Between 2016 and 2020, Robert Innes published 10 impossible crime novellas and one novel and then just…disappeared. And his sudden — thought not seemingly impossible — vanishment from the scene made me overlook his final published work, Dollhouse (2020), which I intend to correct today.

Clearly veering into something akin to alternate history in the style of Harry Turtledove, this novella — written and set in 2020 — seems to be occurring in the midst of some sort of outbreak. There’s talk of people wearing face masks and having to keep two metres apart at all times due to fear of spreading some sort of infection, and while my brain would insist that there was something familiar about all this it also put it behind the equivalent of a psychological paywall that advised me not to look too closely. Besides, who can remember anything about nearly six years ago? I’m sure the world back then was just as wonderful as it is now.

Of far more interest are the events which concern the denizens of the Harmschapel police force: the murder in her locked, gated home of pensioner Mavis McBride. And yet Mavis’s granddaughter knows who killed her grandmother, because she saw the killer through the letterbox when trying to get into the house with her ne’er-do-well brother Connor, who had just been released from prison: the killer was Alice. The only problem is that Alice is a 25-inch tall porcelain doll which has been in the family for decades, and despite Emily’s insistence that she saw Alice walk, no-one is will to believe that a Victorian doll is guilty. I mean, that’s impossible. Isn’t it?

I’ll be honest, I thoroughly enjoyed dropping back into the lives of the people of Harmschapel after my extended hiatus, and while I’m not quite sure that all the answers here fully join up, I lament that Innes dismounted the series at this point and we don’t have a full score of these to enjoy now. I can understand it — the guy came up with, like, 11 sets of various impossible circumstances, and tied them, as here, into some surprisingly complex plots at times, and he must have been exhausted by the end of if all — but these novellas have been a real highlight of my Adventures in Self-Publishing and I miss them.

I don’t really want to say too much about the plot, except that I wasn’t prepared for the direction it went, and, given the increasingly complex nature of the impossible crime in modern writing, there’s something almost shin honkaku about the raft of revelations that make this work. The second murder is a superbly surprising moment, dropped exactly at the halfway point for maximum cliff-hang, and while I don’t know if someone could get…that item…into a police cell without anyone noticing, it’s lovely that Innes is willing to stretch the likelihood of these adventures in the way that the most creative subgenre in the world often flexes to allow.

Creepy dolls are of course something of a mainstay of horror fiction — the Anthony Hopkins film Magic (1978) traumatised me as a child — and Innes does a good job of selling you something that simply can’t be true in the shape of the murderous Alice. The opening scene, in which a young Emily is terrorised by the doll, is exactly the sort of thing that would leave an adult with mental scars, and her increasing bewilderment as the shadows of her past loom up to consume here is very well-handled.

If the impossibilities themselves get a little hand-wavey — I like the principle behind that the paralysis that grips Emily in the opening, but surely it would take a lot to achieve — the overlapping designs behind the various plot strands are well-handled, as Innes has done throughout this series. I looked in completely the wrong direction inside a very small cast, and if some of the clues don’t quite join up (rot13: gung ernyyl VF gbb zhpu pbssrr), the intent is there to provide as much of an opportunity to the reader to solve this ahead of time. A slightly fudged attempt at playing fair will always be preferable to a rock-solid effort which hides key ideas, and it’s to be lamented that Innes stopped here when playing fair was increasingly in his credo.

This also ends on a pleasingly human note, with perhaps the size of events in the world at the time dwarfing any ill-feeling or loggerheads, and the characters showing a degree of empathy and concern that again commends Innes and his world-building. The scars of COVID remain, of course, but to see someone at the time approaching it in a relatively big-hearted way is a pleasing reminder that not everything about that time should be banished from memory. We may not know what happened in Harmschapel after this, but I’ve a good feeling that the community did what was needed and it all worked out well.

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The Blake Harte Mysteries by Robert Innes:

1. Untouchable (2016)
2. Confessional (2017)
3. Ripples (2017)
4. Reach (2017)
5. Spotlight (2017)
6. Flatline (2018)
7. Skeletons (2018)
8. Touch (2018)
9. Atmosphere (2018)
10. Harte (2019)
11. Dollhouse (2020)

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The hub of self-published impossible crime fiction reviews on The Invisible Event can be found here.