Back in 2020 I read and largely enjoyed Jamie Probin’s novel The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) and the short story ‘The Episode of the Nine Monets’ (2020). The first was admittedly rather prolix, but it showed great promise and I’ve kept an eye out for his work ever since.

In due course, two more long short stories appeared — The Heir Affair (2022) and Body of Matter (2022) — promising to be previews of a later collection called Six Impossible Things. Well, I thought I’d wait for that…but, thus far, it’s not surfaced. And since I’m interested to see what other ingenious ideas Probin has been playing with, I’m belatedly jumping in to the first of those stories — where the impossibilities themselves aren’t perhaps as notable as in Probin’s earlier works, but overall there are some excellently-deployed ideas.

Following the death of Logan McCrimmon, laird of Eilean Aedan Castle in the isolated Scottish village of Kinnie, the estate, always passing to the eldest son, legally becomes the property of his only son, Alex. The situation is far from simple, however, because Logan died seven years ago and Alex left Kinnie some eleven years ago at the age of ten, never to be seen again. And now dusty lawyer James Smethwick has an even greater problem: not only has someone turned up claiming to be Alex McCrimmon and ready to stake his claim on the estate, but someone else has also arrived at the same time making the same claim.

Probin smartly adds to this complication, too, by having the history of the entail cast in some doubt: despite Logan being proud of his son and often boasting of the lad’s achievements, the two seemed to become distant as Alex grew up, with McCrimmon, Jr. seen less and less in the company of his father on the mainland, and Logan even enquiring of Smethwick at one point whether it was possible to break the entail. Learning that, no, the estate must pass to his son, Logan then set about ensuring that Alex could not take possession until his 21t birthday, the latest possible point at which the transfer could happen. So, what gives?

Probin sets this intrigue up well, markedly less prolix than The Thirteenth Apostle, with some good work establishing the setting by relating the accents of the people in the town (“The man had a soft, lilting accent which made every sentence sound like the start of a fairy story.”), and tight scene-setting that blends in atmosphere very keenly.

The colour of the paintings and tapestries felt like they were barely holding the crude grey of the walls at bay, and the roaring fire in the grate merely fighting an age old rear guard action against a chill that was part of the building itself.

The pot is stirred further when Smethwick brings in his friend, the university don Dr. Samuel Harris, no mean amateur sleuth in his own way, to aid the identification. A rite of sorts must be completed at the castle, and when only one of the two potential heirs turns up — the nervous man who has been dubbed Married McCrimmon on account of the fading violet wife he has brought with him who “made even the most diffident church mouse look like a playboy on the night of the Boat Race” — and completes the task, the apparently impossible production of a claymore sword from another part of the castle in a locked room, things begin to get murky.

“It has to be a trick, doesn’t it?” asked Smethwick.

“Well of course it’s a trick,” snapped Harris. “That would be obvious to a philosophy student. Ruddy great swords don’t disappear from a locked room and reappear in empty ones.”

Then, upon returning to the inn where the two men are residing, it is discovered that the other claimant, the unmarried Single McCrimmon, has been murdered in circumstances that are best described as ‘impossible’ — the windows on the floor sealed on the inside, and the entire town of Kinnie, gathered in the bar to be close to the intrigue, able to insist that no-one went up the stairs since the murdered man returned.

I shall draw a veil over the remainder, because Probin does an excellent job of making sense of the various contradictions, drawing in a tragedy that saw a young boy seriously injured around the time Alex left the hamlet, and resolving everything in a way that cleverly makes use of a very simple misdirection. Good work is done in investigating the possibilities that could account for the murder, and it’s cleverly resolved in one element even if the overall answer is as old as the hills. Seeing this explanation make such good use of a familiar principle nevertheless seamlessly worked into the narrative makes a strong case for the old methods still being used today: a new wrinkle can always be found to make them workable.

The impossible-production of the sword is less good to my mind, but its use in the story serves a clever purpose, and feeds into the unusual behaviour of Logan ahead of his death. And, to be honest, I sort of prefer it this way: I’d rather the various character-based contradictions be explained away intelligently and the impossibility slightly underwhelm than have a genre-busting new explanation for a fairly minor element of a plot that set up many questions and then answered them in an dissatisfying manner. For my money, Probin got the balance the right way round here.

It is, then, lovely to see that Probin has learned much from his earlier writing, and that his tighter prose and more multi-faceted plotting, along with some genuinely funny turns of phrase, is the result of his efforts. I shall, in due course, get to Body of Matter, and it is to be hoped, on this evidence, that the remaining four impossible things come to public availability before too long.