It is moderately funny to me that I searched for years for Whistle Up the Devil (1953) by Derek Smith, only to finally run a copy to earth for sensible money — with a dustjacket and everything — in 2014. Then, about two months later, Locked Room International republished it along with all Smith’s crime and detective fiction, and I went from zero copies to two in no time at all. In 2018 I called it one of my fifteen favourite impossible crime novels, and one of those has already dropped off the perch, so revisiting this in January 2026 was fraught with peril. But, well, if anything, a second read has given me even more to enjoy about it, and it thankfully remains available now for you to get it for sensible money…so go, quickly!

Exhorted by his friend Chief Inspector Steve Castle, amateur sleuth Algy Lawrence goes down to the family pile of the Querrins in the hope of forestalling elder sibling Roger from seeing through a potentially fatal ceremony: locking himself in a room and seeing if the ghost of a murderous ancestor turns up to relay an apparently ancient family secret. When Roger is stabbed in the back in the locked room despite Algy and younger Querrin brother Peter watching one entrance and local policeman Sergeant Hardinge watching the other, it really does seem as if they are faced with a killer “oozing like smoke through the solid walls”.

Individual responses to books do, of course, vary, but it’s not exactly unheard of for a book to acquire a reputation through unavailability and then turn out, for this reader, to be something of a dud (Exhibit A). So not only was it a delight to find this so enjoyable on first read, it’s great to go back to it over a decade later and see even more here to admire: some superbly unsettling scene setting (“[I]t had been in just these words that the tale had been told a few weeks before, at the dawn of the terror.”), rich genre awareness (The Big Bow Mystery (1892) by Israel Zangwill, Inspector Joseph French, DCI Edward Beale, and others all get a mention), and a pleasingly light touch…

The sergeant muttered something that sounded more like a profanity than a prayer.

…in copious evidence.

Most impressive is how adept Smith proves, in his first novel, at weaving in a genuine touch of Agatha Christie into his clues. I’ll obviously not spoil how, but there are several moments which, when you know the guilty party, read very differently to how they would first time around, and the boldness of this is simply delightful. It’s true that Lawrence himself is a sylph of a character, with the likes of Uncle Russ and Hardinge coming through much more strongly — I’d read another several books about either of them — but when steel shows in Smith’s writing it rings true and fits into the classical mould we’re hoping for:

“I don’t hang murderers to flatter my ego. Whatever a killer’s done, it makes me sick to trap him… I don’t want to sound pompous, damn it, but I think I serve the cause of justice. And I believe, with all my heart, that the person who killed Roger Querrin deserves to be sent to trial.”

Inside a tiny cast, Smith does a job on par with Christianna Brand of hiding his killer and stirring in two excellent impossible murders which are resolved clearly, cleanly, and with zero hand-waving. To see a debut novelist apply himself so confidently to the Grandest Game in the World makes the heart ache that only one other Algy Lawrence novel was ever written, and while we can nitpick — the romance is weird, the final scene unnecessary — the simple fact is that few people ever took on this subgenre with the confidence of the best and made it work. Yes, okay, there’s a blazing clue — (rot13) gur gurezbf synfx — never mentioned that could easily have been mixed in, but everything else is there, it rattles along at a fair lick, and I loved every moment of this second visit.

That’s all I have to say, really: this book is spry, fun, flawed, and beautifully creative, and if you’re a fan of impossible crimes and have somehow not yet read it then I suggest that 2026 be the year you correct that. I’ll reread Smith’s second and final novel Come to Paddington Fair (c. 1954) in due course, but for now this has been wonderful and made me very happy in these gloomy Winter days.