“There’s far too much strangeness in the everyday to bother with making things up. Take the Ferris wheel for instance. If I sound dubious about it, it’s because it was a very literal-minded crime. That means one weapon, one victim, and one suspect. And the crime scene is what you might describe as ‘hermetically sealed.’ So it’s a ready-made collar. A little too good to be true, don’t you think? And I have a friend who favors the lateral rather than the literal approach to problem-solving. He’s taught me that when something seems too good to be true, it usually is.”

It’s 1938, and those who are drawn to locked-room murders, invisible killers and other assorted impossible crimes (but nota closed circle, do you hear me?!? A closed circle is something else altogether) must content themselves with the newest best-seller, The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr. Also To Wake the Dead by J.D. Carr. Also The Judas Window by Mr. Carr, under the alias of Carter Dickson. Also Death in Five Boxes by Mr. Dickson, who in reality is Joh- oh, you know. And did I mention Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by another writer whose name escapes me?

But if you’re Edmund Ibbs, apprentice solicitor, amateur magician and obvious stand-in for all those young Carr-ian gentlemen in peril in The Murder Wheel, Tom Mead’s second mystery novel, you don’t have to resort to mere books. For on this fine September day in 1938, Ibbs is about to confront a series of possibilities that will have him spinning – and just might get him hanged! Once again, it’s up to Joseph Spector, retired conjurer and explainer-of-the-impossible to sort out this varied series of bizarre occurrences and come up with the name of the killer. And as in Mead’s debut novel, Death and the Conjuror, the reader is challenged (on page 233) to proffer their own solution before all is revealed. 

Those of you who follow me around have often heard my harangue against publishers who throw various tomes labeled “MYSTERY” our way with vague promises that the author is  “an Agatha Christie for the modern age” (when they’re no such thing!) or that the plot contains a cunning “a locked room puzzle” (when they mean “closed circle,” a geographical limitation of the suspect list, which as I said above, is completely separate impossible crimes or locked rooms.) But Tom Mead is the real deal, a mystery nerd (like us!) who spent his youth absorbing the works of Carr and Queen and Christie and Brand (just like us!!) and now uses the classics as springboards for his own devilish confections (One of us! One of us!) 

Much of The Murder Wheel takes place at the Pomegranate Theater (whose owner figured prominently in Death and the Conjuror) where Ibbs has gone to rest his mind from the mystifying problems associated with the case he has been assigned. A woman named Carla Dean had accompanied her husband to a county fair. They ascended together on the huge Ferris Wheel, and when they reached the top, Dominic Dean gave a cry and clutched his stomach. On the ground it is revealed that Dean was shot to death. How could anyone but his wife have pulled the trigger?

Ibbs is part of the team defending Carla, and he hopes his love of magic will help him catch a big break, figure out the impossible and catapult his career, especially after he gets hold of a controversial book called The Master of Manipulation, which purports to reveal the secrets of the greatest feats of magic and legerdemain.  But first he hastens to the theatre to attend the comeback performance of Professor Paolini, a veteran magician, who left England five years earlier. And it is here that Mead leans into the theatricality of magic and its similarities to the mystery genre, where fans are faced with a powerful dilemma:

“It’s a paradoxical state of mind that afflicts the magician’s audience – they both want and do not want to be fooled. Perhaps they are like juries in that respect – they want to submit themselves to it, but they want to retain their own personal conception of a status quo.”

In front of a boisterous crowd (including by coincidence – or is it?!? – Joseph Spector himself), Ibbs is called up to assist Paolini with a trick involving a pistol. Then the Professor begins a big trick involving a suit of armor and a disappearing man. But something goes wrong, and suddenly a corpse lies on the stage, a body whose identity links this illusion gone wrong to the Ferris Wheel murder. And before the day’s investigation is completed, Ibbs will find himself directly involved in a locked room murder, the circumstances of which may remind some of you of another young man’s predicament in The Judas Window.

With three such juicy impossibilities laid before us, you might imagine that the section between the murders and their explanations would drag a bit. But I actually loved this middle section, where various characters act in increasingly desperate (and, arguably, stupid) ways and the danger is ramped up. During this section, too, one of the three impossibilities is solved, and I have to admit I felt mighty disappointed in this solution for reasons that I dare not go into. 

Then comes the “Challenge to the Reader,” that point where the author tells the reader that he has all the information he needs to explain all that has yet to be solved. To that, I say, “Well, sure . . . but just try!!!” I found the solutions to both murders quite clever. There were certainly some elements I recognized from classic GAD novels, but I found the explanation for the onstage murder particularly clever. As a person who never really solves the “how” in these types of mysteries because he’s more interested in the “who” and “why,” I could admire the methods used here, but I was really taken with Mead’s clueing of the motives for each crime. These turned out to be nearly as complicated as the methods, but they were well-clued.

My only problem was in motivation on the part of the detectives. Spector’s actions at the end certainly have precedent in classic detective novels but feels less earned here. And I have to say something about a particular thing Ibbs does at the beginning: he gets on a bus and, spying a bored little boy, he decides to take a sovereign out of his pocket and perform a magic trick for the lad which ends with the kid getting to pocket the coin for himself. 

I looked it up: the monetary value today of a 1938 British sovereign in dollars is $574!!! What kind of apprentice solicitor can afford losing money like that in such a cavalier fashion?!?

The Murder Wheel is a charming follow-up to Death and the Conjuror, even if I was a bit more enamored of the earlier novel. I can tell that Tom Mead has a long and steady career ahead of him of fashioning acts of deadly prestidigitation to baffle and amuse modern readers with classic tastes! It’s good to know that Joseph Spector will be back with a third adventure in the near future.