When The Invisible Event hit 1,000 posts — ahh, back in the day — I put up a list of 100 recommended impossible crime novels and short story collections for those of you wishing to be a little more discerning when reading the best subgenre in the world. TomCat was disgruntled with my inclusion of Too Many Magicians (1967) by Randall Garrett, but I stood by it as an interesting take on both the crossover mystery and the impossible crime, with a neat little, expectation-subverting idea at is core, and I vowed to reread it in due course to reinforce these impressions. Well, I’ve reread it now, and while I stand by the locked room murder as clever and fun, the book itself is frankly so tedious that I wonder how I ever saw anything in it in the first place.
“The impulse for this novel,” says Adam Roberts “was a desire to collide together some of the conventions of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction and ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction, with the emphasis more on the latter than the former.” Well, count me in! Sure, the authors he then cites (Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Innes) don’t all fill me with delight, but this is a collision of my two favourite genres plus impossible crimes — how could I pass it up?! And it would have passed me by entirely had not blog-commenter ravenking81 brought it to my attention, so my most genuine thanks for that; at its best it’s a fascinatingly successful attempt at merging the two genres in a way that recalls both Isaac Asimov and John Dickson Carr, who, y’know, are the two finest authors to have worked in their respective genres. So that’s a good thing. By definition, however, it is not always at its best. 
The Invisible Event 