F. Tennyson Jesse

#1390: “Circumstances might arise when a murder would be the only way out of a difficulty.” – Continental Crimes [ss] (2017) ed. Martin Edwards

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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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#777: Circumstantial Evidence – The Baffle Book (1930) by Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay [ed. F. Tennyson Jesse] Problems 22 to 28

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I struggle to think of the last thing I read that disappointed me as much as F. Tennyson Jesse’s 1930 edit of Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay’s Baffle Book puzzles. From stories where subtle changes in detail make finding the solution impossible (‘The Warfield-Cobham Jewel Robbery’) to those whose insistence of physical evidence is so ignorant as to defy explanation (‘The Wayside Mystery’) it’s been a…not good time.

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#650: Puzzles for Players – The Baffle Book (1930) by Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay [ed. F. Tennyson Jesse] Problems 8 to 14

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Baffle Book. The

As in life, this blog has a few untrimmed threads hanging — one of these days I really must return to The Knox Decalogue and The Criminous Alphabet — but for today it’s back to The Baffle Book (1930).  The first seven problems in F. Tennyson Jesse’s edit of Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay’s famous puzzle series failed to excite my reason or my enthusiasm, so how does this second quarter of puzzles stand up?

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