Locked Room International

#548: The Seventh Guest (1935) by Gaston Boca [trans. John Pugmire 2018]

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Seventh Guest, Thestar filledstar filledstar filledstar filledstars
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

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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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#500: Making an Entrance to Remember via The Fourth Door (1987) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 1999]

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Fourth Door, The

I am reliably informed by the product page on Amazon that I purchased the Kindle edition of The Fourth Door (1987, tr. 1999) — the first Paul Halter novel I ever read — on 19th May 2013.  After nearly 6 years, 14 novels, 19 short stories, and 30 blog posts that included a celebration of his 60th birthday I’m going back to the beginning to see where it all began.

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