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Last Notes

2026-10-30 03:12:38 GMT

This Time Forever (1957) by John Glasby
In
2021, I reviewed A
Time for Murder (2002/13) by John Glasby, a prolific
fictioneer of the 1950s and '60s, who produced science-fiction,
westerns, hospital romances, war stories and crime fiction – nearly
300 novels, novellas and short stories. Glasby made a comeback in the
2000s on the insistence of his literary agent and pulp historian,
Philip
Harbottle. A Time for Murder was the first new entry in
Glasby's series about Johnny Merak, "an ex-con turned private
eye," which appeared alongside reprints of the first and third
novel from the series' original run. The second novel remained
out-of-print due to copies being ultra rare, extremely elusive and
practically impossible to come by. That is, until recently!
Some
months ago, Wildside Press reprinted This Time Forever (1957)
with a short, insightful introduction from Harbottle explaining how
it slipped through the cracks and accidentally became a unicorn to
collectors. When attempting to track down a copy to reprint,
Harbottle contacted known collectors from across the world, but
learned "that they too were searching for this elusive
title" ever since Robert Adey listed it in Locked Room
Murders (1991). How a copy eventually turned up and lead to this
reprint is something you have to read for yourself or listen to
Harbottle tell about it by clicking here.
This
Time Forever begins with Johnny Merak and his assistant, Dawn
Grahame, being summoned to the offices of a federal investigator,
Harry Grenville, who would like to draw on the expertise of an
ex-crook. A case dropped on his desk involving Charles Dempster, "a
top-line financier and diamond dealer," whose record is
spotless making him untouchable to the authorities – lately
received some alarming and threatening letters. There was an attempt
to kidnap his daughter. What's behind the plot suggests something
outside the ordinary criminal business of settling scores, shake
downs and protection rackets. But before they can finish their talk,
Grenville is called and informed Dempster was found dead twenty
minutes ago.
Charles
Dempster died from hydrocyanic acid poisoning in his private,
windowless study with the door locked from the inside and the only
key tucked away in his pocket. So the police at the scene call it a
suicide, but the discovery a crumpled playing card in Dempster's hand
suggests murder to Merak. A similar playing card had turned up years
earlier on the body of a slain gangster and the cards are linked to
an underworld figure known only as The Joker. Merak decides to take
on this case involving mobsters, hired guns, dangerous dames and
trail of dead informants and witnesses, but just as dangerous is his
past as an ex-criminal. An ex-criminal turned private investigator
asking pesky, nosy questions in a world where asking questions is
frowned upon. Even more so when those questions comes from a traitor.
So
more than enough happens between the opening and closing stages of
this short, fast-paced gangster mystery, but not much (plotwise) can
be said about it. It's pretty much Merak trying not to get killed,
trying to talk to people before they get killed and keeping an eye
out for Dawn. Harbottle wrote in the introduction Glasby's publisher
employed some dishonest, unsavory tactics to keep the printing
presses running like underpaying authors and guaranteeing their best
talent to publish everything they wrote, tempting them "to churn
out first-draft material" without "any need for polishing
or revision" – ready to be sold and published. There's a
definitely a first-draft feeling to This Time Forever and
often reads like it was originally published in a 1940s pulp
magazine. Which has a charm of its own. Fortunately, there's
something to be said (plotwise) about the opening and closing stages
which is where This Time Forever has something to offer to
detective fans like us.
First
of all, the solution to the locked room poisoning is almost too good
and too clever for such a straightforward, pulp-style thriller
populated with gangsters, hit men and the occasional drive-by
shooting. A locked room-trick that could have been plucked from the
impossible crime fiction by Arthur
Porges. So locked room fanatics and collectors mainly interested
in the impossible crime element can be assured the solution doesn't
turn on something disappointing or lame like a hidden contraption
with a poisoned needle or a swallowed capsule delaying the effects of
the poison. Secondly, the choice of murderer here was interesting as
well, especially since I considered another character based on a
sentence I took as a hint/challenge to the who/why. I was seeing more
than was really behind it.
That's
where the first-draft, pulpy feel and problem comes into play. A
fully fleshed-out, revised and polished version of This Time
Forever would likely have given more consideration to the
murderer's identity and problem of the locked room poisoning. It
would have made for a far more successful fusion of, as Adey
described it, "the classic detection novel with the American
gangster thriller." As it stands, This Time Forever
should not disappoint fans of the (Americanized) pulp-style mysteries
by John
Russell Fearn, Gerald
Verner and James
Ronald with pleasantly inventive solution to the locked room
poisoning. Something that's always a gamble with these type of pulpy
mysteries that play the Grandest Game faster and looser than their
counterparts from the detective story proper, but the best of them
bring a great deal of imagination and ingenuity to the table. Glasby
brought some of that to the table when it comes to the impossible
crime. I think most people who pick This Time Forever up today
mostly pick it up for the locked room angle.
You
haven't seen the last of Glasby on this blog. I have become
interested in the Johnny Merak novel The Wheel Spins Thirteen
(2009). It's probably not an impossible crime novel, but just like
the idea of a man beating a crooked roulette wheel three times on the
same night and walks out with a million dollars.
http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2026/10/this-time-forever-1957-by-john-glasby.html
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2026-10-26 03:21:59 GMT

Crime in May (1946) by Marten van Alland
Back
in July, I reviewed a long out-of-print, practically forgotten Dutch
mystery novel, De
dood kwam door de sneeuw (Death Came Through the Snow,
1957) by Frits de Winter, but, as some of you know by now, the
quality of Dutch detective fiction is all over the place – nearly
impossible to gauge quality beforehand. That's because not much has
been written about them for decades or even reviewed. It doesn't help
that nothing ever gets reprinted in this country.
I
likened trying to track down genuinely good, classically-styled Dutch
mystery novels to trying to find your way through a maze blindfolded
or playing Marco Polo by yourself. De Winter's Death Came Through
the Snow was one of those blind picks based on nothing more than
the attractive cover art suggesting a John
Dickson Carr-like mystery, which wasn't anywhere near to what it
turned out to be. The first-half suggested some influence from early
period Ellery
Queen, but collapsed during the second-half into an utter mess.
Sometimes it feels like the bad detective novels in my country
outnumber the good ones ten to one.
On
the upside, I also mentioned in the review tracking down and doing
some basic quality probing has now become a lot easier and
inexpensive. Delpher digitized
and uploaded a stack of out-of-print detective novels as part of
their project to preserve the paper trail of Dutch culture. Legally
downloadable to read and study. One of their uploads has been on my
list for a very long time.
Misdaad
in mei (Crime in May, 1946) is the only detective novel by "Marten van Alland," a pseudonym of Pieter Mello Heil, who was a
journalist, poet, teacher and writer – mostly remembered today for
his journalistic writing and nursery rhymes (as by "Peter").
After the end of the Second World War, Heil published his only
detective novel that even in my country was surprisingly well
received. That probably also has to do with the fact Crime in May
takes places between 7th and 15th of May, 1940. Days before the
German invasion started on May 10. Before the war, Crime in May
presents a conventional, Golden Age-style detective story that
happened to play out during those final days of peace.
The
setting of Crime in May is the home of Charles Floorman,
somewhere near the east border with Germany between the fictitious
town Middeldam and the village of Veenkaneel, where the police are
called to by Dr. Schuilvink. Charles Floorman was found dead in his
bed with a small, puncture-like chest wound indicating he had been
stabbed with "a long, needle-shaped weapon" like a
knitting needle. Inspector Richard Krook, "under the inspiring
leadership of Inspector Wieland," is determined to make this
murder his case, but he has to content with a houseful of academic
snobs as potential suspects. There's the victim's brothers: the
physicist André, professor of psychology and philosophy Constantijn
and professor of law Ferdinand. They have a sister, Mrs. Van
Gent-Floorman, who's married to Hendrik van Gent who has a doctorate
in Eastern languages. They have two children, Arnold and Loes, who
also have a role the play as does André's son, Gustaaf, and Charles'
assistant Bertus Murks.
So
this is a family that discuss scientific topics at the breakfast
table, but also like to look down on everyone and each other's
special subjects ("we have utmost respect for philosophy and
practice it ourselves as a pastime and mental exercise, but what is
expected of a Floorman is objectivity, not fanciful speculations").
That's why they didn't like Charles.
Charles
Floorman was not a professor or even an academic scholar, but a
dreamer and jack-of-all-trades who struck out on his own as an
inventor and made a small fortune. The villa has a private laboratory
on the third-floor, covering the entirety of the house, where
conducts experiments with his assistant, Bertus, in practically every
field that holds his interest. Inspector Krook's guided tour of the
laboratory is a borderline science-fiction scene. Charles was working
on a water-powered engine and Krook was shown designs of an enormous
airplane without propellers, or wings, that can "take off
vertically and can float like zeppelins" – which sounds like
a UFO. These science-fiction vibes quickly subside, but thought it
worth mentioning. What follows is far more conventional detective
novel that's not without some truly clever, borderline ingenious
touches to the plot and story.
First
of all, the laboratory and Charles Floorman's research is the reason
why the villa is locked up after sundown. That was the case on the
night of the murder, but not everyone in the house when the murder
took place. Three were somewhere else at the time giving them an
alibi. Krook is not blind to the possibility the murder could be
either a closed-circle situation in which the murderer is one of the
people inside the house or a locked house mystery with murderer
somehow penetrating the securely locked villa. You won't find the
answer by checking the toe-tags on this review! Not to mention the
puzzling problem of the missing murder weapon. Krook handles these
problems and the special pool of suspects with skill, intelligence
and patience.
There
are two moments where Krook stands out and shines: deducing something
about the crime scene had been altered, something add and peculiar,
that added a new layer to the plot and his chain of reasoning
demonstrating why only that person could have done it – and
nobody else. Krook's chain of reasoning and deductions doesn't go as
deep as we have come to expect in recent years, but it was fun to see
it properly done in my own language for once. It goes to show just
how influential Ellery Queen was outside of the non-English speaking
world. Ellery Queen is also one of maybe a handful of prolific,
Golden Age mystery writers who had practically their entire work
translated into Dutch. So not including "A Challenge to the Reader" is missed opportunity.
Crime
in May is not just about the mysterious, puzzling murder of
Charles Floorman, but the impending invasion and outright war brewing
in the background. While the police go over all the evidence,
suspects and theories, the days goes from May 7 to May 10. Basically
a hard countdown only the reader is aware of. When the countdown is
about to run out, the spy-thread that had been lurking in the back
springs to the foreground. However, I thought the spy-thread was a
bit muddled, but nothing to the detriment of the main plot. Krook
solves the murder right at the time war breaks out and only gets to
explain his case to Wieland during the first days of occupation. So,
yeah, a bit of a downer ending, but with a flicker of hope.
I'm
really pleased to have finally found another Dutch detective novel
that successfully carried the story and plot across the finish
without collapsing or ending in disappointment. Van Alland carried it
across the finish not merely for the form. Even without the usual
allusions or references, Van Alland obviously knew what a detective
story needed and what it could do without. And brought some much
needed imagination with a dash of originality to too often dry,
stodgy Dutch detective story. Such as his handling of the question
whether the killer was left or right handed, the ambiguity of the
murder (closed-circle or locked room?) and the wonderful solution to
the vanished murder weapon. So, by the standards of the Americans,
British, French and Japanese, Crime in May is a solid,
second-string mystery novel, but for Dutch mystery fans starved of
good, homegrown vintage detective fiction it's a treat! You can find
and read Van Alland's Crime in May here.
Note
for the curious: Well, more of an observation. Wouldn't it have
been funnier, and better, if the ending had gone into
science-fiction/alternate history territory by having the invading
Germans being met with the secret wonder weapons from Charles
Floorman's laboratory?
http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2026/10/crime-in-may-1946-by-marten-van-alland.html
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2026-10-22 03:21:12 GMT

First Contact: Q.E.D. iff vol. 5-6 by Motohiro Katou
The
simply titled story "Even" opens Motohiro
Katou's Q.E.D. iff vol. 5 and begins when Ashikaga Ren, a
second-year university student, tumbles down a cliff and needed to be
airlifted to the hospital – except this wasn't an ordinary hiking
accident. A note was found at the scene ("Got Dumped,
Don't Want to Live") turning an unfortunate hiking
accident into an attempted suicide. Only for the case to take an
unexpected turn at the hospital.
Sou
Touma and Kana Mizuhara are in the hospital visiting Mizuhara's
father, Inspector Mizuhara, who was injured in the line of duty.
Mizuhara passes the hospital room of the still unconscious Ashikaga
Ren when she notices his oxygen mask has been removed and the heart
rate monitor turned off. She immediately calls a nurse and begins to
look around, which leads to her chasing a masked figure in a white
doctor's coat through the corridors and down the staircases of the
hospital. This masked, white coated figure runs into a dead end
hallway and inexplicably disappears into thin air! A short hallway
ending in a double door that's not only locked, but securely chained
together and padlocked. Only thing the vanished figure left behind is
the white doctor's coat. Touma finds out the victim had three people,
all fellow students, who visited the hospital that day. So they begin
probing the suspects and their relationship with the victim involving
relationship troubles, borrowed money and stolen exam papers.
I
think what I liked most about this story is how clearly the problem
of who, why and how is presented. And liked how they logically linked
together with one springing from the other. However, the solution to
the disappearance from the dead end corridor, while visually
pleasingly, is so blindingly obvious I rejected it out of hand –
which kind of betrayed the who and eventually why. Not to mention the
vanishing-trick only worked, in a way, because it was shown and not
explained in a block of text. So "Even" is not a thoroughly bad
story, but neither is it a top-tier entry in the series.
The
second story, "The Imperfect Locked Room," has Inspector Mizuhara
back on the job and going over a murder scene a second time.
Takamatsu Kiminobu, a retired prosecutor, was found stabbed to death
in his bedroom of his house. Only other person present was his nurse,
Itami Sayoko, who claimed someone had knocked her out. However, the
police found all the windows securely locked from the inside, the
house keys inside the victim's pockets and "no suspicious people
on the security camera at the entrance way" ("so this was
a locked room murder"). So the inspector in charge concluded
the nurse was the murderer and arrested her. Inspector Mizuhara has
his doubts as a nurse has much easier methods at her disposal to kill
an sick, elderly man than a knife and casting herself as the only
possible suspects. What he finds is fresh evidence the murder took
place in garage. So the nurse was released.
This
blunder forces the higher ups to send someone down to direct the
local investigation. This person is Tanabata Kikuno, Assistant
Inspector of MPD Division, who's a young, eager policewoman ever
ready to put the handcuffs on the murderer. She learns from Inspector
Mizuhara that this case is not going to be easy, considering the
status of the policeman who made the premature arrest. Inspector
Mizuhara also tells her the case possibly has a connection to an
unsolved, seemingly impossible and unsolved murder, nearly two years
ago, when a dying woman was found in one of the toilet stalls of a
night club, but CCTV footage showed nobody going inside – except
the victim and the people who discovered the murder. So, inevitably,
Tanabata Kikuno meets Sou Touma and Kana Mizuhara leading to the
solution to the two murders. Once again, the plot has its weak points
as the murderer stands out and the solutions to the impossible crimes
lack Katou's customary imaginative solutions or even simplistic
complexity. The locked room-trick used for the murder at the night
club toilets was especially unconvincing with the first one turning
on the why rather than the how. It really is the strong ending that
holds “The Imperfect Locked Room” together.
Fortunately,
the two stories making up Q.E.D. iff vol. 6 is a return to
form and starts with a character-piece, "The Man Who Claimed to
Land on the Earth." This story begins with a prologue set in 1986
when a young woman, Morita Kinue, is living in America with a man
named Dominic. Something her parents back in Japan oppose and beg her
to come, but she refuses and ends up giving birth to a son, Wataru.
Morita Kinue has been cut off by her parents and Wataru grows up in
poverty, until he joins a youth gang and dies in a shootout aged 14.
The story then moves to the present and marks the return of Enari "Queen" Himeko, Nagaie "Holmes" Koroku and Morito "Mulder" Orisato who last appeared in Q.E.D.
Vol. 44. They're now in university and have opened the Mystery
Research Society, but this story is not about their usual
shenanigans. This time, Mulder seems to have a problem that truly
appears to be out of this world.
A
blond foreigner, named Simon, turned up out of nowhere at his
grandmother's house to start taking care of her, but even stranger is
his claim to have landed on Earth from another planet ("...I
used a wormhole to shorten the distance"). Naturally, the
family's more than a little suspicious, but their grandmother refused
to show him the door. And a secret DNA test reveals the mysterious
Simon to be related to them. So they go to Sou Touma who becomes very
interested when he hears Simon has been talking about "cosmic
strings, wormholes, casimir's effect and other such strange terms." Simon showcases some of his other worldly abilities by vanishing from
a closely watched changing room and appearing inside a locked house,
but don't read this story for those fairly minor locked room
situation. This is one of those character-puzzles and it's not even
about who Simon really is. It's about why he's there and why he
choose to tell such an outlandish story. This is more like the Katou
I know and like!
The
last story from vol. 6, "Sudden Change," allows me to end this
double review on a high note. Kana Mizuhara is on a part time job
delivering coffee when she walked into a police investigation.
Egota
Wataru is the producer behind the popular TV show Nangoku Cop, "the detective drama where the guy uses handcuffs like an
acrobat," who was having a meeting with the cast and crew to
discuss the next season of the show. Somehow, he ended up on the roof
and either accidentally fell to his death or jumped on purpose, but
soon, the possibility of murder turns up. A possibility turning an
accidental death or suicide into an impossible murder as nobody could
have reached the roof when he fell from it. And everyone has an
alibi. You can definitely spot the murderer, one aspect simply
invites suspicion, but figuring out how it was done is bit trickier.
Touma understands what can happen when someone finds themselves in an
inescapable situation. Katou brilliantly fused the problem of the
locked room mystery with that of the unbreakable alibi, complimented
by an unexpectedly dark twist in the motive. A must-read for fans of
Tetsuya
Ayukawa and a fantastic story to end this review on.
http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2026/10/first-contact-qed-iff-vol-5-6-by.html
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#motohirokatou #firstcontact #inspectormizuhara #ashikagaren #iff #gotdumped #kanamizuhara #locked #room #even
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2026-10-18 02:51:20 GMT

She Woke to Darkness (1954) by Brett Halliday
She
Woke to Darkness (1954) is the 25th novel in the Michael Shayne
series by "Brett
Halliday," a pseudonym of Davis Dresser, who celebrated this
milestone by taking his hardboiled private eye series into
meta-fictional territory – making himself the central character.
The book opens with an "Author's Foreword" explaining the
previous twenty-four novels were secondhand, fictionalized accounts
of Shayne's real-life cases, but this case is a firsthand account
("this story happened to me, Brett Halliday").
That
story begins with Halliday attending the 1953 Edgar Allan Poe Awards
Dinner, hosted by the Mystery Writers of America, where he chats and
drinks with the likes of Robert
Arthur, Fred
Dannay and Clayton
Rawson ("...I don't know what happened to John Dickson
Carr”). Halliday is looking forward to meeting Dorothy Cecil, a
fictitious mystery writer, but she drifts away in the crowd and
Halliday is introduced to a young woman. Elsie Murray is a big fan of
the Michael Shayne novels and has the complete series in hardcover
from Dividend on Death (1939) to One Night With Nora
(1953). She lures Halliday back to her apartment under somewhat false
and mixed circumstances.
Elsie
has written a half finished manuscript, titled She Woke to
Darkness, partially based on a real, unsolved incident that
happened to her and had no problem writing down the first fifty pages
on paper ("...because I was dealing with real facts"), but
now she's stuck on the middle part – asks Halliday to read it and
advise her what to do with it. Halliday reads the first chapter of
the manuscript and discovers the story concerns a woman, named Aline
Ferris, who wakes up from one of her drunk, blackout stupors in a
hotel room with two dollars stuffed down her underwear and a dead man
lying on the bathroom floor. She has no memories of what happened at
the party she attended. After reading the first chapter, Halliday
decides to give Elsie a phone call, but a man picks up the phone and
discreetly hangs up without saying anything. But it sounded like a
policeman's voice.
After
a phone call to a friend, Halliday is told Elsie was found strangled
after the police received an anonymous tip about a dead woman in the
apartment. That's a problem for Halliday. Scores of witnesses had
seen them leave the banquet together, his fingerprints were all over
her apartment and her lipstick on him. So call Shayne back in Miami
and asks him to get on the next plane to New York. By the way, the
New York friend Halliday called to learn what had happened at Elsie's
apartment is the real-life, true crime writer, Edward
D. Radin, who's constantly in the background helping and covering
for Halliday ("if they ever learn the truth, I'll be sunk in New
York..."). Radin and Shayne tell Halliday to sit tight and go
over the manuscript again while waiting for the law to catch up with
him.
There's
an interesting possibility arising from reading the manuscript as one
of the characters clearly used Aline Ferris to arrange an alibi. Just
one problem. Elsie told Halliday she had changed all the names and
physical descriptions of the people involved. So while the manuscript
clearly points in the direction of the killer, the trick is matching
the fictionalized person to its real-life counterpart. Casting the
tough, hardboiled private eye novel as a meta-fictional biblio
mystery is a stroke of absolute genius!
Michael
Shayne arrives in New York after the halfway mark and acts like he
knows he has only half the normally allotted time to close the case.
Not at all bothered by the fact that a private detective from Miami
has no official standing in New York. Shayne simply shoves a big fist
under the nose of every unwilling witness or potential suspect and
tells them to “start talking.” So not the hardboiled
analog of Ellery
Queen I encountered in previous novels, but still tremendously
fun as Halliday (the writer, not the character) was not above poking
fun at himself. For example, Shayne gets told by one suspect to "check up on an out-of-town writer named Brett Halliday" who "writes those lousy books about a dumb redheaded private eye
in Miami." Shayne races through the second-half to find the
real killer, tear down alibi and clear his friend's name from
suspicion of murder.
I
should warn some of the people who follow this blog not to expect a
multi-layered, grand-style whodunit or a tricky alibi-breaker. She
Woke to Darkness is not that kind of novel. From what I
understand, She Woke to Darkness represents a shift in the
series as Halliday started to put more emphasis on "the sexiness
and violence in dialog among a lower class of despicable characters." You definitely wouldn't pick this up to meet a bunch of pleasant
characters who happened to get themselves involved in a double murder
case. She Woke to Darkness is one of those transitional novels
from the 1950s the previous era of the genre was starting to
disappear in the rear view mirror. But how She Woke in Darkness
was framed and played out carried everything to something more than
an early, 1950s sleazy crime novel. Yes, the self-aware,
tongue-in-cheek humor and cameos also helped making it something more
than thin-ish, grimy plot underneath. She Woke in Darkness is
together with Murder
and the Married Virgin (1944) my favorite Shayne novel to
date.
http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2026/10/she-woke-to-darkness-1954-by-brett.html
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2026-10-16 04:12:17 GMT

The Art of Stealing: "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin
Jamie
Probin is a British-born mathematician currently living in
Charleston, South Carolina, where he teaches mathematics at
Charleston Southern University and writes detective novels and short
stories featuring his mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris –
who's something of a locked room specialist. I should have gotten to
this series before now, but it got loss in the mass of reprints,
translations and neo-Golden Age mysteries. That's until Jim Noy, of
The Invisible Event,
reviewed Probin's newest, non-series short story "Chapter
17: Perroquet Explains" (2026). So moved this series up the big
pile.
I
wanted to begin with Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle (2020),
but the short story "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) is a
prequel and Jim's review suggested reading it before the novel
("...because it sets up the world well..."). What it sets
up, or rather introduces, is a duel between the master criminal Le
Fantôme and the Sûreté, Scotland Yard and Dr. Harris.
Henry
Toussante, Patrick Larson and Alain Noble, of the Sûreté, have been
trying to put a stop to the shenanigans of Le Fantôme for years,
which is easier said than done considering the phantom thief's
affinity for the impossible crimes and a gift for disguises –
getting bolder with each new scheme. Such as Le Fantôme's latest
caper involving the inexplicable disappearance of an early,
little-known work by Claude Monet, "never exhibited publicly," belonging to the millionaire banker Jacques DuFresne. It hung in
DuFresne's Paris townhouse, securely locked, bolted and barred from
the inside, but nevertheless disappeared from the locked townhouse.
Even stranger, Le Fantôme exchanged the Monet for a plain, white
canvas with "a childish outline of a ghost etched into the
centre with a few simple strokes of black paint." I wonder if
Probin is familiar with Kaito KID from Gosho Aoyama's Case
Closed series.
Anyway,
Dr. Harris is mentioned only in passing, "ask his opinion, see
if he has any ideas," but it's the men of the Sûreté who
score a point over Le Fantôme. Patrick Larson, in particular, gets
to play a big role with his rather unorthodox methods uncovering
several copies of the stolen Monet have been sold shortly after the
theft. That nicely added another impossibility to the impossible
theft: how do you make a whole bunch of near perfect copies of a
painting that has never been publicly displayed? Good enough copies
to fool a string of collectors. However, the trick to make the Monet
vanish from a locked townhouse is the better, more imaginative and
fairly-clued of the two impossibilities. More importantly, "The
Episode of the Nine Monets" is exactly what a story about an Arsène
Lupin-style character pulling off impossible crime capers should
be... incredibly fun and entertaining.
I
said Sûreté scored a point over Le Fantôme. They cracked the
locked room problem, recovered the stolen painting and boosted their
reputation, but not "the money Le
Fantôme had gained from selling the forgeries" or
the criminal himself – who has now captured the public's
imagination ("the mood was ripe to embrace a Robin Hood-style
folk hero"). The Thirteenth Apostle is going to conclude
the Le Fantôme saga featuring "a trilogy of impossible
murders." So that one is going to be next and hopefully it
lives up "The Episode of the Nine Monets." A highlight of the
2020s impossible crime story and locked room revival.
A
note for the curious: the ending half-raises a point I have
wondered about before. This series takes place sometime in the
early-1930s, several years after "the great depression had
thundered through France and the rest of the western world,"
which is why Le Fantôme was becoming an anti-hero here. I have
sometimes wondered if the figure the Gentleman Thief could have ever
challenged the popularity of the Great Detective. Writers like
Maurice
Leblanc and E.W. Hornung made their mark with Arsène Lupin and
Raffles, but the Rogue
School perhaps needed their own Agatha
Christie or John
Dickson Carr more than a great depression. I do wonder sometimes
about that strange, alternative universe where the Gentleman Thief
overtook (even if only briefly) the Great Detective in popularity.
http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-art-of-stealing-episode-of-nine.html
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2026-10-16 03:02:10 GMT

The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) by Jamie Probin
Last
time, I reviewed "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie
Probin, a mathematician, who has written a short series of impossible
crime and locked room mysteries about a mathematician-detective, Dr.
Samuel Harris – who acts as a special consultant to Scotland Yard
and Sûreté. "The Episode of the Nine Monets" and The
Thirteenth Apostle (2020) form the "Le Fantôme Saga" with
the former being a prequel to the latter.
Le
Fantôme is the classically-styled, phantom thief who has terrorized
the museums and private collectors of France and Britain for years.
Only real opposition came from Dr. Harris and Henry Toussante,
Patrick Larson and Alain Noble of the Sûreté. The last three
starred in "The Episode of the Nine Monets" as they try to figure
out how their nemesis spirited away a valuable painting from a locked
townhouse. They triumph in cracking the locked room problem and get
back the stolen painting, but Le Fantôme is still on the loose and
more popular than ever. The Thirteenth Apostle is the
concluding chapter of this saga.
Before
getting to the story and plot, I need to get one thing out of the way
first concerning the story's pacing and structure of the plot. Probin
pieced out the story in lumps, big and small, which tend to shift
around a bit, chronologically speaking, leaving dramatic turns of
event hanging to allude to a future crime or go over previous trodden
ground – making it somewhat repetitive. I essentially agree with
Jim a thorough editing job would have resulted in an ever better
detective novel. Superb even! However, the pacing, structuring and
lapses of repetitiveness surprisingly didn't bother me at all. The
Thirteenth Apostle is a fantastical, seemingly impossible crime
caper about a phantom thief toying with the combined police forces
and a amateur detective of two countries. So the repetitive patches
and the lumpy, dramatic and sometimes episodic nature of the plot
gave it the air of a turn-of-the-century French feuilleton. I liked
that aspect, but yes, Jim's point still stands. With that out of the
way, let's begin.
Probin's
The Thirteenth Apostle begins on April 21, 1935, when a dozen
of prominent French and English citizens, under the cover of dusk,
heading towards the Eiffel Tower. All of them received a
politely-worded, but urgent, invitation punctuated by a veiled, hard
to ignore threat to show up. Who didn't need to be coerced to come
are Dr. Samuel Harris and Henri Toussante, head of the Sûreté,
because they know Le Fantôme is up to his old tricks again. And
their best shot to finally catch the notorious phantom thief.
Le
Fantôme reveals himself to the gathering through a gramophone
recording à la Agatha
Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). The voice of
Le Fantôme announces to them his intention to steal the twin Bombay
Diamonds, "their acquisition would be the pinnacle of my
calling," of which one permanently resides in the Louvre. Le
Fantôme claims to have already stolen the other diamond that was on
display at the Palais de Chaillot and informs the group gathered at
the Eiffel Tower they're going to help steal the second diamond from
the Louvre ("to put it bluntly, you all have secrets...").
Leaving them to deliberate and make a decision, but Toussante is
already on the counter offensive and apparently one step ahead.
Toussante has brought the diamond Le Fantôme claims to have stolen
from Palais de Chaillot.
The
setup to this first of numerous impossible crimes is a slow burner,
but played to great effect and pay-off as the clandestine meeting on
the Eiffel Tower culminates with the disappearance of the closely
watched diamond and murder – a poisoning as inexplicable as it's
shocking. And why I'm being sketchy on the details to avoid spoilers.
So everything and everyone, "suspect and police alike," is
subjected to a thorough search without finding the diamond or a even
a hint how it vanished in the first place. The poisoning appears to
be equally baffling and impossible, but there are more puzzling
aspects to the theft and murder. Why was there an abnormally, almost
unnecessarily, large dose of poison in the glass? Why did the victim
picked up the glass and deliberately smashed it before dying? Why the
hell did this dose of poison have such a flair for dramatic timing?
You can perhaps count that last one as a third, borderline
impossibility.
While
a slow burner of a start, the setup to this impossible crime
extravaganza is absolutely fantastic with false-solutions being
bandied about during the initial investigation at the Eiffel Tower.
I'm a sucker for false-solutions! So would have loved for The
Thirteenth Apostle to have continued along these lines, while
picking up the pace along the way, as it headed towards the next
couple of locked room murders. This is the point where the story
begins to move on to the next lump of plot as the dramatic, illusory
crimes at the Eiffel Tower remain unresolved for the time being. A
move bridged with an excerpt from the fictitious book, Ghost in
the Machine: the extraordinary career of Le Fantôme, teasing Le
Fantôme's "last and most infamous accomplishment" ("the
murder in the Oglethorpe Crypt"), but first, there's another
impossible crime. An impossible crime pushing Le Fantôme to near
mythical status in the minds of the investigators.
Nearly
half a year later, in November, everyone who was present "that
most unpleasant evening at the top of La Tour Eiffel" reunite
at Chateau Lambert in Montanix-des-Alpes, France. Their association
with a notorious, unsolved case and status as potential suspects is
becoming troublesome ("...our lives will be forever
tainted..."), which is why they have decided to get together to
try and solve the case themselves. However, the plan to pool their
knowledge, go over the facts and attempt to weed out the truth gets
ditched when they learn of the local legend.
Chateau
Lambert has an ancient, austere and brooding tower, Chambre de
Justice, which once served as a holding cell for condemned prisoners
and, over time, the tower became the stuff of legend – basically a
room-that-kills. A room sparing anyone who's truly innocent, but
beheads any person spending the night the tower alone with a serious
crime on their conscious ("a room with pretensions of being
judge, jury and executioner"). So the gathering decides to let
the tower decide who's innocent and guilty. That goes about as well
you'd expect, only with a slight twist as the murder is not exactly
what was expected from the tower room.
This
poorly done, messy review only gives you a fraction of what happened
between the prologue and the impossible murder at the Chambre de
Justice. So when the story finally arrives at its end stage, The
Thirteenth Apostle only has a handful of chapters left to go. I
started to wonder what Probin could possibly do with the murder at
the Oglethorpe Crypt, which had been alluded to in both the prologue
and interlude. It turns out not all that much. Well, not in terms of
creating the crowning achievement of that promised trilogy of
impossible murders, but at least it served another, not unimportant,
purpose. I can see why Jim was disappointed as it hyped as the
story's main event.
So,
as a locked room mystery, the impossible murder at the Chambre de
Justice stands as the best of the three. I very much enjoyed how
Probin set it up as a shin honkaku-style impossibility, only
to turn around to deliver a very Paul
Halter-esque locked room mystery. The inexplicable poisoning and
disappearing diamond from the Eiffel Tower stand out more for its
dramatic staging, iconic backdrop and some truly first-class
misdirection. So two, out of three, is not a bad return for a mystery
novel with multiple impossibilities. What actually did disappoint me
is how blatantly obvious it's who's behind the Le Fantôme persona.
For more reasons than one, Probin made it impossible to ignore this
character as a serious candidate to the point I began to second guess
myself. I even entertained the idea of two Le Fantômes. The
original, happy go-lucky Le Fantôme who robbed museums and the
person who usurped his identity to go on a murder spree. That also
didn't turn out to be the case and robs the story of some of its
mystification (ROT13: gur
svefg zheqre naq gursg nera'g unys nf onssyvat jura lbh fhfcrpg gung
punenpgre bs orvat gur cunagbz).
Probin's
The Thirteenth Apostle is that good, old-fashioned mixed bag
of tricks. I think I enjoyed more than Jim, but have to agree there's
definitely an even better, tighter-plotted detective novel lurking in
there somewhere. That said, The Thirteenth Apostle is still an
impressive, ambitious first stab at locked room mystery novel showing
how much things had already
changed by 2020. Not so long ago, novels like Gilbert Adair's The
Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006) and Eric Keith's Nine
Man's Murder (2011) were seen as events because they tried or
pretended to write retro or modern locked room novels. We come a long
way in a very short amount of time.
So
definitely going to check out the other two short stories and hope
Probin hasn't forgotten about that short story collection Six
Impossible Things.
Note
for the curious: just one more thing about that over hyped
impossible crime in the crypt that was tucked away at the end. This
impossible situation was described in the prologue as practically a
hermetically sealed tomb with a door can be barred from the inside
with a wooden, six inch thick beam that can be placed horizontally in
two thick iron brackets. The prologue noted this can only be "done
from inside the crypt" and Dr. Harris says "no amount of
jiggery pokery could possibly allow the door to be locked from the
outside." When I read the prologue, I immediately saw a very
simple way to hermetically seal that crypt from the inside. Just
place two pieces of ice inside the iron brackets, place the beam on
top, step out and close the door. As the ice melts, the beam drops
into the brackets barring the crypt from the inside.
http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-thirteenth-apostle-2020-by-jamie.html
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