Okay, no, The Murder at World’s End (2025) by Ross Montgomery doesn’t really qualify for this ongoing feature of my blog, in which I pick books purely because they’re modern impossible crime novels. This, I was going to read anyway, and I only knew it happened to feature an impossible crime because Puzzle Doctor told me. But, well, here we are.
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When I first heard of The Big Bow Mystery (1892) by Israel Zangwill, I legitimately thought it was about a big, y’know, bow — the fancy knot one ties in a piece of ribbon. I also anticipated, given its era, that it would be a dry and soulless tale which would dully wander its way to an obvious conclusion — and, well, I couldn’t have been more wrong on both counts. This story of a man found with his throat slit in his locked bedroom in Bow in London’s East End is, I’m delighted to find after a 15-year gap, still fresh, humorous, and remarkably readable. Indeed, as a novel, it might arguably be the most successful impossible crime story ever written, so wonderfully does it retain its pace, lightness, and acuity.
Christmas is done for another year, and so my mind turns to the summer holidays and the possibilities of Europe. Yeah, it’s early to be planning this sort of thing, but I like to be prepared. And so naturally it is the British Library’s collection Continental Crimes [ss] (2017) that I crack open for research
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How better to commemorate the birth of one J.C. than by exploring the work of another? And so to Truth Comes Limping (1938), the seventeenth mystery by Alfred Walter Stewart writing as J.J. Connington and the thirteenth to feature his detective Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield. And, once more with this author, I find myself swimming against the apparent direction of opinion: Nick Fuller rated this at 2/5, Martin Edwards calls it “very disappointing”, and Curtis Evans dismisses it as a “lackluster mystery plot with dull characters and turgid writing”. And so, of course, I really rather enjoyed it — sure, it’s at the weaker end of the four-star ratings I’ve given Connington elsewhere, but for sheer Humdrum delights it’s rather fine.
Another Choose Your Own Adventure-style mystery from an established novelist, Murder at Christmas (2025) by G.B. Rubin being the work of Gareth Rubin, who recently published Sherlock Holmes novel Holmes and Moriarty (2024). And this one’s Christmas-themed! So let’s dive in…
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Another man accused of murder, another family member going to an amateur detective to prove his innocence. The classics don’t wear, do they? This time it is Stewart Ferrers accused of murdering local GP Dr. Benson late at night in his own home, and Stewart’s brother Peter who goes to ex-Sergeant Wm. Beef, now set up as a private enquiry agent, in the hope that evidence can be uncovered to cast doubt on the conviction. And along for the ride is Beef’s faithful-if-frustrated chronicler Townsend (now called Lionel despite calling himself Stuart at the end of the previous novel…) who hopes that something interesting might come of this to put him on equal footing with other novelists who relate the cases of their famous detectives.
For as long as he can remember, 16 year-old Hisataro Oba has found himself randomly, several times a month, caught in a time loop he dubs The Trap: waking up on the same day nine times in a row, with only the events of the final day of the loop becoming the canon version of the day for everyone else in existence. Having realised this, and in part as a coping mechanism, he has been able to exploit The Trap — cheat on a test, win a bet, etc. — but now things are different. Because now a murder has been committed and he would like, if possible, to avert it in the ninth and final version so that it does not become the reality for everyone else.
One haunted house. One impossible crime. One killer weekend. Thus runs the promise on the front cover of Murder Most Haunted (2025), the debut novel of Emma Mason, and that was enough to get in on my TBR as a modern example of the impossible crime that we’re no longer pretending I read just for TomCat‘s sake. So, did it deliver on those promises?
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In five days, Daniel Bronson will be hanged for the murder of regional ne’er-do-well Blackatter, found shot through the back of the head with the insensible, gun-clutching Bronson nearby. And while “no man so near the gallows can be called alive” his wife Selma refuses to think of him as dead yet and approaches Anthony Gethryn to see if he can, “months after the thing was done, when even witnesses’ memories are getting hazy and any scent there might’ve been at the time’s vanished long ago”, find the evidence that would clear Bronson of the crime which Selma simply does not believe he committed. And, well, how could Colonel Gethryn ever live with himself if he didn’t at least try?
Intrigued by the apparent swathe — maybe I’m exaggerating it in my mind, but there do seem to be a lot of them at present — of Choose Your Own Adventure-style mystery books coming into the market in recent months, I undertook to try one. And having found Antony Johnston’s The Dog-Sitter Detective Plays Dead (2025) an easy read, it is to his contribution, Can You Solve the Murder? (2025), that I turn.
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The Invisible Event 