And so we start the second quarter-century of modern impossible crime novels which we’re no longer pretending I read solely for TomCat‘s benefit. Spoilers: I’m something of a fan of the impossible crime, so I actually read these because I’m hoping to find good modern examples of the form for myself — gasp!

Death on the Lusitania (2024) is the debut by husband-and-wife team Morgen Witzel and Marilyn Livingstone writing as R.L. Graham, though they have previously published at least eleven historical crime novels under the name A.J. MacKenzie. Marilyn Livingston sadly died between the writing and publication of this book, but a follow-up, The Spies of Hartlake Hall (2025), has been announced and so it seems Witzel will be continuing this series. I was drawn to this but its promise of a “body…discovered in a locked cabin with the key inside”, so how does it hold up to my previous attempts to find something notable in this subgenre from current authors?

We start on 1st May 1915 aboard the Lusitania, in dock at New York and about to set sail for Liverpool on what we know will be its final voyage. Government man Patrick Gallagher — clearly involved in espionage, given his bland claim to work for the Paymaster General’s Office — is escorting Harry Chalfont, formerly the British Vice-Consul in New York, back to England in some sort of disgrace, and a whole busload of Types are along for the ride: captain of industry Edwin Franklin, German engineer and “efficiency expert” Charles Schurz, former associate of Gallagher’s and ex-Navy officer James Dowrich, theatrical impresario William Ripley, and Dolly Markland, now a wife with a reputation to uphold who clearly had dealings with Ripley before this voyage.

These few, plus an elderly couple fleeing violence in South America, will all take their meals together in the Lusitania‘s dining room, and before too long mysteries will begin to swirl. Clandestine conversations are whispered in darkened corners, sinister implications will positively bristle at all turns, and one of them will indeed be found shot twice in the chest in their cabin despite the key to the room being on the desk therein:

“Poor devil,” [the steward] said, looking at the body. “Locked himself in his room and shot himself. God knows it’s happened before.”

Gallagher shook his head. “There are two bullet holes. Suicides will shoot themselves once, but not twice. And also, where is the gun?”

What’s good about this setup is that Graham, to give the authors their preferred sobriquet, is very good at clear characterisation, keeping these people distinct in the mind even as, in an early chapter, they all appear one after another at the dinner table in a sort of ‘meet the gang’ montage. As the various members of Table 22 bounce around the ship, encountering both each other and the larger body of passengers in general, there’s never any confusion a bout who is doing what where and why they might be doing it, so clean are the people in your mind and so deftly do our authors handle them.

Additionally, the trappings of history soak through in a way that perhaps belies this apparent debut author’s familiarity with working in an historical milieu. From casual mentions of ships having previously flown the Stars and Stripes in order to appear neutral to any gunships or U-boats they encounter (“That would be a violation of the laws of war.”) to the ease with which every tiny detail is covered as it becomes relevant — cigarettes, matches, the contents of a room — there’s an assured hand steering us through the trappings of history without ever calling your eye to the research that must have gone into this.

Mahogany-panelled walls, green marble fireplaces imitating the malachite rooms of Russian palaces, a barrel-vaulted skylight set amid a plaster ceiling that could have been designed by Robert Adam, an immense green and yellow floral-patterned carpet and plush upholstered furniture; a mishmash of styles and motifs and yet somehow it all worked, combining to form a picture of effortless luxury sealed off and insulated from the outside world, where submarines launched torpedoes from hidden depths and men died crucified on barbed wire or suffocated in the gas vapours filling their lungs.

It must also be said, too, that the sense of threat posed by sailing from the neutral United States into the tinderbox of Europe is very keenly felt:

In the far distance a lighthouse flashed, blurry through driving rain: Montauk Point at the eastern tip of Long Island, sliding away astern. Ahead lay 3,000 miles of open sea; and then, the war zone.

To an extent, this all adds an air of HIBK to proceedings, since we know — and if we didn’t the authors are good enough to remind us up front — that the Lusitania was sunk as it approached Britain, and so the constant reflections on the ship’s impending presence in an area of great international danger is…not exactly bittersweet, that’s the wrong word, but…something along those lines, at least.

As a protagonist, Gallagher is a little bland, seemingly fixated on a lost love in a way that, in fairness, really does make you ache at times (“Ayala had been Roxanne’s favourite champagne… Somehow, in this company, he could not bear the memory. He set the glass down untasted.”) but at others simply interrupts the flow of the various plots and feels like a debut author ensuring their manuscript reaches the appropriate word count (absolutely not a problem here, the hardcover is nearly 400 pages). And “various plots” is the right phrase because, crikey, are there a lot of subplots in this thing.

The main draw for me was, as mentioned, that locked room shooting:

“Someone killed [the victim] and then escaped from a locked cabin without a key. Or, the door was unlocked and they walked out, but somehow they locked the door behind them. Again, without a key.”

Precisely how impossible this crime is will be up to the individual, but the existence of spare keys — apparently untouched, but not with any mathematical certainty — and the fact that the ship’s stewards all have pass keys which can unlock (and therefore presumably lock) any door unarguably makes it rather borderline. The fact that this is also one of seventeen subplots on the boil here is underlined by the very casual way it is resolved, relying on a piece of oversight that is fun if not exactly original or likely to endear Gallagher to you for allowing it to happen.

And here’s where my main difficulty comes in with Death on the Lusitania — not, incidentally, a difficulty I expect everyone to share, especially not if you go in forewarned: there is not one moment of detection in the entire thing. The copy I got from my library — use your local library, people, they’re incredible resources — has a gold sticker on the front with a quote attributed to Philip Gray saying “Perfect for lovers of Agatha Christie” and, yes, we know that an Agatha Christie comparison typically has all the enduring sincerity of a mayfly’s promise, but it at least raises the possibility of some detection or clever misdirection or something, and…there’s none.

As a rollicking novel of espionage and historical adventure, the book is far more successful, mainly because that’s what it is. Shady tête-à-têtes, histrionically “hissed” sentences that could never be delivered in that way (“Open the god-damned door or I’m gonna break it down.”), multi-character plots and sub-plots as the people on board overlap and bounce off each other, revealing previous connections and shady motivations for being on the boat…all this and more does Death on the Lusitania provide, with joyous abandon (along with, it must be said, a few passages of purple prose), but when, on the back cover, Greg Mosse calls it “A vivid historical detective mystery” he’s…mistaken.

The fault, though, is largely mine, since I went into this hoping for a more rigorous book than it was ever intending to be. I won’t be following Patrick Gallagher’s adventures any further, but I can well believe that those of you who like a less formal, more loosely-structured time will have a lot of fun with this. Its keen evocation of times past, and the careful way it probes at tragedy to frame the fictional events it depicts, really do commend it — on another day, in a more forgiving mood, I can honestly believe it would have been exactly the sort of thing I was after. For now, though, I look ahead into 2025 in the hope that it can bring me the rigorous novel of the impossible crime that I so crave from a modern author. And, if you’re awaiting the same, don’t forget that you could always read mine in the meantime.

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