The Summer of the Ubume (1994) by Natsuhiko Kyogoku

Natsuhiko Kyogoku is a graphic designer, yokai researcher and mystery writer whose debut, Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume, 1994), is credited together with MORI Hiroshi's Subete ga F ni naru (Everything Turns to F: The Perfect Insider, 1996) with the starting the second shin honkaku wave – couching its traditionally-styled plots in specialized backgrounds or subject matters. The Perfect Insider takes place at what, in 1996, must have appeared as a futuristic IT research institute and The Summer of the Ubume draws on Kyogoku's research of Japanese folklore.

The Summer of the Ubume is the first in a series of nine novels and a handful of short story collections, known as the Kyogokudo series, which combine the detective story with Japanese folklore, myths and urban legends. Ho-Ling Wong called it "a wordy mystery with deep conversations on a wide variety of topics and a somewhat strange locked room mystery" that's "actually available in English." Sort of.

In 2009, Vertical published an English-language edition translated by Alexander O. Smith. A name you might recognize from the Keigo Higashino translations. Speaking of Higashino, the translation of The Summer of the Ubume was published before Higashino's Yogisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X, 2005) became an international bestseller in 2011 and Ho-Ling's 2015 translation of Yukito Ayatsuji's Jakkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) for LRI started the translation wave – largely went unnoticed by mystery fans. But through no fault of our own. The Summer of the Ubume was not really presented as a shin honkaku locked room mystery, but something closer to the horror genre or supernatural fiction with a rational and skeptical bend. It didn't help that translation silently went out-of-print around the time Japanese detective fiction started to get momentum. Since then, Vertigo ceased to be and was consolidated into Kodansha USA.

So that pretty much put a brake on a possible second printing or a translation of the second, award-winning novel, Moryo no hako (Box of Goblins, 1995), ended there for the time being. And used copies have become insultingly pricey. Like you're buying rare coins or something. But, every now and then, you get a lucky break. Let's finally take a look at this overlooked translation of a second wave shin hokaku mystery reputedly even more unusual than Hiroshi's The Perfect Insider.

First of all, the Kyogokudo books form a series of historical mysteries set in post-World War II Tokyo, Japan. The Summer of the Ubume takes place during its titular month of 1952 and marks the first appearance of the proprietor of a used bookstore, Akihiko Chuzenji, but everyone has to the habit to call him by the name of his bookstore, Kyogokudo. A ferocious reader and bookseller who moonlights as a priest and faith healer specialized in curing possessions and exorcising evil spirits "modified to fit the beliefs of the particular sect to which each customer belonged." You see, Kyogokudo is not a believer who looks out on a world filled with ghosts, monsters and other creatures from Japan's folklore, but acknowledges their existence as social and cultural constructs – which can have very real effects on the people who believe in them or have fallen under their spell. So the bookseller and part time exorcist is prone to hold "arcane lectures" that eat into the page-count of the book. Case in point: the opening chapter that runs for roughly one-hundred pages.

The Summer of the Ubume is narrated by Kyogokudo's long-time friend and freelance journalist, Tatsumi Sekiguchi, who traveled to the bookstore to ask his friend a very unusual question. Is it possible for a woman to be pregnant for twenty months? This question gets bogged down in the first lecture covering everything from ghosts, quantum mechanics and the perception of reality to folklore and the ubume ("...if they die in childbirth, their regrets come back to walk the earth..."). So it takes a while before the problem becomes evident, but it comes down to this: Sekiguchi has gotten wind of a rumor that a woman by the name of Kyoko Kuonji has been pregnant for twenty months with the salient detail that her husband, Makio Kuonji, vanished from a locked and watched room at the Kuonji Clinic in Zoshigaya. A clinic the family has run for generations. Kyogokudo tells Sekiguchi to get into contact with Reijiro Enokizu, "a member of a rare breed, a genuine professional detective," to investigate the case. However, it takes them a while to get to the clinic, because the introduction Enokizu takes some time.

Reijiro Enokizu is a childhood friend of the two and one of two reasons why this review has the "hybrid mysteries" tag. Enokizu is someone who can see other people's memories ("...Enokizu doesn't read people's memories, he sees them"), which makes him a very unusual sort of private eye ("I don't do investigations. I do conclusions"). So kind of like a short cut detective that has gotten him trouble in the past, but a handy gift when tackling a case in which someone "vanished from a sealed room like a puff of smoke" and a woman pregnant for twenty months. Somewhere halfway through the story, they finally arrive at the clinic that would have been a fantastic setting for a more traditional shin honkaku mystery. A writer like Seimaru Amagi could have done something with the largely abandoned building that went from a fully staffed hospital to only doing obstetrics and gynecology as the war depleted their staff and American air raids destroying part of the clinic ("wow, they really did a number on this place, didn't they?"). Enokizu quickly bows out of the case and tells Sekiguchi to call on their friend, Detective Shutaro Kiba of the Tokyo Police. Yes, it takes a while for them to return to the clinic, but the parts with Kiba are actually fun. And feel like the story was starting to get back on track. I was wrong.

All the slow, meandering developments and lectures eventually culminate with Kyogokudo going to the clinic to gather everyone around Kyoko Kuonji's sickbed for the expected denouement – dressed up and presented as an exorcism. Only for Natsuhiko Kyogoku to take a page from Edogawa Rampo's playbook of grotesque body horror, which admittedly is used quite effectively to deliver a scene as unexpected as it's unsettling. Regrettably, this memorable scene didn't signal the end of the story as Kyogokudo's lengthy explanation gobbles up the final quarter of this wordy, rambling and overlong book. I love detective stories soaked in the bizarre or arcane, but a writer has to eventually deliver something on those ideas. Particularly if you keep dragging and delaying things. That was unfortunately not the case here.

Going by what has been translated up until now, The Summer of the Ubume stands as a poor specimen of the Japanese detective story. Even if you want to be generous and only compare it to other hybrid mysteries.

First of all, the vanishing from the locked room is an important part to the overall plot and what, exactly, makes a good locked room-trick is still being debated today, but what Kyogoku pulled here is simply infuriating. A suggestion that was mocked a century ago (ROT13: n punenpgre sebz T.X. Purfgregba'f “Gur Zvenpyr bs Zbba Perfprag” fhttrfgf gung gur zheqrere tbg va, naq bhg, bs n pybfryl jngpurq ebbz ol gvcgbrvat npebff cflpubybtvpny oyvaq fcbgf bs gur bofreiref gb juvpu nabgure erfcbaqf, “nppbeqvat gb lbh, n jubyr cebprffvba bs Vevfuzra pneelvat oyhaqreohffrf znl unir jnyxrq guebhtu guvf ebbz juvyr jr jrer gnyxvat, fb ybat nf gurl gbbx pner gb gernq ba gur oyvaq fcbgf va bhe zvaqf.” Kyogoku thought that was a good idea to explain the disappearance from a locked room (ROT13: ur arire qvfnccrnerq sebz gur ybpxrq ebbz. N cflpubybtvpny oybpx ceriragrq crbcyr, vapyhqvat gur aneengbe, sebz frrvat gur obql naq gura jrag n fgrc shegure ol univat gur obql ghea vagb n jnk-zhzzl haqre irel fcrpvny, uvtuyl hayvxryl pvephzfgnaprf. And, no, Kyogokudo saying "I'm no statistician, but I'd say you're looking at chances close to zero" doesn't make it any better. I should note here Ho-Ling pointed out in his review that while not being a fan of the locked room-trick, it does work in conjunction with the themes of the story like a thematic device. Fair enough. But still rubbish. Nothing else about the plot, motives, missing babies and morbid psychology, justified its length either. So if you're looking for one of those ingeniously-plotted, delightfully subversive shin honkaku locked room mysteries, The Summer of the Ubume is going to disappoint and severely test your patience.

The Summer of the Ubume has one, very small redeeming quality. Historically, it's a fascinating read. I mentioned last year how the translation wave has largely ignored the Japanese mystery novels from the 1990s and especially that second wave of shin honkaku authors. Hiroshi's The Perfect Insider was very enlightening in that regard and The Summer of the Ubume is very similar as they both show their influence on writers like Motohiro Katou and "NisiOisiN." Even more interesting, The Summer of the Ubume might have even influenced H.M. Faust's Gospel of V (2023). It might just be one of those coincidences, but, having read both unintentionally back-to-back, I can't help but see some trace similarities. For example, the two unusual private detectives or the solution to the vanishing skeleton from the locked collection room. It's like a solution Faust came up while reading the book and decided to use it for his own locked room mystery. Rightfully so, if that's what happened! Read that one instead.

So, yeah, to cut a long story short, The Summer of the Ubume simply didn't do it for me. A historical, not unimportant curiosity, but a curiosity nonetheless. The reader has been warned! Next up, back to the Golden Age!

Terrarium Nine: "Murder in the Urth Degree" (1989) by Edward Wellen

Earlier this month, I revisited the short-lived Dr. Wendell Urth series of short stories, "Earth is An Armchair: The Wendell Urth Quartet by Isaac Asimov," which was brought back to my attention by two anonymous comments left on The Caves of Steel (1953/54) review – recommending the Edward Wellen pastiche "Murder in the Urth Degree" ("...which has perturbed me ever since"). "Murder in the Urth Degree" is a pastiche specially written for Foundation's Friends, Stories in Honor of Isaac Asimov (1989) with short stories set in Asimov's universe. I'll admit right off the bat this is a good short story and pastiche, but not for the reason you might think.

Terrarium Nine is one of a dozen hydroponics in near-earth orbit comprising of six concentric spheres with a pseudo black hole at the center to provide Earth-gravity for the innermost sphere. In this future, there are laws in place "against releasing genetically altered plants and animals into the terrestrial environment." So experiments have to be done off-place and the Terrariums in near-earth orbit were created for exactly that purpose.

Keith Flammersfeld, "the lone experimenter aboard Terrarium Nine," is hard worker and only occasionally takes a break to enjoy an interactive video. When the story opens, Flammersfeld is enjoying an interactive video of Through the Looking Glass, but, shortly after plugging out, discovers "someone had entered his system and infected it with rabid doggerel" ("who will win the Red Queen's race?"). A computer virus? A very elusive stowaway who suddenly made its presence known to Flammersfeld? The answer, or part of the answer, is found in the disturbance, uprooted soil of a cabbage patch in Buck Two. Flammersfeld "knew perfectly well what had grown at this particular spot, what should still be growing here, what seemed now on the loose" – stalking and targeting him ("how could he not have seen its intelligence waken, its hate turn on him?"). And he does not survive the encounter.

Now you might think I've revealed too much or Wellen tipped his hand too early, which is not the case. Wellen just managed expectations very well by not being too mysterious about what exactly was running loose in Buck Two of Terrarium Nine. It just needed a lot of horrifying details filled in.

That brings Inspector H. Seton Davenport, of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation, to the extraterrologists' extraterrologist, Dr. Wendell Urth. From the point of the view of the investigators, the death of Flammersfeld presents something of an impossible crime ("we can't call it accident, we can't call it murder, and we're not ready to call it suicide”) on a isolated space station with an array of bizarre clues and facts. Flammersfeld died from a poison-tipped dart, "a weird kind of curare crudely prepared," of which the remnants were found in a walnut shell along with a crude, toy-like catapult and winch ("...contraptions looked as if a child might have put them together"). And a decomposed cabbage! So had the story not been a quasi-inverted mystery showing from the beginning the murderer is non-human, the ending would have been something of a letdown. Well, not to its purely science-fiction audience, but the visiting detective fan certainly would have been disappointed. Now "Murder in the Urth Degree" stands as the most striking of the Wendell Urth short stories. An imitation outshining the original!

However, "Murder in the Urth Degree" is perhaps closer to a science-fiction/horror hybrid seasoned with a pinch of existential dread than an actual science-fiction mystery, but a great short story regardless. I enjoyed it. Thanks for the recommendation, Anon!

Crucified (2008) by Michael Slade

In the previous post, I discussed the twelfth entry in the Bobby Owen series, Suspects—Nine (1939), which is E.R. Punshon's homage to those refined, witty and character-driven novel of manners mystery pioneered during the 1930s by the alternative Queens of Crime – like Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Moray Dalton. So I thought it would be fun to pick something next that is the complete opposite of a classy, satirical 1930s manners mystery novel. Something crude, brutal and horrifying with all the subtlety of a rickety, old chainsaw hacking through guts and bones. Preferably published during the past twenty years. There was only one name on the big pile who fitted the bill. 

"Michael Slade" is the collective penname of Jay Clarke, a Canadian trial lawyer, who collaborated with Rebecca Clarke, Richard Covell and Richard Banks on the "Special X" series. A branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police specialized in hunting down extremely dangerous, completely deranged, criminals and serial killers. Special X series has a not undeserved reputation for its, um, liberal depiction of guts, gore and grisly killings that could teach '80s slasher films a thing or two.

John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, reviewed Crucified (2008) back in 2019 and called the book sadistic retro pulp and Slade "a torture porn maven." I don't think John very much approved of me nonchalantly shrugging at the torrent of bloods and guts in Ripper (1994), but, in my defense, the whole story from beginning to end screamed '90s edginess – deliberately trying to be as shocking and stomach-churning as possible. Ripper struck me at times as trying to bait Americans from crushing the head of a critical reviewer with head clamps to evoking the name of Aleister Crowley. So took Ripper about as seriously as a horror flick that tried too hard to be shocking, but appreciated the attempt to give the gore galore a traditional slant with several impossible crimes in a mechanized death-trap house on Deadman's Island. In fact, there are three of Slade novels listed in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) loaded with locked rooms, impossible crimes and even dying messages of which Crucified sounded the most fascinating. A book that threw everything from archaeology, arcane history and conspiracies to locked rooms, impossible crimes and a secret crusade into the blender to create a mush better than expected.

If Ripper is a product of the '90s, Crucified is clearly a child of the 2000s. The decade of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Passion of the Christ (2004) and conspiracy theories thriving on the internet. Yet, the book is surprisingly tame compared to Ripper. Sure, there's a little bit of disembowelment and exploding skulls scattered, here and there, throughout the story, but no worse than Philip Kerr's recently reviewed Prague Fatal (2011) or your average, dark historical mystery from Paul Doherty. They're more like violent vignettes closely entangled with an increasingly complicated and engrossing narrative that moves around between the past and present. And the many arcane historical puzzles make up the lion's share of the story. So it should be a bit more palpable than Ripper which had skinned corpses dangling from a suspension bridge on meat hooks. 

Crucified begins with a short prologue, of sorts, depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in 33 A.D. as the Roman guard look up at the cross and says, "just as your shadow has vanished from the face of the earth, so you will be forgotten." But history ordained otherwise.

The story than begins to move between those long, grim years of World War II and the present-day with the former revolving around the many mysteries surrounding a long-lost Allied bomber, the Ace of Clubs, which was shot down in March 1944 over Germany – while flying a top-secret mission to bomb a specific location. The crew were ordered "to break away from the main bomber stream and fly a solitary run to an isolated target of no apparent value," but got shot down by a lone wolf fighter. So they had to bail and all but three of the crewmen were captured. Lt. Fletch "Wrath" Hannah (pilot), Sgt. Dick "Ack-Ack" DuBoulay and Sgt. Trent "Jonesy" Jones vanished that night without a trace. The impact of the crash destabilized a slope, "causing a landslide to crumble down and bury the plane" and "with bombs dropping night and day, churned-up dirt was the rule, not the exception." So the bomber lay buried and undisturbed for sixty-odd years until its wreck was discovered during road construction. A discovery that brings more to light than merely the answer to an unsolved question from the war.

In 1944, Hitler gave a mysterious individual who tried to betray him the codename "Judas" and "the rumor is that Judas conspired with Churchill to smuggle a package to Britain in the hands of a secret agent who'd been parachuted into the Reich." The Ace of Clubs was downed on "the same night that a Junkers 88 was given extraordinary orders to cripple an RAF Halifax on a solitary run in a way that would kill no crewmen except the rear gunner." So is there's a link between Hitler's Judas and the downed bomber? But there's more. Beside containing something that could topple Hitler, the Judas package includes ancient religious artifacts recovered from the Middle East. If "the resurrected bomber yields a map to the Judas package, Christendom might be rocked to its two-thousand-year-old foundations" and "the fatal nail in the Vatican's coffin."

A secret, modern-day Inquisitor, "the Secret Cardinal," has to stop the Judas relics coming to light at all costs and dispatches a crusader, the Legionary of Christ – who's either insane or possessed by the devil. The Legionary holds some decidedly old-worlds views on how death should be administrated.

The person caught between the long-buried secrets of the past and the increasing bloodshed in the present is a historian, lawyer and writer, Wyatt Rook, who writes historical expose's bringing long-kept secrets to light – earning him the reputation of muckraker and conspiracy theorist. Rook's reputation brings Liz Hannah, granddaughter of the missing pilot, to his doorstep to ask him to help her uncover what happened to her grandfather with the Judas puzzle and herself as a lure. But then one of the last surviving crewman, Mick "Balls' Balsdon, who put together an archive is horrifically tortured to death. And long-buried, apparently impossible murder is discovered inside the wreck of the Ace of Clubs.

Ack-Ack's decayed skeleton is found on the seat of the small, cage-like rear turret with its torso sprawled forward between the guns, but it's not bullets from a Junkers 88 that killed the rear gunner. Someone had stabbed him in the back three times, which appears to be impossible as everyone was in their battle stations and "remained in their combat positions until they bailed out." Slade drove home how hazardously these planes and bombing raids were and how any shot at surviving depended on teamwork over the plane's intercom. So nobody appears to have had an opportunity to stab the rear gunner. This not, strictly speaking, a proper locked room mystery, but an alibi-puzzle that works as a locked room mystery, of sorts, recalling the tangle of alibis that formed a quasi-impossible crime from Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962). Whatever you choose to categorize it as, an unbreakable alibi or impossible crime, Slade's absorbing storytelling turned it the best, most captivating and memorable parts of the plot and story. The circumstances of the murder, a bomber under attack above enemy territory, did wonders in itself for the trick employed. A trick that would not have impressed as much had it been pulled off in an ordinary setting under normal circumstances. This is not the only the historical locked room mystery Wyatt Rook comes across ("Am I being haunted by the ghost of John Dickson Carr?").

The trail leads to a U-boat called the Black Devil that had been on a test run as the first Elektroboot in the North Sea, between Hamburg and Scotland, but run into a destroyer and a fight ensued. Slade's depiction of what went on in that enclosed and sealed submarine as they got destroyed by a depth-charge barrage. It's as good as what happened aboard the Ace of Clubs, but the Black Devil only comes into play during the second-half and the impossibility is not discovered until towards the end. Something was being smuggled to England aboard the Black Devil, but, when the Royal Navy pried open the hatches and searched the submarine inside out, nothing was recovered. So "do you sneak a sardine out of a tin can that's sealed and remains sealed after the sardine is gone?" This one takes only a short while to be solved, but, needless to say, I really liked what it added to the overall story.

It's the historical puzzles and biblical mysteries that take precedent in Crucified with the present-day murders ending up only playing a secondary role. Admittedly, whenever the Legionary makes an appearance, it's not a pretty picture to behold and the double murder of a married couple is downright revolting, but, as said previously, they act like gory vignettes – which can be skipped without missing anything really important. The way in which the Legionary is disposed of shows how unimportant he and his murders were in the end to the story. What matters are the historical plot-threads. Who killed the rear gunner and how? What happened to the three missing crewmen? How were the items removed from a dead, submerged submarine? Who was Hitler's Judas? Who his secret agent and what happened to him? What, exactly, is the nature of the Judas relics and are they, as feared, "a biblical earthshaker?" The answers to all these questions neatly twists together fact and fiction into engrossing, cleverly plotted historical mystery with the last line being a stroke of genius a stupid joke that made me snicker. What a stupidly brilliant way to close out the story. 10/10!

So, all in all, Slade's Crucified turned out to be unexpectedly great. I half jokingly picked it as stark contrast to Punshon's über civilized Suspects—Nine and expected an all-out gore fest with a slightly traditionally-slanted plot, like Ripper, but the excellently executed historical plot-threads and the scenes aboard the bomber and submarine made it so much more than a mere mystery-thriller. Add to this two, archaeological locked room mysteries and a boatload of arcane and historical lectures and bits of knowledge, you have a serious candidate to be included on the third iteration "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." Recommended with some reservations for those who really can't stand gore. 

A note for the curious: I forgot to mention Crucified is not a part of the Special X series and appears to be a standalone, which might explain why it doesn't all out with the blood-and-guts-to-the-wall killing. Not as frequently as in Ripper. It makes me want to look at some others moderns on the big pile like Micki Browning, Martin Edwards, D.L. Marshall and Slade's Red Snow (2010), but first I need to get to that landmark volume of Case Closed.

Death Within the Evil Eye (2019) by Masahiro Imamura

Two years ago, Locked Room International published an eagerly anticipated translation of Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), an amazing hybrid mystery, which injected an otherwise normal, down-to-earth closed circle murder mystery with zombies – straddling the traditional detective story with the survival horror genre. Unleashing a horde of zombies inside a detective story sounds like a cheap gimmick, but the story, to quote Soji Shimada's introduction, "simultaneously maintains the necessary rigour of the locked room mystery by making the zombies bound by strict rules." So the presence of the undead stumbling around, what would have been, an ordinary shin honkaku mystery changes the entire equation and opened the door to a whole new realm of possibilities. The tricky thing to do, of course, is ensuring that the inclusion of one does not come at the cost of the other and vice versa. Imamura moved across that slippery tight-rope without slipping and falling down. And that makes Death Among the Undead a masterpiece of the genre in my book!

So ended my review hoping that a translation of the sequel, Magan no hako no satsujin (Death Within the Evil Eye, 2019), would materialize before too long. I didn't really expect that translation to appear before 2023, but John Pugmire managed to release it right at the tail-end of 2022.

Just one thing that needs to be mentioned is that this series has to be read in order for numerous reasons. Firstly, Death Among the Undead not only introduces the two main characters, but also the ongoing storyline linking all the individual cases together. Secondly, the first and second are tonally entirely different stories. If the first novel is a shock to the system, the second one is the calm after the storm with a puzzling problem that's more ethereal in nature than living zombies. 

Death Within the Evil Eye, translated by Ho-Ling Wong, opens several months after "the unbelievable bioterrorism attack at Lake Sabea" and Yuzuru Hamura, 1st year economics student and now President of the Mystery Society, has returned to Shinkō – trying to pick up the pieces and coming to turn with the events of the past summer. Hiruko Kenzaki, 2nd year literature student and the only other member of the Mystery Society, has been trying to figure out the cause behind the zombie outbreak and the trail leads to an organization that conducted research on the paranormal. She finally has gotten her hands on a potential clue. A magazine dedicated to the occult, Monthly Atlantis, received a prophetic letter correctly predicting a number of tragedies going back months. One of the prophesies concerned the Lake Sabea incident ("...many of the dead will rise") as well as a very specific fire ("...many people in Osaka will run around as they go up in flames"). A second letter from the same sender to the magazine tells how, decades ago, men "purportedly from the M. Organization" appeared in a remote village in W Prefecture and offered the villagers a lot of money to built a secret research facility deep within their village to carry out experiments on people who claimed to possess supernatural powers.

Hiruko suspects the research laboratory and anonymous letter writer can both be found in the old Magan district near Yoshimi, a remote mountain village, which she wants to check out. Hamura insists on going along to be her Watson. When they arrive, the villagers have temporarily abandoned the place and one of the few people they find is Lady Sakimi. Lady Sakimi was one the test subjects and the only one from the project who stayed behind, despite her powers of prophecy being proven to be legitimate, and had now "lived for over half a century in this haunting region" feared "by the villagers of Yoshimi as a prophet." She "predicted countless disasters and incidents around the world," which is why her latest prophesy emptied out the village. Lady Sakimi announced that "on the final two days of November, two men and two women shall perish in Magan." So there were only a few people around when Hiruko and Hamura arrived.

There are two high school students, Marie Toiro and Shinobu Kukizawa, who traveled on the same bus as Hiruko and Hamura. Toiro appears to be a clairvoyant who carries around a sketchbook in which she draws accurate sketches of "the imminent future." Usually something disastrous involving someone getting hurt or dying. Yasuko Hattori moved from the village to Magan to take care of Lady Sakimi and titular Box of Evil. A two-story, box-like building without windows where once the experiments and tests into the paranormal were performed. Akiko Tokino is a former resident of Yoshimi and returned to the area to visit a grave. Takashi Ōji was touring the countryside on his motor cycle when he ran out of fuel and hoped to find some petrol in the village. Iwao Shishida is Sociology professor with a "perpetually angry face" who had car trouble and is now stuck there with his young son, Jun. Lastly, there's a writer of Monthly Atlantis, Raita Usui, who seems very pleased with the developing story. And then the bridge burns down.

So this group find themselves trapped between a river, a high rock wall with a water fall coming down from it and an inescapable prophecy, until help can arrive and that's likely not going to happen until the first of December – a situation hardly improved by Toiro furiously drawing sketches of the near future. What follows are deadly landslides, attempted as well as accidental poisonings and outright murder!

Ho-Ling Wong said in his 2019 review that the murders "happened under seemingly impossible circumstances," but while there's a quasi-howdunit element to some of the incidents, the only ties to the impossible crime is the minor no-footprints sidetrack in the fourth chapter. If anyone had the wrong impression, the prophesies do not have a natural and rational explanation. Toiro and Lady Sakimi's powers of precognition are not clever, elaborately-staged impossibilities that turned out to have a perfectly rational explanation, but genuine abilities to foresee the future. So those very real abilities, predictions and the nigh impossibility to escape those visions of things to come. When you bound such a prophesy to a location and trap people within that place, you get a practically unique situation that could not have arisen under any other circumstances. Hiruko observes that the murder arising from this unique set of circumstances would appear "incomprehensible to the police coming from the outside," which is why the primary problem is "is not the question of howdunnit, but whydunnit." However, it's not just the presence of two characters with the power to see into the future that makes Death Within the Evil Eye and this series incomparable to anything else out there.

I mentioned in my review of Death Among the Undead that Hiruko is presented as a flesh-and-blood incarnation of the murder-magnet trope, which sounds fun (see John Sladek's Black Aura, 1974), but there are some dark, grim consequences to her "innate ability to attract bizarre incidents" – like getting shunned by her own family. When she has a teary conversation with Toiro about their unfortunate abilities, Hiruko says "if curses do really exist in this world, then I am the one who is cursed. I can't begin to count the number of people who have perished around me." Imamura tried to show what would realistically happen if things such a bio-engineered zombies, prophets who run circles around Nostradamus and murder-magnets who not only naturally attracts "freakish incidents," but possess the ability to resolve them. So the connection between the two protagonists is not your typical Holmes-Watson relation like in other detective stories, which is something Hamura finds out for himself. It makes you wonder if this second wave of shin honkaki writers will end up somehow finding a way to harmonize the traditionalists movements spawned by Seishi Yokomizo with the social school of Seicho Matsumoto in a most fantastic way.

I glossed over the majority of the plot-technical details, but not because the plot plays second fiddle to the characters and outre elements. There's an abundance of plot, “the matter of alibis and motives is important,” which also poses such intriguing question why some scattered flowers in front of Lady Saki bedroom door, why a clock had unnecessarily been smashed to pieces and who was spear-wielding, white clad figure who disappeared down a flight of stairs. And lead the pursuers to another horrible discovery. I also liked how the closed circle situation was scrutinized, "there is no situation less suitable for a murder than a closed circle," which begs the question why the culprit was willing to kill under these dangerous, high-risk circumstances. But they mostly happen after the halfway mark. And don't want to give away too much.

Suffice to say, Imamura created another strange, but stable, mixture of fantasy and realism, "a closed circle situation, plus precognitive powers," which unlocked previously closed doors to new possibilities to tell and play out the traditional, fair play detective story – since this story could not have happened without real precognitive powers. Just like the first novel, it provided the murderer with an original motivation to carry out the murders and the ending definitely had a haunting touch of Final Destination. Even then, there a final chapter playing up the detective part of the story and that one is also made possible due to the predictions being a reality. And it all worked! Death Within the Evil Eye is a very different from Death Among the Undead with the emphasis being on the mental anguish caused by an unwielding future rather than the physical challenge posed by keeping out of biting distance of a zombie horde. So the pacing of the story is notably slower, but what it builds towards is magnificent. The way in which he brought the grounded detective story and the supernatural together almost makes writing and plotting hybrid mysteries look easy. I don't know what more to say except that Imamura is inching closer, and closer, to becoming a personal favorite.

So I'll end this review hoping that a translation of the third novel is in the works, because Kyoujintei no satsujin (The Murder in the House of Maleficence, 2021) sounds completely insane. I called Death Among the Undead a shock to system and Death Within the Evil Eye the calm after the storm, but The Murder in the House of Maleficence strikes me as having come to terms with the new reality and comes out guns blazing.

Pray for the Dawn (1946) by Eric Harding

Eric Harding's Pray for the Dawn (1946) could have been the poster child for obscure, out-of-print and virtually impossible to obtain mystery novels that might have been completely forgotten today had it not been for a single, minuscule plot-thread – securing a place in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991). Adey even highlighted Pray for the Dawn in the preface as "a thriller rather than a detective novel" with "a degree of novelty" that's "well worth seeking out." Another stroke of luck that would eventually wrest the book away from total obscurity is John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, who loves extremely scarce mysteries crammed with occult lore and voodoo rituals. 

John Norris reviewed it back in April, 2021, which promised something along the lines of Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way (1935) meets Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). A detective novel ("albeit a very unconventional one") disguised as an adventurous thriller with an atmosphere of slowly mounting terror on an isolated island. So it begged to be reprinted. Ramble House agreed with that sentiment and republished Harding's Pray for the Dawn for the first time since its original publication 75 years ago.

Before delving into the story and plot, I need to note that I decided against tagging this post as a "locked room mystery" and "impossible crime." The impossibility is described by Adey in Locked Room Murders as "an encoffined dwarf," dead for ten years, "is seen to breath and perspire," but it's such a minor piece of the puzzle that presenting it as a locked room would detract from it as an excellent mystery-thriller. So, now, on to the story itself!

Barry Vane, a ballet dancer and member of the Carl Velte International Ballet, who narrates the story as he travels to the remote home of his uncle, Nathan Claymole. A former explorer, crook and trader in native artifacts, but Barry recalled precious little of his uncle except, a little uneasily, "the hints and rumours whispered about him by other and more respectable members of the family" – having "done nothing to enhance the prestige of the white race" during his time in foreign parts. So quite the black sheep of the family. Barry had not seen his uncle since he was a child and was pleasantly surprised to receive an invitation that suggested "something in the nature of a reunion" with the premise that the visit would be to his advantage. Just at the time when an accident had shelved his dancing career.

The dark, lonely house, "quite a haunted sort of place," which is encircled by a stream, "more of a torrent than a stream," called the Boa ("like a great mad snake") that can only be reached by crossing "a damn' rickety plank" serving as a bridge. The house is covered on the inside with animal skins, spears, knives and shields with shrunken heads decorating the mantelpieces. So a perfect place to either have an old-fashioned detective story or a pulp-style thriller. Either will do. And when Barry finally arrives, the normally quiet, largely empty house has filled with relatives who haven't seen one another in decades. Firstly, there's Toby Judd, or Uncle Judd, who's technically an outsider as he accepted the invitation on behalf of his late wife, Jennie. A niece of the host. Caroline Claymole is "the most tyrannical zealot" of the family with narrow, religious convictions who disapproves of her brother Nathan and browbeat her young daughter, Betsy. Oscar Claymole is a cousin of Caroline and is already "a bundle of nerves" who "looked utterly miserable" when he was introduced to Barry. Bret Jenson is their American cousin whose calm, self-assurance "almost amounted to conceit" and Barry would come to detest him intensely before many hours were passed. Miss Sylvia Bream "is a more distant but nevertheless most charming member" of the family with whom Barry very quickly falls in love. Great-uncle Jonah Clay is the ancient relic of the group and gives meaning to the phrase, "death outliving the grave." Finally, there's the African servant, Kish, who's a somewhat sinister character who utters such pleasantries as "heads—men heads" and "dead sometimes come to life."

So the macabre, outright bizarre stage is set, but it takes a while for Nathan Claymole to appear as he has been standing guard over the body of a dead dwarf. However, the dwarf was no ordinary man!

N'olah was a witch-doctor of the Javiro tribe of South America, "died ten years ago tonight," but Nathan tells his relatives "a devil-man does not die like an ordinary person" and "wakes again in his own good time" – which he believes will happen that night. So he has been watching over the body since dawn, because he's dangerous and must not awake alone. Not even Nathan wants a sadistic, undead murderer "who takes human life for the joy of killing" walking around his house unsupervised. The family even gets to view the terrifying body in his oblong coffin, which is when they see the body breath and perspire. So, as to be expected, Nathan and Kish happened to be out of the bizarre room when N'olah apparently stirred from his "uneasy sleep" and disappeared. Nathan orders Kish to smash the support to the bridge to trap the N'olah on the island. And them with him! What could possibly go wrong? A family member is found strangled in his bedroom with the dwarf's strangling cord, "a plaited raffia loop," still around the victim's neck. There were "eight strangling loops on the dwarf's bandolier." Suggesting there's a noose for each of Nathan's visiting relative.

So it goes without saying the rapidly unfolding events places even more stress on the already strained group of people. While the "regression into savagery" never reaches the levels of Anthony Berkeley's Panic Party (1934) or Christie's And Then There Were None, you can feel that even the rational character have sunken ankle deep into madness with a few of them teetering on the edge as the horrific events begin to translate into outright hysteria. Since the story is presented as a adventurous thriller with supernatural overtones, you really have to read for yourself what goes down on that scary, isolated island in the middle of nowhere. It makes for an excellent read!

Regardless of all its sensational, pulp-style thriller trappings and mounting hysteria, Harding craftily hid a pure, Golden Age detective story underneath it all. John Norris wrote in his review (linked above) that's not unfair "to reveal that all of the supernatural events will turn out to be rationalized." I agree as it both reassures the readers of our blogs that there's payoff in the end and it enhances the fun of trying to work out the solution, because you have an actual shot at doing it. Once again, to quote the real expert, "scattered throughout the story are multidinous red herrings" alongside "several cleverly planted clues." A noteworthy clue that can be safely pointed out the Author's Note at the start of the story in which Harding apologizes for having written "a story of adventure to pass away a peaceful hour" instead of "an exercise in detection." He also points out "a deliberate and intentional gap in the continuity of the story," which "the astute arm-chair detective will readily assess the significance of this omission." A lesser mystery writer would never have dared such a bold move and should have made me more alert than I already was, because the misdirection and red herrings were as good as the fair play clueing. There's a red herring that likely was not intended as a red herring, but it worked as one in 2022. You see, the covered, western sandals of N'olah and Barry noticing his wrists ended in stumps left me very suspicious as I imagined something straight out of a Japanese, horror-tinged detective novel. A piece of body horror coming to life would not have been out of place in Pray for the Dawn, but Harding slipped something a little more sophisticated, oddly traditional pass me unnoticed. Something that has been done before and since the book was published, but seldom executed with the skill, cunning and careful construction as seen here. Just as impressive is how the solutions to the murders contrasted with its fantastic premise and storytelling. Harding ended up having his cake and eating it too! And he got away with it!

So, all in all, Pray for the Dawn is an excellent, unjustly overlooked and forgotten mystery-thriller not only deserving of being resurrected, but makes you mourn the fact Harding only passed through the genre. If he had stuck around, Harding could have been a fan favorite like John Dickson Carr, Theodore Roscoe and Hake Talbot. Recommended as a highly unconventional, but strangely successful detective/thriller novel. 

Just explain one thing to me: how is it possible Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning's The Invisible Host (1930) won the 2021 Reprint of the Year Award, while a novel like Pray for the Dawn was ignored? I need to understand how it happened.

The Lake of the Dead (1942) by André Bjerke

André Bjerke was a Norwegian poet, translator, television host and writer who debuted as a mystery novelist with Nattmennesket (The Night Person, 1941), published as by "Bernhard Borge," which appeared when he was only 23 and introduced his sleuth of four novels, Kai Bugge – a Freudian psycho-analyst like Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley and Helen McCloy's Dr. Basil Willing. De dødes tjern (The Lake of the Dead, 1942) appeared next and the book became an enduring Norwegian classic over the decades. It won a 2001 poll "to determine the all-time best Norwegian crime novel" and has never ranked lower than third in subsequent polls. So a non-English classic of the genre that has stood the test of time. 

Back in February, Valancourt Books published an English edition of The Lake of the Dead, translated by James D. Jenkins, who also provided a must-read introduction. I really recommend the plot-oriented readers of this blog to go over the introduction before plunging into the story. 

The Lake of the Dead is not only more of a thriller than a detective story, but Bjerke also explored "the possibilities of fusing crime and horror," which earned it a comparison to John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937) and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). The former offers "a controversial twist ending that suggested a supernatural solution," while the latter "reads for all the world like a supernatural horror novel until a rational explanation is finally presented." Bjerke tried to fuse and cement those two different approaches, but did he succeed? Let's find out! 

The Lake of the Dead opens with Bernhard Borge and his wife, Sonja, moving into their new apartment and, to celebrate the occasion, they decide to throw a little house party to their friends – six of whom would figure in a haunting drama. Firstly, there's the psycho-analyst detective, Kai Bugge. Gabriel Mørk, a literary critic, who edits a magazine called The Scourge and "sees it as his mission in life to slander as many writers as possible and smite the sewers of intellectual life like God's cleansing thunderbolt." Harald Gran is a lawyer whose hobby is criminology and he's "been busy writing a long criminological thesis." Bjørn Werner is a former theology student turned atheist and "the conveniently timed death of a rich uncle" provided him with "the luxury of being a slacker." His sister, Lilian, is a typically young modern woman ("a little too nervous and a little too erotic") who's best friends with Sonja and engaged to Harald.

During the party, Borge reveals to his friends that he has "nothing left to write about" and his imagination is "as empty as the fleshpots of our time." Simply put, he has a severe case of writer's block and, to keep his family out of the poorhouse, asks his guests to give him a plot. Harald has a ghost of a story for him to elaborate on. More than a hundred years ago, a man named Tore Gruvik built a cabin in the woods in Østerdalen, "one of the gloomiest and most godforsaken parts of the country," where the only trace of civilization is a small hamlet two hours from the cabin. Gruvik was hopelessly devoted to his sister and would not tolerate any man near her, but, one day, she run away with a farmhand with her enraged brother in pursuit. And he caught up with them at his cabin. There he beheaded them with an ax and threw the bodies in nearby, stagnant body of water called Blue Lake, but "that deed was too great a strain even for a tough guy like Tore Gruvik." So, after several days of wandering around the woods, he drowned himself in the lake. Blue Lake is "said to be bottomless" and the bodies were never retrieved, which gave rise to stories of curses, demonic possessions and mysterious drownings.

According to local legends, "a curse has hung over the cabin ever since Gruvik's death" and whoever stays at the cabin becomes possessed by his malevolent spirit, "like a terrible force sucking at their souls," drawing his victim to him – sucking "them all down with him into the lake." So the little nature retreat acquired the ominous moniker Dead Man's Cabin. Bjørn Werner has bought that very cabin, curse, ghost and enchanted lake included, where he intends to spend some solitary weeks with his books and dog. Three weeks pass when his friends receive the news he has committed suicide at the cabin. District Sheriff Einar Bråten had been summoned to the cabin by Werner, but, when he arrived, noticed a single line of footprints leading to the edge of the lake. Werner's hat, shotgun and the body of his dog were lying nearby "the last footprint clearly shows he must have taken the plunge and thrown himself in." A diary recounts how he spiraled into madness during his short stay at the haunted cabin.

So it must have been suicide, because a murderer could not have carried the body to the lake, dump it into the water and then "leap up in the air and disappear thereafter," but Harald believes it was murder ("a murder, plain and simple"). They decide to take an expedition, or holiday, to the cabin to see what's been going on there. The book partially earned its classic status on its setting with the cabin, "massive and hulking," peeking over the trees of the dense, eerie and shadow haunted forest like an enchanted castle in a dark fairy tale. The mysterious lake with its odds way how its surface reflected reflected the moonlight as though "the blue-white, shimmering reflection originated from a secret light source down in the depths" like "an underwater fire." And it has a mesmerizing effect on those who have gathered at the cabin. If that isn't enough, the sheriff informs them a manhunt is underway for an escaped killer roaming the woods of Østerdalen in the dark of night.

What follows is a string of incidents and discussions involving "an invisible phantom that screams and leaves footprints," sleepwalking and dream analysis, discussions of handwriting and hypnosis, nighttime intrusions and one of them eventually becoming "the second victim of Blue Lake's pull." But was it murder or a supernaturally induced suicide? Only that thing can be said for certain is that there's a troubled soul at the back of it.

John Norris reviewed The Lake of the Dead last March and he evoked various mystery writers, ranging from John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot ("eerie atmosphere and use of grisly legends") to the Freudian psychology of McCloy's Dr. Willing and Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley – even Sax Rohmer's The Dream Detective (1920) gets a passing mention. While these comparisons are not inaccurate, they feel like they on fit on the surface. You see, The Lake of the Dead is a little too self-aware as its status as a novel. Chapter 7 opens with an apology to the reader, because they're on page 75 and "so far only a single person has met his end." So the author "certainly understand how the audience must feel cheated" as any "thriller costing four kroner must under no circumstances contain fewer than four murders." Carr subtly broke the fourth wall in The Three Coffins (1935) and The Crooked Hinge (1938), but how Bjerke did it is more in line with Leo Bruce and Edmund Crispin. So you get an unusual contrast between what's happening in the story and how it's retrospectively told to the reader. My impression was much more of tongue-in-cheek homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). And that detracted a little from the atmosphere. However, the jovial tone began to dissipate as the story neared its ending.

So we come to question whether, or not, Bjelke succeeded in fusing the detective and horror genres? Kind of. Technically speaking, yes, he did succeed, but not quite in the way I imagined he would do. There are some genuine detective components to the plot and one, or two, were quite clever (ROT13: jul gur qbt ernyyl unq gb tb), but the driving force behind the plot is something different all together. I can only describe it as trying to explain something supernatural as a purely natural phenomenon and initially hated it, but Bugge's explanation and pointing out all the fairly planted, psychological clues pulled me back in. So, yeah, technically it kind of works as a detective story and you have to appreciate the effort made to make it work, but that aberrant element was a little too loose and esoteric for my taste. I simply expected the whole thing would turn out to be a staged murder plot until the killer is dragged down into the lake by his victims at the end, which I would have liked a lot more as it would have meant an intact detective story with the supernatural horrors only coming into play to take care of the murderer.

As you can judge from my ramblings, the second-half and ending left me in two minds. I honestly appreciated the heartfelt attempt to create a true hybrid between the detective and horror genres, which is even more impressive when you consider "Norway is one of the only Western European countries with essentially no tradition of horror fiction." I'm sure that's another reason why the book became a homegrown classic. But the Freudian psychology, supernatural elements and particular the motive (as dark as Scandinavian Noir) didn't entirely work for me. Or were wholly convincing. Because, you know, I'm what you can call somewhat of a genre purist. However, I would probably have a little more positive had my previous three reads not been Robert A. Simon's The Week-End Mystery (1926), Nigel FitzGerald's Affairs of Death (1967) and MORI Hiroshi's Seven Stories (2016). All unconventional detective novels and all have one curious plot-element, or another, in common with The Lake of the Dead. I hoped to find a little more conventional detective story (blame John's comparison to Carr) or kindred spirit of Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017). This was not it.

So to cut an overlong, lukewarm and mess of a review short, if you're personal taste runs in a similar direction as mine, you might want to approach The Lake of the Dead cautiously. But, if you don't mind an experimental piece of genre fiction every now and then, you might as well pick up this Norwegian classic.

I'll try to pick something more conventional for my next review and, what do you know, my copy of the latest volume from Case Closed has finally arrived. Stay tuned!

Night Terrors: "The Empty Coffins" (1984/2009) by John Russell Fearn

2021 saw the publication of two so-called hybrid mysteries, Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017), which introduced the living dead into the environment of the traditionally-styled detective story with two vastly different outcomes – ranging from the horrifying to the philosophical. Imamura's Death Among the Undead is a classic locked room mystery cast like a zombie survival horror flick, while Masaya's Death of the Living Dead simply blurred the lines that once separated the dead from the living. And they are both awesome! 

A successful blending of the traditional, fair play detective story and genres like fantasy, horror and science-fiction is very difficult to pull off without compromising one or the other. Masaya and Imamura showed it can be done even with something as fantastical as the walking dead. There happened to be a (very short) pulp novel on my TBR-pile that tried to play a similar game with vampires. But how successful was it? Let's find out! 

John Russell Fearn began "what was to become a fateful association with a new firm of publishers in London," Scion Ltd, in 1948 and first commissions were for romantic novelettes and later novel-length Westerns, but, during the early 1950s, Scion took the leap to science-fiction and played with the idea of a horror-detective line – which was scrapped in favor of their science-fiction line. Several decades later, Philip Harbottle gained access to Fearn's study, untouched since his untimely death in 1960, when his widow, Carrie Fearn, passed away in 1982. The study proved to be "an Aladdin's Cave of manuscripts, books, and cans of films written and produced by Fearn himself." One of the manuscripts was of an unpublished horror-detective, entitled No Grave Need I (c. 1950), which Scion returned and was put away to collect dust. Harbottle published a small chapbook edition of the novel in 1984 followed twenty-five years later by a professional edition under the title "The Empty Coffins" (2009) "along with all of the other unpublished mss" he salvaged. Harbottle is the only one who just walks in and out of the Phantom Library with his arms loaded with lost books and unpublished manuscripts.

Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" takes place in a small village on the south coast, Little Payling, which comprises of two, tightly intertwined plot-threads. One of these threads concern a young widow, Elsie Timperley, who had married a drunk brute, but she put up with George Timperley's abuses to ensure she inherited everything he owned. A small fortune which would open the way to marry her childhood friend and true love, Peter Malden, who's the local motor dealer and garage owner. Little Payling is a small village populated with typical village people "eager to seize on the slightest hint of scandal" and they found it indecent Elsie has been seen the company of Peter so many times George was "barely cold in the grave." Elsie has a good reason to get married as soon as possible, because a well-known mystic and seer, Rawnee Singh, told her she has "no future beyond the next eight months." And that can only mean death.

The second plot-thread is introduced when a local girl is attacked in the cemetery. Madge Paignton used the cemetery as a short cut one night when a barefooted creature in a funeral shroud attacked her and left "two gashes close to the jugular" on her throat. The country GP and student of the occult, Dr. Meadows, believes it was the work of a vampire, which belongs to the realm of "folklore and legend." But the situation has gotten from bad to worse during Elsie and Peter's honeymoon. A farmer and a local builder were brutally murdered within the span of a week and their bodies were "almost drained of blood." This is not the last deadly attacked in the village with everything pointing to Elsie as the next victim.

What about the detective aspect of the story, you ask? Fearn's "The Empty Coffins" actually did a good job in keeping the reader guessing which events have a supernatural origin and which are faked, but eventually it becomes evident "there's a human hand" behind some of the attacks – one of "the worst criminals ever, apparently." Consequently, "The Empty Coffins" turned out to be crammed with impossible crimes and locked room mysteries, but let the reader be warned, the ending plunges the story deep into pulp territory. So don't expect anything too much from their solutions, because, even by pulp-standards, not everything stands up to scrutiny. Such as (ROT13) vzvgngvat n jryy-xabja fcrpvnyvfg va urneg naq oybbq qvfbeqref jura gur arjfcncre urnqyvarf ner fpernzvat nobhg “Gur Yvggyr Cnlyvat Ubeebe” jvgu nyy gur rlrf va gur pbhagel sbphfrq ba gur ivyyntr or gur cercbfgrebhf tenir fvtug zrpunavfz erirnyrq ng gur raq, which was a little too much. The plot was further marred by gur cerfrapr bs n ahzore haxabja nppbzcyvprf, frperg cnffntrf naq ulcabgvfz with the human culprit standing out like a tombstone on a front lawn.

So not one of Fearn's most inspired attempts to create a hybrid, pulp-style mysteries or his most original impossible novel, which he combined in a much better in fashion in novels like Account Settled (1949) and What Happened to Hammond? (1951). There is, however, a brief shimmer of brilliance in how the (incredibly pulpy) motive and some of the (even more pulpier) methods that explained why the corpses had to be sucked bone dry. And the horror-elements of the story were put to good use to create a couple of good scenes. I particularly liked the illegal, moonlit exhumation of George's grave and Peter's nighttime visitor to his bedroom ("...was foul, unclean—something dead yet still alive"). This helped the faked phenomena blend in with the real ones. You'll probably be surprised to learn which were real and which were fake.

The horror aspect of the story is often very well done and, on a whole, "The Empty Coffins" is a readable, pulp-style mystery centering on the activities of a vampire and that's always going to be a different beast from your regular whodunit or locked room mystery. So adjust your expectations going in and remember "The Empty Coffins" is not Fearn at his best or most creative. Just a quick, dark-light and atmospheric read making a spirited attempt to incorporate vampires into a detective story. 

A note for the curious: So, while Fearn was not entirely triumphant, he unwittingly provided a blueprint on how to do it. Dr. Meadows explains "a vampire proper is the ghost of a suicide, or some such excommunicated person, who seeks vengeance on the living by attacking them and sucking away their blood" – which gives him a pretty good idea who the vampire in their cemetery is. This also gave me an idea how a proper, fair play detective story with real vampires could play out. Just imagine one of those small, ancient English villages where over the span of a year half a dozen people have died from various causes. But no murders or suicides. Or so everyone assumes until villagers get attacked and killed by, what appears to be, a real vampire. So the detective has to discover the vampire by delving into the past of the six recently deceased village to see if the country doctor misdiagnosed a suicide as natural causes or accident. A subplot can be added with someone using the activities of the vampire as a cover to commit a murder and stages a locked room/impossible crime to blame the vampire. Anyway, I'll try to pick something a little more conventional next time.