By another remarkable instance of synchronicity, at the same time as Father Brown appeared so did Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner. Although the first collection, Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries, did not appear until 1918, the stories were being run in The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines from 1911 on. Alas, all too few of them are miracle murders, though the best, “The Doomdorf Mystery”, which David Renwick refers to and which is reprinted in this anthology, most certainly was.
Chesterton and Post provide the link across the Great War and into the 1920s. There were less impossible crime stories written during this period than one might expect, though the form was well enough established for P.G. Wodehouse to spoof it in the perfectly acceptable “The Education of Detective Oakes” (Pearson’s Magazine, December 1914), where a man in a locked room appears to have been killed by snake venom.
S.S. van Dine, the creator of Philo Vance, gave it a good stab in The Canary Murder Case (1927) and later novels. Agatha Christie also turned her mercurial mind to the matter. Several of the stories in The Thirteen Problems (1932), such as “The Blue Geranium” (The Story-Teller, December 1929) are seemingly impossible crimes which Miss Marple is able to solve simply by applying her mind.
It was now, though, that the real doyen of the impossible crime story emerged onto the scene – John Dickson Carr. Carr had started writing when he was at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, placing stories in the college magazine, The Haverfordian. His third story, “The Shadow of the Goat” (November-December 1926) was his first locked-room murder and also introduced his detective Henri Bencolin. It’s an ingenious crime involving both a disappearance from a locked room and a murder in a house both locked and guarded. Carr was perfecting his craft from an early age – he was only twenty when these appeared. A later Bencolin serial, “Grand Guignol” (The Haverfordian, March-April 1929) was expanded into Carr’s first novel, It Walks By Night (1930).
Over the next forty years Carr was to write over fifty novels featuring impossible crimes, plus numerous short stories. It is impossible to list them all here, but I must single out a few. Probably the classic of them all is The Hollow Man (1935), also published under the title The Three Coffins. When, in 1980, Edward Hoch conducted a poll amongst a panel of seventeen experts on mystery fiction, this novel came out head-and-shoulders above the rest. It involves two impossible murders – a death in a locked and guarded room and a death in a snow-covered street with no footprints. The book features Carr’s best known detective, Dr Gideon Fell, and is notorious for the fact that Carr stops the action at a crucial point to allow Fell to deliver a lecture about the locked-room crime and the various ways in which it can be achieved. The book – and the lecture – remain models of their kind.
There were three other Carr novels in the experts’ top ten. The Crooked Hinge (1938), another Gideon Fell novel, came in fourth. This provides a slightly less satisfying but nevertheless intriguing solution to a murder in the sand with none but the victim’s footprints. The Judas Window (1938), published under his Carter Dickson alias, and mentioned by David Renwick in his Foreword, was voted fifth. I personally rate this as Carr’s best constructed novel – ingenious, surprisingly plausible, and riveting. It features Carr’s detective Henry Merrivale, as does The Ten Teacups (1937), also known as The Peacock Feather Murders, and tenth on the experts’ list. In fact the Henry Merrivale mysteries include some of the most unusual impossible murders such as those in The Plague Court Murders (1934), The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Red Widow Murders (1935).
Carr also used the impossible crime idea in many short stories. Some of the best are found in the collection The Department of Queer Complaints (1940) featuring a new detective, Colonel March. It is one of the those stories, “The Silver Curtain”, that I have reprinted here. Perhaps one of the best examples of misdirection in misleading the reader arises in the novella The Third Bullet (1937) in which three bullets are fired in a locked room, each from a different gun, and yet the only other person in the room did not have the murder weapon.
You would think that with the amount of books Carr produced, and with his profundity of ideas, no one else would attempt an impossible crime story in his shadow. But the reverse happened. Rather than cornering the market, Carr stimulated it. The 1930s was a golden era for the miracle crime. Ellery Queen, which was both the name of the detective and of the authors (the pseudonym adopted by cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee) produced two remarkable locked-room mysteries: The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) and The Door Between (1937). The magician Clayton Rawson, creator of the character The Great Merlini, specialized in impossible crimes and produced some of the best, starting with Death From a Top Hat (1938) in which a whole bunch of magicians are involved. His other novels are The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939), The Headless Lady (1940) – which involves an escape from an electrically controlled, double-locked room, and No Coffin for the Corpse (1942). Rawson, Dannay and Carr often used to challenge each other to come up with the most impossible situations for an impossible crime. On one occasion Carr challenged Rawson to explain how a man could enter a telephone booth and disappear. That story, “From Off the Face of the Earth”, is the one I’ve selected for this anthology.
Another of the Ellery Queen circle, Anthony Boucher, did not write anywhere near enough locked-room mysteries as he would have liked, though both Nine Times Nine (1940), as H.H. Holmes, and The Case of the Solid Key (1941) are competent and ingenious. For ingenuity, though, and barefaced bravado, it was difficult to beat the pseudonymous Hake Talbot. In the early 1940s he produced two novels on a par with the skilled plotting of Carr and the audaciousness of Rawson. Both The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) and especially Rim of the Pit (1944) confuse the reader with all manner of apparent supernatural paraphernalia before the real solutions to the impossible murders are revealed. If I tell you that in one book a man is cursed and his body immediately decomposes, whilst in another an apparent, wind-walker (Wendigo) menaces a snowbound house, you’ll have some idea of the thrill of these novels. Professor Douglas Greene, a noted expert in the history of crime fiction, has called Rim of the Pit “one of the most extraordinary tales of mystery ever written.”
Ethel Lina White produced a minor masterpiece in The Wheel Spins (1936), in which a woman disappears from a moving train. The book is probably better remembered as the film The Lady Vanishes, made in 1938.