At the end of this week, I will be attending Bouchercon, the world mystery convention, being held this year in Dallas, Texas. It's an annual event at which mystery authors and mystery readers meet each other and mingle, all in celebration of the many sub-genres of mystery fiction, from cozies to thrillers. This year is the fiftieth annual celebration of Bouchercon, which was named for the late Anthony Boucher, long-time reviewer and critic for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and other major publications. Boucher, born William Anthony Parker White, was tremendously influential as an editor as well as a critic in both the Science Fiction and mystery genres, and he wrote novels and short stories in those fields along with his criticism. As Wikipedia points out, in a 1981 poll of seventeen prominent mystery authors, Boucher's novel Nine Times Nine (1940) was voted the ninth best locked room mystery novel of all time. That may be arguable, but it is certainly a fine example of the possibilities of the "impossible crime" novel. Nine Times Nine is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Nine Times Nine focuses on a religious cult known as the Temple of Light, patterned after the many screwball religious cults that could be found in Los Angeles in the years leading up to the second world war. The charismatic leader of that cult called himself Ahasver, and he claimed to be the Wandering Jew of Christian legend. He was known to his followers – who called themselves the Children of Light - as the Man in the Yellow Robe; any time he was seen anywhere, he wore a yellow robe, with a yellow hood. At a very public meeting of the cult, Ahasver offered a terrifying curse - what he said was the curse of the Nine Times Nine - against Wolfe Harrigan, a man working on exposing the cult and unmasking its leader.
The very next night, at the Harrigan home, witnesses outside the house saw a man in a yellow robe standing inside Wolfe’s study - Wolfe’s locked and bolted study - with only a single door that could possibly have been used for an entrance or an exit – and that door had been watched constantly. Yet when they broke down the bolted door, they found Wolfe Harrigan’s body – shot to death – and an otherwise empty room. No sign of Ahasver (or anybody else, for that matter) in a yellow robe – and no way he could have gotten out of the room. When they went to confront Ahasver at his Temple of Light, they found that at the moment when he was seen inside that study, apparently murdering Wolfe Harrigan…he was also speaking to more than a hundred of his supporters across town, who would be quite eager to attest to that fact as an alibi.
Impossible? You bet. Nine Times Nine is the kind of book that first hooked me on impossible mysteries. I suggest - strongly - that you give it a try.
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