I’m probably starting in the wrong place with this chronologically fourth collection of the Dr. Sam Hawthorne impossibilities by short story specialist Edward D. Hoch. However, it contains the very first Hoch story I ever read and so seemed as good a place as any to start. I’ve read maybe three Hawthornes in other collections and figured it would be good to end 2018 with a long-awaited perusal of them in greater concentration, and…well, I’m a little underwhelmed. Hoch has a talent for capturing ambience very piquantly, and the best of these stories are very good, but far too few of them have anything like the rigour or intelligence I’d expected given how highly-regarded this series seems to be.
Under the nom deplume Hake Talbot, the magician and author Henning Nelms published two novels and two short stories. Of the novels, The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) is generally overshadowed by the admittedly superior Rim of the Pit (1944); of the short stories, we tend to hear very little.
I’ve been able, in only the briefest of online searches, to find little on the British pulp writer James Ronald, but the small amount of his material I have read thus far has been very enjoyable.
My first experience of the French crime/suspense duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac was the recent Pushkin Press reissue of She Who Was No More (1952, tr. 2015) and…well, I didn’t love it. But Adey lists this novella and so back on the horse we clamber.
Earlier this year, John Pugmire’s Locked Room International imprint answered the prayers of every impossible crime fan the world over by reprinting the genre reference bible Locked Room Murders (2nd ed., 1991) by Robert Adey, liberally revised by Mystery Scene co-publisher Brian Skupin.
Some months ago, in our podcast The Men Who Explain Miracles, first myself and then Dan chose our fifteen favourite locked room novels of all time. In celebration of Locked Room International recently putting out their thirtieth fiction title, I have done essentially the same again, this time choosing solely from their catalogue: effectively, my personal picks for the ‘top half’ of their output to date.
Arthur Porges is an author who seems to’ve faded somewhat from memory despite (or maybe ‘on account of’) writing in a spread of genres. To myself, he’s of most interest as the creator of fiendishly ingenious impossible crime stories, and it was with much delight that I learned of Richard Simms’ on-going project to get all Porges’ short fiction reprinted…and with much impatience that I awaited the Joel Hoffman stories, having first encountered Porges through ‘No Killer Has Wings’ in a Mike Ashley-edited collection…and with much consternation that I admit it’s taken me far too long to get round to this collection since its publication in 2017.
The Invisible Event 