ALLEN K. YOUNG “Reflection on Murder.” Short story. Professor Posenby #2. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1968. Presumably never reprinted.

   The tenth rule of Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction says that “twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” This second of several stories Alan K. Young wrote about retired poetry and code expert Professor Ponsby (no first name known) takes this rule head on and makes an excellent story out of it.

   It doesn’t in any way break the rule, since the fact that Tom and Barnaby Varden are twins is stated up front with no denying it. There is also no denying that one of them murdered their uncle, but which one? Almost no one can tell them apart, so eye witnesses to the fact that one was seen leaving the house at the time of murder are of no value.

   What’s more, the other brother was seen at a boxing match the next town over at the time of the murder, gives one of the two an unshakeable alibi. But which one was which?

   Totally sure that no jury would ever convict either one “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” they boastfully send the following poem to the harried police chief, who comes to Ponsby with it. I hope you can read it:

   I believe I have read another story with exactly the premise, but without the poem, and yet, if so, I do not remember where I read it or who wrote it. You may be able to figure it out — all the clues are there — but I am chagrined to say I didn’t. This is a puzzle story only, with only a cursory attempt at characterization, but as such it’s exceedingly well done. It’s like admiring a solidly constructed crossword puzzle at the end of the week in the New York Times. I enjoyed it immensely.

   It probably won’t ever happen, but Young wrote enough Ponsby stories to put together a very decent collection. I’d buy it!

NOTE: Alan K. Young’s papers regarding his short story writing are stored at Columbia University. A short desription of the collection says that the author “is a former junior-college English instructor, with a B. A. in English from Harvard and an M. A. in the same subject from the University of California.”

       The Professor Ponsonby series —

Letter from Mindoro (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 1968
Reflection on Murder (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1968
The Secret of the Golden Tile (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1969
Ponsonby and the Shakespeare Sonnet (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1969
Ponsonby and the Dying Words (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 1970
Ponsonby and the Classic Cipher (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1971
Child’s Play (vi) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1972
Ponsonby and the Ransom Note (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1972
To See Death Coming (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1973
Truth Will Out (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1974
Incident on a Bus (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1975

     —

PostScript:   Since most you are not likely to ever read this story, I will give you a big hint as to the solution in Comment 1. Don’t read it until you’ve either given up or you want to know if the answer you’ve come up with is correct or not.

Added later: A full explanation is given in Comment #2.

CARTER DICKSON “Blind Man’s Hood.” Short story. First published in The Sketch, UK, Christmas 1937. Collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, 1940). Reprinted in Best Ghost Stories (edited by Anne Ridler, Faber and Faber, 1945), The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (edited by Otto Penzler, Black Lizard, 2014) and The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories (edited by Martin Edwards, British Library, 2018). Also reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1966, as “To Wake the Dead,” as by John Dickson Carr.

   And with all of those credentials on this story’s résumé, I’m sure I missed some, but this is one story that deserves all of them. Personally, I usually feel that tales in which the real story is told to listeners in the present as already having taken place in the place are awkward and forced, but not this time.

   A young married couple visiting a manor home on Christmas Eve find the front door open, all the lights on, a fire igoing, but otherwise the house is empty. Finally a young girl appears, perhaps a governess or a secretary, who then explains why the family themselves are not at home. They are, in fact, deliberately staying away. It seems that a murder had once taken place in the house, one that had never been solved.

   The woman who had died was found alone in the house, with all of the doors and windows locked. There were also no footprints in the snow surrounding the house, other than those made by the man who had walked up to it while under full observation.

   The house is spooky, and the story the girl tells is spookier still. This also a ghost story, but the the solution to the crime has nothing to do with the supernatural. I do not think that anyone but John Dickson Carr could have conjured up a story such as this one, a tale that combines the two so well — a logical puzzle and a more than a wisp of the eerie — and yet keeps the two parts completely separated.

   This one was an absolute pleasure to read. (I read the story in EQMM. I wish I owned the original Morrow hardcover edition!)

CORNELL WOOLRICH “Crime on St. Catherine Street.” Novelette. First published in Argosy 25 January 1936; reprinted as “All It Takes Is Brains” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1966. Woolrich’s original title: “Murder on St. Catherine Street.”

   Woolrich was the kind of writer that could start with the screwiest kind of idea, get his protagonist to go along with it, and make the reader swallow it down whole, enjoying the whole rest of the story without hesitation and with no holds barred.

   Case in point. On a drunken whim, a man named Hewitt, one of Manhattan’s idle rich, agrees to a wager that he can go to a strange town — Montreal, say — with only six bits in his pocket, and manage to survive for a whole week without knowing a single soul. Which he manages to do, of course, and in fact he comes out ahead by several thousand dollars, not including the money he wins on the bet.

   It all begins with him picking up a girl as he starts the first night of his stay, or rather, as it turns out, she thinks she’s picking him up. But when she quarrels with his boy friend and accomplice in crime, a man known only as Louie, she ends up dead and Hewitt ends up on run from the law, with only a salt shaker in his pocket that he can use to pretend he has a gun.

   Coincidences always played large roles in any story that Cornell Woolrich wrote, and this one is no exception. But this is no tale of gloom and doom. In spite of all the odds against him, Hewitt maintains an upbeat attitude throughout, making this a lot of fun to read.

RAYMOND CHANDLER “English Summer.” Written in 1957; first printed in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane (Ecco Press, hardcover, 1976).

   A story that went unpublished in Chandler’s lifetime, and it’s easy to see why. But an excellent work nonetheless, and one of his best in the short story medium — which is saying a lot.

   According to Chandler’s notes (recorded in Raymond Chandler Speaking) he saw “English Summer” as a break-out work, one that would re-define his writing for the future. Hence, the first few pages read like he’s trying to change his accustomed style, and the result is a little constrained and sort of self-consciously Hemingwayesque.

   Fortunately, Chandler can’t keep up the strain of not writing like Chandler for long, and we are soon back into the familiar and uniformly excellent prose of a great writer at his best and when we get into the story proper….

   Yeah. This is a creepy one. The narrator, John Paringdon, is hopelessly in love with Millicent Crandall, who is married to an abusive and neglectful drunk. He is in fact a guest at their country cottage, the sort of situation that should lead to a weekend of brittle dialogue, but Chandler observes the unities here. At break of day Paringdon goes for a walk and meets the bewitching Lady Lakenham. By sunset he will be in love with no one.

   This being Chandler, there’s murder involved, done casually as dust swept under a casket. There’s also cold-blooded seduction committed by Lady Lakenham, in a castle hacked to pieces by her husband.

   We even get the sort of cross-country flight from the authorities one finds in the chase novels of John Buchan. But that’s not what “English Summer” is about.

   “English Summer” is about the death of Love. And it comes from a writer who once observed that in a mystery, the crime is (or should be) less important than its effect upon the characters — brilliantly realized here in a few pages that will haunt me for a long time.

VICTOR ROUSSEAU “Bat Man.” First published in Spicy Mystery Stories, February 1936, as by Lew Merrill. Reprinted in Pulp Review #5, July 1992. edited by John Gunnison, and in The Best of Spicy Mystery, Volume 1, edited by Alfred Jan (Altus Press, trade paperback, 2012).

   In spite of what you might have thought when you first saw the title of this story, it has nothing to do with character who came along later for DC Comics. No, the narrator of this creepy little story is a fellow named John Charters who wakes up from an operation to find himself with his mind intact but he himself trapped inside the body of a bat.

   The way he works it out is that the doctor who did he deed is also in love with Alice, the love of Charters’ life, and this is he doctor’s cruel way of eliminating the competition.

   What makes this such a creepy story is when Charters manages to escape the hospital his mate (a female bat) finds him, leads him back the cave where other bats are staying during the day, he finds a space waiting for him, squeezed among the others, furry bodies all around, and hanging from the ceiling head downward. As he has a damaged wing, his mate also brings him insects to feed him at night.

   Reading this story is like having a very very bad dream, and it does not get a lot easier to read as Charters soon finds what other instinctive thirsts he has. Since this story was published in one of the Spicy stable of pulp magazines, it should not surprise you if I were to say it involves flying into bedrooms of well-endowed young ladies as they sleep at night.

   Should I tell you it all comes out? No, I don’t believe I will. What I will do is point out that not only did I find this a cut above your average spooky pulp story, but I’m not the only one. As you’ll see from the notes at the top of this review, it’s been reprinted at least two times by others.

  JAMES REASONER “War Games.” Novelette. Markham #5. First published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, April 1982. Kindle reprint, 2013.

   The lead story in the same issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine was a Mike Shayne novelette by Brett Halliday entitled “Deadly Queen,” which is of note especially because it just so happens that was ghostwritten by the same James Reasoner who wrote “War Games.” Between the two stories almost half of the magazine was work by James, one of a very few authors producing the same wordage today of the most prolific pulp writers of the 1920s and 30s. Over a million words a year? That’s a lot of typing!

   “War Games” the last of five stories he wrote about a PI by the name of Markham (not related to the TV detective of the same name). In it he’s called in by the head of a military academy for teenaged boys to find out who left him a threatening note in his desk in his office.

   There are a number of suspects. Colonel Rutledge is the sort of hard-nosed former military officer who runs a tight ship, to say the least. The most obvious suspects are a couple of boys, one of whom he expelled, the other a boy from own he is friends with, and an English instructor who was dressed down publicly for using the book Catch 22 in class.

   The colonel does not mention his granddaughter, who lives on the grounds, but Markham quickly adds her to his own list, as not surprisingly, she is, shall we say, the rebellious type. The story proceeds from here, and it’s a good one.

   The story is too short to learn much about Markham as a person, except that he’s the kind of person who, when he accepts a job, makes sure he finishes it. I was reminded more of Philip Marlowe than I was Sam Spade, say, if you’d like a couple of other PI’s to to compare him to. Even so, more than Marlowe, Markham is a guy I’d like to sit down and have a beer someday, if ever I could.

   And this is the kind of story that makes you wish there were more than just the five. The good news is that three of them are already available as Kindle ebooks, as indicated by a (*) below. What I’d really like to see, though, is a print collection of all five. Back issues of Mike Shayne magazines have become awfully hard to find in the wild, and that issue of Skullduggery? Impossible.

       The Markham series —

All the Way Home. Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, April 1979
Death and the Dancing Shadows. Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine March 1980 (*)

The Man in the Moon. Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, April 1980 (*)
The Double Edge. Skullduggery, Summer 1981
War Games. Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, April 1982 (*)

H. BEDFORD-JONES “The Case of the Kidnaped (sic) Duchess.” Novelette. John Solomon. First published in Argosy, 05 January 1935.

   That’s the voice of John Solomon, ship’s chandler, mysterious millionaire, operator of one of the best private espionage operations in the World, the short, stout (think Edmund Gwenn as Santa but minus the beard) Cockney adventurer who first appeared under the by-line Allan Hawkwood, but who, by 1935, was appearing under Bedford-Jones’ own name and commanding the cover of Argosy with the little Cockney’s adventurers.

   This one is a mystery novelette that begins in foggy London where engineer Carson, an American, and one of a long line of engineers, grocers, doctors, and the like to act as assistant to Solomon’s myriad schemes in all ports of call, has received an urgent message to join him before they sail that night for Europe to assist the Duchess o’ Furstein.

   If this sounds all very Holmesian, keep in mind Bedford-Jones also wrote a Holmes pastiche so successfully it passed for a lost Conan Doyle story among some scholars.

   But our guide here is Solomon, not Holmes, though he is just as high-handed, clever, and dangerous to know as the Baker Street sleuth, if less cerebral and more given to flashing guns.

   Carson has hardly arrived at the tobacconists where he’s been summoned when Solomon rushes by, drops a wallet, which he commands Carson to hide, and seconds later is in the hands of a constable accused of picking the pocket of a ’toff, soon to have Carson “up to his neck in emeralds, Sicilian palaces…” as the wallet belongs to Sir Basil Lohancs, who has already kidnapped the duchess, and is delivering her to London on his yacht that werry, I mean very, evening.

   Baghdad on the Thames was never more so. Heady stuff in the pulp era.

   The Duchess has been using her wealth, estates, and is threatening to use her fabulous emeralds, to continue social work in Palermo. Lohanc’s can’t have that. The result as Solomon says is that the Duchess is in “a werry bad fix, as the old gent said when ’e buried ’is third wife.” Lohanc is a bad one “Money, brains and nor scruples whatever, sir. What ’e goes after ’e gets, that’s ’is boast,”and later, “Murder don’t mean nothing to ’im.”

   Scotland Yard and the French police have been fooled, and now the Duchess’s only hope is Solomon and Carson, boarding a yacht full of kidnappers and potential murderers to make a rescue on the fog bound docks with the information her loyal Sicilian maid died getting to them. Without getting all Sax Rohmer on us, Bedford-Jones evokes Limehouse and its environs and a sense of romance built out of the reality and not vague menace and shadows. His Limehouse is that of Thomas Burke and Arthur Morrison.

   Solomon gives Carson an automatic and instructions to get on the yacht while it works its way up the Thames to London, an impossible job. “There ain’t nothing impossible, sir, if so be you ’as a ’ead,” Solomon advises and he proves right, Carson getting on board and making contact with the Countess. Now what ever happens depends on Solomon and his plans, and as always Solomon’s plans are played close to the vest, Carson is captured and drugged by Lohanc and Dr. Vecchhi the murderous doctor in his pay.

   Meanwhile the usual close calls, disasters, and last minute rescues follow until the last possible moment when Solomon plays his last card, the love of a Sicilian whose wife died to protect her mistress.

   If it strikes you that with a little bit of tweaking here and there, this might well be the outline for a thriller by John Buchan, or later Victor Canning, you aren’t far off.

   It’s no great mystery, but as action adventure goes, it’s splendidly told, replete with villains who deserve their just rewards, noble heroes and heroines, and always, the presence of John Solomon, one of the great captains of pulp fiction, part adventurer, part avenger, and always righter of wrongs, cherry cheeked and wispy haired man about adventure. There is nothing quite like him or his kin in most modern fiction today.

   For anyone interested you can download or read this at Internet Archive under their Pulp Collection. The issue also includes a dog story by Albert Peyson Terhune and serial chapters by F. Van Wyck Mason, Theodore Roscoe, and Fred MacIsaac, a pretty good issue.

J. LANE LINKLATER “Mystery of the Mexicali Murders.” PI Alan Rake. First published in 10-Story Detective, January 1941. Reprinted in The Noir Mystery Megapack (Wildside Press, Kindle edition, 2016).

   Although the author of several hundred stories for the pulp fiction magazines, J. Lane Linklater, the pen name of Alexander William Watkins (1892-1971), certainly qualifies as an unknown author today.

   He did write seven hardcover mystery novels, all with a private eye character named Silas Booth. I’ve always meant to read one, but for some fault of my own, I never have.

   One series he wrote for Detective Fiction Weekly had lawyer Hugo Oakes as the leading character, and Monte Herridge wrote about him earlier on this blog here.

   He had few other recurring characters in the stories he wrote for the pulp magazines, but as far as I know, “Mystery of the Mexicali Murders” is the only appearance of private eye Alan Drake, a fellow who reminds me a bit about a fellow who Dashiell Hammett often wrote about.

   Here is the first paragraph of the story:

   This is, of course, Alan Rake. He is here in the area along the border between California and Mexico after receiving an urgent telegram from the head of a big fruit shipping outfit, but when the man is shot dead in front of him when he first meets him, he decides to stay on the case and see if there’s some way he can still get paid the $5000 that was promised him.

   The case is a complicated one, with lots of suspects and a setting that is over 100 degrees during the day and not much better at night. One girl in particular, a young spitfire with flashing eyes named Edna, catches his attention.

   But more than the characters, and who it was who killed Warnbecker, takes second place to the setting, a cantaloupe-growing area that Linklater must have known well to describe it in as much depth as he does, including its vast underbelly of criminal activity. Rake mixes in well, seeing and observing, and quite remarkably, thinking too.

   Linklater was no Hammett — I should make that totally clear — but a better editor could have helped make the ending a lot tighter, and if so, this might be the small gem of a story that it almost is.

R. DJÈLÍ CLARK “A Dead Djinn in Cairo.” Novella. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi #1. First published online by Tor.com. Also available in Kindle format, May 2016.

   In an alternate history version of Egypt, circa 1912, Fatma el-Sha’arawi, a special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities has a problem to solve: who, or what, killed the djinn, twice as tall as a human with aquamarine scales, whom the authorities have found lifeless and drained of blood in his apartment.

   The first thought is that he has been killed by the ghuls that have been infesting the city, but if that were the case, they would never have left his body behind. A closer look suggests that he committed suicide, but since djinns are nearly immortal, the question as to why has no answer.

   Fatima’s world is now a strange steampunk conglomerate of exotic Cairo and demons from another plane of existence. It seems that forty years ago, a mystic by the name of al-Jahiz bore a hole to the Kaf, another-realm of magic, allowing not only the djinns and ghuls to cross over, but angels (of some variety) as well, perhaps better described by the following paragraph:

   There are flying machines, mechanical beings, and a clockwork threat to Fatima’s entire world, but with a kickass female priestess’s assistant named Siti, worldwide catastrophe is narrowly averted at nearly the last instant.

   I apologize for giving the ending away, in a very general sense, but it’s the telling that’s the more important here. This is a world of enchantment that Fatima lives in, one that is fascinating to visit but you really wouldn’t want to visit there:

   There is a definition of the word “enchantment” that describes what’s happening here, isn’t there?

PAUL BISHOP “Bandit Territory.” PI Blue MacKenzie. Novelette. First published in Paul Bishop Presents… Bandit Territory: Ten Tales of Murder & Mayhem, edited by Paul Bishop (Wolfpack Publishing, paperback, 2019).

   What I cannot tell you, first of all, is whether or not this is Blue MacKenzie’s first appearance in print, or if it so happens that it is, whether there are or will be future cases for him to tackle.

   Blue may be the first fictional PI to also be a bodybuilder, as well as a Vietnam veteran and a former CIA agent. Now at a formidable 275 pounds of pure muscle, he certainly isn’t the kind of guy I’d care to have been hired to track me down.

   In “Bandit Territory,” the lead story in the anthology edited by Bishop with the same name, he’s been hired by a music producer to find his number one client, a singer by the name of Charity Ross. Her latest CD is almost ready to released, but she’s disappeared and is now completely out of sight.

   The trail leads Blue to a defunct bodybuilding outfit being investigated for fraud by the FDA. While the connection is not clear, the owner has disappeared the same night as Charity. No coincidence that.

   Paul Bishop, the author and a 25 year veteran of the LAPD, has also written a number of full length crime novels, and his smooth, easy style of telling a tale, even short ones, goes down well, with an every so often knack of coming up with an especially pungent observation or clever choice of phrasing. If there are other stories about Blue MacKenzie, I’d definitely like to know about them.