Miraculous Mysteries

Today sees the UK publication of Miraculous Mysteries, my collection of classic locked room and impossible crime mysteries for the British Library. I've always had a love of this paradoxical type of puzzle, and this book is dedicated to the memory of Bob Adey, the greatest expert on the subject, who guided me to so many hidden gems prior to his untimely death.

The first locked room detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Poe, was a short story, and I feel that the short form is best suited to the locked room puzzle, because of the necessarily fantastic nature of most of the plots. Of course, there are some fine novels featuring impossible crimes, and John Dickson Carr wrote a bunch of them. But I see these mostly as exceptions to the general rule.

As ever, I've tried to include a range of familiar and unfamiliar authors. We all know Conan Doyle, but Grenville Robbins is long forgotten. And so too is Marten Cumberland, even though he had a long and relatively successful career. I'm very pleased too that I've been able to include a little known story by Christopher St John Sprigg that I found highly enjoyable.

I'm delighted by the initial reaction to the book, including this splendid review. It would please me enormously if this book were to sell well, since there are plenty of good classic impossible crime stories around, and I'd love to put together a follow-up volume. But that lies far in the future. Right now, I'm celebrating this book, and I hope that it provides thousands of readers with plenty of entertainment.

The Raven - movie review

The Raven is a recent film that should have a lot going for it. The central character is Edgar Allan Poe, and the storyline involves a series of murders that bear an uncanny resemblance to Poe's bizarre and often horrifying stories. So there is a locked room crime reminiscent of the murders in the Rue Morgue, a "Pit and the Pendulum" slaying that is extremely gruesome, and so on. A great basis for a story, I'd say.

I'm a Poe fan. I love his stories, not just those five remarkable pioneering stories that established the detective fiction genre, but also the imaginative and melodramatic tales that are so memorable: The Cask of Amontillado and so on. He was a brilliant writer, even if (as the film indicates) his personal life was a mess. And he was a gifted poet, too.

There are a number of very good books about Poe. Julian Symons wrote one and so, much earlier, did Edward Shanks, himself a poet and an occasional crime writer and reviewer. Symons also wrote a Poe-inspired mystery novel, The Name of Annabel Lee, which is worth a read. Andrew Taylor's novel about Poe's youth, The American Boy, is very enjoyable, and John Dickson Carr wrote a fine short story featuring the great man.

Back to the film. I'm afraid it ranks as a missed opportunity. There are some neat touches, but the concept is undermined by a lack of subtlety. There are needless anachronisms, and the dialogue did not suggest a strong connection with the realities of Poe's world. There were one or two lines that might have come out of an Oprah Winfrey or Jeremy Kyle show.. And I know that "okay" is a term that may have been used in Poe's day, but its repeated use did not convince me in the context. In a film with so much potential, these were mis-steps. A real shame. I wanted to love The Raven, but in the end, I didn't.

Narratives of Enclosure

A brand new study of the locked room mystery has just been published – the first of its kind. The title is Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction, the author Michael Cook, and the publisher Palgrave Macmillan. It’s an expensive book, like so many academic texts, but I decided to treat myself.

In fact, the book is not quite what I expected, for a number of reasons. The author’s starting point is interesting. He suggests that Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” set a pattern for detective fiction with an emphasis on “enclosures, death and references to sequestered lives”. So although there is quite a bit of focus on Golden Age fiction, when – most people would accept, I think – the locked room mystery was in its hey-day, the book includes extensive discussion of some stories that one wouldn’t really associate with the locked room sub-genre. A key example is that splendid Charles Dickens story, “The Signalman”.

Seven of the eight chapters focus predominantly on specific authors. The obvious candidates, G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr, are among them. But so too are Dickens, Anna Katherine Green, Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Auster. This eclectic and surprising mix offers much food for thought.

A possible criticism of the book is that, at times, there seems to be almost as much discussion of academic studies of crime fiction as there is about individual locked room mysteries. Some excellent locked room mysteries are not even mentioned – for instance, Rim of the Pit, by Hake Talbot.

However, perhaps it is unfair to focus too much on omissions. All books of this kind have to be selective; there is no alternative. This is a thought-provoking book, and although I don’t see it as truly definitive as a study of its subject, it’s well worth a look if you are keen on studies of crime fiction.