Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner

I was all set to love BANNER DEADLINES by the late Joseph Commings. After all he is what we need, a new locked room master--new to most of us, that is, for it seems the cognoscenti have long prized him for his twisty tales of Golden Age Detection. A cult favorite, if you will. Anyhow I wanted to like this book, and the excited intro and the memoir by the late Ed Hoch had me convinced going in, that this was going to be one of the great ones. And the first few stories bore this out. Commings had a protean mind and his solutions seem never-ending, and beyond that he really could write; some of his wacky sentences are worthy of a new volume of GUN IN CHEEK, but most of the time he could really wow you with punchy, noir-inflected metaphors and descriptions of incidental characters. It's hard to say exactly what prevents the book from attaining classic status. The editors say that Commings never appeared in EQMM due to the fact that Frederic Dannay dismissed him as a no talent. I was angry to hear that but after reading the book I could sort of see Dannay's point. First of all, Senator Banner, loveable rogue and blowhard, is so much a carbon copy of the more annoying traits of Sir Henry Merrivale that John Dickson Carr could have sued and won. Everything is exactly the same, except translated to an American setting, and when Brooks U. Banner goes overseas, as he dopes in a horrid French vampire story, it's just like an extended version of BEHIND THE CRIMSON BLIND with all of that oo-la-la. Many of the plots are good, but some are super tasteless, particularly those than involve bodily deformities that allow the killers to set up "impossible crimes." The opening story is quite like the recent Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez film in which the heroine loses her leg to zombies and has a machine gun installed again. John Dickson Carr, one feels, would have never have gone there, nor to the story in which Commings reveals early on that the victim was known to have married a circus freak, or another in which the missing man is said to have had an operatic past and to have played Octavian in DER ROSENKAVALIER. But actually I liked all these stories, it's just that some of them are endlessly long and complicated, or too easy to figure out, like the one where two men die in a rowboat in the middle of an empty lake. I'd read another collection by Commings, but there's no use pretending his book isn't really dreadful in some important ways.

The locked-door mystery appears to be a style of a bygone era and is rarely found nowadays. These intriguing types of mysteries usually involve a crime - usually a murder - involving a dead body discovered in a sealed room that is left in such a way that there can be no possible way for the murderer to have committed the crime and then gotten away undetected. BANNER DEADLINES is a collection of exactly these types of locked-door short stories by Joseph Commings. They have been gathered from such old-time pulp magazines as 10-Story Detectives, Ten Detective Aces and Mystery Digest and put together in this wonderfully presented volume. The stories contained within range in publication date from as early as 1947 and as recently as 1984 and all feature New York Senator Brooks U. Banner, a huge, cigar chomping man with a passion for puzzles, magic and the art of criminal detection. He is loud, gruff and abrasive...and he solves some of the most impossible mysteries through 14 stories. The book kicks off with a classic locked-room story involving a clearly murdered body found inside a room made entirely of glass and, most astoundingly, with no doors. Conundrums like these seem to be right up Senator Banner's alley as, story after story he is faced with the most perplexing crimes only to dispatch them with relative ease, usually revealing a delightful twist at the end. As a taste of what you can expect among the stories, murders take place: at a séance; in a rowboat in the middle of a lake; inside a magician's escape box; in a cemetery; on a movie set; and, a personal favourite of mine, in an old haunted house. For the most part there are plenty of clues provided in each story to give you a chance at figuring out the puzzle, although vital clues are withheld in a couple of the stories until Banner makes his dramatic announcement about who the murderer is and how the crime was committed. All in all this is a beautifully presented collection of intriguing mysteries that will send your mind bending in all sorts of directions as you try to solve the puzzles before Banner.

THIS ARE SHORT STORIES OF LOCKED ROOM MURDERS AND MYSTERIES, FROM THE GOLDEN AGE. ALL ARE VERY GOOD, AND THE READER WILL HAVE HOURS OF FUN. ANOTHER GREAT BOOK FROM CRIPPENLANDRU.