Fun fact: I did not pick up With a Vengeance (2025), the ninth novel by Riley Sager, because I knew it featured an impossible crime. In fact, I’m not even sure it does feature an impossible crime. But it might, and I had a lot of fun with this book, and those two points alone are enough to justify me writing about it.
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With Libby at Solving Mystery of Murder continuing to struggle with the work of French maestro of the impossible crime Paul Halter, and with no new Halter titles on the horizon for a little while at least, I got to reflecting on the titles that John Pugmire so selflessly translated under his Locked Room International banner for two decades before his death last year.
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Another Tuesday in June, another book which has lingered on my TBR, and, coincidentally, another impossible crime. So, does Murder Most Ingenious (1962) by Kip Chase live up to its own self-confident billing? Sort of.
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You don’t write as much as Edward D. Hoch without hitting the bull’s-eye a few times, so I’m finally doing what I should have done all along and starting the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series from the beginning, with this first collection, Diagnosis: Impossible (2000), a tranche of 12 stories initially published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine between 1974 and 1978.
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Another book, bought because I understood it to contain an impossible crime, which has been left lingering on my TBR because it’s a later entry in a series I’ve not otherwise read. More than that, this is a continuation novel, so not even by the series’ original author.
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I have an undeniable fondness for the work of Edgar Allan Poe, having looked at his tales of ratiocination on this blog as well as written a novel inspired by one of his most famous stories. So Beyond Rue Morgue [ss] (2013), a collection of stories edited by Paul Kane and Charles Prepolec purporting to extend the career of Poe’s unfathomably influential detective C. Auguste Dupin, was certainly an intriguing find.
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Tuesdays this month will once again be dedicated to digging books out of my TBR pile that have lingered unloved and are likely to remain so without drastic intervention. First up, Mind Over Magic (2009) by William Rabkin, a tie-in novel from the TV show Psych (2006-14), which I’ve left unread because I figured I should watch the show first. But then I read it anyway; wow, I’m so ungovernable.
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Something a little different today: knowing that I’m a fan of the Australian dramatist and novelist Malcolm ‘Max’ Afford, Tony Medawar — the closest thing the GAD firmament has to Indiana Jones — sent me a selection of Afford’s thus-far-uncollected short fiction, as found in a variety of Australian publications from the Golden Age, and I’ve read them and am going to write a little about each one.
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One of my favourite discoveries of recent years has been the character of Captain Duncan Maclain, the blind protagonist of a baker’s dozen of books by Baynard Kendrick. Having enjoyed The Odor of Violets (1941) and Blind Man’s Bluff (1943) as part of the American Mystery Classics range, I’ve been keeping an eye out for other books in the series, and got very lucky stumbling into a copy of The Whistling Hangman (1937) that was so severely beaten it must have owed money to six different loan sharks. And this was an especially exciting find as the novel has been praised by TomCat, apparently featuring some more ingenious impossible deaths in a large New York hotel…and, yeah, largely lives up to its billing.
Having enjoyed-if-not-loved my first encounter with Roger Ormerod’s work, Time to Kill (1974), he’s hovered on the fringes of my awareness as someone I should get back to. So a timely recommendation for The Weight of Evidence (1978) sees us pick up again with David Mallin
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The Invisible Event 