THE CAMBODIAN CURSE AND OTHER STORIES

by Gigi Pandian

  Praise for the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mysteries

  “Charming characters, a hint of romantic conflict, and just the right amount of danger will garner more fans for this cozy series.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “With a world-class puzzle to solve and riveting plot twists to unravel, Quicksand had me on the edge of my seat for the entire book...Don’t miss one of the best new mystery series around!”

  – Kate Carlisle,

  New York Times Bestselling Author of the Bibliophile Mysteries

  “A delicious tall tale about a treasure map, magicians, musicians, mysterious ancestors, and a few bad men.”

  – Mystery Scene Magazine

  “A joy-filled ride of suspenseful action, elaborate scams, and witty dialogue. The villains are as wily as the heroes, and every twist is intelligent and unexpected, ensuring that this is a novel that will delight lovers of history, romance, and elaborate capers.”

  – Kings River Life Magazine

  “Forget about Indiana Jones. Jaya Jones is swinging into action, using both her mind and wits to solve a mystery...Readers will be ensnared by this entertaining tale.”

  – RT Book Reviews (four stars)

  “Quicksand has all the ingredients I love—intrigue, witty banter, and a twisty mystery that hopscotches across France!”

  – Sara Rosett,

  Author of the Ellie Avery Mystery Series

  “Pandian’s second entry sets a playful tone yet provides enough twists to keep mystery buffs engaged, too. The author streamlines an intricate plot….[and] brings a dynamic freshness to her cozy.”

  – Library Journal

  “If Indiana Jones had a sister, it would definitely be historian Jaya Jones.”

  — Suspense Magazine

  “Has everything a mystery lover could ask for: ghostly presences, Italian aristocrats, jewel thieves, failed actors, sitar players, and magic tricks, not to mention dabs of authentic history and academic skullduggery.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “Move over Vicky Bliss and Joan Wilder, historian Jaya Jones is here to stay! Mysterious maps, legendary pirates, and hidden treasure—Jaya’s latest quest is a whirlwind of adventure.”

  — Chantelle Aimée Osman,

  The Sirens of Suspense

  “Pirate Vishnu is fast-paced and fascinating as Jaya’s investigation leads her this time to India and back to her own family’s secrets.”

  —Susan C. Shea,

  Author of the Dani O’Rourke mysteries

  “Pandian’s new series may well captivate a generation of readers, combining the suspenseful, mysterious and romantic. Four stars.”

  — RT Book Reviews

  “Witty, clever, and twisty… Do you like Agatha Christie? Elizabeth Peters? Then you’re going to love Gigi Pandian.”

  — Aaron Elkins,

  Edgar Award-Winning Author of the Gideon Oliver Mysteries

  “Fans of Elizabeth Peters will adore following along with Jaya Jones and a cast of quirky characters as they pursue a fabled treasure.”

  —Juliet Blackwell,

  New York Times Bestselling Author of the Art Lover’s Mysteries

  The Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Series

  by Gigi Pandian

  Novels

  ARTIFACT (#1)

  PIRATE VISHNU (#2)

  QUICKSAND (#3)

  MICHELANGELO’S GHOST (#4)

  THE NINJA’S ILLUSION (#5)

  Short Stories

  THE LIBRARY GHOST OF TANGLEWOOD INN

  THE CAMBODIAN CURSE & OTHER STORIES

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  Copyright

  THE CAMBODIAN CURSE & OTHER STORIES

  A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Collection

  Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection

  First Edition | October 2018

  Henery Press

  www.henerypress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Henery Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Copyright © 2018 by Gigi Pandian

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-418-8

  Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-419-5

  Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-410-1

  Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-63511-411-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  To the memory of the authors

  from the Golden Age of detective fiction,

  who made me fall in love with

  the puzzles of locked room mysteries.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Apart from “The Cambodian Curse,” the short story that leads this collection, each of the stories first appeared elsewhere. Thank you to Gary Phillips for inviting me to contribute a story to Asian Pulp, and to the editors of the anthologies where the stories originally appeared: Ramona DeFlice Long (editor of “The Hindi Houdini” in Fish Nets: The Second Guppy Anthology and “The Shadow of the River” in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology); Dana Cameron (editor of “The Haunted Room” in Murder at the Beach); Tommy Hancock and Morgan McKay (editors of “The Curse of Cloud Castle” in Asian Pulp); Naomi Hirahara, Kate Thornton, and Jeri Westerson (editors of “Tempest in a Teapot” in LAdies Night); Verena Rose, Barb Goffman, and Rita Owen (editors of “A Dark and Stormy Light” in Malice Domestic: Murder Most Conventional).

  Before these stories were accepted for publication, my critique readers were essential in helping me figure out if my twists were successfully executed. Thanks to Nancy Adams, Paula Benson, Stephen Buehler, Shelley Dickson Carr, Kim Fay, Emberly Nesbit, Susan Parman, Brian Selfon, and Diane Vallere.

  Luci Zahray generously gave me insights into poisons. The Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime provided me with the tools I needed to become a writer and gave me my first publication credit, “The Shadow of the River”—my only Jaya Jones story with a different narrator!

  As always, I’m grateful to the team at Henery Press, especially Maria Edwards and Meagan Smith who helped me with the stories in this collection, and Kendel Lynn, for being part of my journey from the start. To impossible crime literature expert Doug Greene and master of mystery Laurie King for giving their time to introduce this collection. To my husband James, for providing ongoing support even when I would disappear for hours at a time as I worked out these puzzles.

  And to my readers, whether you’re picking up this collection because you’re an existing fan of Jaya Jones, a short story enthusiast, or someone intrigued by locked room mysteries—thank you for making this such a fun undertaking, and I hope you enjoy the mysteries in the coming pages.

  Introduction

  Why Do We Like Our Rooms Locked?

  Laurie R. King

  In the mystery world, there is a spectrum. At one end is the cerebral detection story, a delicious puzzler over wh
ich we linger; at the other is the fast-paced, heart-pounding thriller, where the pages turn so quickly the reader barely has time to breathe, much less reflect. In that spectrum, at the narrowest tip of the detection end, lies the locked-room mystery: a puzzle demanding attention and thought, a story that pits reader against detective—and (more to the point) against the author behind the scenes.

  At its purest, the locked-room tale presents a face of bland impossibility. We have a crime; we have a suspect; we may even know the means and motive and time—but there is simply no way for that suspect to have performed the act. Therein, of course, lies the trickery. We readers see (as that greatest of rational minds, Sherlock Holmes, chided his companion) but we do not observe. For that, we require a detective.

  Locked-room mysteries are among the oldest of stories, with “Bel and the Dragon” placing the Prophet Daniel in the role of sleuth. In the early exemplars of the type, divine interventions and last-minute revelations were permitted, but when “mystery” became a genre, ground rules had to be established (such as Ronald Knox’s tongue-in-cheek “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction”). A writer had to play fair. The reader must be able to solve the crime, at least in retrospect. Hiding clues from the audience is cheating.

  Of course, this still meant that the solution could be based on a fragment of arcane knowledge that one’s detective just happens to possess, or on his (occasionally her) inexplicable determination to follow a tortuous and patently unlikely path, ignoring logical possibilities right and left, until he discovers that diabolically complex piece of machinery, previously unsuspected doppelganger, or drug-unknown-to-science that explains it all.

  Sometimes a writer’s reach outdistances his grasp, and plausibility snaps. (I’m looking at you, Edgar Allan—no way an orangutan would do that. And as for playing fair with the reader, really: an orangutan?) The key to a locked-room story is to walk the very edge: a solution is indeed there for the observing, but it is tucked away inside the story’s details, invisible both to the characters in the story and to the reader looking over their shoulders—until S/He Who Observes points out an overlooked item that sheds new light on the conundrum. The crime is impossible, until one reconsiders some tiny element, and realizes that the solution was indeed there all along.

  When the locked-room story turned from razor-wielding orangutans to a more subtle use of befuddlement, it grew into its own, and a game of wits was born. Misdirection came into play, the story’s effectiveness resting on the skill of the writer as a trickster, the author’s ability to manipulate the reader into grasping the solution mere moments after the story’s detective.

  All kinds of means to this end come into play. The writer’s tool might be a distracting sub-plot, or an eye-glazingly lengthy info-dump that encourages the eye to skip over it (what reader notices a landscape artist’s lack of white paint amongst a tedious list of all the other colors?). It could be the use of some multisyllabic descriptive term that only a reader with a background in a specific field—or one who reads with a dictionary in hand—would catch in passing. A writer might also shine a powerful light of evidence on one particular answer to the puzzle, enticing the reader to ignore the other evidence accumulating in the shadows.

  Naturally, the more experienced the reader, the harder to trick. A modern audience that turns up its nose at the rejuvenating properties of langur-blood (What is it with monkeys and monomaniacs, anyway?) has also learned to resist the obvious villain—although this introduces yet another set of possibilities in the writer’s tool-chest, that of the double-fake: I load a ton of accusation and evidence on the despicable X, so that you the reader know it has to be the sympathetic Y, when in fact it’s the colorless Z framing Y by over-framing X…

  Yes, the game is truly afoot once the writer begins to play not only with the eyes of the reader, but with the heart. I want the villain to be X, the slimy one, the one who hurt our protagonist—but I’m afraid that’s too obvious, that it’s going to be Romantic Interest Y instead. But then again, I remember that this writer has a history of trickery. So maybe that means…

  A locked trunk, behind a locked door, on an island locked in by storm: can it get any better than this?

  As we said, the spectrum of crime runs from intellect to emotion. The highest praise a thriller can receive is a close of the book’s covers and a puff of exhaled breath as the pulse slows to normal. The highest praise of a locked-room story? A wry smile followed by a shake of the head, acknowledgment that the reader never saw it coming.

  What follows will bring a number of wry smiles and shakes of the head, as Gigi Pandian takes us into a series of rooms, and locks the doors behind us.

  —Laurie R. King

  Stories mentioned: (Holmes) Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia”; “Bel and the Dragon” is from the first-millennium BCE Septuagintal Book of Daniel; (orangutan) Edgar Allan Poe, “Murder in the Rue Morgue”; (paint) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Evidence in the Case; (langur monkey) Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”

  Foreword

  In the Tradition of John Dickson Carr

  Douglas G. Greene

  Many years ago at a mystery convention in London, I chaired a panel on locked room mysteries. Among the participants was the late Bob Adey, the bibliographer of books and stories featuring locked rooms. I asked Bob why they remain so popular, and he responded, “Because a locked room always guarantees that the story features a puzzle.” And the detective story in its most fundamental incarnation is centered around the puzzle.

  The locked room mystery is one type of “miracle problem,” a story in which a murder or some other crime is committed that seems humanly impossible. At its most atmospheric, as in the novels of John Dickson Carr, the reader is led to believe that the only explanation is supernatural, that the crime was committed by a witch, a demon, a vampire or some other denizen of the nether regions, until the detective steps in and shows how the murder was actually done by humans for human motives. He acts almost like an exorcist, banishing the supernatural and restoring order.

  In a locked room story, a murder is committed within a room whose doors and windows are locked, sometimes even sealed, on the inside; but only the corpse is there, as the murderer seems to have vanished. And speaking of vanishing, another form of the miracle problem is the disappearance of one of the characters seemingly into thin air. Someone walks into a hallway, with observers at both the entry and the exit, but doesn’t come out. In one spectacular variation, a man dives into a swimming pool and disappears. The pool is drained and no one is there. In yet another novel, a corpse vanishes from a sealed vault. An intriguing story is based around a street that vanishes. Other variations include death by no visible cause, and a murder committed in a house surrounded by unmarked snow or sand.

  It is fair to say that the miracle problem has attracted the most ingenious of all mystery writers. Indeed, it began when the detective story form itself emerged from the gothic story. The very first detective story, Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is a locked-room mystery. Half a century went by and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes a disappearing weapon problem. In 1898, L. T. Meade published A Master of Mysteries, the first short story collection dedicated entirely to miracle problems. A bit more than a decade later, in 1910, two writers emerged who specialized in seemingly impossible crimes. One, G. K. Chesterton, was a master of prose style; the other, Thomas W. Hanshew, wasn’t. Chesterton set Father Brown to investigate winged daggers, disappearing murderers and corpses, a murderous book, seemingly genuine spiritualist phenomena, family curses, and much more. And all of this in Chesterton’s paradoxical, sometimes ornate and often indirect storytelling, enlivened by Father Brown’s cryptic remarks. Also in 1910, Thomas W. Hanshew, an American dime novelist living in London created Hamilton Cleek, the Man of the Forty Faces, who has what is described as a “weird birthgift,” that is, he can writhe his features so
that he can look like anyone he chooses—leading to the “Forty Faces.” Scotland Yard becomes touchingly dependent on Cleek’s ability to solve seemingly impossible crimes, and an admiring Inspector brings him cases that seem to have no rational solution. And what cases they are—locked room after locked room, impossible disappearance after impossible disappearance—including a man who vanishes while turning a somersault, and a huge statue that disappears from a locked museum, and on and on.

  Chesterton and Hanshew were important not only for their own contributions to fictional impossible crimes but also for their influence on John Dickson Carr, the greatest creator of locked rooms and other miracles. Carr so admired Chesterton’s stories that he based his great detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, on Chesterton. Carr didn’t base any characters on Hanshew—no one has forty faces, and his female characters are not all that pure—but he said that, though he recognized Hanshew’s faults as a writer, the creator of Hamilton Cleek had extraordinarily imaginative ideas.

  All this is leading to the book you hold in your hands. In The Hollow Man (aka, The Three Coffins), Dr. Fell stops the story to lecture on the locked room. He describes no fewer than eight methods to kill someone in an apparently locked room:

  The murder is not a murder, but an accident that looks like one;

  The murder is committed by a poison gas, which causes the victim to go into a frenzy throwing things about, thus creating the appearance of the murderer having been in the room;