Send a thief to catch a thief, eh? And then try to catch that second thief and frame him for the theft done by the original thief? Sir, you’re not playing very fairly with Lester Leith.

When an international gem thief checks into the Palace Hotel with a trunk which the police have good reason to suspect contains contraband jewels, and when the thief gets murdered and his trunk disappears before anyone gets a chance to take a look at it, the two-fold mystery is too great to simply ignore. “[I]t’s easier to get money out of the safe then to get baggage out [of the hotel] without a proper check,” Leith’s valet Scuttle — actually police spy Edward H. Beaver — tells his boss, in the hope that the borderline impossible vanishing of the trunk will intrigue him.

“[T]he trunk vanished. It simply evaporated into thin air. It went in, but it didn’t stay in. Yet it didn’t go out. There isn’t a single clue to the murderer, nor to the trunk!”

I’m not sure if this is quite an impossibility, despite the apparently watertight security of the hotel and police searching every room — there’s nothing to stop the guilty party hiding the trunk in Room 3 while the police search Room 1, and then moving it to Room 1 while they’re searching Room 2 and before they get to Room 3 — but those fine, erudite gentlemen Robert Adey and Otto Penzler disagree with me, since the former lists it in Locked Room Murders (1991) and the latter included it in The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries [ss] (2014), so I’ll not argue the case too hotly. And, yes, I’m aware there’s a second impossible vanishing…but that doesn’t qualify, either, and we’ll get to why in due course.

Leith is, of course, intrigued, and checks in to the hotel — into the exact rooms the murdered man had, in fact — making Sergeant Ackley, nemesis of our gentleman rogue, convinced that “[h]e’s got the hiding place of those diamonds figured out, and he’s going there to cop ’em off”. What’s less clear is why, before checking into the hotel, Leith paid $6,000 to bail out unrepentant pickpocket Bessie Bigelow, and why he puts her up in one of the two rooms he’s reserved. Even Bessie herself has misgivings…

“Listen,” insisted the blonde, “if you’re playin’ Santa Claus with the idea that you’re gettin’ a blonde lady friend you got another guess comin’. … I ain’t goin’ to be a sweetie, and I ain’t goin’ to reform. I’m spillin’ it to you straight because you got a chance to go back an’ glom the coin you put up for bail… I’ve done lots o’ things in my life, but I ain’t never obtained no money from a gent under false pretences. I’m a girl that shoots right straight from the shoulder, that’s me.”

Having read the story — twice, now — I’m still not sure why Bessie’s in it, but the character gives Gardner a chance to play up the bold-as-brass, hard-edged female criminal trope to almost its fullest extent (oh, to put her in a room with Bertha Cool…). I especially enjoy her scorning of having been labelled a kleptomaniac — “That’s a line of hooey the lawyer thought up for the judge.” — despite her actions later on showing that she is very much under the grip of some such compulsion. I’ll repeat that, the final sting in the tale aside, I have no idea why she’s there, but I love the little moments she shares with Leith before getting sidelined so we can get on with the plot proper.

“Can you look meek and regretful?”

“Maybe.”

“Okay. Get gloomy, then… Pull out the handkerchief and droop the eyes,” he said.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, hung her head.

“Okay, but don’t put it on too thick, or I’ll giggle.”

I’ll attempt not to spoil too much of what unfolds — though, this being one of Gardner’s pulp stories, the plot isn’t exactly complex — but when a second vanishing brings the police to the scene my interest was piqued because it would appear to be impossible except…well.

It’s telling, I feel, that early on in this story Leith lambasts the police for failing to draw the correct conclusions from the information provided at a crime scene:

“Many times all the facts necessary to solve a crime are in the hands of the police, and in the hands of the newspaper reporters. They simply don’t fit those facts together. It’s like one of those jigsaw puzzles. There may be all the parts in one’s hands, but fitting each part so it dovetails with the corresponding part to make a complete picture is something else.”

This is, in a way, an alternative way of looking at the eighth rule of Ronald Knox’s Decalogue, and celebrating the writer’s ability to get one over on their reader by also providing the information that the reader then fails to assemble correctly. Except…apart from one piece of information that we’re wrong to take at face value — a key part of the genre, I do not contest — the vanishing in this case is achieved by the performance of actions that the reader is not told about. And I get why, because it makes for a better, more punchy ending, I’m just not convinced that it qualifies as an impossibility.

The nearest analogy I can think of is a man found strangled in a locked room, with the door bolted on the inside and four windows similarly barred, bolted, nailed shut, or secured in any way you choose, and the solution being that the whole time there was a fifth window standing wide open which wasn’t mentioned until the ending to maximise the befuddlement of the reader. This isn’t quite that egregious, but you wouldn’t call that an impossible crime and on similar grounds I don’t think it’s correct to call this one.

Don’t, however, allow my cavilling to give the impression that the solution is any less enjoyable for not being openly declared. Gardner has a good sense of how to launch an attack on your expectations, and he does that here — along with some police brutality which is at odds with the playful tone of the tale throughout, though perhaps appropriate for the era — and will make you smile while doing so. So let your expectations be suitably lowered if you’re coming to this on Adey or Penzler’s recommendation, but be prepared to have a good time anyway. And, well, what more could you ask for?