Having previously looked at the first ten stories in this collection of impossible crime tales selected by Jack Adrian and Robert Adey, let’s crack on with the final eleven stories, shall we?

I did not particularly enjoy ‘The Ghost in the Gallery’ (1949) by Joseph Commings when I first read it in the Banner Deadlines [ss] (2004) collection, in fact I thought it awful, but — perhaps aided by knowing how it explained its impossible vanishment from a glass-fronted room — this second visit proved much more favourable. Commings has a good eye for gaudy settings and slightly unhinged people, and he stacks unexpected developments here like a master. So perhaps a second visit to the collection is due, eh?

And, who knows, maybe I’ll see the joy in him before the long-rumoured second collection of Banner stories sees the light of day. That would be rather lovely, wouldn’t it?

I’ve also read ‘The Missing Romney’, a.k.a. ‘Four Square Jane’ (1919) by Edgar Wallace before, but I enjoyed it then and enjoyed it again now. Nothing to add to my earlier thoughts — I’m still not completely convinced it qualifies as an impossible crime — which can be found in this post.

A man moves into a secluded house, but is woken on his first night by a woman’s horrible screams, whose source he is unable to place — this rootless caterwauling proving the impossibility in ‘The House of Screams’ (1932) by Gerald Findler. The payoff for this is both ingenious and slightly disappointing: the reader will guess the essential principle if not the precise details, and you do have to wonder at the boneheadedness of our narrator who is unable to source the wailing. It feels like a far earlier story in this regard, but there’s a cleverness to the conceit that proved enjoyable.

It would be interesting to read a collection of this sort of thing, with Findler providing innovative answers to some baffling questions along this line, but Adey’s introduction makes it clear that such a collection will never result since Findler wrote, as I understand it, only one more story that is known. You can find this in the British Library collection Resorting to Murder [ss] (2015), and I urge you to track it down if only so I can get more opinions on its quality — is it wonderful or is it a complete cheat? Let me know!

I have neglected the work of Edward D. Hoch, and following ‘The Impossible Murder’, a.k.a. ‘Captain Leopold and the Impossible Murder’ (1976) I’m going to attempt to remedy that. Not that this story of a man found strangled to death, alone in his car while sitting in traffic — with no-one having got out of the car, natch — has an especially ingenious solution, but Hoch structures it well, giving it an almost Humdrum vibe, and I admire the talent that goes into fitting such an investigative approach into a relatively small space.

So while I’m not convinced that Hoch is quite the master others make him out to be, I’m more than willing to dig a little deeper into his oeuvre. Any recommendations for which collection to tackle will be gratefully received.

Brief and to the point, ‘A Nineteenth Century Debacle’ (1979) by George Locke is another excellent pastiche on the Holmes/Watson dynamic, addressing here the problem of a man simultaneously washed overboard from a ship while also falling to his death from the air some 300 miles away. The solution is the sort of bonkers ingenuity perfectly suited to the tone in which it is relayed, and as such tops the whole confection off delightfully. Fun stuff.

John Dickson Carr features for a second time with his radio play ‘A Razor in Fleet Street’ (1948), recently reprinted in The Island of Coffins (2020) and reviewed by me here. Interesting to note that this is a shorter version of the text, divested of the framing narrative from Dr. Fabian and with certain lines omitted, but the form and function is essentially the same, and the play a fun one, even if Carr wrote better in that series for my money. At time of publication this would have been essentially a new Carr in print, and so you can understand why it was included.

Similar to ‘Solved by Inspection’ (1931) by Ronald Knox, Leonard Pruyn’s ‘Dinner at Garibaldi’s’ (1954) finds a man starved to death — not surrounded by food this time, but instead after attending the eponymous gourmand’s paradise for three meals a day for the last three months. When our narrator and his lawyer friend Joachim Andreas investigate, the solution will come out of nowhere and probably not make a lot of sense, but it’s also a lot of fun and deserves credit for doing something odd within the genre.

Perhaps more importantly, I really like Joachim, for no reason beyond his characterisation through a series of attributes that seem difficult to consolidate in one person, having the effect of making him perhaps one of the most realistic people in short fiction. I’d read a whole book of stories in which he solved odd cases like this without a shred of detection, but this appears to be all that was ever written featuring the character.

I’ve decided that I don’t really like the writing of Joel Townsley Rogers. I’ve read his hugely-lauded The Red Right Hand (1945) twice and found it solidly okay both times, and 20 pages into the 30,000-word novella The Hanging Rope (1946) I couldn’t take any more of his undeniably atmospheric prose which just felt like being drowned in waves of soup for all its looping back and redundant diversions.

The setup is an interesting one — two dead in a locked apartment, with 12 minutes elapsing between the first and second murders yet the killer still escaping despite the proximity of the police — but nothing will convince me that this story needs to be as long as it is. And I said the same about The Red Right Hand, so I think it’s just a Rogers problem for me. Many might consider this the jewel in this collection, since as far as I’m aware it’s unpublished anywhere else since, and so I’m sorry not to have enjoyed it more. If you loved TRRH you’ll probably hoover this up, so take my opinion with a pinch of arsenic.

The final genuine impossible crime in this collection comes in the shape of ‘Now You See Her’ (1971) by Jeffrey Wallman, in which a woman disappears following an argument with her husband, except all the evidence suggests she’s still in the apartment complex — but the police can’t find her. Not only is this excellently written…

A person moving into [the complex] forsook his individuality, his identity, his memories, for there was nothing in one’s past worth salvaging. The past was a jumble of clash, of worry and strain. Here, life was ordered and safe. One belonged, like cubes in an ice tray.

…the final line reveal kicks like a horse on stilts. Wonderful stuff, like some unholy brew cooked up by Roald Dahl, Stanley Ellin, and John Rhode — so good, it wasn’t until 2 a.m. that I realised it doesn’t work.

That’s it for impossibilities, because ‘The Blind Spot’ (1945) by Barry Perowne is a fun take on the impossible crime but doesn’t fulfil the requirements of the subgenre for reasons that have earned it a lot of praise but feel to me, on this second reading, like nothing more than a cheat. It’s fun, sure — and can be found in the recent Final Acts [ss] (2022) collection if you’re interested — but has no place in a collection of this ilk, which was surely spoilt for choice when it came to excellent examples of the form.

We finish off with the hugely enjoyable, note-perfect pastiche ‘Chapter the Last: Merriman Explains’ (1951) by Alex Atkinson, which sends up Carter Dickson’s Henry Merrivale character perfectly, and succeeds in throwing some delightful non sequiturs in for added hilarity. As a commentary on the complexity of the puzzle plot it’s a sheer joy, but there’s no impossible crime…or rather, what is impossible about it could be literally any other type of criminal activity and it would work exactly as well.

Adey and Adrian are, of course, to be commended for getting this collection out at all in the 1990s, as well as for not cramming it full of over-anthologised lazy choices, but The Art of the Impossible is a strange brew, and one which doesn’t live up to my hopes for the collection given Adey’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the subgenre. Scrub the seven or so stories from here which aren’t impossible crimes and you’re still left with the inevitable curate’s egg that all multi-author collections turn out to be…so, frankly, I’m the one at fault for expecting otherwise, eh?

I usually pick a Top 5 for longer collections, and, sticking to those with an impossible crime in them, I’d opt for:

1. ‘Now You See Her’ (1971) by Jeffrey Wallman
2. ‘An Absence of Air’ (191?) by Jacques Futrelle
3. ‘A Nineteenth Century Debacle’ (1979) by George Locke
4. ‘Coffee Break’ (1964) by Arthur Porges
5. ‘The Missing Romney’ (1929) by Edgar Wallace

It’s a shame that some of the most interesting examples are by people who wrote next to nothing that I can follow up with, but in a way that makes this collection more impressive because they’re such obscure names. I guess I just wish my tastes and those of Adey overlapped more, but, well, we all have our flaws, don’t we?

~

See also

Christian @ Mysteries, Short and Sweet: On the whole, the selections here are well-chosen. I didn’t like all the stories, but I thought they all belonged here for some reason or other. And some of them are really great, no doubt about that.