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.
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
