Unfairly forgotten today, though thankfully his works are gradually being rediscovered, is Clyde B. Clason who wrote a series of novels featuring the historian and amateur sleuth, Professor Theocritus Westborough. Seven of these novels feature impossible crimes of which the best is The Man From Tibet (1938) in which a man, locked inside a room full of Tibetan exhibits, apparently dies from a heart attack.
The British composer Bruce Montgomery also wrote mysteries as Edmund Crispin. He was the creator of the amateur sleuth Gervase Fen, who is an Oxford don and a literary critic. The first of his investigations, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), involved a murder in a room under constant observation. Perhaps his most audacious is The Moving Toyshop (1946), in which an entire shop disappears.
Author and lawyer Michael Gilbert who, amongst other things, was involved in drawing up the will of Raymond Chandler, began his writing career with an impossible murder, Close Quarters (1947), the first of his Inspector Hazelrigg novels. Soon after the brothers Peter and Antony Shaffer, writing as Peter Antony, produced a delightful locked-room mystery with The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951). By and large, though, the locked-room mystery seemed to fall from favour in the fifties, and it only began to re-emerge in the sixties and seventies.
Much of the modern delight in the art can be ascribed to two writers – Bill Pronzini and Edward D. Hoch. Pronzini is a highly versatile writer producing novels and stories in several fields (science fiction, mystery fiction, westerns, horror) but he is probably best known for his books featuring the Nameless Detective. Several of these involve locked-room murders, starting with Hoodwink (1981), which won the Shamus Award of the Private Eye Writers of America. In fact it includes two locked-room murders, of which the victim killed by an axe in a locked shed has the most ingenious solution. Scattershot (1982) goes one better and has three impossible crimes – a stabbing in a locked car, a shooting in a cottage under observation and the theft of a ring from a guarded room!
Although Edward Hoch has written novels, he is the master of the short story, having written over 800 since his first in 1955; and a large number of these are impossible crimes. In fact he has written one long series devoted to nothing but impossible crimes. These are the stories narrated by his New England doctor, Sam Hawthorne, who reminisces back to his early days in the twenties and thirties, where an impossible crime seemed to happen three or four times a year! The series is still running in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM). The early stories have been collected as Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) and I have reprinted a more recent one in this book.
However Hoch does not confine his impossible murders to just one series. He has several series on the go at once and a miracle crime is as likely to crop up in several of them. This happened from the start with his first series character Simon Ark. In “The Man From Nowhere” (Famous Detective Stories, June 1956) a man is found stabbed to death in the snow with no footprints around him. In the Inspector Rand story “The Spy Who Walked Through Walls” (EQMM, November 1966), top-secret blueprints disappear from a guarded office. There’s the Nick Velvet story, “The Theft of the Bermuda Penny” (EQMM, June 1975), where a man vanishes from a speeding car, even though his seat belt is still fastened! There’s the Captain Leopold story, “Captain Leopold and the Impossible Murder” (EQMM, December 1976), where the man driving alone in the car in front in a traffic jam turns out to be strangled. The title of the Ben Snow story “The Vanished Steamboat” (EQMM, May 1984) tells it all. And then there’s the non-series story “The Impossible ‘Impossible Crime’” (EQMM, April 1968), where a man is shot in a snowbound hut, with no one else around for hundreds of miles except for one other who was asleep at the time. Hoch’s versatility seems boundless and I have no doubt he will create plenty more impossible crimes in the years to come.
In addition to Pronzini and Hoch there are plenty of writers prepared to turn a hand to the impossible crime. Michael Innes dabbled with it, with a murder in the library in Appleby and Honeybath (1983). Kate Wilhelm defied computer security for her suffocation in a lift and drowning in a Jacuzzi in Smart House (1989). Michael Dibdin pits Inspector Zen’s wits in Vendetta (1990) where a murder takes place in a high security fortress with video cameras everywhere. Whilst that doyen of the historical mystery, Paul Doherty, has shown the influence of John Dickson Carr in a number of his novels. There’s a murder in a locked church in Satan in St Mary’s (1986); a murder in full view of a crowd with no visible agency in The Angel of Death (1989); a murder in a locked room in the Tower of London in The White Rose Murders (1991) written as Michael Clynes; and the magnificent disappearance of an entire ship’s watch in By Murder’s Bright Light (1994), written as Paul Harding.
And we must not forget David Renwick’s “Jonathan Creek” who solves some of the most bizarre and idiosyncratic crimes on television.
There is no doubt that the future of the impossible crime story is in safe hands as I hope the stories in this anthology have shown. If this anthology has intrigued you I strongly urge you to seek out Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes by Robert Adey (Minneapolis’ Crossover Press, 1991), which is a remarkably detailed survey and bibliography of the field. You may also want to track down other anthologies, alas all out of print, but which give a flavouring of impossible crimes: The Locked Room Reader edited by Hans Stefan Santesson (New York: Random House, 1968); Tantalizing Locked Room Murders edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Walker, 1982); All But Impossible! edited by Edward D. Hoch (New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1981); Locked Room Puzzles edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini (Chicago, Academy Chicago, 1986); Death Locked In edited by Douglas Greene and Robert Adey (IPL, 1987) and The Art of the Impossible edited by Jack Adrian and Robert Adey (London: Xanadu, 1990). I have tried to avoid duplicating too many stories from these books, although as they are all out of print, there are some gems that beg to be reprinted again. I hope your quest is not impossible.
COPYRIGHT AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Ken Cowley, Richard Lupoff, Bill Pronzini, Edward Hoch and Peter Tremayne for their help and support through this project. My thanks also to David Renwick for his Foreword. And a special thanks to Robert Adey for his invaluable book Locked Room Murders and Other Impossible Crimes (Minneapolis: Crossover Press, 1991), which was an ever trusty guide through the minefield of the impossible crime.
All of the stories are copyright in the name of the individual authors or their estates, as listed below. Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright. In the event of any inadvertent transgression of copyright the editor would like to hear from the author or their representatives, via the publisher.
“The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke” © 1997 by Lynne Wood Block & Lawrence Block. First published in Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Fall/Summer 1997. Reprinted by permission of the authors.