Impossible Crimes

#683: “A terrible orgy of murder and crime, and it seems that we are not at the end of it yet.” – The Crimson Circle (1922) by Edgar Wallace

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Crimson Circle, The

My TBR pile, like Norm Lindsay’s Magic Pudding, is an apparently self-aware, endlessly self-replicating source of nourishment that I will never, ever finish.  I daren’t even let it out of my sight sometimes, because who knows what sort of nonsense it gets up to when I’m not looking?

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#682: In Whose Dim Shadow, a.k.a. The Tau Cross Mystery (1935) by J.J. Connington

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In the comments of my review of The Sweepstake Murders (1931) by J.J. Connington, TomCat pointed out that the author’s sole impossible crime novel was among my recently-acquired bundle, and here we are.  In Whose Dim Shadow, a.k.a. The Tau Cross Mystery (1935), however, begins with a shooting in an unlocked room in an unlocked flat that also has a set of footprints leading away from the open French windows and which forms the basis of the majority of the narrative.  And a very entertaining narrative it is, too, only falling down when Connington shanghais pace for exposition, and struggling in the final straight due, in all likelihood, to external concerns.

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#679: The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) by Norman Berrow

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As a wrangler of mysteries, Norman Berrow has many equals and several betters, but as an incorporator of impossibilities he’s in the front rank.  Ever since first reading him with The Bishop’s Sword (1948) I’ve been struck by how neatly he folds his apparently undoable criminous schemes into the plots of his later novels — we’ll get to Early and Late Berrow in due course — and The Three Tiers of Fantasy (1947) is another great example of this.  Yes, two of the apparent mysteries herein are pretty solvable at first sight, but the reason for those mysteries and the use of the impossibility to achieve those ends is as brilliant as ever.

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#672: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder by Magic (2017) by Paul Tomlinson

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Murder by Magic

Typical, eh?  You wait years for a blog to talk about magic, and then suddenly three posts come along at once: the most recent In GAD We Trust episode with John Norris, and two self-published impossible crime stories — one this week, and one next.  Sure, that’s stretching the definition of “at once” to an Orwellian degree, but that’s how I apparently roll.

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#671: “At this point, everything seems too far-fetched to be taken seriously…” – The Invisible Circle (1996) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2014]

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Invisible Circle, The

A triptych of needs are being met here: firstly a last-minute replacement for the Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat I’d intended to write about, secondly the addressing of a Paul Halter book not yet reviewed on this blog, and thirdly some tangential research for next Saturday’s In GAD We Trust episode.

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#669: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder in a Watched Room (2019) by A.G. Barnett

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Murder in a Watched Room

My previous encounter with A.G. Barnett’s self-published impossible crime fiction was An Invitation to Murder (2019), which saw an interesting-if-cozy impossible battering in a locked room lose points for drawing attention to the one detail it then failed to explain.  But, everyone gets two books, and so we’re back, this time with a different series and a stabbing in a locked and watched room.

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