Having now read — and in some cases, reread — all eight of Leo Bruce’s novels to feature sometime Sergeant William Beef, my ordered mind inevitably moves to ranking them.
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It is moderately funny to me that I searched for years for Whistle Up the Devil (1953) by Derek Smith, only to finally run a copy to earth for sensible money — with a dustjacket and everything — in 2014. Then, about two months later, Locked Room International republished it along with all Smith’s crime and detective fiction, and I went from zero copies to two in no time at all. In 2018 I called it one of my fifteen favourite impossible crime novels, and one of those has already dropped off the perch, so revisiting this in January 2026 was fraught with peril. But, well, if anything, a second read has given me even more to enjoy about it, and it thankfully remains available now for you to get it for sensible money…so go, quickly!
A second anthology of impossible crimes from the British Library Crime Classics range, As If by Magic [ss] (2025) is another genre-spanning collection from editor and Detection Club President Martin Edwards that does much to highlight the depth and breadth of classic crime and detective fiction.
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A man sleeping alone in a bolted room, five storeys up in the tower attached to his grand old house, wakes in the night and hurls himself out of the window to his death. Refusing to believe in spooks, spectres, and eldritch terrors, the man’s son determines to sleep in the room as well, and similarly hurls himself from the sole window while alone and the door is again bolted. And if that setup doesn’t entice you to read The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), John Dickson Carr’s lucky thirteenth long form case for Dr. Gideon Fell, then, well, I don’t know how else to entice you in. It was this book that convinced me Carr was going to be my flavour of jam years ago, and I returned to it with great eagerness.
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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When I first heard of The Big Bow Mystery (1892) by Israel Zangwill, I legitimately thought it was about a big, y’know, bow — the fancy knot one ties in a piece of ribbon. I also anticipated, given its era, that it would be a dry and soulless tale which would dully wander its way to an obvious conclusion — and, well, I couldn’t have been more wrong on both counts. This story of a man found with his throat slit in his locked bedroom in Bow in London’s East End is, I’m delighted to find after a 15-year gap, still fresh, humorous, and remarkably readable. Indeed, as a novel, it might arguably be the most successful impossible crime story ever written, so wonderfully does it retain its pace, lightness, and acuity.
While not quite the Jonathan Creek news we might have been hoping for, yesterday I stumbled over a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter that is really rather exhilarating: the publication of a new stage play in the canon by none other than series creator David Renwick.
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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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One haunted house. One impossible crime. One killer weekend. Thus runs the promise on the front cover of Murder Most Haunted (2025), the debut novel of Emma Mason, and that was enough to get in on my TBR as a modern example of the impossible crime that we’re no longer pretending I read just for TomCat‘s sake. So, did it deliver on those promises?
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I stumbled over the Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018) collection, in which thirteen authors offer wildly varying alternative versions of Sherlock Holmes, when searching for more criminous tales by Jonathan Maberry, one of the highlights of the C. Auguste Dupin-extending collection Beyond Rue Morgue [ss] (2013).
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The Invisible Event 