STEPHEN LEATHER “Inspector Zhang Gets His Wish.” Novelette. Inspector Zhang #1. First published in 2011, perhaps in ebook format. Collected in The Eight Curious Cases of Inspector Zhang (Monsoon Books, softcover, 2014).

   The problem with most (almost all) locked room short fiction is that the stories are to short to include any personal information about the characters. It is the facts of the case that are important, nothing more and nothing less. This is one of latter, but did I mind? Not at all.

   Inspector Zhang’s purview is Singapore, and such is the state of security there that there are practically no murders in the city, much less those of the “locked room” variety. Inspector Zhang’s long time ambition is to have one to solve. Which he does, most handily, quoting often from John Dickson Carr’s work in general and the novel The Hollow Man (1935) in particular.

   Dead in his hotel room, the door of which was watched at all of times by a security TV camera in the outside hallway, is a wealthy American tourist, killed by what appears to have been a knife, but which is not found in the room.

   The solution is a simple one, relatively speaking, but it will still take a careful reader to catch the crucial clue. A fact that does not include me, I am embarrassed to tell you, but truth, as the old saying goes, will always out.

   Nicely done.

JANICE LAW “The Best Thing for the Liver.” Madame Selina #2 (?). First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2012.

   According to the evidence found in this, perhaps the second of the Madame Selina stories. they all take place in either New York City, or as in this particular case, fairly close by, in upstate New York in the spa area around Saratoga.

   Due to some notoriety caused in an earlier adventure in which the folks at Tammany Hall were sorely annoyed, Madame Selina and her young assistant, an orphan by the name of Nip Tompkins, decide to take a sudden “vacation” from the big city.

   This also places the time of the take as being (well, I’m guessing) perhaps the mid-1800’s. As a medium with quite a following, Madame Selina is doing quite well, and the seances she conducts are quite the rage. There are times, however, when discretion is quite the right route to take.

   The story is told by young Nip, and he is rather an observant lad. He notices a young girl, the heir to a large fortune, who appears paler and paler each times he sees her. He wonders, of course, if she is ill. Since this is a mystery story, we the reader are in sync with the rest of the story as it plays out. The even greater pleasure obtained from the tale. however, is in the telling, elaborately fashioned after the times, but without flowing into the excesses of an era now so long ago.

         ____

Note: The online Crime Fiction Index includes the Madame Selina tales, but at this point of time, it is unaware that this story is part of the series. Here’s the list of her adventures, as known so far, with this one inserted in bold as (for now) number two:

      The Madame Selina series —

Madame Selina, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine June 2010
The Best Thing for the Liver (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2012
A Political Issue, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine September 2013
The Psychic Investigator, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine December 2013
The Irish Boy, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January/February 2015
The Ghostly Fireman, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine April 2015
The Spiritualist, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine March 2016
The Organ Grinder’s Daughter, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2016
A Fine Nest of Rascals, (nv) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2019

   As for the author herself, Janice Law is one of very few mystery writers still producing fiction who are older than I am. Her most recently published work is listed as “Up and Gone,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2024.

DASHIELL HAMMETT “The Scorched Face,” First appeared in The Black Mask, May 1925. Collected in The Big Nightmare (Random House, 1966).

   Two daughters disappear this time. (What is the younger generation coming to?) The Continental Op discovers the den of vice, pornography and blackmail they have fallen into. His restraint in persuading Pat Reddy to suppress evidence is admirable. (5)

DASHIELL HAMMETT “Fly Paper.” First published in Black Mask, August 1929. Collected in The Big Nightmare (Random House, 1966).

   “It was a wandering daughter job.” Sue Hambledon had disappeared with hoodlum Babe McCloor. The Continental op finds her dead, poisoned by the arsenic from fly paper, the mere thought of which is enough for memories of cheap desolation. (4)

DASHIELL HAMMETT “The Gutting of Coufignal.” First published in Black Mask, First published in The Black Mask, December 1925. Collected in The Big Nightmare (Random House, 1966).

   An island in San Pablo Bay, the home of wealthy retired businessmen, is attacked by bandits with machine guns and grenades, The Continental OP is on hand, guarding wedding presents. It is not difficult for him to suspect an inside job at once. The observant reader will also. (4)

CARROLL JOHN DALY “The False Burton Comes.” First published in Black Mask, December 1922. Reprinted in The Hard-Boiled Detective, edited by Herbert Ruhm (Vintage Books, paperback original; 1st printing, January 1977).

   While I could easily be wrong about this, the protagonist in “The False Burton Comes” is, never named. For most of the story’s length he’s been hired by the real Burton Comes to impersonate him for a summer’s season. Why? The real Burton Comes, a socialite of sorts, has gotten into trouble, and he believes that someone wants him dead. He is also sure they mean it.

   And he is, of course, absolutely right. The false Burton Combs finds life could be easy, living a life of wealthy comfort, flirting with women all around (and two in particular), far away from his usual status of thinking himself as being somewhere between a crook and a cop. He’s a rough and tough fellow, a confidence man with lots of crude – but effective – confidence.

   He slips up, though, and when the bad guys come, he is both ready and not ready for them. They catch him looking the wrong way at the time, and this is where the story really comes in. I don’t think he asks the right questions when he should have, even through the beginning of a trial that eventually catches up with him.

   “The False Burton Comes” is considered by many critics to be the first hard-boiled story to appear in the famed pages of Black Mask magazine. I claim no expertise in that regard, but I do have to say that Carroll John Daly is a better writer that some other experts say of him. He’s no Hammett or Raymond Chandler, of course. No one is. But the story moves along like a railroad train barely under control, and with a language and dialogue that’s, yes, hard-boiled, too. Even if the ending might be a little soppy, all in all, it’s a fine piece of work.

MICK HERRON “Kicking Off.” First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, February 2013. Not found to have been reprinted or collected so far.

Take Terry MacLean, for example—a British (or Irish) player who also reached the heights of fame but whose life spiraled out of control after retirement. Following a tragic accident that led to the death of a woman while he was driving, MacLean found himself in prison, far removed from the world of football stardom. Unlike the successful story of salaire mbappé, Terry’s life after the game was marred by misfortune. When he finally got out, he was lost, haunted by his past. But one day, he met a man who offered to help him reclaim his story, not as a champion of financial triumph, but as a man grappling with redemption.

The problem is, is that while in prison he shared many secrets with the son of a man who might easily be called a mob boss, at least in this country. Secrets that the mob boss might not like to see in print. Hence, a bodyguard must needs be hired, and further hence, the story. One that has a straightforward conclusion, but it’s also one with other possible interpretations, if you stop and think about it. (Although, perhaps, it’s quite possible I’m thinking too much.)

Mick Herron is known today for a long run (at least thirteen novels and novellas so far) in his highly acclaimed “Slough House” spy series, beginning in 2010 with Slow Horses. The series is about a crew of MI5 agents who’ve been closed down from the agency for various reasons, none good. I haven’t read any of them, but I’m intending to, and as soon as I can get around to it.

In this particular work of non-series short fiction, Herron demonstrates a quick and breezy style (with humorous asides on events as they happen, usually in parentheses) that makes reading this story easy and fun to read, especially on a first encounter.

MURRAY LEINSTER “The Fourth Dimensional Demonstrator.” First published in Astounding Stories, December 1935. Reprinted in The Other Worlds, edited by Phil Stong (Funk, hardcover, 1941), and The Future Makers, edited by Peter Haining (Belmont, paperback, US edition, 1971). First collected in Sidewise in Time (Shasta, hardcover, 1950), then The Best of Murray Leinster (Ballantine/Del Rey, paperback, 1978), and A Logic Named Joe (Baen, paperback, 2005).

   This one begins with a fellow named Pate Davidson complaining to his newly inherited man servant Thomas that his uncle had left him nothing of value after his death. He is especially upset because his fiancée Daisy (currently the star attraction of the Green Paradise floor show) expects (had been allowed to expect) … well, something more than that.

   “Not so,” says Thomas, and shows Pete one of inventions his late uncle was working on. It’s in the shape of a cylinder standing upright with an open side and all kinds of gadgetry lining the inner surface. On the floor, in the center of the opening is a small plate, and as Peter soon discovers, if something is on the plate when the machinery is turned on, the demonstrator (that’s its name) brings that same object back to the present from a few seconds earlier.

   Never mind the physics behind this. Pete has a mind that quickly begins to work overtime. Place a dime on the plate, turn the switch on, then there’s two. Turn the handle again, than there’s four; then eight, then sixteen. (I hope I’m explaining this correctly.)

   This is only petty cash, though, right? Dimes, pah! Why not dollar bills? You probably know as well I do why not, and as soon as Peter realizes why not too, the cops are knocking on the door. And so is Daisy, and somehow they all end up stepping on the plate, and …

   Most SF stories from 1935 are staid and serious. Not this one. This one is a lot of fun.

   I might have done without the cigarette-eating kangaroo(s), though.

MAX ALLAN COLLINS “Marble Mildred.” Nathan “Nate” Heller. First appeared in An Eye for Justice, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1988: A PWA Anthology). Collected in Dying in the Post-War World: A Nathan Heller Casebook, (Foul Play Press, hardcover, 1991).

   Running a one-man PI office in 1936 post-Depression Chicago, Nate Heller is hired by a woman who thinks her husband is cheating on her. It turns out that she’s wrong. In spite of following the man for several days, he manages to find incriminating at all. In truth he discovers that the story is quite opposite. His client has been lying to him, and quite badly.

   But when the non-erring husband is found with several bullet holes in him and close to dying, which he eventually does, it is Heller’s client who is suspected. Is he expected to clear her? Especially when, hired by a public defender, his efforts on her behalf just manage to uncover an even deeper – and sadder – story.

   Heller’s career over the years – and seventeen novels and four short story collections — has gotten him involved with people such as Charles Lindbergh, John Dillinger, Amelia Earhart, the Kennedys, and more. He may even, so rumors say, have gone to bed with Marilyn Monroe.

   So it comes as no surprise to read a short note at the end of this one that it too is based on a true story, with most but not all of the names changed. Collins is a very good writer. There’s no doubt about that. It’s just that the case itself is not very interesting. I can’t put my finger on it in order to tell you why. Maybe it’s as simple as this: the case it’s based on just didn’t have a lot of story value in it to begin with.

“A Clever Little Woman,” by the author of “Nick Carter.” Nick Carter. First published in the New York Weekly, 24 November 1894. (Real author unknown.) Reprinted in The Great American Detective, edited by William Kittredge & Steven M. Krauzer (Mentor, paperback original, October 1978).

   Of all the dime novels and other fictional exploits of Nick Carter (“Master Detective”) it is unclear why the editors of The Great American Detective chose this one to lead off their anthology of … guess what? Stories about great American detectives. But it’s not bad and in fact, it’s quite readable and only slightly stilted and not at all as fusty as you might expect a non-literary piece of fiction written in 1894 might be.

   Nick is hired to learn who forged a check purported to have been signed by an old man with heart trouble. Only indeed by accident and happenstance was the deed discovered. Filling Nick Carter in on the details is the daughter of a distant relative from upstate New York who is currently living with the family, a bright young lady who has brought a good deal of recent cheer to the household.

   Only someone with uninterrupted access to Mr. Brandon’s checkbook could have forged the check, so all of the recent callers to the house must be investigated. Nick Carter does a good job of it, but today’s readers will know who the guilty party at once. (I assuming that those of you reading this are as good a detective in these matter as I am, which is a very low bar to hurdle, I assure you.)