#1398: “It’s goin’ to take a bit o’ thinkin’ out…” – As If by Magic: Locked Room Mysteries and Other Miraculous Crimes [ss] (2025) ed. Martin Edwards

A second anthology of impossible crimes from the British Library Crime Classics range, As If by Magic [ss] (2025) is another genre-spanning collection from editor and Detection Club President Martin Edwards that does much to highlight the depth and breadth of classic crime and detective fiction.

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#997: “Actors never betray themselves…” – Final Acts: Theatrical Mysteries [ss] (2022) ed. Martin Edwards

I tend to read multi-author anthologies over — if I’m honest — a couple of months, to better ameliorate the often wild changes in style and content of each tale. In recent times I’ve sped this process up, so that I’m able to review the annual Bodies from the Library (2018-present) collections on this very blog, so let’s see how I fare doing the same for the latest Martin Edwards-edited collection in the British Library Crime Classics range, eh?

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In GAD We Trust – Episode 14: The Island of Coffins (2021) by John Dickson Carr + The 9.50 Up Express (2021) by Freeman Wills Crofts [w’ Tony Medawar]

We’re all prone to speculate at times about how wonderful it would be to discover a previously-unpublished work by a beloved Golden Age author, and for today’s podcast episode Tony Medawar rejoins me to tempt you with two forthcoming collections of hard-to-find material from two of the genre’s titans — John Dickson Carr and Freeman Wills Crofts.

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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

Locked Room Murders

Another month of me taking advantage of the wonderful resource that is the British Library to investigate stories from Robert Adey’s Locked Room Murders (1992) — and we begin with an author I was very eager to read further after recently encountering him for the first time: Mr. Julian Symons.

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