Impossible Crimes

#404: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Black Ledger’, a.k.a. ‘The Mysterious Black Ledger’ (1952) and ‘Diamonds in Paradise’ (1954)

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QBI & QF

To finish off this month looking at some of the impossible crime short stories of Ellery Queen — which started without an impossibility, went verbosely downhill, and then improved significantly — I’m again looking at two stories since both are pretty darn short.  And so…

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#402: The Affair of the Bottled Deuce (1958) by Harry Stephen Keeler

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Emboldened by the experience of The Rynox Mystery (1930) by Philip MacDonald from last week — an author with whom I started poorly and have come to really enjoy — I turn to Harry Stephen Keeler. The only other Keeler I’ve read to date was…fine, and I’ve been admittedly reluctant to begin this despite its locked room murder being why I bought it in the first place.  The superb introduction from Francis M. Nevins explains how and why this was unpublished in Keeler’s lifetime and only came into public being through Keelerite Fender Tucker’s Ramble House imprint in 2005.  As you gather from my rating, I’m of the opinion the public would’ve coped perfectly fine without it.

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#399: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Adventure of the Dauphin’s Doll’, a.k.a. ‘With the Compliments of Comus’ (1948)

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Calendar of Crime

After the disappointment of last week’s ‘The Adventure of the Dead Cat’ (1946) not actually being an impossible crime story, I return this week to Calendar of Crime (1952) by Ellery Queen for the final story in the collection, Christmastime impossible theft ‘The Adventure of the Dauphin’s Doll’ (1948).  Let’s hope we fare a little better this time around, eh?

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#395: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #6: Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (2010) by Lee Goldberg

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Monk is Cleaned Out

I can’t claim to’ve watched swathes of the TV series Monk — starring the wonderfully talented Tony Shalhoub as the eponymous consultant to the San Francisco Police Department — but I always enjoyed its creativity when I did catch it (an episode in which a musical birthday card contributes to the solving of a crime stands out in my memory).

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#391: Fatal Descent, a.k.a. Drop to His Death (1939) by John Rhode and Carter Dickson

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In the style of Sesame Street, today’s review is brought to you by In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel‘s Puzzle Doctor, who kindly leant me this book following years of me failing to find an affordable copy.  And, boy, what an exciting prospect it is: no mere “one chapter each” in the style of ‘Behind the Screen’ (1930), ‘The Scoop’ (1931), or The Floating Admiral (1932), this is a proper collaboration between two of the Golden Age’s titans: Carter Dickson, a.k.a. John Dickson Carr, and John Rhode, a.k.a. Miles Burton — two gentlemen who individually devised a greater library of brilliant means of criminal dispatch than almost any other pair you’d care to name.

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#389: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Confessional (2016) by Robert Innes

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Confessional

Two months after reading Untouchable (2016), the first of Robert Innes’ now six-strong series of self-published impossible mysteries, I’m back with the second instalment.  This time around, parishioners keep having heart attacks in the confession booth of the small Catholic church in the (aptly named, it must be said) village of Harmschapel.  “I think the only suspects you have so far are high cholesterol and God,” DS Blake Harte is told at one point — or is something more sinister going on?

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#388: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery (1926) by Freeman Wills Crofts

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I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive into another complex alibi problem so soon after Cut Throat (1932) by Christopher Bush.  But if anyone can convince me of the joys of alibi-breaking it’s Freeman Wills Crofts, and so off I went in hope of some fiendish minutiae to get the brain cogitating with possibilities.  As it happens, I need not have worried — there is no complex alibi-breaking here.  Sure, there’s a grand mix of ratiocination and weighing the odds on the way to intelligent deductive work, but this is decidedly a ‘wrong man on the run’-style thriller before it’s a novel of routine.  Were pithiness my forte, I’d probably make an ‘Alfred Hitchcrofts’ reference.

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#383: Success, and Being a Victim Thereof in ‘The Fires of Hell’ (2016) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2016]

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EQMM May June 2018

Having recently reviewed Paul Halter’s short story collection The Night of the Wolf (2006), and having previously shared my thoughts on Soji Shimada’s ‘The Running Dead’ (1985), Szu-Yen Lin’s ‘The Ghost of the Badminton Court’ (2004), and Halter’s own ‘The Yellow Book’ (2017) all from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the time seems perfect to look at the newest Halter translation to come our way — the short story ‘The Fires of Hell’, published in this month’s EQMM.

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