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 ...

Originally posted May 17, 2024. Despite cutting my teeth on Detective Conan , I only started reading its influences, writers of the shin honkaku (neo-orthodox) school of crime fiction, a few years ago. At the time, I was in a jaded period where I felt like I’d seen every trick that mystery fiction had to offer, and could no longer be surprised. I was gifted Murder in the Crooked House by Sōji Shimada, thought it was okay, at least enough to seek out his previous book The Tokyo Zodiac Murders . And, well, that one surprised me—enough that I had to put the book down and rest my head in my hands. After that, I was hooked again. I made it my mission to read all of Shimada’s work published in English, which remains ‘not that much,’ and from there, some of his contemporaries. One strategy was to camp out Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine ‘s Passport to Crime department, started in 2004, which publishes works in translation for the first time. Here are some of the scattered shin ho...

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 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...