Impossible Crimes
#562: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Leviathan’s Resting Place (2019) by DWaM
Otto Reylands, multi-millionaire, has been receiving threatening letters, as is the wont of multi-millionaires in fiction (and perhaps reality, I have no experience at either end). Letters accusing him of chicanery and deception. Letters accompanied by photos of a dead woman…
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#559: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘Murder at the Automat’ (1937) and ‘All at Once, No Alice’ (1940) by Cornell Woolrich
The final two stories for this month to be plucked out of the listings in Robert Adey’s reference bible Locked Room Murders (1992) sees a return to the work of Cornell Woolrich, who was discussed on this site only a few weeks ago.
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#556: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘The 51st Sealed Room’, a.k.a. ‘The MWA Murder’ (1951) and ‘The Glass Bridge’ (1957) by Robert Arthur
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been slowly working my way through the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, the first tranche of which were written by Robert Arthur, Jr.
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#554: The Case of the Solid Key (1941) by Anthony Boucher
Several years ago, discovering that the impossible crime novel was a thing, I read Anthony Boucher’s Nine Times Nine (1940), originally published as by H.H. Holmes, and loved it. I then discovered TomCat’s list of favourite impossible crime novels and was intrigued by the fact that, eschewing the accepted classic that Nine Times Nine is, Boucher’s later, less discussed The Case of the Solid Key (1941) was included there instead (TC, it must be said, is something of an iconoclast…). More Boucher followed, some of it disappointing, and last year I finally ran to ground a copy of TCotSK in a secondhand bookshop in Philadelphia and — at long, long last — here we go.
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#553: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘Murder Game’, a.k.a. ‘The Gemminy Crickets Case’ (1968) and ‘Upon Reflection’ (1977) by Christianna Brand
It’s undeniable that I have a slightly unusual relationship with some accepted classic GAD authors and do not necessarily always line up with the accepted wisdom where, say, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Ellery Queen, and Dorothy L. Sayers are concerned.
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#552: Spoiler Warning 11 – The Moving Toyshop (1946) by Edmund Crispin
We are here today to discuss The Moving Toyshop (1946) — Edmund Crispin’s third novel to feature his Oxford University don detective Gervase Fen — in full, spoiler-rich style…proceed no further if you wish read this book without knowing, y’know, everything that happens.
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#550: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘The Phantom Killer’ (1946) and ‘The Impossible Crime’ (1946) by Nigel Morland, A Play-Along-at-Home Experiment
Something a little different this week, potential threats of legal action notwithstanding.
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#548: The Seventh Guest (1935) by Gaston Boca [trans. John Pugmire 2018]
The recent, very exciting publication of the brand new Paul Halter novel The Gold Watch (2019, tr. 2019) served to remind me that I still hadn’t read Locked Room International’s previous publication, a translation of Les Invités de Minuit (1935) by Gaston Boca. This is by my reckoning the sixteenth title from the Roland Lacourbe-curated list of 99 excellent impossible crime stories that John Pugmire has brought into English, and his tireless promotion of these books across the language barrier is a continued source of joy for those of us who lament the dearth of great impossible crime fiction being written these days. Pugmire always has something up his sleeve.
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#547: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘The Hiding Place’, a.k.a. ‘As If by Magic’ (1961) and ‘The Invisible Poison’ (1961) by Julian Symons
The Invisible Event 