Author: JJ
#106: Death from a Top Hat (1938) by Clayton Rawson
Well, where to start? Locked room murders (plural!), magicians, a hefty dose of self-reference, an extended John Dickson Carr homage-cum-lecture, a sprinkling of magical and mystical esoterica, and some really quite awesomely clever solutions…to be honest this — Rawson’s first novel to feature magician detective The Great Merlini and his Watson, journalist Ross Harte — should be a shoo-in for my favourite book of all time. Something about the conflation of conjuring and seemingly-impossible crimes just gets me all a-giggle with excitement, and Rawson wrote one of my favourite impossible crime short stories of all time (‘Off the Face of the Earth’, since you asked) so has previous with me, but this just comes up a little short to call it the masterpiece it probably should be.
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#105: For Tau Day – John Dingbats Carr!
So in March this would have worked perfectly – the Tuesday Night Bloggers were looking at the novels of John Dickson Carr and with March 14th being Pi Day (albeit on a Monday, but that’s a mere trifle) I started putting this together. Then my hand injury intervened and I had to shelve it, much to my own consternation.
Today, however, is Tau Day, which is almost as good (though the mathematician in me wants to point out that pi makes a damn sight more sense as a constant…) and gives me the chance to put my work to good use, so here we go: dingbats of John Dickson Carr books using letters of the Greek alphabet (SPOILER: I am something of a nerd in real life)!
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#104: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Light and Shade of Gervase Fen
Okay, so I’m going to do my best to stay on-task today; none of these wild flights of fancy. A discussion of Golden Age academic mystery and nothing more. And since I already have my post sorted for next Tuesday, and that’s the final week in June, it has to be now that I engage in some discussion about Edmund Crispin and the irrepressible Gervase Fen. Continue reading
#103: Paul Halter Day – III: The Round-Up
Well, as 60th birthdays go, I hope mine is this much fun. And so as Paul Halter Day comes to an end – and given that you’ve already checked out my two posts on the beginning of the Locked Room International enterprise and then some unapologetic fanboying on Halter’s impossible crime mantle-bearing – here’s the round-up of what others who were generous enough to get involved had to say.
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First up, and with thanks for his not taking legal action over me stealing his Crimes of the Century round-up idea for this post, Rich at Past Offences tackled The Demon of Dartmoor, his first toe into the Halter Pool (see what I did there?), and liked what he found:
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#102: Paul Halter Day – II: The Impossibility of More Impossibilities
Declaring that the detective novel was the only form of literature that put the reader to work, [S.S. van Dine] argued that “a deduction game emphasising fair play within a limited setting” would be the story structure with the best potential to result in masterpiece mystery stories […] But when the elements of the game are too severely limited and the building materials are all the same, only the first few builders will get all the glory and there will be an over-abundance of similar novels…
—Soji Shimada, in his introduction to The Moai Island Puzzle
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#101: Paul Halter Day – I: An Epistle of Paul the Impossible
If I ran one of those clickbait-style websites, I would have been teasing this for at least a week now as the tautology of a ‘world exclusive never-before-seen Paul Halter translation’. I mean, it is exactly that, but that’s not the point.
In order to help with the acknowledgement of Paul Halter’s 60th birthday, John Pugmire — perhaps better known under his stage name of Locked Room International — has, with M. Halter’s blessing, sent me a copy of the letter he received from Halter when mutual friend Roland Lacourbe first showed Halter the English translation John had done of his debut novel, The Fourth Door. Lacourbe is, of course, the acknowledged overlord of the French impossible crime scene and compiler of the encyclopaedic reference 1001 Chambres Closes, the French equivalent of Robert Adey’s English language rundown of all things fictional and impossible, Locked Room Murders.
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#100: The Dead Room (1987) by Herbert Resnicow
When the unpopular patriarch of a family is found stabbed to death in his locked study, it’s clear that one of the six family members gathered at the ancestral pile must be the murderer (the servants, of course, are excluded immediately). It’s up to our plucky amateur detective team to work out how he was killed and beat the police to the killer before it’s too late while also beginning to realise how they really feel about each other… So far, so Golden Age. Now substitute the following nouns: patriarch/inventor, family/hi-fi company, study/anechoic chamber (sound-testing room, if you will), family members/company executives, ancestral pile/company studio, and servants/technicians. What you have now is the plot of Herbert Resnicow’s The Dead Room. It’s that simple a switch – but for the trappings of its location, this could not be more of a Golden Age detective story, and the entire enterprise is undertaken in the same spirit as those classics. Continue reading
#99: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Life Imitating Art in ‘The Day the Children Vanished’ (1958) by Hugh Pentecost
It’s possibly a bit of an ask to cram this into the ‘academic mystery’ box as required by this month’s Tuesday Night Bloggers, but there’s too much of interest here not to look at. And the story does concern the seemingly-impossible disappearance of a group of children on their way home from school and so is probably just about allowable.
Nine young children in a station-wagon-acting-as-school-bus are being driven from their school to the nearby town where they live, a route which includes the ‘dugway’ road cut into the rock face between the two towns. The car is seen entering the dugway, the father of two of the children on board drives past it in the opposite direction and so is able to vouch for its presence…but it never emerges at the other side. A close inspection of the road reveals no evidence of the car having crashed through any barriers, the ice-covered lake below shows no breakages or disturbance to its surface, and the steepness of the rockface and density of the forestry thereon precludes any off-road antics even if the car was able to somehow pass through a safety barrier without leaving a mark.
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#98: One week until Paul Halter Day!
The Invisible Event 