Listen, if I was a lawyer and someone had built a replica of a house cursed by werewolves in an isolated location called Solitude Mountain, there’s no hourly rate in the world that would get me driving there for a spooky weekend.

Murder at Black Oaks (2022) by Phillip Margolin starts off encouragingly for those of us who are tired of modern publishing’s inability to distinguish between a locked room (a.k.a. impossible crime, a.k.a. miracle problem) mystery and a closed circle one, with the following author’s note to give us hope:

When I was in elementary school and junior high school I devoured the novels of Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and other great mystery writers. Murder at Black Oaks is an homage to all of the great writers from the Golden Age of mysteries who inspired me to write a novel with an impossible murder, a haunted mansion, secret passages, and a werewolf curse, the wonderful ingredients that made those old mysteries so great.

Those are some big names to throw around, of course, which is a strategy that’s not without risk — Margolin could, after all, fail to live up to the high expectations of readers who know the calibre he is seeking to honour. And so the good news is that this comparison with the greats is, thankfully, not responsible for Murder at Black Oaks coming off as a cheap imitation of the best genre in the world. No, the book Margolin has written is terrible enough to tank all on its own terms.

I don’t even know where to begin with this one, as I can find very little to say in its favour. Firstly, the structure is all over the place, the first third concerning the imprisonment of Jose Alvarez for murder and the later discovery by Frank Melville, the D.A. responsible for Alvarez’s conviction, that Alvarez wasn’t guilty and so is on Death Row wrongly. Never mind that there’s simply no way the trial which convicted Alvarez would have been allowed to go ahead with such staggering oversights as were apparently committed, nor that the ‘evidence’ which frees him is surely as specious and subject to intense doubt as the evidence which convicted him in the first place…it’s also told so slowly and with so littler interest — and such odd leaps forward in time — that any editor worth their percentage would have said “Er, maybe deal with this in a couple of sentences in chapter 4, Phil” and cut down the tedium.

Once Alvarez is free, Melville invites him, Robin Lockwood — the lawyer responsible for his release, and Margolin’s series character — and Lockwood’s investigator Ken Breland out to Black Oaks to apologise in person and attempt reparation. And so, of course, he also invites faded Hollywood action star Corey Rockwell because…well, we’ll get to Corey Rockwell, but a) there’s absolutely no reason for Rockwell to be there except as the reddest herring to ever herring and b) there’s absolutely no reason for Rockwell to be there anyway, since Melville’s in-book intentions do not require the actor’s presence. Anyway, it’s during his gathering that mudslides block off the roads, a patient escapes from the local hospital for the criminally insane, and Melville is murdered in — sigh — impossible circumstances.

Oh, lord, that “impossible” murder.

The setup is, roughly speaking, this: Melville is going to up bed, using the elevator installed in Black Oaks because he’s been paralysed from the waist down for twenty years and is in a wheelchair — we’ll get to that wheelchair later. The elevator has a habit of jarring to a stop between floors, and, when it does it this time, the sound of the emergency alarm, set off by someone in the elevator, brings Lockwood and others out to investigate. Upon climbing through the emergency hatch in the elevator’s roof, Lockwood finds Melville stabbed in the heart with a dagger — we need to talk about that dagger, too — but, since the alarm was tripped from inside the elevator, and the dagger too big to pass through the grating in the door, how could anyone possibly have murdered Melville and gotten out of the elevator?

Now, can you spot the problem with this “impossible” murder? I’ll give you a minute.

If you said “But, Jim, there’s a hatch in the roof of the elevator that anyone could climb through” well done, you’ve given this plot more thought than its author, especially as it’s established that Lockwood, who was first on the scene, “might have waited as much as a minute or two” before going out to investigate the noise of the alarm. As much as a minute or two. A minute. Or two. Never mind that this timing contradicts information given later about how soon other people were on the scene — Melville’s daughter Nelly and secretary-cum-love-interest Sheila Monroe were on hand to see Melville go up in the elevator to begin with, so must have been astonishingly disinterested to wait more than two minutes to follow up the alarm — it opens up a huge window of opportunity for someone to have committed a murder in a location with a perfectly accessible exit and use said exit to leave the location, and as such isn’t an impossible murder. What you’ve written, Mr. Margolin, is a very, very, very possible murder indeed.

Now, no, this isn’t how the murder was committed — though there’s absolutely no reason why it couldn’t have been — but, as I’ve said before, failure to interrogate alternatives doesn’t mean that those alternatives don’t exist. The detection of the actual method employed also isn’t even slightly fair, with one object, obviously involved, mentioned in passing and then tellingly vanishing…but said vanishment remains unknown to the reader until Lockwood confronts the killer in the final chapter, making me suspect that Margolin hasn’t even glanced at a classic novel of detection since junior high and is under the impression that this is how things were done back then. Which, well, leads me on to my next problem.

This novel came to my attention because of a piece Margolin wrote for the CrimeReads website in which he spoke of the joy of being able to invoke many of the trappings and tropes of Golden Age detective fiction in a modern novel. But, like, in invoking these tropes — there’s a hidden passage, there’s a curse involving werewolves, there’s the small matter of disputed identity — he displays nothing more than an awareness of their existence, since he certainly has no idea about how to deploy them. Practically every single one — probably all of them, but I’m being careful not to fall into lazy generalisations — is given lip-service and then immediately dismissed like he’s ticking off the sights of a new city: he’s taken a photograph to prove he was there, and certainly doesn’t need to stick around to absorb any of the culture, thankyouverymuch. Busy, busy, busy, being somewhere and experiencing that place are the exact same thing, now chop chop, fifteen more things to look at before we stop for lunch.

The werewolf curse, for instance, is in here only because the original house on which Black Oaks is modelled had some legend about werewolves and black masses attached to it, with the dagger that kills Melville apparently of the type that was used in said satanic rites. But that’s it. It never ties into the plot except that it existed somewhere else once: no-one is suspected of being a Satanist, there’s no motif of rationally-explained howling or incomprehensible beastly attacks (and don’t you “But the dream sequence…” at me — dream sequence my arse)…Margolin just mentions werewolves early on — associated, once again, with a completely different house in a completely different country — and then moves on. When you consider how richly the Golden Age played with notions of the eldritch, even if the results are rather mixed — c.f. It Howls at Night (1937) by Norman Berrow, He Who Whispers (1946) and Below Suspicion (1949) by John Dickson Carr, The Pale Horse (1961) by Agatha Christie, etc. — it’s embarrassing to think that this is what someone thinks passes for a reference to that seam of the best genre in the world. Hell, all it does here is prove that whoever had the knife which kills Melville made knew about the curse, and so wipe half the suspects from consideration at a single bound.

Equally, the hidden passage: the original house had one, so does Black Oaks, someone is found dead in it, job done; it’s a conceit that’s functional with no purpose, it adds nothing to the book for being there, and could be removed with no real effort. And the notion of disputed identity is hilariously bad when you put it against the Golden Age’s playful tinkering through the likes of The Unicorn Murders (1935) by Carter Dickson: Victor Zelko, inmate at the aforementioned hospital, escapes, Carl Samuels with the sheriff’s office comes to the house to warn the denizens, someone thinks Samuels looks a lot like Zelko, then it turns out that Samuels is Zelko. Right, what’s for dinner?

This brevity is, at least, in evidence everywhere, with characters introduced like you’re genning up from notes you’ve made ahead of an exam…

Like Robin, Loretta was the first person in her family to graduate from college. She’d grown up in the Bronx, graduated from Queens College in New York, and traveled to Portland when she received a full ride from Lewis & Clark Law School. Loretta’s hire had nothing to do with diversity. She had finished fifth in her class, had clerked on the Oregon Supreme Court, and was not only a brilliant appellate attorney but was showing promise as a trial lawyer. She was also fun to be around.

…and then no more ever said about them to provide any depth or intrigue or shift of perception. For an apparent mystery novel there’s really no mystery to any of this. Luther, the houseman at Black Oaks, has a scarred face; Mrs. Raskin, the housekeeper, has grey hair; none of these people really exist, they’re just one-piece puzzle, existing in the vicinity and along the essential lines of what should be an interesting notion but never intersecting with the principle of what they’re aping in a way that makes them feel purposeful. And, even with this extremely first base form of character writing there are still astonishing oversights: Melville’s wheelchair is featured six times before we’re told it’s motorised, Sheila Monroe apparently might have ulterior motives but nothing ever comes of them, Luther’s backstory is divined with so little information to land on so concrete a conclusion that I half expected Lockwood to turn to the reader and reveal she knew she was in a book and thus had access to the author’s thinking.

Mostly, if it’s not already apparent, Murder at Black Oaks is also full of just really bad sentence-by-sentence writing, featuring gems like…

As she drew closer to her destination, buildings grew scarcer, the space between them grew greater.

…and someone genuinely referring to the reopening of a cold case in which a woman was knifed to death by saying, with a completely straight face, that they “[want] to take a stab at it”. Oh, god, and I haven’t even gotten to Corey Rockwell, who is invited to Black Oaks because Melville suspects him of killing his (own) wife and framing someone — the cold case just mentioned. I don’t have the energy to go into it, which is a shame as such a complete absence of intrigue, doubt, subtlety, common sense, intelligence, and general writing acumen deserves to be pulled apart for the complete folly of a plot strand it is, but just trust me when I say that it makes no sense, serves no purpose, and feels very much like it was included only because the book came in under-length and needed another eight chapters in order to fulfil the basic contractual requirements of what passes as a ‘novel’.

Phillip Margolin has written 26 books, and it is to be hoped that Murder at Black Oaks represents by some significant separation the absolute nadir of both his own work and publishing in general in this third decade of the 21st century. As a love letter to the ingenuity of trope application that marked out the Golden Age it might just be the single most misguided thing ever put on paper, and I cannot recommend it in any way, shape, or form. The amount of damage this could do to the perception of the work of Carr, Christie, and Queen by mentioning them up front is incalculable, and I would happily pulp every copy, set fire to the pulpings, bury the ashes in the foundations of a building, buy that building simply to knock it over, and then build a chemical waste factory on the ground to stop anyone ever going near any part of this book ever for the remainder of human history. My god it’s awful, and I enjoyed the hell of out every lousy, half-baked second of it.

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