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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Seventeen scenarios of skulduggery, stealing, and slaughter in the British Library Crime Classics range, all centred on London, the finest city on god’s green Earth, and selected by the ne plus ultra of classic crime appreciation, Martin Edwards.
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Today is the tenth Bodies from the Library Conference, at which, until other considerations intervened, I was due to present on the topic of inverted mysteries. And you can bet I would at some point have talked about Six Against the Yard (1936), in which six crime writers put their ‘perfect murder’ on paper and ex-CID man Superintendent Cornish picked holes in their plans.
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Having looked at Silent Nights [ss] (2015), the first collection of Christmas-themed short stories in the British Library Crime Classic collection a fortnight ago, I move on to Crimson Snow [ss] (2016), the second such collection, edited once again by Martin Edwards.
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I’ve been planning this for over a year, since reviewing the British Library’s fifth collection of Christmas short stories last November. Finally, then, December will see me reviewing Christmas-themed books for perhaps the first time since starting this blog in 2015, with a second BL collection coming in the weeks ahead.
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Bodies from the Library 6 (2023) represents another delightful foray into the neglected and forgotten stories from many of the luminaries of the Golden Age, as editor Tony Medawar puts his enviable genre awareness to wonderful use bringing yet more gems to public attention.
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I’m in a confusing place with Margery Allingham. I definitely read three of her books when I started getting into Golden Age detective fiction, one of which, I’m almost certain, was The Beckoning Lady (1955) and very hard work indeed. A few years passed, and I next thoroughly enjoyed the amoral ingenuity of Police at the Funeral (1931) before stumbling badly over Flowers for the Judge (1936) and sort of abandoning her, faintly dissatisfied. So when The Case of the Late Pig (1937) passed into my hands, the mere 132 pages of this Penguin edition commended themselves as an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the author and see how things go.
With the annual Bodies from the Library collections, which have brought long out-of-print stories of crime and detection back to public awareness, proving rightly popular, editor Tony Medawar turns his attention to another facet of genre fiction with the Ghosts from the Library (2022) collection, in which authors (mostly) better known for their stories of crime and detection have a go at generating some supernatural chills instead.
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With the Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) collection due in a couple of months, and spin-off Ghosts from the Library (2022) coming later in the year, the time seems ripe to revisit one of the earlier collections which — given the timespan over which I first read them — I failed to review on publication. And since, for reasons too complicated to bore you with here, the second volume was the first one I encountered, it’s there I’ll head today.
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Prepare yourself for what might just be the most jam-packed episode of In GAD We Trust to date — when you sit down with Tony Medawar, there’s always going to be a lot to talk about.
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The Invisible Event 