Delicious Death for Detectives (2022) by Kie Houjou

I previously reviewed the first, of currently three, genre-bending detective novels in Kie Houjou's "Ryuuzen Clan" series that successfully added new dimensions to the classically-styled, traditionally-plotted shin honkaku mysteries – weaving together the logical with the fantastical. Jikuu ryokousha no sunadokei (The Time Traveler's Hourglass, 2019) is a superb time travel mystery and Ho-Ling Wong's review of Katou no raihousha (Visitors on the Isolated Island, 2020) makes it sounds like a prototype of what the detective story might look like a hundred years from now. When the detective, horror and science-fiction genres blend together to create a new entity. The third entry in the series keeps the plot a bit more grounded without time travel or otherworldly entities in order to create an insanely tangled, multi-level detective novel that might very well end up fulfilling the role of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) of this century's iconic detective novel.

Meitantei ni kanbi naru shi wo (Delicious Death for Detectives, 2022) is one of Houjou's two novels nominated for the new, updated "Locked Room Library" translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmiicnana." So, with that out of the way...

Kamo Touma from The Time Traveler's Hourglass returns to take on the double role of protagonist and antagonist. Kamo is a magazine writer with a column in the monthly magazine Unsolved Mysteries, "The Pursuit of Truth," in which he presents "alternative explanations" to old, presumably settled cases. His analyses revealed quite a few miscarriages of justice resulting in several wrongful convictions getting overturned. That gave him a reputation of being something of an "amateur detective" and landed him a very special invitation.

Kurata Chikage is a game producer at MegalodonSoft who produces open-world RPG games and the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns caused a boom in game sales. MegalodonSoft into Virtual Reality and created the hit sensation Mystery Maker. A VR game in which "players take on the role of one of the world's top amateur detectives" and "participate in the solving of various difficult incidents" or battle Dr. D, the King of Crime, in Story Mode – even creating original scenarios. Sixty million sold copies later, Kurata and MegalodonSoft expect to release Mystery Maker 2 in February, 2025. By the way, Delicious Death for Detectives takes place in the far-away future of November, 2024. Kurata is organizing an internal event as a special demo, or, to be more precise, "a closed circle event." She asks Kamo to create/design a challenging scenario and play the role of murderer in the play test demo of the VR version of Mystery Maker 2.

The group of people she invited to go head-to-head are "the top real world amateur detectives" who are "to act as detectives and murderers" in an intense battle of wits and cat-and-mouse. Well, Kurata restricted her picks to the amateur detectives of Japan. The first of these amateur detective is the cousin of Kamo's wife, Ryuuzen Yuki, who's a struggling mystery writer under the name "Ryuuzen Yuki." Roppongi Shido is a retired investigator, critic and reputedly an off-the-book consultant to the police ("...often assisted with investigating cases in secret"). Fuwa Shinichiro is the director of the Shinjuku-based Fuwa Detective Agency with a reputation to match. Michi Chiaki describes herself as a job hopping, jack-of-all-trades "who mostly solves or prevents scams for clients." Azuma Yuzuha is an administrator for a hospital, but her brother was a famous detective who died in the line of duty and she carries on his work with her sister-in-law. Hajime Kindaichi Sou Touma Kyu Renjo Kenzan Ryohei is the obligatory, teenage high school detective who solved the cipher murder case at his cram school and several other incidents at his regular high school. Munakata Nozomi is simply known as the drifting detective whose only companion and Watson is a husky, Retsu. Kamo makes eight.

MegalodonSoft honors the time-honored traditions of the detective story and holds the three-day event at Megalodon Manor (floor plan included) on the island of Inunojima in the Seto Inland Sea ("the building certainly resembles the sort of mansion you'd see in a mystery novel"). A VR version of Megalodon Manor was created, called Puppet Hall (floor plan included), where the demo takes place and can be accessed through a full body VR control device – named RHAPSODY. But before the games can even begin, Kurata goes rogue and informs the detectives that there has been a serious change of plan. The game is still going ahead as scheduled, but, this time, being a fallible detective comes with consequences. Kurata states, "normally, the ones who suffer for your mistakes are others, but in this game, you'll be asked to bet your own lives." If the Detectives or Murderer (Kamo) fail to fulfill any of their victory conditions, they'll be killed on the spot. Everyone was given a MegalodonSoft smartwatches that has "death trap" device with a remote controlled poisoned needle. And, to absolutely ensure their cooperation, she gifted similar smartwatches to their loved ones.

You have heard of puzzling brain teasers? Delicious Death for Detectives is a puzzling brain thriller!

I should point out here that all of this is an overly simplified, stripped down summary of the story's setup as it not only has to introduce the characters, laying the groundwork of the plot and explaining the rules of the game, but also has to do a bit of world-building regarding the VR setting of Puppet Hall. An entirely new, specialized setting, "a space set up specifically for a game of deduction," that comes with its own sets of possibilities and limitations. For example, the VR gear is ID-locked with an iris scan bio-authentication and players who get killed in the game, but not IRL, can be resurrected as ghosts with a halo hovering above their virtual avatar to give evidence. So the in-game murderer (Kamo) has to be careful not to be identified when carrying out the murderer. That's why the character of the murderer has the ability to extinguish the lights in the building during "Crime Time" and has night vision function.

So, roughly, the first quarter of Delicious Death for Detectives gives the reader a lot to digest and can be counted as its sole shortcoming as Kurata, in her role as Gamemaster, keeps adding new details and bits of information when the game has already started – giving the impression the story's not playing entirely fair. That's not the case, of course, but simply spacing everything out in order to not give the reader an even info dump to digest. I think it would have been both helpful, not to mention very fitting, if the book had opened with a short game guide explaining the rules, mechanics, maps and list of the in-game inventory and players. It would have smoothed out the opening stages of the story, but, once you get pass that, you get a detective novel like few others. Even by the standards of hybrid mysteries!

I already noted Kamo has to play a double role of detective and in-game murderer. Only the reader, up to a certain point, knows Kamo is the murderer in Mystery Maker 2, but not how he engineered the (locked room) murders. So the murders in Puppet Hall can be taken as semi-inverted mysteries in which the reader knows whodunit, but, frustratingly, not howdunit. Getting caught, having his tricks exposed or successfully defending himself by demolishing a wrong theory, it has deadly consequences either way. If Kamo gets exposed, or one of his tricks, he and his family dies. But if he successfully defends himself, the detective whose theory got demolished is marked for death. The person charged with carrying out the real-world executions is simply called the Executioner and someone hidden among the other players.

I'm going to reveal too many of the details about the impossible crimes themselves, but they deserve to discussed as they're all gems, especially those staged in Puppet Hall.

Firstly, there's the murder Kamo staged in a storeroom barricaded from the inside, which appeared to be the central locked room puzzle of the story as it received a considerable amount of attention and scrutiny – two detectives tacking a crack at it complete with diagrams. A pleasure for everyone who enjoys Ellery Queen-style chains-of-deductions, building false-solutions before tearing them down again centered around the fallibility of the detectives. All the solutions, correct or not, to this locked room puzzle are ingenious and original, but surprisingly conventional compared to the other impossible murder in the VR space. Secondly, around the same time, someone else is poisoned in a locked room and it didn't appear it would develop in anything particular noteworthy, but it ended up giving the book its claim to at least the status of a locked room/hybrid mystery classic. The brilliant solution completely took me by surprise and left me speechless. Revealing a string of pretty unique clues and its brazen originality functioning as a red herring. Is this one of the most pleasing locked room-tricks to mentally visualize? Well, what more can I say? It's a masterclass in how to integrate an invented world or fantastical elements into a fair play (locked room) mystery. And how such a setting can unlock new possibilities to plot and tell a detective story.

If Delicious Death for Detective had been a smaller-scale detective novel restricting itself to experimenting with a locked room murder inside a VR game, it would have still been a first-rate, highly original and fresh treatment of the classical manor house mysteries. Delicious Death for Detectives is a big picture mystery and story continues to twist and turn right up till the epilogue as more people die. But as false-solutions get demolished, the Executioner begins to kill detectives in Megalodon Manor under seemingly impossible, or mysterious, circumstances. I've still barely scratched the surface of this insanely intricate, densely-plotted detective novel climaxing on the third day during the final round of "Answer Time" when Kamo has to reason for everyone's life. Like I said, the story never settles down until the epilogue. All done according to the fair play rules of the grandest game in the world.

I can go on lavishing praise on the story and plot, but you get the idea by now. It's a superb detective novel. A prototype of the detective story of the future and likely going to be a modern classic. What deserves to be pointed out is how it reads like the past, present and future of the genre coming together Megalodon Manor/Puppet Hall, but mostly done very subtly and without referencing famous detective stories or locked room lectures. Those not overly familiar with Japanese mysteries, in all its guises, will no doubt see shades of Christie's And Then There Were None, Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Leo Bruce's Case of Three Detectives (1936) and Ellery Queen, but was particular pleased to spot all the nods to everyone favorite manga mystery series. Some were more obvious ("...the black shadow figure from a certain mystery manga") than others (VR setting and smartwatch hostages), but enjoyed. I really believe what was done with the specialized setting and plot is a glimpse of the detective story of the future.

 Delicious Death for Detectives is not the first hybrid mystery discussed on this blog proving not everything under the sun has been done before, but Kie Houjou delivered a particular effective, convincing and basically a textbook example of the hybrid mystery done to near perfection. And produced a classic locked room mystery in the process. Hopefully, I get an opportunity to read the second, utterly bizarre sounding, Visitors on the Isolated Island one of these days, but, in the mean time, Delicious Death for Detectives comes highly recommended!

Hold on a minute: I have one, very minor, thing to nitpick about. I don't like the title Delicious Death for Detectives or, to use the apparently correct title, "Delicious Death" for Detectives. Just Deserts for "Great Detectives" would be a better fit for an English title, but even that one sounds too cozy-like and this is a story that would actually benefit from a simple, straightforward title. Something like Death and the Great Detectives or Deleting the Great Detectives.

Death Croons the Blues (1934) by James Ronald

Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 7: Death Croons the Blues (2024) is, as of this writing, one of the recent additions to the ambitious, ongoing project to restore James Ronald's crime, detective and pulp fiction to print – scheduled to conclude next year with vol. 14. The headline novel of this collection is the second of three novels about the morally flexible, ace crime reporter of the London-based Morning World, Julian Mendoza. I wanted to start at the beginning of the series with Cross Marks the Spot (1933), collected in Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 6 (2024), but remembered John Norris reviewed Death Croons the Blues (1934) in 2019. It sounded exactly like the kind of pulp-style, slightly off-the-wall whodunit I can appreciate.

Bill Cuffy is an ex-convict and reformed housebreaker with a gravely-ill, pregnant wife at home, no income and bills to pay. Molly Cuffy used to do char work for a well-known blues singer, Adele Valée, who's "rolling in jewels and furs." And her apartment is strewn with valuable knick-knacks. It seemed an easy enough job ("the softest of soft cribs") and Cuffy decided to pull the job on the night Valée is supposed to be away, but panics and leaves behind cartoon smoke when coming across her decapitated body in the bloodsoaked bathroom. Cuffy accidentally took the murder weapon with him as neighbors begin to ring the alarms and patrolling police constables blow their whistles.

An exhausted, frightened and Ghurka knife-wielding Cuffy fortuitously ends up at the boardinghouse of Julian Mendoza's housekeeper, Mrs. MacDougal. Mendoza immediately smells a story when he learns the famous nightclub singer has been brutally murdered. Suspects the housebreaker's story is not wholly untrue.

Cuffy not only took the murder weapon with him, but also an expensive, blood smeared coat belonging to a known troublemaker, the Honorable Timothy Brett – who's not the only man involved with Adele Valée. At the crime scene, Mendoza finds proof Valée had intimate relationships with three very rich, highly influential and powerful men. Sir Samuel Judson, an ex-cabinet minister, the department store magnate Neville Walls and the multi-millionaire Hugo Brancker. Their association is not without a hint of blackmail. Mendoza also has to contend with young Lady Constance Gay, who's determined to prevent Brett from hanging, while trying to piece together how the ex-boxer "Tiger" Slavin fits into the story. Not to be forgotten is Inspector Howells, of Scotland Yard, who frowns on Mendoza's shenanigans ("you're a rotten citizen—and a good newspaper man. That's why I don't trust you. You'd lie, cheat, or rob for a story"). So they go at it like rival detectives.

So a pleasantly busy, rollicking pulp-style detective story showing Ronald's towered over other writers when it comes to creating characters and storytelling, especially series-characters. Sketchy, short-lived as they may be. Similar to Six Were to Die (1932) and the other Dr. Britling shorter stories, Death Croons the Blues is carried by series-characters of Mendoza, Howells and Mrs. MacDougal.

John compared Mendoza to early Perry Mason who brazenly tempered with crime scenes, evidence and witnesses as long as it protected his clients. Mendazo takes a similar approach when it comes to chasing the next headline grabber, which he explains to Howells as follow: "That's where I score over you. You're bound up in red tape and regulations. The only tape in my life comes from a newsticker—and I make up my regulations as I go along." So the straitlaced Howells futilely trying to keep the breaks on the roving crime reporter's antics is the perfect foil and considerably livens up the story in addition to the characters, plot-threads and some actual detective work concerning several iron-clad alibis – even Lady Constance gets to play amateur detective. Ronald was smart enough to have Mendoza's cleverness get the better of him on several occasions and in the end he had to pay a hefty prize for his scoop.

Unfortunately, Death Croons the Blues went from the best the pulps have to offer to the worst with a ridiculous, weak and unconvincing solution. Firstly, the combination of murderer and method strikes a false, unconvincing note (SPOILER/ROT13) orpnhfr V qba'g ohl gung gur zheqrere, nf cerfragrq urer, jbhyq hfr n zrgubq erdhvevat uvz gb eha nebhaq anxrq ba n ebbsgbc be qrcraq ba fhpu n syvzfl, evfxl nyvov. N oevqtr-qhzzl nyvov pna jbex jura gur wbo pna or qbar va n pbhcyr bs zvahgrf. Sbe rknzcyr, Inyér vf nyernql qehttrq naq gvrq hc fbzrjurer va uvf ubhfr, fgnof ure juvyr orvat qhzzl naq gur obql vf yngre oebhtug onpx gb ure bja syng gb znxr vg nccrne fur jnf xvyyrq gurer. Ohg abg jura gur fpurzr erfrzoyrf n fznyy bofgnpyr pbhefr! Vg jbhyq yrnir uvz gbb ihyarenoyr ba nyy sebagf naq ab thnenagrr gur bguref jbhyq or fb nofbeorq va gur tnzr, gurl jbhyqa'g abgvpr uvf cebybatrq nofrapr nsgre zber guna gra zvahgrf. On top of that, (SPOILER/ROT13), gur zheqrere guerngrarq gb trg evq bs gur gebhoyrfbzr Zraqbmn naq Ynql Pbafgnapr ol qvffbyivat gurve obqvrf va npvq. Frr? Gung'f zhpu zber va punenpgre guna ehaavat nebhaq jvgu n Quhexn xavsr yvxr n qrzragrq ahqvfg gelvat gb chyy bss n zrffl senzr wbo. Why not do that in the first place?

So, plot-wise, Death Croons the Blues is not a patch on the excellent Murder in the Family (1936) or the superb They Can't Hang Me (1938), but it still stands as a fun, well written pulp-style mystery carried by its characters and storytelling – rather than a wildly imaginative premise or solution. Normally a hallmark of these pulp-style takes on the traditional detective novel. I'm still glad to finally have an opportunity to poke around the work of once truly forgotten mystery writer and hopefully the next one will be another Murder in the Family or They Can't Hang Me, instead of a repeat of Six Were to Die.

A note for the curious: Mendoza also appeared in a handful of novellas published by The Thriller Library and the first of these novellas, "Baby-Face” (1937), appears in this collection under the title "Angel Face." In addition to two non-series short stories, "The Other Mr. Marquis" (1930) and "The Joke" (1930). I'm not discussing them here, because I'm saving up Ronald's shorter work and review them separately in two, three compilation reviews.

They Can't Hang Me (1938) by James Ronald

In 2023, Moonstone Press published Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 1: The Dr. Britling Stories (2023), collecting three novelettes, the once elusive novel Six Were to Die (1932) and an excellent non-series short story ("Blind Man's Bluff," 1929), starting the process of reprinting all of James Ronald's novels and short stories – spread out over fourteen volumes. The stories collected in the first volume are better written than to be expected from the pulps with a regrettably short-lived detective character, but the plots left something to be desired. However, Murder in the Family (1936), marquee title from Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 2: Murder in the Family (2023), proved to be a surprisingly sophisticated, character-driven crime drama. And an excellent crime drama at that.

I wanted to sample Ronald's often praised impossible crime fiction and Six Were to Die failed to scratch that itch. So looked forward to the release of Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 4: They Can't Hang Me (2024) which include one of Ronald's reputedly best impossible crime novels.

John Norris called They Can't Hang Me (1938) "a corker of a mystery novel" with two impossible crimes "one of which is worthy of Carr," while Jim Noy gave the book a five-star review ("freakin' loved it") and included it in his "100 Books for a Locked Room Library" – commenting that "the impossible gassing is as good a ploy as any Carr dreamed up." High praise indeed! But is They Can't Hang Me good enough to be included in the "New Locked Room Library" currently being compiled? Time to find out

Twenty years ago, the eccentric Lucius Marplay owned the London newspaper the Echo, but the paper was stolen from underneath him by the current managing editor, Mark Peters. He and his cronies made a personal fortune from their hostile takeover. Marplay was locked up as a certified lunatic and forgotten about. Even his young daughter, Joan, was told he had died and was buried abroad when she was a baby. When the story begins, Joan overhears a conversation at a garden party and learns her father is still alive. So the people around her have something to explain. Naturally, Joan wants to meet her father, however, this demand sets in motion a series of events culminating in wholesale murder at the Echo office building.

Lucius Marplay is sane most of the time except on one point: an unquenchable desire to kill the men, Mark Peters, Ambrose Craven, Sinclair Ellis and Nigel Partridge, whom he holds responsible for his situation. Marplay whittled away the decades by filling "dozens of notebooks with ingenious schemes to end their lives" ("Oh, but they aren't wild plans. They're amazingly shrewd"), which gets to put into practice when he manages to escape during a mental evaluation ("MADMAN TRICKS ALIENIST!"). Before too long, the first death announcement is made and one of the four partners, Ellis, is bludgeoned to death in his private office as the Echo building is locked down and swarmed with armed policemen – resembling a beleaguered fortress. However, Marplay continues to strike with impunity. Every murder is preceded by a death announcement and a note is left with each victim reading, "PAID IN FULL." A familiar setup for the pulp-style "miracle menace" thriller!

An important man under police protection getting bumped off in a locked and guarded or a group of people trapped in a house under siege is a popular setup for a pulp-style locked room. I have encountered them time, and time, again in my admittedly still limited reading. John Russell Fearn's Account Settled (1949) and the posthumous The Man Who Was Not (2005) come to mind as does Gerald Verner's novella "The Beard of the Prophet" (1937) and The Last Warning (1962). Some other examples include Brian Flynn's Invisible Death (1929), T.H. White's Darkness at Pemberley (1932) and more recently Anne van Doorn's short story "De man die liever binnen bleef" ("The Man Who Rather Stayed Inside," 2021). However, Ronald might very well have written the delivered the masterpiece of these pulp-style, beleaguered locked room mysteries with They Can't Hang Me and so much more heaped on top of it.

Firstly, the plot is pleasantly busy with multiple characters working at cross purposes without the story becoming a tangled mess. Joan is determined to learn the truth in order to clear her father's name by coaxing a confession from one of the four men and goes undercover as a secretary/typist, which places her in the cross-hairs of the lecherous, fittingly named Ambrose Craven. Fortunately, she has two allies in her guardian, Miss Agatha Trimm, and the Echo's gossip columnist, Lord Noel Stretton, who has fallen in love with Joan. There's an ex-newspaper reporter and Fleet Street drunk, Flinders, who's always hanging around the Echo building trying to make a buck. My favorite character is unquestionably the Scottish private detective, Alastair MacNab, attached to the New World Investigation Bureau. MacNab has been hired by the asylum to help sniff out Marplay, "I've aye had the knack o' understanding whit goes on in an unbalanced br-ain," who's granted unrestricted access to the building ("if he had been able to foresee how much of nuisance Alastair MacNab was to be..."). A fine character in the tradition of Leo Bruce's Sgt. Beef and Carter Dickson's Sir Henry Merrivale ("you aren't one of Doctor Hammond's patients by any chance?"). Secondly, beside the characters, plot, excellent storytelling and pacing, there's the setting itself. James gives an insight look of the newspaper business and these specialized backgrounds or setting are always a plus when handled properly (i.e. not an info dump of the author's research or first-hand experience). More importantly, Ronald fully exploited the setting to enhance and further the plot.

Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) lists only one impossibility for They Can't Hang Me, but there are three and understand why the second one got overlooked, but the third, non-deadly impossibility deserves to be acknowledged – which is a small gem. Peters and the Echo suddenly find themselves in a competitive fight with the rivaling Evening Dispatch. Despite the entire building being under lock down and closely guarded, the Evening Dispatch beats the Echo throughout the story in putting out the news of the developing murders first. Sometimes complete with photographs of the crime scene. But who was leaking information? And how? Not only is the building locked down and guarded, but the switchboard monitors every telephone call. The impossible leakage information is, in my opinion, the best of the three impossibilities as the culprit is what makes its solution great and loved the clue of (SPOILER/ROT13: gur yvivat yhapu).

Marplay having seemingly unfettered access to the building can be counted as a quasi-impossible and ongoing situation, but found Marplay's earlier actions after escaping to be more interesting. After a twenty year spell in an asylum, Marplay proves to be surprisingly resourceful, once outside, collecting and trading money or items to be used in his shenanigans. Such as pawning the coat he stole from the psychiatrist or taking a curtain cord from one scene to use it another like it's a video game. And his presence throughout the story is very well handled. But what about the two locked room murders?

One of the men is shot in a locked and tightly guarded room "as impregnable as one of the vaults of the Bank of England," while policemen were sitting only a few steps away in the anteroom. Another one dies of cyanide, while surrounded by police guards, but no apparent way the poison could have been administrated. The shooting is definitely the better of the two with a novel new way to shoot someone in a locked and guarded room. A trick that by itself could have been developed into something really good as it has enough aspects to have carried a novel-length locked room mystery. The problem with pulp writers (for us, anyway) is that the finer plot details and clueing aren't always treated with exactly the same care or rigor as their Golden Age counterparts. Something that can be a problem for the uncompromising plot purist, but nothing that should deter you from enjoying this lively, well written and characterized story mixing the lurid pulp-thriller with the traditional locked room and impossible crime story.

James Ronald was a pulp writer, but not your average, dime-a-dozen second-stringer who dominated the pulps. Ronald could very well have been one of its best writers, certainly better than my favorite second-stringers, who surprised me with Murder in the Family and entertained me on every page of They Can't Hang Me ("incredible, unbelievable, fantastic, impossible"). They Can't Hang Me is fun with a capital F and pulp with a P. So bring on the reprints of Cross Marks the Spot (1933) and Death Croons the Blues (1934)!

Blackstone Fell (2022) by Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards' Blackstone Fell (2022), alternatively published as The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge, is the third title in the Rachel Savernake series that can best be described as historical, pulp-style retro-thrillers with elaborately-webbed, tangled puzzle plots hidden underneath – comparable only to Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series. A technique known as webwork plotting ("...the art of creating a single story out of random multiple narrative threads") and Edwards cleverly exploited to write one series that satisfies two different groups of readers. Those who enjoy a dark, eventful thriller with characters and those who want their crime fiction supported by a good, solid plot.

I belong to the latter and definitely appreciated the first two Savernake retro-pulp novels, Gallows Court (2018) and Mortmain Hall (2022), which combined the best of the detective story and thriller. Edwards ended both with a "Cluefinder" referring back to the pages and lines where the clues and hints to the solution were hidden in plain sight. Something I can always appreciate, but particularly looked forward to getting to Blackstone Fell as it contains not one, but two, impossible disappearances!

Back in 2022, Edwards wrote on his blog that he had been rewatching "the complete run of episodes of David Renwick's Jonathan Creek," as well as “working on John Dickson Carr titles for the British Library," while Blackstone Fell was still in its conceptional phase – deciding "it would be fun to have a genuine locked room mystery in the book." Edwards has written short impossible crime stories before, "Waiting for Godstow" (2000) and "The House of the Red Candle" (2004), but Blackstone Fell is his first novel-length locked room mystery. Just like it's two predecessors, Blackstone Fell has a plot resembling a deep, densely-webbed structure with maze-like properties. And like the previous novel, this third title in the series has a body count Paul Doherty would approve of.

Blackstone Fell is set in October, 1930, beginning with the arrival of the investigative journalist Nell Fagan in the small, remote Yorkshire village of Blackstone Fell "masquerading as a photographer named Grace" – trying to worm information from the locals about the local sanatorium. Vernon Murray contacted Nell to ask her help to bring whoever murdered his mother to justice, Ursula Murray. A widow who remarried a young, virtually unknown playwright, Thomas Baker ("no, none of the theatre critics have heard of him, either"), who packed her off to Blackstone Sanatorium to recover from a "nervous collapse." There she died from supposedly natural causes, but Vernon refuses to accept that verdict. And, out of desperation, turned to the crime reporter.

Nell took the tenancy of the historical, long vacant Blackstone Lodge as Cornelia Grace and tried poking around, but the close-knit community is not very keen on nosy outsiders and simply refuse to open up ("certainly not to an ungainly Londoner who reeked of tobacco and gin..."). However, Nell's prying disturbed someone as she's almost killed coming down the Fell by a boulder. Realizing she needs help, Nell reaches out to Rachel Savernake through Jacob Flint, because Nell is a persona non grata in Gaunt House. So she has to bait the hook with an offer for Jacob and an enticing mystery for Rachel. A historical locked room mystery centering on the gatehouse known as Blackstone Lodge!

Blackstone Lodge is a damp, drafty gatehouse dating back to the 17th century standing on the grounds of the now crumbling, overgrown Blackstone Tower estate of Harold Lejeune – whose family built and lived in the Tower for centuries. The tower gatehouse stood vacant for nearly as long on account of its dark history of inexplicable disappearances. In 1606, Edmund Mellor was the first guest to be welcomed at the recently completed Blackstone Tower and, one day, was seen by the rector entering the gatehouse, locking the door behind and "not a living soul ever clapped eyes on him again." Mellor had not only vanished into thin air from a locked gatehouse, but a locked gatehouse under observation as "the rector was adamant that he never budged from the spot." Three centuries later, it happened again 1914 when Alfred Lejeune, older brother of Harold, disappeared under similar circumstances from the gatehouse. Never to be seen again and declared dead in 1921. So coupled with the possibility that a killer is on the loose in the village, "perhaps more than one," makes for a pretty mystery to offer to Rachel as a peace offering, but she also had to give Jacob something.

Jacob editor is on a crusade against spiritualism, mediums and other supposedly supernatural mumbo-jumbo, which include "London's most renowned medium," but Ottilie Curle is not easily exposed as she conducted her sessions one-on-one – only to the credulous or the converted. Skeptics and the press are kept at a distance. Nell can arrange a place for Jacob at Curle's séance table under false pretenses, which is too good to turn down and the third main plot-thread of Blackstone Fell. This is only the beginning as people begin to die, left and right, before Rachel can begin her investigation in earnest. An investigation that brings even more deaths from the past to light.

Similar to Gallows Court and Mortmain Hall, you can't really discuss the unfolding events past the setup as things tend to become complicated really fast. Just like the first two books, the complicated web of characters, maze-like plot and potential motives are expertly handled. And beautifully tied together.

First of all, I knew Edwards intended the historical locked room puzzle of Blackstone Lodge to "a sub-ploy rather than the mainspring of the story," but couldn't help being a little disappointed my initial idea proved to be correct. I hoped Edwards' first novel-length locked room mystery would give me something to write about, even only as a minor subplot. The other two plot-threads are better handled with the deaths linked to the sanatorium being retro-pulp at its best ("...n fvtacbfg cbvagvat cebfcrpgvir zheqreref gb Oynpxfgbar Sryy"), while Ottilie Curle's storyline diverges from the usual involving spiritual mediums and dodgy séances. Edwards saved the best for last and concludes with a masterstroke (ROT13) erirnyvat gur guerr, vagrepbaarpgrq pnfrf ner n onpxqebc sbe n sbhegu, zbfgyl snve TNQ-fglyr jubqhavg uvqvat va cynva fvtug. Bravo! It's exactly what I hope to find in a modern mystery styled after the classics of yesteryear.

Just one little nitpick. I was completely satisfied with the ending and immediately turned over to the "Cluefinder," which "enjoyed a vogue during 'the Golden Age of murder' between the world wars" and Edwards decided to resurrect it for this series. It worked wonders for the previous two novels, but not in this case as it showed the clues ("a selection of pointers to the solution of the various mysteries") are not as strong as my impression was from the concluding chapters. Aside from that nagging, fanboyish bit of nitpicking, Blackstone Fell is another page-turner with a captivating, complicated plot and an immersive story that never stop moving. It's a worthy and excellent addition to both this series and the Golden Age revival. I just hope we'll get a genuine novel-length, John Dickson Carr-style locked room mystery from Edwards in the future. Until then, I have Sepulchre Street (2023) awaiting on the big pile.

The Silent Service (2024) by M.P.O. Books

In 2022, E-Pulp announced two forthcoming series by Dutch crime-and detective writer, M.P.O. Books, who debuted twenty years ago with his first of eight novels in the District Heuvelrug series, Bij verstek veroordeeld (Sentenced in Absentia, 2004) – a typical, European-style police procedural/thriller. Over those two decades, Books turned his hands to everything from police procedurals and police thrillers to modern takes on the classical locked room mystery and short stories of every stripe. The short story form is not especially popular in my country, but Books is a Sherlock Holmes fanboy who refuses to give up on the short story without a fight.

Those two new series demonstrate his versatility as a crime-and detective writer. Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023), published as by "Anne van Doorn," introduces Detective Krell of the 16th Precinct in midtown Manhattan confronted with a seemingly impossible murder in a secure, top-floor penthouse of a New York skyscraper. So a fresh take on S.S. van Dine and Ed McBain by presenting it as a Dutch-style politieroman (police novel). However, the Gisella Markus series stands in stark contrast to the New York Cops series.

Gisella Markus first appeared in the final District Heuvelrug novel, Cruise Control (2014), pitting her and her team against a coldblooded, cruising serial killer – who even targeted one of her close friends and colleagues. She now has her very own series of police thrillers, starting with In diepe rust (In Deep Peace, 2022), but not a series likely to excite the people who follow this blog. This new series unmistakably falls into the modern school and Markus a model of the troubled cop of contemporary crime fiction. A character burdened with personal and professional problems that sometimes get intertwined to complicate things even further, but the crimes also tend to be a lot dirtier and grittier with no pretense of trying to plot a whodunit masquerading as a police thriller. That's doubly true for the second novel in the series.

De stille service (The Silent Service, 2024) begins on an unexpectedly cold, slippery night, "the kind of night where anything could happen at any moment," when two patrolling policemen find an old model car that had hit a tree head on. The driver seat is empty and the driver is nowhere to be found. So they assume some kids took it for a joyride and scattered after loosing control on the slippery road and hitting the tree, but then they open the booth of the car to make a gruesome discovery. A horrifically mutilated, raped body of a young Asian girl. Gisella Markus, of the district police in Amersfoort, is tasked with leading the investigation, but that's easier said than done when her rival, Lex Renkema, is part of the team. They fundamentally disagree about the direction the investigation should take.Markus has her eyes on a local art dealer, Roderick van Amstel, who lives nearby the crash site and could have potentially hidden away the driver. Going by the circumstances in which the murder came to light, Markus even suspects there might be an alternative funeral service running along the silent escort service the victim fell prey to. Renkema finds the idea of a "clandestine cemetery" preposterous and thinks they should focus their efforts on finding the driver ("...because we are certain that he's involved"). And then there the problems in her private life, which get hopelessly entangled with her investigation. So more than enough to keep Markus both busy and awake at night.

So, as most of you can probably gather, The Silent Service is not the kind of crime fiction people who read this blog traditionally enjoy, which is heavily slanted towards the traditionally-plotted mysteries rather than character-driven crime novels, but the story is not without interest – plot-technically speaking. The crashed car is a treasure trove of DNA evidence and so the story is not really about finding the murderer, but identifying and dismantling the organization around the silent service. A potentially fascinating idea to give a classical slant to a thriller trying to go for dark, gritty realism. It's not used like that here and it didn't try to, but it could have been played out like that.

Other than that, I don't have much else to say about The Silent Service except that it's a solid, well written police thriller showing why Books is the most underrated, underappreciated genre writers of the Netherlands. Whether he's plotting a locked room mystery or writing a character-driven thriller. I prefer the former to the latter, but they deserve to be better known.

Murder Most Cold (2023) by Victoria Dowd

Victoria Dowd is a former British barrister-turned-novelist, head of the London Crime Writers' Association and author of the darkly humorous, award-winning "Smart Woman's Mystery" series – "a modern take on the Golden Age of crime fiction." The series debuted with The Smart Woman's Guide to Murder (2020) and comprises, as of this writing, of five novels. I heard about Dowd and this series in passing, but only really came to my attention last December.

Steve Barge, the Puzzle Doctor of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, picked Dowd's Murder Most Cold (2023) as the best book of the year (The "Grand Puzzly" Award). Giving it props for "the sheer originality of a locked lake mystery" and "finding a sensible way to make it work." A locked lake mystery, you say? A traditionally-styled mystery with an original-sounding take on the impossible crime story always does the trick for me. So immediately tossed Murder Most Cold on the list of the locked room novels and short stories, published between 2015-25, as material for the lengthy addendum to "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century." First let's see what this so-called locked lake mystery is all about.

Murder Most Cold is the fifth, and latest, entry in the "Smart Woman's Mystery" series and Dowd included an introduction for new readers, "The Mökki Murder Papers," answering the question "just exactly who are these Smart Women?" Ursula Smart, "your guide through this particular circle of hell," is the main character of the series and its slightly unreliable narrator. Pandora Smart is her mother and the operating brain behind their family blog/podcast, Death Smarts, where she relates their close brushes with death and numerous killers ("often exposes intimate facts about her family..."). Charlotte Smart is Ursula's somewhat eccentric aunt who recently moved in with her sister and niece. Breffni Spear ("it's an old Irish name") is only referred to as Spear for obvious reasons and is Ursula's love interest. They met on a previous case that made him a widower. Lastly, there's the self-proclaimed associate of the group, Bridget Gutteridge, who has a pet monkey fittingly named Dupin.

I should note here that Murder Most Cold contains references to previous novels without giving away key details, which I very much appreciated as series today tend to be less episodic than their Golden Age predecessors – often integrating ongoing character-arcs with the plots or use them as subplots. So stepping in the middle of a series nowadays can be a different experience than, say, cherry picking your way through the bibliographies of classic writers like Christopher Bush, Brian Flynn or E.C.R. Lorac (see my review of Dan Andriacco's The English Garden Mystery, 2022). Fortunately, that proved to be less of an obstacle with this series, however, Murder Most Cold probably would have hit differently had I been more familiar with the characters.

Murder Most Cold begins with Spear proposing to Ursula and she said yes, which turned her mother in a terrifying creature known as the wedding planner. Ursula wants to get away from the spotlight of her mother's blog/podcasting empire and they opt for a Winter Wilderness wedding holiday in Northern Lapland ("husky rides, sledges, skiing"). So the whole group bundles up and travels to the Finnish wilderness for the private wedding ceremony where they'll be staying at a group of mökkis (cabins). A small holiday retreat run by a Londoner, Tapio, who's their less than gracious host who cheats on his Finnish wife, Aino. Helmi is their unhappy, twenty year old daughter who tried elope with the general handyman and reindeer wrangler, Matthias ("carries deep-seated belief in the old spirits and myths of Finland"). Now she just mopes, calls out her father's philandering and smoking weed. And the owner apparently knows Spear from somewhere.

In this atmosphere, Ursula begins to get the wedding jitters and second thoughts, but then the situation takes an unexpected, dramatic turn. Tapio is found fatally poisoned at the same time Spear disappeared into the night. Just before, Ursula had overheard Tapio trying to blackmail Spear over past secrets. On top of that, someone "cut all the phones and smashed the Wi-Fi box" while the bodycount begins to steadily climb. Midway through the story an impossible discovery is made when someone, who had been present only hours ago, is found underneath a thick layer of ice of a small lake that had been frozen solid for weeks – a veritable ice-locked tomb! So let's tackle this "locked lake mystery at the icy heart" of the plot.

Firstly, the idea of fresh body spotted underneath the thick, icy surface of a solidly frozen lake is unquestionably original, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. If you're going to introduce a locked room murder or impossible crime, particular one that can be safely described as out of the ordinary, you're obliged to do something with it. I can see why Dowd's explanation is absolutely necessary for the overall plot to work, but (SPOILER/ROT13) vg jnf bayl znetvanyyl zber npprcgnoyr guna n gjva, qbhoyr be rira n ybbx-n-yvxr qhzzl and this story really needed a good, satisfying explanation to the locked lake mystery orpnhfr Qbjq jnyxrq onpx ba jub jnf qvfpbirerq vafvqr gur ynxr. Fbzrguvat gung zhfg unir pbzr nf n fghaavat, zvqjnl gjvfg sbe ernqref jub unir orra jvgu gur punenpgref sebz gur ortvaavat. Vs lbh'er tbvat gb tb onpx ba gung, lbh ng yrnfg fubhyq unir n qrprag fbyhgvba sbe ubj gur zheqrere znantrq gb trg gur obql vafvqr na vpr-frnyrq ynxr. Cybg-jvfr, gur sebmra ynxr fubhyq unir fgvyy cbfrq na bofgnpyr sbe gur xvyyre gb olcnff. Being a somewhat practically-minded Dutchman, I simply assumed the body had been fed into the lake through a subsurface pipe or drainage system.

What about the rest of the story? That's a mixed bag of tricks. I credit Dowd for trying to find a happy middle ground between the sugary, cozy-style mysteries and the grimmer, character-driven thrillers with various degrees of success. So you get the collection of quirky, colorful and bantering characters placed in actually dangerous situations with actual stakes. Nobody is guaranteed to live to see the end of the book. This certainly gives an edge to an otherwise traditionally-styled detective novel, which is excellently played out during the first-half as the wedding atmosphere begins to deteriorate into horror with the bodies piling up around them. During the second-half and especially towards the end, it began to feel like the story wanted to have its cake and eat it too. For example (ROT13), Oevqtrg pbzvat gb erfphr va gur raq evqvat ba gur onpx bs n ervaqrre, “ynapr uryq bhg va sebag bs ure nf cebhq nf n zrqvriny xavtug,” juvpu V nffhzr jnf qbar gb yvtugra gur zbbq, ohg vf vzzrqvngryl sbyybjrq ol n zragnyyl-jbea qbja, abj becunarq Uryzv fubbgvat gur zheqrere guebhtu gur urnq. Be grnfvat Cnaqben vf abg tbvat gb fheivir ure thafubg jbhaq (“Lbh pna'g qvr. Lbh pna'g rire qvr. Ohg fur pbhyq”) bayl gb unir ure fheivir nsgre nyy.

The characters and, more importantly, the plot failed to catch me, but there's something to be said about the evocative setting with its deep, dark and frozen wilderness populated with creatures and spirits of Finnish folklore – lit up with the ghostly green of the Northern Lights. One thing that can be leveled against the neo-GAD writers is that they either retreat into the past or go out of their way to take the modern world out of the equation, which is not entirely untrue. It makes writing and plotting a classically-styled whodunit or locked room mystery so much easier, but D.L. Marshall's John Tyler series has shown it can be more than a gimmick to turn back time for a game of Cluedo. Something the traditionalists of today should take into consideration, because I think exploring specialized, often remote settings can stamp a distinguishable personality of its own on these new GAD-style mysteries. Marshall gave a couple of extreme examples with John Tyler solving seemingly impossible murders on a germ infested island or a nuclear bunker in the Arctic Circle, but why not one set during an expedition in Antarctica or exploration to an abandoned village on a Japanese island gone wrong. Basically turning the modern detective story into an urban explorer. It has fascinating, largely untapped possibilities and one thing Murder Most Cold did very well was tying the plot to the setting.

Hopefully, this lukewarm review can be deemed fair, because I wanted to like it on account of it being the "World's Only Locked Lake Mystery," but Murder Most Cold simply didn't do it for me. I'm afraid this series just isn't for me.

Mortmain Hall (2020) by Martin Edwards

An enjoyable, underrated luxury of being hooked on Golden Age mysteries in the 21st century is the opportunity the reprint renaissance created to practically pick and choose, which is made even easier by the episodic structure of the most long-running series from the period – like giving an addict access to a pharmacy's supply of prescription drugs. One side-effect of this cherry picking habit is that it made me chronologically-challenged over time. Reading a series in order? That's too retro even for me. Funnily enough, the first flickers of a burgeoning, second Golden Age is slowly breaking that habit. Now we have to wait a year on average for these emerging, traditionally-minded mystery writers to finish their next novel instead of sampling their best, most celebrated or influential detective novels. That's a luxury future fans can take for granted.

However, I'm a little behind on recent releases and developments, which has offered opportunities for a relapse. Last year, I read Gallows Court (2018) by the Nestor of the Golden Age Renaissance, Martin Edwards, which is the first of currently four novels in the Rachel Savernake series. The temptation was there to begin with the third novel, Blackstone Fell (2022), because it featured two seemingly impossible vanishings from a locked gatehouse. I decided to learn from past experiences and start at the beginning of the series, which proved to be a good decision. A notable difference between the greats of the past and this new wave is that their novels tend to be slightly less episodic in nature and feature detectives with a backstory that gets intertwined with the plots.

Gallows Court introduces the reader to Rachel Savernake, "the daughter of a sadistic judge," who was notorious during his lifetime as a hanging judge, but "retired from the bench after his mind had begun to fail and he'd attempted suicide" – spending his remaining years on a small, isolated island with his daughter. Rachel endured a bleak, lonely childhood on the island as her father descended "deeper and deeper into a dark pit of madness." When the old judge finally passed away, Rachel inherited his fortune and returned to London with her loyal retinue ("...Trueman family supported her with extraordinary devotion"). There she's spending a solitary existence collecting surrealists paintings and the study of crime, "murder obsessed her," but her involvement in murder cases is not always, exactly, on the up-and-up ("she danced to her own tune"). This eventually attracts the attention the Clarion's roving crime reporter, Jacob Flint, when she gets involved in a string of bizarre murders.

So it sets up everything and likely would not have fully appreciated Blackstone Fell without it. Why not stick with this whole reading things in order with this series.

Mortmain Hall (2020) is the second novel in the series and as difficult to pigeonhole as the retro-GAD, pulp-style thriller Gallows Court, but suppose "a what-the-hell-is-going-on-here" is a good description. The opening of Mortmain Hall opens outside the private station of the London Necropolis Company, in 1930, as Rachel Savernake boards the funeral train to warn a "ghost." Gilbert Payne is the ghost in question, traveling under the name Betram Jones, who faked his own death and fled to Tangiers. Only returned to see his mother buried. Rachel warns Payne that if she knows he's back in Britain, others will know as well. And offers an opportunity to not end up getting murdered simply by trusting her. Unfortunately, Payne turns her down and falls out of the funeral train on the return journey ("run over by one train after being thrown out of another"). So, once again, Rachel and the Truemans are up to their necks in a dark, murky affair, but, what exactly, is not immediately clear.

Jacob Flint also returns in this second novel and finds him in court to cover the sensational trial of Clive Danskin. The man standing trial is accused of the torch-murder of an unidentified victim in order to pass the body off as his own and escape a costly divorce, numerous mistresses and countless creditors – a strong motive with a weak, unsupported alibi. Flint watches on as all the damning, circumstantial evidence and testimonies begins to form a chain, "chain strong enough to drag him to the gallows," but a surprise witness saved him neck. Clive Danskin is not the last one to appear in this story who escaped an early morning appointment with the hangman. And those murder cases appear to be modeled on famous cases from the past. For example, the Wirral Bungalow murder is unmistakably patterned after the Wallace Case that captured the imagination of so many Golden Age writers (e.g. The Detection Club's The Anatomy of Murder, 1936).

A person who appears to take a great deal of interests in these supposed and freed murderers is "one of England's foremost criminologists," Leonora Dobell, who writes under the name Leo Slaterbeck. When she spots Flint in court, she asks him to pass on a message to Rachel. Pretty soon, Flint is dragged into another dangerous, godless adventure straight from the pulps bringing him to the shady Clandestine Club and becoming the target of an attempted frame job. It takes a while before everyone ends up at the titular hall and it's hard to describe much of what happens before or after that ("...it's impossible to be clear who is doing what") without giving anything away. And the less you know, the better.

So while the plot can't really be discussed, Edwards delivered another oddly compelling, not always easy to define, take on yesteryear's crime fiction. I've seen this series described as mystery-thrillers, combining the best of both, but traditional detective novels masquerading as retro-pulp would fit as well. What matters most is that it simply works. No matter how strange the emerging patterns become or turns of events take, Mortmain Hall has an intricate, fair play plot hiding underneath what appears to be a pulpy retro-thriller. It even has a "Cluefinder" at the end of the book pointing out "thirty clues in the narrative to the principal strands of the plot."

I only wished Mortmain Hall allowed for a longer, more detailed ramble, but I'm sure Blackstone Fell is going to give me exactly that opportunity with two impossible disappearances centuries apart. I intend to get to that one presently, but until then, this series comes highly recommended as a fresh and engrossing take on the popular detective stories and pulp-thrillers of the 1920s and '30s.

Six Were to Die (1932) by James Ronald

Last time, I reviewed the three novelettes and bonus short story from Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 1: The Dr. Britling Stories (2023), which is the first of twenty-some planned volumes by Moonstone Press and Chris Verner – aiming to collect all of James Ronald's detective fiction by 2025. The first installment in this series of reprints introduces the regrettably short-lived characters of Dr. Daniel Britling and his twin sister, Miss Eunice Britling, who only appeared in three novelettes and a single novel. That pulp-style locked room novel is also included in this first volume.

Ronald's Six Were to Die (1932), marking the final appearance of Dr. Daniel Britling, was originally published as a Hodder & Stoughton's Yellow Jacket Original, reprinted in 1941 by Mystery House as 6 Were to Die by "Kirk Wales" and a Cherry Tree digest edition in 1947. Verner used the version that was serialized in various newspapers around the world under the penname "Peter Gale" ("...minor punctuation and text differences between these and other versions"). Just to give you an idea that the publication history of pulp writers like James Ronald or John Russell Fearn are detective stories unto themselves.

Six Were to Die deceivingly begins with blissful scene of domesticity at the little flat in Orchard Street, which Miss Britling shared with her brother. Dr. Britling annoyed his sister by staying in bed late, delaying their breakfast and "adding insult to injury" by singing and splashing around in the bath. If I didn't know beforehand what the story is roughly about, I would have assumed from the first few pages it was going to be one of those lighthearted mysteries from the murder-can-be-fun school of Kelley Roos and the Lockridges, but the arrival of a parcel pulls it right back to the pulps. The package comes with a letter warning for the police surgeon, "this morning one Jubal Straust will call upon you and request your aid on behalf of himself and five associates," but advises Dr. Britling not "to be drawn into an affair which is none of your concern" or risk a swift, sudden and untimely death – package included a poisonous death trap as a demonstration ("...you will receive no warning with the next deadly message"). Something that has the completely opposite effect on Dr. Britling ("I don't like to be threatened. I regard it as a challenge"). Dr. Britling explains to Straust he's willing to listen to him not in spite of the anonymous threat, but because of it.

Jubal Straust is a prominent financier, "one of the crookedest members of the London Stock Exchange," who twelve years ago was one of the six partners in the Eldorado Investment Trust. There were, of course, financial shenanigans afoot that eventually caught up with them. So they scapegoated their partner and friend, Arthur Marckheim, who was sent to prison for ten years ("Besides, what is friendship? Its commercial value is nil"). After the trial concluded, they all went their separate ways, considerably richer, but now Marckheim has returned to remind them that the penalty for their double-cross is death. And knowing their former partner, they take the threat very seriously. So the five partners, Gideon Levison, Mark Annerley, Hubert Quail, Jubal Straust and has old father Israel Straust, buried themselves away in Grey Towers near Leighton Buzzard. Home of the old Straust. The sixth person on Markheim list of people to kill is his ex-wife, Cora, who's the current Mrs. Annerley.

Grey Towers is very well protected as the ten foot high fence around the estate has an integrated burglar alarm and the grounds outside are constantly patrolled by armed men, "all ex-policemen or ex-pugilists," who are armed – blowing a whistle turns on the rooftop search lights. What could go wrong? Jubal Straust is fatally poisoned while driving Dr. Britling to Grey Towers. A simple, but clever, poisoning trick demonstrating the murderer's creativity and resourcefulness. Particularly when it comes to playing on the victim's personalities, weaknesses or simply habits to help them along to an early grave. One by one, the men are poisoned under seemingly impossible circumstances or get shot in locked rooms or speeding cars.

Six Were to Die has more impossible situations than Robert Adey listed in Locked Room Murders (1991). For example, a warning from Marckheim is found inside a sealed package of playing cards or the overarching impossibility of how Marckheim can enter or move around the house without being detected. Some are better and more convincing than others, of course, but all the tricks are firmly rooted in the tradition of the pulps. I think the best of these pulp-style locked room-tricks is the poisoning of Hubert Quail, because the method to introduce the poison is ludicrous. A trick you might actually have heard about and wondered if anyone actually used in a detective story. Well, yes. Ronald tried not unsuccessfully to make it sound somewhat plausible and turning it into a locked room problem certainly helped towards that end. Another quasi-impossible situation I enjoyed is how one of the characters gets thrown out of the house and manages to sneak back in without getting caught or even spotted by the guards. It's cartoonishly clever. Something you can imagine Bugs Bunny doing to get into the house.

When it comes to the impossible crimes, Six Were to Die gives you, more or less, what can be expected from a pulp-style locked room mystery with a group of people under siege and dying under inexplicable circumstances – comparable to Brian Flynn's Invisible Death (1929) and Fearn's Account Settled (1949). Not always credible, as far as method goes, but always bubbling over with wildly imaginative, downright crazy ideas or tricks. Where it differentiates itself from other pulp stories like it is simply plot management. There's never more than a chapter between one of the impossible crimes taking place and it's solution, which made for a far tidier and tighter plot and story than had they accumulated until a lengthy explanation was needed. Not to mention adding to the overall mystery how a murderer can have the run of the place without getting caught or seen. It also cleared the way for the ending when it was time to abandoned any pretense of being a detective story and barreled full throttle into pulpville, which is where the story managed to loose me.

In the previous review, I noted that pulp writers like Ronald and Fearn wrote for a less demanding audience than the Golden Age aficionados who are discovering them today. Now I don't think anyone expects the rigor of a Golden Age mystery from a pulp novel nor will the outlandish nature of the locked room-tricks be a stumbling block for many, but after such a well written, nicely balanced and above all entertaining mystery I expected something slightly better from the conclusion. Something more inspired fitting everything that preceded it. And how the murderer had the run of the place is ridiculous. Something that's always tricky to pull of convincingly, but didn't buy it here at all. But it comes with the territory of the pulps. For every good, wildly imaginative or original idea, they do half a dozen things that makes most GAD fans want to pull out their hair at the roots.

Sorry to have to conclude this on a somewhat sour note, but I really did enjoy Six Were to Die right up until the last handful of chapters. Until then, Six Were to Die is an incredibly entertaining pulp mystery dispatching its cast of characters, left and right, under seemingly impossible circumstances and the ominous presence of the killer constantly looming over them – eating away at their nerves. It deserved a better ending. Just like Dr. Britling deserved a longer run as a series-character, because, once again, he shined as a leading character. Even his twin sister has a strong, off-page presence when she begins to exchange letters with her brother. So much more could have been done with them. However, I also realize the three Dr. Britling novelettes and this novel merely represents some of Ronald's earliest, tentative steps as a writer of pulp mysteries. Six Were to Die is perhaps not a rival to the plots of John Dickson Carr or John Rhode, but possesses all the promise, ingenuity and freshness to eventually deliver on that promise. So eagerly look forward to the coming reprints of Murder in the Family (1936), They Can't Hang Me (1938) and the "Michael Crombie" novel The Sealed Room Murder (1934).