“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 may have heard of the Detection Club , the mystery writers club formed in 1930, whose original membership included authors such as Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, and G.K. Chesterton. But did you know that the club also collaborated on several books? —Actually, anyone who had heard of the Detection Club would probably know this. Well, I've now read three of them. Here's what I thought! The Floating Admiral A round-robin novel in which each chapter is written by a different author, leaving G.K. Chesterton to tie it all up at the end. The roster features the most heavy-hitters, for sure, but it's more "writing exercise" than "readable". Reading it feels like a fever dream. The Floating Admiral recognizably has the structure of a mystery novel, but the story bobs from anchoring point to anchoring point. Plot threads are piled on, discarded, forgotten about. It's an interesting historical experiment for genre enthusiasts, but not something I ...

"They were trying it with a bogy, but for a bogy to be effective its terrors must be known to the victim." This is the actual Rex Stout book chosen for John Dickson Carr's 10 Best Detective Novels , and I realized on cracking open the first chapter that I had read it in high school, despite remembering nothing about it. JDC chose Stout for his "literary" skill and character work: In the powerful story called The League of Frightened Men, with its tortured figure of Paul Chapin, you will find Wolfe the psychologist drawing a moral which might well be heeded by many writers of the too-hard-boiled school. A group of Harvard boys seriously injure an underclassman in a hazing prank, leaving him with a permanent leg disability. They guiltily form a "League of Atonement" to take care of him. What they don't realize is that their victim is Moriarty. Twenty-five years later, he is apparently taking his revenge by killing off the League one by on...

"If this is all true—you knew it last night, didn't you? Why the hell didn't you spill it when the sheriff was there? When the cops were there on the spot?" "I represented no interest last night, sir." Part of my motivation for reading Some Buried Caesar was that I came away from John Dickson Carr's essay 'The Grandest Game in the World' thinking that it was his one of his favourite mystery novels . When I looked up the essay again recently, I realized that the full list was written out elsewhere in the book it was collected in (if I had just turned back a couple chapters) and this was not one of them. Egg on my face, and the post has been amended accordingly. Well, I can still point to the other motivation, David Bordwell's lengthy and fascinating essay on Rex Stout's novels, which points out that in this one, Wolfe forces the killer to commit suicide. What on earth leads up to that? Some Buried Caesar is an atypical entry i...

“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 12, 2024. ‘No darling,’ said Tedward. ‘That was a doings, very brilliant but not brilliant enough for the Yard.’ Christianna Brand’s work is a hole in my genre knowledge. She’s often pointed to as an underrated GAD author, with some unique and devious solutions. I checked out the one book of hers the library had some years back, and bounced off it for reasons of outmoded bigotry that I don’t remember the specifics of. I try to take a measured approach that (1) people are products of their society, and any author writing >50 years ago probably had at least some values that I would not agree with, but (2) that doesn’t mean it was acceptable back then, either. It can be useful to follow the throughline of tropes to modern fiction. Ultimately, though, I’m reading on my own time, and sometimes things just throw me out of the book. In any case, Fog of Doubt is one of the free mystery eBooks offered by Early Bird Books, so I took the chance to give Inspe...

Originally posted May 29, 2024. “One of my names,” she said, “is Nemesis.” “Nemesis? And what does that mean?” “I think you know,” said Miss Marple. “You are a very well educated woman. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end.” — Nemesis, by Agatha Christie When my wife gets home from work, we like to unwind with vaguely investigative popcorn shows. The latest that we’ve finished is Ms. Ma, Nemesis ( Miseu Ma: Boksuui Yeosin ) (2018), a Korean thriller-mystery serial created by Hong Chang-wook with writer Park Jin-woo,that loosely adapts the Ms. Ma rple series by Agatha Christie. I was inspired to check it out by the glowing review over on Ah Sweet Mystery! A creative re-imagining of Christie that re-tools the component stories into one longform thriller? Sign me up! We had a great time with it, and the series is an interesting adaptation—but some of its original elements were the parts I liked most. The series is based on five Ms. Marple boo...

Originally posted May 22, 2024. Ellery Queen, you lucky devil! thought Ellery Queen. There were a couple of Ellery Queen novels whose eBooks were on sale for $2 (no longer at time of writing), so I picked this up alongside Cat of Many Tails. You might think based on how I talk about them that my least favourite part of EQ stories is when I’m able to solve them—not so! In fact, my least favourite parts are the moments where Ellery behaves like an unrepentant skeezebucket. How does The Greek Coffin Mystery score on those two counts? Let’s dig in. During the funeral for millionaire art dealer Georg Khalkis, his lawyer discovers that the dead man’s new will is missing. Khalkis had written in a new name, but refused to tell the witnesses who it was, so without the will, they’re in a very awkward legal position. To make matters worse, there was only a tiny window during the funeral that it could have been stolen, but an extensive search fails to locate the will anywher...

Originally posted May 10, 2024. I’ve long maintained that the enduring popularity of murder mysteries has far less to do with the murder than it does with the mystery . To me, at least as far as fair-play detection is concerned, a mystery holds the same appeal as a magic trick (in fact, there have been quite a few detectives , several culprits , and a couple authors who are stage magicians or magic designers, if not actual wizards ). Although, that isn’t an exact analogy: with stage magic, audiences want to be baffled, and the cliche is that finding out how a trick was done, in a way that is both mundane and audaciously complicated, invariably leads to disappointment. With a fair-play mystery, on the other hand, it’s desirable for the solution to a baffling trick to be audaciously simple: not “I never saw that coming,” but “I’m kicking myself for not having seen it.” Which brings me to Ellery Queen’s The Lamp of God , which John Dickson Carr included in his list...

Originally posted May 6, 2024. Murder tales seem nice things sometimes for a lady to sit and read all by herself by the fire. But murder isn’t a nice thing, and when a murderer’s desperate and trying to hide his tracks he isn’t even as nice as he was before. I’ll ask you to bear that in mind. Well, I’ve warned you. I had never heard of Lord Dunsany until the title story of Two Bottles of Relish: The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories was mentioned by mystery author Tom Mead in his list of best impossible crimes for Publisher’s Weekly . It seems like Dunsany wasn’t widely read in 1934, either: while some of his fantasy writings were very influential, according to the book’s foreword by Ellery Queen, he didn’t consider his previous stories to have been well-received by the public. Believing that this was because they were too anodyne (murder-obsessed culture, these days…) he set out to write a story that was as gruesome and horrifying as possible, and the res...

Originally posted May 1, 2024. Is mystery fiction anti-art? Jorge Luis Borges didn’t seem to think so: a mystery enthusiast, he encouraged translations of various European novels into Spanish. In fact, Borges’s first work in English translation was the short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , translated by mystery novelist and editor Anthony Boucher. While that story is better-known when you think “Borges” and “mystery”, Borges also produced a volume of humorous detective stories alongside his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, writing under the pen name H. Bustos Domecq. The Don Isidro Parodi stories are an affectionate, well, parody of the genre, and a satire of cosmopolitan Buenos Ares—anti-art in a different sense. Don Isidro is a stationary consulting detective, the ratiocinating kind, who solves problems brought to him merely after having them described. In a turn that the foreword tongue-in-cheekily...

Originally posted April 25, 2024.   While John Dickson Carr (and his alter-ego Carter Dickson) frequently dominates lists of best locked room mysteries , for good reason, I’ve always gotten the sense that The White Priory Murders is a divisive one, so I had some trepidation in checking it out. Some reviewers say that the impossible crime has a brilliant solution; others think that it’s overlong, tedious, and lacking in character. After reading it, I have to agree with both opinions. Marcia Tait is a British Hollywood actress, returned to her home country to star as Barbara Villiers in a play about Charles II. The playwright’s eccentric, unpleasant brother owns a (fictional, as far as I can tell) historical manse featuring a pavilion called the Queen’s Mirror, where Charles II allegedly conducted numerous liaisons. Marcia decides to sleep there for method purposes, and is found dead early the next morning. The pavilion is not locked; rather, it is surrounded by unble...

Originally posted April 23, 2024.  The 8 Mansion Murders , which I read recently, had a reference to Clayton Rawson’s short story ‘Off the Face of the Earth’. I’d already read it a couple years back, but gave the whole collection The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective a re-read to refresh myself. In a formula that would later be used by Jonathan Creek , Merlini is a stage magician and proprietor of a magic shop (inspired by Rawson’s real-life performance under the same stage name), who uses his expertise in “impossible” tricks, misdirection, and occasionally cold-reading to crack various cases that baffle the police. It’s a quick and amusing read. As you might imagine from the premise and length (with some as short as four pages), these stories are pure puzzles, often focused on identifying the crucial clue that allowed Merlini to work out what happened, like an Encyclopedia Brown for adults. Indeed, some of the stories were originall...