Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes - Softcover

Martin Edwards; Kate Ellis; Margaret Frazer; John Dickson Carr; Michael Kurland; Edward D. Hoch; Lois H. Gresh; Robert Weinberg; Lynne Wood Block; Lawrence Block; Michael Collins; Clayton Rawson; Amy Myers; Thomas Bailey Aldrich; Melville Davisson Post

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841191299 ISBN 13: 9781841191294

Publisher: Robinson Publishing, 2000

Synopsis

This collection of criminal conundrums are more than whodunits, they're howdunits and are intended to stretch your powers of deduction to the limits.

About this title

Review:

Penzler Pick, February 2001: The very thing that first hooked me on mysteries long ago is the element most on display in this fat and satisfying volume: amazement. Not whodunit or why, but how. And that really means wow, as in, "Wow, I can't believe what I just read!" Such cases were originally the province of Edgar Allan Poe's Inspector Dupin, whose unraveling of such sensational "impossible" crimes as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" gave the reading public of an earlier era its appetite for gasp-inducing solutions. Just a few decades later the mystery genre had progressed to a more rational approach, with which Arthur Conan Doyle equipped Sherlock Holmes, though the crimes demanding our greatest sleuth's attention were highly fanciful more often than not. Snakes in airshafts menacing gentlewomen! Clubs restricted to redheaded fellows! Wow!

Next appeared the exceedingly baroque whimsies of John Dickson Carr, who eventually grew to feel the strain of being regarded as the Houdini of mystery literature. But before he saw his powers of invention begin to flag, Carr, who also wrote as Carter Dickson, had defined the subgenre of locked-room crime for all time, producing over 50 novels and dozens of short stories featuring some startling variations on the theme. The Hollow Man, published in the U.S. as The Three Coffins, is considered by experts to be this author's greatest achievement. It offers in the course of the story a seminal lecture about the locked-room crime.

In this bargain tome, Carr is represented by "The Silver Curtain," in which a man standing alone in a cul-de-sac is fatally stabbed in the back. From a less well-known writer, Clayton Rawson (a real-life magician as well as an authorial one), comes a tale written in response to a challenge by Carr, his friend and rival: make a man vanish from a phone booth. (He succeeds, of course.) Also on hand are four clever contemporary tricksters: Peter Lovesey, H.R.F. Keating, Lawrence Block, and Edward D. Hoch. There's almost too much entertainment value in these 29 tales assembled by veteran editor and mystery scholar Mike Ashley. "I've endeavored to bring together a collection of stories," he says, "that seem utterly baffling and where the solution is equally amazing." That's OK. Ration them, and you'll only savor them more. --Otto Penzler

About this edition

• Publisher: Robinson Publishing
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1841191299
• ISBN 13: 9781841191294
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512