One of the genuine joys of starting this blog is that it has given me an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the work of Anthony Berkeley, who, early doors, I declared one of the four most important male writers of the Golden Age despite merely liking the majority of his work. Through reprints and revisits, I’ve come to appreciate Berkeley much more, it has to be said, and I’m now an avowed admirer of much of his output.
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Having first turned up in perhaps the best debut of the Golden Age, Roger Sheringham’s second case pursued a similar line to inevitably lesser effect. Taking up the cause of one Mrs. Bentley, who is accused of poisoning her finicky, hypochondriac husband with arsenic, our gentleman sleuth is convinced that the accused lady is either “the most imbecile criminal who ever existed and simply went out of her way to manufacture the most damning evidence against herself…or else…she didn’t murder her husband at all.” But fine theorising is one thing, and actually proving the matter is quite another, especially when everyone else in the county seems to have made up their mind about The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926).
I’m not sure why there was a six-year gap in my reading of DWaM. I mean, sure, A Eulogy for Reason (2019) is weird, man, but the creativity brought to both the impossible crimes he writes and the setting he embeds them in appeals to my sense of adventure…so the hiatus in my reading of his work can only be put down to too many options and not enough time. All of which brings us — belatedly — to Hear the Devil Sing (2020).
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I’ve been blowing hot and cold on the work of Roger Ormerod, with his often superb ideas bogged down in tedious — sometimes incomprehensible — telling, marked by the narrative grinding to a halt at some point, and his sometimes-ingenious solutions reached via a complete absence of anything approaching detection.
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The notion that authors do their weakest work at the end of their career is under much scrutiny at present. Having recently devoured the final two novels by Norman Berrow, I picked up J.J. Connington’s antepenultimate novel The Twenty-One Clues (1941) with some slight hesitation — he’s all over the map quality-wise for me, having penned some of the most tendentiously dull novels in the genre — only for it to be easily among the best three of his I’ve read. Taking on the sort of tight focus that normally means he’s going to be tediously belabourous (c.f. The Brandon Case (1934)), this proved instead a delight of Humdrummery, intelligent detection, and superbly surprising plot mechanics.
The mysterious entity known only as A. Carver really is living the dream, constructing byzantine impossible crime puzzles which have caught the attention of fans of the subgenre, and putting out so far four novels and now a collection of shorter stories, Death in 13 Rooms [ss] (2026)
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I’ll not deny that I’ve been less than resoundingly positive about latter-era Jonathan Creek (1997-2016). And yet the show undeniably holds a dear place in my heart, not just because it was so damn good at its peak, but also because, in being so, it held huge sway in my interest in impossible crimes. So when playscript The Fantom of the Acropolis (2026) was announced on Kickstarter last year, you’re darn tootin’ that I was excited to get my hands on it.
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The first novel by husband-and-wife team Kelley Roos, Made Up to Kill (1940) was one of about 30 or 40 books I purchased from the now sadly-defunct Rue Morgue Press, who did such excellent work keeping Golden Age novels in print long before it was cool. And this debut sets the tone for (what I’ve read of) the series that would result very well: Jeff Troy and Haila Rogers — not yet married, that would come soon — stumble into a murder mystery by proximity and end up investigating the various Types who seem to exist within its boundaries. Narrator Haila is good for an eerie turn of phrase now and then, and happy-go-lucky Jeff will tend to bound around like a spaniel until almost accidentallying his way into the path of the murderer.
Obviously I read the Sherlock Holmes canon before I had started this blog, but — or, perhaps, so — it’s interesting how vague my recollections about so many of the stories are.
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The prospect of a collection of completely new impossible crime short stories is an exciting one, because I’m pretty sure we haven’t had a new multi-author collection since The Book of Extraordinary Impossible Crimes and Puzzling Deaths [ss] (2020) over which we shall pass quickly.
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