Eight stories narrated by the athletic Jerry Phelan, who meets Trevis Tarrant in the first story, “The Codex Curse,” when they are both locked into a room in the Metropolitan Museum trying to keep an Aztec Codex from being stolen. They fail, but not to worry, because Tarrant knows who took it and how to recover it.
Tarrant prefers to call these “episodes,” the word “case” being “too formal an expression for his activities. He is not a detective, but looks for “apparently inexplicable problems” which he solves by a rigorous adherence to the doctrine of causation. Jerry remembers his experience with Tarrant and reaches out to him in the second episode. “The Tangible Illusion” is one oppressing Valerie Mopish, soon to be Mrs. Phelan. Tarrant and Katoh move in to Valerie’s “modernistic” house, built for her by her brother. Katoh is Tarrant’s Japanese butler/valet, who is a doctor at home in Japan and a spy in the States. It turns out the brother may have been less than all right that Valerie got all the money when the parents died.
“The Nail and the Requiem” is a locked room murder mystery, and Tarrant solves it by the process of elimination: if the murderer couldn’t have gotten out…. “Torment IV” is a boat, and it may or may not have other characteristics in common with the infamous Mary Celeste.
The only stories that can be recommended are in this first half of the book; skip the first one and read the next three.
“The Headless Horrors” is a silly story about voodoo ritual beheading. “The Vanishing Harp” is a slow-moving story, another locked-room puzzle, but not a murder, though an attempted one, and at the end Tarrant gives the miscreant the “honorable” way out. “The Man with Three Eyes” does a classic sleight-of-hand move in diverting attention from the obvious answer to a murder committed in plain sight—almost—with several witnesses. This story is also probably worth reading. But the final episode, “The Final Bargain,” goes off into la-la land with twisted auras causing paralysis and Tarrant pledging to go away for seven years as some kind of bargain to save Jerry’s sister Mary, who loves Tarrant and vice-versa.
This collection made it into Ellery Queen’s list of the most important detective and crime fiction short stories.
