Certain so-called friends of mine have made a point of telling me that back issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine are available at their local library. My library, while cool, is not quite that cool, and so it’s taken me a while to track down some stories published therein, including this one from the September/October 2020 edition.
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I find my books by various means, but this might be the first time I’ve taken advice from YouTube: this video recommending 15 Criminally Underrated Mystery Books was shared in the Facebook GAD group, and mentioned The World’s Greatest Detective (2017) by Caroline Carlson, with the promise of some impossible crimes amidst the youthful crime-solving…how could I resist?
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I haven’t loved these annual translations of the Bizarre House Mysteries series by Yukito Ayatsuji, but there can be no denying that they’re written with the precepts of the puzzle mystery — maximum confuse, maximum unlikely, maximum invention — front and centre, and as a puzzle-head myself I’d be a stick in the mud to not want to dive in to each new book. And The Clock House Murders (1991), newly translated by Ho-Ling Wong, might well be the most successful entry since opener The Decagon House Murders (1987), using its setting superbly in a way that I’m not sure the other books did and turning on a trick so ingenious that you can’t help but be impressed.
Okay, no, The Murder at World’s End (2025) by Ross Montgomery doesn’t really qualify for this ongoing feature of my blog, in which I pick books purely because they’re modern impossible crime novels. This, I was going to read anyway, and I only knew it happened to feature an impossible crime because Puzzle Doctor told me. But, well, here we are.
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One haunted house. One impossible crime. One killer weekend. Thus runs the promise on the front cover of Murder Most Haunted (2025), the debut novel of Emma Mason, and that was enough to get in on my TBR as a modern example of the impossible crime that we’re no longer pretending I read just for TomCat‘s sake. So, did it deliver on those promises?
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When A. Carver published The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023) close to Christmas 2023, I was caught off-guard: with that title, one feels it should be read in the Winter, and I try to be about four to five weeks ahead on my blogging and so it had to wait until 2024. Then I just…didn’t read it in 2024, so Winter 2025 finally comes to the rescue
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It’s fairly incredible to me that I have a copy of The Sealed Room Murder (1934), originally published by James Ronald under his Michael Crombie nom de plume, at all. Only the recent efforts of Chris Verner and Moonstone Press to bring Ronald’s criminous oeuvre back into print for sensible money have made this and others available to fans like me without endless connections and deep pockets, and I remain extremely grateful for their undertaking. The book, then, delivers largely what one has been able to come to expect from Ronald’s earlier, pulp-adjacent writing, with much thrill and little substance: fun, but not worth the sorts of money previously requested online.
After five novels of seemingly impossible crimes explained away with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, James Scott Byrnside tackles the far harder shorter form in his latest book, It’s About Impossible Crime (2025), which gives us five stories featuring his most frequent protagonists, Chicago P.I.s Rowan Manory and Walter Williams.
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Thanks to the ongoing efforts of the wonderful British Library Crime Classics range, I have an improving impression of the work of Ethel Lina White — the excellent ‘Water Running Out’ (1927) was included in the Crimes of Cymru [ss] (2023) collection and The Wheel Spins (1936) was a superb little thriller which did well with its highly appealing setup. All of which saw me snap up a copy of The Spiral Staircase, a.k.a. Some Must Watch (1933) when one drifted into my orbit, and, well, this shows again how effective White can be with a small number of people in a restricted setting…even if, at times, she’d rather have them get together and talk over old ground instead of getting on with the story.
The Invisible Event 