The Paradise Affair (2021) by Bill Pronzini

In 2005, Bill Pronzini revived his two historical gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, who sold their professional detective services in San Francisco at the turn-of-the-century – when the Old West was coming to an end. This new run of short stories appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine starting with "Quincannon in Paradise" (collected in Quincannon's Game: A Western Quartet, 2005) and seems to have ended with "Pick Up Sticks" (2021). During the 2010s, Pronzini started to rework the Quincannon and Carpenter short stories into novel-length mysteries with his wife, Marcia Muller. The series began with the delightful The Bughouse Affair (2013) and some have called it the novel that rebooted the series, but it's more of a continuation of Quincannon (1985) and Beyond the Grave (1986) merging and streamlining the short stories with the original 1980s novels.

The Paradise Affair (2021) is the ninth and, as of this writing, seemingly last entry in the series based on the short stories "Quincannon in Paradise" and "Pick Up Sticks." A whole lot has changed since the days of The Bughouse Affair.

John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter finally tied the marital knot, "their future together was bright," but Quincannon, "the most accomplished detective in the western United States," suffered an affront to his pride and skills – allowing two slippery criminals to escape his clutches. Jackson "Lonesome Jack" Vereen ("an ironical moniker, for he was a libertine of gargantuan appetites") and E.B. "Nevada Ned" Nagle ("whose primary vice was the opium derivative morphine") are con artists who graduated over their lengthy career from bait-and-switch trickery to swindling people with phony stocks. Their latest mark and Quincannon's current client, R.W. Anderson, not only bought two-thousand dollars of bogus stock in a nonexistent silver mine, but the two swindlers seized upon an opportune to make off with his portfolio of stock certificates and bearer bonds. Anderson hired Quincannon to bring the two to justice and hopefully recover the stolen portfolio. However, two weeks of exhaustive detective work gets thrown out of the window when Quincannon learns his quarries booked a passage for for Honolulu, Hawaii.

Sabina spots an opportunity for a second, busman's honeymoon ("we deserve a vacation, even if it is a working one") and convinces both her husband and their client to follow Lonesome Jack and Nevada Ned to Honolulu.

The Paradise Affair takes place during the first-half of 1898, "the Sandwich Islands Kingdom was overthrown and Queen Lili'uokalani's reign ended in January of '93, five years ago," but before the United States annexed the then independent Republic of Hawaii – which happened later that year on August 12, 1898. So the story is drenched in local and historical color. The impending annexation is a popular conversational topic ("...if Japan doesn't invade and annex it first, as they have threatened to do"), while the Spanish-American war and increased U.S. military presence hover in the background (Admiral Dewey's Asiatic Squadron swarm Honolulu Harbor). However, the best and most evocative part is Quincannon riding a donkey pass the rugged coastline, fishing villages, lava tubes and spouting blowholes as he tracks down his elusive quarries. It takes Quincannon's resigned Scottish pessimism ("no boats, no horses, naught but wagons and asses! What other handicaps did these island gardens of delight hold in store?") a while to acclimate, before his feelings towards the islands begin to mellow. And while her husband is hunting down a pair of swindlers, Sabina gets a case of her own practically thrown in her lap.

During their voyage, the Quincannon's befriended the Prichards, Lyman and Margaret, who are traveling homeward and invited them to stay at their Waikiki home. So stays with their new friends when her husband is roaming the islands for Lonesome Jack and Nevada Ned, but one particular hot, stuffy night, Sabina ventures out into garden when "an explosive report broke the quiet" – a gunshot coming from the house next door. Gordon Pettibone, owner of the neighboring property, had apparently had locked himself in the study with a loaded gun and opinions differ on how he got shot. The local police believes it was suicide, but Philip Oakes insists his uncle had been fiddling with the gun and accidentally shot himself. A twenty thousand dollar insurance policy with a nonpayment clause in case of suicide depends on it. Oakes heard Sabina is a detective and asks her to prove his uncle's death was due to an accidental misfire, but she has the sneaking suspicion Pettibone might have been cleverly murdered. Sabina thought she a shadowy shape close to the back wall shortly after hearing the gunshot and than there's those three, strange words Pettibone spoke before he died, "pick up sticks." Like the old nursery rhyme ("One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, knock on the door. Five, six, pick up sticks").

Ah, yes, an Ellery Queen-style dying message inside a John Dickson Carr-like locked room mystery. The detective story's take on the riddle wrapped inside an enigma and Sabina's knows dying messages and impossible murders is Quincannon's bread and butter ("conundrums of this sort intrigued him"), but "she had, after all, been instrumental in solving a few conundrums herself." Sabina makes short work of the locked room and dying message puzzles with the latter having a clever answer to the criticism often leveled at the dying message. Why would a mortally injured and dying person come up with a cryptic clue on the spot instead of outright naming the murderer? This dying message is even more damning than simply naming the murderer. The locked room-trick is a nicely-done variation on an impossible crime technique that always fascinated me (ROT13: haybpxrq qbbef naq jvaqbjf gung nccrne gb or ybpxrq naq obygrq sebz gur vafvqr). So both quickly, and neatly, wrap up their respective investigations with days left to spare to enjoy that second, well deserved honeymoon.

The Paradise Affair is a relatively short, but tightly written and plotted locked room mystery full of local and historical color, which certainly makes it a standout of the series. More importantly, it provided a satisfying closure to the character-arcs of John and Sabina Quincannon. John Quincannon was introduced as a broken ex-Secret Service operative haunted by the gun battle in which his ricocheting bullet killed a pregnant woman ("the burden of responsibility for the loss of two innocent lives had been unbearable"). Everything changed when he met Sabina, then a "Pink Rose" of the Pinkerton Agency, who had lost her husband in the line of duty. Their first collaboration allowed both of them to move on and create Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. So, if The Paradise Affair really is their last outing, they got a happy sendoff that retrospectively brightened Beyond the Grave. A crossover across time between this series and Muller's short-lived series-character Elena Oliverez, which takes place in 1894 and 1986. The 1986 portion of the story makes it very clear Carpenter and Quincannon are long gone. Either way, this is not the last you have seen of them on this blog. I still have The Bags of Tricks Affair (2018), which I overlooked and forgot about. The stories collected in Quincannon's Game warrant a second look as three of the four stories are locked room mysteries. Why not end where the series began, Quincannon, because that would be on theme for this blog.

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) by Bill Pronzini

Last year, I posted a short story review under the title "The Nameless Detective: "The Hills of Homicide" (1949) by Louis L'Amour," which is best described as a western-flavored, hardboiled locked room mystery solved by a Los Angeles private eye – whose name is never revealed. So labeled the story as a curious ancestor of Bill Pronzini's "Nameless Detective" series, but recently stumbled across a much more fascinating link with Pronzini's historical private eye novels. I'm not talking about the handful of Carpenter and Quincannon short stories that originally appeared in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine during the mid-1990s. 

"The Hills of Homicide" mentioned in passing miners, or high-graders, smuggling gold ore out of a mine under seemingly impossible circumstances, but it was an anecdote without an answer. I closed out the review with my own solution to the problem of the pilfering miners. Not a bad solution, if I say so myself. However, I was less pleased with past Tom's cleverness when coming across an identical impossible situation in one of the latest Carpenter and Quincannon novels. Did I inadvertently spoil a locked room mystery by coming up with the best possible explanation for a rather one-of-a-kind locked room problem? Only one way to find out! 

The Stolen Gold Affair (2020) is the eight, of currently nine, novels about John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter, Professional Detective Services, who operate in 1890s San Francisco when the glory days of the Old West began to wane and fade – as a new century dawned. A time when the line between the American frontier and the settled states blurred and motorcars, or horseless carriages, began to replace "horse-drawn conveyances as the primary method of transportation." One of the constants in this ever-changing world is the always adaptable criminal.

John Quincannon is summoned by one of the city's wealthiest businessmen, Everett Hoxley, to his social club to discuss a particular vexing and costly problem.

Hoxley is the head of a large mining corporation that "owned several gold and silver mines in northern California and Nevada," but the production of high-quality ore in the Monarch Mine has dropped noticeably and there have been rumors of high-grading. So he wants Quincannon to go undercover as a newly hired timberman to "identify the individuals responsible for an insidious high-grading operation" and "to put a satisfactory end to their activities," which comes with a generous fee, expensive and a possible bonus. Only obstacle is that it's likely a four-week assignment and his marriage to Sabina Carpenter is planned three weeks from then. But that's the life of a detective.

Quincannon arrives in the small mining settlement of Patch Creek, northeast of Marysville, under the alias J.F. Quinn where's confronted with multiple, quasi-impossible crimes and a full-blown "locked room" murder – twelve-hundred feet underground! Firstly, he not only has to identify the gang of high-graders, but figure out how they were refining gold-bearing ore to produce pure gold dust in "a mine operating with mostly full crews twenty-four hours a day." Secondly, the method used to smuggle the gold out of the mine. Thirdly, he has to do all that while doing eight-hour of backbreaking, mining labor in "the dangerous bowels of the earth." A place where cave-ins, premature detonations, rock gas and runaway cages or tramcars were greater threats to his health than "the actions of a gang of gold thieves." Quincannon believes there's "no better detective in the Western states" and gets some quick results, but, having stumbled across an important piece of evidence, he is knocked out in a abandoned, dead-end crosscut. He's awakened by the sound of a pistol shot and is found next to a dead body. There's only one way in and out of crosscut, which was in sight of several miners when the shot sounded. Nobody else entered or left the crosscut. So "as pretty a frame as ever had been set around an innocent man."

The passages of the story that takes place in the mine are the best part of the book, but the solutions to the various problems vary enormously in quality. The locked room-trick used for the shooting is good and simple, which nicely fitted both the underground conditions and the circumstances in that crosscut. Indubitably, the best plot-strand of the Monarch Mine case. Quincannon more or less stumbles across the refining process, but a clever little criminal operation nonetheless. Regrettably, the method used to the smuggle out the gold was a huge letdown, because I expected something a little more ingenious rather than a gross oversight on the part of the shift inspectors. But they remain the best and most memorable parts of the whole book.

So, while Quincannon is playing the Sherlock Holmes of Agartha in the Earth's crust, Sabina is holding down the fort, but the detective business experiences one of its slack periods and only has two minor cases on her hands.

Firstly, Sabina is doing a background check on an unsavory character who turned up in Quincannon's case and how to get that information to him, because Patch Creek didn't have a Western Union office. Secondly, she unofficially and unethically ended "the criminal careers of a confidence man and an embezzler" without a paying client or earning "so much as one thin dime," which is a cardinal sin – to "John's way of thinking." They meet up again in the last quarter to hunt down the last high-grader as the story becomes a charming, well written period railway mystery with an impossible disappearance as their quarry vanishes from a moving train without a trace.

One thing to remember is that the novels in this series are rewrites and expansions of the short Carpenter and Quincannon stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Louis L'Amour Western Magazine from 1994 to 2018. The Stolen Gold Affair is an expansion of "The Desert Limited" (LLWM, Nov. 1995) and "The Gold Stealers" (EQMM, Sep/Oct. 2014), but had previously only read "The Desert Limited" in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Servives (1998) and hoped the solution would be better in a novel-length treatment. There are some clever touches to it (how Sabina solved it and why Quincannon missed it), but not everything holds up. I thought (ROT13) Zbetna hfvat “fbzr fbeg bs ehfr gb trg gur onttntr znfgre gb bcra hc” was a cop-out answer and too easily glossed over. That was suppose to be a legitimate obstacle in closed, moving locked room and presenting it as "an educated guest" doesn't make it any less unfair.

That being said, my opinion of the short story at the time is that the whole trick and setting would probably work better in a visual medium, which is also true for its expanded version in The Stolen Gold Affair. I believe this series, particular its novel-length treatments, would make perfect source material for a television series as it has everything on the ready. A beautiful, striking period backdrop during a time of great change with two great, memorable lead-characters who came with their own personal, and intertwined, storylines – culminating in their marriage. There's also the ongoing storyline with the crackpot Sherlock that ran through multiple novels (beginning with The Bughouse Affair, 2013) and ready-made plots that are neither overly complicated or insultingly simplistic. Some of the impossibilities from this series would translate beautifully to the small screen like the ghostly apparitions in The Spook Lights Affair (2013). Not to mention Pronzini and Marcia Muller's time-crossing crossover, Beyond the Grave (1986), can be adapted to give such a TV-series a strong and memorable ending.

So, on a whole, I did enjoy my time with The Stolen Gold Affair with the chapters that take place underground and the impossible shooting in the crosscut standing out, but the problem is that they were noticeably better done than the other plot-strands. So it's the Monarch Mine case that's the main attraction of The Stolen Gold Affair and comes particular recommended to locked room readers as there are not that many impossible crime stories that use the woefully underutilized mine setting. Pronzini demonstrated what you can do with a deeply buried, rock-solid locked room situation. Just one question remains... did that throwaway anecdote from "The Hills of Homicide" gave Pronzini the idea for the "The Gold Stealers" or was it Clyde B. Clason's Blind Drifts (1937)? An impossible crime novel with a mine setting Pronzini fanboyed all over it.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Robert Adey wrote in his preface to the second, revised edition of Locked Room Murders (1991) that after the 1930s, "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels" was John Dickson Carr with the only other author "who produced them in any quantity" being a little-known pulp writer, John Russell Fearn – who wrote (roughly) twenty locked room novels between Black Maria, M.A. (1944) and his untimely passing in 1960. These include the posthumously published The Man Who Was Not (2005) and Pattern of Murder (2006).

In my reviews of The Fourth Door (1948) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951), I went over the wealth of fresh ideas and originality Fearn brought to the detective story. And, in particular, to the impossible crime story.

Regrettably, the pile of unread Fearn novels have dwindled over the years and only one, of the twentysome, locked room mysteries remained on my wishlist. An extremely obscure, hard-to-get Western-style mystery, Merridrew Marches On (1951), which has a curious backstory that has remained invisible to most locked room readers until now.

Meredith's Treasure (2005) by Philip Harbottle, editor, writer and Fearn's long-time literary agent, was first published by Robert Hale in their hardcover "Black Horse Western" series and the synopsis had a specific line that attracted my immediate attention – a dead man is found on a mountain trail with "no footprints in the dust beside his body." What can I say? Every body of water has its shallow parts. However, when I contacted Harbottle to inquire about Meredith's Treasure potential status as an impossible crime novel, he told me that it was actually based on two separate already published novels written by Fearn. Namely the previously mentioned, very obscure, Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again (1952). So what's the backstory?

Harbottle explained that, in 2000, Robert Hale had lost a lot of their regular writers and his Cosmos Literary Agency had been hired to help them maintain their ten new titles every month "Black Horse" line. His still active writers were able to supply new novels along with scores of their older titles, which Hale reprinted with due acknowledgments and Harbottle himself supplied a number of new novels that were based around a number of disparate Fearn short stories and novelettes. As copyright holder of all Fearn's stories by virtue of his widow's will, Harbottle was legally entitled to create these posthumous collaborations.

Harbottle explained that he had "to completely rewrite and "stitch" two, and sometimes three, separate stories together, changing all the different heroes and heroines to the same person" to "expand them to novel length" – whilst "retaining much of Fearn's original text." There was, however, an important proviso imposed by Hale's library buyers. They could only reprint old paperbacks and, under no circumstances, would the library buyers accept hardcover reprints. Fortunately, most of his clients had published Westerns mostly in paperbacks and only Fearn had done hardcovers in any quantity, which left out the Merridrew Westerns. A series Harbottle thought "represented some of his very best work." So he decided to rewrite the Merridrew character/books, which made them qualify as brand new works to satisfy Hale's library buyers. Harbottle explained that the originals had modern setting, the 1950s, but all the characters in the small, isolated Arizona town ride around on horses, carry gun belts and six shooters and act just like old-time cowboys. Every now, and then, the town is "invaded" by the modern world when outsiders arrive in cars, or trucks, who bring modern equipment with them. So he decided to rewrite them as all taking place in the old west (c. 1890). No cars, no airplanes, no radios. Merridrew became Meredith. He rewrote the first and second novel, but the third and fourth posed a real problem.

Merridrew Marches On and Merridrew Fights Again have plots involving their modern-day setting, such as the discovery of uranium and initially secret mining operations, which is why he decided to merge the two novels into Meredith's Treasure. A merger that retained all of the original plot strands, motivations and impossible crime elements, but with all the names of characters changed to those of relatives and friends of Harbottle. One of the characters is named after Robert Adey! Something he very much enjoyed.

So why this long introduction to a pulp western/detective novel? Merridrew Marches On is listed in Adey's Locked Room Murders and so will be known, in name only, to readers of this blog. A blog with a special interest in locked room and impossible crime fiction. However, I doubt very much whether many of you have actually read Merridrew Marches On, because it is extremely scarce and expensive. So the question is whether Harbottle's more readily available Meredith's Treasure, in which he asserts has preserved Fearn's impossible crime plotting, is worth our attention – purely on its own merits. Let's find out!

First of all, I've to acknowledge that the blending, an stitching together, of two different novels was indeed seamlessly done, because the whole plot coherently stuck together. However, it does explain why the story cycles from one genre to another. Story begins as an old-fashioned Western, but quickly turns into a detective story with an impossible crime, covered in the fingerprints of the scientific mystery, before it turns into an all-out adventure-and thriller yarn with all the trappings of the Western. And, all the while, Fearn's science-fiction and pulp roots were showing.

Meredith's Treasure takes place in "a sweltering little township," Mountain Peak, where "every board was warped and every trace of paint had been blistered" by the torrid Arizona sunlight. The small township is governed by the potbellied Mayor Randle Meredith and his son, Sheriff Bart Meredith.

On a blistering, mid-afternoon, Sheriff Meredith is visited by Reverend Maurice Peregrine, creator of the Reformed Sinners' Gospel, whose lectures and sermons converted many hardened criminals in other towns – picked Mountain Peak as his present port of call to spread his gospel. Legally, or morally, there are no objections to him preaching, but the Merediths are worried about the dozen dusty, gruff and impatient-looking horsemen he brought with him. All of them converted criminals. What could go wrong? Their arrival coincides with the appearance in town of a wanted criminal, "Holdup" Hogan, who has been involved "in a sundry of stage holdups and train robberies." As to be expected, this leads to a confrontation between Hogan, Peregrine and the Mayor, but they're interrupted by Brian Teviotdale storming into the saloon. On the foothill trail, Brian encountered a phantom horseman who began to chase him and he fled "like a man with the devil at his heels." One of the patrons, Bob Cook, is skeptical and immediately goes to the spot where Brian saw the phantom horseman, which is where his body is eventually found. There are no marks on the body and no accounting how the body got there or the lack of footprints in the dust. Dr. Adey makes it even more of an impossible situation when he tells the Meredith's Cook was gassed to death!

This is not the last murder, or impossibility, in the first half of the story. A local girl is found murdered in the streets with "Holdup" Hogan next to her. So the towns people are ready to string him up on the spot, but, before he can be swung into eternity, a third body appears out of nowhere in the middle of the main street! The entire crowd stared into the dark sky for an answer, but there was nothing there "but the stars and the silence of the night." Cleverly, the possibility of a hot-air balloon is quickly eliminated as too large and slow moving not to have been spotted by the crowd.

What I liked about the detective bits and pieces, roughly taking up the first half of the story, is how they quickly come to the conclusion that they're "not dealing with hillbillies" who only know "the trigger of a gun" – which doesn't rhyme with the deaths suggesting "intelligence and scientific knowledge." And this apparent fact was cleverly woven into the plot. Admittedly, the people who read Meredith's Treasure as a detective novel will very likely spot the brains behind the plot, but how the bodies miraculously appeared in impossible places is a lot trickier and more in line with the weird menace pulps than with the pure locked room/impossible crime story. On first sight, the method seems out-of-time and the imagery of how it was done would be more at home in a fantasy/science-fiction story, but it actually existed in the 1890s. And it actually figured in one of Edward D. Hoch's short stories about his gun-slinging cowboy sleuth, Ben Snow.

Yes, Harbottle definitely succeeded in preserving Fearn's impossible crime plotting and ideas here, because the solution is unmistakably one of his. It perfectly fits in his with his other pulp-style locked room mysteries, Account Settled (1949) and The Rattenbury Mystery (1955).

After this halfway mark, the story becomes, more and more, an adventure-and thriller yarn with a Western setting centering around the planned assault on a mountain stronghold and the long-buried secrets held inside it. This second half is full of dangerous bluffs, deadly double crosses and a cunning piece of misdirection with the Meredith's finding themselves, more than once, in a very tight corner where death is only a heartbeat away. Mayor Meredith is not exactly, what you would call, an infallible detective and surprisingly hardboiled in his approach, which include a bit of (mental) torture to extract information. An explosive and dangerous situation that eventually devolves in Mexican standoff between the Meredith Posse, a gang of outlaws and a group of natives trying to protect the mountain's long-held secret. This becomes quite a bloody affair that can match one of Paul Doherty's historical bloodbaths. Mayor Meredith concludes the case with a puppeteering act that even Dr. Gideon Fell or H.M. would find questionable. Very hardboiled!

So, on a whole, Meredith's Treasure is a busy, fast-moving and interesting pulp-style take on the Western, but where does it rank among Fearn/Harbottle's output and the former's impossible crime novels? I wouldn't rank it with their best detective/locked room novels, such as Thy Arm Alone (1947), Except for One Thing (1947), Death in Silhouette (1950), Flashpoint (1950) and Pattern of Murder, but still towers over lesser novels like The Tattoo Murders (1949), Ghost Canyon (1950), Lonely Road Murder (1954), Robbery Without Violence (1957) and One Way Out (2012). So very much a mid-tier, or second-string, novel. Nevertheless, it can stand on its own as a fun, pulpy treatment of the Western blended with the traditional detective story that's well worth a read as long as you keep in mind that it was written as a Western first and a detective story second.

I'll return to Fearn's original work sometime in the near future, because my private stash of pulp has been replenished and look forward to reading Fearn's attempt at a mystery novel with real vampires in it.

Edward D. Hoch: The Bullet from Beyond and Other Ben Snow Tales

Edward D. Hoch wrote nearly a thousand short stories and created a retinue of detective characters, some with more storied careers than others, who were, as Mike Grost so astutely described it, custom designed "to personify different mystery subgenres" – allowing him to write or indulge in any kind of detective story and trope. Hoch pretty much used his series-characters as a set of skeleton keys to go from the locked room mystery to the historical mystery, police procedural or the spy story. Clever guy!

So everyone has their own favorite series-character, or characters, that tend to reflect their personal taste to some degree. Unsurprisingly, my personal favorite is Hoch's 1930s New England country physician, Dr. Sam Hawthorne, who exclusively solves locked room murders and other seemingly impossible crimes. Dr. Hawthorne is nipped at the heels by Ben Snow and Nick Velvet.

The most important difference between these three divergent characters, a country doctor, a gunslinger and a professional thief, is that there have been multiple short story collections featuring Dr. Hawthorne and Velvet, but only one that stars Snow – namely The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales (1997). Since C&L have no immediate plans to publish a second volume, I decided to make up my own collection (all in my head) with uncollected stories.

Ben Snow is a turn-of-the-century gunslinger roaming the Americas around the time modern civilization began to encroach, and tame, the Wild West, but not without a fight. Old customs and legends lingered on, up and down, those dusty trails. Such as Snow's remarkable resemblance to that notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid, who had been reportedly shot and killed in New Mexico! So he regularly comes across people who either want to take a crack at the ghost of Billy the Kid or hire the fastest gun in New Mexico.

I assembled a six-shooter loaded with, as of now, half-a-dozen uncollected Ben Snow tales with story titles or plot descriptions that sounded promising. Yes, my selection includes more than one locked room and impossible crime story. Let's hit the trail!

"The Victorian Hangman" appeared in the August, 1988, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (hereafter, EQMM) to the town of Oceanfront, California, where he's hired by the owner of the Oceanfront Hotel, Douglas Rutherford. A guest had apparently hanged himself from the bandstand roof with "the traditional thirteen turns of the rope such as hangmen use," but his wife claims he couldn't even tie a square knot. Shortly after his death, the hotel received an ominous note in the mail: "ONE FOR THE HANGMAN. MORE TO COME." A promise that's kept during Snow's short stay at the hotel and the key to solving the murders is finding the motive linking the victims together. An unusual, but well done, serial killer/whydunit story.

"The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek" was published in the June, 1991, issue of EQMM and opens with Snow heading south to avoid the Montana winter, which, one evening, brings him to Buffalo Creek just after sundown. In the gathering gloom, Snow sees with his own eyes a rider, "dressed like a cowhand and urging his horse on with a beating of the reins," who has no face or head! A headless horseman!

Snow meets a local newspaper reporter, Thelma Blake, who tells him that the headless horseman is a recent addition to the town and she has been staking out the place where a regular appears, near the Clayton ranch, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the ghost – which is why he decides to accompany her the next night. They're rewarded with a headless horseman, but, this time, it's not a ghost or someone playing a ghost. It's a headless body riding a horse! Something had just whisked off the head as he rode, but there's no sign of a wire. Very clever to immediately eliminate the possibility of a stretched wire, because it added to the overall mystery.

I'm not sure whether, or not, to classify "The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek" as an impossible crime story, but the explanation is excellent and has a first-class, double edged clue alluding to both the who-and how. The answer to the subplot of the ghostly horseman places the story squarely Scooby Doo for grownups territory. One of the better stories in the series with a solid plot, clever clueing and a satisfying end.

"The Granite God" was published in the June, 1995, issue of EQMM and is a minor story, compared to the others reviewed here, which begins when Snow is hired by a retired cavalry officer, Colonel Faraway, to bring back his maid, Esmeralda. Colonel Faraway tells Snow she had "gone to the mountains to see the Lord." The mountain in question is near a silver mine, where they were blasting rocks, when the image of God appeared on a slab of granite. So people began to flock to the granite image, which is where Snow finds Esmeralda, but she's stabbed to death while kneeling in front of the image. I appreciated what Hoch tried to do here, but somehow, it left me completely underwhelmed. So moving on!

"The Bullet from Beyond" was published in the August, 1998, issue of EQMM and brings a creature to turn-of-the-century Oregon commonly found roaming "musty castles and fog-bound streets" of the Old World – an alleged vampire! Snow returned from the Yukon Territory, in Canada, to Grants Pass where he had stabled his horse five months previously. Something had changed since he was away. Six weeks previously, someone, or something, started killing animals and "the veterinarian who examined them said the blood had been drained out of their bodies." Snow is roped in to confront this alleged vampire, Ray Ridge, who's suspected of having "killed his wife up north about twenty years ago" and now lives as a recluse in an isolated cabin in the woods. But what he gets to witness is an impossible murder.

Ray Ridge is shot in front of his eyes, shots were heard outside, but "the windows were unbroken" and "the walls unpunctured," which means that the three armed men outside couldn't have fired the silver bullet. And the two other people inside the cabin were unarmed. So is there's any truth in the old legend that a silver bullet can penetrate a wall, or window, without leaving a mark and still kill a vampire?

Hoch naturally provides the story with a rational explanation, which is not one of his most ingenious locked room-tricks, but a footnote revealed that the solution was plucked from the pages of history. I checked it and, sure enough, it's true. You can read about it here (spoiler warning). So, on a whole, a pretty decent and readable locked room story.

"The Daughters of Crooked River" was published in the November, 1999, issue of EQMM and has Snow arriving in the middle of a racially charged dispute in the small town of Crooked River, Saskatchewan, part of the Northwest Territories – a place settled a generation ago by French-Canadian hunters and fur trappers. Indian women bore their children, the Metis, who now claim the land as their own. But the railroad has opened Saskatchewan to eastern wheat farmers and immigrants who want their share of the land. A complicating factor in the dispute is the death of the Metis leader, Anatole Dijon, who was shot and killed in his cabin with the door bolted on the inside. Only representative of the law, a Mountie, concluded that “his dog put its paw on the trigger of his rifle and fired it.” But not everyone is willing to swallow that story.

Usually, Snow's detective work is limited to observing and noticing small mistakes or incongruities, which spells the truth to him, but here we actually get to see him do some old-fashioned detective work. Snow tries to reconstruct the shooting in the victim's cabin, before realizing that he approached the locked room problem from the wrong angle. The locked room-trick is a good one and neatly fits the exact circumstances of the murder, but it's a variation on a trick that has been used before in the series. However, it's different and original enough to justify it being reused here.

"The San Augustin Miracle" was published in the January, 2001, issue of EQMM and Snow has drifted south to Tucson, a city of about 7,500 residents, located on the often-dry Santa Cruz River. Snow decides to stay when he hears a balloonist, Pancho Quizas, is en route with an hot-air balloon to give an exhibition, but he's not the only one looking forward to see the balloonist. A gruff, old-school gunslinger, Scooter Colt, is waiting for him with his right hand resting on the butt of his gun, but it never comes to confrontation as Pancho miraculously vanishes from the balloon basket as it descended. This situation becomes even more impossible when an irate Colt begins firing his six-shooter at the sky. Believe it, or not, but "the sky fired back." Colt dropped to the ground with a bullet in his eye!

A marvelous setup for one of those rare, two-way impossibilities with the strength of the solution laying in how these two impossibilities, minutes apart, connect and not how Pancho disappeared or how Colt was shot – which, by themselves, are nothing special. But with everything stitched together, you have a good and entertaining detective yarn.

So, all in all, my random selection of stories turned out to be a strong sampling of the Ben Snow series with the quality of stories ranging from outstanding ("The Headless Horseman of Buffalo Creek") to fairly decent ("The Granite God"), which is not a bad score for a hypothetical short story collection. Hopefully, this review will help a little bit in helping justify that second (official) volume.

A note for the curious: Nothing is Impossible: The Further Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne (2014) collects a rare crossover story, "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee," in which an elderly Snow meets Dr. Hawthorne. I love crossovers almost as much as a good locked room mystery and would love to see Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller writing a crossover in which Snow crosses paths with their 1890s San Francisco gumshoes, John Quincannon and Sabina Carpenter. I know they'll treat Snow as if he was one of their own characters.

The Four Horsemen

"The more you know, the shorter your life is."

- Electra (Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' On Heaven's Door, 2001)

John Russell Fearn hardly requires an introduction on this blog, especially after the past year-and-a-half, but for the benefit of the uninitiated I'll very briefly go over his career again.

Fearn was an astonishingly prolific writer of science-fiction, westerns and detective stories, published under a legion of pennames, which largely appeared in such popular periodicals as the Toronto Star Weekly, Astounding Stories and Amazing Stories – marking a British success story in the American pulps. However, he was more than just a remarkably productive writer of magazine stories.

If you look at his bibliography, you'll notice that Fearn churned out full-length novels as fast as his short stories and they practically covered every single form of popular genre-fiction. So far, I primarily looked at his regular detective stories, like Except for One Thing (1947) and Death in Silhouette (1950), but also reviewed a science-fiction novel, The Lonely Astronomer (1954), which transported the classic locked room mystery to the distant, far-flung future. Earlier this year, I discovered Fearn might have done something similar with one of his westerns and thought of it would be a nice followup to my previous review to take a look at a western-style mystery novel.

Ghost Canyon (1950) was originally published under one of Fearn's many pseudonyms, namely "Matt Francis," and was based on a lengthy plot-outline written by a friend, Matthew W. Japp, who was a greengrocer and was decorated World War II veteran – who fought in Normandy, the Netherlands and Germany. Japp also wrote a western solo, titled Jackson's Spread, but the lion's share of his literary endeavors consisted of plotting six westerns for his friend. Ghost Canyon looks to have been their third collaboration and has an impossible disappearance mystery at the heart of the story.

The protagonist of the story is "a saddle tramp," Jerry Carlton, who arrives at a small outpost in Arizona, called Verdure, which has "an oddly deserted aspect" and resembled a ghost town. There were, however, strips of lights visible between the cracks of the wooden shutters that had been placed across every window in town. So there were people living there.

Carlton stops at the gateway of a "solitary wooden dwelling" and is met at the doorway by a woman with a gun, named Hilda Marchland, who lives there with her old father. It's from them that Carlton learns that the town is regularly haunted by the ghosts of four horsemen, "like they came out of the Apocalypse," clad in spectral white and the townsfolk have become too frightened to leave their homes after dark – some are now considering to abandoned the "hag-ridden" town. Even though the town is surrounded by rich, green patches of pastureland. Carlton has done enough riding under a clear sky and in the wind to start believing in spooks.

Hilda is delighted to have finally found someone who shares her skepticism and together they decide to tail the phantom horsemen to see what, and who, are behind the haunting, but they find more than they bargained for.

Each time the horsemen were seen, they rode into Star Canyon and staking out the mouth of the gorge yields immediate result. Carlton and Hilda saw the phantom horsemen appear, "dead in line with each other," slowly riding into the canyon and they followed behind to see where they were heading, but in the narrowest part of the canyon the hoof-prints came to a halt. As if they had ridden into a portal to the Other World! The walls at that point are smooth, and steep, without any rockery niches, acclivities and umarred by a single seam, which appear to be completely immovable "except by blasting" - which had all the potential of a first-class impossible problem. Regrettably, the gentlemen who wrote and plotted this story were not playing entirely fair with their readers.

You see, they early one discarded one possibility, a tired old trick, but the ending revealed that this discarded trick is exactly how the ghost-trick was accomplished, but by that time I had already grown fond of my own explanation.

My solution was based around the narrow passage and three hundred feet high walls. I imagined that, on the flattened top of the rocky canyon, a (movable) ramp-lift, like a mine-shaft elevator, stood that could be operated with a hand-winch and the horsemen were simply "air-lifted" out of the narrow passage by an accomplish. On top of the canyon, out of sight of everyone, the horses could be put away for the day in a tiny, makeshift stable. Nobody from the town below would dare to come there anyway. Sadly, the actual answer to the seemingly impossible disappearance of the horsemen turned out to be more prosaic, unfair and very, very dated.

So the only detective-element of any interest proved to be a monumental letdown and the remainder of the story was more reminiscent of a hardboiled western than a cowboy-detective.

For one, there's no real mystery about who's behind the business of the ghostly horsemen. Verdure is under the control, and run, by a small circle of men: Sheriff Harrison (who has an eye on Hilda), Mayor Burridge and the owner of the Black Coyote Saloon, Grant Swainson, who have clear motive for pulling this Scooby Doo stunt. So the primary problem for Carlton is how he has to deal with these men and trying to convince the towns people that they're being frightened out of their property.

A task slightly complicated when the people behind the swindle start murdering people who knew too much. Tragically, one of the victims is Hilda's father, but the villainous sheriff is also shot in the most stereotypical manner imaginable. After the death of Old Man Marchland, Carlton was roughing up the sheriff in the office, promising him he would stop when he starts talking, but a bullet whizzed through the open window to permanently silence him. By the way, it would have made more sense for the murderer to have shot Carlton, because he was physically attacking the sheriff and therefore could be passed off to the people of the town as a justifiable homicide.

So, yeah, the crime-elements are pretty sub-par in Ghost Canyon, but this is slightly made up by the action-scenes towards the end. Such as a very memorable scene when a destructive animal stampede passes through the town. I also snickered at the scene when the murderer is confronted by the angry towns people, ready to lynch him, but tells him he's entitled to stand on his constitutional rights. As to be expected, the people of Verdure were not having any of it.

Well, Ghost Canyon is a very readable and even fun story to read, but the plot is decidedly second-rate and can not be recommended as an example of the western-style detective story like Edward D. Hoch's Ben Snow stories. So I'll probably stick to Fearn's regular detective-fiction for the foreseeable future. Luckily, he wrote enough of those to last me a while.

A Note for the Curious: Fearn's collaborator on this book, Matthew Japp, passed away in January of this year at the grand old age of 102. Only four days short of his 103rd birthday!