Having enjoyed Jamie Probin‘s previous stabs at the impossible crime, I turn to the currently last of his stories to be made publicly available, the long short story ‘Body of Matter’ (2022).

This time, his detective — Mathematics lecturer Dr. Samuel Harris — has been invited to the University of Liverpool where an annual conference is occurring at the behest of three physicists locked in a competition to be the first to successfully transport matter instantaneously. The conference location cycles between Liverpool, Pisa, and Illinois, where each of the physicists are based, and this time it is Professor Jules Gagnier who claims that he will demonstrate the teleportation effect they all so eagerly chase.

Harris arrives at the location for the demonstration on the second morning to find the place crowded and, more worryingly, one of the rival physicists exiting the room where the machinery for the demonstration has been set up. When Gagnier arrives and learns of this, he angrily storms into the otherwise-empty lecture theatre to check his experiment…a large explosion follows…and as the gathered throng push their way into the room there appears to be no signs of Gagnier anywhere, just a smoking hole in the floor.

The a phone call is received: a man matching Gagnier’s description has just wandered in something of a daze out of some woodland on a golf course 20 miles away, only speaking in French and with apparently no memory of what has happened to him. History, it seems, has been made.

Probin does well to set up the central conflict, with the three professors locked in a struggle where “the thought of losing is far more terrifying than the thought of succeeding is exciting”, and is quick to establish that the journey to the golf course would take far longer than current transport methods could account for, setting up the impossibility. The fact that Gagnier’s research assistant also insists that he’d already seen the effect in action lends credence to this apparently unachievable happening:

“He had me flip a coin ten times, write down the results on a piece of paper and sign it. Then he folded the paper into a box and zapped it with that.” He pointed to the smoking hulk of the device. “It disappeared, Davies! Right on front of my eyes. And then we walked over to Abercrombie Square and there the box was, underneath a tree. The paper inside was the sheet I’d just written.”

I also quite enjoy that Harris, as a logician, is quick to acknowledge that there is a difference between deciding for yourself that something cannot have been genuine and proving it to other people (“If I can’t explain an alternative hypothesis, do I have any right to doubt it?”). While it’s true that as a detective there’s rather more of the moment of sudden realisation about the resolution of this, it’s pleasing to have someone keep their head while also admitting the feasibility of what they can’t possibly have just seen happen.

The solution ties in nicely some of the little questions that prod at the characters throughout, and, while nothing close to original, at least has the chutzpah to indulge in a piece of misdirection that is as classic as is it ballsy. I got the essential thrust of what must have happened, thanks to Probin being open-handed about the information he provides, but I laughed out loud when I saw the key moment in the correct light, and I applaud the use of this so brazenly. More modern writers of impossible crimes need to be this unabashed in how they pull the wool over a reader’s eyes, because it’s so much fun when you understand what was done.

It is to be hoped, then, that the collection Six Impossible Things that was promised when Probin released this and The Heir Affair (2022) does eventually see daylight. Probin has a facility with setting and a confidence with stirring in some classic tropes that really sets his work apart, and these shorter stories have been largely shorn of the prolixity that made his novel The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) a little bit of a slog amidst its strong ideas. The man is clearly capable of learning, and I hope he’s writing when the time allows it and we see more of the unflappable Harris before too long.

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