Alias Simon Hawkes (2002) by Philip J. Carraher

I generally prefer homages, parodies and spoofs over outright pastiches, because pastiches seldom measure up to the original and rarely add or outshine the original – imitation has its limitations. So never understood why the estate of Agatha Christie commissioned a bunch of new Hercule Poirot novels, which were never going to be as great or rival the originals. Why not commission writers, like Sophie Hannah, to write a series of Sven Hjerson mysteries under the "Ariadne Oliver" name? Ariadne Oliver and Sven Hjerson can be used to expand on Christie's work without intruding on it. Not to mention fairer to whomever is doing the writing considering it's less of a Herculean task than expecting them to create a new Poirot novel from scratch.

Another problem I have with pastiches, especially Holmesian pastiches, is writers selling their own ideas short by presenting them as imitations. A problem that becomes even worse when the characters and writing aren't perfect imitations of the original. No matter how good the writing, characterization and plot actually is.

For example, Roy Templeman's short story collection Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair & Other Stories (1998), which features a pale shadow of the Great Detective, but the plots of "The Chinese Junk Affair" and "The Trophy Room" aren't without merit – fun impossible crime stories in the David Renwick mold. Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair has very little to offer for hardcore Sherlockians and ignored everyone else not interested in the "further adventures" of Sherlock Holmes. That's how today's subject got overlooked for more than two decades.

Philip J. Carraher's Alias Simon Hawkes: Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in New York (2002) is one of three volumes of Sherlock Holmes pastiches chronicling his long-lost adventures in New York City during the Great Hiatus. A period during which the Great Detective concealed his identity under the alias "Simon Hawkes." I likely would have never known about Carraher or Alias Simon Hawkes had Brian Skupin not mentioned the collection in the introduction to Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). Skupin noted the stories are "decidedly non-Holmesian, but clever" with "a good locked room mystery." Only locked room fan who acknowledged the collection is Hal White who listed Alias Simon Hawkes ("worth reading") on his website under "Suggested Reading & Viewing." And the few reviews from Sherlock Holmes fans are a bit mixed. So enough to place Alias Simon Hawkes on my special locked room wishlist, but never gave it special attention or top priority.

Why this rambling, quasi-coherent preamble about pastiches? I recently found out Alias Simon Hawkes is still in print and dug around a bit to see if it was worth to snatch up a copy with, as you have seen, meager results, but enough to pique my curiosity – especially the two stories listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement. They impressed me stories more suitable for today's locked room revival than the lean years of the early 2000s ("The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century"). I decided to just order a copy and judge the stories solely on their merits as detective stories/locked room mysteries rather than Holmesian pastiches.

"The Adventure of the Magic Alibi," a novella, is the first of four stories making up Alias Simon Hawkes and is an inverted mystery in which the murderer is known, but the bastard has an alibi that stands like a fortress. The murderer is question is Clifford Greenleaf, a rich man, who's hobby is magic tricks and is himself a gifted amateur magician. Greenleaf has gained a reputation for throwing fancy dress parties ("imaginative affairs") for high society and entertaining his guests with "feats of wizardry and pretend-witchcraft." Greenleaf is planning a very special theatrical trick, "a feat of magic," performed during a Halloween party to serve as a cover for murder and creating an unbeatable alibi in the process.

During the festivities, Greenleaf is going to enter a specially prepared room, on the second floor, which has only one door and a window permanently nailed shut that morning. The door is going to be locked behind him and guarded by a Chief Inspector of the New York City police, William "Big Bill" Devery. After a minute, the room is unlocked to allow twenty, ten men and ten women, randomly selected party attendees to go inside and investigate – only to discover their host has inexplicably vanished from the locked and guarded room. Apparently having crossed "the unseen bridge between this physical world and the world of departed souls" as promised. Before the trick can be completed with Greenleaf's reappearance, the murder of Virginia Greenleaf is discovered. She had been fatally wounded in her bedroom, but lived long enough to scrawl her murderer's name in blood, "Cliff killed me." Nothing cryptic about that dying message! Only problem is her husband has a very strange, but incontestable, alibi. There are over twenty people, including Devery, who swear Greenleaf was in the locked, guarded room with them without actually seeing him ("...a very unique alibi"). Inspector Cullen's colleagues belief the dying message was a fake, based on the strength of her husband's alibi, but if he's guilty how did he manage to get out and back into the room?

Inspector Cullen turns to Simon Hawkes for help. Hawkes had assisted Cullen before in The Adventure of the Dead Rabbits Society (2001) and the problem of the magical alibi appears to be better fix to keep boredom away than his usual 7% solution. The setup of the story is great! A crime adhering to Tetsuya Ayukawa's believe that an alibi is a locked room in time and a locked room an alibi in space, which Carraher smashed together. For example, the plan requires a fake locked room-trick to explain Greenleaf's unseen presence inside the locked, watched room. So the setup is first-rate stuff. Unfortunately, the second-act and solution to the locked room alibi are not. And that while there was a much better, more convincing solution staring you in the face (ROT13): nyy lbh arrq vf tvzzvpx gur jvaqbj gb znxr vg nccrne vg jnf anvyrq fuhg (phg-bss anvyf, rgp. cvpx lbhe gevpxf). Nsgre ragrevat gur ebbz, Terrayrns fvzcyl bcraf gur ebbz, fgrcf bhg ba n ynqqre, pybfrf gur jvaqbj naq rvgure tyhrf vg fuhg be hfrf pynzf gb znxr vg nccrne sebz gur vafvqr vg'f ybpxrq naq anvyrq fuhg. Ohg hfvat tyhr jbhyq tvir uvz nabgure ernfba gb jnvg jvgu evfvat gur nynez, orfvqr przragvat uvf nyvov. Vg arrqrq gvzr gb qel. Jura gur zheqre vf qvfpbirerq naq thneqf ner chyyrq njnl sebz gur ybpxrq qbbe, Terrayrns fvzcyl hfrf uvf fcner xrl gb tb onpx vafvqr gb or sbhaq jura gur ebbz vf haybpxrq. Not a blistering original solution, but it eliminates (ROT13) gur arrq sbe n crfxl, gebhoyrfbzr nppbzcyvpr jub arrqf qvfcbfvat naq Terrayrns univat gb qvfthvfr uvzfrys nf n jbzna. Fhpu vzcrefbangvba gevpxf vaibyivat jvtf, naq jungabg, eneryl pbzr npebff nf nalguvat ohg frpbaq-engr. This would have shortened the novella to a short story, but sometimes less is really more. Still enjoyed the overall story, despite the second-half and ending failing to live up to the excellently posed problem of the miracle alibi.

The second and first short story of the collection is "The Adventure of the Captive Forger" and brings Simon Hawkes into contact with an art dealer, named William Lancaster, who has "a reputation for being able to discern forgeries." Lancaster tells Hawkes at the Dead Rabbits Society he has gotten a lucrative, but troublesome, offer to go the home of one Charles Buonocore to appraise some sketches. A battered Lancaster returns the next day with a strange story of a long carriage ride in the dark to a remote, lonely house where a young woman's being held captive and barely escaped the ordeal with his life. And he has no idea how to find the house again.

If the premise sounds somewhat familiar, you're correct. "The Adventure of the Captive Forger" is a rewrite of one of Conan Doyle's worst Sherlock Holmes short stories, "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" (1892). Only real difference is in the characters and settings, but, in every other regard, they are essentially the same story following exactly the same pattern – right down to the ending (ROT13: ubhfr sver naq bar bs gur pevzvanyf trggvat njnl). Even worse, Holmes barely does anything in the original short story except retracing the route the house by figuring out the carriage-trick. Only thing Hawkes has to here is to recall the case of that young engineer Victor Hatherley, "he too was taken on a ride in a carriage," and remarking how striking the similarities between cases are. No shit, Sherlock! And, no, I don't accept the argument that the story is clever self-parody about forgers missing the creative spark to create art themselves.

Detective story or pastiche, either way you cut it, "The Adventure of the Captive Forger" is lazy, irredeemable trash and a case-in-point why not every detective fan is keen on exploring the lost adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Fortunately, "The Adventure of the Glass Room" is the best story of the collection and the reason why Alias Simon Hawkes was even noticed by Skupin and White. A tricky, complicated locked-room-within-a-locked-room mystery. The story begins with Sherlock Holmes, alias Simon Hawkes, is talking at the Dead Rabbits Society with a former client and devout spiritualist, Alwyn Pritchett. Pritchett is boosting to Hawkes about a method he devised "to assure the authenticity of any psychic phenomenon" during a séance. A glass structure, or cube, erected in his own parlor with a glass door that can be bolted from the inside. The only furniture in the glass room is a small table and two chairs. One for Pritchett and the other for the spiritual medium, Charlotte Davreux. Nobody's allowed inside the parlor, beside Pritchett and Davreux, which is also securely locked. So no room for the usual trickery. Hawkes is surprised when the news arrive the next day Pritchett and Davreux died in an apparent murder/suicide.

According to the evidence, Pritchett shot Davreux before turning the gun on himself. They were all alone, sitting in the glass room, the door bolted from the inside and the parlor securely locked ("...a sealed room of glass that is itself standing within a locked room"). So the involvement of a third person seems impossible. Hawkes finds an explanation to explain the seemingly impossible from droplets of blood found in an odd place and reasoning from there. The locked room-trick is complicated and a bit patchy with some points raising an eyebrow, but not bad and a really involved solution fits the tricky, equally complicated and involved presentation of the murders. Just read it before any of the other stories, because you'll appreciate it more (SPOILER/ROT13): fvzvyne gb gur svefg fgbel, gur fbyhgvba erdhverf n crfxl, oheqrefbzr nppbzcyvpr naq gur zheqrere vzcrefbangvat n jbzna.

If "The Adventure of the Magic Alibi," is too long, "The Adventure of the Talking Ghost," the fourth and final story, is too short. Simon Hawkes receives news from London that "the criminal empire of Professor Moriarty now lay shattered" ("an exception of note was the escape of Colonel Sebastian Moran") and considers shedding his new identity to resurrect Sherlock Holmes. While pondering his option, Hawkes receives the news that an ex-client, Joseph Carter, was shot and killed by a gypsy fortune teller. Madam Tollier claimed she shot Carter in self-defense after he tried to attack her with his sword stick. But why? Carter tried to kill the medium to "silence a ghost." Carter's daughter died recently in a drowning accident, but her ghost told him she was murdered ("my killer must be punished"). After his daughter's accident, his wife was killed during a mugging in Central Park. Now he has been shot!

Something fishy is going on! "The Adventure of the Talking Ghost" should have been an intriguingly played, meticulously executed breakdown of Madam Tollier's identity and motive, which would have justified the length of the opening novella. Now it almost feels like the solution is thrown out there when the time comes for Hawkes to simply recognize her (SPOILER/ROT13: pbzcyrgr jvgu chyyvat njnl n jvt. Lrf, gur guveq fgbel va juvpu gur zheqrere hfrf n tbqqnza jvt). There's undoubtedly a good, Doylean-style detective story hiding in here, but Carraher only caught a glimpse of it.

Alias Simon Hawkes is the expected mixed bag of tricks with the first-half of "The Adventure of the Magic Alibi" and "The Adventure of the Glass Room" standing out, but, read back-to-back, the stories come across as repetitive and derivative. Funnily enough, there's a short "About the Author" stating that Carraher believes "each new book should not merely be a practiced variation of the previous one." These stories are all practiced variations on previous/other stories. I already mentioned (SPOILER/ROT13) gjb bs gur fgbevrf eryl ba gebhoyrfbzr nppbzcyvprf naq gur zheqrere vzcrefbangvat n jbzra, juvpu ur ergheaf gb va gur guveq fgbel jvgu n oybaqr jbzna vzcrefbangvat n tlcfl jbzna jvgu n oynpx jvt naq znxrhc, ohg gurer'f nyfb gur fcvevghnyvfg frg qerffvat naq jnyxvat fgvpxf uvqvat jrncbaf. That's why I recommended reading "Glass Room" first. It's the best and most practiced variation of Callaher's favored plot-ingredients. And the only story I can honestly recommended to impossible crime fanatics.

Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? (2021) by Stuart Palmer

Stuart Palmer was a Hollywood screenwriter, mystery novelist and former president of the Mystery Writers of America who created one of the best, most convincing spinster sleuths in the game, Miss Hildegarde Withers – a New York schoolteacher and "self-appointed gadfly to the homicide division." Miss Withers appeared in fourteen novel-length mysteries and around fifty short stories. A portion of the short stories were collected over the decades in The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947), The Monkey Murders (1950) and a collection of crossover stories, People vs. Withers and Malone (1963), co-created with Craig Rice. That left about half of the stories unaccounted for and it would take nearly forty years, before Crippen & Landru published Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002). One of the best collection of short stories from their "Lost Classic" series!

Two decades later, Crippen & Landru published a sequel to that classic collection, entitled Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? (2021), which comes with an introduction by historical mystery writer, Steven Saylor.

Saylor writes Douglas Greene, Jeffrey Marks and Tony Medawar tracked down ten more, previously uncollected, Miss Withers stories in addition to a Howie Rook story, two Sherlock Holmes pastiches and a tale of the supernatural. More importantly, the introduction tells Palmer claimed in 1952 "he had written about 50 Withers stories at that point" and, if his math is correct, that leaves over a dozen stories "buried and waiting to be discovered in miscellaneous American (or Australian?) newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s." So another collection is not off the table, which is why this volume should have been titled Hildegarde Withers: Uncovered Riddles and that hypothetical, last collection should be Hildegarde Withers: Concluding Riddles. And with that out of the way, let's dive into these stories. 

"The Riddle of the Black Spade" was originally published in the October, 1934, issue of Mystery and begins with Miss Withers, "uninvited and unannounced," barging in on Inspector Oscar Piper at the New York Homicide Bureau with a newspaper in hand – carrying a report of a freak accident on a golf course. A former state senator and attorney, David E. Farling, had been discovered lying face down near one of the water hazards of the course. Apparently, Farling had been accidentally struck by a golf ball, killing him instantly, but Miss Withers correctly smells a murder as such accidents never end with a body. She has gets a good reason to stick her nose in the case when the victim's son, Ronald, is arrested on suspicion of murder. Ronald not only had a blazing row with his father, but a skilled golfer who can take "what they call a mashie and chipping balls twenty feet into a tin pail." Miss Withers has her own ideas about the case.

This is a somewhat uneven story that leaves me undecided whether it's too short or too long. Firstly, the story mentioned that whatever killed Farling "would have to be traveling with the speed of a bullet to make such a wound," which makes Miss Withers' solution sound wholly unconvincing. There's no way that was done with the force of a speeding bullet to a skull of "normal thickness." Secondly, there's a very cleverly contrived attempted murder towards the end linked to an early incident in the story and would have made for an excellent short story or an additional plot-thread in a novel-length mystery. So a pretty decent detective story that could have been better had it been either whittled down a little or fully expanded upon. 

"To Die in the Dark" was culled from the pages of the November 18, 1944, issue of The Australian Women's Weekly and brings Inspector Piper to "a run-down, respectable street of brownstones" where he expects to investigate a conventional kind of murder. But what he finds is "another of those locked room things." Charles Portland, a rare book dealer, had been shot to death in his bedroom, but the door was locked on the inside and "the only known key was found in the pocket of the victim's dressing-gown." There's no trace of the gun to be found in the locked room except for a shell case on the floor and the slug that had flattened itself against a wall. What truly astonishes Piper is finding Miss Withers in the house on an assignment and now she has to explain the impossible to exonerate two innocent people. Palmer hardly breaks any new ground here and, normally, I detest this sort of detective story and solution to a locked room puzzle (ROT13: fhvpvqr qvfthvfrq nf zheqre), but it was cast in a somewhat acceptable form. The problem of the absentee gun, in particular, punched up the overall quality of the story. A middling effort from a writer who can do so much better. 

"Where Angels Fear to Tread" was originally published in the February, 1951, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and stands out as the story has Miss Withers "acting like a mother-hen instead of a bloodhound." Miss Withers travels to San Diego, California, to visit a recently married niece and her husband, Joanie and Neil Samson, but finds their honeymoon cottage locked up and abandoned. A neighbor tells Miss Withers "the folks who lived here broke up a week ago" and Joanie appears to have "walked out in what she had on her back," but the bedraggled living room, smashed radio and stained carpet makes her suspect the worst – hitting closer to home than her "impersonal kibitzing on police homicide investigations in the past." This involved her own Joanie! Detective-lieutenant Villalobos is not as accustomed to the schoolteacher's meddling and Inspector Piper has to intervene over the telephone to keep her out of prison ("that New York inspector says you're just a meddlesome old battleaxe of an amateur detective..."). The story then shifts to a shady radio host, Dr. Doan, who has a marriage counseling show complete with dramatic reenactments and a pay-to-play scheme ("...just enclose a five-dollar bill to insure a number-one priority"). Dr. Doan ceremoniously dismisses his small, but loyal, staff to trade his radio career for a television show.

When these two plot-threads begin to come together, Miss Withers has to deduce who out of a handful of people killed Dr. Doan. I strongly suspected the murderer and spotted the big clue, but struggled to explain what the clue actually meant or how it interpret it. And the answers to that question was as surprising and logical as it was satisfying. I don't feel especially bright right now for not catching on to the meaning of that (ROT13) nofheq ubccvat qnapr naq zbnaf bs, “Bu-bu-bu.” Abg gb zragvba gur pyhr bs gur bcra-gbrq fubrf. Well played, Palmer. Well played. The first great story of the collection. 

"The Jinx Man" was first published in the December, 1952, issue of EQMM and concerns "Fortune's fair-haired boy," Roscoe Brock, whose luck has began to run a little thin. A stray bullet pierced his hat while horse riding. A spoiled bottle of cognac turned out to have been poisoned. And when Brock went down to the subway to shelter from a thunderstorm, he was pushed off the platform in front of a train. The train stopped mere inches from where Brock was sprawled. Inspector Piper tells Miss Withers "real murderers don't fool around with fake accidents that misfire," but tend to come right to the point and usually it's "the point of a knife or pistol." So gives Miss Withers his consent to play sleuth, but the near death escapes continue. Miss Withers is even present when Brock opens a package containing a coral snake. Inevitably, one of the attempts results in a victim, but probably not the intended victim. Or was it?

Miss Withers remarks that the case is like "skim milk masquerades as cream" and "murder is a two-edged sword, not to be fooled with." She was right. I think most seasoned armchair detectives can anticipate most of the plot developments, but the ending springs a genuine surprise with a bitter twist on the reader. A minor, but very well done short story that ended stronger than expected. 

"Hildegarde and the Spanish Cavalier" was first published in December, 1955, issue of EQMM and is the reason why this review is tagged with the "Courtroom Drama" label, because the story earned it on every front! This story has everything. Courtroom drama, courtroom shenanigans and courtroom wizardry to the point where Perry Mason probably considered suing Miss Withers for gimmick infringement. Juan del Puerto, also known as the Spanish cavalier, has been under suspicion of having killed his wife and "somehow disposed of the body on the honeymoon cruise," but the only thing the police could pin on him was a bigamy charge. Having served a five-year sentence, Del Puerto is about to be released and he has retained lawyer to claim his wife's life saving. A sum of thirty thousand dollars which he was wearing in a money-belt when arrested as Del Puerto claims it was a gift to him from before they got married.

Miss Withers plans to detonate a bombshell during the court hearing in order to crack the case, but a newspaper headline and a gunshot in court throws the whole case in disarray. And places an entirely different complexion on the case. This story has better storytelling than plotting as it's not difficult to see which the direction the solution is headed towards, but a thoroughly entertaining story nonetheless. And poor Piper! After reading the headlines berating the police for their failure, he laments that has "spent thirty-five years as a cop, and nothing to show for it but a couple of months' pay in the bank and a stake in the retirement fund. I've personally helped send over a hundred murderers to the Chair, and stayed up all night drinking black coffee and hating myself the eve of their executions. I've been beaten up by thugs, I've had gangster lead pried out of my carcass twice, I've worked twenty-four hours a day for days on end when a big case came up, and all the thanks I now get for it is a tabloid's editorial."

"You Bet Your Life" originally appeared in the May, 1957, issue of EQMM and is the unexpected highlight of the collection as it's more of a suspense thriller than detective story. The story opens with Miss Withers making her television debut on Groucho Marx's real-life 1950s TV show, You Bet Your Life. Miss Withers tells Groucho her avocation is criminology ("face cream or dairy cream?") and she's currently working on a solution to the Walter McWalters case. A socialite and conman who "walked off some months ago with a suitcase full of somebody else's money," $200,000 in total, but McWalters pulled "a disappearing act more famous than anything since Judge Crater's" and Miss Withers claims to have succeeded where "the biggest police manhunt in recent history has failed" – even knowing his approximate whereabouts. This is, of course, all part of a ruse to draw McWalters out of hiding, but Inspector Piper was horrified at the broadcast. Miss Withers assumed McWalters is nothing more than an ordinary, non-violent conman, but Pipers knows he's a regular Bluebeard who's "wanted in several states on suspicion of murder." So now her prying has gotten her in the cross hairs of a very real and dangerous lady killer. You can almost read it like a siege story with the question not so much being as how and who McWalters is going to be revealed, but how Miss Withers is going to survive this ordeal. Since her only protection is "a silly French poodle who loves everybody in the world" and "a squirt gun." A surprisingly great story considering it's a suspense thriller rather than a proper whodunit. 

"Who is Sylvia?" was first published in the July, 1961, issue of EQMM and, as you gathered from the previous few stories, Palmer began to put more emphasis on character and storytelling during the mid-1950s. This story is a fine example of Palmer playing around with characters and identity to tell an entertaining yarn. Miss Withers is asked by a former pupil who has fallen in love with a young, aspiring actress, Sally Burris, who headed to the city in a stagestruck daze and simply vanished. Now both Miss Withers and her ex-pupil worry something dreadful has happened. So she asks Inspector Piper for help and has some unexpected news. A wealthy socialite, Mrs. Lola Mills, who's convinced her son has married "a reasonably accurate facsimile" of Miss Lizzie Borden. The woman in question is an oddball who lapses into a British or Australian accent and has "a big leather bag that she keeps locked in a closet and guards with her life" named Sylvia Burris! Mrs. Mills want her "daughter-in-law arrested and deported so that the wedding can be quietly annulled," which puts tension on the family. And pretty soon evidence emerges that someone is thinking about murder.

Miss Withers is "a firm believer in preventive detection" and has to figure out what, exactly, is going on and why, before someone decides to pull the trigger. Yet another unexpectedly great tale as it's not your typical detective story. 

"The Return of Hildegarde Withers" (1964) is the next story in the collection, but I'm going to skip it as the story is a very light rewrite of "The Riddle of the Forty Costumes," which had also been collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles. While reading, I began to experience a mild case of déjà vu and a quick search turned up the title "The Riddle of the Forty Costumes" and a comparison of the two confirmed my suspicion. All you need to know it's the dullest story in the collection in which Miss Withers investigates the disappearance of a dance teacher. 

"Hildegarde Withers is Back" was originally published in the April, 1968, issue of EQMM and is a return to form for both Palmer and Miss Withers. Miss Withers has retired and settled down in California, but returned to New York City to come to the aid of her old friend, Inspector Piper, on the Barth case. Cecily Barth was "one of Hollywood's most famous stars in her day," known as the Love Goddess of the Silver Screen, who has life story told as TV special. The producer, Boris Abbas, brought a Hollywood scriptwriter, Gary Twill, to New York and they picked a "young sexpot actresses to play," Lilith Lawrence, "the leading role." However, the producer disliked the script, fired the writer and Twill proceeded to do, as Piper described it, "the Dutch Act out of his hotel window" ("I do wish, Oscar, you would stop insulting the people of Holland"). The police believes it was a simple case of suicide, but Miss Withers is willing the wager a pretty penny the scriptwriter was cleverly murdered. Throughout the story, you can't help but cast a suspicious eye in the direction of the murderer, but the crux of the plot is how it could have been done. Oh, boy, did I sink my teeth into a red herring and stubbornly refused to let it go.

A very peculiar item that figured in a previous story is casually mentioned here and this peculiar item can do something that could have explained how it was done, because the impact of the fall would have obliterated evidence of its use on the body – especially if it was a head-on collision with the pavement. It was simple, elegant and completely wrong. Palmer came up with a better, much more satisfying explanation. A great throwback to the puzzle-driven stories from the 1930s and '40s. 

"Hildegarde Plays It Calm" was first published in the April, 1969, issue of EQMM and gives Miss Withers a new experience as an amateur detective. Many years ago, Miss Withers solved "the famous toe-print case" that placed Eileen Travis in the death house on two counts of Homicide One, but her sentence was commuted and served only ten years. Now she's on the outside, Eileen turns to Miss Withers to ask advice on behalf of a friend who's still on the inside. A friend, named Bunny, whose husband has stopped coming up to see her or even write anymore. Since this is the first time Miss Withers has "a chance at firsthand to see what they're like when and if they get back into the world," she decides to help Eileen and take her to see what Bunny's husband is up to. But the evening doesn't exactly go as planned. How or what is something you have to read for yourself, but the story is a fitting capstone to Miss Withers' short story run. A fitting, final case for a schoolteacher who keeps sticking her nose in murder cases! 

The last four stories will be discussed in bulk in order to not bloat this review even further and because the stories were not particularly interesting to me. Firstly, there the only known short story in existence featuring Palmer's secondary series-detective, "The Stripteaser and the Private Eye" (1968), in which Howie Rook comes to the aid of a well-known stripper who may have witnessed a gang killing. So not my type of detective story. "How Lost Was My Father" (1953) is a very well written ghost story that became a rural legend and comes with an introduction to give some cultural and historical context to the story. I really liked it. Just one questions. Why has the premise of a man who "one moment he had walked in the middle of the forty-acre pasture, and the next moment he had vanished," while being watched, never been used for an impossible crime novel? Someone tell Paul Halter to get to work! I expected much more from the Sherlockian pastiche "The Adventure of the Marked Man" (1944), in which Holmes and Dr. Watson try to save a man being pestered by a would-be-assassin, but not one of the Great Detective's most remarkable or memorable cases. On the other hand, I really enjoyed "The Adventure of the Remarkable Worm" (1944), a Holmesian pastiche, which is modeled on an allusion to one of those many untold cases. While a parody, it manages to come with a surprisingly logical and coherent story based on this brief description from "The Problem of Thor Bridge" (1922): "A third case worthy of note is that of Isadora Persano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science." The collections ends with essay/fan letter titled "The I-O-U of Hildegarde Withers" (1948) explaining why there would be no Miss Withers without Sherlock Holmes. A nice touch to round out the collection.

So, as usually is the case with collections of short stories single author, Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? is a mixed bag of treats with only one real dud, some decent stories and a few welcome surprises, but, on a whole, not the classic collection that its predecessor was. However, I think the stories collected here suffered from Palmer trying to move along with the times and began to emphasize character-driven storytelling over intricate plotting. Whereas Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles comprised of short stories from the thirties and forties. Although I don't think a slight reduction in the plotting department will diminish any of the fun these stories will bring to long-time fans of Stuart Palmer, Miss Hildegarde Withers, Inspector Oscar Piper and that kindhearted poodle "who would gladly have held the dark-lantern for Jack the Ripper."

City of Libraries: "The Climbing Man" (2015) by Simon Clark

Simon Clark's novella "The Climbing Man" is a pastiche of Conan Doyle's immortal detective specifically written for an all-original anthology of new Sherlock Holmes stories, entitled The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad (2015), which Brian Skupin listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – describing a honey of an impossibility. This time, it was not the promise of an original-sounding locked room murder that attracted my attention, but the archaeology-theme and backdrop. I love archaeological mysteries and there are not enough of them. The impossible crime here is merely a bonus. 

"The Climbing Man" takes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia, tasked with stamping out "a vipers' nest" of plunderers determined "to loot Mesopotamia of its ancient riches." A criminal gang who employed Arab riflemen, clad in gray, who passed themselves of as legitimate protection for travelers and archaeologists.

When the story opens, Holmes and Watson have made off with a dhow (sail boat) crammed with stolen artifacts, but the gray-shirts on the riverbank pepper the boat with bullets and they're pretty much sitting ducks – even succeeding in wounding the Great Detective. Only the hand of providence guided the boat away from the gray-shirts, down the Euphrates, "towards one of the most baffling mysteries" they encountered. Holmes and Watson end up at an dig site of two archaeologists, Edward Priestly and Professor Hendrik, where two generations have been working on excavating the subterranean tunnels, basement and vaults of the buried city of Tirrash. A once legendary city referred to as Bibliopolis or the City of Libraries.

Three thousand years ago, the city was attacked and destroyed, but, before the barbarians destroyed and plundered the city, the people emptied the libraries of the clay tablets. These clay tablets were "carefully stored in the basements beneath the houses and sealed shut," which remained intact and undisturbed under the desert sands for most of recorded history. But a perplexing, modern-day mystery is discovered in one of its sealed chambers.

A few years ago, Edward Priestly's brother, Benjamin, vanished without a trace from the excavation site and a week ago, they discovered his naturally mummified body in a place that begs for a rational explanation.

During an exploration of an underground passageway, they discovered one of the many hidden vaults, doorway sealed with stone blocks, which "has not been disturbed in three thousand years" and began their meticulous, scientific examination – cutting a small aperture in the wall to look inside. What looked back at them was Benjamin's dry, shriveled face! A second aperture gave them a better view of the body, but it deepened the mystery only further with a second impossibility. The mummified body clung to the wall, facing the stonework, arms outstretched above his head as if he's climbing or "trying to escape from his grave." So the problem is twofold: how did the body end up in a 3000-year-old sealed and undisturbed chamber with four feet of dust covering the floor and how "the devil was he glued so high up on the wall" like "a gigantic spider?" And to give the problem some urgency, the guards hired by the two archaeologists turn out to be gray-shirts. The game's afoot!

The problem of the body in the underground sealed chamber has, as to be expected from its premise, a two-pronged solution. Firstly, the explanation as to how the chamber was entered is not something that will excite many locked room readers, but how the body ended up stuck to the wall was kind of marvelous. A trick that perfectly fitted, time-wise, with the type of impossible, or weird, detective fiction that being written during the Doylean era of the genre. It's the kind of trick/solution you would expect to find in L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace's A Master of Mysteries (1898). Unfortunately, "The Climbing Man" also shares the clunky, uneven clueing of the detective stories from that period. Such as when Holmes was collecting evidence and slipping it into an envelope, but Watson only caught a glimpse of "a glittering item." You have to wait until the solution to find out what, exactly, he found. So you only have some room to do some educated guesswork.

Nevertheless, neither the uneven clueing nor the anti-climatic confrontation with the gray-shirts could spoil this thoroughly entertaining and absorbing story that made excellent use of its archaeological setting. I also appreciate it when a pastiche treats someone's else creation with respect and not unduly temper with the original, which can be simply achieved with Sherlock Holmes by giving him a complicated, knotty problem to occupy "that remarkable brain of his." And that's exactly what Clark did here. 

A note for the curious: "The Climbing Man" was not Clark's first foray into the realm of impossible crimes and locked room mysteries. Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997) contains Clark's "The Adventure of the Falling Star," which is not listed in Skupin, in which Holmes is asked to investigate the disappearance of a meteorite from a collection in a locked laboratory. So, yeah, that story has now been added to my special locked room wishlist. Something else that's now on my wishlist is an anthology of Sherlock Holmes locked room/impossible crime pastiches (Sherlocked!).

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories (1998) by Roy Templeman

Roy Templeman's "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" is one of three novella-length pastiches, collected in Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair (1998), which came to my attention when reading a fascinating description of the plot in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) – a theft from "a locked trophy house" protected with "trip wires, booby traps and a flock of geese." A bit of detective work revealed that two of the three stories are impossible crime tales! So on the pile it went.

I've never been a huge fan of pastiches and only handful of writers, like Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch and Arthur Porges, wrote pastiches that truly honored or even added to the original source material instead of staining it. Dale C. Andrews and Kurt Sercu's "The Book Case" (2007) with a 100-year-old Ellery Queen is a good example of a pastiche that should considered canon. More often than not, they're nothing more than glorified fan fiction or aspiring authors hitching their wagons to classic, ready-made characters. This is something that's especially true for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which has become somewhat of a cottage industry.

There is, however, a third, much rarer, kind of pastiche. Pastiches with either good plots, ideas or writing that were depreciated by being presented as imitations.

Templeman's three Sherlock Holmes pastiches definitely fall into this category and can't help but feel that these stories would have been better remembered today, particularly among locked room fans, had he created an original detective character – like a modern-day Rival of Sherlock Holmes. Either that or he should have tried selling the impossible crime ideas to David Renwick, because these stories would have worked remarkably well as Jonathan Creek episodes. Something tells me Templeman had at least watched the first season before he began working on the stories.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" is the first of the three stories and opens with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being summoned by Mycroft Holmes to have a private interview with the Prime Minister and a cabinet member, Sir Simon Clayton. Sir Simon has bizarre story to tell of, what could be, either "a huge confidence trick" or "a world-shattering discovery which could topple Empire." Great Britain could be at "great peril" from it.

Sir Simon recently rekindled an old friendship with a crony from his university days, Rodger Hardy, who came from a family of industrialists with "a flair for invention," but the family went bankrupt and the ancestral home, Halam Hall, became a ruin. Rodger had gone abroad and nothing was seen of him for years until, one day, he turned up again to invite Sir Simon, to Halam Hall, where he wished to show him something. And that something was a sight to behold! Halam Hall is "an unbalanced architectural mongrel" that had been flogged over the decades with the whims of fashion and individual tastes, which includes an underground ballroom that was left unfinished and down there ten grinning Chinamen were constructing "a full-sized ocean-going wooden junk" – over fifty feet in length. But why was he spending six months to construct a large boat in a place where there was no hope of ever getting it out?

Rodger asked Sir Simon to come down every month to observe its construction and promises all

will be revealed upon completion. When the time comes, the completed vessel was surrounded by poles and caged in with strands of copper wire, which appeared to make a buzzing sound. Rodger told his friend the junk is being "electrically energised" and invited him to join him for dinner, but, when they returned two hours later, the huge Chinese junk that had taken up the whole space of the ballroom had simply vanished into thin air. A situation that becomes even more impossible when Rodger drives Sir Simon to the River Thames where the newly build ship was floating on the water.

 

So what's the catch? Rodger claims to have invented a way to transpose "matter through space by means of converting solids, by electricity, into waves, which could then be converted back again into the original solid state." And he's willing to part with the secret for the then astronomical sum of one million pounds. British government wants Sherlock Holmes to find out whether they've got the hands on paradigm shifting invention or if they're being trick, which means finding an explanation how the vessel was removed from the underground ballroom to which the door was "too small to allow exit." And how it reappeared on the River Thames.

A neatly posed locked room puzzle cleverly making use of the underground ballroom, because it immediately excluded the possibility that the architectural monstrosity housed two large, identical rooms – promising something more original than a simple piece of misdirection. I'm glad to report that the solution delivered on the promise made by its premise and the locked room-trick made this story the most Jonathan Creek-like in the collection. No idea why it wasn't included in Locked Room Murders: Supplement.

Unfortunately, "Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair" also has some flaws and shortcomings preventing it from becoming a true (locked room) classic.

Sherlock Holmes only deduces the motive behind the scheme, but has to relay on subterfuge to find out how the vessel disappeared from the ballroom and reappeared again on the Thames, which came at the expense of the clueing. So what should have been a how-was-it-done type of puzzle detective story becomes a story about a detective tackling a massive locked room mystery. You can only make an educated guess how it was done. A second problem is that the story is a little overwritten with modern attitudes bleeding through in certain parts, which is true for all three stories in this collection. Each story could have been told in half the number of pages without compromising the plots. Still a highly enjoyable story with an originally worked out impossible crime.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" is pretty much a (historical) travelogue of the Peaks District, Derbyshire, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are spending a holiday when they begin to hear about the mysterious death of an old, German watchmaker – who was found in his ransacked home with a head wound. The doctor concluded that the wound was not fatal and that he had died of heart failure, but the villagers believed it was "an unnatural death." A believe strengthened by escaped pet raven of the old watchmaker who has been frantically screaming, "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen, kiefernzapfen," around the village. The message of the raven turns out to be a dying message by proxy that reveals where the old man had hidden his money, but most of the story has Holmes and Watson soaking in the local color and history. There's a darkly humorous anecdote about a mischievous parrot and the history of "the plague village," Eyam, which is remembered for the way "the god-fearing folk contained the pestilence" by isolating themselves that stopped the plague from spreading to other nearby villages. Here's to your memory, Eyam.

So a very minor, but readable enough, story with a simplistic, paper-thin plot and a holidaying detective that makes it one of Holmes' least exciting and memorable cases.

"Sherlock Holmes and the Tick-Tock Man" convinced me Templeman is either a schoolteacher or an (amateur) historian, but probably a teacher, because I heard the voice of a teacher every time one of these stories slipped into lecture mode.

The last story is the one that got listed in Locked Room Murders: Supplement, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room," in which Holmes is consulted by Viscount Siddems who recently returned from India with a collection of trophies and eastern armory – building a trophy house-cum-armour museum to store the collection. Viscount Siddems had his house burgled and this made him decide to protect his trophy house, built a few hundred yards away from the hall, with "man-traps, trip-wires to set off shot guns" and "a flock of geese." Geese were used in Roman times as watchdogs because the slightest unusual sound would set up "an unholy honking."

However, these securities measures didn't stop a thief from walking up the trophy house, unlocking the door with a key and taking a Japanese shield from the wall without setting off the flock of geese. So the viscount doubled the number of traps, shotguns and fixed bells to the trip-wire, but the thief simply took away another shield. But how?

Just like the opening story, "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" shows a lot of ingenuity and originality with how it presents the impossible situation, but this time that's not reflected in the explanation. Such an elaborate setup requires a scrap of cleverness to either put the traps out of commission or circumvent them with a way to keep the geese quiet, but the solution, while perfectly workable and logical, was a little too facile. And underwhelming. Luckily, the reason behind the thefts was good and something Arsène Lupin would have warmly approved of.

So, as some of you probably noticed, my take on the individual stories don't seem to align with the opening of this review, but I believe the flaws and shortcomings of these three stories were enlarged by being pastiches. It comes with certain expectations that Templeman was unable to live up to. But had he created his own detective characters, Templeman could have told his stories on his own terms with the result being something along the lines of Hal White's The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (2008), Andrew May's The Case of the Invisible College and Other Mysteries (2012) and Stephen Leather's The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (2014). I think originally created detective characters would have softened some of its flaws.

After all, even as pastiches these were superior detective stories, especially the first one, compared to most what was being published at the time.

Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories is not a timeless classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a well intended collection of stories written by an enthusiastic amateur with a commendable interest in locked room puzzles – something that was too rare in the nineties. So recommended to the ferocious locked room reader and addicted Sherlockian who'll read everything with the name of the Great Detective printed on it.

Lifting a Tip of the Veil: Jonathan Creek vs. "Sherlock Holmes"

"All will be revealed in due course."

- People who plot and scheme

Jonathan Creek (Alan Davies) with Joey Ross (Sheridan Smith)

While the BBC hasn't released any official air dates or synopses for the upcoming Jonathan Creek episodes, Radio Times announces yet another incarnation of the immortal Sherlock Holmes as an enticing plot-thread and rival detective for Creek in the opener of the fifth season.

In a third season episode, Miracle in Crooked Lane (1999), Jonathan Creek's investigation of a possible case of astral projection is hampered by a growing legion of fans, who follow him around like a flock of mimicking lovebirds. This new character, Ridley, is studying criminology and also admirers Creek as a detective, however, Ridley takes his cue from another, even more famous sleuth.

Ridley wears "a black coat, has a thick crop of dark hair and an eye for observing details" and the actor playing the part, Kieran Hodgson, studied Benedict Cumberbatch's recent interpretation of Sherlock for inspiration. Unfortunately, for the fans of Holmes' modern day reinvention, series-creator David Renwick reportedly wrote the episode as a spoof. I suspect from the article Ridley will be somewhere along the lines of the oddball Sherlock from Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Bughouse Affair (2013), which also happens to be a locked room mystery. Radio Times further reports Jonathan Creek is due to air on BBC1 in February.

Well, to pad out this notification, and in anticipation of the upcoming season, I'll post a short list of my favorite episodes as an excuse to babble about impossible crimes. Also known as the part where you can stop reading without the fear of missing anything of importance. 

Jack in the Box (1997)

The standout episode of the first season with an original, satisfying answer for the problem of the retired comedian found dead in the disused nuclear shelter, heavy door locked from the inside, underneath his home. Creek reasons the truth from a toilet basin and a light bulb. 

Danse Macabre (1998)

A well-known and controversial author of sensational horror stories is shot dead on All Hollows' Eve, and her murderer was dressed for the part, clad in a tight skeleton suit, but during the escape from the house the shooter kidnaps the daughter of the victim and they're eventually trapped in the garage. The place is surrounded, but when the door is opened the shooter has disappeared from a locked, windowless room that was constantly guarded. Even if the police should've solved this one immediately, it's still a good trick and overall a very good episode.

Time Waits for Norman (1998)

Read my full review of this episode here. 

Black Canary (1998) 

A once famous illusionist, known as the "Black Canary," apparently took her own life after chasing away a limping man dressed in rags from the snow covered garden, which was witnessed by her wheelchair-bound husband, but a post-mortem reveals his wife died hours before her committing suicide. The man in rags he saw limping away from his wife must have been lighter than air, because the blanket of snow was bare of any footprints! I still think this the series' masterpiece. 

Satan's Chimney (2001) 

The seemingly impossible murder of an actress during a movie shoot, struck by a bullet fired through a window without breaking the glass, leads Jonathan Creek to an ancient castle with a room where the devil consumed the souls blasphemers. I did not think much of the first plot-thread, but the miraculous disappearance from the dungeon room and the whodunit-aspect were very well put together.

The Tailor's Dummy (2003) 

A truly great episode from the last, regular season until the irregular, seasonal specials took over and begins when a bad review leads a designer to commit suicide, which sets a delightfully piece of a Carrian revenge in motion – in which a man changes his physical appearance in matter of seconds.

Well, I hope to be back before long with a regular review, but a few orders began to arrive around the same time (I was behind on a few series) and now I’m going through something of an existential crisis. I'll sort it out though.

Learning from the Best: C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes

"The trouble is that as usual you are so engrossed in the fact that you are oblivious to its environment."

- Nero Wolfe (Fer-de-Lance, 1934) 

"Dupin was a very inferior fellow" and "by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine," opined Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887) after his trusty companion, Dr. John Watson, mentioned that Holmes reminded him of Dupin – remarking that he had "no idea that such individuals did exist out of stories." Holmes may not have recognized an equal in Dupin, but the trick his Parisian counterpart employed to deliver the killer in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to his doorstep still worked for Holmes half a century later. No. I'm not referring to their first case.

First we've to go back to Paris, 1841, where the terrific shrieks rouse the inhabitants of the Rue Morgue to the doorstep of Madame L'Espanaya and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille L'Espanaye, but the premise is secured from within and the gateway had to be forced with a crowbar. The cries had ceased by this time, however, when they moved upstairs they hear a pair of rough voices, but when the second and last door was broken down there was nobody there that was alive to tell them what had happened. Madame L'Espanaya was decapitated, Camille stuffed up the chimney and a crime-scene that resembles a battle field without an apparent escape route for the murderer – leaving the police baffled. All except for Dupin, who sees the plain truth in the sheer impossibility and brutality of the case as well as some great deductive reasoning on the multilingual perception of the voices that were heard from the locked, upper floor room.

One of Sherlock Holmes' cases of lesser repute, "The Adventure of Black Peter," collected in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903), provided the Great Detective with a problem that featured similar outré characteristics and his method echoed Dupin.

The retired Captain Peter Carey earned his nickname, "Black Peter," for his villainy and was known the flog his wife and daughter through the park in the dead of night and had a private retreat, a wooden outhouse he called the "cabin," which is where he died – pinned to the wall like a butterfly with a harpoon. Naturally, Holmes is ahead of the police, who arrest the wrong man along the way, reasoning where to look for the killer based on a pouch of tobacco and the strength needed to pin a rugged, ill-tempered seaman to the wall.

I don't want to cast any aspersions on Conan Doyle's character, but I suspect him of having had a bit of fun at the expensive of his readers who've read "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." I've always got the impression from this story that Doyle wanted to put the suggestion into the readers head that he's going for a similar solution, from the background of the characters to the force needed to pull off the crime, before presenting a far more rational answer as opposed to Poe's fancy solution – which made the whole story really nightmarish. That image of the murderer wielding a razor blade like a mad barber is perfect for a Tim Burton movie. With Johnny Depp as Dupin, of course!, and Jude Law as the nameless narrator. Just to screw with the Sherlock Holmes movie franchise. But seriously, I would love to see a Burton/Depp adaptation of Poe's Dupin.

At the end of the day, Dupin and Holmes reasoned truth from different clues that told in essence the same story, but their understanding of the physical strength involved made interpreting everything else all the more easier. And based on their deduction, Holmes followed Dupin's example to place an ad that lured the culprit to their rooms. But this begs the question... was remembering that story what made Holmes dash off to the butcher's shop, in the wee hours of the morning, for an experiment (we know he read Poe) and did he acknowledge this by using Dupin's ruse to ensnarl the murderer? 

Well, I guess we simply don't have enough data to make a solid brick, but I always felt this story was as much in the Dupin/Poe spirit as "The Speckled Band," collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891), and The Sign of Four (1890) - even though it does not contain a locked room or an atmosphere of horror.