Full description not available
R**N
A world-tour of locked room stories.
Short fiction punctuated by true life cases of supposedly impossible crimes and happenings.Jacob's Ladder (Paul Halter) PLOT: an odious man in a rural town is found dead, ostensibly haven fallen from a great height onto a pond on his family's land; but the pond has no tall topography, trees of other places he could have fallen from. REVIEW: an OK story from the French Impossible Crime master. It's not that intriguing and the solution not that surprising. ***Cyanide In The Sun (Christianna Brand) PLOT: a group of holiday guests at an English seaside resort listens with ner4vousness as their landlady recounts a string of poisonings in the town, some of which she witnessed. Then her guests start to die. REVIEW: nicely told tale with a logical outcome. ****Windfall (Ulf Durling) PLOT: Two old friends recount a years-old mystery concerning the death of an old man who is standing in the way of his niece's true love. One of the friends has recently figured out how the old man died, although someone had already confessed. REVIEW: an interesting take on the problem of a death where no one could have approached the victim. But I thought that how one character acts was totally preposterous. **The Case of the Horizontal Trajectory (Joseph Skvorecky) PLOT: a not-particularly appealing police investigator looks into the obvious murder of an old woman in her locked bedroom. REVIEW: nice to read a story by a Czech author, but I wondered why he made the detective so unpleasant. The solution to the crime isn't that well explained; although the detective mentions drawing diagrams pertaining to the solution, we are not presented with them. ** ½ *The Mystery of the Sleeping Car Express (Freeman Wills Crofts) PLOT: aboard a train gunshots ring out and two people inside a compartment die, while the third occupant is unable to exit because the door is wedged shut from the outside. Other travelers (including the third occupant) are cleared of suspicion, and when the train and surrounding areas are searched no one can be found -- it seems impossible anyone could have left the train undetected. REVIEW: a fun ride, but the story cried out for a diagram of the railway car involved, although the train layout is meticulously written about. ****Dead Man in the Scrub (Mary Fortune) PLOT: a decomposing body is found inside a sealed tent in the Australian outback. REVIEW: gets points for unusual setting and time (written in the 1860's.) Not really a locked-tent puzzle since the policeman discovers what was done right away. The reason behind sealing the tent is never fully explained and the culprit is discovered by one of those outlandish coincidences authors sometimes employ. Enjoyable nevertheless. ****The Hidden Law (Melville Davisson Post) PLOT: Uncle Abner is called in by a neighbor whose gold has been stolen from his home in which all doors and windows have been barred. REVIEW: As referenced in the introduction, I found the religious proselytizing by Abner tiresome, and the author telegraphs the solution early on in the tale. **House Call (Alexandre Dumas) â PLOT: a school girl is abducted from her locked bedroom at a boarding school. REVIEW: adapted from two chapters in an 1854 book, it was probably included because of its historic nature. It's not that interesting â the detective spends most of the time figuring out how many people were involved by examining ladder impressions in the garden. Meanwhile no one makes sure the locked and shuttered room is really empty. And it ends very abruptly. *The Twelve Figures of the World (Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares) PLOT: a man endures a test as an initiation, which results in murder. REVIEW: not a locked room story, more like an illusionist's crime. I found it a bit confusing. **Rhampsinitos and the Thief (Herodotus) PLOT: an Egyptian king's treasure trove is pilfered from a seemingly sealed chamber. REVIEW: Not a mystery, but an interesting ancient story. ***The Martian Crown Jewels (Poul Anderson) PLOT: A Treasure disappears from an unmanned rocket when it lands on Phobos. REVIEW: A mostly tongue in cheek 1956 tale set in the future when trade is common between the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th planets, but unfortunately cigarettes are still in full use. ***Leaving No Evidence (Dudley Hoys) PLOT: An American adventurer in Lebanon is confronted by the disappearance of two of his mountain guides, whose footprints end in virgin snow. REVIEW: A clever take on this plot device and a nicely written tale. *****The Venom of the Tarantula (Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay) PLOT: a doctor in India seeks help to determine how a patient continues to ingest a poison despite being watched day and night. REVIEW: OK tale with a sort of predictable solution. ***Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture (Victor L. Whitechurch) PLOT: While being transported on a short railroad line, a wagon containing a valuable painting goes missing, from the middle of the train. REVIEW: a clever trick explained by the mastermind behind it. ****The Miracle on Christmas Eve (Szu-Yen Lin) PLOT: A man enlists the aid of a detective to prove the existence of Santa Claus because of a mysterious event when he was a child. REVIEW: Nice take on a locked-room mystery (not a crime, though.) ****Seven Brothers (Alexis Kivi) PLOT: a two page excerpt from a 1870 novel in which a man encounters human footprints in snow that turn into fox footprints. REVIEW: clever interpretation of snow vs. footprints. ***Lying Dead and Turning Cold (Afonso Carreiro) PLOT: people at a remote building in a snowy region of Portugal are confronted with a murder. REVIEW: Another clever take on the âfootprints in the snowâ trope that evokes the dread the people feel. *****The âImpossibleâ Impossible Crime (Edward D. Hoch) PLOT: two men are at a remote cabin in Northern Canada when one of them finds the other has been shot. REVIEW: Short and to the point, which is a nice twist. ****The Locked Tomb Mystery (Elizabeth Peters) PLOT: the sealed tomb of a woman buried with treasure is found to have been looted. REVIEW: Well told but only OK variation on the trick. ****Deadfall (Samuel W. Taylor) PLOT: Two men trapped in a snowbound cabin write a journal mentioning mysterious footprints in the snow. REVIEW: interesting take on the problem that leaves you thinking in the end. *****The Lure of the Green Door (Rintaro Norizuki) PLOT: a locked-room mystery fan uncovers the truth about a locked-room mystery collector's supposed suicide. REVIEW: Clever solution and nicely written, but an action by the culprit didn't make much sense. ***The Barese Mystery (Pietro De Palma) PLOT: a man is discovered in a locked room days after his death. REVIEW: tongue and cheek tale which references a number of classic locked room books. Solution is different. ****The Witch Doctor's Revenge (Jochen Fusler) PLOT: A man enlists a policeman's help because he fears he and his friend are in danger of disappearing. REVIEW: Nicely told story that details how the men did actually disappear. ****All the Birds of the Air (Charles B. Child) PLOT: a revered old man in Baghdad dies in a watched room guarded by police. REVIEW: Interesting setting and plausible (though oft-used) method of death. ****The Warder of the Door (L.T. Meade & Robert Eustace) PLOT: An ancient curse on a family's first born seems to have come true. REVIEW: good use of a supernatural atmosphere and an (almost) realistic denouement. ****The Locked House of Pythagoras (Soji Shimada) PLOT: A man and his mistress are found brutally stabbed in a locked room the floor of which is covered in papers the man was judging for a school art project. REVIEW: an eye-glazing solution (complete with floor plans) marred by a sort of obnoxious schoolboy who solves the puzzle. ***
M**S
As with most short story collections, some stories were good while some were just okay
As with most short story collections, some stories were good while some were just okay. The ones I particularly liked were: "Venom of the Tarantula"; "All the Birds of the Air"; "Cyanide in the Sun"; "Windfall"; "Leaving No Evidence"; "Deadfall"; and "The Miracle on Christmas Eve".When I was elementary-school age, I read something about "The Moving Coffins" of Barbados in a magazine my parents had. For a few days after that, I was too scared to go into the basement by myself!
L**T
A lot of cleverness, with more hits than misses
The Realm of the Impossible is a rather nice assortment of locked-room mysteries and impossible crimes, bringing together authors and settings from around the world (and one in space) in a collection that shows off the variety of ways one can produce apparent miracles. The quality of the stories and the mysteries they contain are mixed, but on the whole they’re good – and, from what I’ve seen in other reviews, most of them haven’t been anthologised before, so if you’re worrying about wasting your money on stories you already own, fear not: there’s bound to be something new here. In addition to fiction, the book collects twelve real-life impossibilities, some solved and some unsolved, which serve as a nice reminder that this kind of mystery isn’t quite as far-fetched as it might appear, and in the case of the unsolved ones can give the reader something to puzzle over. I won’t review them individually; suffice it to say that they’re presented clearly and entertainingly.What else to say before I address the individual stories? There are a few typos here and there, mostly in the names of people and places, and none of which spoil the stories. In addition to murder, some of the stories contain misogyny, mentions of rape and animal cruelty, and a few instances of racism; none of these add much to the stories but we’re stuck with them.Now that’s handled, let’s move on to the stories themselves. First up is “Jacob’s Ladder”, by Paul Halter, which presents us with a hated religious maniac who falls to his death seemingly out of thin air. Halter provides a well-clued ingenious puzzle, marred only by the policeman failing to ask an important question (though this only affects the question of who rather than the more interesting how). It’s a strong start, and the next story doesn’t disappoint either: Christianna Brand’s “Cyanide in the Sun” gives us a serial killer, two impossible poisonings, a very clever way of foiling the murderer, and some entertaining characters.Sadly, Ulf Durling’s “Windfall” spoils the good streak. It’s a promising impossibility – a man hated by everyone is found dead under an apple tree, with no visible cause of death, his food and drink free of poison, and his ferocious dog gave no sign that anyone approached him. Natural causes? Not according to his neighbour, whose suicide note included a confession of murder… though no description of just how he managed it. Unfortunately we get a false solution that’s utterly risible and a true solution (we assume – the “detective” only guesses and has no actual proof) that renders the whole story pointless. One might appreciate the pathos of a tragic misunderstanding, but not at the cost of the puzzle we were implicitly promised.“The Case of the Horizontal Trajectory”, by Joseph Škvorecký, is something of an improvement. A woman is found in her pitch-dark locked bedroom stabbed through the eye, and the bedroom is not only locked but so cluttered that no one could have found their way through it in the dark – and the darkness rules out the spike being shot through the window. It’s clever, and the moment when I realised the false assumption I’d been led to make was quite effective, but I’m unsure if it’s actually solvable before the detective realises this false assumption. This isn’t helped by the fact that the detective himself is rather unpleasant in an irritating way, nor by the summation suddenly revealing the murderer to be an expert in something relevant to the murder. It’s better than “Windfall”, but it doesn’t rise above okay. Something similar can be said for “The Mystery of the Sleeping-Car Express”, in which Freeman Wills Croft gives us a murderer who disappears from a train carriage while the train’s in motion. The detection is nicely rigorous and the method of disappearance is clever, but I’m not sure it’s really solvable until the murderer confesses on his deathbed – and I had to read his confession twice before I understood his movements; this would have benefited from a diagram of the carriage.Next up is “Dead Man in the Scrub”, by Mary Fortune, which technically is a locked-room (or rather locked-tent) murder, but that aspect gets solved rather trivially four pages in to a ten-page story and there’s not much mystery beyond that. I suppose it’s interesting for the glimpse it gives of nineteenth-century Australian mining culture? It is, however, a far better mystery than Melville Davisson Post’s “The Hidden Law”, which is only puzzling at all because the reader’s natural inclination is to think “surely the answer to a particular question is ‘no’ because otherwise it’s obvious”. The answer to that particular question is ‘yes’, and everyone who isn’t the detective is an utter fool for not figuring it out. About the only merit here is that Post makes the insufferably Puritanical detective less insufferable at the end. If you really care, the premise here is the entirely possible theft of a miser’s gold, but the story is an immense disappointment.“House Call” is adapted from chapters 73 and 74 of Alexandre Dumas’ “Les Mohicans de Paris”, and if you can tolerate Dumas’ prose is an entertaining enough investigation of an abduction from a locked room. It’s apparently the earliest-recorded example of a common locked-room trick, so it has historical interest going for it.Moving to something quite different, “The Twelve Figures of the World”, by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, gives us a mystery where the murder is perfectly ordinary, but the circumstances in which it takes place, an initiation ritual into a Mysterious Foreign Cult™, appear to show that reciting the signs of the Zodiac gives the initiate psychic powers. It’s atmospheric and the trick is a clever one, but because of that cleverness it’s very familiar and has been used by countless magicians in real life. It also assumes that immigrants are inherently hostile to those born in a country, which… no.Next up is the story recorded by Herodotus, “Rhampsinitos and the Thief”, which isn’t technically a mystery as it’s told from the point of view of the thief who loots the Pharaoh’s treasury. It’s also not a very clever solution, but it’s a cute story nonetheless, and is here mainly for historical interest as one of if not the oldest recorded locked-room mysteries (“Bel and the Dragon” might be older).We’re back to more traditional detective stories with Poul Anderson’s “The Martian Crown Jewels”, in which the titular jewels disappear from an unmanned spaceship in flight from Earth to Mars. The solution’s good and entirely fair (assuming you can remember enough high school physics), but the whole Martian Sherlock Holmes thing is a bit insufferable. After that comes Dudley Hoys’ “Leaving No Evidence”, a short fun tale of impossible disappearances in the snow. It’s not at all clued, but the solution is so ingeniously simple (if perhaps running more on coolness than plausibility) that it more than makes up for it. “The Venom of the Tarantula” by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay comes next, with the problem of how a bedridden old man gets his regular fix of spider juice (I’m not making that up) despite his family’s attempts to stop him. Like the previous story it’s well-written, but unlike “Leaving No Evidence” the solution is staring the reader in the face.The same can’t be said (at least in my opinion) for “Sir Gilbert Murrell’s Picture”, by Victor L Whitechurch, in which an entire carriage in the middle of a train vanishes in transit, and when it appears again it is without the valuable painting it had been carrying. The trick is delightfully clever, but there are two problems I had with the story: the detective identifies the thief but has to rely on the thief’s confession to learn how it was done; and the detective himself has this bizarre belief that the hired thief is worse than his aristocratic employer, which leads to a somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion.Szu-Yen Lin’s “The Miracle on Christmas Eve” is certainly more satisfying in that respect, though its sweetness borders on saccharine. A young boy’s bedroom is searched, the window and door locked and sealed with tape, while the boy, his classmates, and his father sleep in the corridor outside; naturally the next morning Santa Claus has filled the room with gifts and is seen flying away. That final aspect of the impossibility is a bit unlikely, but the rest of it is a clever use of misdirection, and it’s a nice change of pace to see an impossibility performed in the cause of good (an actual impossibility, that is; I’m still not over “The Hidden Law”).After this comes a one-and-a-bit page extract from a Finnish novel by Aleksis Kivi, “Seven Brothers”, giving the problem of and solution to how human footprints can change to those of a fox in the middle of a snow-covered field. It’s not really a detective story – the protagonist just stumbles across the solution – but it’s an elegant trick. The same can kind of be said about the trick in Afonso Carreiro’s “Lying Dead and Turning Cold” – it’s very simple, and impressive in its audacity – unfortunately it’s so simple that if it weren’t for the well-built atmosphere of supernatural horror no one would be mystified by how a man is strangled in the snow by a murderer who left no footprints. It doesn’t help that a witness says, “hey, this is just like a certain G K Chesterton story” and then the solution is exactly the same as in that Chesterton story. Like I said, the atmosphere of dread is built up really well, but the solution ends up a disappointment – Chesterton did it better.Edward D Hoch’s “The “Impossible” Impossible Crime” is next, giving us two men alone in a snowbound cabin in the wilds of northern Canada, whose friendship deteriorates until one of them is found shot, but not by the other. It’s a clever solution and the killer’s motive for doing it this way is adequately clued, but there aren’t many clues as to how it was achieved; the narrator just sits and thinks for a bit. I think it is solvable with a bit of thought, but there’s not much space in the story between the presentation of the relevant facts and the explanation.Next is Elizabeth Peters’ “The Locked Tomb Mystery”, which gives us a very nice depiction of Ancient Egypt and an impossible grave-robbing. Unfortunately it’s very restricted in possibility – the precise workings of the theft may elude you but there’s really only one person who could have done it. Nonetheless it’s a good story and a clever use of Egyptian culture. Samuel W Taylor’s “Deadfall” comes next; it’s a psychological thriller based around impossible footprints in the snow. The set-up is similar to “The “Impossible” Impossible Crime”, and the solution will be familiar to anyone reading these stories in order, but it’s effective and nicely creepy.“The Lure of the Green Door” by Rintarō Norizuki tells how the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Rintarō Norizuki (…okay) and a librarian friend investigate why an occultist’s widow refuses to fulfil her late husband’s will and donate his books to the library. It’s a noble cause indeed, and only made nobler when Norizuki realises the occultist’s death was no suicide and sets out to expose a killer. This is a very fun story to read, and has a truly ingenious locked room trick, but it’s not perfect: the scheme relies on a lot of accomplices, and there’s a bit of casual misogyny in the narration that threw me out of the story for a bit. But if you can get through those problems, it’s really good.After that comes Pietro de Palma’s “The Barese Mystery”, in which a bibliophile count is found dead in his locked study/sex room. There’s not much to say about this: it’s got a nice solution, but some relevant facts aren’t revealed to the reader until after the summation – it might be solvable nonetheless, but it still feels like a cheat. (There’s also a matter of personal preference: the murderer’s motive is sufficiently sympathetic that I’d have preferred it if they’d got away with it, but you can’t have everything.)Next we have “The Witch Doctor’s Revenge”, written by Jochen Füseler especially for this collection, and honestly I think they could have found better. The premise is good – a man is seen through a keyhole hanging upside down from the ceiling but when the door is broken open he’s vanished – and the deduction is explained well. There’s also a nice subversion of the racist “Darkest Africa”-type of pulp story we’re initially presented with. However, the detective’s female Watson is right out of that era, and ingenious as the solution is, it fails in an important detail: photographs have backgrounds. There’s another part of the solution that is ambiguously impossible due to the order of events, but I think if (to be as vague as possible) it could be done from outside, it would work fine. After this is “All the Birds of the Air”, in which a man is found bludgeoned to death in… an unlocked room watched by a suspect and by a policeman who fell asleep for a few minutes before the crime. And to add insult to injury, while the room is underground and thus windowless, it has an air shaft in the ceiling. The story’s perfectly entertaining, but the mystery isn’t.“The Warder of the Door” by L T Meade and Robert Eustace is a mystery rather than a crime: how can it appear that a ghost guards the door to a chamber containing a coffin in which no human lies buried? It’s focused more on horror than mystery, which in one way is to its benefit as the solution is wonderfully simple and as it is we’re given just enough detail for it to be uncanny without becoming obvious; however the horror didn’t work for me, and after the mystery is solved the ending is just a cop-out.Finally we have Soji Shimada’s “The Locked House of Pythagoras”. It’s a prequel to his novel “The Tokyo Zodiac Murders”, featuring that book’s detective as a schoolboy solving the murder of an artist and his mistress found in a locked room in a locked house with no footprints entering it. If you have a tolerance for precocious children outthinking the police it’s definitely worth a read: there’s an intricate interlacing of three puzzles that when put together illuminate what happened in that house. It’s very complex, and probably one to follow along with rather than try to solve (though that might just be me), but the complexity is such that I’m not sure if the kid detective is deducing some of the things he works out before visiting the house or just being told the answer by the author. I’m also not fully sure the maths he uses takes into account the tokonoma display space at the crime scene. Shimada does however give a satisfying explanation for why the murders were done the way they were, and despite my doubts about some of the deductions, the way all the pieces slot into place is very satisfying.So, in conclusion there are definitely more hits than misses in this collection, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the genre.
B**T
Five Stars
amazing book a great read
A**R
Writing Impossibly!
A very broad-based collection of "locked room"/ impossible crime fiction. The stories by international writers add another dimension to this work since they allow for the discovery of new writers while showing the universal appeal of the challenge to create impossible crime fiction. The intercalary presentation of true events/ accounts is also something new and worthy of note. Not all stories are of equal merit; some are rather contrived and not particularly well-written which is an ongoing issue with works that put puzzle and plot well ahead of phrasing and characterization. Nonetheless, a worthy contribution to this mystery sub-genre!
Trustpilot
2 days ago
1 month ago
