"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...

Originally posted June 3, 2024. The Wikipedia page for The Lamp of God by Ellery Queen mentions that it is “included by the mystery writer John Dickson Carr in his list of the ten best mystery stories ever written.” Naturally I wondered: what are the other nine? The thing was, though, the list didn’t seem to be transcribed. Anywhere. And when I went a-googling, the only other novel described as one of JDC’s “ten best” was The Greene Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine. To the source, then! The “list” is actually the essay ‘The Grandest Game in the World,’ originally written in 1946, and which is reprinted in the collection The Door to Doom —specifically the 1991 edition. Dickson Carr is quick to clarify that these are not the best novels, rather some of the best novels—this was originally supposed to be the introduction to an anthology that never happened. The essay itself doesn’t summarize the novels in an ordered list, rather discussing the significance of the ten author...

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...