As I mentioned in the masterpost for this blogging endeavour, French mystery authors are a bit of a lacuna in my mystery knowledge. Noël Vindry is one such author, a mystery novelist who wrote a string of meticulously fair-play "puzzle novels" in the 30s and 40s before quitting the genre, and is apparently almost as forgotten in French as he is in English. Thankfully, I don't have to lean on my shoddy French skills, as John Pugmire translated several of his best works into English through Locked Room International, including Through the Walls . The Locked Room:   A family is menaced by a mysterious intruder who leaves the house's upstairs without having entered, can kill in locked bedrooms and in broad daylight while facing the victim, and vanish in plain sight. The Story: Through the Walls leans towards the far extreme of the puzzle plot, which is to say, there's vastly more puzzle than plot. Petty bureaucrat Sertat comes to Police Commissaire Maubritaine looking...

“But rest assured, my indications will lead you to the truth.” He paused. Then he said: “And perhaps, then, you would wish that they had not led you so far. You would say instead: ‘Ring down the curtain.’” The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was one of the first mystery novels I read, the one that arguably made me Someone Who Is Into Detective Fiction. The other two Poirot novels that my school library had were Murder on the Orient Express and Curtain: Poirot's Last Case . Quite the reading order. What you might call a speedrun. Which meant that this grand summation of Poirot flew way over my head the first time I read it (where is Styles, anyway?). I've now read, I think, just over half of the novels, so more of the references to past events made sense. On a reread, I would still say Curtain 's mystery has its underwhelming elements. But oh, that ending. The Locked Room: A man is found dead in his locked room (which the narrator saw him enter), holding a gun and with a bullet h...

How terribly alone one was, among all one's friends... Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand is widely regarded by anglophone mystery readers as a top-notch locked room mystery with a devious solution, but it was technically left off the actual Locked Room Library list due to the French translation changing the ending. That only made me more curious to know what all the fuss was about. Some of the other entries are more properly "impossible crimes" than "sealed rooms", but this is one of the most thoroughly sealed rooms out there. The Locked Room: An actress in a medieval pageant is killed onstage: strangled by hand and her body apparently dropped over a balcony by the killer. But the set was locked on the stage side, and the only other exit is in full view of the audience.   Of course, as Inspector Charlesworth points out, "in sealed room mysteries, the solution is never really anything to do with the room being sealed. The murderer has always gone into...

“You dabble in mysteries you are not able to comprehend, like a child playing on the rim of a volcano. Imbecile, like the child, to think that which lies dormant cannot engulf you.” Since I started (and fell off) my blogging chronicle of the 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library , there has been an entire effort to create a new list with over 500 novels . Very cool! I’ll stick to blogging about the original ones for now, but looking forward to that project. Today’s entry is Rim of the Pit , a horror-themed mystery where the culprit may or may not be that ghost with the ugly mug on the cover. The edition I read was actually this one , which instead shows a cozy mountain cabin with a subtle nod to the impossible crime. The Locked Room: Rather than a single impossibility, Rim of the Pit is packed full of magic tricks, phony séances, and two fantastical murders which, frankly, each could have supported a book. Although the séance that kicks off the novel is fake, the pr...

Originally posted June 14, 2024. “But now, Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever.” When thinking about how to organize my blogging chronicle of the 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library , I settled on a randomly-generated order (with some leeway for availability) to avoid twenty straight weeks of John Dickson Carr. That means we’re kicking off the series with an unusual entry: Isaac Asimov’s science fiction murder mystery The Caves of Steel . Asimov is best known for the Robot series, followed by other influential SF like the Foundation trilogy, but he was a mystery lover who wrote some stories of his own, including the later Black Widower series (of which I’ve only read “The Cross of Lorraine”). Caves of Steel is both: a fair-play mystery follow-up to the stories in I, Robot , investigated by a human/robot duo, and the result is rather unique. The Locked Room: A pioneering roboticist is shot on his...

Originally posted June 10, 2024. In a few previous posts, I’ve linked or referenced the 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library page compiled by the late, great John Pugmire along with fellow genre theorist and LRI editor Brian Skupin. It’s a fantastic place to start, and a few years back (during the height of lockdown-induced madness, ironically enough) I made an effort to try and read every book on the list. I made a dent but didn’t finish my goal. Given this blog’s mandate, I’ve been contemplating taking up the task again. I’ll update this list with a running tally as well as links to any blog posts I cover on here. Many of the books have since been translated into English since the original poll was made (yay!), so I’m listing them for personal reference under their English title. What with this being my reading blog, I’m arranging this list by which books I can, well, read, followed by those in my second language. I’m also including some of the entries that didn’t mak...