Poul Anderson: Murder in Black Letter (1960)

Poul Anderson was one of the 20th century’s most prolific writers of science fiction, and one of its most inventive and versatile. In addition to SF, he wrote a number of fantasy works, and in the 1950s, three mystery novels featuring private detective Trygve Nakamura. As an Anderson fan, I’ve been aware of these books for years, but had never as much as seen a copy of one until I was browsing on my Kindle the other day and saw that one of them was available for the low, low price of 99 cents Canadian. One download later…

The story takes place in and around Berkeley, California, and in particular at the University of California’s campus there. Teaching assistant Bruce Lombardi has been murdered, and from the marks on his body it’s clear he’d been tortured in the hours before his death. But what information did he have that the murderer wanted, and what’s the murderer going to do next? Professor Robert Kintyre, a man of action in spite of his academic job, identifies the body for the police, then sets out to investigate with an occasional bit of mentoring from his friend and judo sensei Nakamura…

I was never bored reading the story, but it seems to me Anderson was trying to be all things to all readers in this one. We have an orthodox “whodunit” plot with one quite good clue to the murderer’s identity, but we also have plenty of gangsters and other tough guys, several fight scenes where Kintyre gets to show us his knowledge of judo, and late in the book, a subplot straight out of one of the “psychological realism” mysteries that writers like Helen McCloy and Margaret Millar were turning out at the time. There’s no inherent reason why you can’t combine a puzzle with hard-boiled violence and probes into the human mind, but I kept feeling as though I was jumping out of one novel and into another. And while everything gets wrapped up satisfactorily by the conclusion, the finale didn’t so much end the book as stop it abruptly. 

If you’ve read much else by Anderson, you won’t be surprised to learn that this tale bears the hallmarks of his other work: his distinctive but very readable style, bits of esoteric knowledge, and some grousing about the Way Things Are Today.

I enjoyed Murder in Black Letter enough that I’ll buy the other two books in this series if I ever see them on sale at a reasonable price, but based on this one, I won’t be expecting anything on the level of Anderson’s SF classics like Tau Zero or The Time Patrol.

One amusing little in-joke: Anthony Boucher’s 1937 novel The Case of the Seven of Calvary also takes place at Berkeley, and involves a professor named John Ashwin who solves several murders. A “Professor Ashwin” is mentioned in passing in this book. Given that Boucher also wrote and edited science fiction, and that every professional SF writer in 1960 seemed to know all the others, I can’t believe this was a coincidence.

Edward D. Hoch: All But Impossible (2017) – Part 1 of 3

Beginning a look at Edward D. Hoch’s fourth collection of impossible-crime stories featuring Dr. Sam Hawthorne, 1930s New England’s greatest amateur sleuth.

“The Problem of the Country Church”

What seems to happen: Dr. Sam’s former nurse, April, and her husband Andre ask him to be their newborn baby’s godfather. At the christening ceremony, all is going well until someone switches the baby for a doll and a ransom note, without anyone present noticing what happened.

A simple solution, but one that Hoch conceals well with a lot of misdirection. I don’t think the switch would have gone as smoothly in real life, but this is still one of the better cases in the book.

“The Problem of the Grange Hall”

What seems to happen: Sweeney Lamb and his All Stars are performing in Northmont. Bix Blake, the band’s trumpeter, is supposedly an old friend of Sam’s colleague Dr. Linc Jones, but Blake dies from an intravenous injection of codeine while he and Linc are alone in a room together… just the two of them and the hypodermic needle in Linc’s hand…

Not a bad one, but I think you need to know a bit about poisons for the solution to play completely fair.

“The Problem of the Vanishing Salesman”

What seems to happen: At some point, any mystery writer who deals in impossible crimes has to do his own variation on that untold case of Sherlock Holmes’ that involved Mr. James Phillimore, who went back into his house to get his umbrella and vanished. Here it’s Mr. James Philby, who goes back into someone else’s house to get a lightning rod, but with the same result.

I always like an impossible-crime problem that has one or more well-worked-out false solutions before you get to the true one, and “Vanishing Salesman” has a good one. The real answer is a bit of a letdown by comparison.

“The Problem of the Leather Man”

What seems to happen: A different kind of impossibility for a change – a wanderer named Zach Taylor tags along with Dr. Sam as our hero walks around the Northmont area and encounters several locals – but later, everyone Sam met swears he was quite alone.

Any mystery of this kind will have to involve either a grand conspiracy, which is as bad as having a secret passage to a locked room, or a series of unlikely events. The eventual explanation of what really happened isn’t bad, but it didn’t dazzle me.

“The Problem of the Phantom Parlor”

What seems to happen: Another classic gambit, this one the room in a house that randomly appears and disappears without a trace.

A pretty good resolution, but as with “Country Church,” I doubt things would go as smoothly if you or I actually tried to pull this off.

To be continued…

Ellery Queen: The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1934) – Part 2 of 2

Here’s a look at the last five of the eleven stories in Ellery Queen’s first short-story collection.

“The Adventure of the Teakwood Case” – there’s been a series of jewel thefts at the exclusive Gothic Arms apartments. Now the body of a man, identity unknown, has turned up on the sixteenth floor, the victim of strangulation. Is there a connection? A second murder then happens, right under the combined noses of Ellery, the Inspector, Sergeant Velie, Dr. Prouty, and assorted detectives.

I’m not going to say much more about the plot because this is one of the best stories in the whole collection, the book’s most outstanding case of a short story having a plot that could have filled a whole novel. Read it and see for yourself.

One more word: like The French Powder Mystery, this is one where you have to wait till the final line to learn the identity of the killer. So don’t peek ahead!

“The Adventure of ‘The Two-Headed Dog'” – “The Two-Headed Dog” is the unusual name of a tourist-cabin operation where Ellery stays for a night. He meets a cast of colourful characters and, inevitably, has to solve a murder that’s committed during his stay.

Well, you could pretty much say the same things about this story as about “Teakwood Case” – an excellently plotted story that a lesser writer would have padded out to 60,000 words or so. Frederic Dannay must have been a plotting machine in the early 1930s, and it’s a shame that he and Manfred Lee decided (for business reasons) to make the stories simpler after the Nationality-Object Mysteries were done. Happily it wasn’t a decision they were still sticking to by the time they got to Calamity Town!

“The Adventure of the Glass-Domed Clock” – someone has bludgeoned curio dealer Martin Orr to death, but before he succumbed to his wounds he managed to drag himself against the floor of his shop and pull down two objects – an amethyst and a clock – apparently to indicate the identity of his murderer.

in the 1950s and later, the name of Ellery Queen became synonymous with dying-message mysteries almost as strongly as John Dickson Carr’s was with impossible crimes. This was Queen’s second effort in that subgenre (the first was “…The Bearded Lady” in the same collection), and it’s very different from most of what followed. Generally, when you read something like The Scarlet Letters or “GI Story” and find out what the victim was trying to say, the effect (or at least the desired effect) is for you to smack your forehead and proclaim “Of course, why didn’t I see that myself?” Here, by the end you’re more saying “Yeah, I guess so” to Ellery’s solution. Dannay was good at complex plots, but I think this one is a little too complex.

“The Adventure of the Seven Black Cats” – Rich old Euphemia Tarkle is buying black cats from pretty young Marie Curleigh’s pet store at the rate of one a week. And she hates cats. What’s she up to?

Another good one in the puzzle department, but I do wonder what the authors were thinking when it came to Ellery’s attitude toward women, especially of the attractive “heroine of a mystery story” type. Here, it’s obvious he’s attracted to Miss Curleigh (as she’s called throughout the story), yet as soon as the case is solved and explained, he can’t seem to get away from her fast enough. I guess in those days your sleuth could have a “girls, yuck!” kind of viewpoint, and people just accepted that he was too much of a brain to allow emotional entanglements to cloud his vast intellect.

“The Adventure of the Mad Tea-Party” – Ellery attends one of those weekend house-parties that of course turns into murder, and someone is not only manufacturing mysterious clues, they’re doing it with a distinct Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass theme. What more appropriate books for a story in a genre that’s its own kind of Wonderland?

This story was actually adapted into a dramatic work, as an episode of the short-lived Ellery Queen TV series from the mid-1970s (the only one based on an actual Queen story). It’s fun, but when you get down to the business of identifying the murderer, Ellery’s chain of logic is actually quite simple – this is one short story that was better off at that length. Still, it’s a fun way to end the book, and the last line hints that the early Ellery might not have been quite as virginal as he seemed.

Ellery Queen: The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1934) – Part 1 of 2

There’s no denying that the early Ellery Queen books (the nine [Nationality] [Object] Mysteries, Halfway House, and the novella The Lamp of God), published between 1929 and 1936, will not be to the taste of every reader today. Ellery the character is often a smug prig, the style of writing is mannered and can be hard to plod through, and the stories can move at a slower pace than we moderns are used to. (Much the same kind of thing could be said of the four books written in this period as by Barnaby Ross, featuring alternate sleuth Drury Lane.)

On the other hand, considered as puzzles, this group of works includes some of the finest fair-play mysteries ever to challenge a reader, and it would be a shame if a serious mystery fan were to try reading the first few chapters of, say, The Roman Hat Mystery, get scared off, and never get to enjoy the delights of Greek Coffin or Siamese Twin.

So what’s a reader to do? My recommendation: start with The Adventures of Ellery Queen, a collection of short stories published in 1934. They feature the same insufferable Ellery as the contemporaneous novels and the same florid writing style… but they move right along, and most of them feature the same ingenuity of plotting, even better than in some of the above-mentioned novels.

There are eleven stories in this collection. Here’s a look at the first six.

Before I start, I am going to make one general observation that applies to all eleven stories: “A lesser writer could easily have taken the plot of this one and expanded it into a novel… and it still would have been a good, solid mystery. The two Queen collaborators were so good at coming up with puzzles that they could afford to write up this one as a short story.”

“The Adventure of the African Traveler”: Queen had a lot of fun over the decades with stories that presented the reader with one or more false solutions before you got to the true one. This is one of the earliest examples: Ellery teaches a criminology class to three hand-picked students and takes them with him on a murder investigation. Each comes up with a different explanation that he demolishes before revealing the truth. 

The long arm of coincidence may get stretched a bit in this one, but it’s nice in one passage to see Queen poking fun at (instead of quietly going along with) some of the casual racism of the period.

“The Adventure of the Hanging Acrobat”: a vaudeville performer is found with a rope around her neck in her dressing room. The lady seemed to be sleeping with every male member of the troupe, but which one of them decided life would be better without her?

The real delight of this one is the way it gives the reader a taste of the world of a kind of performance now relegated to history. As for the puzzle… well, if you do anticipate the identity of the murderer, well, you won’t be the only one.

“The Adventure of the One-Penny Black”: Everyone who buys a copy of a certain book from a certain bookseller becomes the victim of a robbery – in which that book alone is stolen.

I’m not quite sure this one plays fair with the reader, although it’s hard to say without committing a spoiler. But once you’ve read it, have a look at the last line and see if you don’t agree there’s an adjective in there that hasn’t been fairly set up earlier.

“The Adventure of the Bearded Lady”: A murdered artist’s last act was to paint a beard and moustache on his portrait of a woman.

The first Queen short story to use what would become the team’s trademark device of the dying message; unfortunately, this particular message is not as ingenious as the ones they would dream up in later years. As well, the other clues to the identity of the murderer will probably be easier for a reader in the 2020s to pick up on than they were in the 1930s.

“The Adventure of the Three Lame Men”: The kidnapping of a wealthy businessman turns into murder, but not in the way you might expect.

A lot of good clues, yet it’s not unlikely you will beat Ellery to the solution.

“The Adventure of the Invisible Lover”: Ellery investigates a murder in a small New York town, committed with a gun that was unquestionably in the possession of one man and only one man during the period when it could have been committed. Yet everyone who knows him swears he’s no murderer…

By far the best story in the first half of the book, this is a clear example of a complex story that could have been stretched out into a perfectly good full-length novel. Queen gets a little pretentious toward the end of the story with some Deep Thoughts about Weighty Matters, but they don’t really get in the way, so I’ll forgive him.

To be continued…

Edward D. Hoch: Nothing is Impossible (2013) – Part 3 of 3

The pandemic has turned my day job upside down (no complaints, I still have a day job), but I finally have a chance to do another blog entry, so here goes! This is the third and last look at Edward D. Hoch’s third collection about impossible-crime specialist Dr. Sam Hawthorne. Reviews of the first and second thirds of the book can be found here and here.

“The Problem of the Two Birthmarks” 

What seems to happen: a patient at Pilgrim Memorial Hospital is murderously attacked during the night; shortly after, a nurse who should have been on duty at the time turns up strangled in the operating room, even though it’s locked and the one and only key accounted for. The whole thing is somehow mixed up with an attempt to destroy a ventriloquist’s dummy at a local night spot.

A weak explanation for the impossibility (Dr. Sam has to say “try it yourself if you don’t believe me”) and some motivation I found impossible to swallow keep this from being a classic.

“The Problem of the Dying Patient” 

What seems to happen: elderly Betty Willis has been poisoned while lying in her sickbed, and it looks as if the only person who could have done it was the attending physician, Dr. Sam himself, who has to think fast to keep from being arrested and losing his license. 

The clue that tips Sam off is not bad, but it’s not that well-concealed… if you spot it as soon as it’s mentioned, you’ll wonder why someone as sharp as our hero is doesn’t as well, and you’ll be impatient waiting for him to see the light.

“The Problem of the Protected Farmhouse” 

What seems to happen: Rudolph Frankfurt lives in a house with locked windows and doors, an electrified fence and guard dogs, convinced his enemies want to kill him. Someone does.

The first one in this group to really score, with a well-concealed killer and motive.

“The Problem of the Haunted Tepee”

What seems to happen: In 1890, western gunman Ben Snow (another of Hoch’s series characters) comes across a mystery he can’t solve – a tepee that seems to kill anyone who spends the night in it. In 1935, he tells the story to Dr. Sam and his nurse Mary, and they’re able to explain what happened.

I love a good “room that kills” puzzle, but this one depends on a fact you either know or don’t. Not very satisfying. This is the only Dr. Sam story that’s told in the third person, I guess because we see the beginning and end from his viewpoint and the middle part from Ben’s.

“The Problem of the Blue Bicycle”

What seems to happen: Teenage Angela Rinaldi is part of a group of kids riding their bicycles along a winding country road. She sprints ahead and rounds a curve, the others momentarily losing sight of her. When they also round the curve, her bike is lying in the middle of the road, but she’s gone – and there is no place in the surrounding fields where she could have hidden in the few seconds she was unobserved, nor were there any other vehicles around.

Another really clever one and a high note to end the collection on.

I’ll try not to let so much time pass before my next review!

Columbo: Season 3 (Part Two)

Life’s been coming hard at all of us lately, so let’s relax and go back to a simpler time when you could stand less than two metres from someone, the murderers were brilliant, and a certain unassuming policeman was even smarter…

(My look at the first half of Season 3 is here).

“Publish or Perish” by Peter S. Fischer (who would write several more Columbos and go on to co-create “Murder, She Wrote” with Levinson and Link)

Book publisher Riley Greenleaf (Jack Cassidy in his second outing as a murderer on this show) has a star author named Alan Mallory (Mickey Spillane). Unfortunately, Mallory wants to sign a contract with a different publisher. Greenleaf decides to have him killed – at a time when he has an airtight alibi – and collect on the hefty insurance policy he has on the writer’s life. (As I type this, I realize how reminiscent this is of the motive in Cassidy’s first episode, “Murder by the Book”.)

This one is not bad, but it should be better than it actually is, given Cassidy’s usual stellar performance and strong contributions by Spillane and by John Chandler as a psychopathic would-be author. The problem is, for me, the same one as in “Etude in Black” – as soon as a certain clue appeared, I said “That’s how Columbo is going to catch his man,” and so it was.

Peter S. Fischer wrote a total of five episodes for the original NBC Columbo, and two more for the revival on ABC, and they’re all at least good. On the other hand, most of his plots have one thing in common, and saying what it is outright might partially spoil some episodes for those who have not watched them. So here it is in rot-13:

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“Mind over Mayhem” by Steven Bochco, Dean Hargrove and Roland Kibbee, based on a story by Robert Specht

Dr. Marshall Cahill (Jose Ferrer) is a brilliant scientist who’s pushed his non-brilliant son Neal (Robert Walker Jr.) too hard all his life – so much that Neal, now a college student, has resorted to passing off the work of a recently-deceased researcher as his own. Dr. Howard Nicholson (Lew Ayres), a member of the same think tank where the Cahills work, threatens to expose Neal, so Marshall runs him over with his car, planting the body in Nicholson’s own living room and passing the crime off as a burglary gone wrong.

An ingenious murder and some equally ingenious detection by Columbo, but the way he finally exposes Cahill is, in terms of both morality and ingenuity, on the same level as dragging him into an interrogation room and beating a confession out of him. The episode still leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I think of it.

“Swan Song” by David Rayfiel, based on a story by Stanley Ralph Ross

Country superstar Tommy Brown (Johnny Cash) would be a lot happier if not for his blackmailing wife, Edna (Ida Lupino), who can prove he had an affair with Maryann Cobb, an underaged member of their entourage (Bonnie Van Dyke). As long as Edna is alive, the profits from Tommy’s concerts will go to Edna’s evangelical ministry. Tommy, an experienced pilot, flies Edna and Maryann to Los Angeles in his private plane. He gives them a thermos of coffee laced with sedatives and, once they are unconscious, parachutes out of the plane, letting it crash into the a mountainside. His plan hits a snag when he breaks his leg on landing, but he is still able to bury the parachute and drag himself to the crash scene in time for emergency crews to find him there.

Johnny Cash brings a lot of conviction to a character who’s basically him but a killer, and there is a wonderful scene at the crash site when an FAA investigator (John Dehner) goes from wanting to shoo Columbo away and let the professionals handle things to wishing he had someone as brilliant as the LA cop on his squad – in about five minutes! The episode’s ending is not one of the great ones, but there are lots of excellent clues and deductions up to that point.

“A Friend in Deed” by Peter S. Fischer

Wealthy Hugh Caldwell (Michael McGuire) kills his wife when a domestic argument turns violent. Knowing he’s not smart enough to get away with it, he turns to his friend, Deputy Police Commissioner Mark Halperin (Richard Kiley), to create an alibi for him. Mark does so, but that’s only the beginning of his sinister plan.

What if Columbo realized one of his superiors was implicated in a case he was investigating? Well, we know the guilty parties would pay the price at the end, but watching Columbo overcome this extra obstacle without ruining his career is suspenseful, and the way he does it is ingenious. And take special note of the brief sequence where a black guy turns up near a crime scene and the uniformed cop is all “Well, well, looks like we just caught our murderer!” This series did not take place entirely in fantasyland.

Taking Season 3 as a whole, I make it three excellent episodes (“Candidate for Crime,” Double Exposure” and “A Friend in Deed”), three good ones (“Any Old Port in a Storm,” “Publish or Perish” and “Swan Song”), one okay one (“Lovely But Lethal”) and one bad one (“Mind over Mayhem”). Would Season 4, with only six episodes, do better? Stay tuned…

John Dickson Carr: The House at Satan’s Elbow (1965)

There have been repeated ghost sightings at Greengrove, the country house built in the mid-18th century by that disreputable judge, Sir Horace Wildfare. Is Sir Horace returning from the grave to scare the current residents? Is a living person creating a ghost-hoax for some more sinister purpose? And is either entity responsible for the locked-room shooting that closely followed the latest sighting? Dr. Gideon Fell investigates…

The mid-1960s and onwards were not, by anyone’s yardstick, the glory years of John Dickson Carr. As Douglas Greene ably outlines in his biography of Carr, his writing was by now showing certain mannerisms not to everyone’s liking. Characters began to lecture each other; when they didn’t lecture they spoke enigmatically to no good purpose; and humour played a greater role than ever before, none of it funny. (And Carr developed a peculiar fondness for stringing three sentences together as one, separating them by semicolons.)

All that said, however, The House at Satan’s Elbow is well worth at least one reading if you’re a Carr fan. The locked-room puzzle is intricate, generally solid and probably the last first-rate impossibility Carr ever created. You may find it reminiscent of an earlier one — I won’t be more precise — but this one is different enough that I would acquit the author of mere repetition. And if the characters are pretty much out of his stock company, well, that never stopped me from enjoying one of his books before.

So, if you’re unsure about giving late (say, post-1960) Carr a try, this would be a good one to start with. Our old friend Dr. Fell is much as he had been 20 or 30 years earlier; the plot, in spite of a few contrivances, is not unworthy to stand aside those of Carr’s Forties mysteries. The main difference is the “late Carr” style of writing. If you can’t get past that, then the last two Fells and the final historical novels are probably not for you.

Edward D. Hoch: Nothing is Impossible (2013) – Part 2 of 3

Looking at stories #6 through #10 in this collection of impossible-crime stories featuring Dr. Sam Hawthorne, country medico and amateur sleuth in 1930’s New England. Part 1 is here.

“The Problem of the Invisible Acrobat”

What seems to happen: The Bigger & Brothers Circus has come to Northmont, which means the five Flying Lampizi Brothers will be performing their death-defying trapeze act. At the end of the performance, though, only four of them have come back down to ground level. Later, the missing brother is found murdered…

A classic problem with a classic solution you’ll spot in no time if you’ve read enough classic mysteries. If you’re new to the genre, Hoch does a pretty good job of hiding the clues.

“The Problem of the Curing Barn”

What seems to happen: tobacco magnate Jasper Jennings and two of his employees are in  a curing barn when one of them cuts his throat, practically under Dr. Sam’s nose – but neither man has a weapon on his person, nor is there one anywhere near.

If you read this story up to the point where Dr. Sam tells us “suddenly I knew I was right” and then do a re-read, you’ll probably spot the phrase that indicates the secret of the impossibility. The solution satisfies but is not all that well-hidden.

“The Problem of the Snowbound Cabin”  

What seems to happen: You can guess, can’t you? Ted Shorter enters his cabin in the Maine woods; snow falls; the next morning he’s found dead with no weapon or killer inside – and no tracks outside.

There’s nothing quite like a good no-footprints problem, and this is a good one, one that had me fooled. Before Dr. Sam figures out the truth he offers a solution that turns out to be false, but would have been good enough to be the real one.

“The Problem of the Thunder Room”

Not the typical locked-room or impossible-disappearance situation that usually confronts Dr. Sam. Instead, May Russo is lying on an examining table in his office at the exact time that witnesses swear she was several miles away, murdering Hank Foster.

Like “Invisible Acrobat,” the basic solution to this one is not original, but Hoch does give a fresh spin to an old classic.

“The Problem of the Black Roadster”

It’s the era of John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, so naturally masked men hold up the Farmers & Merchants Bank and clean out all the cash. Dr. Sam and Sheriff Lens happen to be driving by as the getaway car zooms off, but even though Lens has the state police throw up roadblocks all around Northmont, the robbers don’t go through any of them. And there’s no place they could be hiding within the perimeter.

The weakness of this one is that the impossibility does not seem all that airtight – a witness even says that the bad guys could have gone past one of the checkpoints before the roadblock was set up, and the best comeback a state cop has is “I doubt it.” That said, the way the robbers escape detection is a clever one, and for once it’s not Dr. Sam who figures things out, although again he comes up with a decent wrong explanation.

To be concluded eventually!

Lamb chops and pineapple

In Carter Dickson’s 1940 novel And So to Murder, Hollywood scriptwriter Tilly Parsons swears by a diet of lamb chops and pineapple as a great way to take off those extra pounds. (Her colleague Bill Cartwright calls it a “hellish combination”.) I assumed John Dickson Carr was parodying fad diets and had just made up an unlikely combination when I read this passage, but I’m in the middle of rereading Anthony Boucher’s 1941 The Case of the Solid Key, and at one point Fergus O’Breen suggests he and Norman Harker have lunch at a movie studio commissary: “Watch buxom blondes, brooding brunettes, and ravishing redheads – all eating lamb chops and pineapple?”

So I checked Wikipedia and sure enough, “lamb chops and pineapple” was a real fad diet back in the day! Apparently the idea was that the protein in the lamb and the sugar in the pineapple would give you strength, while the acid in the pineapple would dissolve the fat in the lamb, or something like that. Like so many fad diets, it turned out to be unhealthy because eating just two foods meant you were missing out on a lot of essential nutrients.

The things you learn reading classic mysteries!

Public Service Announcement: Anthony Boucher

I don’t know how long this has been going on, but Amazon Kindle is now selling Anthony Boucher’s Fergus O’Breen mysteries – The Case of the Crumpled Knave, The Case of the Solid Key, The Case of the Seven Sneezes – as well as The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, which does not feature Fergus but takes place in the same universe. Kindle also has Boucher’s short-story collection Exeunt Murderers. If you don’t have these books, this is a chance to get copies (well, e-copies) at a reasonable price.