A lot of impossible crime novels published these days have, let’s face it, about enough impossible crime content for a short story. So a short story collection seems like a sensible thing to try, right? Even one that does put ‘short stories’ on its cover and then call itself “a novel” on the back. Right?
The opening story, ‘The Matter of the Duct Tape Tuxedo’ sees Captain Heinz Noonan of the Sandersonville Police Department in North Carolina consulted by a midget — “Everyone thinks they’re a comic when it comes to midgets. I am a midget, by the way, not a dwarf.” — whose house has been robbed by Bigfoot. Except the Bigfoot thing goes nowhere and instead it’s simply one of a series of robberies in the small Alaskan town where seemingly random knick-knacks have been stolen. Noonan has an Alaskan wife — the reader is told about her twice in two pages — and this seems to be why he is being consulted, as “I wanted this case to be taken seriously”. There is…zero logic in the conclusion Noonan comes to, and the supposedly impressive reasoning he strings it all together with could result in several equally implausible solutions. It’s also not even vaguely an impossible crime, so picking this as the title story and putting “and Other Impossible Crime Short Stories” after it makes me wonder if a comma or two has gone missing.
‘The Matter of Louie the Lobster’ asks the question “How could a diamond ring appear in a locked lobster tank?”, and Noonan proffers a suggestion — “Anybody could have jimmied it open” — which is actually less disappointing than the eventual answer. Maybe this is meant to be impossible, but it’s too stupid to put in that company. I want to appreciate what Levi’s doing in trying to pull disparate, apparently unrelated information together into a startling conclusion, but his reasoning is so, so bad — would a magician really use a $25,000 ring in their stage act? — that it bears repeating that just because your characters don’t immediately spot the solution doesn’t mean it’s an impossible crime. Levi also has no editorial eye at all: we’re told that Louie the Lobster’s owner is called Avalon Lone “with a silent e” three times in two pages (and, honestly, does “silent e” mean the name is pronounced “Lon”, or so that is rhymes with “phone” rather than”phony”?). We also get Heinz Noonan “wearing a tie!!!”, so things must be slow in NC if neckwear warrants three exclamation marks.
I tried, I promise I tried, but ‘The Matter of the Reappearing Coelacanth’ was the point where I gave up hope of this collection being any good. Charged by Commissioner Lizzard with finding out the provenance of the eponymous creature, believed extinct for millions of years and yet caught off the North Carolina coast in the last few days, the key question of, like, how this thing was still alive is never addressed — doubly odd, given the motive uncovered. Nothing is explained, and sentences like “The story at the National Park was as bureaucratic as a sunrise” (?!?) puzzle the will and make us rather bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. It’s not fun, it’s not clever, it’s not even trope-ridden and predictable, it’s just bad. At this stage of things, the only reason I can see Steve Levi calling himself a “Master of the impossible crime” on the cover of the book is because some hard-up university offered a post-grad evening class. I should write another 30 words to keep the total consistent across the stories, but this is shit and I refuse to waste any more time on it.
“Someone go and wake the others…”
So, onwards to ‘The Matter of the Reverse Dinner Bell’ and the proving of the thesis ventured above that this collection is no good. The sole point of this story seems to be that one of the police officers has a funny name — snarf, chortle, etc. — since it is (I’m not kidding) mainly about that guy telling Noonan a story he doesn’t believe (and we don’t hear) about crocodiles chasing rats on an island and being scared away by tripwires with bells attached to them. Then Noonan tells a story (that we do unfortunately hear) about a monkey feeding a crocodile apples and something about the crocodile’s wife insisting the crocodile kill the monkey and steal its heart. The payoff? “Well, both are tales”. I paid money for this. Actual money, that I worked pretty hard for. This isn’t even bad any more, it’s become fully insulting.
‘The Matter of the Evanescing Elixir’ might have a good idea behind it — the theft of 8,000 gallons of distilled glacier water from a vodka factory — but it’s most interesting for the typos that now being to intrude on the text with greater regularity. Such as Harriet, Noonan’s female secretary, saying that the thief was definitely a man and that a woman would have gotten away with the crime because “women are smarter than me.” Mind you, given that she appropriates two bottles of vodka and promises to return the empties to Noonan “tomorrow”, that’s probably not a typo and she’s just too drunk to know what she’s saying.
Before I even read it, I suspected the most interesting thing about ‘The Matter of the Purloining in the Peninsula Country Land Fill’ would be its title. But, reader, I was wrong. The most interesting thing about this story is that it thinks digging “a circle 30 feet across to a depth of four or five feet” would be equivalent to “something like 300 cubic yards”. No. You’re a looooong way off, Steve. It’s actually about 125 cubic yards — and, sure, maths nerd, who cares, etc., but if you’re not even going to get something as unequivocal and easily checked as your mathematics correct then why is anything else you do worth paying attention to?
“I think you should have a rest, Jim.”
At least we get something that sounds like an impossible crime in ‘The Matter of the Penny-Ante Kleptomaniac’:
“Where have the thefts been taking place?”
“In locked rooms within secure vaults in a passkey protected building.”
And so, perhaps inevitably:
“Three weeks ago a desk blotter was stolen. Two weeks ago it was the carafe from the coffee maker. Last week paper tray from the copier.”
“These items were in the vault?”
“No. The locked room where the vault is located.”
Not so much “in locked rooms within secure vaults” then, Steve, as “in a room that contains a vault”. Very different. Oh, well, at least it’s a locked room and so access is restric—
“Lots of the family go in and out of that room all the time … Anyone who has to work in the room opens their vault drawer and takes out what they need.”
But you’ll at least have checked the vault drawers for the missing items, ri—
“I have not checked the empty [and unlocked] drawers.”
I give up.
‘The Matter of the Phantasmagoric Highbinder’ posits the problem of an apparently ghostly figure appearing and then disappearing on the security footage of a manuscript archive. Apparently no-one in the entirety of San Francisco law enforcement thought of the possibility of turning the camera off and on again, and so had to consult this genius from across the other side of the country. Have none of them seen Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)? The motive here is very, very good. But everything else is insulting.
In Levi’s defence, he’s at least trying to get some interesting motivations in these last few stories — in ‘The Matter of the Cozened Gomes’ Heinz again reaches his conclusion based on nothing approaching actual reasoning, but the possible motive for lots of gnomes stolen a year ago and now appearing in clusters around town isn’t bad (always — ha — assuming it’s correct…). The real problems here are the sort of laziness in editing and writing that dog self-publishing and give a bad name to the authors trying to do this properly. The gnomes are two feet tall, then they’re a foot-and-a-half, and Brando Tagaloalagi is named such because “my mother was an aspiring actress and fan of Marlin Brando” — the sort of fishy occurrence that would be a clue in the work of a half-competent author…and isn’t even an unfortunate typo here since it’s repeated on the next page. Also, Heinz Noonan hates his mobile phone — grrrr he hates it, oooo how he hates it — and has christened it “the beast of Satan” to show what a rootin’ tootin’ down-to-earth type he is. Though since he appears to drink red wine while eating fish — chilled red wine, people — I’m inclined to believe he’s actually a serial killer.
“Good heavens, you’re right!”
Finally, finally we have ‘The Matter of the Fattening Igloos’, which is about as close as we get to a decent story: sealed cargo containers being flown across the country are double the weight at the end of the journey that they were at the start. We still get simply incomprehensible errors…
“Yes, Mr. Theobold,” Noonan accented the “a” in the name.
The Invisible Event 
Aww… Some of these self-published mystery novels sound traumatising. At least you get some sympathy from your black and apricot furry friends. 🐶 And your upcoming read by Vera Caspary is meant to be very good – but not much of a puzzle per se, I’d thought? Looking forward to your review!
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I wouldn’t say “traumatising” so much as “not worth spending money on” 🙂 This was distinctly a so-bad-I-can’t-look-away experience, and that’s without even mentioning the huffy, self-important jeremiad against people who use Wikipedia without paying for it…
Truly, this is one of the oddest reads of this entire AiSP undertaking.
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Thanks for the warning, JJ! I’ve Levi’s The Matter of the Dematerializing Armored Car on my to-be-read pile, but, if this is what I can look forward to, I’ll move it to the bottom of the pile as barrel scraping.
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If I can find another one of his cheap — and secondhand — I simply must read it to see if they’re all like this. The notion of this kind of…approach stretched across a whole novel is baffling to me. Maybe the short story’s not his thing, and his novels are wonderful, but I’m doubtful.
Incidentally, got another modern impossible crime novel tee’d up for Saturday. Started it last night, no idea how excited or otherwise we should be just yet.
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“Maybe the short story’s not his thing, and his novels are wonderful, but I’m doubtful.”
Agreed. You can usually tell when a writer is better suited for novels, because their characters or plots don’t get enough room to breath in the short story format (see Hake Talbot). Reverse is also true. Some writers need the focus of the short story format to keep their plots on track. But, going by your review, I doubt Levi needs a novel-length canvas to work his magic.
Do you want to give us a clue for your Saturday review? It’s been a while since I deduced one of your mystery reviews.
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I wouldn’t even now how to go about hinting at it. It was published in 2019 and, er, I feel like anything else would give it away too easily…
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The Flying Boat Mystery?
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I should specify, it was originally published in 2019 — would be a Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery contender otherwise…
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So, to clarify – you didn’t like this one?
Certainly puts my recent blindingly obvious locked room self-published read in the shade when it comes to quality and that’s saying something…
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I saw that review and was sorry the book turned out to be a stinker, since it sounded fairly interesting. This — the story about the crocodiles and the rats especially — is on quite another realm of disappointing. I haven’t seen a book fail on so many levels like this for a long, long time.
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If I told you any detail about the situation in the locked room, you’d solve that in an instant. Complete waste of my armchair detection skills.
That detail? One was poisoned and the other stabbed, the missing knife found outside the window…
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A locked window?
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Open window in a tower…
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Although it could be locked on the inside, makes no difference
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D’accord. Tres facile.
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Wow! I’ve had some not so great reads this month, but this puts them somewhat into perspective. Some of the characters may have total nincompoops but at least they were nincompoops with the correct grammar, punctuation and spelling lol Been puzzling over the sentence you include: “The story at the National Park was as bureaucratic as a sunrise,” being the Eng Lit Grad and all. I was wondering if he was trying to suggest rigid regularity/consistency, as in everyday there is always a sunrise, with no unexpected deviations from the norm? But still even if that was the case bureaucratic would not be the word to use. Perhaps he has been having fun with the thesaurus like Joey did in friends?
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Yes, it’s a very cromulent sentence. Added to the emphasising of “a” in a name that doesn’t have an “a” in it and we’re left to wonder what parallel universe we’re operating in 🙂
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Do yo know what the best part of AiSP is? Imagining the look on your face as you read, theorizing what is really going through your mind, and the words/phrases that you must inevitably utter. I hope there are no small children within earshot 🤣🤣.
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Ha. For me, the best part is the alternative outcome: that I discover something great and unheralded to get other people excited about. When it’s dreck like this, I mainly just enjoy the ride and try not to be too vituperative about it in the aftermath. I’m always aware that an author might pop up and challenge me to do better 😁
But, lool, I like to think I’ve brought James Scott Byrnside, Robert Innes, DWaM, and Robert Trainor to a wider audience, and if there’s more of that quality out there then it deserves to be found. So let’s see what happens next week — imagine me sighing, rolling up my sleeves, and plunging my arm into a pile of SP manuscripts hoping for something worthwhile…
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ROTFLMAO! Here’s hoping there are no dinosaurs eating lobster hiding from midgets carrying gnomes in your future.
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Actually, that sounds pretty good 😁
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So . . . did HE misspell Marlon Brando, or did you?
Speaking of name spelling, this has been a very weird post for me . . . because of the author’s name. It’s spelled differently, but Steve Levy was the man – boy, really – who introduced me to both Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock. And so, honestly, Steve Levy transformed my life for the better on a permanent basis . . . and I haven’t seen the guy since I was nine.
After I read your post, I went searching online for MY Steve Levy. There’s a famous journalist from Pennsylvania – it’s not him! And there’s a lawyer living up in Fife, Washington. It COULD be him: I remember seeing Steve play a lawyer in his high school mystery play that my parents graciously let me see. So yeah, he was involved in high school theatre, too – just like me! I feel like if I could find this guy, I would give him a big hug, apologize for the hug, and then try and explain coherently why he means so much to me.
Wow, Mr. JJ, look what your bemusing snark has wrought on this guy! I practically have tears in my eyes here.
Oh, and I’m not buying this book.
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Gee, I sure would feel bad if this WAS by an old friend of yours. Imagine if he was simply changing the spelling of his last name to protect his identity, or to differentiate from his serious legal journal work.
Mind you, if he grew up spreading the Gospel of Christie, I like to think he’d know better. Not, I understand, that that stopped Sophie Hannah 😉
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Good news! If you Google “Steve Levi Master of the Impossible Crime,” you will find a link to a webinar held by The Master himself where in you can learn “How you can give [him] ideas for a book” and “How you can share ideas with [him].” Judging by this review, though, it seems he is high on ideas, low on… all other aspects of execution. I wouldn’t normally support mocking an author, but self-proclaiming to be a “Master of the Impossible Crime”… wow. And somehow, despite the editing flaws, this book is available in audio?
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I can only think that that audio version must be the result of some sort of text-to-speech algorithm thing that Amazon must offer. To entertain the possibility that someone read this and recorded it and made it available for sale alongside the POD self-published book is…the first step on the road to madness.
Very interesting, though, to see an author actively encouraging people to send in ideas for a story. Surely, in these litigious days, it’s the last thing you want: someone cropping up after you make a packet on a book with a claim that it was their idea in the first place and so you owe them 90% of your profits. I suspect there must be all manner of legal boilerplate, but Levi also doesn’t strike me as a careful or thorough man on this evidence. But, hey, given some of the millions-selling authors out there, you surely wouldn’t want to risk it…
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I dug around a little and found this little gem from Levi: “Just as in nonfiction, I want my fiction to be unique. As far as I know, I am the only writer who produces “impossible crime” novels.” So he’s either lying here or really has no idea what he’s talking about. You really know how to find them, don’t you, JJ? 😀
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The…I mean…how…if…wh–
I have to be honest, if I’d known of this quote before reading this book, it’d just make me want to read it more. because that is a…very interesting amount of awareness about one’s subgenre. Especially as I don’t think I’d say that a single one of these stories qualifies as an impossible crime. The lobster one would if it wasn’t so inane; the plane one might if it didn’t blatantly lie to you in order to get its surprise ending in; the one where the figure appears on the security tape is impossible only if you allow for species-threatening levels of stupidity; and the stuff being stolen from the room again requires people simply not to look in the obvious place.
However, if he genuinely believes no-one else writes impossible rime novels, that does at least explain why he views himself as this one-eyed king in the land of the blind…
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Or he has own definition of what constitutes an impossible crime story. Probably something along the lines of a weird menace tale from the pulps.
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Yeah, an interesting idea that. But then “I’m the only one who writes my very specific perspective on what I write” could be applied to, like, anything.
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Where does the dinosaur on the book cover come in? Surely it isn’t meant to be the Coelacanth…
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I can only think that it’s a Komodo dragon, because — man, do you really want to know? — the duct tape tuxedo of the title has a jacket made of duct tape and trousers made of Komodo dragon skin.
And since you’ve made me relive some of this, here’s another source of irritation related to that very point: the dwarf makes a point about the distinction between “trousers” and “pants” when Noonan calls then pants, getting sniffy that they’re the former and not the latter, and then proceeds to refer to them as “pants” for the rest of the story.
Also, the cover of this declares it “Heinz Noonan, the Bearded Holmes Book One” and yet his own website lists at least two previous books with Noonan as the main sleuth. What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On?
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