One final visit for this month to the reading of my past, as I revisit the crime and thriller novels which paved the way into the Golden Age obsession that fills my every waking moment.
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Another modern novel which sounds like it might have an impossible crime at its core, sufficient reason for me to grab a copy — from the library, dear boy, I’m not made of money — and see if it’s worthy of TomCat‘s attention. I get no enjoyment from this whatsoever, you understand. And I do it for free!
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Between 2016 and 2020, Robert Innes published 10 impossible crime novellas and one novel and then just…disappeared. And his sudden — thought not seemingly impossible — vanishment from the scene made me overlook his final published work, Dollhouse (2020), which I intend to correct today.
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I’ve written before about my experience with the DI John Rebus books by Ian Rankin, a series my changing tastes saw me vacate somewhere in the early 2000s, having read about fifteen of them. Well, I recently discovered that twenty-fifth entry Midnight and Blue (2024) contains an impossible crime, so let’s saddle up one more time and see how things play out. Purely for TomCat‘s benefit, you understand.
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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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In an age where the term “locked room mystery” increasingly seems to mean “closed circle mystery” — as in, one of the limited number of characters in the story committed the crime, as if you’d want there to be an alternative — how refreshing to come across someone in Alex Wagner who actually demonstrates an awareness of what an impossible crime is.
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I recently acquired a boxset of 8 Maurice Leblanc novels and short story collections featuring his gentleman bastard Arsène Lupin, and so before I dig into those I thought I should revisit the first Leblanc book I read, the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone collection The Eight Strokes of the Clock [ss] (1922).
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Another self-published impossible crime story, I can’t remember how The Westerlea House Mystery (2013) by Adam Croft came to my attention, but it did, I’ve read it, and we’re going to look at it today.
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Having enjoyed Jamie Probin‘s previous stabs at the impossible crime, I turn to the currently last of his stories to be made publicly available, the long short story ‘Body of Matter’ (2022).
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Well, I am thoroughly enjoying revisiting the work of Anthony Berkeley, with Not to be Taken (1938) proving decidedly more fun at second assessment, and now his debut The Layton Court Mystery (1925) upgrading itself from ‘amusing but seriously flawed’ to ‘Holy hell, this is superb!’ after a reread. Indeed, I enjoyed this so much that I’m deliberately reviewing it on a Thursday so that I don’t go over my self-imposed 1,000 word limit, because I feel like I could talk about this book for weeks, and frankly no-one needs that. So, a gathering at a country pile, complete with one host found shot in the locked library…hit me with the classics.
The Invisible Event 