Locked Rooms and Huge Kabooms in BLACK RUN (2021)

"No point living if you've nowt to die for."

The first book in D.L. Marshall's John Tyler series, Anthrax Island, was a surprise COVID-era gem. It got several rave reviews from the mystery blogosphere, and personally I found both the setting and the clever locked room mystery to be highly original. The version I read had this rather dour cover, so I was pleasantly surprised on picking up Marshall's second book Black Run to see these new editions pictured to the left. They really nail the tone of the series, that tone being "cheese popcorn".

If you're not familiar with unconventional detective John Tyler, let me paint a picture: he's a grizzled super-spy from Yorkshire whose body is decorated with scars and "tattoos from everywhere he's done jobs". Some days he's stabbing a man in the throat with a screwdriver, and other days he's sat in a cafe with a Maigret novel drinking hot chocolate with mini marshmallows. He dry-swallows prescription pills to stop seeing the ghosts of the friends he's lost (which is all of them), as well as anthrax medication due to the events of the previous novel. In two words: well hard.

Tyler narrates through a toothpick and a mouthful of Yorkshire Gold:

The way she moved, the way she held her nerve, fingers hovering close to that pistol; she hadn't been cheap, but like a bottle of L'Oréal she was clearly worth it.

I'm just imagining the author chuckling while writing some of these Tyler lines. The books can be quite grim, but they're also fun. They read like he had fun writing them and wants you to have fun, too. Which I did! I mean, how could I not enjoy moments like this:

My finger twitched, I flicked the safety down and hummed the Band Aid song. I got as far as the chimes clanging Bono's doom, then exhaled and settled in. The red dot wavered over his chest, at this distance the high-velocity bullet would pretty much remove his heart or a lung. A smile twitched at the corner of my mouth. Well tonight thank God it was him, instead of me.

Black Run picks up almost immediately after Anthrax Island. Tyler has used his latest job as a convenient excuse to kidnap the man who killed his brother and extract revenge. Tyler and his target board a freighter turned German rave boat turned smuggling vessel, crewed by pirates who follow the "law of the sea".

Naturally, an impossible crime occurs before he has time to breathe: Tyler's prisoner is apparently stabbed while stashed in a locked smuggling hold whose only entrance is under Tyler's bed, while Tyler was monitoring the target's vitals with a Fitbit. The plot alternates between the present-day scenario and the extraction mission that led up to it, which is significantly more action-packed but has a few twists of its own.

The John Tyler series might be the only example of combining "action spy thriller" and "fair-play detective story" I've ever seen. It makes me wonder why no one has tried this before. Perhaps it's an idea that solving a locked room murder might seem less important, even hypocritical, when the protagonist goes around mowing down "at least twelve men—probably more." In the previous book, Tyler is trying to catch a murderous mole, while here the emotional stakes are less about justice and more related to his unfulfilled revenge. If you're following from the previous book, you probably care enough about Tyler for this to work, although you must admit it's a little funny that Tyler's kill count in this book is higher than the actual murderer's.

As for the solution, it's a high-tech variation on a very old trick (arguably the oldest trick). There's some great sleight of hand in the implementation, but if you've encountered the trick before you will probably twig to it right off. Although, interestingly, I would say the locked room itself is a diversion for another major twist—and that one completely got me. Again, I don't think I've ever encountered a trick like that before, and remain continually surprised at how Marshall combines familiar genre pieces in unexpected ways. Though if you're still craving impossible crimes, there is a second locked room murder (that could only be pulled off in a spy novel). This one, hilariously, is created by the protagonist while he's trying to find the killer. I mean the bad guy. I mean the other guy.