In an age where the term “locked room mystery” increasingly seems to mean “closed circle mystery” — as in, one of the limited number of characters in the story committed the crime, as if you’d want there to be an alternative — how refreshing to come across someone in Alex Wagner who actually demonstrates an awareness of what an impossible crime is.
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Another self-published impossible crime story, I can’t remember how The Westerlea House Mystery (2013) by Adam Croft came to my attention, but it did, I’ve read it, and we’re going to look at it today.
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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).
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When A. Carver published The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023) close to Christmas 2023, I was caught off-guard: with that title, one feels it should be read in the Winter, and I try to be about four to five weeks ahead on my blogging and so it had to wait until 2024. Then I just…didn’t read it in 2024, so Winter 2025 finally comes to the rescue
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We’ve all been there, eh? One minute you’re imagining violent and fitting deaths for all the people who demean and annoy you on a daily basis, and the next those very same people are dying in front of you while you’re powerless to help. What? You’ve…not been there? Oh.
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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.
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After five novels of seemingly impossible crimes explained away with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, James Scott Byrnside tackles the far harder shorter form in his latest book, It’s About Impossible Crime (2025), which gives us five stories featuring his most frequent protagonists, Chicago P.I.s Rowan Manory and Walter Williams.
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A nice bit of crossover here, with a juvenile mystery that’s also a self-published impossible crime novel easing the transition from Minor Felonies this month to another batch of Adventures in Self-Publishing in November.
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Excepting a couple of books by James Scott Byrnside, who graduated magna cum laude from the University of Self-Publishing, the last time I pursued these Adventures was October 2020. So, grizzled and too old for this shit, I am summoned out of retirement by The Author is Dead (2022) by A. Carver.
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It’s rare that factors surrounding the existence of a book are more interesting than the book itself, but with his third novel, The Direction of Murder (2020), John Nightingale has achieved exactly this feat. Allow me to explain…
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The Invisible Event 