A second anthology of impossible crimes from the British Library Crime Classics range, As If by Magic [ss] (2025) is another genre-spanning collection from editor and Detection Club President Martin Edwards that does much to highlight the depth and breadth of classic crime and detective fiction.
Continue reading
A man sleeping alone in a bolted room, five storeys up in the tower attached to his grand old house, wakes in the night and hurls himself out of the window to his death. Refusing to believe in spooks, spectres, and eldritch terrors, the man’s son determines to sleep in the room as well, and similarly hurls himself from the sole window while alone and the door is again bolted. And if that setup doesn’t entice you to read The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), John Dickson Carr’s lucky thirteenth long form case for Dr. Gideon Fell, then, well, I don’t know how else to entice you in. It was this book that convinced me Carr was going to be my flavour of jam years ago, and I returned to it with great eagerness.
While I would have liked Sam Sedgman’s debut novel The Clockwork Conspiracy (2024) to be rather more clue-based, given his history in the juvenile mystery field, I nevertheless enjoyed its fast pace, high energy, interesting premise, and unusual settings, and so am back for its sequel, The Forbidden Atlas (2025).
Continue reading
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.
Continue reading
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.
I don’t make a reading round-up post an annual occurrence on The Invisible Event, but particularly wanted to do one today if only because I read 164 books in 2025, which is the most in a single year in the existing archives.
Continue reading
A final non-canonical Sherlock Holmes story this month, with Death Cloud (2010) by Andrew Lane being aimed at the 8 to 12 year-old market and setting up some Minor Felonies posts for Tuesdays in January.
Continue reading
While not quite the Jonathan Creek news we might have been hoping for, yesterday I stumbled over a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter that is really rather exhilarating: the publication of a new stage play in the canon by none other than series creator David Renwick.
Continue reading
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
Continue reading
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.
The Invisible Event 