I thoroughly enjoyed the very readable set of stories collected in Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018), which gave a variety of almost crossover mystery interpretations to the Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson pastiche. So I’m back for the original volume in this brace to see what other twists have been put on that classic and enduring setup.
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Hand on heart, I honestly believed I had read The Infernal Device (1978), the first of five books about Professor James Moriarty written by Michael Kurland, before now. Hell, I have talked about this book at length with various people, recommending it to them in very strong terms. So to pick it up and discover that, nope, I have never encountered this particular story — and that it’s so dull I was forgetting swathes of it as I read it, not that it mattered — was something of a shock.
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I find my books by various means, but this might be the first time I’ve taken advice from YouTube: this video recommending 15 Criminally Underrated Mystery Books was shared in the Facebook GAD group, and mentioned The World’s Greatest Detective (2017) by Caroline Carlson, with the promise of some impossible crimes amidst the youthful crime-solving…how could I resist?
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In a pure coincidence of timing, I read the first of Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes novels, Death Cloud (2010), at about the time a series based on the books was announced by Amazon. The trailer, however, seemed to share ‘teenage Sherlock Holmes’ with the books — “teenage” in Hollywood meaning “played by someone who’s nearly 30 years old” — and nothing more, so let’s get onto the second volume today instead.
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It’s been a while since I read any of the often boundary-straddling works of DWaM, and with a couple of self-published books by other authors proving hard going, common sense finally prevailed and I turned to An Odyssey to the Castle of Vampires (2023) — an epic which has been patiently waiting its turn for nearly three years now.
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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.
Following the conclusion of the excellent Adventures on Trains series by M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, I — no doubt along, one suspects, with children’s publishers — was keen for another dose of transport-based juvenile mystery-making. And so at the start of the Mysteries at Sea series by A.M. Howell do we find ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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Another Choose Your Own Adventure-style mystery from an established novelist, Murder at Christmas (2025) by G.B. Rubin being the work of Gareth Rubin, who recently published Sherlock Holmes novel Holmes and Moriarty (2024). And this one’s Christmas-themed! So let’s dive in…
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The Invisible Event 