The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Detective Novels from the 1950s

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction is generally narrowed to the interwar period, roughly covering the 1920s and '30s, because the World Wars make convenient bookends for the detective story's post-WWI boom period and post-WWII decline – not everyone agrees. Some have argued it started with E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913) or even earlier with G.K. Chesterton's short story collection The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). It also ignores the 1920s was a decade of growing pains as the genre was still putting itself together. And, worse, it dismisses the 1940s. A time when established writers produced some of their best, most mature work and new names appeared on the scene.

I have changed my opinions on the start and end of the Golden Age several times over the years. Placing it first somewhere around the early '20s and coming to an abrupt end in 1949, but later included the 1950s. More recently, I have come to see the Golden Age as a life cycle rather than a clearly, or vaguely, defined period.  

1910-1919: I officially consider this period pre-GAD, but it can be seen as the GADs infancy/nursery

1920-1929: GADs childhood years of discovery, trial and error

1930-1939: GADs adolescence years full of dreams and wild ideas

1940-1941: GAD matured into adulthood

1950-1959: GADs twilight years

The 1960s is the decade when the traditional, fair play detective novel of the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s died with only a few holdouts persisting through the '60s and 1970s – until Gladys Mitchell and Michael Innes turned out the lights in the 1980s. This view is, of course, somewhat of generalization in itself as there were plenty of so-called Golden Age writers who never developed pass the nursery or childhood stage. It works for me and doesn't blot out two decades of which one is rather important and the other too often overlooked. I, too, was skeptical about the fifties, but that decade keeps surprising me. The '30s and '40s were definitely in the rear view mirror, but there was still life in the old thing at this point. So wanted to spotlight that too often ignored twilight decade.

A few years ago, it was all the rage to post top 10 lists of favorite mysteries from the 1920s, '30s and '40s, but doing a list of the twenties would comprise almost entirely of titles from the last three, four years of that decade and would need a top 25 for the other two. So decided to do "The Hit List: Top 10 Favorite Detective Novels from the 1950s," but my first version bumped into a problem as most of them appeared on previous Hit Lists. It looked more like a thematic copy/paste clipshow post than a top 10 post. I compiled a new list excluding every novel that has appeared on a previous Hit Lists.

So no S.H. Courtier's The Glass Spear (1950), Douglas Ashe's The Longstreet Legacy (1951), Stuart Palmer's Nipped in the Bud (1951), Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1953/54) and Derek Smith's Whistle Up the Devil (1954). Worst of all, I had to scrap one of my all-time favorites, The Danger Within (1952) by Michael Gilbert, because it's already on both "Top 10 Fascinating World War II Detective Novels" and "Top 10 Favorite Reprints from Rue Morgue Press." This second iteration of the list was a little trickier to put together, but the result is far more interesting list and representation of what the 1950s had to offer (albeit in diminished quantity) than the original list. There were still titles that didn't make the final cut like Christianna Brand's London Particular (1952), Bruce Campbell's The Clue of the Phantom Car (1953), Christopher Bush's The Case of the Three Lost Letters (1954) and Asimov's The Naked Sun (1956/57). So you're probably wondering what the hell actually did make the list? Let's find out!

Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1950) by Herbert Brean

Until fairly recently, Herbert Brean was primarily remembered for Wilders Walks Away (1948), nearly netting him an Edgar for best first novel, but fans today consider Hardly a Man is Now Alive to have been Brean's best mystery novel – a minor classic of the American detective story. The pattern of the story and plot are as intricate as they're simple. Reynold Frame and Constance Wilders plan to get married in the historical town of Concord, Massachussetts, by the 104-year-old Dr. Annandale, but a strange disappearance, a ghost lamp, a phantom army, a historical mystery and a body in a disused well threaten to upset their plans. Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, called the book "majestic and exhausting and wonderful" offering "a great picture of the genre at a time of huge change." I couldn't agree more and the fact it's has remained out-of-print to this day is baffling.

Night of the Jabberwock (1950) by Fredric Brown

I never understood the popularity of Joel Townsley Rogers' The Red Right Hand (1945), a phantasmagorial crime novel, which somehow bagged the 2020 Reprint of the Year Award. Fredric Brown may not have been the first to try his hands at a criminal flight of fancy, but his Night of the Jabberwock is so much better and imaginative than The Red Right Hand. Doc Stoeger, editor of Carmel City Clarion, is putting the paper to bed as he wishes something newsworthy would happen for him to write about. He then steps out into the night and into, what appears to be, the Twilight Zone. Or, as the title suggests, tumbled down a rabbit hole into a different reality where rationality doesn't exist. A fantastic mystery novels!

Death in Silhouette (1950) by John Russell Fearn

Fearn is my favorite second-stringer, pulp writer and at times a surprisingly decent, sometimes underrated, mystery novelist. Fearn wrote some grossly underrated mysteries like Except for One Thing (1947), Flashpoint (1950) and the posthumously published Pattern of Murder (2006). Death in Silhouette is one such underrated novel which takes place in the house of a modest, middle class family whose members have ordinary jobs like a restaurant cashier or store clerk and no domestic servants. That creates notable change in tone and atmosphere when an engagement party ends with the discovery of the future groom hanging behind the locked door of the basement. Fearn is incredibly cheeky with his solution, but just as interesting as the locked room trickery (simple as it is), is the part the pulp magazines that litter the house play in the story. It has been pointed out this is "one of the best sociological portraits of the popularity of US crime pulps in England." Death in Silhouette deserves more credit than I have given it.

Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) by Seishi Yokomizo

I cheated just a little bit by including The Inugami Clan, because it came as my recommendation for Seishi Yokomizo in "Top 10 Beneficiaries of the Reprint Renaissance,"  but that list was more about writers and their rise from near or total obscurity – not their works. So took that as good enough excuse and how could you not include it on a list of best 1950s mystery novels? The Inugami Clan is the Japanese detective novel taking place at the lakeside villa of a family of influential silk merchants, but the death of the patriarch throws the various, warring branches in a conflict over the inheritance. What follows is a string of grotesque murders as iconic as the book itself and the detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, who eventually solves those murders. A grandiose whodunit and one the grand detective novels from the second-half of the previous century.

The Sleeping Bacchus (1951) by Hilary St. George Saunders

This excellent, often overlooked and out-of-print impossible crime caper has an interesting backstory. Hilary St. George Saunders, who shared the penname "Francis Beeding" with John Palmer, found a copy of Pierre Boileau's Le repos Bacchus (Bacchus Rests, 1938) in Parisian bookshop and asked Boileau's permission to adept the book into English. So a rewrite rather than a translation. Nevetheless, The Sleeping Bacchus is a very fun caper about a debonair, snooty gentleman thief, called "Zed," who stages a series of impossible thefts and miraculous vanishings. I would love a twofer volume with a reprint of Saunders' The Sleeping Bacchus and a translation of Boileau's original version.

Murder Points a Finger (1953) by David Alexander

The dying message is a well-established, popular trope and one that admittedly works much better in short story form than inside a novel-length mystery where they're usually only a small part of the larger plot. There are, however, a few detective novels, not written by Ellery Queen, making real work of the dying message. Alexander's Murder Points a Finger is one of those rare novels in which an ex-policeman and fingerprint expert is shot and mortally wounded, but leaves behind a cryptic message naming his killer with a set of fingerprint cards. Like others, I have always been surprised at the lack of reputation of Murder Points a Finger as it's a very good, if somewhat unusual, mystery novel that has never been exceedingly rare or hard to find. I found my old paperback copy right here in the Netherlands. And that was long before Wildside Press reprinted it. A highlight of the fifties!

Black Widow (1952) by Patrick Quentin

I know crossovers are generally regarded as cheap gimmicks or promotional material, smacking of desperation, but they're my guilty pleasure. There have been some genuinely good detective crossovers over the decades. Notably Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice pooling their detectives in a series of six short stories, starting with "Once Upon a Train" (1950), collected in People vs. Withers and Malone (1963), but arguably one of the best crossovers remains largely unacknowledged. Black Widow takes Peter Duluth from the Quentin's flagship series and frame him for the murder of a young woman. A murder investigated by Quentin's secondary detective, Lieutenant Trant from Death and the Maiden (1939), who starts out believing Duluth guilty and really goes after him. So a legitimate case of when worlds collide, but even without the crossover element, Black Widow still would have been a very well done suspense drama driven by a clever persecution plot. Deserves to be better known.

Cake in the Hat Box (1954) by Arthur W. Upfield

Upfield was not known for creating intricate, maze-like plots or realistic, razor sharp characterization, but, as a so-called regional regional mystery writer, he was nearly unmatched in casting Australia as a backdrop for murder from remote cattle ranches and dying lakes to the desolate Nullarbor Plain – crimes committed there often feel native to the setting. For me, Cake in the Hat Box is the most striking of Upfield's mysteries bringing Bony to the small, dried up desert settlement called Agar's Lagoon. A strange place surrounded by an ever-widening ring of empty bottles and a great place for star gazing or watching meteor showers. Bony strolls into this settlement not long after the local police constable is found shot dead in his jeep. This is one of those novels in which Upfield pleasingly gave more consideration to the plot and harmonized it with the evocative, colorful backdrop. I don't know if there's such a thing as an outback procedural, but if there is, Cake in the Hat Box is a superb example of it.

Captain Cut-Throat (1955) by John Dickson Carr

For some obscure, never fully explained reason, John Dickson Carr's historical fiction is often overlooked or outright ignored. I suppose they're generally considered swashbuckling adventures full with duels and romance, which is not entirely incorrect, but they also have strong detective plots and great mystery hooks. My favorite of Carr's historical mysteries is unquestionably Captain Cut-Throat. A thunderous mix of ghostly murder, spy shenanigans and adventure when the figure of Napoleon loomed large over Europe. Captain Cut-Throat takes place in the summer of 1805 when Napoleon had gathered Armée d'Angleterre to invade England, but an apparently invisible entity is sneaking around the camp and killing sentries. There's also a lot of swashbuckling action and derring-do between the murders exemplified by the midnight chase through the Field of Balloons. I rank Captain Cut-Throat with Carr's best non-historical mysteries.

The Double Turn (1956) by Carol Carnac (a.k.a. E.C.R. Lorac)

I mentioned in past reviews and "Top 10 Beneficiaries of the Reprint Renaissance" how Lorac's return to print has done wonders for her once tarnished reputation, because her work dropped out-of-print when she died and was mostly remembered novels which were easy to get secondhand – which didn't include her best work (e.g. Murder by Matchlight, 1945). British Library remedied that by mostly cherry picking the work to reprint that garnered Lorac praise and a reputation during her lifetime. Recently, British Library have begun reprinting the novels publisher the "Carol Carnac" pseudonym and The Double Turn is currently my favorite. Lorac had her own ideas about the detective and preferred to plot her own route through what could have been fairly typical and conventional detective novel. In this case, the apparent locked room murder of the Miss Trimmings, a major-domo of an invalid's household, who's found dead at the bottom of the staircase along with half the ceiling. The problem of the locked house is not the central focus of the plot. This is, after all, still a Lorac novel, but still a solid locked room mystery and a fine example of her home brewed detective fiction.

So, as you can probably gather from the list and cut titles, the 1950s was not without its moments and even produced the occasional classic or noteworthy mystery novel, but after 1955 it undeniable began to taper off. Still enough to consider that decade the twilight years of the Golden Age detectives, before the fire was reduced to embers when the world entered the 1960s. Even then some of those embers were still glowing bright, but that's something for a future list.

Cardula and the Locked Rooms (2026) by Jack Ritchie

Back in 2024, I posted "Locked and Loaded, Part 5: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories," a series of reviews of randomly selected short stories, which included the misidentified, non-impossible crime story, "Cardula and the Locked Rooms" (1982), penned by Jack Ritchie – another long-gone giant of short stories. So even though "Cardula and the Locked Rooms" is not an impossible crime story, it's still a hilarious and clever mystery about Cardula (Dracula) who moved to the US to moonlight as a private detective. And the reason why Cardula had to flee to the US is fantastic in the literal sense of the word. To quote Mike Grost, "the throwing of his vampire detective Cardula out of East Europe after the Communists nationalized his castle is a great comic concept."

"Cardula and the Locked Rooms" not only has a genuinely funny and fresh premise for a private eye series, but it's also a pretty good, solid detective story in its own right. Cardula is hired by an art collector to retrieve a stolen Vincent van Gogh that got stolen a second time and compared it to Edward D. Hoch's Nick Velvet series. So jotted down the Cardula stories as a series of interest and even mentioned in the comments I would welcome a Crippen & Landru collection. Guess what?

In February, Crippen & Landru released Cardula and the Locked Rooms (2026), edited and introduced by Brian Skupin, gathering all nine short stories about the vampire detective and a whopper of a bonus – all six of Ritchie's impossible crime stories! What a clever excuse way to turn that misleading short story title into a descriptively accurate title for this collection by bundling the Cardula stories with Ritchie's impossible crime fiction. I admire how Skupin tackles and solves editorial problems. Like to see more, but let's take a look at this collection first.

Fittingly enough, this unusual detective series begins with a non-detective story, "Kid Cardula," which first appeared in the June, 1976, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Cardula, on the verge of running completely out of money, turns to a boxing trainer/promoter, because he has read in the papers "there's a fortune to be made in prize fights." Something that should be easy money for an undead vampire possessing the strength of ten men, but Cardula eventually figures out someone in his position probably can't afford to become a boxing champion or legend. No matter how big the prize purses get. So this story is hard to rate as there's no mystery to be solved, but it sure is a fun story and introduction to the character. I particularly enjoyed Manny having to arrange Cardula's fights like pro-wrestling matches, otherwise every fight would have ended in an instant knock-out. You have to send the crowd home happy.

These light, humorous touches and furtive references to Cardula being a vampire ("You got blue blood in your veins?" "Occasionally") would fortunately be carried over when the series went into private eye mode with the second story.

"The Cardula Detective Agency," originally published in the March, 1977, issue of AHMM, brings Olivia Hampton to Cardula's nighttime detective agency. Someone took a shot at her uncle, Hector, who had gathered his family to tell them he was going to cut them all out of his will and Olivia wants Cardula to ensure he's still alive when he sees his lawyer the next morning – after which the motive to kill him is removed. Cardula enters the somewhat eccentric household as a bodyguard to ensure Uncle Hector lives to see the sunrise. Hilariously, Cardula reads a book on hematology while sitting guard. During the night, Cardula finds out the case is not as clear cut as presented and gets to showcase his abilities as a detective and vampire-detective. But the ending demonstrates Cardula's not like other detectives. Not just on account of his fangs or ability to fly. This story also gives a bit of background on what happened Cardula's wealth ("what wasn't confiscated or nationalized was destroyed") and castle ("...east gallery has been converted to public restrooms"). So good reboot of the character and series.

"The Canvas Caper," originally published in the August, 1977, issue of AHMM, brings an unusual, anonymous client to Cardula with something more akin to a confession than a case. This man and his associates cut cards to see who had to kill their shared blackmailer and the man drew the low card. However, he couldn't go through with it and turned to Cardula figuring "any private detective whose office hours are from eight P.M. to four A.M. must be closer to the night world of crime than anybody else." So he offers Cardula ten thousand dollars to kill the blackmailer or find someone willing to do the job, but, once again, the assignment is not as simple and clear cut as it was presented to him. Simply as a detective story, "The Canvas Caper" is blatantly unfair, but, as a story about a vampire detective, it's as entertaining as all the others.

"Cardula to the Rescue," originally published in the December, 1977, issue of AHMM, casts Cardula not as a boxer, bodyguard or fangs-for-hire, but as a Good Samaritan coming to the rescue of a woman. A purse snatcher tried to take her handbag, but Cardula made short work of him. No good deed goes unpunished. The woman tells him to mind his own damn business, promptly disappears and the police want to arrest him for assaulting the purse snatcher! Cardula pulls a Batman to escape from the policemen, only for exactly the scene to repeat itself the following evening ("had I somehow inadvertently passed through a time warp?"). Not surprisingly, Cardula finds there's more behind the attempted robberies than just the daily routine of a purse snatcher and his victim.

"Cardula and the Kleptomaniac," first published in the April, 1978, issue of AHMM, is the longest story in the series and brings an unusual problem to Cardula's desk. Diana Weatherly is dying with curiosity to find out whom of her old friends is the kleptomaniac who has been stealing their trinkets since their schooldays. She has whittled down the list of suspects down to four friends and even prepared a baited trap, but, while trying to catch the thief in the act, she fell asleep – which is why she turned to Cardula. She wants Cardula to come to her house party, undercover, to identify the thief. You guessed it, Cardula pretty quickly notices there's more beneath the surface than a human magpie. So, plot-wise, this is one of the better stories, but the conclusion also show its hardboiled side.

"Cardula's Revenge," originally published in the November, 1978, issue of AHMM, is similar to the first story, "Kid Cardula," technically not a detective story. Cardula's old nemesis, "that beast Van Jelsing," is dead, but his grandson, Professor Van Jelsing the Third, carries on the torch. This new vampire hunter has become a real pain in the neck to the vampire community, but they can't get near him as he wears a magical collar around his neck. What's worse, Van Jelsing is currently in the US on a lecture tour to present his nephew and successor, Henrik van Jelsing. So what's a vampire detective to do? Not a detective story or mystery at all, but an entertaining comedy in which a vampire outwits two vampire hunters like a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd skit.

"The Return of Cardula," originally published in the February, 1982, issue of AHMM, brings a petty thief and burglar, Walter, to Cardula. Walter had a partner in crime, Albert, who had been in-and out jail together nearly their entire life, but something went terribly wrong when they hit the ball park to go through the locker rooms while the players out on the field. Walter stood guard at the entrance, of the corridor leading to the locker rooms, while Albert went inside to loot the lockers. Two minutes later, a dying Albert came stumbling back and uttered the cryptic words, "no snow." Yes, an actual dying message! Walter asks Albert to find the killer of his long-time friend and we get to see Cardula (getting caught) sneaking into the stadium, but solves the murder and dying message while watching the ball game. Skupin wrote in the introduction that this story "could have been an Ellery Queen tale" with "its baseball milieu and wordplay solution" (c.f. Ellery Queen's "Man Bites Dog," 1939). I agree!

The next story is "Cardula and the Locked Room," but already reviewed it as part of "Locked and Loaded, Part 5." However, it should be noted it's arguably the best and strongest story of the series. Perhaps it would have been best if the series had ended here.

"Cardula and the Briefcase" appeared in the June, 1983, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (not AHMM) and has a premise similar to “The Return of Cardula.” Alvin Atkins, a burglar, turns to Cardula after burglary job has presumably gone wrong. He and his partner, Charley Whittle, burgled a posh apartment, but, when he returned from bringing a typewriter to their car, discovered the front door chained shut. Charly tells him through the locked door the home owner has a gun and is going to call the police, which is followed by a thud and groan. Alvin makes himself scarce, but the next day no news about what happened. So asks Cardula to find out what really happened and the case of the missing burglar becomes entangled with a briefcase full of money. I suppose this is not necessarily a bad story, but I found it instantly forgettable and struggled to remember what it was about. For some reason, this last story left no impression whatsoever on me.

So that concludes the first part of Cardula and the Locked Rooms. Obviously, the Cardula series does not entirely adhere to the traditional, fair play mystery format. There are three or four really good, solidly-plotted stories in this series, but their main draw is unquestionably the character of Cardula, the premise of the series and the vein of humor running through all the stories. I suggest reading this as a short series of stories about an unusual detective instead of a series of unusual detective stories and take the better plotted stories as an extra.

Now let's see what Cardula could do with the stronger, plot-driven locked room mystery and impossible crime story.

"Upside-Down World," originally published in the May, 1962, issue of AHMM, technically is a how-was-it-done, not an impossible crime or locked room, but a good one. Regan, an insurance investigator, is tasked with investigation the sudden death of a client, Robert Cramer, who died from a heart attack when visiting a friend. Nothing suspicious as the autopsy showed Cramer had died from heart disease, but the two-hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy obliges the company to investigate. Even more so when the beneficiary is not the widow, but a woman named Miss Helen Morland. Only clue or detail hinting at something resembling foul play is that fingers of Cramer's right hand had been "seared slightly" with fragments of glass embedded in them, but he obviously wasn't electrocuted. So what happened and how do you give a man a heart attack? Like I said, this is not an impossible crime story, but it definitely has some impossible crime features like the key-element of the solution. So a good and solid opening to this section, even though it's technically a howdunit.

"Swing High," originally published in the May, 1965, issue of AHMM, arguably is the best overall short story from this collection. The policeman narrator is investigating the death of man, Thurmond Fraser, whose body was found beside the Medical Arts Building beneath three windows – third, fourth and fifth floors. If he didn't fall from one of those three windows, he must have fallen from the roof. However, the roof is covered in a thick, undisturbed coat of coal dust and each of the three windows is the waiting room of a doctor or specialist, which were either empty and locked or occupied. Nobody has seen anyone jumping or being pushed from one of those (locked) windows. So a neatly posed impossible crime with a credible motive on the murderer's part to create a confounding locked room situation. What makes "Swing High" more than just a very well done locked room mystery is the secondary plot-thread concerning the detective's marriage. Normally, I'm not exactly a fan of the post-Golden Age troubled cop trope, but here it complimented the traditionally-styled impossible crime plot and provided a superb conclusion. A conclusion that would not have been possible without the detective's private problems intruding on his work. So definitely a future inclusion for "The Locked Library."

"Pearls Before Wine," originally published in the August, 1968, issue of MSMM, is a three-page, short-short about an attempt of insurance fraud by making a string of duplicate pearl disappear from a locked and guarded room. Nothing much to say about this one other than the method is not bad and couldn't help but think how this short-short could have been the premise of a novel-length murder mystery. Just imagine (ROT13) fbzrbar fcbggvat gur inavfuvat-gevpx naq tenoorq gur bccbeghavgl gb trg evq bs fbzrbar ol fbzrubj znavchyngvat be thvqvat gung tynff bs npvq gbjneqf gur ivpgvz. But a fun and amusing short-short nonetheless.

I'm not entirely sure if "Play a Game of Cyanide," first published in the May, 1961, issue of AHMM, counts as a full-blown or borderline impossible crime story, but either way, it stands as one of the most original and entertaining stories of its kind. An exasperated policeman has to deal with a pair of clever and mischievous children, Ronnie and Gertrude, who got their hands on a dozen cyanide pellets – which they have hidden all over the house. A house that has been searched top to bottom by the police, but not with too much success. So they try everything from threatening to bribing the children, but they're determined to let police work their brains in order to find the pellets ("I always regarded the Children's Crusade as a great tragedy... not quite so certain now"). Some flashes of inspirations reveal a few of the cunning hiding places, however, what happened to last cyanide pellet is what makes this short story a little more than a monstrous Easter Egg hunt that could have been organized by Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. I begin to see why Ritchie counted so many short story writers among his biggest fans.

The next and penultimate short story is "Box in a Box" (1977), but already discussed it on this blog in my review of the Edward D. Hoch edited All But Impossible: An Anthology of Locked Room and Impossible Crime Stories (1981). Since it's the least interesting and successful of Ritchie's impossible crime output, I'm skipping it here.

Finally, "The Crime Machine," originally published in the January, 1961, issue of AHMM and anthologized in Alfred Hitchcock's Crime-Watch (1984), ditches the customary supernatural trappings when a locked room mystery evokes the other worldly to go for a science-fiction angle. Mr. Reeves is an outwardly normal man with a wife and an apparently good paying job, but Reeves source of income primarily comes from being a murderer for hire. So imagine his shock and surprise when, one day, a man named Henry visits him and tells him in intricate detail about his most recent murders. Henry claims to have invented a time machine allowing him to observe the past anywhere at anytime ("I cannot participate in any manner in the past... only observe"). So why not look at some recent, unsolved murders for a bit of extra pocket money. Reeves laughs at the whole idea and tells Henry to hop in his time machine to find out Jack the Ripper's true identity ("I'll do that tonight"), but how did he know about the murders down the smallest detail? Slowly, but surely, Reeves becomes convinced the time machine might be real after all. And wants to buy it. But not without a convincing demonstration. Henry gives a demonstration worth his money as he hops into his time machine and briefly vanishes from a sealed room.

"The Crime Machine" is, of course, not a hybrid science-fiction mystery, like Anthony Boucher's "Elsewhen" (1946) or Isaac Asimov's "Obituary" (1959), but a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery with a solid explanation for the disappearing time machine. The source of Henry's impossible knowledge is linked to the who and why, which is not overlooked in this excellent impossible crime story. I have mentioned this before, but never understood why the post-WWII detective story, especially the impossible crime story, rarely ventured outside the Victorian setups of haunted houses, cursed rooms and murder around a séance table. Just the still largely untapped potential for impossible crime stories and locked room mysteries involving possible time travel, apparent interlopers from parallel universes and outer space. As this story shows, it gives a new impulse to the classic locked room setup. Great story to end this collection on!

Cardula and the Locked Rooms can stake a claim to the title of best balanced anthology or collection of short stories. Cardula, the vampire-detective, is the star and main attraction of his own series, but with enough twists and turns to keep the demanding, slightly spoiled detective fans like myself happy. The stories with the gamey plots can be found in the Locked Rooms section. "Swing High," "Play a Game of Cyanide" and "The Crime Machine" being the standouts with "Upside-Down World" and even the short-short "Pearls Before Wine" following closely behind. So, to cut a long story short, Cardula and the Locked Room is a fantastic short story collection from Crippen & Landru and Brian Skupin that comes highly recommended.

I guess between Seishi Yokomizo's Yoru aruku (She Walks at Night, 1948), Locked Room Puzzles (1986), Carver's Death in 13 Rooms (2026) and this collection, I more than made up for the dry spell in locked room reviews last month.

She Walks at Night (1948) by Seishi Yokomizo

Back in May, Pushkin Vertigo released their eighth Kosuke Kindaichi novel, Yoru aruku (She Walks at Night, 1948), written by the patriarch of the Japanese honkaku mystery novel, Seishi Yokomizo – translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood. No doubt, the book title will make Western readers immediately think of John Dickson Carr's It Walks by Night (1930) and not wholly without reason. But, as Ho-Ling Wong noted in his review, it also smacks of Edogawa Rampo's grotesque tales with its sleepwalkers, hunchbacks and headless corpses.

This bizarre, twisted case begins when Naoki Sengoku consulting Torata Yashiro, a childhood friend and struggling mystery writer, concerning the Furugami Family. Naoki's family has been shepherding the Furugamis, "notorious for their naivety and indecisiveness," through Japan's most turbulent times from the Meiji Restoration to the depression of the 1920s. A much needed stewardship of the Furugami estate and fortune as generations of inbreeding produced a long line of idiots and hunchbacks. Naoki's father, Tetsunoshin Sengoku, even "stepped in as a sort of stud horse" and fathered Yachiyo Furugami with the now widowed, second wife of Oribe Furugami, Lady Oryu. Yachiyo is the reason why Naoki decided to consult and invite Torata to the Furugami estate.

A strange situation has developed as tangled and twisted as their own family tree and backstory. Yachiyo Furugami is the 24-year-old daughter of Lady Oryu and the drunkard Tetsunoshin Sengoku, but her official father, Oribe Furugami, consulted a soothsayer who ensured his daughter is not going to be a hunchback – instead she's destined to marry a hunchback. So good news for Yachiyo's hunchbacked half-brother, Morie, who's fallen in love with his technically not blood related half-sister. Only for her to announce her intention to marry a modernist painter, Koichi Hachiya, who's a hunchback. What worries Naoki is Koichi Hachiya was wounded a year ago when a woman shot him at Cabaret Hana. This still unidentified woman spotted the painter, shouted "you monster" and shot him. Naoki knows the mysterious woman who shot him at the night club is Yachiyo. On top of that, Yachiyo has been receiving bizarre letters alluding to the soothsayer's prophesy or warning her "walk not at night." That's a very odd, very peculiar warning as nobody outside the Furugami household knows she's a sleepwalker.

Torata is intrigued enough to accept Naoki's invitation, but things get progressively more bizarre than Naoki's story suggested and begins the moment they arrive. First of all, the Furugami estate is one of those Ellery-in-Wonderland style buildings, "a clever blend of traditional Edo Period craftsmanship and modern Western design," which gives off "a mysterious, almost otherworldly atmosphere." The bizarre scene greeting them could have been a fever dream: a furiously drunk Tetsunoshin Sengoku, dressed like a samurai, chasing a laughing and jeering Koichi Hachiya with a very real sword ("Bizarre old place, this house. Real monsters' den").

So they take the sword away and decide to lock it away in a safe "requiring both the key and a combination to be unlocked." Torata comes up with a three-word character for the combination lock, while Naoki hangs on to the key. Neither men can open the safe on his own. This precaution provided the plot with a locked room puzzle when the body of a headless hunchback is found. Together, they open the safe and discovered the sword coated in thick, dark blood! But how could the killer have taken and returned the sword from a double locked safe ("objects don't just travel through locked doors")? And then there's the question of identity. Who, exactly, was beheaded? Morie and Koichi are both missing and certain identifying marks ended up not giving a clear cut answer. And why take the head?

There are many more mysterious, horrifying incidents following the murder and discovery of the bloodstained sword, but two months pass without a solution. Inspector Sawada permits them to escape the gossip and chatter of Tokyo to go to their old estate in a remote mountain village in Okayama Prefecture. While traveling to the village, Torata and Naoki are joined by a scruffy, shaggy-haired man with a slight stammer and shabbily dressed in a serge kimono and an exhausted-looking hakama – nobody less than Kosuke Kindaichi. Not that the two man are aware Kindaichi is a well-known private investigator who has the respect and corporation of the police. So the Great Detective doesn't turn up until halfway through the story and his role remains somewhat peripheral, even having to cede the spotlight during the denouement to the murderer's unhinged confession. In spite of that, Kindaichi's low-key entrance into the story immediately added interest and excitement to the case. It's easy to see how the figure of the tousle-haired man in an unfashionable kimono and hakana trousers became as iconic and synonymous with the detective story as the silhouette of Sherlock Holmes.

However, not even Kosuke Kindaichi could prevent the murderer from collecting a second head before the case can be closed. So how does it all hold up? Better than first expected.

She Walks at Night is not exactly an immaculately clued detective story, however, I was very please when the second-half began to force me to abandoned the solution I had settled on. You see, I wrongly assumed to have spotted the almost childishly simply method to take and return the sword from the double locked safe (ROT13: Anbxv ghearq uvf onpx jura Gbengn jnf cvpxvat gur guerr-jbeq punenpgre sbe gur pbzovangvba ybpx, ohg jung vs Anbxv unq n cbpxrg zveebe va gur cnyz bs uvf unaq ranoyvat uvz gb ybbx bire uvf fubhyqre. Na byq qbqtr ahyyvslvat gur qbhoyr ybpxf naq thrffrq Anbxv jnf va pnubbgf jvgu Lnpuvlb gb trg evq bs ure byqre unys-oebgure). So, when the second-half rolled around, I had expected nothing more than absorbing, thoroughly entertaining and unchallenging mystery yarn. Fortunately, my armchair solution didn't hold up during the second-half and the locked problem turned on something far more sophisticated and satisfying than the childish magic trick I suspected. Same goes for the who and why. And, while there's definitely an old or two at play, Yokomizo played them very well indeed.

So even though it has its shortcomings, She Walks at Night nonetheless developed in something more complicated than you would expect from a bizarre, nearly pulp-like story teeming with sleepwalkers, hunchbacks, decapitated corpses, missing heads, prophesy and a cursed sword vanishing from a securely locked safe. She Walks at Night is no Inugamike no ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951) and Yokomizo would go on to write a better, bizarrely grotesque family murder mystery in Akuma ga kitarite fue o fuku (The Devil's Flute Murders, 1951/53), but She Walks at Night is a solid, mid-tier entry in the Kosuke Kindaichi series and the current translations. This series remains a highlight of the translation wave, because getting to read these previously inaccessible Golden Age mysteries is something not even best shin honkaku mysteries can match. So look forward to Jooubachi (The Queen Bee Mystery, 1951/52), coming next spring, which is apparently a high-profile Kosuke Kindaichi novel that "often makes the jump to both the small and the silver screen."

Death in 13 Rooms (2026) by A. Carver

Last month, A. Carver published the fifth title in the Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow series, entitled Death in 13 Rooms (2026), which is a collection of previously unpublished short stories that has, sort of, been foreshadowed in previous novels – teasing comments about cases like "The Knife in the Devil's Throat." Fans of the series will be glad to see Alex Corby and her great-aunt Cornelia front and center of these thirteen short stories. Cornelia was sorely missed in The Dry Diver Drownings (2024) and Hangings at Hempel's Green (2025) was pretty much a standalone mystery that happened to feature Alex and Cornelia. They're back, front and center, picking apart and dispelling thirteen locked room mysteries and other crimes of the impossible variety.

First things, first. Death in 13 Rooms has a brief "Author's Note" noting that "the following stories are presented in the order they were written." So the stories improve as Carver gets a hang of the short story format, because that's a bit of different game than the tightly-plotted, fairly clued and novel-length locked room extravaganzas of The Author is Dead (2022) and The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023). What's also worth mentioning as a sign of the time is that the standard legal disclaimer now includes "no generative artificial intelligence was used in the making of this book, nor any previous books by this author" beside the usual this is a work of fiction and resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Now, onto the stories!

"The Hunting Room" is one of the cases previous novels referenced, "the hunting room that opened fire on the Greenlove family," which conjured up an image of a very different kind of room-that-kills – one that opens fire on anyone who tries to enter. I even imagined a shoot out with an empty room and the whole idea amused me to no end. Carver wrote a different kind of impossible crime than the allusion suggested beginning when Alex and Cornelia are out and about when they gunshots and a scream. So when they go investigate, they arrive at a manor house with body and prosthetic leg lying on the lawn. However, the family already apprehended the murderer, old Sir Harry Greenlove, who apparently shot his own son from the window of the Hunting Room. Only old Sir Harry, only him, had access to the Hunting Room at the time of the shooting. Cornelia has her suspicions and together with Alex she sticks her nose where it doesn't belong and pieces together an entirely different solution. While not what I expected, "The Hunting Room" is a good, Arthur Porges-esque locked room mystery and liked how the solution revealed that the impossibility was of a different nature than the premise suggested. A solid opening story!

The second story, "The Knife in the Devil's Throat," was referenced in Hangings at Hempel's Green as the first time Alex and Cornelia crossed paths with Detective Inspector Peveril. Their first meeting happens when a rescue mission turns into a homicide investigation. Four school girls and their teacher found themselves trapped by rising floodwaters in the Devil's Throat cave and a team of expert divers were assembled to get them out, but, when they divers returned for the last time to get the teacher, they return to his bloodied corpse. However, none of the four girls could have cut his throat as they were all sedated as they were rescued one by one. And no weapon was found on either the girls or inside the cave and flooded passage. Alex has been following the news as one of the girls is an old school friend and, when her great-aunt smells an inexplicable crime, they're on the case. 

This story has a lot of going for itself, a disaster/survival mystery in a miniature, but hated the solution for the vanishing knife and shockingly unoriginal coming from Carver – who has been everything but unoriginal in explaining miracles. A type of vanishing-trick I simply detest as a solution for disappearing weapons and other items. No matter how it's dressed up and presented, but the who, why and circumstances in which the murder makes for a fascinatingly good and modern detective story. Just not a very good locked room mystery.

The third story, "Where the Crows Gather," returns to form as Alex and Cornelia are out and about again when they meet a police officer asking then if they're "here for the murder." The murder in question is that of Professor Pierre Surrey and appears to have been the victim of a blade-wielding fiend, "some are calling him the Night Ripper," who chased the professor up to his front door, killed him and disappeared without ever showing up on the CCTV footage. Cornelia's obsession with impossible crimes rivals my own and jumps on the opportunity to tackle this apparently invisible killer. She and Alex, of course, succeed in doing so and liked the solution tying the invisible attacker roaming the neighborhood with the apparent inexplicable murder of the professor. A short, simple and satisfying story.

By the way, nearly every story in Death in 13 Rooms either has a diagram, floor plan or even the odd family tree, but "Where the Crows Gather" has a grainy, timestamped frame from the CCTV footage – showing nothing more than an empty front garden. Maybe a small, unimportant detail, but a detail that tells there's now such a thing as a 21st century locked room mystery.

Next up is "Vote for Murder" and has Alex accompanying Cornelia to the polling station, a school building, to cast her vote in mayoral race between Andrew Stilldare and Geoffrey Uppermere. When they arrive at the polling station, Alex and Cornelia find that the two candidates are also there to cast their votes. Stilldare and Uppermere banter a bit and the former disappears behind the curtain of the small, crammed voting booth. Shortly after a thock is heard as Stilldare toppled out of the voting booth with "an arrow buried in the centre of his forehead." So with Alex and Cornelia sitting right there when the murder happened, they piece together how someone could have fired an arrow inside "a space no larger than a phonebox." The impossible murder here is very reminiscent of Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Voting Booth" (1977), but Carver had a far superior solution to this conundrum.

Only drawback of "Vote for Murder" is that the locked room is so tight, and the murder so specific, there's only one way it could have been done. Other than that, another good and solid locked room mystery.

"The Second Problem of the Potting Shed," one of the collection's shortest story, makes it abundantly clear Carver had been reading Edward D. Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne series when writing this and the previous story. Hoch's "The Problem of the Potting Shed" (2000), collected in Challenge the Impossible (2018), is one of my top 10 Dr. Hawthorne stories and Carver picked up the gauntlet to provide an alternative solution to the problem of a body inside a locked garden shed. Carver's story begins with someone complaining to Alex and Cornelia about their neighbors potting shed, which has two major problems. Firstly, the potting shed is an eyesore and, secondly, that their neighbor is lying dead inside – "none of us can understand quite how it happened." The potting shed has a single, fixed window and the door "crudely locked by winding a length of string around a pair of hooks set in the door and doorframe." So how could the murderer have escaped from this locked shed? Like I said, this is one of the shortest stories here and therefore less complicated than other, but very much appreciated Carver's practical, cleverly clued approach on how to leave a body inside a locked shed. Hoch would have approved!

The sixth story, "The Suicide Selfie Curse," is both longer than the previous stories and one of my favorites from this collection. A story that can be seen a companion piece to The Dry Diver Drownings.

Alex and Cornelia have started to become known enough as amateur detectives that sometimes a problem is brought to them, instead of being drawn to them like the murder magnets they are. This time, Alex's attention is drawn to the tragic deaths of two internet personalities, Melanie "Melodramassacre" Douro and Roshni "Roshni Relates" Patil – respectively a horror streamer and true crime podcaster. Melodramassacre was the first to die when she visited a secluded tower, Hopeloss Monument, standing on a wooded hilltop inside a small clearing. She took a selfie on the tower's stone balcony and fell to her death. Roshni Relates, the second victim, had came to the tower to do a piece on Melodramassacre's death, but she suffered the same fate as she fell to her death following a selfie. What's more, there are witnesses who believe the girls were shoved to their death by something invisible.

It goes without saying Cornelia pricks up at the prospect of an intangible killer shoving people from a tower, but Alex is more reserved and reluctant "to just go hassling poor bereaved strangers from out of the blue." She's overruled by Cordelia, but not without consequences. Firstly, they get to witness the third victim plunge to her death and get to confirm the tower is empty. Secondly, Alex beats Cornelia to the correct solution and now Cornelia has to sit back trying to figure out what Alex spotted that she has missed. So, character-wise, “The Suicide Selfie Curse” is treat for everyone who missed Alex, Cornelia and their interactions, but Carver also presented an interesting new variation on the death by defenestration from a locked room conceit with the last sentence revealing the method. Not to mention a very effectively done scene revealing the murderer. "The Suicide Selfie Curse" is an impossible crime story for the 21st century and a fine, anthology worthy impossible crime story at that.

The seventh story, "Shadows of the Solitary Man," begins with Cornelia dragging Alex out of the bed to go to the home of Elias Morass, a collector of manuscripts, who has sold her manuscript of rare, unpublished detective novels in the past and now claims to have gotten hold of Hake Talbot's unpublished, long-lost third novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness – which is one of our near mythical treasures. Alex and Cornelia arrive at the strange, box-like and walled-in house, they're greeted by Detective Sergeant Jones-Smith. Not long before they arrived, a man dressed in black and wearing a motorcycle helmet forced his way into the house with a gun. There were five people present at the time, Elias Morass, his three children and a journalist. The masked man took one of them hostage, killed Elias and escaped outside where he vanished into thin air. Sounds relatively simple and straightforward for an impossible disappearance, but there's an ambitious and intricate scheme lurking underneath. However, the story is not entirely flawless as both the ambitious plot and daring murder needed more space to breath. I think the setup alone would have justified the length of the story and it's a pity Talbot's lost manuscript was only peripherally involved in the case. And no lore or mini-lectures on the detective story's lost media. So a good short story that could have been even better had it been longer, but handling a plot and idea like this in short story form is still impressive.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the next story, "A Diaphanous Wall of Jericho," which begins when Alex and Cornelia take a stroll through the graveyard of the village near their home. Alex to visit the graves of victims in their murder cases "whom she felt a responsibility to at least remember" and Cornelia "to gloat over all the people she had outlived" ("I have finally beaten you"), which is the best scene/part of this story, but then Cornelia spots a hat perched on top of a tree – asks Alex to fetch it for her. However, the hat was stained with blood and Alex saw a body through the top window. The tree is standing in the garden of the vicarage and "a strange house it was" occupied by two normally opposing clergymen, Reverends Viridian and Hurt, who previously appeared in Hangings at Hempel's Green. Recently, they found a common enemy and tore down the wall dividing their semidetached houses which was replaced by an invisible wall. They can't cross into each other's part of the house, because they both wear ankle monitors ("...can only be deactivated by both of our thumbprints at once") and deafening alarm goes off when they cross the invisible border. That complicated the problem of the body inside the locked room upstairs. Not to mention the two other potential suspects one of whom can't walk and the other has two broken arms. Or who they are and why they were there.

Carver was mentally in novel-mode here and definitely tried to cram too much into this short story, which made it more muddled as it rushed towards its conclusion. So this one didn't work for me, but that's inevitable with anthologies and short story collections.

"Where Good Intentions Go," on the other hand, is another favorite and a future addition to "The Locked Library." Alex and Cornelia have taken a holiday to the island of Snute where there's a pristine, secondhand bookshop without a digital presence, but, barely arrived, they bump into Jane Blue from "The Knife in the Devil's Throat." This time, her brother Dominic got himself involved in murder and pretty much the only suspect the police has. Dominic is doing intern work for a company manufacturing marine equipment and have been on the island to do a cross between a promotion and a competitive experiment for their underwater habitats ("they float on the surface of the ocean, with like a one-person hotel room underneath") called Isolation Submersibles pods. Lilian LeRouge, a famous documentary maker, and marine scientist Fiona Dieve have agreed to test the pods by seeing who can stay down the longest. And, since they're rivals, neither is willing to be the first to quit. Dominic's job is to bring them supplies and do daily checks, but one day, several months into the competition, he finds Lilian dead in her pod. Only they had keys and a picture is automatically taken every time someone opens the door.

So who else could have done it? But then a curious clue turns up inside the locked room establishing a link with the other locked pod "separated by miles of ocean." And this is followed by another murder under similar impossible circumstances. I love it when mystery writers get creative with their locked room settings as it opens the door to get creative and even original with the solution, which is an opportunity Carver took with both hands. Purely as a locked room mystery, it crackles with originality, especially the second murder. But on a whole, "Where Good Intentions Go" is a solid and another anthology worthy story. I love a good, rare underwater locked room mystery.

The tenth story, "The Man Who Read William Brittain," is obviously a homage to another master of the short detective story, William Brittain. This story follows Mr. Lionel Suss, an elderly chemistry teacher, who's a big fan of Brittain's detective fiction and particular the Mr. Strang series. Even trying to model himself after Mr. Strang. There are, however, no real mysteries or puzzles to be solved at Yew Valley Secondary School, until he's told a student was seen roaming around in the chemistry room – followed by "a bright flash in the room" ("...that boy's been playing with the gas taps..."). So they rush to the chemistry room to find it locked and empty, but someone had turned on all the gas taps except the master valve. There's an obvious suspect in Yew Valley's most notorious student, Bryson "Bud" Bruin, who appears to have more than one impossible trick up his sleeve for his teachers. Not only did he appear to have vanished from a locked classroom, but chalk writing inexplicably appeared on the blackboard after the locked classroom was entered. 

This little prank has some serious consequences for Mr. Suss as it's made clear somebody has to take responsibility, if this results in a scandal. So the only thing Mr. Suss can do is step in the shoes of his hero and explain the apparently impossible, which he does with logic and reason. So all's well that ends well, but, some time later, something unexpected turned up to put a new perspective on his clever solution. Showing him that climbing on the shoulder of giants, even fictitious giants, takes more than adapting their style and mannerism ("What would Mr. Strang think? What would William Brittain think?"). Simply an excellent mystery and homage! 

By the way, this story also has a nod and wink to The Kindaichi Case Files as the chemistry room has a ghost story said to be one of the Seven Mysteries of Yew Valley Secondary ("though what exactly the other six were, nobody was exactly clear").

The next story, "The Horrendous Occurrences of Colonel Henry Haunt," is tremendously entertaining parody of Hoch's Simon Ark series. Colonel Haunt, narrator, is now an old widow with grown-up children and grandchildren, but while his mind is going he still has clear and fond memories of an old friend, Simon Set. An apparently ageless, eternal wanderer he befriended in the Middle East during his time in the army. Colonel Haunt hasn't heard from Simon Set in ages when a mysterious invitation to come to a remote, rundown mansion to witness a special demonstration. A demonstration for only a handful of people: an American businessman named Mr. Glass, Colonel Haunt, Alex Corby and her great-aunt Cornelia. Simon Set, accompanied by his servant Long Shi, reveals to the group that he's 268-years-old and ready to finally share his secret for a price. Not without a convincing demonstration.

Simon Set has constructed a glass pyramid, containing black box, in which he will be sealed shut. Naturally, he disappears from the black box and reappears an hour later. Dead and decades younger! Cornelia, one of Simon's ardent critics, is not impressed in the slightest. Simply as a locked room mystery, this story offers what you can expect from stage magic shenanigans. No, the strength of the story is in the narrator who's not always there, the characters and getting to see a slightly villainous version of Hoch's Simon Ark. So not a blistering original impossible crime story, but tremendously entertaining homage.

That brings us to the penultimate tale, "Disappearance at Loch Dreich," in which Carver gets creative again with the setting. This time, Alex and Cornelia are holidaying at Loch Dreich somewhere in the remote Scottish Highlands and stay at one of the four old hunting towers currently "submerged past the first storey by flowing and treacherous floodwaters." They occupy the Library Tower as it houses a huge collection of rare, out-of-print mystery novels, but the other three towers are also occupied. Cal, Isa, and Tam, members of Wyrdine University's Paranormal Research Society, have the South Tower. Donald, an unpopular member of the same society, has Well Tower. Evelyn LeRouge, professional treasure hunter, is staying at the Oxbow Tower. The area is rich in history and legends of ancient treasures and stories of the Loch Dreich Monster. So how could one of them have vanished from their tower that was tightly locked from the inside and surrounded by floodwater? Followed by a gruesome slaying under nearly identical circumstances? Carver put the setting and circumstances of the flooding to great use to spin a pretty good impossible crime yarn with, what can be called, a custommade solution for the various impossibilities. So, needless to say, I liked it.

Finally, the thirteenth and last story, "The Tumbling Tower," closing out Death in 13 Rooms. Cornelia is once again dragging Alex along to the home of a collector who has the only surviving copy of an unknown Walter S. Masterman mystery novel ("...consequence when a warehouse holding an author's books is destroyed in the Blitz"). When they arrive, history finally caught up with the surviving copy of Masterman's novel as the house burned down to the ground. Cornelia refuses to give up and contacts the collector's nearest relative, Sir Francis Omar, who has a library of his own. And offers Cornelia to poke around. But while they are there, Sir Francis falls from the top of a tower and "grimly impaled on the rusted metal spikes of the gate." There was, of course, nobody else present up there when they saw him fall. Only two other people were present, Fernie and Hope, who were both so-called lost souls taken in by Sir Francis. Why is Fernie accusing Hope, a pale, undernourished girl younger than Alex, of having killed her entire family?

The problem with this last story is that it's perfectly fine by itself, not great, but fine. However, as the thirteenth and last story, it comes across as patchwork with Cornelia hunting for long-lost mystery novel and an impossible murder involving a tower, but not nearly as well-done or executed as in those previous stories. The locked room-trickery not as original or imaginative as what came before it. So not necessarily a bad story, but well below average for this collection and not the best story to close out on. Maybe it would have been better if the last two stories had been switched around.

So, there you have it, the thirteen, brand spanking new impossible crime stories making up Carver's Death in 13 Rooms. For me, "The Suicide Selfie Curse" and "Where Good Intentions Go" are the two standout stories with only "The Knife in the Devil's Throat," "A Diaphanous Wall of Jericho" and "The Tumbling Tower" falling short of the mark – one reason or another. Nailing it ten times out of thirteen is not bad and what makes Death in 13 Rooms a first-rate and noteworthy addition to the growing stack of locked room-themed anthologies and short story collections, but personally enjoyed the insight the short stories offered into Carver's mind as a writer and plotter. Carver's novels have on average four, or five, locked room murders and other types of impossible problems that get properly explored and examined. You can't write a Carver novel like The Christmas Miracle Crimes in short story form and it was interesting to watch Carver trying to contain that rich plotting style and creativity to the confines of the short story. These stories also revealed Carver's fascination with the role weapons can play in helping to make a murder look completely out of this world. Death in 13 Rooms could just as easily have been titled Wonder Weapons or An Armory of Miracles.

What more can I say? Carver's Death in 13 Rooms is a buffet for locked room addicts and impossible crime fiends. I look forward to the next meeting with Alex and Cornelia!

Locked Room Puzzles (1986) edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini

So, back in May, I added "The Locked Library," a companion page to "The Muniment Room," which is a permanent, easy to edit update of "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Murders & Impossible Crimes" – essentially doubles as my version of "99 Novels for a Locked Room Library." I kind of forgot to post a short blog update to draw everyone's attention to the new page and there has been a lull of impossible crime reviews this month. No opportunity to mention it in passing. That oversight has been corrected and now onto the next.

Benjamin Stevenson's Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026) was the last impossible crime novel to be reviewed on this blog with not even short locked room mystery story between then and now. A whole month with only a single locked room mystery reviewed! I've no idea what came over me, but was determined to close out this month some impossible crimes.

I decided to take this opportunity to finally reread Locked Room Puzzles (1986), edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini, which is the third of five themed mini-anthologies in the Academy Mystery Novellas series. Locked Room Puzzles was my second ever, locked room-themed anthology after Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000) that gave me a rare John Dickson Carr novella and second stories for Edward D. Hoch, Bill Pronzini and Clayton Rawson – whom I all read for the first time in Ashley's anthology. So thought it was time to give Locked Room Puzzles a second read.

The first, of four, novellas is John Dickson Carr's "The Third Bullet," originally published (as by "Carter Dickson") in 1937, but this shortened version appeared in the January, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. "The Third Bullet" features a rare, one-shot detective character, Colonel Marquis, who's the Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police and prototype character of Colonel March from The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). Note a similar one-shot detective starred in one of Carr and Val Gielgud's stage play, "Thirteen to the Gallows" (1944). Colonel Marquis and his subordinate, Inspector Page, confront a murder as confusingly impossible as any of the case brought Colonel March's Department D-3 at Scotland Yard.

Mr. Justice Charles Mortlake, recently retired, was a so-called red judge presiding over "serious offenses like murder or manslaughter," but the liberal judge was well-known for his leniency on the bench. However, Justice Mortlake was surprisingly hard on a man, named Gabriel White, who got "fifteen strokes of the cat and eighteen months' hard labor for robbery with violence" – despite it being his first offense based on shaky evidence. White didn't take the sentencing, nor the flogging very well and threatened the judge, which he kept up even after being released. White apparently kept his word, entered the judge's guarded house and shot him inside his private pavilion practically in front of two policemen. Even admitting to having fired one of the shots, but a shot, he says, completely missed Mortlake. A second gun is discovered hidden inside the pavilion, but then the autopsy reveals the bullet came from a third, yet to be discovered gun. That makes the whole mess a total impossibility, because "out of four sides of a square, one was a blank wall, one was impregnable with rusted bolts, and the other two were watched." So nobody, except White, could have shot Mortlake inside that locked and guarded pavilion, but he appears to be innocent. Who did it and how?

I guess whittling down "The Third Bullet" from a novel to a novella has come at the cost of Carr's normally cavalier clueing, but nonetheless enjoyed this competently put together little locked room puzzle. While not as strongly clued as a top-tier Carr, "The Third Bullet" demonstrates his talent for misdirection and muddying the waters without muddying the story or plot. So, of course, the Merrivalean blinkin' cussedness of things has a big sway over the plot making the simple and straightforward look labyrinthine. All perfectly handled by Colonel Marquis and Inspector Page. So the only thing that can really be said against "The Third Bullet" is that Carr has written better locked room mysteries, because of course he has.

The second story is Bill Pronzini's "Booktaker," plucked from the short story collection Casefile (1983), which finds the Nameless Detective in his brand new, Dumm Street office when a client comes knocking, John Rothman – owner of San Francisco's largest secondhand bookshop. A three-story building crammed with everything from "reading copies of popular fiction and nonfiction to antiquarian books, prints and the like," but someone has been helping themselves to rare books, etchings, prints and old maps locked away in the third-floor Antiquarian Room. A room that's always kept locked with only Rothman and two employees having keys ("...out of bounds to customers..."). The room is also protected by an electronic gateway that triggers an alarm if anyone tries to leave the room with an item that wasn't scanned and cleared. Somehow, it barely slowed down the thief and Rothman suspects an inside job.

Nameless gets hired to go undercover at the bookstore under the ever so subtle alias of Jim Marlowe ("...in honor of Raymond Chandler") and root out the thief. And rooting around his does. More than enough rooting and digging to make the thief nervous enough to do something really stupid and short sighted, but too late as Nameless already figured out who and how of behind the impossible thefts. "Booktaker" is one of a dozen novels and short stories Pronzini contributed to that mysterious, short-lived locked room revival from the 1980s and one of my favorites from this series. Not only has it a great and surprising premise for a hardboiled detective story with a solution as clever as it's simple, but it has a fantastic example of a red herring doubling as a clue (SPOILER/ROT13: jul gur guvrs unq gb tb sebz fgrnyvat ener obbxf gb inyhnoyr zncf vf obgu n terng pyhr naq na rssrpgvir fzbxr fperra). So, yes, this one more than stood up to another, long overdue reread.

The third story is Clayton Rawson's "From Another World," originally published in the June, 1948, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, in which Ross Harte visits the Great Merlini hoping to learn something about ESP and PK. Harte is writing a magazine article on Extra Sensory Perception and shortly has to interview a millionaire, Andrew Drake, who wants to invest millions of dollars into psychic research – if he can be convinced. So a demonstration is planned between Drake and a well-known medium, Rosa Rhys. Merlini smells trouble when he hears her name and when they arrive at Drake's home, they're met by Dr. Garrett, who had just arrived following a distressed phone call from Drake. Rosa Rhys and Drake had locked and sealed themselves away in his private office for their ESP experiment, but they give response to their knocking. So they break down the door to find Rosa knocked unconscious and Drake dead from a stab wound. The door and windows were not only securely locked from the inside, but sealed was not only tightly locked from the inside, but the door was sealed with gummed paper tape!

"From Another World" is a fairly well-known, often anthologized story and not entirely without reason. Rawson came up with a good and original locked room-trick to explain that tricky conundrum of the so-called tape sealed room, however, it was pointed out a few years ago it has a giant, gaping plot hole I missed the first two times. Now that it has been pointed out and reading back my review of The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective (1979), "From Another World" definitely has lost some of its former prestige. I still liked the idea behind the locked room-trick.

Finally, Edward D. Hoch's "Day of the Wizard," originally published in the August, 1963, issue of The Saint Mystery Magazine, mixes exotic adventure, impossible mysteries and Cold War intrigue in Egypt. The US government desperately needs Simon Ark to help them track down the wreck of a plane, carrying a highly secret and sensitive cargo, which crashed somewhere in the desert at the end of World War II. So they ask Ark's friend and his nameless narrator to track the ancient detective down, presumably somewhere in Cairo. Our narrator has the luminous idea to ask a local magician, the Wizard, to issue an open challenge to Simon Ark to solve his most miraculous of magic tricks ("you get the publicity and I find Simon").

The Wizard agrees and asks him to buy a good, strong and reliable padlock to securely lock an empty cabinet. The door is closed, the padlock snapped into place and the keyhole plugged with a matchstick ("...broke off flush with the surface of the lock...") – sealed with drops of candle wax. The Wizard then asks what should appear inside the locked and sealed closet when they open it the next day ("the most beautiful girl in Cairo"). Simon Ark turns up before the closet is unsealed, but when it's opened, the problems really begin. A drugged, unconscious woman is found lying at the bottom of the closet followed by a murder and a track through the desert to hunt for the wrecked airplane and its mysterious cargo. Rest assured, "Day of the Wizard" is better and more consistent than my description perhaps suggests. Hoch expertly strung together the miraculous appearance of the girl in the closet and the murder with the hunt for the lost airplane and it's highly sensitive cargo, even throwing in an impossible disappearance during a brief desert sandstorm ("...vanished now as completely as if the sand had swallowed her up"). And played more than fairly with the reader. That makes for a very attractive, slightly unusual story and a highlight of the Simon Ark series. I agree with Mike Grost that this is "one of Hoch's most Carr-like stories."

Historically, "Day of the Wizard" is a fascinating and not wholly unimportant contribution to the locked room mystery simply on account of the padlock. I commented in the past you rarely ever see padlocks being used in locked room mysteries, because they're notoriously unreliable and easy to pick open. So it really difficult to pull off a convincing impossible crime scenario when the only thing keeping the door locked is a simple padlock. Hoch picked up the challenge like Carr and Rawson tackled the problem of the tape-sealed room to deliver the most definitive padlock-trick. Great stuff!

Greenberg and Pronzini's Locked Room Puzzles is perhaps not the greatest or most exciting locked room anthology you can get your hands on today, it's still a great starter anthology for those new to the wondrous world of impossible crimes and locked room murders. Locked Room Puzzles gives you an obscure John Dickson Carr novella, Rawson's famous take on the tape-sealed room and two gems from Hoch and Pronzini. So a must-have for everyone who wants to build their own locked room library.