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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In my online book club, discussion turns from time to time to our favourite GAD novels of a particular decade. Having done the 1930s and the 1940s, we turned to the 1920s. And, since there’s an expectation of Agatha Christie being in the mix when discussing favourite GAD titles, I thought I’d return to what I remember to be my favourite from her first decade, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929).
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This first English translation of The Secret of the Pointed Tower (1937) by Pierre Véry was a cause of great excitement when announced, and I regret only that the complexity of the multi-limbed TBR has delayed me this long in getting to it.
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Having sold squillions of copies in its native Japan, Strange Pictures (2022), the debut novel of mysterious YouTuber Uketsu, vaults over the language barrier into English thanks to Pushkin Vertigo and the excellent work of translator Jim Rion, and…honestly, it underwhelmed me.
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I have an undeniable fondness for the work of Edgar Allan Poe, having looked at his tales of ratiocination on this blog as well as written a novel inspired by one of his most famous stories. So Beyond Rue Morgue [ss] (2013), a collection of stories edited by Paul Kane and Charles Prepolec purporting to extend the career of Poe’s unfathomably influential detective C. Auguste Dupin, was certainly an intriguing find.
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Something a little different today: knowing that I’m a fan of the Australian dramatist and novelist Malcolm ‘Max’ Afford, Tony Medawar — the closest thing the GAD firmament has to Indiana Jones — sent me a selection of Afford’s thus-far-uncollected short fiction, as found in a variety of Australian publications from the Golden Age, and I’ve read them and am going to write a little about each one.
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The first of (so far…) two volumes of William Brittain’s short fiction from Crippen & Landru, The Man Who Read Mysteries (2018) contains the eleven stories written under the non-series ‘The X Who Read [Author Name]’ titles and seven selections from editor Josh Pachter of the tales featuring crime-solving high school science teacher Leonard Strang.
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Even before the sad death of John Pugmire, who brought us much in the way of foreign language impossible crime novels through Locked Room International, Pushkin Vertigo had started some heavy lifting in supplying us with ingenious puzzle plots from the other side of the language barrier. They’re not all bangers, of course, but the commitment Pushkin have shown, and continue to show if the raft of upcoming titles on their slate is anything to go by, is heartening for those of us who love a complex problem rigorously exploited. And The Labyrinth House Murders (1988) by Yukito Ayatsuji, recently translated by the talented Ho-Ling Wong, is certainly that.
An aristocratic family, a big house in which an aged relative resides, everyone converging for a party, said elderly relative being the victim of a crime, a precocious young girl keen to investigate, rumours of a family treasure hidden in the grounds…lordy, I hope I’m not reading The Swifts (2023) again.
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“A man is shot in a room from which, apparently, no one could have made an exit. Now what’s the first rational possibility that strikes you?”. It is the shooting of Wolfe Harrigan which Detective Lieutenant Terrence Marshall must solve: rationalist and exposure of religious chicanery Harrigan having apparently been shot by Ahasver, the yellow robe-wearing, centuries-old Wandering Jew who leads the Children of Light church in Los Angeles…and was on stage at the time of said shooting. And when the “rankly fantastic notion of a secret passageway” in Harrigan’s study is dismissed, what possible explanation can there be? Men don’t just vanish into thin air…
The Invisible Event 