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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Having written six fast-paced and energetically witty mysteries featuring Jake and Helene Justus and their lawyer friend John J. Malone, Craig Rice decided that 1942 would be a year of experimentation. Some worked, some was hard work, and some was probably successful if you like that kind of thing. Thankfully, 1943 saw her return to Malone & Co., though the ghost of experimentation wasn’t completely laid and a little of the need to innovate — no bad attitude, not if you see yourself in writing for a while — carried through to Having Wonderful Crime (1943). So Jake, Helene, and Malone decamp to New York rather than Chicago, but murders happen in the Big Apple too, and before long we’re caught up in one.
I have, in my limited exposure to his work, come to quite enjoy the thrillerish tendencies of Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace. You don’t come to him for solid plotting, intelligent detection, or subtle clewing, but there’s a brand of creativity he brings to his wild schemes that is difficult to find elsewhere.
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The Affair at Little Wokeham, a.k.a. Double Tragedy (1943), was the last of Freeman Wills Crofts’s books to be recently reprinted by Harper Collins in these lovely paperback editions. Fear not, I have acquired the rest of Crofts’s oeuvre — though if you have an unread House of Stratus edition of Death of a Train (1946), do get in touch — and shall indeed complete the Full Crofts here on The Invisible Event, but let’s spare a thought for what might have been: when the Inspector French TV show seemed a likely prospect, we could have had all of Crofts’s novels for grown-ups in bookshops in the 21st century. Alas, Utopia must remain a dream.
Having previously poked their tongue into their cheeks with Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village (2021), Maureen Johnson and illustrator Jay Cooper turn their minds to committing crimes rather than evading them with The Creeping Hand Murder (2025). I have Brad to thank for bringing this to my attention, and, having recently held forth on the hiding of clues, it seemed the perfect opportunity to look at the inevitable use of the visual to communicate that which would be far more obvious, or difficult to convey subtly, in prose.
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It’s fairly incredible to me that I have a copy of The Sealed Room Murder (1934), originally published by James Ronald under his Michael Crombie nom de plume, at all. Only the recent efforts of Chris Verner and Moonstone Press to bring Ronald’s criminous oeuvre back into print for sensible money have made this and others available to fans like me without endless connections and deep pockets, and I remain extremely grateful for their undertaking. The book, then, delivers largely what one has been able to come to expect from Ronald’s earlier, pulp-adjacent writing, with much thrill and little substance: fun, but not worth the sorts of money previously requested online.
Having adored the Ealing black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) as a teenager, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the novel from whence it sprang, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) by Roy Horniman. Thus, to the film do I return for the first time in easily 30 years to see if it holds up in the many ways I remembered it improving on its source material.
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Few people are as surprised as me at how much I’ve enjoyed the opening novels of S.S. van Dine’s career. They’re not fair play detection of the sort I’d like, but as an example of rigorous police work alongside an amateur dilettante they’re swiftly-plotted, lightly-written, and a very pleasing way to pass a few hours. And the fourth in the series, The Bishop Murder Case (1929), improves on the previous three in the matter of the killer not being frankly bloody obvious well before the halfway stage. Sure, you have to swallow a few coincidences, but, meh, where would classic detection be without that? Did anyone ever complain that Hercule Poirot or Perry Mason always happened to be on the scene of a murder? Think of what we’d have missed! Kick back and enjoy, that’s what I say.
The Invisible Event 