People will tell you that I don’t like the Brooks U. Banner stories of Joseph Commings. And, well, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

See, there was a time when I was really, really getting into the delights represented by the impossible crime in fiction and, as a result, took it, perhaps, just a little too seriously. I wanted grand plans, ingenious solutions, nothing but originality and magnificence and — most importantly — I wanted it to be treated Very Earnestly Indeed.

It was in this frame of mind that I stumbled over a hardcover of Banner Deadlines (2004), the much-sought collection of Banner short stories put out by Crippen & Landru and now, as then, vanishingly hard to find. And so, knowing Commings’s reputation, I settled down, prepared to be blown away…and got treated to pulpy, slightly playful attempts to astound while elbowing in the ribs that did not fit my self-important tastes at the time.

And so, several years later, and having enjoyed a couple of Banner stories in isolation in the likes of Bodies from the Library 6 [ss] (2023), I’m here to take on this collection a second time, and hopefully be able to relax and find more joy in his Pulpish leanings.

See, I think I got off to a poor start with Commings, since ‘Murder Under Glass’ (1947) isn’t exactly vintage stuff. The problem of a man found stabbed in a giant glass bell — “It’s all one thick, solid, unbreakable piece. And it literally weighs a ton.” — is creative, but the solution tediously mechanical, even if the workings do rely on a garishly Pulpy idea that’s difficult not to enjoy.

More successful is Commings’s writing, which while overflowing with simile and metaphor to the point of distraction…

He picked the nub of a cigar out of the ash try, stuck it between his teeth and tried to bring it back to life by making a bellows out of his cheeks.

…is full of sublime minor character notes (“She was not exactly plump, just a little too much of everything.”). Serious Jim would have missed these first time around, being concentrated fully on plot, and the plot is far from the best.

A séance concerns us in ‘Fingerprint Ghost’ (1947), but not the various manifestations within the séance itself. Rather it’s the stabbing of the medium when everyone was in straitjackets and sitting in a circle with each person resting their right foot on the left of the person next to them. Again, some great minor character notes (“Her whole face was as wrinkled as the palm of an old leather mitten.”) and a lovely, succinct confrontation of the idea that, sure, someone could just wriggle out of their straitjacket…but how could they then put it back on?

Again, this is very pulpy, and again that’s Commings’s metier and so it’s meaningless to cavil too greatly, and this is not even remotely fair play of course, but short stories rarely are. Again it doesn’t feel ingenious, but the comparisons frequently made of Banner to Carter Dickson‘s Henry ‘H.M’ Merrivale are valid and carry this though on good feeling alone, and it’s rollicking enough and trades in good atmosphere, even if I do wish I loved it rather than liked it.

I remembered disliking ‘The Spectre on the Lake’ (1947), and I wasn’t wrong. Again, the question — how two men can be shot at close range while alone in a rowing boat in the middle of an untenanted lake — is answered in the least interesting way, and the misdirection relies on a visual principle that would be much better if shown on screen rather than told about in print. And the characters aren’t interesting, either.

It’s to be wondered if we’re progressing in strict chronological order with these stories — we are in publication order, as the list at the back of this collection makes clear — since ‘The Black Friar Murders’ (1948) is the most successful fusion of plot and character yet. I mean, I still don’t quite believe the central effect that sees a knife-wielding killer vanish through a stone wall, but the sulfurous air of dread summoned up by the gloomy abbey and the tale of a murderer on the loose hits more effectively than any previous settings.

“[P]hony spiritualist” is, however, a tautology, and the ease with which an impersonation takes place is surely too corny to pass any sort of muster. 30 years earlier it would be easier to swallow, but the idea that everyone was taken in feels rather…convenient. Again, Commings believes it on the page, but I don’t believe it in my head.

‘Ghost in the Gallery’ (1949) is clearly a favourite of Adey’s, since he included it in The Art of the Impossible [ss] (1990). I enjoyed it a lot more second time there, and had a very good time with it on third encounter here. It is, by some distance, the best story so far in the collection, with a strong use of architecture and, at last, a misdirection that I believe would present in reality as we’re told it would on the page. Please note: I’m not saying it would happen like that, rather than Commings’s telling makes me believe it would, which is far more important.

The increased incident of this one feels like Commings maybe cracked a code in his own writing. If memory serves, the stories get busier from here, which speaks of a man learning how to effectively cram in events to the limited space offered by the short form. Good final line, too; always pays to leave the reader smiling.

Once more, the mechanics of ‘Death by Black Magic’ (1948) are big and uninspired, but the writing shows a real leap forwards in quality, using everything from the weather to exaggerated details of people’s appearance to stir in unease. Even the setting — and old theatre, rumoured to be haunted since the leading man strangled his wife on stage in its final performance — is well-limned, with tiny details like a paper star pasted on a door, “curling up like a starfish with the cramps” and occasionally pulpy turns of phrase as colourful as anything from Chandler:

The lobby doors got a rubdown with nightsticks.

Again, the layering of events is well-handled, but I’ve seen some excellent examples of ‘man killed on stage with no-one near him’ and this one feels unimaginative for all its gaudy trappings.

A 12 year gap results in full Victorian ludicrousness on show in ‘Murderer’s Progress’ (1960), where five members of a gentlemen’s club decide to each set an apparently impossible problem for Banner to solve, only for one of them to end up dead having apparently a) vanished impossibly from a watched room and b) committed a murder several blocks away only a short time later. The workings are ridiculous in the extreme, but it’s hard not to enjoy the sheer nonsense chutzpah of it all, with again some superbly hard-edged turns of phrase (“[He] picked our brains the way a crow picks the heart out of cherries.”) that shows the roots Commings is growing from.

Interesting, too to see a reference to the “shooting at the legation on X Street”, implying that Commings had something akin to ‘The X Street Murders’ (1962) already in mind at this point. I’ve always wondered how far ahead authors conceive of short stories, but I guess there’s no strict limit: some you’ll steam over for years, others you’ll knock out in an afternoon. I imagine.

My, how the turn tables. ‘Castanets, Canaries and Murder’ (1962) lacks in focus — first it’s about the poisoning of the canaries owned by the frankly exhausting starlet Imperio Ramilles, then an impossible murder-on-camera rears its head with the poisoning back-burnered on the dodgiest psychological reasoning going. Some lovely phraseology enlivens things (“[H]is gray britches sagged as if he were hiding a dwarf in them.”) but the uncertain plot falls a little short for me; however, the method for the impossible murder is a chef’s kiss of ingenuity.

Actually, wait, t’was ‘The X Street Murders’ (1962) that I first read from Commings, in one of the Mike Ashley collections. And I hated it. It was, to quote the good senator, “too damned impossible!” — the shooting of a man apparently achieved by a gun in a sealed envelope that fired through the paper without leaving any holes done purely for the sake of adding befuddlement to a fairly transparent scheme.

Second time around, it’s still bleedin’ obvious what’s happening, but the puzzle has a sense of fun to it that appeals to me much more, and some of the clues are subtle — Commings has a talent for hitting you with pertinent facts in a way that thoroughly disguises their intent. It still makes no sense, and I don’t believe it deserves to be a highly-regarded as it is, but at least I can find much more merit in it now.

Back to effective, gloomy scene-setting for ‘Hangman’s House’ (1962): a flood isolating a carload of people at an abandoned mansion, hints of obscured identity, one of the passengers ending up hanged from the chandelier in the dusty ballroom with no footprints to account for the murderer.

The candle flames capered and the gross shadows cavorted on the ceiling.

Commings’s ability to fit the pertinent details of each method into very little space is amazing, but this really needs a moment to dwell on the feats undertaken here — John Dickson Carr would have got much from (rot13) n zheqrere unatvat snpr-gb-snpr jvgu uvf ivpgvz — but we’re sweeping on perhaps to hide the unlikeliness of this and the complete absence of detection. Still, it’s the sort of grandiose fun you could imagine Vincent Price introducing, and I enjoyed it much more this time around.

Another hilariously superb method that deserves a little more space to breathe awaits us in ‘The Giant’s Sword’ (1963). How a man can be practically driven through with a four-foot blade that no-one in the vicinity had the strength to wield is the question of the day. The answer is beyond ridiculous, but, hot damn, I’d give any amount of money to see it enacted on the screen. Utter and complete pulpy nonsense, and all the more superb because of it.

The impossible vanishing of a young woman while she walks up the stairs to her apartment which forms the basis of ‘Stairway to Nowhere’ (1979) was an idea Edward D. Hoch gifted to Commings, and is marked out by the simplicity of a lot of Hoch’s ideas. It’s one of those cases where the impossibility is so eerie that the explanation could well disappoint, but Commings does well to justify the need for the vanishing and so make up for this slightly damp squib.

The longest story in the collection, the Paris-set ‘The Vampire in the Iron Mask’, a.k.a. ‘The Grand Guignol Caper’ (1984) is also something of a mini-epic, with a swooning love triangle, violent sword fights, gloomy architecture, and a mask-faced vampire emerging from a tomb that’s been locked for centuries to strangle children in his snow-covered cemetery.

Again, the impossibility here is fairly minor, but again Commings does a superb job of weaving it all into a coherent narrative to explain it away. Sure, the H.M.-ness of Banner is only amplified by the snowball-to-hat routine from Dickson’s The Gilded Man (1942) and again this isn’t remotely fair play, but it’s as Carrian as Commings gets in this collection (“For a full fifteen seconds they were in the dark with whatever else resided in the mausoleum…”) and it would take a hard heart indeed not to revel in it.

To round things off, the previously-unpublished ‘The Whispering Gallery’ — which should really be called ‘The Upside-Down Murderer’. The simple version of this is that a gunshot must have been fired while the shooter was not only inverted but also hovering in mid-air, and the answer to this is, actually, really rather superb. So how did this remain unpublished until 2004? Well…it has some issues.

For a start, is a man really going to win his daughter’s affections by telling her that her prestidigitation-practising husband doesn’t really have magical powers? I know she’s young, but she’s not that much of an idiot. More tellingly, you can’t just (rot13) onat n anvy va n jnyy naq unat n senzrq fvk-sbbg pnainf ba vg…so the key piece of misdirection doesn’t work. And I’m not clear how (rot13) gur obql jnf ohevrq va gur fabj jvgubhg nal sbbgcevagf gb tvir vg njnl.

So, well, maybe Commings saw the flaws in this and never submitted it. But the core idea is fun enough if you don’t look too closely.

So, my patented, no-one’s ever done this before Top 5™ for this collection would be:

1. ‘The Vampire in the Iron Mask’ (1984)
2. ‘Ghost in the Gallery’ (1949)
3. ‘Murderer’s Progress’ (1960)
4. ‘The Giant’s Sword’ (1963)
5. ‘The X Street Murders’ (1962)

Commings has a real skill for boiling what seems incredibly complicated down to just a paragraph or even a line to explain away his illusions, and the colourful use of description and growing talent for atmosphere evinced herein is pleasing to see. He is far from unique in producing a variable output, of course, and when he’s good he’s hugely enjoyable — so take that, Serious Jim; you missed out before, and it was certainly more your fault than that of the author involved.

Crucially, as well, it’s worth remembering that these stories are the picks of editor Robert Adey — a wonderfully knowledgeable man where the impossible crime was concerned, but I’m not sure he and I saw greatly eye-to-eye when it came to favourites in the subgenre. The bibliography in the back of this — an excellent inclusion — lists another 19 stories in the Banner Universe, and I remain, after this second read, really very enthusiastic indeed to see what else the good Senator got up to in this sideline. After all, ‘The Glass Gravestone’ in the aforementioned Bodies from the Library 6 [ss] (2023) was superb, so no doubt some gems remain unknown by the public at large.

Now we just need one more impossibility, and for that long-rumoured second collection to become a reality. How do you see that being achieved, Brooks?