In an age where the term “locked room mystery” increasingly seems to mean “closed circle mystery” — as in, one of the limited number of characters in the story committed the crime, as if you’d want there to be an alternative — how refreshing to come across someone in Alex Wagner who actually demonstrates an awareness of what an impossible crime is.
Continue reading
I recently acquired a boxset of 8 Maurice Leblanc novels and short story collections featuring his gentleman bastard Arsène Lupin, and so before I dig into those I thought I should revisit the first Leblanc book I read, the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone collection The Eight Strokes of the Clock [ss] (1922).
Continue reading
Despite enjoying a few standalone titles by Belgian minimalist Georges Simenon — thanks in no small part to the Orion Crime Masterworks series — I was left rather ambivalent by my first encounter with Inspector Jules Maigret in The Late Monsieur Gallet (1931). A recent comment on that post, however, directed me to a few titles which might be to my liking, and so here we are with Maigret Sets a Trap (1955), the forty-eighth of seventy-five books featuring the character. A serial killer has already murdered five women in the same Paris arrondissement, and while much of what follows feels very familiar, you also have to wonder if it was Simenon who established a pattern that others would so intently adhere to in the decades ahead.
Another self-published impossible crime story, I can’t remember how The Westerlea House Mystery (2013) by Adam Croft came to my attention, but it did, I’ve read it, and we’re going to look at it today.
Continue reading
Fifteen tales of murder and mystery centring around various athletic pastimes would, you imagine, be a fairly difficult undertaking to assemble, and so Martin Edwards is to be commended for finding enough to fill the pages of Settling Scores [ss] (2017) for the British Library Crime Classics series.
Continue reading
The fourteenth published tale by Erle Stanley Gardner about L.A. P.I.s Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, Some Women Won’t Wait (1953) marks the halfway point of my reading all thirty titles for the blog — ‘cos, y’know, there’s that unpublished one — very nearly five years after I started. And while I won’t say that the machine is starting to bleed to death here, it’s probably the simplest Cool and Lam case put on paper to date: relying essentially on a moment of misdirection akin to a classic novel of Golden Age detection rather than the imbrication of a variety of switchbacks that have been the hallmark of the series thus far.
Having enjoyed Jamie Probin‘s previous stabs at the impossible crime, I turn to the currently last of his stories to be made publicly available, the long short story ‘Body of Matter’ (2022).
Continue reading
Double Death (1939) — variously subtitled ‘An exercise in detection’ and ‘A murder story’ — is another example of the round-robin mystery that sells itself on a few big names and then brings in a few, er, less established authors to complete the endeavour.
Continue reading
Having completed Sergeant Wm. Beef, I turn to the other series of detective novels Rupert Croft-Cooke wrote under his Leo Bruce nom de plume, those featuring schoolmaster Carolus Deene. The books are not easy to find, however, and so I am reliant on the recentish reprints by Academy Chicago Publishers, who neglected the first three in the series and began with fourth title Dead Man’s Shoes (1958). And it’s to be hoped that those earlier books were overlooked due to rights rather than quality issues, because this first encounter with the crime-solving History master leaves me somewhat underwhelmed. This was written by the convention-busting creator of Sergeant Beef? Really?
A fourth story from the 13 Crimes of Science Fiction [ss] (1977) collection, as I further explore my interest in the crossover mystery. Might this be the point where this collection springs to life?
Continue reading
The Invisible Event 