#1367: Adventures in Self-Publishing – It’s About Impossible Crime [ss] (2025) by James Scott Byrnside

After five novels of seemingly impossible crimes explained away with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, James Scott Byrnside tackles the far harder shorter form in his latest book, It’s About Impossible Crime (2025), which gives us five stories featuring his most frequent protagonists, Chicago P.I.s Rowan Manory and Walter Williams.

I maintain that the short story is by far the harder ask of a detective fiction writer, because you need to cram character, mood, misdirection, clewing, and denouement into a fraction of the space a novel allows, and so any dead weight is really felt. Nevertheless, if I believe anyone can do it, I believe in Byrnside, so let’s get down to it and see how he fares.

‘The Silent Steps of Murder’ was originally made available on Byrnside’s website, but since I knew I wanted to buy the book I didn’t read it at the time. Set on New Year’s Eve, it concerns a rookie policeman who stumbles upon the scene of a savage killing and, in his panic, runs out of the house and into the arms of Manory and Williams. There are some lovely atmospheric turns of phrase in here (“Lipstick had been applied to excess, smeared past the contours of her lips the way a child disobeyed the lines of a coloring book…”) that add to the gloomy, downtrodden feel expertly.

The crime would seem impossible, given that only the policeman’s footprints approach and leave in the snow, and the other tenants of the rooming house are cleared of complicity, but the solution to this is minor and so throwaway that I almost missed it first time around. My suspicion (rot13 for sort-of spoilers) — gung Dhva unq erpbtavfrq gur xvyyre naq pneevrq gurz sebz gur fprar ba uvf onpx, pnyyvat nggragvba gb uvzfrys juvyr gurl syrq va gur bgure qverpgvba — turned out false, and Manory’s reading of the crime scene is clever in dismissing all but the truth. He’s superbly compelling in the final stages, too; exquisite characterisation there.

The superbly-titled ‘Where There’s Smoke, There’s Pazuzu’ comes next, in which the eponymous fiend — “the single-most destructive demon known to man” — kills a captain of industry in his locked, watched office. With Manory forewarned and unimpressed (“I have investigated many murders. The solution always lies within the bounds of reality.”), can he explain how the office contained only the eviscerated remains of the victim, and how the smoke said to emanate from Pazuzu’s summoning could possibly be explained?

I anticipated the how of this correctly, but the who and why eluded me, and are both very good. And it’s great to see Williams demonstrate some practical intelligence in his investigations: too often the idiot friend is made into a caricature, but the use of Williams in these stories, as a genuine arm of Manory’s investigations who adds meaning and insight to Manory’s understandings, is lovely to see.

Tedious correction that only I will care about: cows chew sideways.

We’re in vaguely Woolrichian territory for ‘Instrument of Death’, with a violent criminal only too happy to kill people who stand between him and a valuable instrument, and newly-married Violet Reynolds, little though she knows it, the ultimate aim of his murderous carnage.

There’s a clever idea in here, and the mood is suitably heavy at times in a way that befits something more in the Suspense vein, but I struggled to keep some of the characters straight, which proves a problem when it comes to the closing section. Still, Byrnside sold me a feint I totally went for by offering up the obvious denouement at the halfway stage, and managed to get a surprise or two — and an excellent fair play piece of declaration — in the last stretch.

No impossible crime, but when the whole is mostly this well-mustered it goes to show you don’t always need one. Who knew?!

Complexity abounds in ‘The Preminger Curse’, which sees Manory and Williams in Cairo, Illinois (“It wasn’t a broken town, not exactly. But it had the look of a place where the paint peeled faster than it was reapplied.”) for the reading of a will in which, for some reason, Manory has been added as a legatee. The Preminger siblings, called back to the creaky ancestral pile, gather and snipe and, required to stay the night under the terms of the will, some of them die…

There’s a wonderfully oppressive tone to this, with fracturing tempers (“Rowan caught the look in his eyes — the kind of look a man has right before he forgets there are witnesses.”), appropriately gloomy weather, and a great sense of panic as people ricochet around the house, ghostly women appear and vanish, and the escalating emotional pitch sweeps everyone up in its arms.

Against it are that I felt too many characters appear at once, so I couldn’t quite keep them straight, and the one true locked room murder arguably isn’t explained clearly. But those are far from enough to spoil this, and it shows how much Byrnside has matured as an author that he’s able to evoke such shivers so effectively.

Finally, ‘Cue, Murder!’, with an overheard murder in an apartment house resulting in a dead body inside a locked room with plenty of odd features — celluloid strips, an anonymous letter, a scathing review of a previous performance given by the dead actor. This is one of those setups that feels inherently false, but it’s sold well, and the decision to simply tell this in as unfiligree’d a manner as possible (no curse, no demonic possession, no looming weather, etc.) is a good one.

There’s an interesting sub-stream in this which sent me down the rabbit hole of American law, but which, due to the — let’s say — power dynamics involved also left me feeling a little unclean. Byrnside does well to juggle the various intersecting elements of this, however, and, if the guilty party didn’t take me totally by surprise, the clever way Manory builds so much up out of so little is very adroitly handled.

With short story collections, I typically pick a top 5; since this only contains five stories, they all make the cut — yay! Were I to order that list, however, I’d probably say:

‘The Preminger Curse’
‘The Silent Steps of Murder’
‘Where There’s Smoke, There’s Pazuzu’
‘Cue, Murder!’
‘Instrument of Death’

A ranking of course implies a drop of quality over the titles concerned, but Byrnside has done so well with these stories that it’s a very tight grouping indeed. And, perhaps the most enjoyable thing of all, his detective actually detects: these stories are still, despite their relative brevity in comparison with a novel, chances for Manory to show his ingenuity. The shorter form typically finds detection going out the window in order to compress matters into less space, but Byrnside shows real acumen here in his scattering of clues, well-hidden motives, and surprising choices of killers…all reasoned out neatly, swiftly, and convincingly by the astute, unflappable Manory.

If the impossibilities slightly lack in the ingenuity Byrnside has evinced previously in his career, this collection at least stands as a salutary lesson that the old saws still have plenty of life in them yet, and an ingenious trick means nothing if surrounded by turgidity. Byrnside is to be commended on the clarity of his characters, the clever manipulations that enable these plots to exist in a genuine-feeling 1920s Chicago, the exquisite juggling of moods and styles, and the tireless application of clewing and smart reasoning that brings the whole into focus. Loads of fun, we are lucky to have him.

James Scott Byrnside on The Invisible Event

Featuring Rowan Manory and Walter Williams: