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 Roland Lacourbe-curated list of 100 impossible crime novels has held quite a sway in my reading life. Hell, I got one of the titles on it reprinted purely so I could read it myself. Until John Pugmire’s death, Locked Room International did a stalwart job bringing many of the foreign-language titles into English…but still some books on the list seemed frustratingly out of reach, no more so than Into Thin Air (1928) by Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk.
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I hold John Sladek’s second and final detective novel Invisible Green (1977) in very high regard indeed, but have not read his first, the slightly less successful Black Aura (1974), for well over a decade. It’s pretty incredible that something which gave so much air to three baffling impossibilities was written as late as 1974 at all, and so revisiting it and finding a book which doesn’t quite fulfil the expectations of any idiom — it’s too puzzle-focussed for the gritty style that was popular at the time, but too nebulously handled to satisfy true puzzle heads — isn’t really a surprise. There’s still some enjoyable stuff in here, but this is very much the apprentice work for the masterpiece Sladek would produce three years later.
A collection of short stories, each part of an overall arc, My Grandfather, the Master Detective (2023) by Masateru Konishi is yet another intriguing Japanese mystery carried over into English by Louise Heal Kawai for our enjoyment.
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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.
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!
The Invisible Event 