The Kindly Blackmailer - Kyotaro Nishimura

Theme: Murder in the Most Unlikely Places

Name of the story: The Kindly Blackmailer

Author: Kyotaro Nishimura

Source: Ellery Queen’s Japanese Golden Dozen

Story Number: 47

Most of the events in this story take place in a barber shop – reminiscent of one other classic story with the same setting. I’ll shamelessly borrow EQ’s introduction to this story here as it’s gone save me invaluable amount of time to figure one out myself: ‘A good short story should create a uniform impression throughout, and it should gradually build into breathless suspense and then settle in a satisfactory epilogue. Nishimura’s “The Kindly Blackmailer” not only does this but also manages to outwit the reader with an unexpected turn. A barber shop is the locale – an interesting place for intrigue and an unlikely background for crime …’

The story begins with Shinkinchi, a barber getting a new customer who is very reticent about himself. But he is not so tightlipped when it comes to talking about his knowledge of the barber – he tells him that he was a witness when the barber driving a little truck had run down a little kindergarten girl! And the blackmailing starts from there. Every week, this man returns to sit in the barber’s chair for a shave and at the end of it doubles his request (from the previous week) for the money. At one point, Shinkinchi hires a private detective to trace this man and provide him with any material which he himself could use to counter blackmail him but the man who is named Saburo turns out be clean without any skeletons in his closet.

The barber decides to close his shop and move to a new location. But it takes very less time for the blackmailer to catch up with him. The blackmailing continues and Shinkinchi has reached the end of his savings, he is in a bitter predicament and decides to do something the next time Saburo turns up. Interestingly he doesn’t turn up the next week as expected. One day, he reads in a newspaper that Saburo was hurt when he attempted to rescue a girl from meeting with an accident. Shinkinchi thinks that his troubles are over at last but he is in for a surprise when Saburo turns up in his shop for a shave the next week!

Why is Saburo taking such a big risk of allowing him to shave when he knows that the barber can kill him so easily with the knife? What will the barber do? Will he finally get the courage to kill his blackmailer? Well, the suspense mounts till we reach the conclusion – which has two great surprises which the reader wouldn’t have bargained for!

The Spherical Ghoul - Fredric Brown

Theme: Murder in the Most Unlikely Places

Story: The Spherical Ghoul

Author: Fredric Brown

Source: Homicide Sanitarium, Thrilling Detective(1943), The Arbor House Necropolis (A horror anthology)

Story Number: 46

Fredric Brown contributed more than 150 stories to the pulps – some of the best uncollected stories out of these are now collected in 7 different volumes – the first out of them being Homicide Sanitarium.

Bill Pronzini in his introduction to this book best describes this story as: “This story has a typically wild and wonderful Brown plot – its ingredients include a morgue at night, a horribly disfigured corpse, mayhem aplenty, and a classic locked room mystery – and one of the cleverest(if outrageous) central gimmicks you are likely to come across anywhere”.

The morgue in most of the stories or novels comes into the picture only when there is an autopsy involved or when somebody has to identify the corpse and is not a place where someone would expect a crime to be committed in. This story is an exception to that rule -  not only is the morgue the scene of the crime but the entire action takes place inside the morgue. Jerry Grant is working his way through the last year of an Ethnology course by holding on to a night job in the coroner’s department. The morgue has accommodation for seven customers with a glass showcase to put an unidentified body. His thesis topic ‘The origin and partial justification of superstitions’ couldn’t have had a better setting, opines one of the characters.

The police Lieutenant visits the morgue to have a look at the unidentified corpse in the showcase. He is not buying the theory that the victim met his death due to a hit and run accident. Jerry, the coroner and the Lieutenant inspect the body within the locked showcase before leaving for the day. The door to the morgue is locked and Jerry, working on his thesis, takes guard in front of this door. Two hours later, when someone turns up to identify the body, they find that the glass case is broken and the face of the corpse is horribly disfigured, beyond recognition. There is only one entrance to the morgue and that door was locked and guarded. The only other inlet into the room is a ventilator which no human can enter for his nefarious purpose, which forces everyone to think of a superstitious legend about a ghoul (an imaginary creature that robs graves and feeds on corpses).

The only clue turns out in the form of a man being seen by a witness approaching the morgue holding a large bag. He further adds that the bag indeed had a bowling ball inside it. A clue, which is more than sufficient for Jerry to figure out this very clever locked room problem, which rightfully takes its place in the locked room anthology Death Locked In.

The Riddle of The Whirling Lights - Stuart Palmer

Theme: Murder in the Most Unlikely Places

Name of the story: The Riddle of The Whirling Lights

Author: Stuart Palmer

Source: Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles

Story Number: 45

Stuart Palmer's wrote more than 20 detective novels usually featuring the spinster sleuth Hildegarde Withers, who made her debut with ‘The Penguin Pool Murder’. His other creation was the hardboiled private eye Howie Rook.

Tony Lassiter is killing some time by visiting the skyscrapers in the city of Chicago as he has around 3 hours left to catch his train to New York. In the process, he stumbles across a girl who looks as lonely as himself and someone who wouldn’t mind having a male companion escorting her. They get to talk and realize that both of them are heading to New York and they have some free time to explore. They decide to visit the Planetarium. They are seated at the corner of the fourth row from the back and as the lights dim out and the show progresses, Tony notices that the girl is leaning on him. When he puts his hands across her, he realizes that she is cold and there is blood flowing down her neck. When the lights are switched back on, they find that the girl has been stabbed with a sharp instrument, her bag is missing and more importantly, there’s no sign of the murder weapon!

Tony is arrested on suspicion of murder and Hildegarde Withers is summoned all the way from New York to help clear the allegations against Tony. The four other suspects that the police round up are the Planetarium Professor who gave only the introductory speech and departed the auditorium, the presenter of the show who was rooted to his place all the time, the girl who is selling the booklets and the guard. All four are searched but they don’t find any incriminatory evidence. The bag and the murder weapon are found – far away from where the body was found. But it still remains a mystery as to how the impossible murder could have been committed as the people sitting in the row behind the girl would have surely seen the person who stabbed her?

It takes some meticulous sleuthing on behalf of Miss Withers to find the motives and the relationships between the various individuals involved. The final trap for the murderer is laid in the planetarium when the show is running, with Miss Withers taking the seat of the murdered girl and the District Attorney taking the seat next to her. Surely one of the most unique places to commit an impossible murder (with a strange murder weapon as well), a setting which can hardly be replicated again!

Death On Needlepoint - Josef Skvorecky

In the 165 odd years of the existence of the formal detective story, innumerable murder mysteries have been set in country houses, libraries of the country houses, theaters, colleges, schools, trains, ships, flights, automobiles, gardens, hotels, bookshops, golf courses etc. But what are some of the most unlikely places ever conceived as the locale of a murder mystery? I'll be exploring 7 stories this week (of the 16 that I have found so far) which invariably contains a murder with a most unusual crime scene for its setting! Interestingly, most of these stories also fall into the impossible crime territory which makes me wonder whether the author's motive of setting a story in such a bizarre locale can rationally be explained only by the impossible nature of the crime?

Theme for the week: Murder in the Most Unlikely Places

Story: Death On Needlepoint

Author: Josef Skvorecky

Source: The Mournful Demeanors of Lieutenant Boruvka

Story Number: 44

Out of the 12 stories in the first collection of stories by Josef Skvorecky, 3 of them feature the  locked room or impossible crime theme and 3 of the stories could equally fit into my theme for this week - murders set in exotic locations!

In this story, Lt Boruvka of the Prague police force is called in to investigate an impossible murder in an exotic location - on the top of a mountain or a rock face. One woman, two of her suitors and one mutual friend (who is not a climber) to the three climbers have been planning this tough hike for quite some time. The three climbers decide to ascend the rock face from the east side with all three connected to each other with the rope harness so that they can communicate with each other. 2 men go in front and the woman forms the rear. The non climber tends to the base camp. With the summit just a few minutes away, they end up in bad weather with the mist hiding them from one another and from their surroundings. At this instance, the man in the middle gets a shock when he feels the harness rope being disengaged from the climber on top and also from the one at the bottom - which would only mean death if something goes wrong. He suspects that the man above him must have reached the top but he can't understand why the woman below should have disengaged her harness. The mist clears in a few minutes and the second man reaches the top in another 10 minutes only to find the first person to have been stabbed with a knife!

Lt. Boruvka has only 3 suspects to pin this murder on but his most challenging problem is to figure out how the murder could be committed on top of a mountain which doesn't have any other access to the top and is cut off from all the other neighboring mountains. He quickly does away with the simplest idea that it was the second climber who killed the first one. Next, he considers the situation of the non climber taking a gravel path to reach the top, kill the climber and get back to the base camp before his other two friends go down. Not being happy with this solution, he takes the help of the students from a mountain climbing academy to test his third theory that it was the woman who killed the first climber by a series of intricate moves which would involve the woman bypassing the middle climber and going on to the west side of the rock face, climb and reach the top, wait for the first climber, kill him and go back the same way on to the east side and below the 2nd climber! He is able to prove that this method could work but the woman doesn't budge from her story that she didn't kill him.

That leaves Lt. Boruvka to come up with another ingenious theory, which again is tested out by the students of the climbing academy to arrive at the way the murder was committed which would indirectly point to the only person who could have committed it! The solution is pretty complicated and a bit of mountain climbing knowledge would go a long way in understanding the beauty of the solution but even otherwise, it can be enjoyed for its setting and one of the unique impossible crime situations that the reader can ever encounter.

Murder Story - William Irish

Theme for the Week: Queen’s Quorum Titles

Name of the story: Murder Story

Author: William Irish

Source: After-Dinner Story (Queen’s Quorum Title #97)

Story Number: 43

William Tucker is a detective story writer who has a tough deadline to keep. But his present story will hardly tax him in terms of creating a story. He has been plotting to kill his colleague Henry -who has become famous only because William has been ghost writing for him. He has figured out the opportunity and the place but he has waited for 2 years to find the means to achieve it. He chances upon it when he is visiting his doctor, who incidentally happens to be the doctor for the hypochondriac Henry as well. Tucker goes to Henry’s house and on some pretext enters the bathroom where his medicinal kit is housed. He replaces the stomach tonic with a poison (prescribed for Tucker as ointment to be applied externally) and removes the electric bulb on the way out. Henry dies after consuming this poison in the dark.

Immediately after reaching home, Tucker writes his own murderous escapade as a detective story by just changing the names of the characters involved and sends it off to his editor. What then follows is a cat and mouse game between the cops and Tucker – each trying to outmaneuver the other with the cops coming out the victor in the end. Just before he is carted off, he gets a chance to check the reply from the editor for his submitted story – a reply which serves as a fitting punch-line ending for this good inverted detective story.

Out of His Head - Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Theme for the Week: Queen’s Quorum Titles

Story: Out of His Head

Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Source: Out of His Head (Queen’s Quorum #6), Death Locked In.

Story Number: 42

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was the first American to write a detective story after Poe; 17 years after the appearance of "The Murders in The Rue Morgue". Out of His Head is actually a novelette but chapters 11 through 14 constitute a detective short story. It's just these 4 chapters which are presented as a story in the Locked Room Anthology Death Locked In.

The Danseuse Mary Ware has been found dead in a locked room with the key still inside the lock. All the windows are closed and there is no other entrance into the room and the knife used to split the throat is missing thereby ruling out suicide. The neighbors give evidence that Mary had 2 lovers - a Lieutenant King and her fiancé Julius Kenneth. The story is told as  a first person narrative by the detective Paul Lynde - who confesses to the crime and gets himself arrested without revealing how he committed the crime. He later invites  the murderer to the jail and confesses to him his motive to take the blame even though he didn't commit the crime, a motive which is quite extraordinary! In the process he also reveals the very simple solution to the locked room murder.

As pointed out in Queen’s Quorum, this excerpt from the novelette reveals the author's debt to Poe: the general plot is clearly derived from Rue Morgue but Aldrich adds three significant points of development to the detective story: he created the first American variation of Poe's "locked room", he carried on the tradition of an eccentric sleuth (though to an extreme as the detective is also a madman) and the earliest example of a detective story where the protagonist is not only the detective but also the murderer, in the sense that the detective himself is responsible for the murder having been committed.

The Cyprian Bees - Anthony Wynne

Theme for the Week: Queen’s Quorum Titles

Story: The Cyprian Bees

Author: Anthony Wynne

Source: Sinners Go Secretly (Queen’s Quorum #74)

Story Number: 41

Anthony Wynne is known for his locked room murders and impossible crime novels which number more than 20. While some of them deal with clever puzzle plots, the critics have had issues with his style of writing – the writing in most of his books border closely on the fringes of dullness; at times it’s very repetitive and at times it’s too pedantic and at times the solutions are highly improbable!

Anthony Wynne has only 1 collection of short stories to his credit and looks like it’s one of the hardest to lay your hands on from the Queen’s Quorum list – the cheapest copy that I see online is for around 120 dollars! One story “The Cyprian Bees” from this collection is highly anthologized for its unique murder method.

Inspector Biles approaches Dr. Eustace Hailey with an unique problem – a woman is found dead in a completely closed car having died of shock or heart attack. She had been bitten by a Cyprian bee. He also produces a wooden box for the doctor’s perusal – a box which held 4 such bees when it was found near the Piccadilly Circus. The police expert has studied the bees and has given a verdict that only a mad man would carry it on him as it contains only worker bees which are known for their notorious ill behavior. What the police can’t understand is the connection between the death and the bee – surely a bee sting would not induce death?

The doctor explains how this could be achieved via the method of an anaphylactic shock – a process where in if a human being receives an injection of serum or any extract, a tremendous sensitiveness is apt to develop towards that substance – a further injection of the same material or even consuming it orally a month down the line could lead to serious ill effects. Using this knowledge, the doctor opines that the police should be able to find the culprit if they look for a doctor in a certain London locality, who is staying away from his wife (from another clue) and is also a bee keeper. The police fail to unearth any such person and it falls upon Dr. Hailey to solve the case for them by concentrating on the human nature aspects & on the individuals involved in the case.