What is the most existential birthday present you’ve ever received?

I hope that question doesn’t seem too foreboding! It’s not my aim to inspire dread in any of my readers who are about to celebrate their own Big Day. I simply wanted to tell you all about the most existential birthday present I ever got. It happened on my most recent birthday, and boy! was I honored to receive it!

Last December I celebrated one of the Important Birthdays – you know, one of those with zeroes in it. (Just one zero, smart ass!) I woke up that morning to find many lovely birthday messages on my social media, including a special one from Las Vegas resident and friend of the blog James Scott Byrnside. He directed me to his website, where I found the first glimpse into his newest book, The Architecture of Murder. Following in the footsteps of his previous one, It’s About Impossible Crime, this is a collection of four shorter works. So, yes, I had to wait a bit for my present to make its full appearance, but now it’s here, and I get to share it with you.

Happily, all four of these tales are set in Golden Age middle America (usually Chicago and the environs around it), and all feature the grumpily brilliant private detective Rowan Manory and his quip-laden assistant, Walter Williams. The book’s title refers to the complex design process a murderer goes through when plotting out an impossible crime. In keeping with this metaphor, my vision for this collection is that it resembles one of those gigantic estates you might find in any of a thousand Golden Age mysteries. You know, where you drive through the gates and wind over and around the property until you come to a mansion large enough to house three generations of family, ten houseguests, and a staff of twenty. 

We begin our mental architectural tour at the handsome wrought-iron entrance gates where the charming cottage belonging to the groundskeeper stands. Actually our first story,  “Killer Pete,” is set in a gigantic castle, “a fortress of stone and iron that looked as though it had drifted west from the Rhine and gone to seed in the Illinois flatlands of Oak Brook.” It has been erected by a reclusive millionaire named Horace Cobb, who made his fortune in 1899 by inventing the Cobb Light Radial, a device that found its way into half the planes that flew over Europe in the Great War. Cobb has left the running of his engine factory in Cicero to others while he sits in his stony castle, dallies half-heartedly with his young lover, Victoria, and tinkers with his beloved automatons. (Yes, the callback to The Crooked Hinge, one of my favorite Carrs, is strong here – but this is not my birthday present!)

One of these contraptions is a life-size cowboy by the name of Killer Pete. Wind him up, and he faces you down, raises his gun, and fires. This time, it appears that the shot coming from Pete’s gun is a fatal one, for when Manory and Williams arrive at the castle, Mr. Cobb is lying dead in his enormous workshop, facing Killer Pete, with the only door to the room locked on the inside and the key taped to the floor fifteen feet away from the door. 

Manory interviews a half-dozen suspects and uncovers a highly complex back story that may have led to this tragedy. At the fifty-page mark, Byrnside issues a formal Challenge to the Reader, asking us to answer seven simple questions. Simple, hah!!! I’m happily mortified  to say that I could answer none of these questions, and yet Byrnside played completely fair with me, providing some excellent clues.

The second story, “Madmen Prefer Blondes,” resembles that impressive drive you take from the gates to the house, a road filled with glimpses among the trees of something odd and horrible. (Oh, you Byrnside! You can be sooo creepy!) The plot, as it unwinds, has strong allusions to all three of my favorite mystery authors, Christie, Queen and Carr – but this is not my birthday present, either!

A serial killer is terrorizing the city of Chicago, targeting blonde women (I do love the nod to Marilyn Monroe in the story’s title) and cutting their throats. The story alternately focuses between the efforts of the police team to track down the killer and the perspective of the Most Likely Suspect, a petty grifter named Benny Strake. (Christie fan that I am, I couldn’t help getting an A.B.C. Murders vibe as I read this.) The sections featuring Benny allow Byrnside, who loves exploring the seamy underbelly of early-20^th century Chicago, to take us to some dark places, like Benny’s less than successful date with a prostitute, or his tortuous tussle with two hoodlums, one of them hideously scarred and the other possessed of the brilliant name of Rollo Vasovagel and a psychotic giggle. (I, too would titter uncontrollably if my name was Rollo Vasovagel!)

Manory and Williams show up late to this one; in fact, you could almost say this tale really belongs to Delbert Grady, the odious police detective who has grudgingly worked with the private eyes on many of their recorded cases. Grady is under fire from the new mayor, “a choirboy, the sort who followed every rule, even those antithetical to results,” which means Grady has to play nice with the suspects. This mayor has so far resisted the expenseof bringinginManorytoconsult but saddles Grady with a renowned psychologist who specializes in serial murders, a man who conveniently has a beautiful blonde wife of his own and an assistant who might be up to no good. It is here that readers sensitive to these sorts of things might start getting a hit of Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails.

When the killer finally seems to make a mistake, Manory and Williams are brought in, and not a moment too soon. As the story heads toward its climax, the specter of John Dickson Carr shows up with a locked room murder – or, at least, it must be one if we are to receive any sort of surprise at the end. I have to admit that, while I had no clue how the murder was pulled off, I had little doubt as to the identity of the killer. All this reading of classic mysteries can’t help but hone the senses of any halfway decent armchair detective, and I’m no exception.

The third story, ”Red River,” is also the longest, which is as it should be because this is my birthday present!!! Think of it as the gorgeous mansion at the end of the drive, a little steeped in age as befits its thirty-nine years (wait! No zeroes!?!) but an architectural wonder nonetheless.

This time we get a village mystery, and I do love village mysteries. It’s set in the town of Red River, where on a snowy winter day, an illustrious citizen invites four other illustrious citizens to witness a miracle. The host is an actor, now owner of the town’s sole theater, who has decided to dabble in magic. He is an admirer of educators (perhaps he was one in a former life?), and he does like to talk, especially when his chatter can build to a dramatic climax. He is, as one character puts it, “quite the showman!” 

Oh, and his name? It’s . . . Bradley Friedman!

Yes, that Bradley Friedman: retired schoolteacher, theatre director and occasional actor, erstwhile blogger, lifelong mystery fan and quite the showman! And for my birthday, James Scott Byrnside put me into one of his stories! Better still . . . I’m the victim!!

Bradley has invited the town’s mayor, the sheriff, the new schoolteacher in town, and one of her students to the Visitor’s House, which “crouched at the edge of the woods like something half-forgotten, its windows swallowing what little November light remained.” He recounts the story of the only recorded murder in the town’s history, which occurred fifty years earlier in 1874. The victim was Ambrose Kellach, a professional magician so extraordinary that those who saw him called his talent “unnatural.” The history that Bradley recounts is a terrible one about a trick gone wrong (or did it??) and the town’s horrific response. 

Bradley has found the notes to Kellach’s tricks and intends to perform them in public. As a demonstration, he plans to show his four guests a trick called “The Unwalked Path,” which will get my pal JJ’s pulse racing because he lovesimpossible crimes involving footprints! The guests are asked to wait in the Visitor’s House for fifteen minutes while Mr. Friedman prepares the trick outside. Only . . . Bradley isn’t standing smugly outside when the others gather there. Instead, he’s found just inside the threshold of another nearby structure, the Folly House, with his throat slashed! 

A funeral follows, and the townsfolk give the victim a touching eulogy: “In life, Bradley has been all brightness – quick wit, easy laughter, a man who treated everyone as though the world were a game worth playing. Even weeks later, townspeople would recall his warmth and lack of bitterness. Who could hate a man enough like that to kill him, and why take such savage care in the doing?”

Oh, Byrnside, you know me so well! 

With such a baffling tragedy on their hands, the Sheriff’s deputy urges the Mayor to bring Rowan Manory and Walter Williams to Red River in order to sort out all these questions about footprints and other strange things in order to discover who had the audacity to murder someone as good and intelligent and handsome and fine as . . . well, you know who! Meanwhile, a young woman who left Red River behind in order to pursue her own ambitions in the big city returns with a mission from a dead man: her old friend Mr. Friedman had written to request that she look into the fifty-year-old double tragedy that still haunts the town. 

Despite at least two investigations going on simultaneously, a second murder occurs, and it’s yet another impossibility involving footprints. Rowan and Walter must work quickly before a frightening pastor, who may have ties to the long ago murder case, whips the townsfolk into a frenzied mob. Manory does solve the case, but the effect of his solution on Red River is devastating.

After touring the main residence, a passageway takes us straight out the back door into an expansive yard that contains an elaborate bouncy house shaped like the exterior of a creepy carnival, the setting of our final story, “The Carny Murders.” There’s no sign of Manory or Williams in this one; instead, we are introduced to a motley assortment of characters who populate Raymond Hargrove’s traveling carnival. They are the sort of oddballs you’d find in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), or Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936), or, most especially, the noir classic Nightmare Alley (1947). There’s the cynical Bearded Lady, the fortune teller, the aging strongman, and the Armless Wonder! The resident femme fatale is Sheila, the Tattooed Woman, and the newest attraction is a ventriloquist named Leonard Pike, whose dummy pal Marlow seems to be a little too much in control of the act, if you know what I mean. 

Then the fortune teller goes missing – in fact, three of the carny girls have disappeared in quick succession, and Raymond has an uneasy feeling that they haven’t simply left the job. What’s a boss to do? As Melvin tells him, “You kill a shopkeeper in Paducah, they’ll hunt you down to Tennessee. You kill a carny, nobody bothers filing the paperwork.” Which means the carnies are on their own, and things are about to get a whole lot creepier.

My lips are sealed about the rest of this story, except to say that Byrnside frees himself from the requirement of crafting an impossible crime and unleashes his pulp horror side to excellent effect. The mystery is bloody good fun and sleazy in all the right ways, as when the manager tries to hire outside labor to guard the carnies against the killer, but all he can afford to pay them with is “food and ten minutes with the sword swallower.” The death count climbs, building to an eye-popping climax that is rooted in the best tradition of the pulps. 

The Architecture of Fear is available for purchase on Amazon. My mom wants me to let James Scott Byrnside know that she does not appreciate his killing off her son. I’m more sanguine about it, and I enjoyed attending my own funeral and finding out how truly beloved I am. Thank you, Byrnside, for my birthday present! (And an extra thanks for not dropping me into that creepy carnival story!!!)