“A man is shot in a room from which, apparently, no one could have made an exit. Now what’s the first rational possibility that strikes you?”.  It is the shooting of Wolfe Harrigan which Detective Lieutenant Terrence Marshall must solve: rationalist and exposure of religious chicanery Harrigan having apparently been shot by Ahasver, the yellow robe-wearing, centuries-old Wandering Jew who leads the Children of Light church in Los Angeles…and was on stage at the time of said shooting. And when the “rankly fantastic notion of a secret passageway” in Harrigan’s study is dismissed, what possible explanation can there be? Men don’t just vanish into thin air…

It is into this situation that writer Matt Duncan finds himself thrown; having approached the wealthy and influential Harrigans on a quite different matter, he hits it off with Wolfe and is taken on as the man’s amanuensis just before the murder. Having seen first-hand the curse of the Nine Times Nine that Ahasver put on Wolfe, and especially how the ritual “transform[ed] plain and good people into the vessels of mad hatred”, Duncan is inclined to take the matter very seriously. But, again, how to explain that disappearance? When even The Hollow Man, a.k.a. The Three Coffins (1935) by John Dickson Carr can’t provide the answer, you know you’re in trouble.

Nine Times Nine (1940) by Anthony Boucher was among the first impossible crime novels I read after getting an ereader — the book proving remarkably difficult to find in physical form — and had enjoyed a strong reputation in my memory. It’s pleasing, then, to revisit it and see it largely stand up, whether from the sly comments Boucher makes about religious cults…

[T]he rewards [Ahasver’s gospel] held out were no vague promises of future bliss; they were pointed and documented assurances that the man who knew the Ancients could win friends and influence people no end.

…to the slightly more dangerous realisation that “political allusions…are creeping more and more often into the messages of the Ancients”. We’re the best part of a decade from the Red Scare of Joseph McCarthy, but it’s interesting to see Ahasver preach about “Communist doctrines preached abroad” and the effect Boucher imagines this having on his audience of decent, everyday, middle class Americans. The man really was ahead of his time.

Of course, the book also provides a dying message, a “last clew by which the murdered man, in extremis, leaves a cryptic token of his murderer’s identity. The sort of thing Ellery Queen has so much fun with” — and, just to reassure you that he’s playing the game (Boucher must be, after all, the only person to ever lock a room with Catholicism) there are references to G.K. Chesterton, assurances that the Sherlock Holmes canon “aren’t mysteries” because of the withholding of information, and a reference to the fact that “Mr. Carr wouldn’t like it” if your room was unsealed by linguistic trickery alone. There’s also a pleasing bit of meta-reflection that a character about to spill some beans would be killed before they got the chance “in a standard whodunit”, so you can be assured that Boucher is a student of the genre, and knows how to play the game.

Enter, then, Sister Ursula, whose father was a detective and who has a “special weakness” for locked room mysteries. Sure, she may not care for the Croftian principle of alibis or John Rhode’s ingenious murder traps, but we’ll forgive her that for the calm, common sense she brings to proceedings, figuring out Wolfe’s dying message very quickly and then unpicking the means by which the murderer left the room. This, it must be said, isn’t clued quite as fairly as it might be, and is perhaps the one blot on this reread: a sudden second life of a minor character must be introduced, and knowledge the reader never had is unfurled to explain the key principles. And…fine, it would have been difficult to do properly, but it would be nice if Boucher were a little more open-handed in a few instances.

But, well, everything else is so good. The book licks along, the romance is a little creepy but evolves reasonably sensibly, and there are a couple of legitimately good jokes. Boucher captures his characters quickly and memorably (“Joseph was doing nothing, majestically.”) and manages to put in the occasional passage to make you sit back for a moment or two:

Death is not so terrible among the rich, [Matt] thought; with them it only balances the account, while from the poor it takes their last possession.

Intriguing, too, is the claim that “Boris Karloff…[had] committed just such a [locked room] crime in a Universal picture shortly to be released” — anyone know if this is true? Boucher’s note at the start makes it clear that this is set contemporary to its writing, but Karloff was in 13 films in 1939 and 1940 alone…so any narrowing down would be appreciated!

In the final analysis, then, yes, this was fun to reread and I’m glad to have taken the opportunity to look it over a second time. Is it the ninth-best impossible crime novel of all time? No, but it’s better than its sequel Rocket to the Morgue (1942), and that’s been reprinted recently, so, c’mon, someone give this another shot in paperback. I, for one, would love a physical copy…one that would then mysteriously vanish from my bookshelf, no doubt.