foreshadowed in the early chapters of the book. And the third body is a classic one that threw me off the scent of the murderer for a brief moment. So they hardly qualify as padding and that was pleasantly surprising. I was not as thrilled by the spot of danger Blackburn found himself in, which had the murderer cartoonishly confessing to everything and promising that "if it is the last thing" this person does "upon this Earth," but Blackburn was going to end up somewhere were he'll not be able to do any of his "damned investigating."

So, all in all, The Dead Are Blind has an original structured locked room plot insulated by a fairly decent, if not always perfect, detective story, but as a whole it's well worth a read.

Not as Impossible as You Might Think

"My curiosity is roused by your locked-room. If you can find a new way of doing it, many congratulations." 

- John Dickson Carr (excerpt from a letter to Anthony Boucher)

I had originally planned to post another review of a Christmas-themed country house mystery, supposedly written in the same vein as C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934) and Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941), but the story proved to be surprisingly dull and lacking in spirit – which caused me to become bogged down around the halfway mark. Obviously, I needed a break.

Incidentally, a fellow mystery blogger and locked room aficionado, known as "Double J," posted a review of Owl of Darkness (1942) by Max Afford, which gave me an idea. I would take a brief detour and return to the pages of that Christmas mystery with renewed vigor and energy!

A slender volume containing several of pieces of Afford's shorter fiction, entitled Two Locked Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn (2008), seemed to lend itself perfectly for that purpose.

Max Afford was an Australian news reporter who turned to fiction in the late 1920s and edged out a name as an author of more than sixty radio-and stage plays, but readers appreciative of Golden Age mysteries will associate his name with the Jeffrey Blackburn novels – a handful of them are even listed in the late Robert Adey's Locked Room Mysteries and Other Impossible Crimes (1991). Somewhat surprisingly, however, is that Adey only listed the full-length locked room novels and not the short stories collected in the volume under review. Because they were (IMHO) excellent examples of the genre.

The first story is "Poison Can Be Puzzling" and was originally published in a 1944 issue of The Australian Women's Weekly, which has Jeffrey and Elizabeth Blackburn being plucked away from the cinema by Inspector Read. Some trouble is brewing and Read figured Blackburn "might like to be on any fun that's offering."

Ferdinand Cass is a "financier of sorts" and "so crooked he could hide behind a circular staircase," which made it advisable to turn his home in a fortified stronghold: a flat "eight floors from the ground" and "six from the ground" with covered windows and a steel floor-and ceiling. A single door, giving entrance to the apartment, is double locked and chained. There's only one problem: all of those securities offer protection against mortal beings, but not from a vengeful ghost from beyond the grave and the reason why he "demanded police protection until after midnight." 

The disgruntled ghost in question is that of Cass' late-wife, who got "mixed up in some black magic hocus-pocus" and threw herself out of a window, but her spirit appeared during a trip in the South American jungles and prophesized his death. Even her perfume can be smelled inside the home!

Unfortunately, all of the precautions and presence of a couple of detectives were in vain, because Cass is mysteriously poisoned "while dressing alone in a hermitically-sealed room" with "four witnesses standing not a dozen yards away." 

The choice of victim, the locked room set-up and a seemingly impossible poisoning was very reminiscent of Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Exterminator," collected in The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), and The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep (1976) from the Ellery Queen TV-series, but with a completely different and original solution – one that is distantly related to a John Dickson Carr novel from the 1930s.

The next story is "The Vanishing Trick," first published in 1948 in Detective Fiction, which has Jeffrey and Elizabeth Blackburn visiting friends at their historical home.

Max Afford (c. 1930s)

Kettering Old Home is one of the oldest houses in England and has "a kinda haunted room." The room lacks a proper, old-fashioned English ghost, but people tend to "just vanish into thin air" when left alone in the room, which began in the 1700s: a local parson was accused of witchcraft and held prisoner in the haunted room, but when the room was opened the man had simply vanished. But it's not all ancient history.

Three years before, the previous owners asked one of the servants to clean out the room, but "the door slammed shut on the poor devil" and "when they opened it again" they made an unsettling discovery – the room had swallowed and digested another victim. However, the guests of Jim and Sally Rutland are skeptical, because they have a penchant for practical jokes.

A suspicion confirmed to the reader when Sally convinces Elizabeth to become complicit in a prank: Sally wants to be sealed inside the room, while dressed as a servant, in order to give the "doubting Thomases" a scare when they come down to investigate the supposedly haunted room. Sally is locked up in the room by Elizabeth, but as soon as the bolts were shot and walked down the passage there was a call for help ("Elizabeth... help! Come back!"). The room had lived up to its reputation and swallowed up another human being.

As Jeffrey Blackburn remarks, "the trouble with practical jokes is that they have damndest way of kicking back," which occurs when a second person vanishes from the room and Sally refuses to resurface.

I'm surprised "The Vanishing Trick" never founds its way into one of the many locked room anthologies, because it's a wonderfully charming example of the impossible disappearance and a wonderful clue is slipped in during Sally's disappearance. A clue that reveals the entire trick, if you're observant enough. In short: I loved this one.

The final story is "The Gland Men of the Island," originally published in 1931 in Wonder Stories, which is not a detective story. A small group of men make a momentous discovery on "one of the numerous islands that stud the Polynesia," which they made when following a well-worn path to a thick island-forest and discover a race of Asiatic giants. I initially assumed this was one of those lost civilization stories, but it soon revealed itself as one of those genre-bending, pulpy tales of Yellow Peril and featured a sinister Chinese scientist – who wanted to "restore China to rightful position as Mistress of the World."

I'm not really a fan of sensationalist pulp stories, but this one answered a question I never dreamed of asking: what would be the result if Sax Rohmer had written Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). So there's that.

Well, I enjoyed this collection as a whole and reminded me why I love locked room mysteries. I'm curious now to see what Afford is able to do when he writes full-length impossible crime novels. And, now, back to that dreadful Christmas mystery!