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So, back in May, I added "The Locked Library," a companion page to "The Muniment Room," which is a permanent, easy to edit update of "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Murders & Impossible Crimes" – essentially doubles as my version of "99 Novels for a Locked Room...
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Some months ago, I reviewed a short story from Edward D. Hoch's Captain Leopold series, "The Rainy-Day Bandit" (1970), which Alessandro favorably compared in the comments to the subject of today's review, "The Jersey Devil" – originally published in the October, 1971, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's...
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Back in 2022, I concluded my run of reviews of the lamentably short-lived, surprisingly classically-styled Inspector Floris Jansen series written by the Dutch editor, translator and chess player Peter Verstegen – who published his detective novels under the name "Ton Vervoort." A run of reviews...
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Last year, I tried the first of Benjamin Stevenson's Ernest Cunningham novels after some initial skepticism, but Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone (2022) sold me on Benjamin's hilarious, classically-styled meta whodunits and quickly followed it up with Everyone on This Train is a Suspect...
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In 2013, the Breakthrough Bandwagon Books translated and published over half a dozen short stories by MORI Hiroshi, associate professor, engineer and somewhat of an experimental mystery writer, which included two short stories in his popular S&M series, "Sekitō no yane kazan" ("The Rooftop...
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Last year, James Scott Byrnside published It's About Impossible Crime (2025), a collection of original short stories, in which he paid homage to MacKinlay Kantor's It's About Crime (1960) and radio director William Spier – who worked on The Adventures of Sam Spade and Suspense. Shortly after it's...
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P.J. Fitzsimmons' Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling (2023) is the seventh historical locked room comedy in the Anthony "Anty" Boisjoly series, sporting a title that could have been used for an episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You!, but "longer and more involved" than previous entries –...
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Last year, I looked at two pictorial novels, Henna ie (Strange Houses, 2021) and Henna e (Strange Pictures, 2022), written and crafted by the masked horror/mystery Youtuber "Uketsu" – which received mixed reception in these parts of the fandom. I enjoyed both as something straying off the beaten...
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Edward D. Hoch was the King of Short Stories, the Man of a Thousand Tales of Mystery and Detection, but, during his five decade run, Hoch also wrote a handful of novel-length mysteries like The Shattered Raven (1969), The Blue Movie Murders (1973) and a three-novel series of science-fiction hybrid...