'Impossible' Mystery Novels that Equal the best of Carr

[Patrick Gore]

This topic comes in response to the debate elsewhere on this site over the relative merits of Rim of the Pit and Mystery of the Yellow Room. Thus, it's not really off-topic...I hope.

Granted that JDC is the master of the impossible murder mystery genre, I wonder which impossible murder mysteries by other writers come closest to matching the excellence of Carr's best (like The Three Coffins and He Who Whispers and The Black Spectacles)?

This might be useful to those of us who have read most of the Carr and Dicksons and want to branch out.

Among the books I've read, I would nominate (in no special order) these novels as coming close to matching in ingenuity the best of Carr.

• Nicholas Blake, Thou Shell of Death
• Ellery Queen, The Greek Coffin Mystery
• Agatha Christie, Death in the Clouds
• Christianna Brand, Green for Danger
• Clayton Rawson, Death from a Top Hat

And IMO, perhaps the worst would-be Carr mystery is Randall Garrett's Too Many Magicians, which nevertheless appears on a lot of Best lists.


The ball is rolling......

[Dave]

Brian, what was the impossible aspect in Green for Danger. I just finished it and I don't recall anything that would be considered impossible.

And welcome to the forum

[Patrick Gore]

Originally Posted by Dave

what was the impossible aspect in Green for Danger. I just finished it and I don't recall anything that would be considered impossible.

And welcome to the forum

Thank you for the welcome! I was referring to the central puzzle: how a man can be suffocated on the operating table in plain view of six (I think) trained medics. But that may not be as puzzling as it was to me at 14/15 (when I first read it), since the way it was done was obvious to you. Or perhaps you are just too clever for Brand!

[stoke_moran]

The Innocence & Incredulity of Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton)
"In a Telephone Cabinet" (G.D.H. & M. Cole)
"Solved by Inspection" (Ronald A. Knox)
Busman's Honeymoon (Dorothy L. Sayers)

[Patrick Gore]

Originally Posted by stoke_moran

"Solved by Inspection" (Ronald A. Knox)

"Solve by Inspection" is definitely one of the best impossible murder stories -- what a perfectly simple, and yet ingenious, method!

[BlackAdder]

"Green for Danger" doesn't really involve an impossible crime, in fact the solution is pretty obvious (and has been used with variations in other mysteries). What is outstanding is the presentation of the problem, the way the reader is mislead so cleverly. No doubt, 'realists' would complain that any competent police investigation would have solved this case pronto. BTW, while this made a good movie with Alastair Sim, he was not really suited to the role of "Cockie." (Maybe it's his type-casting as Scrooge, not his fault, but there it is -- Cockie is NOT Scrooge, when you read the books.)

[Patrick Gore]

Originally Posted by BlackAdder

"Green for Danger" doesn't really involve an impossible crime, in fact the solution is pretty obvious (and has been used with variations in other mysteries). What is outstanding is the presentation of the problem, the way the reader is mislead so cleverly. No doubt, 'realists' would complain that any competent police investigation would have solved this case pronto. BTW, while this made a good movie with Alastair Sim, he was not really suited to the role of "Cockie." (Maybe it's his type-casting as Scrooge, not his fault, but there it is -- Cockie is NOT Scrooge, when you read the books.)

Well like I said, when I read it (when I was about 15) I was utterly baffled how the CO2 got in the Oxygen cannister. That despite the ingenious clue of the extra large hole in the second victim's apron. Perhaps it would be more obvious to me if I encountered it for the first toime tomorrow, but I can't test that out.

[BlackAdder]

Well, if one is talking about judgements made at the age of 15 or so, I have to say that I found Carr's "Castle Skull" the best mystery I'd ever read, much better than the "Shadow" stories I was into at the time.

[Patrick Gore]

Originally Posted by BlackAdder

Well, if one is talking about judgements made at the age of 15 or so, I have to say that I found Carr's "Castle Skull" the best mystery I'd ever read, much better than the "Shadow" stories I was into at the time.

Well. (Polite cough.) I've read Green for Danger since and still find it beautifully written and compelling, and ingeniously clued. I'm just admitting that it's impossible for me to really judge whether I could figure out the murder method if I were reading it for the first time now. I'm not relying upon my judgment as a 15-year-old -- though I believe there are several members here who are not much older than 15 and might be a little insulted by that posting.

[stoke_moran]

I wouldn't say insulted, but I do resent the implication that, when one was an adolescent, one didn't have enough intelligence to understand the books one was reading, or to make a sensible judgement on their quality. Good grief! I'd read most of Doyle and Christie by the time I was eleven, and my favourite writers at the age of fifteen were Carr, Blake, Queen and Mitchell. Incidentally, I read GREEN FOR DANGER in July 1999, about a week after my sixteenth birthday. I failed to spot the murderer, but I failed to spot the murderer in Brand's other works as well (including DEATH OF JEZEBEL, which I read late last year).

[BlackAdder]

Well, Nick, we all knew you were a child prodigy (I'm looking forward to the Gladys Mitchell book you edited for Crippen & Landru). I'd never underestimate the teenaged mind, after all having read "King Solomon's Mines" at the age of twelve and fully appreciating all the references to Sheba's breasts, and Gagool the Witch (in my mind still far more scarifying than Hannibal Lecter). I read the captions on the 3-D thingamajig they used to have, forget what it was called, but it was a binocular thing that had disks with film inserts that you'd click around to view all 8 or so of the pictures, complete with a 'full plot'. This was at the age of three, since my mother insisted on teaching me how to read before I ever had to deal with schools. (The first word I ever figured out for myself, never even having heard it spoken, was 'surveyed', as the second slot on "Sam Sawyer Goes to the Moon" showed him standing there with hand in 'surveying mode' over his eyebrows, and the caption under it was 'Sam Sawyer surveys the surface of the moon' -- had no problem with Sam, Sawyer, The, and Moon, but Surface was a brief struggle; Survey was what they call an epiphany, and when I told Mom, she quickly corrected my pronunciation of the word.)

Point is that these originally important books, even infantile reading matter, often lose importance with time, especially things like "The Shadow" and "Castle Skull" -- though I still like that sort of thing, in a different way. True classics like "King Solomon's Mines" never lose their freshness, and in fact I reread it with great enjoyment (see my web site entry: http://www.geocities.com/~betapisces...es/haggard.htm) a few years ago while going through a doldrum of interesting mysteries to be occupied with. Think of Wield (in Reginald Hill), whose only literary interest is Rider Haggard, or of Betteredge in "The Moonstone," whose Bible is "Robinson Crusoe."

But the sort of mysteries that appealed to me as a kid always seemed to involve the master criminal being the respectable old lady or the rich businessman or aristocrat of 'impeccable* reputation', and I always guessed who it was. Maybe that might interest a psychiatrist, but to hell with that.

*Defined by Ambrose Bierce in the wonderfully cynical "Devil's Dictionary" as 'not liable to detection'.

[BlackAdder]

...forget what it was called...

A stereoscope, what else? I must be going senile.

[Barry Ergang]

Originally Posted by BlackAdder

...forget what it was called...

A stereoscope, what else? I must be going senile.

Are you thinking of the Viewmaster?

[BlackAdder]

Yes indeed. (I still have it, and some of the disks, but God knows where I stashed it away.) But now I have to figure out what to do to get my old Avatar back. I sent one to Xavier (Bencolin) as being more apt than Dalziel, but somehow it ended up as my avatar. The members area allows you to upload avatars but doesn't seem to have any area where you can SELECT one from a panel.

[patrick_o]

Searching through old threads, I came up across this one, and just for the record, I wouldn't place AC's Death in the Clouds among the best locked-room/impossible novels ever. It moves very slow for my taste, and the

Spoiler

second murder is a bit unnecessary.