Hake Talbot | Joseph Commings | Alan Green | Hugh Pentecost | Thomas Flanagan | Clayton Rawson | Peter Godfrey | Akimitsu Takagi | Soji Shimada | Arthur Porges | William Brittain | William F. Smith | Paul Halter | Michael Kurland | Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg | Phil Mann | Mike Wiecek | Catherine Mambretti | Hal White | Bill Pronzini

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

Hake Talbot

The Rim of the Pit (1944)

Rogan Kincaid short stories

• The High House (1948)

Joseph Commings

Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner

• Murder Under Glass (1947)
• The Black Friar Murders (1948)
• Death by Black Magic (1948)
• Castanets, Canaries, and Murder (1962)
• The X Street Murders (1962)
• Hangman's House (1962)
• The Giant's Sword (1963)
• The Whispering Gallery (2004)

Non-series short stories

• Bones for Davy Jones (1953)

Alan Green

What a Body! (1949) (Chapters 1- 5, 15)

Thomas Flanagan

Major Tennente stories

• The Cold Winds of Adesta (1952)
• The Point of Honor (1952)
• The Lion's Mane (1953)

Clayton Rawson

The Magical Mysteries of Don Diavolo

• Ghost of the Undead (1940)
• Death Out of Thin Air (1940)
• Claws of Satan (1940)
• Mr. Mystery (1940)
• The Ace of Death (1942)

The Great Merlini

• Off the Face of the Earth (1947)
• Nothing Is Impossible (1958)
• Miracles -- All in the Day's Work (1958)

Hugh Pentecost

The Death Syndicate (1938)

Impossible Crime stories

• Room Number 23 (1925)
• The Day the Children Vanished (1958)

American Magazine novellas

• The Dead Man's Tale (1943)
• Murder in Manhattan (1952)
• Murder Plays Through (1952)

Lt. Pascal stories

• The Contradictory Case (1951)

John Jericho stories

• Jericho and the Nuisance Clue (1966)

Non-series short stories

• Challenge To The Reader (1947)

Peter Godfrey

The Newtonian Egg

• The Face of the Sphinx (1948)

"To Heal a Murder" (1977)

Arthur Porges

Dr. Joel Hoffman stories

• Dead Drunk (1959)
• No Killer Has Wings (1960)

The Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn: Being the Compleat Sherlockian Writings of Arthur Porges

• Stately Homes and the Invisible Giant (2003)

Professor Ulysses Price Middlebie stories

• Blood Will Tell (1966)

Scientific detective stories

• Janie Zeroes In (1966)

John Sladek

"By An Unknown Hand" (1972)

William Brittain

Mr. Leonard Strang tales

• Mr. Strang Takes a Field Trip (1968)
• Mr. Strang Finds a Car (1972)
• Mr. Strang Versus the Snowman (1972)
• Mr. Strang Accepts a Challenge (1976)
• Mr. Strang Interprets a Picture (1981)
• Mr. Strang Takes a Partner (1982)
• Mr. Strang and the Purloined Memo (1983)
• Mr. Strang Takes a Tour (1983)

The Man Who Read stories

• The Man Who Read Ellery Queen (1966)
• The Man Who Read Dashiell Hammett (1974)
• The Man Who Read George Simenon (1975)
• The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov (1978)

Non-series short stories

• The Zaretski Chain (1968)

William F. Smith

Raymond Stone stories

• An Almost Perfect Crime (1987)

Paul Halter

The Night of the Wolf

• The Abominable Snowman (2002)
• The Dead Dance at Night (1988)
• The Call of the Lorelei (1998)
• The Tunnel of Death (1993)
• The Cleaver (2000)
• The Flower Girl (1998)
• The Night of the Wolf (1990)

Uncollected stories

• The Robber's Grave (2002)
• Nausicaa's Ball (2008)

Michael Kurland

Stanley Baum stories

• The Stolen Saint Simon (2000)

Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg

Penelope Peters stories

• Death Rides the Elevator (2000)
• Murder in Monkeyland (2006)

Phil Mann

Horace Masters stories

• "Touch of a Vanish'd Hand" (2000)

Mike Wiecek

Special Railway Agent David Keegan stories

• The End of the Train (2007)

Sakonju tales

• A Death in Ueno (2005)

Catherine Mambretti

Redhunt stories

• Dead of Winter (2007)

Hal White

The Mysteries of Reverend Dean (2008)

• Murder at an Island Mansion
• Murder in a Sealed Loft

Bill Pronzini

Undercurrent (1973)

"The Arrowmont Prison Mystery" (1976)

"Ace in the Hole" (1986)

"Stakeout" (1990)

Casefile

• Preface (1982)
• It's A Lousy World (1968)
• Death of a Nobody (1970)
• Sin Island (1972)
• Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade? (1979)
• Dead Man's Slough (1980)
• Booktaker (1982)

Small Felonies

• The Clincher (1969)
• The Man Who Collected "The Shadow" (1971)
• Changes (1980)
• The Terrarium Principle (1981)
• Cache and Carry (1988) (with Marcia Muller)

The Best Western Stories of Bill Pronzini

• Fergus O'Hara, Detective (1974)
• Wooden Indian (1989)

Stacked Deck

• Vanishing Act (1975) (with Michael Kurland)
• Stacked Deck (1987)
• Here Comes Santa Claus (1989)

Graveyard Plots

• Smuggler's Island (1977)
• Strangers in the Fog (1978)
• Two Weeks Every Summer (1980)
• Cat's-Paw (1983)

Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services

• No Room at the Inn (1988)
• Burgade's Crossing (1993)
• Lady One-Eye (1994)
• The Horseshoe Nail (1997)
• Medium Rare (1998)

Quincannon's Game

• Quincannon in Paradise (2005)

Quincannon - uncollected stories

• Devil's Brew (2006)

Gun In Cheek (1982)

Son of Gun In Cheek (1987)

NOTE:

Thanks to Bill Vande Water, for providing important information about impossible crime fiction.

Hake Talbot

Hake Talbot only published two novels, a play and some short fiction, so his output was very small. Talbot's first novel, Hangman's Handyman (1942), is disappointing. But his second novel, Rim of the Pit (1944), is a masterpiece. Talbot is the only Carr imitator whose work could actually be preferred to that of Carr himself. Both of these novels are now back in print, from the publisher Ramble House.

Talbot's mystery technique is closer to Carr than it is to any other writer, such as Chesterton or Futrelle, and one suspects that Talbot was familiar with and inspired by Carr's work. In Carr's The Three Coffins, the reader is often inventively misled about the order of events and their actual significance; the same technique is used in Rim of the Pit, in complex and creative ways. In Carr's work, suspects are often wandering around from location to location, and their position at various times is relevant in the solution. Carr also uses ingenious methods to mislead readers' about these positions. This is an aspect of Carr's work that he took over from the mystery novel as whole, not just its impossible crime wing. (It is most useful as a technique in the novel as opposed to the short story, since in a novel there is room to describe the elaborate wanderings of a group of characters.) We see this same technique in Talbot. There is a certain sophistication and "man of the world" attitude to Carr's characters; we see the same in Talbot. Carr was fascinated by problems involving "impossible" crimes in open fields and beaches, complete with tracks in the ground; Talbot gives us just such a problem, among the many marvelous puzzles in the book. (Carr's hero Chesterton was one of the first to propose such a problem, in The Poet and the Lunatics. His solution was nowhere as good as Carr's many later approaches to this puzzle, but his tale could have fired Carr's imagination.) There is also an air of "creative eclecticism" in Carr, where he was willing to use and combine many different techniques of impossible crime to make up all the puzzles in a novel. Talbot's work shows a similar eclecticism.

I hope it is clear from this discussion that while Talbot was influenced by Carr's approach, he in all cases showed plenty of personal creativity.

Talbot wrote at least two impossible crime short stories about the series sleuth of his novels, Rogan Kincaid. "The High House" (1948) has an impossible crime based in the architecture of its remote country mansion, like some of the miracles in Rim of the Pit. This sort of concern for architecture was a Golden Age specialty. Rogan Kincaid has manipulated a few events behind the scenes, actions we learn about in the finale, as in Rim of the Pit. And it deals with a curse that threatens to annihilate the hero of the story, as in Hangman's Handyman. The story has some of Talbot's trademark atmosphere, with a group of characters stuck in a remote place where eerieness reigns. There is an odd feel of time having stopped, while we watch strange events unfold as in a dream. There is also a complex series of interrelationships between the characters in the story: Talbot has worked out the special nature of the relationship between each pair of the story's characters. This too adds to the feeling of plot density and weight.

The Spring 1948 (Volume 6, #3) issue of Mystery Book Magazine, where "The High House" originally appeared, has a good illustration on the title page of the story. This is the only portrait of Rogan Kincaid I've ever seen. He is shown wearing a good suit: this is the height of the film noir era, and Kincaid seems like the sort of snappy dresser one sees in the heroes of Hollywood crime thrillers of the period.

Joseph Commings

Joseph Commings' impossible crime short stories have been collected in Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (2004), available from its publisher Crippen & Landru. Commings' series detective Senator Brooks U. Banner, shows some similarities to John Dickson Carr's two principal detectives. Like Carr's Sir Henry Merrivale, Banner is an important government official, with comically casual manners and slangy speech. And like Carr's Dr. Fell, Banner is massive and rotund. The fact that both Merrivale and Banner work for the government allows them both to be involved in tales with spy backgrounds, as well as more domestic crime. There are still at least 17 uncollected Banner impossible crime short stories, in addition to those collected in Banner Deadlines. The rest of Commings' large body of short fiction lies scattered in post World War II detective magazines, only rarely being reprinted in anthologies. Commings' early stories often appeared in Ten Detective Aces, which since the thirties had carried the banner of the impossible crime story in the pulps, where it was known as the "weird menace" tale.

Commings also wrote many non-series short stories, not about Banner. At least five of these are impossible crime tales, each about a different detective. The Locked Room Reader (1968) edited by Hans Stefan Santesson includes the excellent "Bones for Davy Jones" (1953).

The freshness of Commings' concepts helps: many of his impossible crimes are new and different. Commings' approach offers plenty of imagination, something he shares with Chesterton, Carr and Talbot. Commings is also generous with his illusions: his tales often feature not one, but numerous ingenious gimmicks, all working together to produce the ultimate illusion.

Commings and Edward D. Hoch were friends, and there are signs that Commings' fiction might have influenced Hoch's, in general terms. Both men are prolific short story writers, specializing in impossible crimes. Both men tried to come up with new impossible crime situations, that had not appeared in other writers. Hoch coined the phrase "novels in miniature", for short stories that have all the structural ingredients of a full length mystery novel, such as puzzle plot, suspects, clues, a fair play solution, etc. It is a good description of Hoch's own work, and that of Commings' before him. Both men introduced Golden Age detective motifs, into modern day settings in the United States. Commings also freely incorporated spy elements into his puzzle plot mysteries on occasion, like those of Hoch's Rand tales to come.

Commings has a feel for the dramatic possibilities of his locales, whether New England, Washington DC, or East Germany. His characters are lively, colorful and sympathetic, which helps a good deal as well.

Individual Tales: Impossible Crime Technique

These discussions might contain SPOILERS. The reader is advised to read Commings' excellent tales first, before reading this discussion.

One can break down Commings' best tales into series or groups, with some common characteristics in the way they handle their impossible crime solutions.

1) Physical Challenge tales. The general technical approach to the impossible crime in "Murder Under Glass" (1947), shares some similarities to that in "Hangman's House" (1962). Both are stories of startling physical challenges. The crimes in Commings' stories have the feel of magic tricks: they seem carefully staged by the bad guys to produce some effect. Often the villains seize some small edge, and really work it, trying to produce this effect: you get the feeling that the criminals have come in just under the wire, so to speak, and if their space to maneuver were any tighter, they would not have been able to pull off the crime.

"The Giant's Sword" (1963) is another of Commings' "physical challenge" tales. It is a most satisfying piece of storytelling.

"Murder Under Glass" (1947), with its glass room, appeared the year before a comic book story about a whole environment made of glass, the Air Wave tale "The City of Glass" (Detective Comics #136, June 1948). Aside from the settings, the stories have nothing in common. One suspects they both reflect some real-life glass environment of the era.

2) Illusion tales. "Death by Black Magic" (1948) seems a central work in Commings' output. Its three impossibilities make it a rich story, especially abundant for a short tale. Its central impossible crime, involving the watched cabinet, will involve an explanation which Commings will vary ingeniously later in "Castanets, Canaries, and Murder" (1962). Both of these explanations center on show business illusionism: magic shows on stage in "Death by Black Magic", film in "Castanets, Canaries, and Murder".

"Death by Black Magic" is also an architecture centered tale. Everything in it revolves around the architecture of the theater stage, the cabinet, etc. Much of Commings' work is similarly architecturally oriented: "Murder Under Glass", "Hangman's House".

"Stairway to Nowhere" (1979), which Commings wrote in collaboration with Edward D. Hoch, also has a central impossibility based in perceptual illusion. It too is an architectural mystery.

"The Black Friar Murders" (1948) and "Ghost in the Gallery" (1949), a pair of linked stories in Commings' approach, are also somewhat in the illusion tradition, found in "Death by Black Magic" and "Castanets, Canaries, and Murder". The impossibilities are simpler in "The Black Friar Murders" and "Ghost in the Gallery". They are also unfortunately less plausible - so these tales are not among Commings' major works. Despite these limitations, "The Black Friar Murders" shows some vivid storytelling and is well worth reading.

3) A Unique story. "Bones for Davy Jones" (1953) is another of Commings' major works. It has a number of broad similarities in its technique to "Death by Black Magic" - although the illusion important in "Death by Black Magic" has no role in this tale. 1) The boats in "Bones for Davy Jones" can also be considered as architecture: their physical layout becomes important in the tale. 2) "Bones for Davy Jones" involves vertical movement: a diver goes down from a ship on the surface, to a sunken ship, then returns back up. Such vertical movement also appears in "Death by Black Magic". 3) "Death by Black Magic" is also an alibi story, with the alibi forming the third impossibility in the tale. Such alibis form a "hidden presence" of a character at a location; this too will play a role in "Bones for Davy Jones".

4) Rearrangements in Space and Time. "The X Street Murders" (1962) is another of Commings' major tales. Commings' effects here are created by large scale rearrangement of the apparent relationships in time and space of the various actors and physical objects in the tale. So far, this is the only Commings story known to me that uses this method, which has a long history in impossible crime fiction. This approach, pioneered by Israel Zangwill, has always seemed more satisfying to me than locked room stories done by passing a string through a keyhole, or some other purely mechanical device. But Commings has also used some unique mechanical devices in his tales. Like Carr before him, he is eclectic in his approach.

"The X Street Murders" shows Commings' anti-Communist politics, as does "The Cuban Blonde" (1964), a routine spy tale without any mystery or impossible crime elements.

Comparison with Carr

Commings' "Ghost in the Gallery" seems the most directly imitative of John Dickson Carr's storytelling among the Commings tales that have been reprinted, although all the mystery plot ideas in it are completely original. It is fairly early in the body of his fiction, and his later stories develop a more personal style and approach. Carr often stages his crime from the point of view of a witness; he emphasizes that the witnesses are honest in their testimony insofar as they understand what is going on, but are probably also being bamboozled by a master illusionist-criminal. Just as in Carr, Commings' young couple here are the witnesses to the crime. Structurally, this is a very different approach from simply finding a body in a looked room the day after a crime, with the police then beginning to investigate the murder. How far the witnesses are from what they think they are seeing becomes important, as well as how much lighting they have, what they can't see from their point of view, and what they did immediately before and after the crime. The whole crime develops into a sort of private stage show, presented to the witnesses.

The storytelling also seems especially Carr like here, with the young lovers trapped in a complex mysterious situation that just keeps getting both creepier and creepier, and full of more impossibilities. Just as in Carr, various suspects about whom the couple and the reader know really very little show up in the middle of events, and are already "positioned" in time and space, having a part in the floor plan and time table of the crime. All of these suspects say what they have just been doing, but any or all of them could be lying about their actions before they appeared to the reader.

Alan Green

Alan Green's locked room novels resemble those of John Dickson Carr. Not the eerie, apparently supernatural Carr; rather the funny, farcical Carr of the humorous interludes in his books. What a Body! (1949) has a well constructed impossible crime plot. As in Carr, the central impossibilities are multiplied into numerous mysterious, impossible looking aspects of the crime. One can hear stylistic echoes of Carr, as well. The tone of the final explanation of the mystery audibly recalls Dr. Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale, and Green has a wicked spoof of one of Carr's authorial footnotes in Chapter 5. Green's novel shows the Golden Age interest in elaborate architecture, here a complex Florida resort hotel. This architecture is interwoven into the mystery plot in the best Golden Age tradition.

What a Body! is better at its mystery aspects than as a novel. Green's characters tend to be a bit one dimensional. Also, the satirical aspects of the book seem a bit off. What a Body! takes on exercise cultists. It is a spoof on the same movement that appears in Richard Thorpe's movie musical Athena (1954). The book tries to suggest that these people are ripe for satire. Actually their regimen - exercise, no tobacco or alcohol, a healthy diet - just looks like the sound medical advice of every physician alive today. So the book is left without a real satirical target. Green is much funnier when going after the press and politicians, as he occasionally gets a chance to do. Green's work would have been better as a novella. A reader can get all the plot by reading Chapters 1- 5, then the solution in Chapter 15.

Alan Green wrote only one other detective novel, the third-rate They Died Laughing (1952). It too is set in a hotel, this time in New Hampshire, and involves the same detectives as What a Body!. This time the locked room ideas are routine and unoriginal. Green's satire is directed here at early television. The first three chapters have some interesting inside looks at show business, as well as a pleasant follow-up on the progress of his detectives since their last book. Green was an advertising executive; there is an ad man in the book, from the days in which sponsors and ad men were heavily involved in the production of television and radio. However, as an inside look at television, this story is eclipsed by such works as The Dick Van Dyke Show or Clarence Budington Kelland's The Key Man (1951), which is probably the best mystery story set in the world of early TV.

Hugh Pentecost

Hugh Pentecost's "The Day the Children Vanished" (1958) is an impressive impossible crime story, but this sort of story is apparently an isolated event in its author's literary career, which generally focuses more on characterization than on fair play puzzle plots. It is reprinted in All But Impossible! (1981), edited by Edward D. Hoch. Pentecost is also known for his 1960's treatments of the era's liberal social protest and civil rights movements. Pentecost was clearly sympathetic to these movements, and his fiction shows a life long devotion to liberal causes.

Pentecost's characters are often caught up in difficult circumstances, with which they have to make a valiant personal effort to cope. The old man who is the detective in "Vanished", just doesn't stand around and talk, he has to make a radical effort to cope with the criminals. Pentecost's story also benefits from the novelty of its impossible crime: it is not just another locked room, but something new in magical effects.

Pentecost's first short story "Room Number 23" (1925) was also a locked room tale. It is reprinted in the anthology Maiden Murders (1952). The impossible crime mechanism of the story is of the same general kind as Chesterton's "The Invisible Man" (1910). As in Vincent Starrett's stories of the same era, it is modeled on the Sherlock Holmes tales in its detective characters and setup. There is also the same sort of 1920's big city feel to the tale as Starrett's, complete with a suspect who doubles as a bootlegger.

Series Detectives

Pentecost's pure mystery writings sometimes focus on people selling luxury goods and services to the big rich. These include the high priced stamp merchants of Cancelled in Red (1939), the diamond merchants of the Lt. Pascal novella, "Murder in the Dark" (1949), and the luxury hotel managed by Pierre Chambrun in his stories. I confess that the inside looks at such businesses in these works do not interest me very much. Cancelled in Red is particularly dreary as a novel. It depicts some of the scams used by crooked stamp dealers, but it fails to convey any of the romance or glamour surrounding stamp collecting as a whole. "Murder in the Dark" is better. It is no classic, but it does have its moments of ingenuity.

Luke Bradley, the New York City Homicide cop of Cancelled in Red, turns up in uniform to solve a military spy-mystery in The Brass Chills (1943). The early chapters, which show a Hollywood scriptwriter's struggles to enlist following Pearl Harbor, have some interest as sociological history. But after this, the novel turns into a relentlessly grim look at a small military outpost in the war. It just has little merit as a mystery.

"Bottom Deal" (1941) is a novella with a background in the Broadway theater. Its only notable aspect are its detectives, gambling specialist Coyle and his leg-man, "Harvard" Donovan, characters that also appear in two Pentecost novels, Odds on the Hot Seat (1940-1941) and The Fourteenth Trump (1942). The two are pastiches of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. The year before, Rufus King's Holiday Homicide (1940) had also included versions of Stout's sleuths, so perhaps something was in the air. The story emphasizes "Harvard" Donovan's extreme good looks, as well as his dapper tailoring. Sleuths aside, this is a routine story, with a mystery plot recalling Agatha Christie's Peril at Edge House (1932). Pentecost seems to have revived the character later: the short story "According to Coyle" (1948) appeared in Mystery Book Magazine, in Volume 7, #1, Summer 1948.

Pentecost wrote a few works about the colorless but penetrating psychiatrist detective, Dr. John Smith. Three of them appeared in the American Magazine during 1945-1946, and were collected in book form in 1947 as Memory of Murder. I've never seen this rare book. Ellery Queen reprinted "Volcano in the Mind" (1945) from it in his anthology Champions of Mystery (1977). "Volcano in the Mind" seems far-fetched as a mystery plot. And like a lot of psychoanalytic fiction, it is grim and joyless stuff. A character in the tale is a jovial artist with a huge red beard; he seems like a dry run for Pentecost's later artist-sleuth, John Jericho.

Non-Series Mystery Novellas in American Magazine

"The Dead Man's Tale" (1943) has lively characters and storytelling; it is perhaps the best of Pentecost's many novellas. It is set at a war time chemical factory, and has the sort of detailed background about an institution that appears in many of the mystery novellas that appeared every month in the American Magazine. Pentecost was a frequent contributor of such novellas; they tended not to be locked room tales. Most of Pentecost's thirty American Magazine novellas are non-series works that feature new sleuths. This story is notable for its treatment of environmental issues, at a very early date. Pentecost also pays close attention to the architecture of the buildings in the story, in the pleasant Golden Age mystery tradition of buildings with elaborate and unusual architecture. We also get an inside look at men's clothes of the era, including the special work clothes men wear at the factory. The parts of the story that involve a criminal scheme are more ingenious than the actual murder mystery. Pentecost weaves life histories for his characters into the tale, and these play a role in the puzzle plot. There is also a history for the factory.

Among Pentecost's American Magazine novellas, "Murder Plays Through" (1952) is closely related to "The Dead Man's Tale" (1943). Both stories have similar sorts of characters and mystery plot. In fact, the later tale can be regarded as a re-working of material from the earlier. Two men at the center of the plot of each tale are both clothes horses, as well. The backgrounds are completely different however: "Murder Plays Through" is set against an absorbing look at the world of professional golf tournaments. "Murder Plays Through" is less original than the earlier work, but it is still fun to read. It has a flood of storytelling, and several pleasant twists and turns in the plot. Pentecost gives a detailed, sympathetic portrait of a struggling young golf pro, barely hanging on in the tournaments. He would create a similar portrait of a broke young actor, in the little mystery tale "The Missing Miss Maydew" (1959). Both young men are decent, highly likable people.

"Murder in Manhattan" (1952), published earlier in the same year as "Murder Plays Through", also has plot elements that recall "The Dead Man's Tale", although in less pure and concentrated form. It also brings in and develops ideas from other Pentecost works. An ingenious part of the puzzle plot, that dealing with the revelation of the killer at the finale of the story, got a dry run in "Murder in the Dark" (1949). The set-up of the story, dealing with a powerful New York City columnist and his large household, recalls Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe tales, and reminds us that Pentecost did an earlier pastiche of Wolfe in his Coyle and Donovan stories. The tale is narrated by the columnist's leg man, who rather resembles Wolfe's leg man, Archie Goodwin. As a mystery, "Murder in Manhattan" is notable for the steady succession of plot twists, developments and surprises it keeps throwing out. They come as regularly as drum beats here.

Pentecost's American Magazine novella "The Talking Calf" (1952) has a nicely developed background, in this case farming and cattle raising. He integrates these well into his mystery plot, both the murder itself, and the thefts behind it. It also has vivid characters. However, the story never builds up into anything like a fair play puzzle plot. The theft scheme is mildly ingenious, and together with "The Day the Children Vanished" shows Pentecost as a writer into clever crime schemes. In both story the crimes take place in the countryside, involving vehicles that traverse their way through a large terrain. Both involve the vehicles hiding or disappearing into obscurity after they commit their crimes. Both stories are rooted more in theft than in murder, although a murder occurs in "Calf". Both stories also involve older men who get involved in amateur detection.

An earlier American Magazine novella, "The Corpse Was Beautiful" (1942), also has a good background, vivid characters, and an ordinary plot. Its local Vermont sheriff shows unexpected shrewdness under his eccentric and clownish exterior, another persistent Pentecost trait. And there is an interest in vehicles and their movements again: here the "vehicles" are airplanes, and they are being tracked by the civilian characters in the story as part of W.W.II Civil Defense.

Pentecost's Thrillers: Carole Trevor and Maxwell Blythe

Many of Pentecost's early pulp stories would be classified as thrillers, not mysteries, such as the gangland and cops tales about villainous actress Ivy Trask that appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly in the early 1930's. So would The Death Syndicate (1938), one of two novels he wrote about noble socialite Carole Trevor, who runs a detective agency, and her madcap playboy ex-husband Maxwell Blythe. Pentecost has thrown a little bit of everything into this: pulp action scenes against gangsters and crooks, zany society characters resembling the stars of 1930's screwball comedy films, and some rather unexpected liberal social commentary. The book is both pro-feminist in Trevor's determination to head a detective agency, and outspoken about the rising Nazi menace in Europe. Like the comic book creators of the era, Pentecost clearly hated the Nazis, and he is gung ho about denouncing them. He is also forthright in denouncing their persecution of the Jews, something that unfortunately is rarely seen in print fiction of the era.

There are small elements of mystery in The Death Syndicate. Like a good deal of Pentecost's later mysteries, these involve sinister hidden criminal schemes, which his heroes have to uncover. There are no whodunit mysteries here, however. Even in Pentecost's later mysteries, the criminal schemes tend to be more ingenious and elaborate than his often perfunctory whodunit aspects. Pentecost's fondness for life histories of his characters is also present here, as is his working of romantic triangles into the plots of his stories. Here the triangles are confined to his good guys. In his more mystery oriented tales, the triangles will also be worked into his puzzle plots, with their ambiguities serving a constructing elements for his mysteries.

The Death Syndicate is best in its first half, where Pentecost shows some cracker-jack storytelling. After a while, he runs out of plot surprises. Still the book is surprisingly good natured and upbeat. Its tone is much closer to pulp than Golden Age mystery novels. Carole Trevor and Maxwell Blythe return in Death Delivers a Postcard (1939).

Carole Trevor's detective work clearly recalls that of Theodore Tinsley's series character Carrie Cashin, an earlier woman who ran a detective agency in tales that appeared in the pulp magazine Crime Busters. Cashin pre-dated Trevor by one year: Cashin's first appearance (I think) was in the November 1937 first issue of Crime Busters. Slightly before either character was Rex Stout's female private eye Dol Bonner, who appeared in The Hand in the Glove (1937); and before any of these was Cleve F. Adams' sleuth Violet McDade, who appeared as a series in the pulp magazine Clues. Comic books also featured woman sleuths, with Sandra of the Secret Service pioneering in the 1930's, and "Sally O'Neill, Policewoman" in National Comics and two-fisted lawyer-sleuth "Betty Bates, Lady at Law" in Hit Comics being long running series in the 1940's. With all the interest in female private eyes today, one suspects readers might be interested in some of their ancestors. Bernard Drew's anthology Hard-Boiled Dames (1986) collects several such 1930's pulp tales.

Pulp fiction expert Monte Herridge writes:

"Carole Trevor and Maxwell Blythe of this novel also appear in a number of shorter pieces as well as serialized novels in Detective Fiction Weekly:

• We Trade in Death - April 30, May 7, 14, 21, 28, June 4, 1938
• Murder Most Foul - January 7, 14, 21, 28, February 4, 11, 1939
• Night of Terror - March 25, 1939 (novelette)
• Murder of the Ancients - April 22, 1939 (novelette)
• The Murder Box - May 6, 1939 (novelette)
• Hounds of Despair - July 15, 22, 29, August 5, 12, 19, 1939

The stories often are featured on the cover art of these issues."

The Park Avenue Hunt Club

Pentecost also wrote a series of pulp magazine thrillers about the Park Avenue Hunt Club, which have recently been collected into one volume. These were a group of adventurers who were determined to defeat the sinister Green Shirts, an American Nazi organization. The Green Shirts were a fictitious group, but there were plenty of real life American Nazi groups organized by Hitler, during the days before the United States entered World War II late in 1941. Pentecost clearly despised such Nazi groups, and his stories still contain some stinging social commentary. American Nazi organizations were also the target of the comic book adventurers Red, White and Blue. Pentecost's Hunt Club tales are also noteworthy for the inclusion of a sympathetic Chinese character among his heroes.

Thomas Flanagan

The Major Tennente short stories

Thomas Flanagan is a writer of historical novels, who is known to mystery readers for a series of high quality short stories about Major Tennente, a decent policeman who deals with the horrors of a dictatorship. They take place in an unnamed country that seems to be Franco's Spain.

Thomas Flanagan's "The Cold Winds of Adesta" (1952) is an impossible crime tale, and the first short story about Tennente. It deals with an apparently impossible smuggling, and has no murder mystery. It has a well developed political background that is interesting in its own right, and which gives a carefully dovetailed framework for the smuggling mystery. Its use of a detailed political context as a setup for an impossible crimes plot has predecessors in Chesterton's work - see "The Finger of Stone" or "The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse". The story's ongoing political discussion, and philosophical analysis of dictatorships also seems Chestertonian in form.

Smuggling tales have a tradition in mystery fiction - the anthology Rogue's Gallery (1945), edited by Ellery Queen, contains examples by William Hope Hodgson and T.S. Stribling; Queen was the publisher of Flanagan's Tennente stories, as well, in EQMM. Victor L. Whitechurch's "Peter Crane's Cigars" also comes to mind. Both the Hodgson and the Stribling stories focus on the clever personality of a recognized smuggler. This smuggler often uses psychological methods to confuse and outwit the authorities. The portrait of the smuggler is right out of the Rogue tradition. By contrast, Flanagan's tale is more concerned with a scheme of smuggling, a physical process that is largely independent of personalities and psychology.

"The Cold Winds of Adesta" shows the interest in landscape that is a notable feature of Golden Age mystery.

"The Point of Honor" (1952), the second Major Tennente tale, is not an impossible crime. It also seems quite Chesterton-like, with a strange intellectual structure built up around a murder investigation.

"The Lion's Mane" (1953) is the third tale of Major Tennente, and not an impossible crime. This is an intricately plotted tale of a political killing. It is not quite a traditional mystery, with a corpse and a cast of suspects. But still, this is a mystery, and not a thriller. We do not know the background of the killing, and only gradually learn it throughout the story, in which move follows counter move in the sinister politics of the dictatorship. In this, the story resembles "The Point of Honor", which also investigates the background of what first looks like a cut and dried murder, but which uncovers many paradoxes. The two stories form a pair, with similar themes and approaches. The tales show impressive logic and plotting skills. Once again, the political situation is tied to the mystery.

Non-Series short stories

Flanagan's debut work, "The Fine Italian Hand" (1949), is a minor tale that seems like a dry run for "Adesta". Although it dances around the borders of the impossible crime tale, it never actually presents its readers with an impossible looking crime - the "impossible crime" proposed early in the story is immediately given three alternative solutions for investigation by the detective.

"This Will Do Nicely" (1955) is a minor tale about the aftermath of a killing in New York City. It attempts the same sort of paradoxical dialogue and ideas found in "The Point of Honor" and "The Lion's Mane". But there is no mystery here, and it is much less clever.

Clayton Rawson

Clayton Rawson specialized in impossible crimes. Most of his work appeared in a short five-year period, 1938-1942. After this, his rare mystery fiction output was restricted to some short stories, eventually collected as The Great Merlini.

Don Diavolo

Rawson wrote four novellas in 1940 about magician-sleuth Don Diavolo. They have recently been collected in book form as The Magical Mysteries of Don Diavolo. The first three Don Diavolo stories are Rawson's richest impossible crime tales.

The central murder mystery impossibilities in "Ghost of the Undead" (1940), about a vampire that can fly through windows, are given a routine solution. Where the tale excels are the many magic stunts performed by Don Diavolo in the course of the tale. First these are presented as seeming impossibilities. Then Rawson immediately explains how they were done, instead of making the reader wait till the end of the story for the answer. The background Rawson creates for Don Diavolo and his helpers is also rich and colorful. His house is especially interesting.

The five impossible crimes in "Death Out of Thin Air" (1940) are mainly variants of two separate impossible crime ideas. Each variation uses the central ideas in somewhat different ways, creating both variety and ingenuity. They make a rich overall tale, with lots of pleasing plot.

"Claws of Satan" (1940) has a complex series of events happening before, during and after the murder mystery, both outside and inside the murder locked room. This is a Rawson tradition, that runs through many of his tales.

And during the investigation after the murder, more and more bizarre, seemingly nonsensical clues and discoveries keep being found by the detectives. This is part of the delightful surrealism of puzzle plots in the grand mystery tradition. Eventually, all these bizarre clues will get put together into a logical account of the mystery, during the solution.

The Don Diavolo stories often feature dying messages, a kind of mystery puzzle that rarely appears in impossible crime tales. Rawson is throwing every possible mystery ideas into these tales.

The last Don Diavolo novella, "The Enchanted Dagger" (1940), is much poorer than the first three. Its impossible crime solution is a cheat. And it features one of those awful Oriental Villains. By contrast, the first three Diavolo tales were notable for non-stereotyped Asian character of Diavolo's assistant Chandru.

The Great Merlini

Rawson's best known works are about another magician sleuth, The Great Merlini. These include the novels Death from a Top Hat (1938), The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939), The Headless Lady (1940), No Coffin for the Corpse (1942) and his story collection The Great Merlini.

Clayton Rawson's impossible crime puzzles in his Great Merlini novels are disappointing. Rawson's solutions are usually a let down. He finds some uninteresting way to barely explain the problems he has proposed. Carr's solutions, by contrast, tend to be wonderfully imaginative, often at least as much so as the central mystery itself. In addition, Rawson's solutions sometimes stretch believability beyond the breaking point. In addition, there is something unlikable about Rawson's characters and stories, considered as works of fiction. Not recommended. This review is perhaps a bit unfair, considering that Rawson's books work like beavers to try and entertain the reader, loaded with lore about magic and the supernatural, and with numerous impossibilities.

Death from a Top Hat (1938) opens with a long list of what Rawson considered the great mystery writers; made before Haycraft or Queen published their lists, it is an interesting barometer of 1930's opinion.

The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) contains good storytelling in its opening third (Chapters 1-10), with exciting nocturnal adventures in a now obscure corner of the New York City of its day. These sections benefit from the Golden Age interest in both architecture and landscape, with an island, its buildings and the surrounding waterways nicely imagined and described. Unfortunately, the mystery problem expounded here is ultimately given a complex, but not especially ingenious solution. The subplot about Lamb is the best part of the solution. Also good: the subplot about the footprints. Rawson will include another footprint mystery in "Nothing Is Impossible" (1958). The portrait of psychical research in these early chapters will return in the short Merlini tale, "From Another World" (1948). Rawson will also write an OK story about a man with "real" psychic powers, "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" (1944).

Chapter 18 of The Footprints on the Ceiling contains witty allusions to S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, and Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. These are all members of the Van Dine school. As Rawson points out in the novel, all three are amateur sleuths, like Merlini. We might add that Rawson shares with these Van Dine school authors a New York City locale, and characters chosen from show biz and the intelligentsia. He also shares with Van Dine and Queen a fondness for detailed investigations of crime scenes. Merlini is often expounding expertly on various subjects, also like Philo Vance and Ellery Queen. So Rawson seems like a member of the Van Dine school, as well as being an impossible crime writer.

The Headless Lady (1940) is a mystery with a circus background. Chapters 2-4 vividly recreate a traditional circus, with all its special slang and events. Rawson, who was a professional illustrator as well as a novelist, includes an aerial drawing of the circus. The picture and the text specify with unusual precision the geographic layout of all aspects of the circus. The novel embodies the Golden Age fascination with elaborately described architecture and landscapes, with here the architecture being the layout of the circus. Rawson is also big on circus slang. 1930's circus argot includes words that would later spread to other subcultures: "the fuzz", for the police, and "being hep to" something, indicating having knowledge about a subject, a term that would be used by the Beats and jazz musicians in the 1950's. After its opening, this turns into a long, uninspired novel, one without impossible crimes, except for a brief prison escape.

Rawson includes a mystery novelist as a character, researching the circus for a book; this novelist is especially interested in collecting the words used by circus people. This novelist character is named Stuart Towne, which is also the pseudonym used by Rawson on some of his pulp magazine novellas. One suspects that Rawson has included himself as a character in his own novel. Later, William L. DeAndrea will include himself as a character in Killed in Paradise (1988) under one of his own pseudonyms, a similar reflexive device. Agatha Christie's mystery writer character, Ariadne Oliver, is also a thinly disguised self-portrait.

Among the Merlini short stories, "From Another World" (1948) and "Miracles -- All in the Day's Work" (1958) have a similar structure. The solutions have a similar disappointing feature, in the treatment of witnesses. The later tale compensates with some ingenious extra deception, however, and is the richer of the two tales. These extra ideas involve mechanical concepts, as do the mysteries in "Nothing Is Impossible" (1958).

Pulp Stories

Among Rawson's pulp short stories, "Mr. Mystery" (1940) is a fast paced tale of bad guys after a professor's secret formula. It is not an impossible crime tale, but it is full of good storytelling. The many different characters whose schemes all keep intersecting are a pulp tradition: please see the article on Erle Stanley Gardner for a discussion of the "pulp style of plotting". While novels like Death From A Top Hat invoke Golden Age traditions of puzzle plots, this tale is instead firmly in the fun pulp magazine style: Rawson was something of a literary chameleon. This tale shows logic, in the relentless pursuit of the characters for the information. Rawson shows clever ways of their going after the information, and steps by the good guys to protect it. There is a terrific portrait of Mr. Mystery in his white tie and tails, on the cover of Detective Fiction Weekly, August 3, 1940, where this tale originally appeared.

The second Mr. Mystery tale, "The Man with the Radio Mind" (1941), starts off well, turning the pickpocket Eddie Duke of the previous tale into an assistant who helps Mr. Mystery with his mind-reading act. After this, the story is not very interesting. The tale mentions Merlini, putting Mr. Mystery in the same universe as the Merlini stories.

The third, last and best Mr. Mystery tale is "The Ace of Death" (1942). (All three of the Mr. Mystery works are included in The Magical Mysteries of Don Diavolo.) This story has a genuine puzzle plot. The story gives an in-depth look at the collaboration of Eddie Duke with Mr. Mystery and his magic act.

"The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" (1944) is not a mystery, but rather an action thriller, about a cop battling both the mob and crooked cops. Its portrayal of police corruption is vigorous, and the tale is fairly enjoyable.

Peter Godfrey

Peter Godfrey is a South African writer of mystery short stories. His recent collection The Newtonian Egg is largely disappointing. The only story I really like in it is the political work, "The Face of the Sphinx" (1948). This is set against a fascinating look at South African politics.

Two tales in The Newtonian Egg, "Time Out of Mind" (1948) and "The Flung-Back Lid" (also published as "Out of This World" in his 1954 collection Death Under the Table - the Table being the Table Mountain outside Cape Town, where the stories are set) have some common features, in addition to their similarities in title. Both deal with eccentric characters who are deeply obsessive: the first is set in an insane asylum, the second among characters who have various delusions and obsessions concerning science fiction. In both stories, some of the obsessions involve religious mania. In both, the murder victims are obnoxious and hateful to everyone, and no one is surprised when they finally get killed. Both stories involve stabbing. Both stories describe and depend on the routines of institutions, the asylum in the first tale, cable cars in the second. Both cases are solved by Rolf Le Roux, uncle of Inspector Joubert. There is a whole continuing ensemble of police supporting characters, and the basic setup is similar to the Ellery Queen or Philo Vance tales. Le Roux's wisdom and sternness even recalls Uncle Abner. The strange obsessions of the characters function somewhat similarly to the surrealist backgrounds of Ellery Queen. "The Flung-Back Lid" / "Out of This World" is an impossible crime: Godfrey offers a novel twist on one of the methods included in Carr's Locked Room Lecture. Godfrey's two tales here are fair play detective stories, pleasant in their storytelling, especially their characterization, fair but not extraordinary as puzzle plots.

Godfrey was born in 1917; this makes him part of a younger generation of mystery writers influenced by Ellery Queen, one which includes Anthony Boucher and Jack Ritchie. His work is largely inaccessible in this country. All of these writers emphasized the short story.

There are whole flourishing schools of Southern Hemisphere mystery writers in countries like South Africa and Australia. Most of these writers are not exported, and have been treated as if they were for local consumption only. I am far from being expert on them at all. Most of the work that is exported falls strongly within schools of Northern mystery fiction: there are intuitionists like Godfrey, strongly aligned with Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, and Jennifer Rowe, who derives from Agatha Christie; realists like Arthur Upfield; hard boiled writers like Peter Coris; and police procedural authors like James McClure.

Akimitsu Takagi

Akimitsu Takagi has reportedly written 24 impossible crime books, and many other mystery novels as well. Unfortunately, only a little of his output has been translated from Japanese into English. Please click on this link, for a detailed bibliography of his impossible crimes, by Fei Wu. (Takagi's bibliography is half-way down this page.)

Akimitsu Takagi's The Tattoo Murder Case (1948) is a formal puzzle plot, Golden Age style detective novel. One has a hard time placing it in a school: one could interpret it as either an intuitionist or a realist work - it shares features of both.

On the intuitionist side are a number of features. First, it has an impossible crime, a locked room. There is also a reference to John Dickson Carr's impossible crime classic The Three Coffins (1935) in the book. The locked room has some features that make it look like the fulfillment of a curse, as well; this sort of fake supernaturalism is a typical feature of Carr and his descendants. The solution of the impossible crime does not feature the sort of "rearrangements in time and space" favored by Chesterton, Carr, Hake Talbot and others of their school. Instead it is in the mechanical tradition of Edgar Wallace's The Clue of the New Pin (1923), and S.S. Van Dine's The Kennel Murder Case (1933), being particularly close to the latter novel. The English title of the book is also in the paradigm used by Van Dine: The (six letter word) Murder Case. However, I have no idea if the original Japanese title is anything like Van Dine; this could just be an artifact of translation. Other Van Dine like features include a team of policemen on the squad, each individually characterized, and clearly designed to be continuing series characters in Akimitsu Takagi's stories.

The puzzle plot recalls aspects of Chesterton's "The Secret Garden" (1910), Ellery Queen's The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) and Craig Rice's Having Wonderful Crime (1943). It is especially close to Ellery Queen.

On the realist side, much of the actual plot and detection in The Tattoo Murder Case consists of the investigation of alibis. The solution of the case follows that realist school pattern, "the breakdown of identity".

The story also has a Background, the world of Japanese tattoos, which are investigated in depth. The reader gets a whole education in the world of tattoos, in the classic background fashion of such Realist writers as Crofts, Sayers, Blochman, etc. While there are no racial minorities investigated in the work, the book does look at the subculture of tattooing, an outcast group in Japanese society partly associated with the criminal underworld. We learn all about the technology involved: another realist school tradition. However bizarre The Tattoo Murder Case becomes, it is never actually surrealistic. The mystery plot is actually fairly conventional, and so are the characters. Instead, its grotesque tone comes from the world of tattooing itself. This is a bizarre, and to my mind, not very likable subculture.

The detective and the detection is the book are also ambiguous across the two traditions. On the intuitionist side, the hero is a Great Detective. He is a young genius, who has a mastery of science, literature and analytic reasoning. In fact, the teenage nickname of this hero, now in his twenties, was The Boy Genius, and he is usually called this throughout the work. He also solves the crime through pure thinking and insight, another intuitionist school trait.

On the other hand, he is a forensic scientist. This is exactly in the tradition of R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. While he is still an amateur, his declared hope is to join the police in the future.

The Tattoo Murder Case is full of food. These meals are elaborate, and always appetizing - Takagi's characters like to eat.

Soji Shimada

Soji Shimada is one of the world's prolific creators of impossible crime tales: he has reportedly written at least 14 novels and 10 short stories in this category. Only a little of his work has been translated from Japanese into English. Please click on this link, for a detailed bibliography of his impossible crimes, by Fei Wu.

Soji Shimada's first mystery novel, Senseijutsu satsujinjiken (1981), is known as The Tokyo Zodiac Murders in its English translation (published 2004). It contains both a locked room subplot, and a much larger scale non-impossible crime story about the hunt for a serial killer. The locked room mystery is essentially a short story embedded within the larger novel, and only loosely linked to it. It is nicely done, with an original solution.

The serial killer aspects, which form the bulk of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, are exceptionally grisly, and also involve an unpleasant look into the sick mind of a character. This critic has to admit his personal prejudices: this sort of extreme horror material is not a kind of reading I enjoy. However, the serial killer segments do include an ingenious and original puzzle plot mystery. Like Akimitsu Takagi's The Tattoo Murder Case (1948), the formal puzzle plot aspects of the serial killer story are in the tradition of Chesterton's "The Secret Garden" (1910), Ellery Queen's The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) and Craig Rice's Having Wonderful Crime (1943).

Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges is the third most productive writer of impossible crime stories, with at least 45 to his credit. (Both Edward D. Hoch and John Dickson Carr created over 100 each, and are the number one and number two all-time champions.) These Porges tales are all short stories, most of which have not been collected into books, unfortunately. Readers might want to check out Richard Simms' excellent site devoted to Porges' work, The Arthur Porges Fan Site.

Richard Simms has also edited a collection of Porges' Sherlock Holmes pastiches, The Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn: Being the Compleat Sherlockian Writings of Arthur Porges (collected 2008). This is available from its publisher, The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. Porges' Sherlock Holmes parody, "Stately Homes and the Invisible Giant" (2003), is a gem of a fair play, impossible crime tale.

Porges also wrote a large number of science fiction short stories. Richard Simms has edited a science fiction collection, Eight Problems in Space: The Ensign De Ruyter Stories (collected 2008), also available at The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. There is also a book collecting some of Porges' fantastic fiction, The Mirror and Other Strange Reflections (2002), published by Ash-Tree Press.

Puzzle stories

The Dr. Joel Hoffman impossible crime stories

Arthur Porges' pathologist detective Dr. Joel Hoffman starred in five impossible crime tales. Dr. Hoffman recalls Lawrence Blochman's Dr. Coffee. Both men work as forensic specialists for towns where the official coroners are incompetent; both actually work at a place called Pasteur Hospital. The combination of scientific detection and impossible crimes is most unusual, although it has precedents in both Blochman and R. Austin Freeman's "The Aluminum Dagger", a story that bears some resemblance to Porges' work.

Arthur Porges' "Dead Drunk" (1959) and "No Killer Has Wings" (1960) both explicitly invoke John Dickson Carr as the ancestor of their impossible crime plot. Carr wrote several brilliant variations on the "man found on a beach with no footprints near him" gambit found in "No Killer Has Wings". Porges has come up with original impossible crime ideas here, as far as I can tell, something that is not easy to do. Porges' stories do not tend to use the "rearrangement in space and time" developed by Israel Zangwill and often found in Chesterton and Carr. Nor do they use the simple mechanical devices of jiggling locks and keys with string often found in lesser writers. Instead, they tend to be ingenious ideas based in science for creating impossible crimes. Their closest ancestor seems to be Carr's works of 1939 - 1941, such as "The Locked Room" (1940) and The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939). Carr's stories from this period tend to use this same paradigm: science based ingenuity for the creation of impossibilities. In both Carr and Porges, the result is very satisfying.

William Brittain

Mr. Leonard Strang short stories

William Brittain wrote a number of fine impossible crime short stories, including "Mr. Strang Takes a Field Trip" (1968) in All But Impossible! (1981), edited by Edward D. Hoch, and "Mr. Strang Accepts a Challenge" (1976) in The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000), edited by Mike Ashley. These feature Brittain's series sleuth Mr. Leonard Strang, who like Brittain himself in real life, was a high school teacher. Only a few of Brittain's mystery tales are impossible crimes. The Mr. Strang tales tend to include Brittain's most complex puzzle plots. Brittain's work involved murder far less frequently than traditional Golden Age writers. This might reflect the prevalence of young people in his stories; it was not considered in good taste to mix children and murder together.

William Brittain's mystery plots tend to turn on some complex, elaborate and imaginative scheme of the villain's. This scheme is hidden from both the reader and the detective; trying to determine of what it consists, is the main subject of the puzzle plot. The detective has to figure out the central idea of the scheme. He also has to elucidate many aspects and components of the scheme. Many of these components have clues to their existence, that Brittain has embedded within the story.

Brittain often develops an elaborate story in which the mystery is embedded. This framework often contains, in a concealed way, clues to the components of the villain's plan. Brittain will also show innocent seeming physical objects or events as part of this story that are actually used by the villain in the scheme. The detective will put these apparently unimportant, incidental objects and situations together, see that they can be interpreted in an alternative way as components of a sinister plan, and piece together all the sub-sections of the villain's enterprise.

Brittain's best stories generate considerable intellectual excitement as the sleuth reveals their solution. It is very interesting to any true mystery fan to see a whole hidden pattern come to light out of a surface story. The fact that the solutions are often rich in detail adds to their excitement.

Brittain's best stories are true mysteries, with puzzle plots and solutions. He and his technique are much weaker on suspense plots, or tales that reveal most of the facts about the crook and his schemes early in the tale. Such tales are strictly among the minor works in his output.

William Brittain is clearly an intuitionist writer. His techniques are those of the intuitionist school: ingenious mysteries solved by pure thinking, often by an amateur, genius detective. Brittain's works are full of references to earlier detective writers, and these are typically of the intuitionist tradition: Doyle, Christie, Carr, Queen, Rex Stout. Several of Brittain's best works can be seen as armchair detective stories, where the sleuth solves the problem immediately after the facts are presented to him, without any further on scene investigation or sleuthing. This too is in the intuitionist tradition. Brittain often shows little interest in investigative technique, moving right from the puzzle to the solution. The fact that his works are compact short stories probably encouraged this approach. But it most deeply reflects his intuitionist emphasis on pure thinking.

Brittain's tales also tend to have a well described scene of the crime. The description often conceals clues about the mystery.

In addition to his pure impossible crime tales, "Mr. Strang and the Purloined Memo" (1983) centers around a hidden object that eludes the most exhaustive search. This was a kind of tale invented by Poe in "The Purloined Letter", and frequently written by Ellery Queen. It has links to the impossible crime: after such a search, it seems impossible that the object is anywhere in the room. Brittain offers intriguing ideas about the theory and practice of such concealment in the tale.

Some of the Strang tales deal with serious social issues. These often involve problems faced by different age groups in society. These tales tend to be extremely sad. They are not as ingenious as some of Brittain's tales written for pure escapism, but they use the same formal techniques, of Mr. Strang uncovering hidden patterns and significances in the details of a case. Among the better of such tales are "Mr. Strang Checks a Record" (1972) and "Mr. Strang and the Cat Lady" (1975).

The Man Who Read short stories

Brittain published numerous short stories during 1964 - 1983. He had two series in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, one featuring Mr. Strang. The other series all had titles similar to "The Man Who Read" some famous mystery writer, for example, "The Man Who Read George Simenon" (1975). (This George Simenon tale is charming, but it is atypical for Brittain in that it is inspired by a non-intuitionist writer.) Each one of these dealt with a new character, an ordinary person who liked mystery fiction, and who took on the characteristics of that author's detective to solve some crime. There was a good deal of humor and ingenuity, in giving this amateur the personality and abilities of a famous sleuth. These stories are atypical of detective series in that they had no continuing characters: all the characters are entirely new in each tale.

"The Man Who Read Dashiell Hammett" (1974) involves the debate between fans of private eye fiction, and those of the kind of genius amateur detectives that populate the intuitionist school. This debate is incorporated right into the plot of the story. This tale is one of Brittain's most light hearted and charming tales. Unlike most of the "Man Who Read" series, it does not try to recreate the style of the author in its title. This is perhaps because Brittain is a fundamentally non-hard-boiled author. Instead, the story propounds a puzzle, embodied in a fictional form. "The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov" (1978) also centers around a riddle, but this is wholly appropriate, because several of Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers stories, of which this tale is a pastiche, are essentially puzzles. Several of Brittain's stories have such a riddle form. It is an alternative paradigm in his work to the pure mystery that often occurs in the Strang tales.

Non-series short stories

"The Zaretski Chain" (1968) is one of Brittain's many non-series stories. It is related to the challenge and puzzle tales that often appear in his "Man Who Read" series. This fun piece is perhaps not part of the series, because its characters are a bit more roguish than the heroes of that sequence. The story has a magic background, a favorite of intuitionist school writers. Brittain's challenge stories tend to have a well-developed background, setting up the context of the challenge. Then the challenge is an essentially separate puzzle nested within it. "The Zaretski Chain" shows Brittain's fondness for simple but effective mechanical devices.

This author is sometimes referred to as William E. Brittain. He is also a prestigious author of children's books.

William F. Smith

William F. Smith's "An Almost Perfect Crime" (1987) is an impossible crime tale, reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2006), edited by Mike Ashley. This ingenious short story is full of scientific detail. It is clearly in the tradition of R. Austin Freeman, both his scientific detective stories in general, and Freeman's impossible crime mysteries in particular. According to Ashley's introduction, the tale is one of only six mystery short stories that Smith published in his career.

Paul Halter

Paul Halter is a prolific and much admired contemporary French writer, who specializes in impossible crime novels in the tradition of John Dickson Carr. He has published at least 28 impossible crime novels, and at least nine short stories. Halter has a personal web site. An informative Halter article and bibliography, by Halter's English language translator John Pugmire, appears on-line in the journal MYSTERY*FILE.

The Night of the Wolf

Halter's short story collection The Night of the Wolf is now available in English translation (I ordered my copy from an Internet bookseller, the easiest way to obtain it.). It is recommended. These tales display Halter's ingenuity in plotting impossible crimes, which make up nine of the ten stories in the book. "The Flower Girl" (1998) is one of the best impossible crime short stories of recent years, and "The Abominable Snowman" (2002) is also outstanding.

Both of these tales take place outdoors, in front of large Victorian houses. Like "The Call of the Lorelei" (1998) and "The Night of the Wolf" (1990), they show the pleasing Golden Age interest in landscape and architecture, with the landscape around the crime scene playing a role in the impossibilities.

There is something in the arrangement of the rooms of the Victorian mansion in "The Abominable Snowman" that recalls such French impossible crime novels as Noël Vindry's La Maison qui tue (The House That Killed) (1932). Halter has his characters scattered in separate rooms during the time of the killing, as had Vindry before him. Both Halter and Vindry like to show the inhabitants of isolated houses as under siege at night from mysterious and terrifying forces. There are no other plot similarities between the two works, which propound very different puzzle plots. But still, one suspects that Halter is familiar with the Gallic tradition of impossible crimes, as well as the English language one.

"The Abominable Snowman" is also notable for the way in which many of the subplots or apparently insignificant aspects of the case dovetail into the ultimate solution. Something of the same effect is found in "The Flower Girl" and "The Cleaver". Such dovetailing plots are part of the ancient tradition of the puzzle plot mystery, and along with the impossible crimes, mark Halter as a modern day exponent of this school.

"The Cleaver" (2000) is part of a fascinating sub-genre of impossible crimes, that deal with apparent dreams and premonitions of murder. Eventually, such dreams are provided with a rational explanation. Such stories include Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Mr. Higginbottam's Catastrophe" (1834), Agatha Christie's Murder at Hazelmoor (1931) and "The Dream" (1937), Anthony Abbot's About the Murder of a Startled Lady (1935), Day Keene's "Remember the Night" (1949), Craig Rice's "Beyond the Shadow of a Dream" (1955) and "No, Not Like Yesterday" (1956).

"Murder in Cognac" (1999) propounds the same kind of puzzle as Ellery Queen's "The Three Widows" (1950): how was poison seemingly introduced in an impossible manner? The story is set in the Western French town of Cognac, which produces the famous liqueur, but the setting has little to do with the plot. At least in these short stories, Halter shows little interest in the sort of detailed Backgrounds of a region or industry that were so prominent in early scientific detective fiction, British Realist writers like Freeman, Crofts and Sayers, or modern police procedural authors. What Halter instead concentrates on are spooky, detailed portraits of the isolated buildings and landscapes where his crimes occur.

"Nausicaa's Ball" (2008) is not an impossible crime tale. Instead, it recalls Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1941), being a tale of alibis and time tables after a murder is committed at an island resort.

Unfortunately, my French is just not good enough to read Halter in the original - so am actively anticipating the future publication of English language translations of Halter's novels.

Michael Kurland

"The Stolen Saint Simon" (2000) is an inventive impossible crime story. Kurland offers a wealth of story-telling ideas. The story is in The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000), edited by Mike Ashley.

Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg

"Death Rides the Elevator" (2000) is an impossible crime tale, in The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (2000), edited by Mike Ashley. This story's basic structure recalls that of John Dickson Carr's and John Rhode's Fatal Descent (1939), which also involves an impossible murder of a man alone in an elevator. However, Gresh and Weinberg's locked room idea is new. Even better is the tale's delightful story telling.

"Murder in Monkeyland" (2006) is another locked room mystery about Penelope Peters, a female pastiche of Nero Wolfe, in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (2006), edited by Mike Ashley. The narration contains more horror material, and the mystery involves scientific background and situations, like a modern-day version of an Arthur B. Reeve tale.

Phil Mann

Mike Wiecek

Wiecek's private eye short story, "A Death in Ueno" (2005), appeared in the March 2005 AHMM. This tale offers a look at the lower depths of Japanese society. It is surprisingly political.

Mike Wiecek has a personal web site. It says his name is pronounced "WHY-sek".

Catherine Mambretti

Catherine Mambretti has a personal web site.

Hal White

The best tales in the collection, "Murder at an Island Mansion" and "Murder in a Sealed Loft", are notable impossible crimes tales. "Murder at an Island Mansion" contains not one but two impossibilities. The two crimes, both original in their concepts, echo each other in interesting ways. Both deal with a geometrically complex murder area; both puzzle with a killer who has somehow miraculously escaped from the crime scene, an apparent impossibility. The two solutions are different. But both involve a step-by-step approach by the killer: a sequence of events. These sort of puzzles recall in broad terms such Joseph Commings tales as "Hangman's House", although White's problems and solutions are original.

"Murder in a Sealed Loft" deals with a single crime, but one which is provided with two separate solutions. The first solution is clever, involving some subtle misdirection. "Murder in a Sealed Loft" also has the best characterization of the stories, introducing the sleuth's policeman friend, Detective Mark Small.

Most of the creativity in The Mysteries of Reverend Dean is lavished on the impossible crimes. Unfortunately, little ingenuity is spared for the other aspects of the mystery plots. I was able to figure out whodunit right away in all of the tales, for example.

It is legitimate for the Reverend Dean and his author to proselytize for their religious beliefs. But the book crosses the line in the worst tale, "Murder at the Lord's Table". This story depicts "liberal Christians" as evil people who will commit murder at the drop of a hat. Depicting people whose religious beliefs are different from White's own as evil, is wrong, untrue and intolerant.

Hal White has a personal web site.

Bill Pronzini

The Nameless Detective

Bill Pronzini's tales of "The Nameless Detective" are an ambitious attempt to combine the private eye tradition and the classic mystery form, especially "the impossible crime" genre of G. K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr. So far his most interesting works of Nameless Detective fiction have been Undercurrent (1973) and the short stories collected in Casefile (1983). Pronzini has stated that he prefers writing short stories to novels. I think in general his talent is best displayed in the short form.

Several of the Casefile stories benefit from being set against backgrounds that Pronzini knows well in real life. (I am indebted here for information on Pronzini's life, to a biographical sketch of Pronzini that appeared in Best Mystery Stories of the Year, 1973, by Edward D. Hoch.) "Sin Island" is set on Majorca, where Pronzini lived for a year. "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" takes place in a warehouse, and Pronzini worked in a warehouse in his youth. "Booktaker" is set in the sort of second hand bookstore that Pronzini, a collector of pulp magazines, presumably knows very well. I have no direct evidence, but I suspect that "Dead Man's Slough" is also set on the type of island where Pronzini has often gone fishing. In all of these works there is an immediacy, a fullness of interesting detail. These settings also seem to trigger something in Pronzini's imagination, some sense of a much thought about, much mentally dwelled upon place finally stimulating the growth of a mystery set in it, and integrated with it. This is speculation, of course - I can't see into Pronzini's mind or creative processes. What is certain is that these are among the most successful of contemporary mystery tales - with imaginative, well constructed mystery plots, good storytelling and characters, all against interesting backgrounds.

Both Undercurrent and the Casefile stories benefit in that they concentrate on theft. Theft in early mystery fiction was often a snoozer. But here it helps the author concentrate on mystery, as opposed to action or literary artiness.

The best parts of Pronzini's novels are often digressions that have nothing to do with the mystery itself, but which concern Nameless and the people he meets. These "digressions" actually function like short stories embedded in the larger text. Undercurrent has my favorite character in Pronzini's novels: the veteran pulp writer Russell Dancer. Dancer makes return appearances in Hoodwink (1981) and Bones (1985). The latter novel also has a spaghetti dinner that is one of Pronzini's best comic set pieces.

The Nameless Detective shows distinct similarities with Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op. Both are middle-aged, somewhat overweight men, based in San Francisco; neither detective's name is ever learned by the reader. Both detectives have a professionalism and a veteran's experience of detective work, both are low key, neither is ostentatiously macho. Hammett's detectives and Pronzini's tend to work with partners, with whom they have a close relationship. The stories of Pronzini and Hammett both tend to feature prominent puzzle plots. Nameless definitely bears little resemblance to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe; Pronzini is one of the few post-Chandler private eye writers who have not used Marlowe as a model.

Impossible Crimes

Pronzini is a leading writer of impossible crimes, having created over twenty of them. He is unusual in having them solved by a private eye: most impossible crimes are tackled by genius amateur sleuths.

Pronzini's best impossible crime tales involve Impossible Disappearances. Men disappear in "Vanishing Act" (1975), "The Arrowmont Prison Mystery" (1976), "Dead Man's Slough" (1980), "No Room at the Inn" (1988), "Devil's Brew" (2006), with the last three tales being particularly close in approach. Objects vanish in "The Terrarium Principle" (1981), "Booktaker" (1982), "Ace in the Hole" (1986) and "Cache and Carry" (1988). Pronzini shows a wealth of imagination in these tales, which often involve clever hiding places. His amusing look at a crooked seance, "Medium Rare" (1998), also is related to this tradition.

Pronzini has also written a series of locked room problems. These tend to show a physical approach to creating locked rooms. The most imaginative of these is "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" (1979).

Gun in Cheek

Gun In Cheek and its sequel, Son of Gun in Cheek, are Pronzini's look at "alternative crime fiction", mystery stories so bad that they are outrageously funny. Both books are hilarious. These fascinating books shows much of the vitality of early, pre-1960 crime fiction. Paradoxically, what Pronzini holds up to affectionate ridicule, despite its often obvious badness, often holds hidden virtues. The way out plots of the books, however totally implausible and absurd, often show great imagination and originality. Similarly, the overdone writing, hilariously absurd, at least shows linguistic inventiveness and enthusiasm, and often its own special poetry, as do the strange plots.

Carpenter and Quincannon

Recently, Pronzini has written a second set of detective tales, about 1890's detectives Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon. They are collected in Carpenter and Quincannon: Professional Detective Services (1998), available from its publisher Crippen & Landru. These short stories are hybrid Western-detective tales. Both "No Room at the Inn" (1988) and "Burgade's Crossing" (1993) take place among complete, multi-building landscapes. The precise layout of each building and architectural feature is known to the reader, as well as all man made aspects of the landscape itself, such as roads, ferries and docks. These are some of the most elaborate landscapes since those of Arthur Morrison in the 1890's. Both "Burgade's Crossing" and "Dead Man's Slough" are set in the Delta region of the Sacramento River east of San Francisco. After such vivid stories, this watery region is marked as being peculiarly Pronzini's own. J. G. Ballard has suggested that delta regions represent the Unconscious, a sort of living map of the interior landscape of part of the human mind. Certainly the Delta landscape Pronzini has created in "Burgade's Crossing" has a powerful fascination.

Both "No Room at the Inn" and "Burgade's Crossing" involve the detective hero Quincannon's attempts to prevent an assassination. This makes them sound like suspense stories, not mysteries. But actually, the stories have considerable elements of mystery. Quincannon knows that a murderous attempt is going to take place, but he does not know how or where. He is continually searching the landscape of the two stories, trying to find out where the attack might take place. This involves an in-depth analysis of the landscape itself, trying to figure out which building or architectural feature might contribute to the murder-to-be. The reader sees what Quincannon sees, and all his ideas about the potential use of landscape features in the coming crime are fully shared with the reader. What Pronzini has done here is create an innovative sort of puzzle plot, one in which the challenge is to figure out how a crime will be committed.

Pronzini has a fondness for scenes of night and rain. In part, this simply makes things harder for his characters to see, thus increasing the mysteriousness of his situations. Some of his plots, such as that of "The Arrowmont Prison Mystery" (1976), make good technical use of this obscurity. But it also serves a purpose in creating atmosphere and emotion. As in the works of Mary Roberts Rinehart, his characters are often exploring the dark, and are not sure what might turn up. In both Rinehart and Pronzini, there is something archetypal about this. I always loved wandering around in the dark as a kid, and I still love being out in the rain, especially near water. Reading about such situations gratifies deeply held human needs.

Pronzini came by his hybrid of Western and detective fiction at an early date. "Fergus O'Hara, Detective" (1974) is a fine mix of the two. Its tone and storytelling approach anticipate the later Carpenter and Quincannon tales. The hero and his wife could serve as rough sketches for the two later detectives. It is set in Pronzini's best location, the river area from San Francisco to Stockton. The name of its hero, Fergus O'Hara, recalls Anthony Boucher's series detective Fergus O'Breen. Both O'Hara and Quincannon love showing off at the end of the tales, explaining to others how they deduced the criminal's identity and schemes. The various rooms and structures on board the steamship here are described with Pronzini's typical architectural precision - they form one of his architectural "landscapes". The comic militiamen here recall the equally comic riflemen aboard ship in the Lockridges' Voyage into Violence (1956).