(April Fools) My Top 10 Favorite Locked Room Mystery Novels

I’ve been teasing this for a long time, but finally I think I feel confident enough to name what I consider the top ten best locked-room mystery novels ever written. I will be taking no notes, thank you.

1. Le Tigre Borgne (The One-Eyed Tiger) by Paul Halter
2. The Double Alibi by Noël Vindry
3. The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr
4. The Fourth Door by Paul Halter
5. Death in Five Boxes by John Dickson Carr
6. Six Were to Die by James Ronald
7. The Seventh Guest by Gaston Boca
8. The Eight Mansion Murders by Takemaru Abiko
9. Nine Times Nine by Anthony Bouncer
10. The Ten Teacups by John Dickson Carr

My Mother, the Detective (1997) by James Yaffe

The great gamut of female detectives is taken up by little old ladies solving mysteries with their inordinate sense of human nature and time-sharpened wit. We all know of the exploits of Miss Jane Marple, Miss Maud Silver, and Miss Hildegarde Withers. But in a little apartment in the Bronx, cooking a mean roast chicken dinner, is another little old lady who proves that, truly, Mother knows best.

Over the course of 80 years, James Yaffe proved himself to be something of a mystery-writing prodigy, being one of, if not the youngest author published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, first publishing when he was a young teenager. From 1943 to 1946, Yaffe wrote six stories for the publication, all locked-room mysteries or impossible crimes featuring the aptly named Department of Impossible Crimes. Only one of these stories has since been anthologized, that being the exceptionally clever “The Problem of the Emperor’s Mushrooms”, re-published in the Mystery Writer’s Association’s All But Impossible! locked-room mystery anthology.

Impossible crimes, however, would only be a footnote in Yaffe’s career, as in 1952 Yaffe would kickstart a series of short stories and novels that would span seven decades! We’re talking, of course, about Mom, whose made her written debut in 1952 in “Mom Knows Best”. Since this story, Yaffe would publish another four stories from 1953 to 1955 featuring mom, another three from 1966 to 1968, four novels from 1988 to 1992, and another story in 2002.

As a series, “Mom” is fairly formulaic in structure — I clued into this within the first page of the first story, in fact, after realizing that the first seven paragraphs introducing Mom and our narrator Dave are nearly word-for-word identical to the first seven paragraphs introducing the same two characters in A Nice Murder for Mom, the first Mom novel, published 36 years later.

Nearly every Mom story has our narrator, a police detective, and his wife Shirley visiting his Jewish mother in the Bronx for a Friday night dinner of roast chicken. Although she makes fun of him for his job, insisting it requires no brains, she still takes an inordinate interest in hearing about the cases her son is struggling with (usually with him arresting the wrong person as the killer and her proving their innocence), asking “three little questions” that always seem bizarre at the outset, and lording it over him that she can crack the case before dessert, all the while Shirley occasionally butts head with Mother, not liking the way she talks over Davie; Mother, in turn, butts heads with Shirley, not liking the way she talks over Davie, and Davie just tries to keep the peace. And then, come the solution, (ROT13) qrfcvgr gurer orvat n fznyy frg bs fhfcrpgf, Zbz jvyy zber bsgra guna abg cebir ubj gur xvyyre jnf n zvabe onpxtebhaq punenpgre zragvbarq va gur zbfg pbairavrag bs cnffvatf.

The first two stories, “Mom Knows Best”, in which Mother solves the murder of a promiscuous young women in a hotel after three suitors come to visit her one after the other, and “Mom Makes a Bet”, in which Mother proves that the meek little waiter Davie arrested for poisoning the soup of a rude customer is innocent of the crime, are the purest forms of this formula.

In the introduction to My Mother, the Detective, Yaffe explains he had moments of disillusionment with the detective story as a vehicle for a puzzle of murder. He felt, at times, that he had “graduated” to more mature, character-oriented writing in his career since he’d become an adult. Over time, he says, he began to reconcile with the craft, realizing that he’d never fall out of love with it, but also that there’s no reason the detective story can’t also have flesh-and-blood characters and be in touch with reality. Hence, over time, while the Mom stories were always problem-oriented detective stories, they’d slowly grow to be equally fascinated with the characters and their psychology, albeit in an unfussy, unobtrusive way. This included — or, in fact, highlighted the character of the detective.

In the introduction, Yaffe describes “meaningful eccentricities” — traits that seem like silly quirks on the outside, but present insight into the character’s psychology on retrospection — as one of his guiding philosophies for writing Mom. Going forward, quirks established in the first two stories are retroactively given more depth as Mom’s character is fleshed out from a loving caricature of a Jewish mother to a loving portrait of a Jewish mother.

Starting with the third story, “Mom in the Spring”, while the basic formula is relatively in tact, the actual telling of the stories start to shift a little. Davie and Shirley still visit for Friday night dinner, Mom still listens to her son’s stories, still asks “three little questions”, and then, finally, elucidates. However, in this story, despite her constant bickering with Mother, Shirley and Davie have agreed to set her up with Davie’s coworker, Inspector Millner. She immediately takes a keen liking to him, falling for his “helpless eyes” that appeal to her constant need to mother someone. Mother’s… motherly habits also play into the fourth story “Mom Sheds a Tear”, in which Davie arrests a five-year-old boy for murder. Mother refuses to stop harassing Davie about having a child of his own, and proves that the five-year-old is innocent to show him that children are the best gift in the world. For once, however, Mother, in her constant infantilization of those she dotes on, fails to realize that all men were once someone’s gift. Davie lords it over her that the true murderer was also somebody’s child once.

This greater introspection into the identity of Mom gives the stories more flavor and character, and turns Mom into a more compelling and interesting character. However, it also comes at the expense of the actual reasoning that brings about the explanation.

Mom’s detection style can essentially be boiled down to a bisection between Miss Marple and early Ellery Queen. She’s an armchair sleuth solving crimes related to her exclusively through stories from her son, and is equipped with Miss Marple’s knowledge of human knowledge and constant references to stories that tangentially relate to the murder case. She, however, also has Ellery Queen’s propensity for chaining together deductions into deductions — a typical Mom denouement is not a collection of disparate observations and contradictions that build up a picture of the crime, but instead one fatal observation that unleashes a swarth of deductions after inductions after abductions that break apart Davie’s understanding of the crime. Something like “we know that these two irreconcilable facts are presented to us, therefore this one is false, which gives a new perspective on an older detail that suggests that we were totally mistaken about this person’s turn of phrase, which by turn also suggests that the killer did this, and since the only person who was in the position to do that was this person for XYZ reasons, it stands to reason that they’re the killer” would be perfectly at home in an earlier Mom denouement.

It’s an interesting combination that in the best of the mystery plots, like “Mom Makes a Bet”, creates tight reasoning that points irrefutably in the killer’s direction. Occasionally, however, overreaching gender and age psychology (“this is undeniably the handwriting of a lonely old woman and no other person could write like this”, “no woman would ever open the door to a man and be caught dead without wearing lipstick”, “no child would ever question a lie told to them however much it conflicted with their understanding of the world”) can sometimes make the logic feel a little loose and, by extension, less credible. Not, necessarily, that her methods are wrong, but just that they’d only be right in moments when she lucks into crimes involving the perfect archetypes of what she believes the psychology of every demographic on Earth is, and only if we assume that this psychology is universally applicable, are Mom’s arguments are perfectly sound. In defense of Mom, there is usually a more concrete detail suggesting that something is significantly wrong (for example, someone claiming to see something years before that something even exists) and the psychological clues tend to be supporting details that help resolve that conflict, but in the worst of cases it absolutely goes well beyond where I can be expected to reasonably buy into Mom’s logic. And since the stories always end with the police making a real arrest, I can only imagine these deductions being laughed out of any courtroom in the world…

Another problem with the Mom detection style is her “three little questions”. When all is said and done, and all of the information presented, Mom’s deductions are at the very least valid and reasonable. However, these three little questions are always the three cinching details that show us the correct interpretation of the crime. Before them, you’re not meant to be able to entirely solve the crime. It’s always implied that Mom simply divined the solution from the first pass, and then asked the questions that would retroactively confirm the theory she’d already constructed. It’s never, in any one of the stories, explained how Mom reached the correct conclusion from half-complete information, and in a few instances it borders on omniscience.

That all being said, My Mother, the Detective is an interesting look at an author’s reconciliation with a genre he once had a disdain for. Mom grows into one of the most charming and delightful “spinster” sleuths in the genre, and the mysteries are on the whole incredibly satisfying! That all aside, James Yaffe’s work is clever, charming, colorful, and well-worth anyone’s attention — even if it’s just to see what Ellery Queen would’ve been like as a little old Jewish mother.

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As with all of my posts like this, we’ll round things off with a ranking of each individual story in the collections. While I’m moving more towards discussing collections and anthologies holistically, instead of breaking down each individual story, I still want to include this segment at the end of these reviews to at least get my individual opinions on each story out in the open. I’ll leave a sentence or two describing the story and my opinion on it, but ultimately these segments are skippable.

1. “Mom Makes a Bet” – 8.50/10 – A waiter is falsely accused of poisoning a rude customer. The tightest and most credible reasoning in the collection, one of the most clever clues, and a denouement Ellery Queen would be proud of. Easily a favorite of mine.
2. “Mom Makes a Wish” – 8.25/10 – A drunk ex-professor is falsely accused of murdering his former boss. Highly psychological, but this story supports the psychology with clever physical evidence that makes it credible.
3. “The Haunted Mink” – 8.00/10 – A doctor takes out a loan to buy his wife a wildly expensive mink coat she’s been wanting since they got married a month ago. However, after they find out the previous owner committed suicide, a series of supernatural phenomena surrounding the coat — the coat being yanked off her body, a psychic relaying a death threat from the coat’s late owner — eventually culminates in the mink apparently coming to life and smothering the woman to death. The supernatural element here isn’t the most atmospheric, and is hammy in presentation, but the set-up is the most original of all the Mother stories. The explanation for the “hauntings” is about what you expect, but the actual motive makes this clever and, in my opinion, the most seamless marriage between the characters and the mystery. The murder is a minor point.
4. “Mother Knows Best” – 7.75/10 – A promiscuous young woman is murdered in her hotel room after being visited by three suitors. Features overreaching psychology, but it’s ultimately a minor point that’s supported by other contradictions. A very clever and satisfying clue near the end, and a good reversal with its double-solution. Another entry for Ellery Queen.
5. “Mom Sings an Aria” – 7.25/10 – A feud between two opera lovers culminates in one being poisoned during a performance, and Mom proves the other isn’t the killer. Awash in farfetched psychology, but in this story the psychology is majorly texturing, or supported by facts that make the important deductions credible. Charming and colorful in its passion for opera, with some good logic, but by far less outright clever than most other stories in the collection. The solution is fairly obvious. Mom is at her most charming.
6. “Mom Sheds a Tear” – 6.75/10 – A five-year-old boy starts acting up after his late father’s brother moves into their house. The child is later falsely accused by Davie of murdering his uncle by pushing him off of a balcony. The clues are conceptually very neat, and parts of the “killer’s” plan are clever, but the psychology in this one is invasive, overreaching and borderline absurd, patronizing to children and untrue when applied to practically every five-year-old I’ve ever known in my life. The explanation for how the victim actually died makes sense, but is a bit of an anti-climax and unintentionally almost comical. Has one of my favorite scenes with Mom and Davie.
7. “Mom in the Spring” – 5.25/10 – A woman’s romantic pen pal appears to have murdered her — a fate that her son and daughter-in-law had warned her and the police about. My least favorite story in the collection. Messily plotted, much unverifiable, overgeneralized psychology, generally obvious and unsurprising. As with all of the Mom stories, there’s a few clever ideas, some smart clues, a neat twist or two, but in all this is the weakest Mom story.

A Question of Proof (1935) by Nicholas Blake

Cecil Day-Lewis (father of preeminent film actor Sir Daniel Day-Lewis) was for much of his life a “serious poet”. As many were at the time, he was taken with the detective novel and wished to write one of his own, but was naturally anxious that his reputation would be tarnished by the knowledge that he had sullied his hands with the less-than-art of crime fiction and instead opted to write under the name “Nicholas Blake”. Within no time, however, the British reading public quickly identified Nicholas Blake as Cecil Day-Lewis. In spite of his worries, however, his reputation was not hampered but bolstered by this fine novel of detection, and he went on to write nineteen more, most featuring the detective of A Question of Proof Nigel Strangeways.

At the Sudeley Hall premonitory school, schoolmaster Michael Evans is waist-deep in a love affair with the wife of his employer, the Headmaster Percy Vale. When the Headmaster’s nephew Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss winds up strangled in a haystack where Evans and Mrs. Vale had just shared a lunch earlier that day, Superintendent Armstrong starts to formulate a theory that the illegitimate lovers committed the murder. To save him and his darling from the noose, Evans summons to his aid psychological detective Nigel Strangeways.

A Question of Proof is in every way a “detective novel of character” — the psychological detective story, as Anthony Berkeley described it, literarily conscious and high-brow, deriving a puzzle not from means or opportunity, but from motive and psychology. To that end, I can praise Nicholas Blake for his living and breathing setting, well-drawn if unpleasant and not particularly charming characters, and a handful of entertaining scenes that stick out in my mind. But, even for all that, I did not particularly enjoy A Question of Proof, a novel with great characters who get to do nothing in a plot so thin the people in the story openly apologize for it.

Call me “low-brow” or “tasteless”, but I found this one hard-going in its nearly total lack of detective interest for the hefty majority of the tale. The murder occurs fairly early on, and an investigation is underway. The ensuing investigation, however, is densely-packed into much less space than it could’ve used, giving us a sweeping and itemized overview of every major character’s schedule. Despite being a novel of character interest, I found this scene gave us very little in the way of psychological insights, and amounts to very little in the way of criminal insights, as the noted lack of material evidence makes it impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from the information given to us. For almost the entire remaining length of the story after this, we’re treated to (occasionally entertaining) scenes of a chapter-long car chase, bickering schoolmasters, bickering detectives, bickering students, Nigel psychoanalyzing teachers from afar, a secret society initiation, and glimpses into the wavering romance between Evans and Mrs. Vale. This is where the novel loses me, unfortunately, as both a detective novel and a novel of character interest.

As a detective novel, there’s very little in the way of detection going on here. There are few scenes that move the murder plot along, and even those are all by accident. Mostly protracted scenes of Nigel doing something quite irrelevant and by sheer unbelievable fortune stumbling onto one or two pieces of literally-the-most-important-information-he-could’ve-gotten clues, and rather large assumptions are quickly made therefrom. We’re meant to find these assumptions brilliant, but they’re always guesses later vindicated by bullying characters into a confession or Nigel shooting his shot and wowing someone into confirming them.

As for being a novel of character interest, I’m of the mind that just having well-drawn characters doesn’t make for the best of novels. Or, perhaps they might! But for certain not the best of novels I’d be caught reading. The characters do, in fact, have many definable character traits, but the dialogue is interminably stuffy and not pleasant to read through at all (did people really talk like this in 1935?). The characters have many personality traits, but I found myself ingratiated to none of them. It is majorly because the characters, on top of being unpleasant, get no room to show off the “silver-linings” of their awful personalities. Outside of the sometimes pleasant adventures of Nigel Strangeways, Michael Evans and Mrs. Vale, nearly the entire principle cast spend the entire novel doing nothing but being asses to one another. And I will not allow Nicholas Blake to escape the “show, don’t tell” axiom, for much if not all of the psychological depth these characters have is demonstrated shallowly and summarized by Strangeways based on detached observations of a small handful of events designed to give him an artificial grounds for psychoanalysis. When you remove Strangeways from the equation, this illusion of “psychological definition” vanishes.

When we do get scenes where characters get to stretch their legs a little bit and actively demonstrate their personalities outside of quibbling with one another, they’re very often, as the book openly admits, filler. Yes, the book admits to having unnecessary scenes, in a self-conscious and apologetic quote from a character who criticizes detective novels for protracted scenes of nothingness and arbitrary second murders, because “they can never stretch the murder over two-hundred pages”. Considering that the book also had a second murder, Nicholas Blake was either acknowledging that he was engaging in the very same faults his characters dislike in detective novels, which actively makes it worse, or he has a total lack of self-awareness and the criticism takes on a new ironical quality.

Now, the resolution actually had many clever bits, and I enjoyed the answers to the questions posed by the story. The first murder relies on a fairly neat plot that brilliantly draws from the setting as it is established. I actually began to enjoy myself when the second murder happened in the last fifth of the story, and characters got to move around and do things that mattered, and we got some genuine detection for a moment. Plus, while the second murder was quickly resolved, it uses a decent and neat Chestertonian explanation for the murder and disappearance of the weapon in a guarded playfield (you might be able to call this an impossible crime as much as “The Invisible Man” is, I suppose…). A much more enjoyable short story buried inside of this book.

All-told, I did not enjoy A Question of Proof. The book criticizes itself through one of its characters, and despite this apparent self-awareness I actually believe Blake compounds his perceived faults of the genre in this effort. The characters are well-drawn, but you couldn’t care less about them if you wanted to, and they get to do nothing meaningful to really make their personalities shine. Many prolonged and empty scenes. Artificial psychoanalysis and weak detection from a detective who deals in admitted guesswork that fate seems to vindicate. The book has beautiful descriptions and good prose, but as a plot it fails as both the character novel it sought to be and the detective novel it sought to supersede. There are good ideas come the resolution, but since Nicholas Blake openly notes the faults in long-form crime writing, perhaps he’d have been better served as a writer of short stories?

More Dead than Alive (1980) by Roger Ormerod

It’s easy to see how Roger Ormerod can fly under the radar of many enjoyers of Golden Age mysteries. To begin with, he wrote chiefly in the latter half of the 20th century (his earliest novel was published in 1974!), well out of the territory many readers would expect to find a fledgling in the craft of the puzzle plot. The front covers of the most recent reprints of his work are indistinguishable from one another — a brooding silhouette with his back turned against drab urban scenery that may not even have any connection to the plot anyway — and don’t do their part in suggesting anything other than a cheap dimestore crime thriller. An impression which, mind you, isn’t helped by the “A David Mallin Thriller” subtitle slapped onto every book in this particular series (his other series gets the very occasional distinction of “An Inspector Patton Mystery“).

More Dead Than Alive is the second Roger Ormerod novel I’ve read and, by extension, the second David Mallin I’ve read, with the first being his debut novel Time to Kill (1974), and save but the occasional moment of crassness and sex-positivity that would simply be unthinkable to many writers of the former half of the century I can’t find a single strand of the DNA of the dull, lackluster police thriller that the author’s marketing advertises. Yes, the writing is snappy, and the characters are a bit bolder and more down-to-earth than is typical, but at his heart David Mallin seems to be a late member of the class of puzzle-plot mysteries any fan of Golden Age mysteries would be remiss to neglect.

More Dead Than Alive sees David Mallin summoned to the decrepit medieval Kilvennan Castle by his wife, Elsa, to investigate the presumed death and, more importantly, impossible disappearance of famed illusionist and escape artist Konrad Klein. The vanishing act was performed from a room at the top of a tower with a door sealed from the inside by the weight of a trick cabinet and otherwise blocked off by a window opening to nothing but sheer rockface and a deadly drop into the waters below. Klein’s family are concerned about whether his disappearance was a suicide, foul-play, or something else entirely, as the magician’s insurance was quite clear that money would not be paid to the family in the event of suicide; a worry that is quickly discarded when Klein’s body washes ashore, decidedly killed with a bullet wound that creates a brand-new problem of a killer vanishing from a sealed room…

What makes up the majority of the novel is experimentation, with Mallin and his partner, the eager Coe, finding a delightful array of false solutions to the problem of the locked-room. However, at the end of the formulating-and-discarding of theories, David Mallin is able to, with the evidence provided, come to a conclusive answer about how the murder of Klein was committed and provide a blockbuster of a solution to the problem.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, More Dead Than Alive is a 1980 novel in nothing but aesthetic. It is conceived, plotted, and resolved as cerebrally and cleverly as any 1930’s crime novel, and provides a thoroughly satisfying and well-crafted impossible crime puzzle. Being released as late as it is, though, the book does borrow something from its contemporaries. A more modern wit, incredibly unfussy and easygoing writing, and characters just a bit more ordinary than a nosy egg-shaped Belgian or a bored aristocrat may make the book something shy of high literature, but absolutely pleasant to read.

The novel and its mystery can well be considered fairplay, but I confess that I can’t speak very confidently on that front. A combination of Tomcat’s review mentioning that, compared to the other solutions, the proper solution is somewhat incredible with Ormerod brow-beating you with a key detail about the killer made it somewhat easy to guess at the core artifice of the solution somewhat easily and early while bypassing the intended logic of the puzzle. Ordinarily I’d write it off as simply a lucky guess combined with preparation for the solution thanks to Tomcat’s review, but I confess that I was just as able to guess at the solution to Time to Kill, a novel I’d read ages ago while having no introduction to Ormerod’s work at all. This seems to me to be Ormerod’s greatest weakness in the two novels I’ve read is a hyper-excess of fairness. It’s almost like Ormerod wasn’t confident he planted enough clues for the reader in More Dead Than Alive and felt it necessary to go above and beyond to bring them to your attention in fear that he’d receive scorn if he didn’t. Which, in Ormerod’s defense, is probably a safe assumption, given the solution is tough to swallow, as jaw-droppingly devious as it is!

In spite of this, however, neither of the two Ormerod novels I’ve read so far has been a disappointment. In fact, I’m really taken with Ormerod. The problems and their resolutions in both Time to Kill and More Dead Than Alive are wildly clever and imaginative. I brought up Time to Kill in my post On A Defense of the Impossible Alibi Problem and “Doylist” Impossibilities, and it sprung to my mind when writing the post simply because it is my single favorite resolution to the problem of how a killer, who is guaranteed to be the killer by the narration mind you, can commit a crime while apparently under unbroken supervision by our reliable narrator. Yes, I guessed at the solution, just as I guessed at the solution in More Dead Than Alive, but I felt vindicated, rather than disappointed. I didn’t figure it out because I’d read a lot of mystery stories and was able to spot a familiar pattern in a familiar resolution, which would’ve been, frankly, disappointing and annoying; I figured it out because Ormerod was damn good at setting these problems up, giving you the information to figure them out, and resolving them. The overexcess of fairness might turn some people off, but these solutions are so unique you’re bound to feel clever for figuring them out either way, and if these early stories are, as Tomcat suggests, of lower-than-average quality for Ormerod’s output than I’m more than happy to name Ormerod a very likely favorite of mine.

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The recent draught in reviews has, in some part, been due to my recent reading not inspiring much in me to say. I’ve had a whole host of books lined-up to read and review, but it always ended up being the same story for me. I read Come to Paddington Fair by Derek Smith and found the central problem incredibly novel, and the resolution simply as clever as clever gets, but was able to see past the core deception and resolve the heart of the mystery fairly early. On recommendation, I just read A Nice Murder for Mom by James Yaffe and found the resolution uninspired and immediately obvious. I read Mrs. McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie, and felt like the solution was incredibly clever and novelly-clued, but was also able to jab at most of the heart of the mystery. Murder in the Maze was a decent classically-styled mystery, but I felt like spotting the identity of the killer was a trifle. I’d also read and easily figured out The House That Kills by Noel Vindry and found the novel incredibly uninspired from its writing, to its crimes, to its solutions and frankly only remember it for this. Add onto this I had a sudden urge to review Time To Kill, which I also resolved fairly early, and it was just too much.

Frankly, I didn’t really want to write seven reviews in a row that included any variation of the phrase “I figured it out”, because not only does it feel like I’m just bragging, it also doesn’t make for interesting reading material for you all. Unfortunately, I felt like I needed to get back into the habit of weekly reviews, so I bit the bullet and picked one of my older reviews to publish. At the moment I’m reading Max Carrados, a short story collection featuring the blind detective of the same name, written by Ernest Bramah, and should be able to review it by next Sunday to return to a regular schedule.

Happy reading!

On A Defense of the Impossible Alibi Problem and “Doylist” Impossibilities

There’s been no end to the ingenuity of the impossible crime genre. When you see murders committed inside of perfectly sealed rooms, and stabbings in virgin snow where the killers leave no footprints, you’re only taking the daintiest of baby-steps down the iceberg of magic murders. Take a few steps further and you’ll find yourself barreling into the realms of animated murderous snowmen, disappearing hotel rooms, witchery, teleportation, telekinesis, premonitory dreams, apparitions, flying men, transmogrification, impossible golf shots, men dying from falls when there’s no elevated surfaces for miles, time travel, people running through solid brick walls, and even the apparently magical disintegration of a man in front of witnesses. All of which, mind you, must be explained through perfectly human means without reliance on far-fetched science-fiction technology or preternatural agency — or, if sci-fi tech and ghostly happenings are commonplace in your world, their rules must still be adhered (and are usually exploited to establish the impossibility…). A whole world of man-made miraculous murders that would have the skeptics of our world taken aback! When you imagine the impossible crime problem, you imagine a scenario which absolutely cannot be taken at face value, and which the characters in the story have to battle with the reality of, whether it’s through disproving the supernatural or an ostensible suicide. There’s an impossible crime tale for damn near every insane scenario under the sun a person could think of. However, there’s one situation which is so sedate in its presentation, and which, in our world, wouldn’t make anyone bat an eye, that has been something of a point of contention in the impossible crime world: the impossible alibi problem.

The “impossible alibi” puzzle comes is essentially this: we know that the killer has to be this specific person (or someone among a closed circle of suspects with proximity to the crime), usually by insistence of the book or narrator, but this specific person (or every person in aforementioned closed circle of suspects) has an apparently unassailable alibi. Usually, this alibi is vouched for and reaffirmed in some way by the narration — when the guilty party is definitely one specific person, the book also usually goes an extra step to assure the reader they aren’t being hoodwinked and that the crux of the puzzle turns decidedly on this person’s guilt. Consider if you will Columbo, where they always open an episode by revealing the killer and how they carried out the crime, and the puzzle is in figuring out how Columbo solves the mystery — the “howcatchem”. By then removing the actual knowledge of how the killer committed the crime from the formula and giving them an airtight alibi, the “impossible alibi” problem can straddle the howcatchem with the locked room mystery with ease.

What I would say makes it hard to see this problem as “an impossible crime”, per se, is that if the crime were to occur in our world we would simply not pursue it as such — and, save perhaps for the detective, nobody in the book is approaching it from that angle either. Someone who isn’t the suspect could have just as, if not even more easily, committed the crime and the “impossible” problem melts away. The problem is possible… but only so long as you take it as the events of the novel being experienced from the perspective of someone impartially involved with the affair, that is. The murder is only “impossible” to us as readers, and nobody else, and only as long as we wholesale accept a certain premise.

This is far from a fair criticism to levy against the “impossible alibi” plot. Consider if you will what I like to call “The Judas Window Problem”: a murder is committed in a locked and sealed room, only of course, inside of the room isn’t just the victim’s body, but also a living individual presumed to commit the crime; it is only when we accept that this person is innocent that the crime takes on its “impossible bend”. In many cases, there does end up being some physical evidence at least lightly suggesting that the person in the room is innocent, but there are also more than a few cases where there isn’t and the detective investigates more out of personal interest. Does it stop being an “impossible crime” story simply because you’re missing hard, physical proof the suspect is innocent? Does it become “a totally possible crime which only incidentally features a sealed room and the exact kind of trick that would be used to commit a locked-room murder elsewise” simply because the book expects us to accept some premise that wouldn’t necessarily be accepted within the confines of the story? If it feels like we’re suddenly splitting hairs here, why is it suddenly a different story when we’re expected to accept one person’s innocence, when the alibi problem is only the dichotomous opposite of accepting one person’s guilt?

Four years ago, on The Reader is Warned’s post on this very topic, Dan suggests that the “impossible alibi” problem doesn’t deserve to be called an “impossibility” because alibis don’t hold water under scrutiny and are “meant to be broken down” — and, specifically, because the suspects say “I wasn’t there”. There are two points here, “the alibi is meant to be broken” and “alibis are flimsy because they’re based on testimony”, which will be dealt with reversely.

The second point is markedly unfair; there is no novel out there claiming to feature an “impossible alibi” problem where the problem begins and ends with all of the principle suspects saying “I wasn’t at the crime scene, I was in my room!”. A crime where someone is murdered in an immediately accessible location, but everyone promises they were somewhere else with next to no corroborating information would never pass snuff as an “impossible alibi” problem. It’s when other people’s testimony and physical evidence starts to make it appear as if every alibi is assuredly true when the impossibility starts to take form.

Consider Roger Ormerod’s Time to Kill, wherein the detective all but assures us that an ex-convict he’s playing pool with is the culprit of a murder on another floor of the hotel in which they’re playing, which was proven by autopsy to have occurred during the ongoing pool game. Or, the locked-room mystery and impossible-crime story by popular Japanese author NiSiOiSiN, Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle, where one of the crimes is the destruction of the narrator’s friend’s computer while every member of our classically-styled stranded island closed-circle cast testifies that every other person was in the same room at the same time at the critical moment, which is known to be the period of time when everyone was assembled together. Consider Agatha Christie’s “The Christmas Tragedy”, where we’re 100% guaranteed to the identity of the culprit but reliable testimony places him elsewhere at the time of death.

Now, of course, you could argue a lot of things that end up explaining the problem away, even though you seem to have physical evidence and other testimony supporting the alibis. Seemingly reliable testimony was actually fudged to provide the culprit with an alibi; perhaps, somehow, the time of death was obfuscated; perhaps the killer used some bizarre, unknown trick to make it look like he’s in one place when really he isn’t; perhaps the killer wore a disguise; perhaps a once-thought-dead individual in a closed-circle is actually alive, having faked their death; perhaps the crime was committed remotely through some unknown means.

…Which brings us to the first of the earlier two points. Yes, these are all possible explanations to the “impossible alibi” problem… but they’re also all possible solutions to any other number of impossible crimes! Any trick you use to commit a murder under these conditions will, like it or not, play under the same rules, with the same train of thought as the resolutions to any impossible crime, whether it’s a locked-room mystery, guarded rooms, or an invisible killer. I’d go so far as to suggest that a guarded-room mystery is fundamentally exactly the same as some styles of the impossible alibi problem in terms of how the impossibility is established and how it can be resolved. The possibility of faking alibis doesn’t preclude these sorts of problem from impossibility status, because the very heart of impossible crimes is “an entirely possible series of events fraudulently established as apparently ‘impossible'”. All impossible crimes are built on the conceit of the situation being faked in some way; there’s no reason to discriminate against the airtight alibi on these grounds, when there’s sufficient supporting information making every alibi apparently airtight and credible. Is the killer never committing murder despite being in front of the detective’s face at the key moment not impossible enough?

The “impossible alibi” differs in no way from any other impossible problem.

Does it require the onus of special care in setting up the alibis to truly and properly make them appear reliable and airtight? Yes, but in very much the same way guarded rooms demand the onus of special care in establishing the faithfulness of the guards, the way that the Judas Window problem demands special care in establishing the innocence of the person locked inside of the room, or the same way that locked-room murders demand special care in establishing when, where and how the door was locked, the same way that snowprint murders demand special care in establishing when the footprints were created and when the snow stopped…

Can the information that establishes the alibis as credible be forged? Yes. The same way the details the establishes the lockedness of a locked-room, or the nature of a snowprints mystery can be faked and forged. Faking the details and making them appear reliable is quite literally the heart of misdirection and deception. All details can be faked, forged, and tricked, not much more more difficultly than an alibi could be — and all deceptions which are considered true and proper solutions to each and every single one!

Does it demand extra conditions to function as an impossibility for the reader? Yes; in fact, it’s the perfect polar opposite to the Judas Window problem. One demands you accept the guilt of a person known to be inside of the room; the other demands you accept the innocence of a person known to never be at the crime scene.

At this point, I propose establishing categories of impossible crimes dubbed “Doylist” and “Watsonian”. A “Watsonian” impossible crime is an impossible crime for the benefit of the characters in the story. Your locked-room murders, your snowprint murders. Murders which, should they occur in our own world, would demand acceptance of no conditions beyond the existence of the crime itself to be considered “impossible”. The “Doylist” impossible crime is an impossible crime for the benefit of the readers. Murders which demand acceptance of some additional premise which nobody in the story is obligated to accept but which we, as readers, must note when considering the problem. Naturally, the impossible alibi falls under this category, but it is not alone; the “Judas Window Problem” falls under this category. I’d also argue defensible coincidences, like “rooms inciting heart attacks”, more than fit here, for demanding the reader accept the condition that there is foul play, and that it involves the “killer” room. Guarded rooms also demand to some degree our acceptance that the “guards” are reliable and faithful for the impossibility to function, and many versions of the “invisible killer” problem demand our good faith that the crimes aren’t suicides or that witnesses aren’t lying.

The “impossible alibi” is more than deserving of being considered an impossible crime problem, true and proper, even if it does demand the special “Doylist” distinction — something which it wouldn’t even be the first to do. Any mystery where the problem relies on the assurance that the killer is one specific individual, or one among a static group… and where sufficient evidence is provided to allow that the killer could never have even approached the crime scene… is as worthy of its impossible status as any other. In solidarity with the “impossible alibi” problem, I will use it as a category for “impossible crimes” in this blog from this point going further, as long as I feel comfortable asserting that the novel does in fact create an impossible situation from the alibi problem, or as long as someone doesn’t convince me that I’m wrong.

So, what do you say? Do you believe that the “impossible alibi” problem is a fair classification of impossible crime, or should it stay firmly out of the realm of the impossible for good…?

Death of Jezebel (1949) by Christianna Brand

Agatha Christie. Margery Allingham. Dorothy L. Sayers. Ngaio Marsh. These four names have been carved into the annals of crime fiction history as the “Queens of Crime” — the highest of the highest examples set in detective fiction, the grand dames of murder, the gold standard of mysteries for a century to come. These four women were the superpowers in crime writing culture in their time…

But nobody’s ever been satisfied with just four of anything, right? Four is such an awkward number. Three’s much nicer, but… well, it isn’t very nice to say that someone doesn’t deserve their decorated reputation. That isn’t to say I wouldn’t, but I want this to be a positive piece so, instead, I’d like to make a case for a fifth Queen of Crime. A brilliant writer who put to paper three accepted masterpieces and at least three more nearly-comparable efforts in about the same amount of books it took Dame Christie to grow out her training wheels, and one of the unsung heroes of the women of the Golden Age of Detection: Christianna Brand!

Christianna Brand’s literary career started in 1941, when she wrote a murder mystery featuring Inspector Charlesworth, called Death in High Heels. The novel was inspired by her fantasies of how she’d get away with killing bothersome customers and co-workers while she worked as a salesgirl and, evidently, crime writing proved to be a cathartic outlet for her unsavory tendencies as she almost immediately wrote and published Heads You Lose, the first of her longest-running series of novels featuring Inspector Cockrill. She had a steady output of detective fiction featuring primarily Inspector Cockrill for the next two decades, before slowing down but still occasionally publishing the odd crime novel or children’s book well until her death in 1988.

In 1948, she published Death of Jezebel, a locked-room mystery where Cockrill’s career is still recovering from his blunder in Green for Danger, her most famous novel, a 1944 mystery set in a military hospital during wartime bombings. Consequently, he is at odds with a local police inspector, who also just so happens to be Brand’s secondary series sleuth Inspector Charlesworth and who isn’t entirely convinced Cockrill is up to snuff to solve this mystery. Though Death of Jezebel novel is technically a crossover between the two, it’s primarily a Cockrill novel, with Charlesworth ultimately failing to solve the crime before Cockrill.

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Her name is Isabel Drew. But her company prefers “Jezebel”. It’s been years since Drew compelled her best friend Perpetua Kirk to engage in drunken adultery with Earl Anderson, even though she had only just recently gotten engaged to her loving fiancé. Cruelly, when the fiancé shows up looking for Perpetua, Drew led him straight to the scene of her infidelity and, horrified, he immediately drives his car into a wall, killing himself.

Since then, his death continues to linger over the company like a nasty miasma. Drew, Anderson and Kirk, all still together in spite of the horrible events years prior, are set to premier in a historical medieval pageant at the Homes for Heroes Exhibition, with this animosity culminating in each of the trio receiving death threats, promising their demise at the Exhibition. Not willing to sacrifice the pageant, the three bring in Inspector Cockrill to defend them, falsely hoping that the deaths, if any should there be, would occur between shows…

And yet, to the horror of thousands of spectators, in the middle of the pageant, as seven knights ride out onto stage on their horses, Isabel is thrust from the peak of the tower on which she stood, and is found to have been fatally strangled just a few minutes before her fall. On one side of the tower, a door was locked and bolted from the inside, and guarded on the outside by one of the crew… and on the other side of the tower, an open archway exists, in full view of the massive audience, all of whom swear that nobody ever went into it since all of the actors rode out on stage. A seemingly impossible case of strangulation and defenestration, committed inside of an empty tower nobody could’ve ever entered, in front of a reliable crowd of thousands of witnesses.

And so, the game is afoot, with Inspectors Cockrill and Charlesworth on the tail of a dangerous killer armored with unparalleled ingenuity.

Death of Jezebel represents the greatest example of and the logical extreme of Brand’s greatest strength as a puzzle-crafter: her mastery over the dramatic logical reversal. Brand is borderline Machiavellian in her ability to plant ideas and theories into the reader’s brain, convince them they thought of it themselves, shred it to pieces and move on. Brand is a puzzle-crafter who is able to lay down pieces with such a casual frankness that it’s always hard to tell when she’s trying to hide something from you, or if she’s trying to hide the fact she isn’t trying to hide anything at all… False solutions that play on theories the reader will assuredly have at that point in the game, clues that never mean quite what they seem they should… and in the middle of Death of Jezebel, during a long series of false confessions, possibly the single most damnably mischievous and mean-spirited “meta”-misdirection I’ve seen in this genre, period end, which I would love to talk about in a little spoiler-dedicated section at the end of this review, as it aligns somewhat with a complaint many people have with this book….

Oh, and never-you-think that all of this misdirection, cluing, red herring planting, game-playing, manipulating and mind-reading Brand’s engaging in is wasted on a solution that isn’t worth her efforts. Brand demonstrates marked ingenuity and cleverness in her locked-room puzzle, creating a solution that, while somewhat convoluted (is that really a bad thing?), flows brilliantly and organically from the information we’ve been given, and which could truly only work in this set-up. The solution is devilishly macabre and novel, and beyond daring and clever, and hits like a bolt of lightning when it’s revealed.

As a puzzle mystery, locked-room or otherwise (but especially for locked-room mysteries), Death of Jezebel has become the gold standard for me. It’s become an example I try to follow in my own impossible crime writing in cluing, misdirecting, and solving, and the example against which I measure nearly every locked-room mystery novel I read. It’s impossible to describe just how formative this novel has been in guiding my experience with reading and writing puzzle mysteries for years since I’ve read it. I’ve read mystery novels that surprised; this one took it a step further and inspired.

And hark, O Ye Socialites of the genre, for no Brand is ever just a simple, cozy, humdrum puzzle plot. As with any of her mystery novels you can select at random, the characters in Death of Jezebel are described and developed with a surprising amount of that ever-elusive third-dimension, and a persistent charm. Even the bleak, more toxic cast of Death of Jezebel sticks out to my mind years after I first read the book, and the clarity and complexity in which their flaws are drawn gives them a sort of bizarre negative charm; Perpetua Kirk is one of my favorite suspects in a mystery novel ever. And mind you, I’ve never been one much to get too caught up in the literary merits of a Golden Age mystery — puzzle first, and all that — but Brand’s skill at eliciting immediate familiarity with her core players is still worth mentioning, even for someone like me who usually doesn’t care.

The novel pips along chipperly in a marked contrast to its somewhat un-cozy, darker narrative, and manages to be reliably playful when it knows it ought to be. And yet, there’s also its own fair share of grittiness and frankness that you rarely see from this genre, in this period of time. As with her puzzles, Brand’s stylization is, put simply, daring. I also consider Death of Jezebel one of her better-paced mysteries. Many of her other novels take too long setting the stage, and the interpersonal dramas, before getting to the murders, but the more concise, elegant dynamics between the central trio in Death of Jezebel let Brand get to the mystery quickly without necessarily sacrificing the human element that she’s always handled so well.

I’m sure you can tell, given I’ve had not a single negative word to say about this novel from beginning to end, but I absolutely adore Death of Jezebel. I can say with no reservations, no doubt, and no trepidation that this is my favorite locked-room mystery ever written, my favorite puzzle plot ever conceived, my favorite piece of misdirection, and my favorite mystery novel ever written, period, and has been wildly influential to me as a reader and writer of puzzle plots and impossible crimes. It is, in my opinion, the greatest effort by one of the greatest practitioners of the Golden Age mystery, who should be better known than she is. Book-for-book, Brand would make Agatha Christie sweat if the two decided to compete. No complaints, no negativity. Death of Jezebel is a masterpiece, and anyone and everyone with half an iota of interest in anything crime fiction could do much worse than to pick it up for themselves, and then read four more Brands immediately after…

All rise for the newest Queen of Crime.

*** SPOILERS ***

One of the most frequent complaints I see levied against Death of Jezebel is the false solutions being annoying and not credible. In any other mystery novel, I’d accept that a pointless series of false confessions is annoying and detracts from the work, but in Jezebel I feel as if the greatest piece of misdirection in the novel would be lost without them.

Many locked-room mysteries make the mistake of tipping their hand by not letting the reader get to intimately investigate key pieces of information that highlight the vulnerabilities in the set-up. In pure spite of that, Brand boldly reveals the most important half of the solution in the middle of the book. Christianna Brand reveals the actual solution in the middle of a long series of fake solutions, at a point in the novel when it’d be unthinkable for the writer to reveal the real solution, and so she never has to actually prove it wrong. We’ve already subconsciously accepted that there’s no way this is going to be a real answer, presented in the middle of five other fake confessions, in the middle of the book. When the detective gives some flimsy excuse proving this solution wrong… we just sorta go “okay, that’s fair” and immediately X out that line of reasoning from our brain. The book tricks us into taking the CORRECT answer when it’s presented to us, distrusting it, and immediately throwing it out and just deciding to never think about it again for the rest of the book without any great deal of logical effort from her part. This is absolutely brilliant, even if S. S. Van Dine wouldn’t necessarily approve, and I could not imagine this book without this fantastic piece of false-solution-based misdirection.

The Fourth Door (1987) by Paul Halter (transl. John Pugmire 1999)

Humor me for a moment, while I tell you a riddle that has nothing to do with the coming review.

A man is found, hanged to death, inside of a barn. There are no chairs, tables or any other sorts of furniture for the man to have kicked himself off of. He’s too high off the ground to have hung himself, and yet the barn was locked from the inside, precluding from the possibilities murder of any sort. So, how did the man die?

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Well, we’ve all heard the riddle before. The solution is, naturally, that the man stood on top of a sheep, or a goat and jumped off to hang himself and the poor complicit animal simply walked off to another part of the barn, away from the body.

Notice how you practically have all the information you need right there in that paragraph. To figure it out demanded no strenuous detection or investigation — just a creative reconstruction of the information as it’s observed from the first pass. One could even argue there’s any other number of possible solutions besides the intended one… Such is the nature of the lateral thinking problem. Fun, short bursts of creative, semi-misleading problems. One can only wonder how such an exercise would fare if stretched well out over a full novel…

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The Fourth Door (originally published in French as La quatrième porte) is the apprentice novel by Paul Halter, who people would have you believe is the second coming of The King of Locked-Room Mysteries John Dickson Carr himself, the Da Vinci of sealed rooms and how to commit murder inside of them. Incidentally, the second post on this blog is a review of Halter’s second novel, Death Invites You, which I felt had a dreadfully uninspired resolution and cheap misdirection, and I’m only motivated to read more Halter on merit of some delightfully clever clues…

The Darnley home has become something of a local legend in this quaint Oxford-adjacent village, ever since the night when Mrs. Darnley apparently took her life in the loft of the house. John Darnley and his father Victor quarrel violently at every opportunity as the latter’s mental health worsens by the day. Out of work, he rents the home out to tenants who stay no more than a few weeks before leaving, complaining of hearing footsteps from the attic and seeing ghosts! When the Latimers, two apparently spirit-loving occultists, move in, it seems like a match made in heaven… and their bond only bolsters, when Alice Latimer, in an apparent fit of hysterics, is able to precognitively read a letter written to the dead woman and wax-sealed in an envelope, and give an answer from beyond the grave…

Three years after the seance, the Latimers are continuing to do professional spirit-speaking services, when they suddenly declare that they’ll attempt to summon the spirit of the dead woman, matrialize her, and give her agency to communicate with her husband. Patrick Latimer will be in the so-called “haunted room”, which will be marked with wax seals pressed with a unique coin to rule-out any sort of foul play, and left there to communicate with the spirit. But when the spectators return to find the seal unbroken but no answer from within, the door is opened to the sight of a dead body — and it’s not Patrick Latimer! An impossible murder in a sealed room… has Mrs. Darnley returned from the grave to exact revenge on her killers?

Scattered throughout the novel are a ton of little “minor” impossibilities, including the same person being spotted in two different places at the same time, impossible footsteps heard inside of an empty room that was decidedly impossible to escape from, a young boy having a clairvoyant dream of his mother’s death, and a final murder committed in an empty house surrounded by unmarked snow. All the while, our skeptical and even-headed narrator, James Sevens is at odds with Scotland Yard Inspector Drew, with mundane but reasonable-sounding solutions being established, discarded and revisited over the course of the narrative…

The plot is over-stuffed in a lot of ways with strange going-ons and decidedly impossible crimes, but I’ll maintain early on that this novel is for a certain mind. For those who revel in simply the presentation of a mystical scenario, seemingly supernatural, and the subsequent setting-in of reality in a rational explanation — those who take the impossibilities as reading material first, and problems to solve second — this is a cornucopia of varied ideas and a plot that feels closer to a feverish horror novel than a story of detection. If you’re absolutely here for the puzzle, and ingenious conceits behind the crimes, you’re going to be disappointed, and I can’t say I wasn’t.

Recalling the beginning of this review, few of the impossible crimes were given special consideration beyond the first pass. You got the information, the information was refined and refined but rarely if ever significantly changed, and the book moved on to its next plot point. The Fourth Door in many ways presents itself as a horror novel with incidentally human agency behind the events, with the horrific events handled like the lateral thinking problem above where it’s a simple matter of being imaginative enough to see what the writer believes is “the sole possible explanation”. You’ll find few clues that either point towards the proper solution, or point away from equally applicable wrong solutions. Absolutely, this novel is not a tale of deduction, detection or ratiocination. Now, there’s something of a meta-textual “turnabout” in the structure of the novel towards the end that, I suppose, in many ways serves as both a framing device and an apology for this plotting style, but I honestly wasn’t impressed — the novel could have been left entirely in-tact without this “turning inside out” the plot, and it wasn’t a necessary point to sacrifice the plotting for in my opinion.

Come the denouement, many of the impossible happenings are explained away with a textual shrugging-off of an earlier piece of information that falsely disproved an inordinately mundane and disappointing theory held by the narrator. I also take umbrage with the book’s insistence that from context these are “the only possible explanations”, another unfortunate result of the book’s plotting not being entirely favored by it’s “turning inside out” of the story. When we finally get to the wax-sealed-room trick, I’m actually delightfully surprised to find a hugely unique and clever resolution to the problem, but by this point I’m so exhausted with the denouement that I couldn’t muster the energy to be excited or invested in it. Immediately following it, we’re treated to a second denouement to the wildly predictable footprints in the sand mystery.

As a puzzle-lover, I am wildly dissatisfied with The Fourth Door. There is a clear energy and flourish for the macabre and unexplainable here that is very admirable for Halter’s freshman effort, but the novel wants to throw near half a dozen impossibilities at you with no special consideration for them outside of the treatment you’d give a lateral thinking puzzle. All of them but one are resolved sloppily and boringly, and even the one that was incredibly well-realized had its effect dulled by being sandwiched between two full denouement chapters that simply weren’t worth it. The pre-resolution twist is a clever enough conceit from a storytelling perspective that does serve to recontextualize the book’s odd nature, but doesn’t begin to make me enjoy what were otherwise dull and loose impossible crimes. The seal-waxed-door is another seed of hope that later Halter’s later endeavors properly showcase the efforts of the reincarnation of Carr, but The Fourth Door is a second fizzle for me…

The Policeman’s Evidence (1938) by Rupert Penny

I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that if Ramble House has fans, J.J. of The Invisible Event is one of them. If Ramble House has no fans, J.J. is dead. Between his emphatic praise of the works of Rupert Penny and the works of Norman Berrow, and the fact that both authors appeared in his top 15 impossible crime novels, it’s hard to imagine that anyone else in the mystery blogosphere is as excited about the Ramble House reprints as J.J.. And the excitement is as infectious as smallpox! About half a year ago I read and positively reviewed The Footprints of Satan by Norman Berrow, and now I’ve finally made my way to J.J.’s other Bramble House locked-room favorite The Policeman’s Evidence.

Ernest Basil Charles Thornett is an English “crossword expert” who, under the pseudonym “Rupert Penny”, wrote a series of detective novels featuring Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Beale and narrated by his watsonian pal Anthony Purdon, starting with the 1936 The Talkative Policeman and ending with Sealed Room Murder in 1941. The Policeman’s Evidence is his fifth novel to focus on Chief Inspector Beale.

Major Adair, a skilled cryptographer from the Great War, catches wind of a document from a miserly, hunchbacked former tenant of a now-decrepit manor that somewhere on the premises a great treasure is hidden. The ever ambitious Major assembles a crack team of hired-guns, daughters, employees, friends, enemies and randoms to help him scour the home for any sign of the treasure or more hints to its whereabouts, which leads him to a seemingly insurmountable riddle in an old shorthand code and a valuable ruby. He recluses himself in his study to tackle the riddle… and just as he is on the cusp on uncovering the meaning behind the message, the ruby is stolen and Adair apparently destroys all of his work and shoots himself inside of his study. Of course it had to be suicide! After all, how could Major Adair have been murdered in his study with double-treble-bolted, locked door, and shuttered and latched window? Only Inspector Beale isn’t convinced, and sets about making an unofficial case of the death…

The Policeman’s Evidence is a shockingly intricate enterprise, touched up with delightfully pulpy self-awareness that never did become too much, and hugely readable prose that keeps the book drifting along nicely even during its slowest moments. More than anything, The Policeman’s Evidence is fun to read — and it’s clear as day Penny had fun writing it, too. The detective in particular is a bit of a character, and a delightful departure from the typical “humored and bemused but impersonal saint” supersleuth we’re used to, with Beale having no reservations being honest with his sometimes not-totally-polite opinions on the members of the household.

This novel is a puzzle plot, purely and simply, and it’s been a long while since I’ve had the delight of reading a crime puzzle that’s such a delicate tapestry of clues woven with this level deftness and dexterity. Part of me was a bit skeptical about this near the end of the book. The murder doesn’t take place until pretty much the exact, perfect midpoint of the narration, and there are some points where it felt like they were trying to get a book’s length of investigation into half that page real estate, and some (admittedly unimportant) information was handled pretty inelegantly. However, come the denouement, I was shocked to find out how many seemingly mundane and innocuous interactions from upwards of damn near 80 pages before the murder occurred were actually integral to piecing the whole picture together, and some of them are so insanely clever that it’s hard not to be in awe at Penny’s ingenuity.

The locked-room itself is, and this will make the most sense after reading the novel, better than it had any right to be. The physical artifice of how the locked-room was executed is nothing to write home about, being an ages-old cliche that even in 1938 people were likely just a bit tired of. However, The Policeman’s Evidence is probably the purest piece of proof of the idea that as much as we may seek out totally new, entirely innovative answers to the question of “how can murder be committed inside of a locked room?”, sometimes that’s not possible, and an otherwise mundane solution can still strike like a bolt of lightning when the misdirection backing it is so salient, deft and powerful! Sure, the room is so “over-looked” that it’s hard to not guess at part of the core of the solution, but to fill in all of the necessary blanks, dot your i’s and cross your t’s is another thing all together, and this book does a good job at keeping you on your toes nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the novel isn’t quite the masterstroke I’d love for it to be. For starters, I can think of a dozen ways that the solution to the encrypted riddle could’ve played a more intimate part in the mystery than it did, and yet it… didn’t. Aside from playing the twin role of MacGuffin/trap-for-the-killer, the solution to the riddle was unceremoniously wrapped up in a two-page appendix slap-dab at the end of the novel, after the narration proper had already ended. It only served to give the reader an extra “for your consideration” puzzle, and almost never mentioned in remarkable detail for the remainder of the novel. It felt like a criminally underutilized plotpoint, for something that dominated basically the entire first half of the book leading up to the murder.

Furthermore, some events which led the detective to the solution felt like they happened solely to lead the detective to the solution. More than in almost any other Golden Age puzzler, there were times that I could feel the detective got wildly lucky in this unrelated person making this specific decision, or this unrelated person making this specific observation. Perhaps that’s true in nearly every crime novel of this sort, but there’s one or two specific examples here that feel especially egregious. They weren’t mistakes that occurred organically in the throes of committing the crime, or covering it up, but just things that happened independently of the criminal committing the crime that just so happened to establish necessary evidence for the feature sleuth. This isn’t a deal-breaker, so to speak, but I do feel as if there could’ve been better ways to establish the same information without the overwhelming chance.

All-in-all, The Policeman’s Evidence is another successful reprint from Ramble House, and another successful recommendation from J.J. to me. A salient, complex puzzle that wastes a few plot threads and ends up tripping itself up in some small parts of its long list of fantastic and ingenious clues. Just like with The Footprints of Satan, I’m not 100% convinced I’m going to run off and name this a favorite just yet, though I will say I’m much more in favor of this one than the former. Some part of me feels like despite my disposition towards impossible crimes, Penny is a writer who would thrive outside of the locked-room mystery format. I’ve got The Lucky Policeman laying at my bedside ready to vindicate me or embarrass me in that stance…

The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2011) ed. by Mike Ashley – Part 3

I’m sure you know the drill at this point. Twenty-nine locked-room mystery short stories, spread between six different parts of this long review of Mike Ashley’s anthological accomplishment, The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries. If this is your first time reading this mini-series, be sure to check out the previous two parts before jumping in.

Part 1 – “An Almost Perfect Crime” (William F. Smith) – “The X Street Murders” (Joseph Commings) – “Locked in Death” by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer – “Proof of Guilt” (Bill Pronzini) – “No Killer Has Wings” (Arthur Porges)
Part 2 – “Murder in Monkeyland” (Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg) – “The Impossible Murder of Doctor Satanus” (William Krohn) – “A Shower of Daggers” (Edward D. Hoch) – “Duel of Shadows” (Vincent Cornier) – “Eternally Yours” (H. Edward Hunsburger)
Part 3
Part 4 – ???
Part 5 – ???
Part 6 – ???

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“The Hook” by Robert Randisi is a historical mystery featuring Bat Masterson, a real-world journalist, lawman, and gambler.

A slew of unsolvable murders is haunting police officers — three women, all of whom died inexplicably despite no apparent signs of violence. When journalist Bat Masterson chides the police for their sloppy work in solving the crime, a spiteful Police Chief Flaherty drags him down to the station and challenges him to do better. It’s during the course of his investigation that an autopsy is performed, showing that all of the women are missing their internal organs despite only a small incision being made in their sides…

I’m already not a fan of “biological impossibilities” like this, but… god, it’s bad. Earlier, I considered just leaving the review at that. “‘The Hook’ by Robert Randisi is a bad story. The end.”, and then move on with my life. But then I decided that it wasn’t professional enough, so now I’m going to spoil this story in this review. I can’t articulate how annoying the ending is without taking that step. This is your one and only warning if you still give a damn about reading this story, because the very next sentence reveals the solution to this gripping impossible crime. The answer to the question of “how could the killer remove his victim’s organs despite the presence of only a small incision?” is… “the killer removed his victim’s organs through the small incision”. The “woundless death” impossibility is also just an idiotic consequence of people neglecting to remember that poison is a thing that exists — and also the police just… being wrong about the presence of no marks on the body, which should’ve been noticed even in spite of the lack of exhumation. Ultimately, everything just turns on the fact that, damn, forensics and the police really sucked in the 1890’s, and that’s basically the extent of the story’s explanation for its main plot hook. Add to this the fact that the killer is caught on baseless intuition (“his eyes were challenging me”), and then needlessly confesses to the crime (which, even in arrogance, shouldn’t end with him being surprised at his capture), and you get a bad story, the majority of which is pointless. You’ll get more satisfaction from reading this paragraph review of the story than I got going through the whole damn thing to the end. Simply the worst story in the anthology so far, and I can’t say there’s anything worth reading here unless you’re dying to know what Bat Masterson got up to in the late 1800s.

“The Hook” by Robert Randisi is a bad story. The end.

“Slaughterhouse” by Barry Longyear is a locked-room mystery and the only mystery story from a sci-fi author best known for his classic “Enemy Mine”, which was the subject of a 1985 film adaptation.

Nathan Griever has killed his wife, and inherited $23,000,000 from her. Police knew he had to be the killer, and yet he perfectly got away with the crime as it had happened inside of a locked room with a complex security system and a door with an electronic lock that constantly requires two living people to operate for anyone to get in, or out, of the room. His friend, Sir James Owen Cockeral, invites him to join “Slaughterhouse”, a club filled with criminals who have perfectly committed murder and escaped the law. Every member of the club will take a stab at solving his murder, and if they all fail he is granted membership and the right to explain his brilliant machinations to an adoring audience…

Another story straddling the “impossible-inverted-mystery” genre. This is going to shock everyone who knows me and has read this story… but I actually didn’t mind it all too much. This is definitely an outlier for me, since it’s not the kind of story that would appear to hyper-purists, and I don’t think it was on purpose but this story just did something right that made it pleasant enough for me.

This isn’t spoiling too much, since pretty much the entirety of the mystery turns on people making various guesses along the lines of the killer’s mechanism for holding the electric bolt open long enough to escape, but… really, that’s the impossibility. Not “the murder in a locked room”, but “the impossible wedging open of a door that is simply designed to not allow it”. Sure, it’s disappointing, and none of the solutions (the fake ones or the real one) are exactly clever or tricky, but I think the story framing itself as “how did the killer carry out this one specific type of locked-room solution?” curbs your expectations for what kind of explanation you’re going to get and primes you for it in a way that sorta subdues the disappointment you’d have gotten if the story were established as anything else.

I’m a bit worried to mention this here, since… while I don’t give away any aspects of the solution, I’m acknowledging something that the reader probably shouldn’t be aware of going in, so best to skip this paragraph if you plan to read the story blind. What really made this story shine for me is the one-two sucker-punch ending that revealed that a second puzzle tangential to the locked-room mystery was lurking in the background the entire time about the identity of the “Slaughterhouse” club, and the reader very possibly never noticed it. A real “slap your knee for not getting it”, and “feel clever for spotting it” resolution that came in at just the moment to save the story from a really mediocre locked-room mystery. No, it’s not totally “fair”, but I think it’s foreshadowed well enough to get that “yeah! In retrospect…” feeling. A better impossible crime would have won this story more points, but I’m more forgiving of it than I was in “Eternally Yours” in light of a better surprise, its clever “hidden puzzle”, and decent-enough setting up of the locked-room angle that keeps your fancies grounded. Probably the weirdest story to appeal to the small, not-as-stuffy side of my normally purist brain.

“Death and the Rope Trick” by John Bayse Price is one of the few known mystery short stories from a man who was a zoologist, biologist and teacher by trade.

Western University is offering a $500,000 reward to anyone who can perform the Indian Rope Trick, a legendary magic trick that few (if any) have ever seen performed with their eyes, which involves a rope standing stiff in the air, a young boy climbing to the top, and then suddenly vanishing before rematerializing a mile away. A skeptical Edward Dobbs, Chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees, is sent to verify Dr. Clive Marlin’s claims to be able to perform the trick “with the power of his mind”. And, lo and behold, he succeeds… with a caveat that the assistant materialized on the other side of a lake, and drowned to death.

This is actually the second story using the Indian Rope Trick as a subject I’ve read, the first being Tom Mead’s “The Indian Rope Trick”, written as a contribution to a 2020 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and I think this vindicates me in my stance that the narrower and more fantastical the problem, the harder and harder it is to think of unique ways out. Both “Death and the Rope Trick” and “The Indian Rope Trick” clearly had similar thought processes behind how to approach the problem, and in the end the explanations were themselves similar in mechanism, but distinct in application — distinct, in that I feel “Death and the Rope Trick”‘s explanation suits a magic trick, whereas “The Indian Rope Trick”‘s better suits a mystery story.

“Death and the Rope Trick” had a solution that was… cunning, but in the very same way a magic track in real life is cunning when the curtains are pulled back and the mechanics exposed. This reminds me very much of Hake Talbot’s The Rim of the Pit in that regard. “Sure, it’s neat that all of these things could contrive to make that happen, but…”. The effect comes first and foremost, and the explanation second. A dozen different moving parts come together to create the illusion, but there’s no precision, no conciseness, no clever trickery, no elegance. Some things were even just explained away by “oh, he just lied about this being there or not being there”. A complicated series of mechanisms that tripped over itself and dulled the impact of the reveal by none of the smaller parts being even remotely interesting on their own, and the end product being less than the sum of its parts. Tom Mead’s “The Indian Rope Trick” is overall a simpler explanation, but much more refined — and a better written story at that.

Anyone interested in this problem would be better off just asking Tom Mead for a copy of his story and giving Price’s story a skip afterwards.

“Three Blind Mice” by Laird Long

A serial robber nicknamed “The Rat” is found dead one morning in his apartment, but security footage shows him robbing a jewelry store later that afternoon — even though his death had already been assured.

Dreadfully bad writing with no sense of time or place, and which loves to hard-cut between locations, days, and scenes with the most choppy of transitions, makes the greatest puzzle in this story figuring out where the protagonists even are right now. Every paragraph has at least one hilariously bad, uber-cheesy line that reads like a poor attempt at gritty police witticisms. Also, a type of impossibility that isn’t well-known for being represented with the most ingenious of solutions (which usually fall into two equally boring camps). This story has a solution that’s just as mechanical and disappointing as “Murder in Monkeyland” with none of the science-fiction creativity to even make the horribleness memorable. Some stand-out lines in the story:

Maybe The Rat had actually gone out the same way he’d come in — accidentally, Pinero thought.

And the young detective’s apparent indifference to all things chip-driven earned him a special place of contempt in McGrath’s ebook.

McGrath played around some more with his Blackberry, his right eyelid twitching as he stared at the glowing screen. “I told you, I don’t follow boxing. It’s too violent.” Thumbs flying like a twelve-year-old video-gamer chalking up kills on God of War, he added, “You should see all the great features on this thing.”

Tolmeyer laughed. She had a soft spot for Pinero — right between the legs.

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I’m going to cut this one short here. I realized that when I counted the number of stories in this anthology, I was off by one — there’s twenty-nine, and not thirty. Which means one of these posts gets to get away with one less story than the others, and honestly this feels like it. I was going to wait until the very last post, but I’m starting to get a stress head-ache from grinding through 14 generally poor short stories in three, four days? This set of four is overall not great, with two stories cracking the bottom three, and I’m starting to worry the anthology’s peak is well behind us. The updated ranking is below.

1. “The X Street Murders” by Joseph Commings – 7.75/10
2. “The Impossible Murder of Doctor Satanus” by William Krohn – 7.25/10
3. “Slaughterhouse” by Barry Longyear – 6.75/10
4. “No Killer Has Wings” by Arthur Porges – 6.25/10
5. “A Shower of Daggers” by Edward D. Hoch – 6/10
6. “Eternally Yours” by H. Edward Hunsburger – 5.75/10
7. “Death and the Rope Trick” by John Bayse Price – 5.25/10
8. “An Almost Perfect Crime” by William F. Smith – 5/10
9. “Duel of Shadows” by Vincent Cornier – 4.75/10
10. “Murder in Monkeyland” by Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg – 4/10
11. “Proof of Guilt” by Bill Pronzini – 3.75/10
12. “Three Blind Mice” by Laird Long – 2.75/10
13. “Locked in Death” by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer – 2.5/10
14. “The Hook” by Robert Randisi – 1.50 / 10

The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2011) ed. by Mike Ashley – Part 2

In my very last post, I decided to take a step out of my comfort zone and delve more into my very sad, neglected pile of locked room mystery anthologies, starting with The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries. I then decided that because I couldn’t afford another three month hiatus on my blog I could do worse than to document my experiences with the stories contained within so that other… short-story-shy readers like myself would know where to look and what stories to avoid for satisfying impossible puzzlers! Just as before, we’ll be looking at five stories (chosen in the order I decide to read them) and ranking the anthology at the very end! Today, the curtain rises on Monkeyland…

Part 1 – “An Almost Perfect Crime” (William F. Smith) – “The X Street Murders” (Joseph Commings) – “Locked in Death” by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer – “Proof of Guilt” (Bill Pronzini) – “No Killer Has Wings” (Arthur Porges)
Part 2
Part 3 – “The Hook” (Robert Randisi) — “Slaughterhouse” (Barry Longyear) — “Death and the Rope Trick” (John Bayse Price) — “Three Blind Mice” (Laird Long)
Part 4 – ???
Part 5 – ???
Part 6 – ???

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“The Murder in Monkeyland” by Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg is a locked-room mystery from a duo of writers best known for their “techno-thriller” The Termination Node. Lois Gresh is a computer programmer, and Weinberg is a collector of pulp magazines and art.

At a secure government research facility that engages in torturous animal tests, microbiologist Dr. Carl Schneider is found dead from unknown means after being locked into his laboratory overnight by a perfect and impenetrable security system. Agoraphobic problem solver Penelope Peters is called on to solve the problem with the aid of her assistant, O’Brien, who scopes out the crime scene and reports back to her with his eidetic memory.

I’ll come right out and say it: I chose this story out of pure spite of the word “Monkeyland”. It’s the exact same reason I skipped ahead to the Jonathan Creek episode The House of Monkeys. Whenever I know there’s a monkey-centric setting in a locked-room mystery, my worst instinct is to derisively go “ohoho, out to capitalize on ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, are we?”. And, loathe as I am to admit it, I’m always proven wrong; these stories are not out to rip-off Rue Morgue at all… they’re actually worse.

Initially, I was actually on board with the story. Making the detective agoraphobic was a compelling weakness, and her pairing up with a muscle-bound detective with “photographic” memory but no imagination was a fun and intuitive evolution of the traditional armchair sleuth-deadly serious detective dynamic. I also noticed the story’s attempts to ingratiate itself to Sherlockian circles. In many Sherlock Holmes stories, the story will open with Holmes showing off a specific side of his deductive reasoning skills to an agog Dr. John Watson, which would later end up finding itself reapplied in the case-at-hand. In very much the same vein, there was a similar interaction between O’Brien and Peters over a copy of The Sign of Four wherein Peters calls to mind one of Holmes’s most famous axioms: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” All of this while avoiding the pages of pretentious references to Greek mythos one often finds in Doyle’s works, and I thought it was a neat, modern interpretation of the Holmes structure… until it became a problem.

Ignoring the solution and taking the denouement in a void, I was… baffled during the last few pages of the story. Bearing in mind that all of the suspects are obsessive but (ostensibly) rational minds of science, Penelope Peters has the insane idea to engage in the years-old mystery cliché of catching the culprit with a séance — the very last thing that would appeal to scientists. It seemed odd, but I decided that the story was just going to indulge in some genre-trope fun and let it be… until… Penelope just entirely abandoned the séance idea altogether mid-performance to frankly call the killer out in front of everyone. She had asked everyone to come in, sit down, hold hands… and then immediately called the killer out. The point of the séance denouement is to scare the culprit into outing themselves, but in this case it was just a normal drawing room with the trappings of a séance for three paragraphs for… some reason? And when asked at the end of it all how she knew the solution, the only explanation offered was the earlier axiom of “When you have eliminated the impossible”, with no real break-down of her mental process.

It was at this point that I had to finally take it back and actually figure out who these two were, and Mike Ashley provided me with a very informative explanation in the story’s introduction. They were writers of sci-fi thrillers, who (I’m speculating) wrote a small handful of crime stories on a whim and… I felt it. I think at the end of the day, this just isn’t a locked-room mystery for locked-room mystery fans. This feels like a locked-room mystery for existing fans of the duo’s sci-fi thriller novel. The allusions and parallels to classic mystery fiction feel superficial, and even ill-informed such as in the case of the unnecessary séance gathering, and the solution was science-fiction in the extreme, lacking in trickery and cleverness and more just exercising mechanical knowledge over the elements. I can only gather that anyone who picks up The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries is just not in the story’s demographic. We’re not the audience for this book. Maybe if I was looking for a sci-fi thriller that just incidentally resembled classic crime fiction, I’d have enjoyed it more, but as it stands I can’t speak very highly of it as a locked-room mystery story. All I can say is that it was at least complete and the solution at least had been given some foreshadowing in the story, which is more than I can say about a couple other stories present in this anthology, and even though it was worse than, say, “No Killer Has Wings”, “Murder in Monkeyland” at least gave me plenty enough to talk about…

“The Impossible Murder of Dr. Satanus” by William Krohn was written by an 18 year old disciple of John Dickson Carr, and has the distinction of being the only published crime story by Krohn ever. Though he wrote a second story, it was rejected for being “too complex”, and he subsequently went on to be an accomplished historian and critic of Alfred Hitchcok.

The stage magician Dr. Satanus, christened as Charles Kimbell, boards a hotel elevator with the intention of speaking with a private investigator he hired to ascertain suspicions Kimbell had of his wife’s infidelity. The elevator moves from the floor on which he and his wife slept, to the lobby floor, without stopping even once; yet, shockingly, when the elevator opens on the bottom floor of the hotel, Dr. Satanus is found inside, alone, and impossibly stabbed in the back!

This story is impressive. Not just “for an 18 year old” — but especially because it was written by an 18 year old — but just in general an impressive feat. I’ve seen impossible crime specialists who’ve been writing for decades of their life produce worse locked-room mysteries than something William Krohn dished out on his first and only go at it. And not only is the plotting great, you could easily convince me with the prose that the story was written by someone more seasoned in the genre than this. I do not believe in “talent” or “gifts”, but whatever the next closest thing is, Krohn had plenty of it. The main drawback is that we only ever will see one of these stories from Krohn.

Perhaps it seems a bit disingenuous that I have much less to say about this story than something like “Murder in Monkeyland”, but there’s a lot more ways to mess up a story than there is to write one well — and more ways to talk about it, too. The solution is all very clever, and intricate and neat. If I had to highlight any downfall, it’s Kimbell’s clear lack of confidence — there was no audacity at play here. No “the solution dangles in front of you”, no literary sleight-of-hand, no… chutzpah, as I’ve seen others call it. The clues, the red herrings and the misdirection are handled all very timidly, hiding in the regular information just fine, which is a standard way to obfuscate your solution from the audience but in the same vein also makes the whole thing have less impact. It, along with somewhat of a reliance on an accident that made the whole affair feel less concise, dulled what, with a little more oomph, would’ve been a truly fantastic locked-room mystery and what otherwise was my favorite locked-elevator mystery and my favorite magician-centric crime story. It’s a shame that Kimbell didn’t have the time to grow into the craft more, because this is a promising debut that’s starting to really turn me around on my opinion of impossible crime short stories…

“Duel of Shadows” by Vincent Cornier

In 1752, a Ensign the Honourable Nigel Koffard fired a bullet from his dueling pistol. Two hundred and twenty-two years, two months, one week, five days, twelve hours and forty-seven minutes later, Henry Westmacott is listening to the radio alone in his living room when the very same bullet Nigel Koffard fired strikes him in the shoulder as if shot from the void! With nobody hiding anywhere near the victim, all exits accounted for, a missing weapon, and locked windows, it appears if the bullet had been fired through time to harm Henry Westmacott!

I don’t have much to say on this one. The problem and solution are partially borrowed from a real-world incident (which will remain unnamed) that I already knew the details of when going into the story, so while I couldn’t quite pin the exact solution, the core mechanic was known to me before even reading the story. However, had I not had foreknowledge of the real-world incident, the solution would likely still be disappointing in much the same way many of real life’s miracles are when the artifice behind it is revealed. Scientific coincidence is the keyword for today.

This falls into the “too impossible to be good” camp of impossible crimes, where the writer is so invested in the baffling scenario that he creates something so damned fantastic and absurd that there’s simply no way the solution can actually be clever enough to meet the expectations of the problem. It also feels as if it falls into the “so impossible, it’s obvious” camp, where the impossibility is so impossible, and so narrow, the only possibility (the solution), or at least the important parts, end up being highlighted by the sheer absurdity of the situation. And, finally, it turns more on physical artifice than any sort of abstract trickery, which is just a general turn-off for me with these stories. A neat problem with a disappointing resolution that is infinitely better served in the context of nonfiction than a story.

“A Shower of Daggers” by Edward D. Hoch is a blend of contemporary cop-drama and Golden Age locked room puzzler from the man who needs no introduction, the “modern king of short stories” whose output of short fiction in his life was pushing 1000 published works. With such a massive outpour of content, it’s no surprise that Edward D. Hoch is the only writer to get two stories published in the same volume of either Mammoth Book impossible-crime anthology, one of the four only authors to be published in both, and the only writer to get three stories collected between the two volumes.

Susan Holt, a representative of a Manhattan shopping outlet Mayfield’s, is in New York to check on the opening of Mayfield’s first branch in the city. While visiting the apartment of her soon-to-be-coworker Betty Quint, the two are alone in the bathroom while Quint showers. Suddenly, Quint screams in pain, and collapses with a dagger in her back and one at her feet. After calling the police, Susan is immediately arrested under suspicion of Quint’s murder, and soon tasked with finding the real killer to clear her name while also aiding police with an ongoing counterfeiting investigation…

The story was better than I expected, but not by a huge margin. Whenever I read an impossible crime story set in the more-or-less modern day, I tend to expect strictly analog solutions that turn on physical mechanisms and artifice, with very little of the cerebral Golden Age trickery that tend to hit home. Fortunately, Hoch managed to touch base with a fair mix of both that was pleasant, even if majorly uninspired. A few neat clues, such as the disappearing double dagger, were fun enough, even if the elements of actual deduction were flimsy at best. However, beyond just not being very inspired, the solution also demands a lot out of Susan’s behavior and takes the term “miracle problem” to a damn near other level with just how much had to go right (or wrong) for the impossibility to come out at all, and the level of originality just didn’t compensate for the unreasonableness. This really tore apart the conciseness, and made what would’ve otherwise been a not-too-very-unique but competent locked room mystery solution a whole lot more dull than it needed to be. A passable locked-room mystery diversion that seamlessly blends contemporary crime fiction and Golden Age puzzling, but which is not going to gobstop anyone with its ingenuity or originality.

The “Judas Window”-type situation with the detective, Susan, being fraudulently framed for the crime also felt somewhat unnecessary, since suspicions towards her are dropped almost immediately on merit of her reputation as a crime-solver. It almost exclusively served as an excuse to get Susan investigating to begin with, and also detracted a lot from the experience with us being assured of what Susan’s movements were in the locked room, which narrows down the possible solutions significantly. A problem probably better served with our narrator not being the suspect.

Not a bad story by any means, but flawed in a lot of ways. It is neither the best nor worst Hoch I’ve read. I reluctantly find the solution somewhat more interesting at its core than “No Killer Has Wings”, and the disappearing dagger was a cool idea that should’ve been given more attention, but the poor presentation of the impossibility and reliance on flimsy chance knock off just enough points to put it below the Porges story, which was wholly better-constructed and a better-realized locked-room puzzle.

“Eternally Yours” by H. Edward Hunsburger is the only known mystery short story from a writer of mystery novels and westerns.

Jeff Winsor has just moved into his new apartment, and is just settling in when he finds himself haunted by postcards addressed to the dead previous tenant of his room, all of which reference modern events that undeniably occurred after the tenant’s death. With some prodding from his girlfriend, who believes the tenant didn’t just slip on his rug and fall to his death, the supernatural-skeptic Winsor seeks out to solve these seemingly impossible events…

Robert Adey called it “quirky and ingenious”, Tomcat from Beneath the Stains of Time calls it one of his favorite mystery short stories ever… Maybe I’m the problem, because I didn’t think this story was all that. It was injected with plenty of charm, the investigation was actually quite fun and populated with a cornucopia of vivid characters, and the core impossibility is harmless and cute. If you read a story like this, and can stop yourself from being in constant anticipation of the resolution and just enjoy the ride, I can 100% see its appeal. A story like this probably won’t appeal to someone like me, though…

In my mind, when a story features an impossible crime, I absolutely do weigh the quality of the impossibility heavily in my overall feelings of the crime. A mystery story that’s otherwise fantastic but fails on constructing an enjoyable impossibility will be disappointing to me — “you could’ve not had this bad locked-room mystery, and this would’ve been a great story without this massive, distracting stain”. Perhaps it’s just because I’m stuck in the mindset of consuming these stories as puzzles first and foremost, the rest of the story second. It may seem reductive to some, and I can’t argue that point, but it’s the factor that has always endeared me more to the Golden Age than to modern crime fiction — it’s the intellectual exercise that emboldens me to keep reading and which has instilled into me the passion for this genre — and I choose to stand by myself here.

“Eternally Yours” is conflicting to me, because I recognize that as a story it is fantastic, and it does make me ashamed of my habit of consuming these stories with minimal concern for the literary merits of the work when I don’t come out of it enjoying it as much as I feel like I should have. As much as it saddens me to say this about what was otherwise a fantastic crime story, the resolution to the impossibility is probably the worst part of the whole affair, and definitely doesn’t help it stay in good standing with me. The locked-room murder is just bad and meager, and obvious from damn near a mile away, and the “ghostly postcard” is yet another one of those “so specific and narrow” impossible situations that spoils the core mechanic of the solution by sheer merit of “it could only really ever be something like this”. And, perhaps this is my fault, but come the denouement I fully understand everything about the correspondence trick except I never got a satisfying explanation for why the postcards ever had to actually totally reach the narrator’s door to begin with, which makes me somewhat dubious of the set-up, but I could blame that on myself and offer this story a re-read in the future…

A fantastic story if you can enjoy the ride, but a sub-par impossible crime in my opinion. Don’t let my somewhat unflattering score put you off of this story. It is probably my most subjective and skewed scoring of the whole anthology.

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Alright! Another week and five more stories down. The average quality of this set of five was higher than before. We came close to reaching new highs with “The Impossible Murder of Doctor Satanus”, and didn’t come too close to any lows as low as “Locked in Death”. It was a rocky start with “Murder in Monkeyland”, but it was only ever up from there. I’m not entirely shaken in my stance on the impact of short impossible crimes, but I’m still not deterred from seeing this anthology through to the very end. Without further ado, a comprehensive ranking of the ten stories we’ve covered from The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries…

1. “The X Street Murders” by Joseph Commings – 7.75/10
2. “The Impossible Murder of Doctor Satanus” by William Krohn – 7.25/10
3. “No Killer Has Wings” by Arthur Porges – 6.25/10
4. “A Shower of Daggers” by Edward D. Hoch – 6/10
5. “Eternally Yours” by H. Edward Hunsburger – 5.75/10
6. “An Almost Perfect Crime” by William F. Smith – 5/10
7. “Duel of Shadows” by Vincent Cornier – 4.75/10
8. “Murder in Monkeyland” by Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg – 4/10
9. “Proof of Guilt” by Bill Pronzini – 3.75/10
10. “Locked in Death” by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer – 2.5/10