A Swarm of Villainy

"Rouse yourself, my friend, rouse yourself. And look – look where I am pointing. There on the bank, close by that tree root. See you, the wasps returning home, placid at the end of the day? In a little hour, there will be destruction, and they know it not."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's "Wasps' Nest," from Poirot's Early Cases, 1974)

One of my first blog-posts was a review of a once rare and coveted locked room mystery, Death of Jezebel (1948), which came from the hands of a criminally underrated mystery novelist who deserves a place among the "Crime Queen" – namely the very talented Christianna Brand.

Brand was a late arrival on the scene, debuting with Death in High Heels (1941) during the Second World War, but I consider her to be on equal footing with Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. She had a similar fondness for seemingly impossible situations as the latter and was as apt with the closed-circle of suspects as the former, e.g. Green for Danger (1944) and London Particular (1952).

However, in spite of my opinion of Brand, I seem to have grossly neglected her after that initial review, but began to crave good writing, interesting characterization and solid plotting after struggling through Mavis Doriel Hay's mind-numbingly boring The Santa Klaus Murder (1936) – which led me back to Brand. So I decided to treat myself to one of her collections of short stories: What Dread Hand? (1968). Because a single, novel-length detective story simply wasn't enough to wash away the bad taste the previous one had left behind. 

The first story from the collection is "The Hornets' Nest," perhaps better known under its original title, "Twist for Twist," which is a promise that’s delivered on in spades and shows Brand was in the same league as Christie!

It's an ingeniously complex story centering on the poisoning of Cyrus Caxton: a "horrid old man" who "had been horrid to his first wife" and "was quite evidently going to be horrid to his second" – who had been the late Mrs. Caxton's nurse. There were a number of men in her life willing to protect her, but were they willing enough to fool around with a tin of cyanide? Inspector Cockrill is at hand to straighten out the tangled, twisted mess and even constructs a false solution reminiscent of The Murder on the Orient Express (1934). One of the best stories from the collection!

"Aren't Our Police Wonderful?" is what's known in the genre as a "Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard," in which a brother tries secure his inheritance by bumping off his brother and was inspired by "a case that happened a hundred years ago or more." However, as Mark Twain observed: history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes and that becomes the murderers undoing. A quick, fun story.

The third story from this collection, "The Merry-Go-Round," has something to offer to both readers of classical detective stories and modern crime stories: a recently widowed woman is being blackmailed with a collection of lurid photographs found in a private drawer at the office of her late husband. A revolver stashed away in his bedside drawer provides relief for his widow. However, the blackmail angle does not stop there, but simply continues from a different angle. I loved the wonderfully sardonic ending and wished more modern crime fiction were in this mold.

The titular "Blood Brothers" from the fourth story are named David and Jonathan, who are actually twins from a small village, but even the locals are unable to tell them apart, which is cleverly exploited when they in a hit-and-run that killed a child – setting the stage for a premeditated murder. Inspector Cockrill tries to piece everything together, but whether or not he was successful is debatable. A splendid demonstration how twins can be properly used in a fair-play detective story. Even when said story is structured as an inverted mystery.

"Dear Mr. Editor..." begins with a short letter from Christianna Brand to her editor, in which she apologizes for having been unable to provide him with a freshly written story for his anthology. However, Brand did include a copy of a document written by "a poor creature," who "was quite mad," and was addressed to her editor. It's a thriller-ish suspense story with a twist, but one most readers will probably spot well before the ending.

"The Rose" is a short-short story and a postscript reveals it as an early endeavor of the author, which kind of shows. A loving husband is planning to dispose of his wife by hoisting and shoving her from the balcony, but these seemingly perfect schemes seldom pan out as planned. You’ll probably guess it as well.

The following story, "Akin to Love," is an odd inclusion, because it combines the romance story with the ghost yarn, in which a young woman spends the night in a room haunted by the ghost of a young man – who had "joined one of the Hell Fire Clubs" and "sold his soul to the devil." The man had sinned against "womankind" and can only be set free if a woman forgave and loved him. Sort of like Beauty and The Beast, but not really my kind of stuff.

I wanted to enjoy "The Death of Don Juan," but ended up not caring for it: Vicomte Coqauvin, "Don Juan," is going to settle down and breaks up a pendant, known as the "Collar of Tears," to give all of his mistresses a diamond drop as a memento. The entire undertaking had "been a nightmare of threatened suicides," but the final woman on his list was angry enough to empty a pistol on him. A Duchess sets out to reassemble the pendant and by the end it's revealed she had an unexpected role in the murder. It's not a bad story and some will like it, but I'm not one of them.

The quality picks up again with "Double Cross," which is a story fans of classic Ellery Queen will appreciate: Sir Thomas Cross had been "an unaccommodating relative to his heirs" by living too long, spending too much money and extracting revenge for his murder with an "equally unaccommodating will" – condemning his three cousins and potential murderers to live together in the "gloomy glories of Halberd Hall." A failure to comply excluded the absentee from further interest in the estate and basically amounted to a Tontine scheme, which is at the heart of several short EQ stories and radio plays. The solution is a good play on the least-likely-suspect and most-likely-suspect gambit. I liked it.

"The Sins of the Father" is a pure horror story and is about sin-eaters, who "flourished in Wales" up "to the end of the seventeenth century," but might have been around as recent as a hundred years ago. They eat the sins of men and send the dead with a clean slate into the afterworld, but are treated abominably for taking "sins upon them" – being cast out for being "doomed for all eternity" and "heavy with the load of other men's transgressions." In this story a young sin-eater is called upon to relief a dead man of his sins and "eat from the breast of a corpse." It's not a mystery, but very intriguing nonetheless.

"After the Event" is one of the longer stories from the collection, in which the "Grand Old Man of Detection" gives an expose of the Othello case. A case in which he collared the murderer by building up "a water-tight case against him" and "triumphantly brought to trial," but the jury failed to convict. However, Inspector Cockrill is present as well and found himself in "the position of the small boy at a party who knows how the conjurer does his tricks," which the observant and seasoned armchair detective can largely follow. And that's the most attractive part of this elaborate and theatrical story: rival detectives butting heads.

Note: I'm refraining from giving any details about the Othello case, because it really is an elaborate story. Read if for yourself.

"Death of a Ghost" is a story-within-story: a family secret is being divulged about a cousin who took deadly tumble down a flight of stairs and the ghost of a "Wicked Earl" from the eighteenth-century, which are closely tied-together. I kind of liked the story except for the feeling more could've been done with it.

"The Kite" is another minor, stand-alone story, but one I did not care about or remember anything about it. Skippable at best.

"Hic Jacet..." is another inverted mystery playing on the "Hoist-On-Their-Own-Petard," in which Mr. Fletcher-Store is plotting the murder of his wife by drowning, but his plan horrendously backfired and the R.A.F. jacket he purchased in the pub is part to blame. I really enjoy these type of stories, but I rare come across them and only found a small selection of them in two collection of short stories: Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories (1998), which has a selection of such stories containing the brilliant "The Possibility of Evil" by Shirley Jackson, and Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2008), which has the amusing "You Have a Friend at Fengrove National."

Finally, there's "Murder Game," which is better known among locked room enthusiasts as "The Gemminy Cricket Case," and has an impossible crime plot as complicated as it's classical.

It's another one of those story-within-a-story structured story, in which Giles Carberry tells "the old man" about the Gemminy case. Thomas Gemminy is a London-based solicitor "dealing largely in criminal cases," but was "kind and compassionate" with a trust fund for those "who had passed through his hand" and "might turn for help in time of need." His home had also been open to the pitiful children who usually had no idea what their parents had been up to. So not really your typical story-book victim, but Gemminy is brutally murdered inside his office: tied to a chair with a cord and handkerchief knotted tightly around his neck, but the finishing blow came from knife-thrust between the shoulder blades – and the wound was still bleeding when the door was broken down. A door that was locked and bolted from the inside. On top of that, the office was set on fire and the victim was heard screaming something "vanishing into thin air" and "the long arms."

It's an extremely knotty, twisted affair and the solution is clever, but, it has to be said, a composite of some time-honored tricks. However, Brand found a way to twist it in a new direction and came up with a logical and clever answer why the second victim suffered a similar fate as the bleeding heart lawyer. But the best part is the final revelation, which makes this a very, very dark story and explained where the murderer found the guts for such to pull off such a locked room trick.

Well, that were the tales murder and horror collected in What Dread Hand? and, hopefully, I have done them some measure justice, because I enjoyed the vast majority of them and were exactly what I needed after the previous disappointment.

So, if you've never read Christianna Brand before, I have only thing to say to you: stop being a filthy heretic and find a copy of Green for Danger!

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!

Mapping Out a Plan

"It does help the reader relate events to setting, and does so accurately and with a sense of atmosphere. As a combination of decoration and usefulness, it's probably the best of the lot."

- Jack Iams (on the "mapback" edition of his Girl Meets Body, 1947)

I unearthed a spiral-bound book during a minor restructuring of my shelves and it's one of those books I intended to read, but lingered on the pile before being shelved. Well, Piet Schreuders' The Dell Mapbacks (1997) is actually more of a diary posing as a booklet than an actual book. It goes in a few short chapters, fourteen pages in total, over the history of the immense popular and highly collectible Dell Mapbacks – distinguished by their airbrushed cover art and crime maps on the back covers.

Schreuders is a graphic designer by trade and admirably adopted the Dell Mapback style-and trademarks for the compilation of The Dell Mapbacks, which is plainly a labor of love of a collector/fan. The book even opens with What This Book is About ("a series of highly collectible BOOKS published between 1943 and 1953"), Wouldn't You Like to Know ("who murdered the DELL historian, William H. Lyles?") and Persons this Book is about – followed by a dramatis personae and a List of Exciting Illustrations.

Dell Books was brought into being in the middle of World War II when Dell founder, George T. Delacorte, Jr., needed paper to print books and Lloyd Smith of Western Printing & Lithographing wanted printing work, but the most eye-brow raising from this chapter was how these beloved collectibles were abridged or even censored! "Some books were abridged drastically so as to fit Dell's page requirements" and "although the front cover blurb... suggested that the books were complete, they rarely were." And worse: "one compositor, Ralph MacNichol, spiced the house style with his editorial judgment by removing words like Christ, Jesus, and Goddamn." It's good to see one moral arbiter had to foresight to see the possibility of the nazi's eventually opening a North-American branch of the Kultuurkamer and brushed up on his résumé just in case. Hey, I had to raise that petty censorship with a Godwin.

The following chapter concerns the art-department of Dell Books and in particular the work of Gerald B. Gregg, who painted the covers of 212 novels and drew a couple of back covers, and praised for "extraordinary skill with the airbrush which made the Dell covers of the 1940s unique in appearance." True to the nature of a detective story, Gregg was "resorting to the tricks of the time to get the effects" such as pasting a paper doily onto the bottom of a painting (i.e. cover of Fanny Heaslip Lea’s Half Angel, 1946; a romance novel). The Dell Mapbacks reproduces fourteen of Gregg's covers in this book. Another artist mentioned in this chapter is Robert Stanley, who used himself as a model for characters such as Sam Spade, Mike Shayne, Hercule Poirot and Zorro! 

However, it's the crime map on the back covers that stands out as the standard feature among these Dell Book trademarks, and the feature that keeps drawing-in readers, but they probably cost them the most work – from editors and volunteers to map specialists. Something worth mentioning is that Schreuders included two of his own (fake) mapbacks, but they are truly astonishing pieces of art! I especially liked the map showing the location, Haags Gemeentemuseum, of the first international paperback art exhibition in The Hague, in February, 1981. The chapter also notes Dell historian, Lyles, discovered the identity of a prolific crime back artist, Ruth Belew, who drew 150 (or so) in the series.

The historic overview of Dell Books ends on a sad note with the story of William H. Lyles, writer and researcher, who wrote a biography of the Dell Books entitled Putting Dell on the Map (1983) and it's reputedly a meticulous analysis of the stories in comparison with the artwork/crime maps. Unfortunately, there were personal and financial problems for Lyles (resulting in selling-off his entire and complete collection of mapbacks), which ended with him snapping and committing suicide after shooting (and wounding) his then girlfriend in July of 1996. The remainder of The Dell Mapbacks consists of a diary for 1998 and interspersed with replications of front-and back covers of various Dell publications – from mystery and romance to western and science fiction. Flipped through the book again, but it's hard to pick a favorite. Even the simple map of the European Theater of Operation, from the back cover of Eisenhower Was My Boss (1948; Kay Summersby), makes me want to seek out that book.   

Long story short, The Dell Mapbacks is an interesting curio and as collectible for Mapback collectors as the original books. And Schreuders included a list of essential reading, if your interest has been piqued on this niche subject.

Yes, I just rambled for more than a full page on what basically amounts to a calendar/diary from 16 years ago, because it had some background info in it about a defunct publisher of detective stories from the 40s. Again: welcome to the niche corner.

When We Dead Awaken

"And now for something completely different."

- John Cleese (Monty Python's Flying Circus)

The disadvantages of maintaining a bustling blog dedicated to fostering an environment in which a Silver Age of Detection can blossom have been few and far between, but one that has been bugging me, as a direct result of becoming a blogger, is that the detective story has usurped every inch of my reading list. I have been longing to return to Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl-series for over a year now. So I decided to make this place prone for occasional side distractions and took a dib in the few, unread, manga books stacked up on my to-be-read pile and came up with the 12th volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service – a sort of humanistic horror series covered with dark touches of humor and touching stories. 

As pointed out previously, I'm not a devoted or active participant in the anime and manga community, however, I do consider myself as a casual fan who picked up one or two series after immersing myself in Detective Conan and have come to admire the gift of Japanese story telling – especially when they tell it through a visual medium like a comic book. Whether it's about an ancient board game or a bored Shinigami, if they are from the hand one of their top-notch writers, they are almost impossible to put down or turn-off. Readers of this blog might want to consider giving the animated series Death Note a try. It's a supernatural thriller bound to rules in the spirit of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the plot twists and turns like smoke in a curl, in which everyone is constantly plotting and scheming. A very intense and intelligent thriller with a daring and dramatic twist halfway through. 

The "skeleton staff" of the KCDS.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a company specialized in locating discarded and forgotten bodies, in order to fulfill their last wish, usually assisting them in taking care of unfinished business, and consists of five graduate students from a Buddhist university – all of whom possess a special gift or talent. Kuro Karatsu is a student Buddhist monk and the psychic of the group who communicates with the corpses they find and can even (temporarily) reanimate them. He also has a spirit, Yaichi, lingering near him. Ao Sasaki is the brain of the outfit, as well as a computer expert/hacker, who takes care of the practical side of business. Makoto Numata is a dowser who can detect dead bodies instead of water and it’s up to him to find clients. Yuji Yata is a bit on the introversive side and wears a grotesque hand puppet, which he uses to the channel the conscience of a bad mannered, wisecracking alien intelligence. Keiko Makino looks like a sweet and innocent girl, but she studied in America to become a fully licensed embalmer and as a result has become somewhat of an outcast in Japanese society. Embalming is seen as an unclean profession over there.

"I ain't afraid o' no ghost"

In the earlier volumes, most of the stories were short-short stories, covering a single chapter, but they expanded over the course of the series and now span for several chapters, however, they can still be read as individual stories – making it easy to sample the series before you decide to read on. After all, it's a series with "explicit content" and you have to take that quite literal. The portrayal of corpses in various stages of decomposition, nudity and violence show that Housui Yamazaki has quite a skill with the pencil, but, personally, it never felt that they were just included to gross out the reader or to service its fans (see: fan service). Because gutted bodies and sex isn't this series selling point... it's the wonderful, varied stories and its cast of gargoyles. The best things I remember from the earlier volumes aren't the gruesome depictions of dead bodies, except, perhaps, for the alien, but the stories that were either moving or funny (this series is the first one to poke fun at itself) or even borderline detective stories or full-blown supernatural thrillers. The second volume is basically a novel-length story in which the Kurosagi-crew uncovers a cruel exploitation of the dead.

The 12th volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service begins where it all began: Jukaiyama. It's an immense forest and a popular haunt of the lost souls of society to watch the sun rise or set one last time before taking their own lives – because business, as usual, was not booming and they need a client. Unfortunately, Numata’s pendulum only turns up a napping woman, Yuka Suzuki, who's attached to a credit agency and looking for an ex-debtor. Mr. Kawai paid his debts and moved to Jakaiyama Village, a secret settlement somewhere in the woods where people who have grown tired of life and contemplated suicide find sanctuary, except that he’s still around and the crew even speaks with him, but Suzuki insists that he’s an imposter! It's a twisty and gloomy story that brutally molests satirized a part of 21st century life and ends on a note as wonderfully cynical as MacKinlay Kantor's "The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz."

Shakuya nailed it!

My favorite story from this volume is the second one and puts the spotlight on two young people: Nene and Shakuya. Nene is a nightclub hostess who can separate her spirit from her body at will and uses this nifty trick to lure in customers. One evening, while gazing at the city lights, her eyes fall on Shakuya, an aspiring actor/comedian who lives in houses, where the previous tenants were murdered or committed suicide, for a living (so the landlord can present a clean record of the previous tenant to the next one), and decides to beckon him in. A bond is a swiftly forged between the two as it cruelly broken when Shakuya is murdered in the apartment they had just moved into. The Kurosagi-crew are basically there to mend two souls torn asunder and the resolution had a nice decorative touch of lampshade hanging.

In the last story, the guys find an old man pushing a wheelchair along the river with a life-size doll of a woman in it. The doll is a replica of what his sister might have looked like if she hadn't died as a child during the great air raid on Tokyo. The man is also involved with a gang of foreign agents, who kidnap them, and the spirit of his dead sister, through the doll, asks the Kurosagi-crew for help and the solution involves a dictator, more dolls and guardian spirit. The story also briefly looks at Yata's past again, who was the sole survivor when his parents tried to take their kids with them in a suicide pact, but I have no idea if this was brought up because there are parallels between his and the old man's story or to suggest that his hand puppet might have a different origin.

All in all, an excellent collection of stories that were well worth the wait, but I hope the next release will be within a 12-month period. Anyway, I hope this was not too much of intrusion and a regular review will be up as soon as possible.