Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912) by Victor L. Whitechurch

Rev. Victor L. Whitechurch was an Anglican churchman, author and creator of Thorpe Hazell, a vegetarian railway enthusiast, who's one of the oddest "Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" appearing in a short-lived series of nine short stories from 1905 to 1906 – collected in Thrilling Stories of the Railway (1912). Whitechurch started out as a turn-of-the-century mystery writer in the Doylean tradition, but also got the participate in the early Golden Age of the British detective story with novels like The Crime at Diana's Pool (1927), Murder at the Pageant (1930) and Murder at the College (1932). Not to mention being a founding member of The Detection Club and penning the first chapter ("Corpse Ahoy!") for the round-robin mystery The Floating Admiral (1931).

Whitechurch is best remembered today for the railway detective and thriller stories written during the first decade of the previous century, which extends pass the Thorpe Hazell series. That gives them some historical importance. Mike Grost pointed out Whitechurch's "stories appeared early in the Impossible Crime movement" and "very early in the Technological Detective movement" that "had already been piloted by L.T. Meade in this era, but just barely." Thrilling Stories of the Railway and Whitechurch's other railway mysteries were fairly obscure and out-of-print for decades, until they entered the public domain. They have since been bundled together and reprinted by different publishers. I wanted to finally take a look at this collection of pioneering detective stories.

The first story is "Peter Crane's Cigars," originally published in the July, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine as "The Ingenious Ruse of Mr. Crane," which briefly introduces Thorpe Hazell. A book collector, railway enthusiast and amateur detective "whose knowledge of book editions and bindings was only equaled by his grasp of railway details," but what made Thorpe Hazell an odd duck at the time was another one of his eccentricities – "a strong faddist on food and physical culture." A vegetarian to the extreme who was constantly practicing strange, outlandish physical exercises.

So this first story presents a fairly minor problem as Hazell has to deal with a tobacconist undercutting his competition by selling quality cigars at bargain prices ("...only paid fivepence each for them"). That brand can be "picked up very cheaply in Holland or Belgium," but not resold at those low prices unless they were smuggled into the country without paying the duties. Hazell dons a disguise to tail Crane on his monthly excursion abroad, but even the railway detective is baffled how Crane was smuggling the cigars. So you can categorize this story as a borderline impossible crime story and not something as banal or disappointing as the cigars being smuggled pass customs inside the books Crane was lugging around on his travels. Whitechurch came up with something more ambitious for the core solution, but its dependence on (ROT13) haxabja nppbzcyvprf detracts from the overall plot. Still a fun, enjoyable introduction to the series.

"The Tragedy on the London and Mid-Northern," originally published in the August, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine, begins with Hazell perusing the morning newspaper when a headline, "SHOCKING ACCIDENT ON THE RAILWAY," catches his eye and attention. An unidentified man was found leaning out of one of the windows of an express, on the London and Mid-Northern Railway, who had a wound on the back of his head and an ear torn off. So the authorities assume the man was looking out of the window and struck his head against one of several bridges over the line, but Hazell would like to know more about the incident. Between stretches and dumbbell exercises, Thorpe Hazell becomes Thorpedyke Hazell and follows a trail of physical evidence right to the murderer's doorstep. As noted before, these are early, pre-Golden Age mysteries that reads like a blueprint of what's coming, but often lacked fair play. So Hazell is as much as an oracle as an detective. Still a fun story.

Interestingly, Whitechurch's "The Tragedy on the London and Mid-Northern" appears to have been the blueprint for another impossible crime story from the same decade. This story sounded so familiar, I started looking over the "Train Mysteries" tag and came across "The Unseen Hand" by M. McDonnell Bodkin from The Quests of Paul Beck (1908) and anthologized in Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums (2016). "The Unseen Hand" was published in the December, 1907, issue of The Royal Magazine. So assume Bodkin had been aware of Whitechurch's story and tried to improve on it, because it doesn't seem like a blatant copy/paste job.

"The Affair of the Corridor Express," first published in the September, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine, is an interesting one. A distressed Mr. F.W. Wingrave, a master at Shillington School, comes to Thorpe Hazell asking him to help find a 10-year-old school boy, Horace Carr-Mathers, who's the son of a millionaire and impossibly vanished from a moving train – vanished right under the nose of the school masters! So the London express was thoroughly searched, every compartment, luggage rack and passenger, but Horace was nowhere to be found. Hazell can see "a distinct plot" in Wingrave's account and accepts the case. I think this is the first story with a plot that has aged surprisingly well. Not only does it indulge in some clueing and foreshadowing, but the visual image of how Horace vanished from the train makes for a memorable visual image. That poor kid! One of those rare detective stories that manages actually do something with a kidnap plot.

"Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture," originally published in the October, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine under the title "The Car That Vanished" and anthologized in The Realm of the Impossible (2027), is another early highlight of the impossible crime story. A case that "found a prominent place in Thorpe Hazell's notebook" and for good reason. Sir Gilbert Murrell has three paintings on loan to an expedition, but they inexplicable disappear in transit, on a goods train, along with its entire waggon on a non-stop right. And to top it all off, the vanished waggon with the paintings was in the middle of the train! I don't know how feasible the disappearance-trick is or whether it can be pulled-off on a first try, but the idea is ambitious, original and light years ahead of its time when it comes to the impossible crime story. A good and entertaining impossible crime caper.

"How the Bank was Saved," published in the November, 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine as "The Frustration of Kinch," begins with admitting "Thorpe Hazell always looked upon the affair of the Birmingham Bank from a distinctly humorous point of view" – "not worth calling a railway mystery or adventure." I agree. This is a mild crime comedy in which Hazell helps a bank thwart a plot to destroy their credibility over a personal grievance. A plot involving a robbery aboard a train, but Hazell has a counter plot. A fun, light, but forgettable, criminal farce.

"The Affair of the German Dispatch-Box," originally published in the December 1905, issue of The Royal Magazine and previously anthologized in Vintage Mystery and Detective Stories (2005). This time, Thorpe Hazell gets to play a cross between Arsène Lupin and James Bond. Hazell is approached by Mostyn Cotterell, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affair, who has an unusual request. How do you steal back stolen document from a German diplomat traveling from London to the Continent by the ordinary boat train? The documents in question being carried in a locked dispatch-box. So, on this case, Hazell is not solving a train heist, but organizing and carrying one out. A daring assignment on paper ("...the most daring case which he ever undertook..."), but, as the ending showed, not half as dangerous or impossible when you have the backing of the British Empire. Still an amusing yarn regardless and not half bad for the time.

"How the Bishop Kept His Appointment," originally appearing in the January, 1906, issue of The Royal Magazine, is a mild, humorous adventure story in which Hazell helps a bishop get to his important speaking engagement after their train derailed. So not much to say about this one except that it has one or two good moments.

"The Adventure of the Pilot Engine," first published in the February, 1906, issue of The Royal Magazine, takes place at "a juncture when European politics were considered by diplomatists to be in a very delicate state" when Count von Neglein arrived in the country – scheduled to have "an interview with the English Prime Minister" ("...in presence of the King"). A small group of spies, headed by a man named Dubourg, plot to prevent this meeting from ever happening and the plot he has hatched makes this the most technically complicated stories in the series. A complicated and fiendish scheme involving a particular stretch of railway with quadruple tracks and switch boxes. There's even a map of that stretch of railway line. Refreshingly, Dubourg admits "there are several weak spots in the plan" and "must trust to luck." Nobody could have planned on a certain railway detective playing deus ex machine to spoil their carefully laid out and executed plot. So not too bad for a vintage spy thriller.

Note for the curious: one of the characters involved in the plot is a Russian spy, named Koravitch, who's probably the same character from Whitechurch's The Adventures of Captain Ivan Koravitch (1925). That could mean Whitechurch could have written the first, or one of the first, crossovers in the detective genre. Something deserving of being footnoted.

"The Stolen Necklace," originally published in the March, 1906, issue of The Royal Magazine, concludes this short-lived series on an underwhelming note. A short story from the late 1800s or early 1900s about stolen or misplaced diamond necklaces, strings of pearls and gold rings tend to feel like filler stories – because rarely something really is clever is done with it. This story is no exception. Hazell helps a woman retrieve a diamond necklace she lost on a train, but turn out to have been stolen. An OK story by itself (and for the time), but forgettable and very weak to end this series on. At least Hazell was satisfied with his ending ("...glad to think that the last of my little investigations of railway mysteries has cleared a good man of suspicion...").

Hold on! There are six more, non-Thorpe Hazell thrilling stories of the railway in this collection beginning with another locked room murder aboard a train.

"The Mystery of the Boat Express," published in the February, 1912, issue of The Royal Magazine, begins with a passenger of the Great Southern Boat Train paying the guard a half-crown to lock his compartment ("...I do not wish to be disturbed"). When the train arrived at its destination, the guard unlocks the compartment and discovers the passenger has been shot through the head. So it appears to be a case of suicide, but the evidence screams murder. How can a man alone inside a locked compartment, on a moving train, have been shot? The solution to that conundrum makes "The Mystery of the Boat Express" another footnote worthy title. I think the locked room aficionados has seen a variation, or two, on this trick before, but this story predates them all by more than twenty years. Other than that, very much a short story of its time.

"How the Express was Saved," originally published August, 1911, issue of The Royal Magazine, runs along similar lines as some of the previous stories. It revolves around a group of disgruntled railway strikers who were told by their employer to hit the road. So they hatch a plot to derail the train, on which their General Manager is traveling, pitching it straight into the river. In my opinion, the best written of Whitechurch's railway thrillers complimented by a beautiful map of the scene where the train is to be derailed.

 

 

I have very little to say about the last four, fairly minor short stories from The Royal Magazine. "A Case of Signalling" (1911) has a maid and her railway worker boyfriend spoil a burglary. "Winning the Race" (1911) is another affair of international intrigue and concerns trying to get one train to arrive before the other. "The Strikers" (1911) is much the same as "How the Express was Saved," but not as good. Finally, "The Ruse That Succeeded" (1911), in which the Russian spy Koravitch has to be smuggled out of Britain. I guess this story comes from The Adventures of Ivan Koravitch.

So, all in all, Whitechurch's Thrilling Stories of the Railway is an interesting, but mixed, collection of short stories. The best of these stories are "The Affair of the Corridor Express," "Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture," "The Mystery of the Boat Express" and "How the Express was Saved" followed at some distance by "The Tragedy on the London and Mid-Northern" and "The Adventure of the Pilot Engine." You have to judge these stories by the standards (or lack of standards) of the pre-Golden Age period when the detective story of the 1930s and '40s slowly started to take its form. That's perhaps the biggest strength of Thrilling Stories of the Railway is showing this transition from one period to the other. Like the best from this period, they read like a blueprint or premonition of the coming Golden Age (e.g. Isabel Ostrander's The Clue in the Air, 1917). Whitechurch's railway mysteries belong to that category with its technical, more ambitious and complicated plots, impossible crimes, diagrams and floor plans. Whitechurch was not the first to include floor plans and diagrams, but they were still far from a staple of the detective genre. So definitely enjoyed this collection and its historical window into the development of the detective story. Recommended not only to vintage crime fans, but fans of vintage fiction in general.

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.

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.

The Architecture of Murder (2026) by James Scott Byrnside

Last year, James Scott Byrnside published It's About Impossible Crime (2025), a collection of original short stories, in which he paid homage to MacKinlay Kantor's It's About Crime (1960) and radio director William Spier – who worked on The Adventures of Sam Spade and Suspense. Shortly after it's publication, Byrnside started working on a second collection of stories and posted updates on his blog how the collection was coming along.

The Architecture of Murder (2026) was released in early April and is made up of four, pulp-style novellas "about constructed realities that turn on their creators" and impossible crimes, but "the solutions are tied to the characters completely." However, The Architecture of Murder is a better collection of locked room murders and miraculous misdeeds than It's About Impossible Crime, which succeeded as retro-GAD mysteries, but hadn't all that much to say about its impossible crimes. Not to mention that its best story, "Instrument of Death," is a non-impossible crime tale. That's not the case here and one of the novellas from The Architecture of Murder become an instant favorite right after finishing it. Can you guess deduce which one?

"Killer Pete" begins with Horace Cobb, engineer and inventor, being found shot inside his workshop, "locked, bolted from the inside," where he worked on automatons with completed and half-finished mechanical creations filling the crime scene – everything from a ballerina and tin terrier to the classic chess player. However, the largest of the automatons, a cowboy, stood in the middle of the workshop holding a .38 revolver in its right hand ("...iron index finger firmly entrenched inside the trigger guard"). Killer Pete can move, fire the gun and even speak ("how does my lead taste, bucko?"), but was it Killer Pete who shot Cobb or was it someone else present at the house when the shot rang out? More importantly how was it done and why was the only key to the door taped to the floor some distance away from the locked door? Those aren't the only curious aspects confounding the murder.

So the police call upon Rowan Manory and his assistant, Walter Williams, who are the best private investigators money can buy in Prohibition-era Chicago. Locked room slaying and other impossibilities are Rowan Manory's bread and butter, but even he's taken aback by the presentation of this particular locked room shooting. But not for very long. While it's true the solution is tied to the characters completely, it's the bizarre crime scene and locked room-trick making "Killer Pete" a killer yarn. Only smudge on the story is that it was published in 2026, not 1926 or 1936, but I won't hold that against Byrnside. A banger of an opening to this second collection!

"Madmen Prefer Blondes" brings a serial killer to the Windy City, cutting the throats of young blondes, but Sergeant Delbert Grady has an even bigger problem on his hands. William E. Dever is the new mayor who played it by the book and expected the police to play it straight, not drink or swear ("worst of all, bribery was a crime again"). Dever turned down Grady's request to hire Rowan Manory in favor of a criminal psychologist, Ferris Brandt, "responsible for the capture of two multiple murderers" believing it's time the public sees its police catching the criminals rather than "some freelance gumshoe" – who's not cheap either. Grady has to work together with Brandt and his psycho-analytical profiling of the razor wielding maniac, but, when things eventually go south, Grady gets to call in Manory and Williams. Chasing the killer's bloody, twisted trail stops at the door of a locked room with two more bodies inside. Trying to muddy the waters with a locked room murder is always a risk when Manory is on the case!

This impossible murder is introduced with only a dozen pages left to go, however, it has some pleasant complexity as there are no gaps for wire-tricks and the heavy, brass bolt could not have been manipulated with magnets. The locked room-trick itself is not routine either, although (ROT13) vg'f n fvzcyvsvrq inevngvba ba gur gevpx sebz gur svefg fgbel. So, the locked room, for me, helped punch up the ending, but kudos to Byrnside for penning a story that reads and feels like it could have come from pulps like Ten Detective Aces or Dime Detective Magazine.

"Red River" takes place fifty years after "the only recorded murder in Red River," a small, out-of-the-way town, which happened when a stage magician, Ambrose Kellach, came to the town – whose assistant, Sandy Brown, grew up in Red River. So her return home was something of triumph turned tragedy when she plummeted from the rafters. However, the cause of death was not the fall, but strangulation and the towns people turned on the magician. Ambrose Kellach was beaten into a bloody pulp, dragged to the cemetery, hanged from a lone tree and finally buried in an unmarked grave. Now, half a century later, Bradley Friedman, head of the local theater, discovered Kellach's trunk in the theater's attic with notes on a lost magic called "The Unwalked Path." Friedman decides to perform the trick for a group of friends at his home.

There's a small structure, called Folly House, surrounded in all directions by a moat with only way in, or out, being a narrow wooden footbridge. Friedman has a special pair of shoes with unique, diamond-patterned soles ("...that cannot be reproduced") and covers the footbridge in a layer of hydrated lime. Friedman tells his friends he's going to cross the bridge, leaving a one-of-a-kind trail of footprints, go inside and all they have to do is return in fifteen minutes. He'll be miraculously standing on the lawn to greet them with "singular and impossible-to-replicate shoes" left inside Folly House. And, of course, the trail of footprints on the bridge would have been left completely undisturbed. So, when they return fifteen minutes later, Friedman is not there to greet them and they find his body inside Folly House! But how was the murder to cross the bridge without disturbing the diamond-patterned footprints?

Red River has a big problem. Not only are they ill-equipped to handle a murder, let alone a murder of the impossible variety, but the town will have a vote on the sale of the town's mineral rights in two weeks. So the last thing they need is the prospective buyers learning Red River has a cut-throat running amok and decide to hire an expert, Rowan Manory. Even he can't prevent the murderer from striking a second time under extremely bizarre, Theodore Roscoe-esque circumstances. And, once again, there's only a single track of prints going up to the body. I've said before how I consider the no-footprints problem to be most difficult and tricky of all impossible crime scenarios to pull-off both successfully and satisfyingly, which is difficult as the scope and range is much more limited than your standard locked room mystery. So always admire when a writer pulls one off without leaning on one of the routine tricks or basic principles. I think Byrnside added something new to the range of possible solutions to the no-footprints problem, because I can't recall anything similar. Just as important (well, almost as important) as a pair of original no-footprints impossibilities is the intertwining of past and present leading to two more murders. If there's anything to complain about it's that "Red River" is not a novel-length mystery, but, other than that, it's arguably Byrnside's best piece of impossible crime fiction to date. A personal favorite and must read for fans of Paul Halter and Tom Mead!

Finally, "The Carny Murders" is a standalone, pulp-style mystery thriller without Manory and Williams rounding out The Architecture of Murder. A very seedy, pulp-style mystery at that as it takes place behind the scenes of the traveling Hargrove Carnival involving such characters as a tattooed lady, a ventriloquist, a missing psychic and her replacement, a bearded woman, their grimy boss and one of his ex-employees – who returned to pick up something he had stowed away. The trouble really begins when their various "shenanigans" become entangled with murder when sliced, cut-up bodies begin turning up. Similar to the second, pulp-style story about a mad slasher, there's a locked room murder towards the end. It didn't work for me this second time around. I like a good carnival or circus setting and atmosphere as much as the next mystery fan, but I'm always wary of the carny-type solution like a human fly or trained animals. I'm not a fan of that type of solution and "The Carny Murders" is no exception. However, as carny as it may be, it was undeniably used for great effect and ending. Just not something you can present to me after the first and third story.

So, on a whole, The Architecture of Murder exposed my traditional leanings still have a strong sway over what I like and prefer. I can enjoy a good, pulp-style locked room mystery, but, if you give stories like "Killer Pete" and "Red River" in the same collection, it's impossible not to play favorites. I highly recommend this collection on the strength of those two novellas. Highlights of the 21st century locked room and impossible crime story.

A note for the curious: it's been a while since I shared one of my incorrect armchair concoctions. So the first no-footprints problem from "Red River" had not only the undisturbed footprints on the lime covered bridge as an obstacle, but also the high, brittle reeds throughout the water and escaping through the water would leave a trail of damaged reeds ("...even with stilts..."). Two things got me thinking: the name of the trick ("The Unwalked Path") and Friedman's theater background. What if the trick was nothing but showmanship and stage dressing? What if Friedman had donned a waterproof dungaree and had carefully cleared a path through the moat and replaced them with fake, but sturdy, reeds (i.e. stage props). So, for the trick to work, all Friedman had to do is hide a waterproof dungaree inside Folly House and make big showing of creating the prints on the footbridge. When everyone is away for fifteen minutes, he puts on the waterproof and leaves through the path of fake, harder to break reeds. The murderer could have seen the preparations and decided to make use of the invisible exit. Don't worry, this armchair solution is not anything like Byrnside's two solutions nor anywhere near as good.