In a bizarre turn of events, I have no memory of acquiring the much-sought-after anthology The Art of the Impossible, a.k.a. Murder Impossible (1990) edited by the legendary pairing of Jack Adrian and Robert Adey. And yet I do have a copy. So let’s worry about my leaky memory later, and instead pick through some classic impossible crimes selected by two of the most knowledgeable men in the business, eh?

The introduction makes interesting reading, even if I am a little surprised to see these editors state that “[c]haracterisation and scene description are often shoved ruthlessly aside as largely irrelevant” in an impossible crime story. But, well, I suppose you have to acknowledge what the market is tuned into, and in 1990 the police procedural was all the rage:

Perhaps this is why the Impossible Crime is to a certain extent frowned on now. In some ways the pure puzzle is a relic of the Golden Age along with all its attendant impedimenta: the X-ed sketch-map of a country house; an itemised list of the contents of the corpse’s pockets; whole chapters of train-times from Bradshaw; a bumbling official detective; a silly-ass sleuth one would like to take a pickaxe handle to oneself, never mind the murderer. Nowadays, we are far more likely to encounter harrowing details of the detective’s current domestic crises than a floorplan of the murder building or pages of correlated railway timetables. And, frankly, a good thing too.

But we’re here for the stories, twenty-one of ’em, many of which at the time has not been included in any anthologies and so would have been collectors’ items. Nobody wants to read about 21 stories at once, however, so I’ll write up the first 10 today and the remaining ones next week. Thus, without further ado…

Many people consider ‘The House in Goblin Wood’ (1947) by John Dickson Carr — though it’s a Henry Merrivale story, so surely that should be Carter Dickson… — to be pretty much the pinnacle of the impossible crime, and I was the same on first read, but this is the third time I’ve read it now and cracks are appearing. I’ve never believed that…that act could be completed in the time given, but there’s also a staggering lack of detail about certain elements of how it would work and…yeah, nah, I’m not so enamoured of this one any more.

I won’t deny its good atmosphere, nor its clever double layering which cannily leads the ingenue reader away from the central scheme, but for all Carr’s cleverness there’s something hollow about the lack of detail where, really, quite a lot of detail feels like it’s needed. An entertaining time, and I can understand why it’s included, but no longer a classic for me.

I first read ‘The Other Side’ (194?) by Hake Talbot in the back of my Ramble House edition of Rim of the Pit (1944), but that was countless years ago — back when my knees didn’t hurt all the time — and so I was able to read it here as if for the first time. Adrian calls it “something of a coup” to have this previously-unpublished story included, but that’s perhaps a little generous: it’s pretty thin, involving a religious leader, an impressionable sixteen year-old heiress, the two uncles of the latter who are reluctant to see her fall into the former’s clutches, and a suicide that has to be murder but simply can’t be.

The real shame here is the detection is non-existent, with the solution coming because series sleuth Rogan Kincaid “saw through [the] murder trick at once” for no reason that we’re ever told and so a confession coming because the detective knew what was in the author’s mind. Talbot was ingenious in the long form of the impossible crime, but here he’s too stripped back and must gloss over too many leaps in logic, and so it’s difficult to get too excited.

The first new-to-me story in this collection, ‘The Courtyard of the Fly’ (1937) by Vincent Cornier is…weird. It’s not an impossible crime — unless you count the existence of a huge flying insect “as large as a mouse”, I guess — and concerns the eponymous member of the diptera order stealing a priceless string of pearls from, and thus ruining the reputation of, a famed jeweller. Years later, the policeman who investigated both that theft and the later sighting of the same creature in possession of the jewels, suggests a solution.

And, as with the little Cornier I’ve read, that solution is…fine. It feels like there’s a cleverer way to deploy this idea, but I can’t say it wouldn’t work even if I don’t quite believe it. Man, the impossible crime used to be such a source of delight to me, and this opening triptych has left me feeling like something of a curmudgeon. Am I a curmudgeon now? Is this a result of my aching knees?

I’d previously read the highly enjoyable ‘Coffee Break’ (1964) by Arthur Porges thanks to the excellent work done by Richard Simms in getting some of the short work by this hugely prodigious writer back into print. A locked cabin with a nailed shut window contains a dead body next to a steaming cup of coffee…so how can this open and shut poisoning be anything but murder?

You can fault this for our detective, Professor of English Ulysses Price Middlebie, simply knowing the answers almost at once, but its main intent is to apply a John Rhodian level of scientific ingenuity to murder, and it achieves that with flying colours.

I can understand Adey’s enthusiasm to include the all-but-forgotten ‘Bullion!’ (1911) by William Hope Hodgson, but it’s a pretty dire affair, with the mildly intriguing prospect of chests of gold vanishing and reappearing in a ship’s strong room devolving to secret passages and poisons unknown to science. Bleurgh.

I’ve never quite been able to warm to Bill Pronzini‘s fiction, and ‘Proof of Guilt’ (1973) continues this trend. A lawyer is shot in his sixteenth floor office, and the man he was meeting with at the time is locked inside…but the nature of the shooting, and the absence of a gun, complicate matters. I wouldn’t call this strictly impossible, either, and while the solution is interesting — I saw the TV episode this was made into several years ago — there’s something about it that fails to excite. But, then, as I say, that’s Pronzini all over for me.

Update: Turns out I’d read this before in one of the Mike Ashley collections, but I didn’t remember it. I distinctly remember that TV episode, which I must have seen when I was about 15, but the story? Nah. Sorry, Bill, I wish we got on better — you’ve written so much, and it would be wonderful to want to dive head-first into such a huge oeuvre.

Written before his death aboard the Titanic, Jacques Futrelle’s ‘An Absence of Air’, a.k.a. ‘Vacuum’ (191?) shows how older crime fiction could be ingenious, and remain so despite the advances in technology that have followed. The motive is nonsense, and the means by which a variety of people are found suffocated without being strangled won’t exactly blow you away, but it’s crisply written and demonstrates what a talent Futrelle was. I should read more Thinking Machine stories; let’s add that to my list of projects.

Also lovely to see someone picking a Thinking Machine story that isn’t ‘The Problem of Cell 13’ (1905). That story’s fun, but far from the masterpiece it’s held up as, and Futrelle’s work deserves to be better-known beyond merely one over-used tale, so this was a good choice

There’s a simplicity both in the setup — valuable documents in locked, alarmed cases in a double-locked strongroom — and the solution of ‘The Impossible Theft’ (1964) by John F. Suter. If a man can smuggle one of these documents out of the room, their wealthy owner will donate $50,000 to a charitable cause…and that’s it. The problem is minor, the solution canny but hardly earth-shattering, it’s a fun time. I’m sure I’ve read Suter before, though I can’t remember where, and on this evidence I’d happily read him again.

I’ve read some John Lutz before, but again I can’t remember where, so ‘It’s a Dog’s Life’, a.k.a. ‘The Case of the Canine Accomplice’ (1982) might as well be my first encounter with his work. Alas, as weirdly happens in these themed collections, it doesn’t fit the theme, since the shooting of a socialite in his home is done in an unlocked room with open French windows through which the family dog is suspected to have chased the perpetrator…and so is not even mildly impossible.

I do enjoy a ‘down on his luck P.I. who shows up the police’ story, though, and Sam, the dog of the title, is a delight, so maybe I’d have enjoyed this more if two hugely knowledgeable men in the field hadn’t assured me ahead of time that it had an impossible element. Lutz’s clewing isn’t the best, but we don’t really hold that against short stories, and this proved very readable. So maybe if there’s an actual impossible crime from the guy I’d enjoy it, who knows?

We finish today with ‘The Death of Cyrus Pettigrew’ (1909) by Sax Rohmer, another author whose short stories I’m certain I’ve encountered even though I can’t name a single one. And, again, this isn’t an impossible crime, since the poisoning of our wealthy man of private means in a train carriage is easily achieved (the window was open, there are puncture marks on his body) we just don’t know what the poison was. And the answer is hardly worth waiting for, with the vintage of this giving tongue to the somewhat melodramatic turn things take.

I might not rush out to read more Rohmer after this, especially given how many other authors on my TBR seem more enticing. Sure, it’s of its time, etc., etc., but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it. Things date, writing goes out of style, ideas progress…some stuff is bound to get left behind, and this one is better left there.

This opening tranche leaves me a little underwhelmed, then, but mostly I’m confused as to how 40% of these opening ten stories don’t meet the brief of being impossible crimes. Adrian says it took a decade to put this book together, and Adey had already compiled his famous reference work — which, admittedly, has some unusual entries in it — so it doesn’t bode well for the second half that we’re clearing the bar so infrequently. 

See you next week for the remainder, where things will hopefully improve.

~

See also

Bev @ My Reader’s Block: As with so many short story collections, this is a mixed bag–ranging from brilliant solutions, to big let-downs (especially after the build-up in the introductions given by our editors) to just plain silly parodies. The best are true impossible crimes with absolutely terrific solutions and, quite often, a nifty little twist at the end.