My Mother, the Detective: The Complete "Mom" Short Stories (1997/2016) by James Yaffe

Around this time last year, I reviewed James Yaffe's second of four novel-length "Mom" mysteries, Mom Meets Her Maker (1990), which began as a series of short armchair detective stories that ran for sixteen years in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine – a total of eight stories were published from 1952 to 1968. Mom is the widowed mother of a New York homicide cop, Dave, who visits her every Friday night up in the Bronx together with his wife, Shirley. 

Over a home cooked dinner, Dave tells Mom about one of his tricky, difficult to solve murder case. After listening and some verbal sparring with Shirley, Mom asks three or four "simple questions" whose answers always prove to be very illuminating. Dave knows his mother has a "natural talent for seeing into people's motives and never letting herself be fooled by anybody," which "comes from her long experience with shifty-eyed butchers and delicatessen store clerks." So is usually able "to solve over the dinner table crimes that keep the police running around in circles for weeks." Yaffe revived the series two decades later and moved Mom and Dave from New York to the Mesa Grande, Colorado, where works as the chief investigator for the public defender's office. This period spanned four novel comprising of A Nice Murder for Mom (1988), Mom Doth Murder Sleep (1991), Mom Among the Liars (1992) and the previously mentioned Mom Meets Her Makes. Dave and Mom would make one last appearance in a short story, "Mom Lights a Candle" (2002), commissioned by Crippen & Landru and published as a limited edition chapbook of 353 copies.

It was Crippen & Landru that collected the original eight short stories, published as My Mother, the Detective: The Complete "Mom" Short Stories (1997), which received an enlarged edition in 2016 – adding "Mom Lights a Candle" to the line-up. This collection is generally highly regarded ("one of the most important contemporary collections of mystery short stories") and had been on my wishlist for years. I'm glad Mom Meets Her Maker brought My Mother, the Detective back to my attention as the enlarged edition really is a classic collection of armchair detective fiction. 

My Mother, the Detective also comes with a fascinating, must-read introduction in which Yaffe details how his ideas about the detective story went through three different phases. A journey that began when, as a kid, he became mesmerized by the ingenious puzzles the detective story presented. You have to remember Yaffe debuted as a 15-year-old on the pages of EQMM with his short-lived series about Paul Dawn and the Department of Impossible Crimes ("the detective story to me, in that stage of my life, was the puzzle and nothing but the puzzle"). Near the end of the Second World War, Yaffe discovered "real" literature and his attitude towards the genre became "one of hostility." A thankfully short-lived period as he returned to the genre 1952 and wrote his first Mom story to make money ("or at least that was what I told myself"), but really was moving into the second phase. Yaffe began to find a happy balance between the heart (character) and mind (plot) of the detective story. Douglas Greene, of C&L, has once said that the Paul Dawn series, as a whole, is not worthy of being bookformed. Yes, the series was written by a callow teenager whose only point of reference were "other detective stories" and a short story like "Cul de Sac" (1945) can only be described as a painful lesson, but that adds so much more value to the Mom series. A collection of Paul Dawn stories would make a nice contrast to the stories he would go on to write once he matured a little and gained experience. So let's take a closer look at these nine short stories. 

"Mom Knows Best," originally published in the June, 1952, issue of EQMM, which is the first recorded instance of Mom employing her ordinary common-sense to solve a murder over the dinner table. Dave has been investigating the murder of Vilma Degrasse, "a genuine platinum blonde," who's living in "a sort of high-class low-class hotel." She has plenty of male admirers buzzing around her. Three men visited her on the night of the murder. A desk clerk and elevator girl verified only those three men went up and came down again. And nobody else. So whodunit? Mom asks some of her wild and woolly questions, which often appear to be irrelevant to the case, but they're usually on the mark. They always lead to the correct solution. A quite a good solution placing this story among the best two or three in this collection. A good and solid series debut! 

"Mom Makes a Bet" first appeared in the January, 1953, issue of EQMM and is my favorite for several reasons. Dave is handling a poisoning case, "which is strictly open-and-shut," because the police knows who must have done it – a sweet, kindhearted and well-liked elderly gentleman. What really bothers Dave is the apparently preposterous motive. Irving is an elderly waiter who has been serving the customers of Krumholz' Grotto for 30 years, "always asking the customers about their illnesses and their babies, and remembering, their birthdays and anniversaries, and so on," but one customer took particular pleasure in picking on him. DeWitt Grady, an unlikable theatrical producer, always picked on him and on his latest visit he harassed Irving about not wanting salt in his noodle soup or he'll get terrible heartburn. Grady made such a fuzz that the owner himself, Krumholz, overlooked the order and even tasted a spoonful of the soup to make sure there was no salt in it. But when the soup was served, it was loaded with cyanide and Grady died on the spot. So "the poison must have been put in the soup after it left the kitchen and before it got to Grady," which leaves Irvin as the sole suspect.

Naturally, the kind, old man is completely innocent and that makes it the kind of impossible crime I always associate with Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) series. Mom's reasoning is sound and the best application of her Miss Marple Method that translated into one of Yaffe's better detective tales. More importantly, "Mom Makes a Bet" convinced me Yaffe's Mom series directly influenced Isaac Asimov's Black Widower short stories and believe it entirely possible Asimov modeled Henry on Irving. Just compare the solution of "Mon Makes a Bet" to the first Black Widower story, "The Acquisitive Chuckle" (1972; collected in Tales of the Black Widowers, 1974), which both reveal (SPOILER/ROT13) gur gjb jnvgref gb or fvzhygnarbhfyl vaabprag naq thvygl. Only flyspeck is that it shows Mom's deductions are at their most convincing when picking apart a tightly-knotted puzzle opposed to some of the looser, character-driven problems in other stories. Otherwise, a very well-done impossible crime story strangely overlooked in both Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) or Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019).

Unfortunately, "Mom in the Spring," published in the May, 1954, issue of EQMM, turned out to be the weakest story in the collection. The story began interesting enough with Dave and Shirley conspiring to find Mom a new husband and invited "the oldest and most eligible bachelor on the Homicide Squad," Inspector Millner, to their regular Friday night dinner in the Bronx. The dinner conversation traditionally turned to murder. Fittingly, the murder the Homicide Squad has on their hands involved, what can be called, a Lonely Hearts Killer and the victim is an elderly woman, Old Aunt Margaret. She had been lonely enough to put an ad in a personal column and began to receive letters from a tobacco planter in Louisville, Kentucky – named Thomas Keith. This infuriated her dotting nephew and his wife, Edward and Edith Winters, who were convinced Keith had designs on her money. And perhaps even her life. Aunt Margaret ends up being murdered and her body is discovered clutching a telegram from Keith. Unfortunately, the whole scheme is as see-through as plastic wrap and Mom's deductions a little shaky. But more than that, it feels like a missed opportunity. This should have been a non-series story of domestic suspense told from the perspective of Aunt Margaret, which would have made the arrival of the telegram something straight out of The Twilight Zone. Not a highlight of the collection. 

"Mom Sheds a Tear" originally appeared in the October, 1954, issue of EQMM and is as unusual a piece of crime fiction as it's interesting that reminded me of Anne van Doorn's "Het joch dat grenzen overschreed" ("The Brat Who Went Too Far," 2017). Dave tells Mom over dinner the sad story of the widowed Agnes Fisher and her 5-year-old son, Kenneth. They live in a four-story house in Washington Square and recent addition to the household is Kenneth's uncle, Nelson Fisher, who contracted malaria in the Pacific. And needed a place to recover. Kenneth first wanted nothing to do with his uncle, but, soon enough, he developed "a case of genuine, full-fledged hero-worship." However, he also began to steal items that belonged to his dead father. This comes to a tragic end when he's on the roof with his uncle and the latter takes a deadly tumble over the edge. Nelson Fisher exclaimed with his dying breath, "Kenny, why? Kenny, why?" Dave tells Mom that "all the indications are that little five-year-old Kenneth Fisher is a murderer," but Mom has her opinions on the matter and asks her usual questions. While the solution certainly is an interesting one, it also feels a little flawed as it reeks of (SPOILER/ROT13) gur nagv-Pbzvpf pehfnqr guvaxvat bs gur 1950f naq Lnssr zhfg unir orra njner bs guvf jrnxarff nf ur gevrq gb ervasbepr gur cybg ol znxvat Xraargu n ybaryl, sevraqyrff obl. A good and original premise, but flawed in it's execution. 

"Mom Makes a Wish" was first published in the June, 1955, issue of EQMM and is a short and sweet detective story. Dave and Inspector Millner have "a pretty depressing business on their hands" concerning a former college teacher, Professor Putnam, who went to seed after his wife died. He began to neglect his work, got fired and started drinking. So his daughter had to quite school to take care of his father, but he blames the dean who fired him. It goes without saying he was not very pleased when his daughter became engaged to Dean Duckworth's son and openly threatened to kill him ("and it won't be murder... it'll be an execution"). When the Dean is murdered in the street with a broken whiskey bottle, the situation looks grim for the ex-professor. Mom reasons an alternative solution from the psychology of the characters involved strengthened by some fine, physical clueing. 

"Mom Sings an Aria," published in the October, 1966, issue of EQMM marked the first of two returns of Mom, Dave and Shirley following an 11 year hiatus and poses a similar impossible problem as "Mom Makes a Bet." Dave asks Mom a tantalizing question, "maybe you can understand how a man could love music so much that he'd commit murder for it." The Metropolitan Opera House offers half an hour before every performance standing-room tickets, at two-fifty each, on a first-come first-served basis and opera lovers line up outside hours ahead of time – standing hours in line to stand for three hours during the opera. So a group of regulars have formed over the years and two of them, Sam Cohen and Giuseppe D'Angelo, can be labeled as stereotypical fanboys. For fifteen years, they have been arguing while waiting in line and their latest disagreement is over who's the greatest soprano alive today, Maria Callas or Renata Tebaldi? This argument got really heated as Cohen threatened to spoil the next performance of D'Angelo's favorite soprano, Tebaldi. The night Tebaldi sang Tosca, Cohen drank poisoned coffee D'Angelo had bought for him at a nearby cafeteria. So only he could have poisoned the coffee, or did he?

Technically, a really good impossible crime story and an even better take on the theatrical mystery as it shifted the focus from the stage to the audience. Not even the most classiest section of the audience. Very original! However, the problem is easily solved as the plot feels like an amalgamation of previous stories and, reading these stories back-to-back, you can't but notice certain plot-patterns Yaffe favored. So you can anticipate in which direction the solution is headed and spot the clues when they're dropped. Regardless, it's another good and solid entry in the series. 

"Mom and the Haunted Mink," originally published in the March, 1967, issue of EQMM and is a personal favorite as the premise of the plot would not have been out of place in Carter Dickson's The Department of Queer Complaints (1940). For years, Dr. Alfred McCloskey has been saving money and even took out bank loan to buy a mink coat for his wife, Mrs. Laura McCloskey. Dr. McCloskey had a lucky break and acquired a practically new mink coat at the reduced prize of five thousand dollars, which "would've cost three times as much at any retail store." However, the previous, now dead, owner vowed she would not allow any other woman wear it. Mrs. McCloskey swears the mink coat has a life of its own as it jumped off her shoulders during a party and, one night, saw "it slid across the floor" out to the foyer where it was found "wrapped around the handle of the front door." As if it tried to leave the house! This ends with Mrs. McCloskey being smothered in her bed, while home alone, which was done with something that left small bits of fur on her lips and in her nostrils. I'm a sucker for these kind of stories and loved the two-pronged solution to the problems. One part of the problem deals with the human element and the motives of the characters involved, while the second-part concerns the murder. And how one tragically lead to the other. Really liked it. 

"Mom Remembers," published in the January, 1968, issue of EQMM, is the longest story in the series and obviously intended to serve as an ending to the series, which can be read as a prequel or origin story for Mom. This story revealed she inherited detective talents from her mother, "a regular genius at solving crime," who solved small, petty problems in the neighborhood. Mother solved one murder when Mom's fiancé, Mendel, is arrested on suspicion of having murdered a woman he knows from work. The retelling of this 45-year-old murder case is interspersed with a sordid murder Dave is currently working on, which appears to be a simple, open-and-shut case. A teenage immigrant, Rafael Ortiz, is suspected of having stabbed a cabdriver during an attempted robbery and Dave himself was an eyewitness, but did he really do it? Mom comes to a different conclusion by drawing a parallel between the very different murder case ("a Jewish boy on the East Side, a Puerto Rican boy on the West Side") from the past and precedent. Characterization and storytelling take precedence over plotting, but a good story nonetheless and served its purpose as the originally intended end to the series.

Yaffe revived Mom and Dave in a short-lived series of mystery novels that lasted from 1988 to 1992, which is where the series would have actually ended had Crippen & Landru not commissioned one last short story in 2002, "Mom Holds a Candle" – published as one of their annual holiday chapbooks. The story served as second ending to the series tying the original run of short stories, sort of, to the novels as it's set in the Mesa Grande and Mom is now in her eighties. "Mom Holds a Candle" takes place over the holidays and Dave has a case on his hands that has "a lot to do with Hannukah." A man "was killed in the middle of a candle-lighting ceremony" and there are more than enough suspects and motives to go around ("injured husbands and outraged fathers, not to mention furious women with shooting experience"). The story appeared to be another instance of characterization and storytelling over plotting, but the ending has a nasty twist in its tail with a clue I completely missed. So another great and, this time, a permanent ending to the series. That's really an accomplishment. Not every Great Detective received a proper sendoff, if they even got one, but Mom got two really good and fitting endings to her detective career. And perhaps there's even a third curtain call as I've no idea how Yaffe ended Mom Among the Liars.

So, all in all, My Mother, the Detective turned out to be an excellently balanced collection of armchair detective stories in which Yaffe tried, and mostly succeeded, to find a way to merge the heart and mind of the modern and traditional detective story. And to do it with the figure of the armchair detective is nothing short of impressive! I always considered the armchair detective to be the genre's tribute to the ability of the human mind to consider and work out complicated problems, or puzzles, purely by reasoning from a comfortable armchair. But they tend to be incredibly plot-driven puzzle stories. There's never a lack of humanity, for better or worse, in the Mom stories. Yes, they're not all classics of their kind, but, from the nine stories collected here, only one truly disappointed ("Mom in the Spring") while another was a little questionable in execution ("Mom Sheds a Tear"). The very best stories, like "Mom Makes a Bet," can stand comparison with their Golden Age counterparts. Add to this Yaffe's personal journey as he struggled to reconcile his ideas about fiction as a adult with his childlike love for the Great Detectives, you have a collection of stories very much worth seeking out. Highly recommended!

Mom Meets Her Maker (1990) by James Yaffe

James Yaffe was an American professor of English and mystery writer who debuted aged 15 with "D.I.C." in the July, 1943, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that introduced his first series-character and head of the NYPD's Department of Impossible Crime, Paul Dawn, who appeared in half a dozen short stories – published in EQMM between 1943 and 1946. A regrettably uneven, short-lived series that peaked with the brilliant "The Problem of the Emperor's Mushrooms" (1945) and hit a low with "Cul de Sac" (1945). By the 1950s, the training wheels had come off and Yaffe created two new series-characters more closely aligned with Rex Stout and Ellery Queen than the John Dickson Carr inspired Paul Dawn stories. 

Dave is a detective on the New York Homicide Squad who visits his Jewish Mom every Friday in the Bronx to tell her about his latest unsolved murder case and "between the chopped liver and the strudel she always managed to solve it," which made him an inspector before he was forty. Dave and Mom appeared in eight short stories from 1952 to 1968 and were collected in My Mother, the Detective (1997). A collection Mike Grost highly praised as "one of the most important contemporary collections of mystery short stories" with plots "as good as those in classical writers" like Agatha Christie. My Mother, the Detective received an enlarged edition with an extra story, "Mom Lights a Candle" (2002), but Dave and Mom had a real revival in the late 1980s and early '90s. 

Yaffe revived Dave and Mom in four novel-length mysteries, published between 1988 and 1992, but the series had some notable changes in scenery and format. 

Dave is now a widower and moved from New York to Mesa Grande, Colorado, where he become the chief investigator for the public defender's office, but disliked leaving his 75-year-old mother behind in her New York apartment – who had to find another pastime now that her "homicidal connection was cut." Playing detective was among "the greatest pleasures of her life" and she always looked forward to Friday evenings. So she moved to Mesa Grande as she was pleasantly surprised to discover "people kill each other just as easy in the Southwest as they do in the Northeast." Dave had enough cases with unusual features on his plate to keep his mother from being bored. 

Mom Meets Her Maker (1990) is the second novel in the series and takes place during Christmas week. The story begins with a case grabbed from the headlines, "Minister Shot in Anti-Christmas Assault; Harvard Student Held for Attempted Murder," which played out a little differently than reported in the only newspaper of Mesa Grande.

Abe and Sarah Meyer retired to Mesa Grande, where they bought a one-story house with their savings, living not uncomfortably on Social Security and Abe's pension, but lately, their "paradise turned into hell." Two years ago, the Reverend Chuck Candy moved into the house next door with his family and nothing happened until last November. Candy began to extravagantly decorate his house until it resembled "the Christmas display window of a metropolitan department store" complete with lights, "flickering on and off in five different colors," across the roof, windows and statues of Santa Clauses, the Virgin Mary and Child. All of it "outlined in bright garish orange neon," also flickering on and off, while the lawn Santa Clauses make "appropriate ho-ho noises." There were also loudspeakers blaring thunderous Christmas carols from early morning to late into the night, which attracted a lot of sightseers. That began to take its toll on the Meyers.

So when their son, Roger Meyer, comes home from Yale and saw the nervous, frayed state of his parents, he goes next door to confront Candy, but it becomes an altercation in which a gun is drawn and fired – leading to Roger being arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. The case ends up on the desk of the Public Defender and Dave's boss, Mrs. Ann Swenson, who immediately find themselves caught in a two-way fight. They have to ensure Roger gets the best possible defense guaranteed by the American Constitution, but Arthur T. Hatfield, of the Mesa Grande Republicam-American newspaper, is making a personal crusade out of a Jewish, out-of-town student shooting a local Christian minister over Christmas lights and music. Already accusing the local authorities of being soft on crime and allowing "their hearts bleed for the lawbreaker" at the expense of his victim.

Mom nudged Dave in a direction casting a more sobering light on the Christmas decoration fracas and potentially good news for Roger, but then Candy is shot and killed in his own home. His body was found in the living room practically under the Christmas tree, which is very relevant. A wounded and dying Candy opened a present with crayons and wrote a dying message on the carpet, "GOLD, FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH."

An incomprehensible dying message that the local police has no use for as they bloody shoeprints in the hallway and fingerprints on the murder weapon incriminating Roger Meyer. There's even a witness who saw Roger entering the home around the time of the murder and came running out five minutes later "looking very agitated." Since he's nowhere to be found, the case against Roger looks very grave. Even worse is that Dave and Swenson have to contend with different parties who, for one reason or another, try to muscle in on the case. The local chapter of the ACLU (The American Civil Liberties Union) wants to take over the defense and they can get a well-known lawyer, Victor Kincaid, who "had defended every radical and war protester and activist in sight" during the 1960s. Swenson knows what he wants to defend is a symbol. Not a person. So he wouldn't shy away from making a media spectacle out of the case with Roger's life hanging in the balance. On the other hand, there's the small town politics with demands Roger pleads guilty to second-degree murder to prevent damaging the reputation of a town currently undergoing considerable growth.

All of this takes place against the preparations and eventual celebration of Christmas with Santa Clauses doubling in the streets every day, the traditional lightening of Christmas Tree and a never-ending stream of Christmas songs and movies on the radio and television – while "Joy to the World" was being caroled all over town. You're advised to pay close attention to these festive scenes or you might miss something very clever and subtle that went unacknowledged in Mom's solution.

So, right up until the ending, my impression is that Mom Meets Her Makes was nothing more than one of those modern, lightweight mysteries (borderline cozy), but with the serious frown of a contemporary crime novel. Well, I lived up to my reputation as a fallible armchair detective. You see, I wrongly assumed I spotted the key to the dying message that identified the murderer with only the motive requiring a bit of educated guesswork, which turned out to be a trap. A very, very deep trap as Yaffe went full-blown Ellery Queen with twists and false-solutions. Every single false-solution could have ended the story without leaving me disappointed at the end. Mom Meets Her Maker gloriously broke with that long-standing tradition of the false-solution(s) outshining the correct one! Yaffe interestingly wrapped up the false-solutions in the title of the book. 

Mom Meets Her Maker opens and closes with Mom praying to God and asking for guidance, because she has not told the whole truth and has a crisis of conscience. What she has withhold from her son and the authorities gives one last and correct interpretation of the dying message, which has the kind of religious imagery that can be found in EQ. It's a shame Frederic Dannay was no longer alive when the book first appeared. He would have loved this seasonal, 1990s take on The Glass Village (1954) stuffed with all his favorite plot ingredients!

Lastly, I have to go back to Mom as an interesting specimen of the armchair detective. Dave regularly reports back to her and, while he eats, she listens and "no detail, no matter how trivial, ever escapes from that rat-trap memory of hers." She does some sleuthing on her own and, while that happens off-page, it makes her a very active armchair who works on her feet. Whether she's feeding her son or talking to people under the guise of being social, Mom is gathering and piling on the details to make up her case. So I can see how the original run of short stories may have influenced Isaac Asimov's Black Widower series. Yaffe's Mom and Asimov's Henry are two characters cut from the same cloth. 

Mom Meets Her Maker is a remarkable addition to the lineup of seasonal-themed detective novels doing the murder around Christmastime the American way. Exuberantly loud! No quiet, snowed-in mansion in the British countryside, but a town decorated from one end to another complete with gunfire, petty, small town politics and a bit of religious strife. What's hiding underneath, like a wrapped present, is a first-rate, EQ-style detective story with multiple false-solutions superbly making use of the dying message trope. There are surprisingly few classic dying message novels, or even short stories, but Yaffe's Mom Meets Her Makes can be counted among those few classics.

Nothing is Impossible!

"The human mind; what a magnificent mechanism! Properly applied it creates miracles. Nothing, basically, is impossible..."

- Brooke (The Newtonian Egg).

Open any anthology of detective stories, published in the pass thirty years, and chances are that most of them contain one or more stories penned by the unequalled Edward D. Hoch – one of the last giants of the genre until he passed away in 2008. He wrote over 900 (!!!) short stories and appeared in every issue of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine from May 1973 until several months after his death. That's an unbroken streak of publications lasting nearly four decades! But his real legacy will be that of the modern master of the impossible crime story.

He was probably more prolific than John Dickson Carr himself, the acknowledged master of all things impossible, and was just as original as Joseph Commings when it came to finding new ways to dispatch people to the great hereafter that completely flies in the face of reality.

Hoch put his prodigious mind and diabolic creativity to use to create such baffling situations as a man jumping from a skyscraper on the top-floor, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground several hours later; fresh corpses turning up in recently unearthed coffins and time capsules; an old haunted oak tree with branches that strangles everyone going near it; a man sitting alone in his car is murdered while stuck in a traffic jam and a shower that miraculously starts spitting daggers are only a few examples.

In All But Impossible! (1981), however, he gives the stage to his fellow composers in crime and allows them to show what tricks are hidden up their sleeves. Unfortunately, this collection turned out to be the usual mixed bag of treats and subsequently touches on all the weak and strong points of a short story collection. There are a handful of stories that you'll absolutely love, some will make you want to chuck the darn book across the room, a couple you've probably seen one time too many in other collections and a few of them have no business being there.

But enough of this palaver, let's take them down from the top:

The Shadow of the Goat by John Dickson Carr

This is one of the first impossible crime stories that John Dickson Carr put to paper, for his school news sheet during his undergraduate days, and introduces the first of his recurring detectives: M. Henri Bencolin. He's a cunning prefect of the Parisian police whose coal black eyes, pointed beard and hair parted in the middle and turned up like horns gives him a Mephistophelean appearance – and his menacing ambience strikes fear in the heart of many. However, he has not yet morphed into the theatrical devil of the novels here and merely provides the answer as to how a man could've vanished from a watched room, commit a murder, and disappear a second time during a disturbed attempt at a second murder. The story has all the familiar elements of later day Carr, but misses its refinement. 

There are more of John Dickson Carr's earlier forays into the mystery genre collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980) – a posthumous compilation showing him grow as a writer from infancy to adulthood. Highly recommended!

The Little House at Croix-Rousse by Georges Simenon (translated by Anthony Boucher)

The literary father of Inspector Maigret wasn't really known for honoring the traditional detective story, but one of his first tales was a full-fledged locked room mystery – in which a man is shot in an empty house surrounded by an observant battalion of policemen. The solution, easily deduced, anticipates John Dickson Carr by nearly a decade, but the whodunit angle leaves its reader with an unnecessary sense of disappointment.

The Problem of the Emperor's Mushrooms by James Yaffe

Paul Dawn, the only member of the Homicide Squad's Department of Impossible Crimes, listens to Professor Bottle's historical account of the murder of the Roman Emperor Claudius – and the impossible angle to his demise. A poison was administered in his favorite dish of mushrooms that didn't affect the Emperor's food-taster, but threw him in a violent convulsion. I reveled at the double layered structure of the story, that runs for only 14 pages, and James Yaffe, who was only sixteen at the time he wrote it, should be commended for it. A thoroughly enjoyable and sagacious story! 

Douglas Greene had the following to say about this series when I asked if the stories were ever collected in a book: "Emperor's Mushrooms is far and away the best of the lot" and "the others have their moments but I don't think the series as a whole is worthy of being bookformed."  

Still, I wish stories like those from the Department of Impossible Crimes were more easily available for sampling to us that represent the next generation of enthusiastic mystery addicts.

From Another World by Clayton Rawson

This story was the result of a sporting challenge between Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr, in which they competed against one another to see who could come up with the best possible solution to the following premise: a murder has taken place in a room that's not only locked from the inside, but also completely sealed shut with tape! It's one of Rawson's finest tales and I think it won him this little wager with the grandmaster himself.

You can find John Dickson Carr's answer to this challenge in He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944) – published under the byline Carter Dickson.

Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

A carefully crafted persecution story, in which a young woman lost two great teaching jobs because students and staff were frightened by her ghost-like doppelganger haunting the school grounds. It's an innovative approach to the impossible problem, but like vanishing houses and trains the possible solutions are limited – and every observant reader will stumble to the identity of the perpetrator and motive before the end of the story. However, you can't help but take pleasure in how expertly all the plot threads are tightly woven together. Helen McCloy was an excellent plotter!

This story was extended into a full-length novel and published under the same title in 1950. 

Snowball in July by Ellery Queen

As far as I can tell, finding a logical and rational explanation as to how an entire train, including its cargo of passengers, could've evaporated in between two train stations hasn't been attempted since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle broached the idea in his 1898 short story, "The Lost Special." The solution in this story isn't as spectacular as the one in Doyle's story, but it's one of the few, if not the only, alternative solution to this problem – and it's a workable one at that! 

The Newtonian Egg by Peter Godfrey

The smallest of all locked room mysteries, in which a terminal ill man lectures from his hospital bed on Jacques Futrelle and John Dickson Carr – eats a spoonful of egg, after cracking its perfectly sealed shell, and almost immediately succumbs of cyanide poisoning. So how could poison be introduced in a sealed egg without penetrating its exterior? The answer isn't half as clever as you might expect from such a tantalizing premise and left me a little bit disappointed. The problem required a grander solution.

The Triple-Lock'd Room by Lillian de la Torre

Dr. Sam Johnson and James Boswell try to protect a woman who has confined her concerns regarding the safety of her jewels to them and fix her door with a triple lock, but that didn't stop this apparently invisible prowler from slipping into the room and stabbing her to death. The idea and characters were promising, but the solution De la Torre flings at her readers is one that should've only been uttered by a very dense Hastings-type of character, before being laughed out of the room, or at best proposed as a tongue-in-cheek false solution.

The Brazen Locked Room by Isaac Asimov

This is one of those gimcrack stories that makes you scratch your head in utter amazement at what the anthologist was thinking in adding it to the lineup. It's a pure fantasy tale, in which a miserable man makes a pact with a demon for 10 years of happiness in exchange of becoming a demon himself, and as a final test he has to escape from a solid bronze room – using his newly acquired demonic powers. I kid you not!

The Martian Crown Jewels

The third real dud in a row and another complete waste of space, that could've been used to reprint one of the many uncollected impossible crime stories by such short story specialists as Joseph Commings and Arthur Porges. But instead we get a pseudo-futuristic acid hallucination about a giant talking space chicken, who fancies himself the Martian equivalent of our Sherlock Holmes, looking into a bunch of purloined stones – and a failure to retrieve them may threaten relations between Earth and Mars. Yeah, I'm tapping out on this one.

The Day the Children Vanished by Hugh Pentecost

Hugh Pentecost picks up the slack in this fascinating story, in which a small town is thrown into panic when a school bus of children drives into a dugway and never comes out on the other side – and the solution is as clever as it is simple. But it's not just another cannily plotted locked room mystery, it's also a very well told story in its own right with a smashing end. I also dug the character Pentecost casted for the role of detective and the way in which he confronted the culprits. Possibly my favorite story of the collection!

As If by Magic by Julian Symons

Well, I learned something from this story: Symons wasn't only a first-class prick but also a hypocrite of the first water! You can't go around passing judgment on your contemporaries, for lacking a sense of realism, and than churn out a two-bit short-short, in which a typical amateur detective just so happens to be present at the same amusement pier where a murderer, before disappearing in the masses, starts stabbing away at someone and is invited by the police to help solve the case. Oh wow, that surely gave the genre a much-needed dose of reality, eh? 

I could've forgiven him this blatant hypocrisy, if he had shown Carr and Talbot how the impossible crime story should've been done and came up with something dazzling. But this is just petty and amateurish at best.

The Impossible Theft John F. Suter

This really pains me to say, but I'm developing a slight aversion for this wonderful story. It's a clever little nugget about a bet that involves the theft of a document from a tightly secured vault. The solution is brilliant and can be explained in one short sentence and the first time you read it you probably want to kick yourself, however, I have seen this story too often – and anthologists really aren't doing us a service by continues reprinting it (clever though it is). We're all very familiar with Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," and Chesterton's "The Oracle of the Dog." Now give us something we haven't read before and haven't already, at least, a dozen copies of in our collection!

Mr. Strange Takes a Field Trip by William Brittain

This pleasant, but minor, diversion tells of a very improbable disappearance of a valuable golden mask from a museum, and the only ones who were swarming that floor at the time was a school teacher and his class. At first, everyone assumes it's a pranks from two boys who sneaked off on their own, but when a search of the floor fails to turn up the missing artifact their protest starts to carry some weight – and there teacher turns detective and comes up with a solution that is both original as well as amusing.

No One Likes To Be Played for a Sucker by Michael Collins

Michael Collins is apparently one of those authors who effortlessly blends hardboiled story telling with a classic locked room puzzle. Here his one-armed private eye, Dan Fortune, is hired to keep taps on someone's business partner, but murder rears its ugly head and it involves a locked room angle. However, Collins takes a turn on that well-trodden path that leads to a slightly different hermitically shut door. The ending involves a particular kind of tough justice fitting for a story about a hardboiled gumshoe.

I really enjoy it when writers like Bill Pronzini and Michael Collins let their private eyes take on a good old-fashioned locked room mystery. It's a nice change of pace from the usual haunted mansions, harboring a boarded up room that kills its occupants, and other supernatural menaces who apparently run amok on this plane of reality.

The Arrowmont Prison Riddle by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini himself also provides a story for this volume of locked room riddles and his impossible problem boosts one of the most convoluted solutions I have ever come across in a short story of this kind, but what a firework display of ingenuity and imagination! The quandary the reader has to ponder over here is how a convicted murderer, a mere minute after his execution, could've vanished from a locked and watched execution shed after being dropped through its roof with a stiff rope pulled tight around his neck. Like I already pointed out, the solution is very convoluted and even knottier than its premise, but you really have to admire anyone who can dream up such a plot. John Dickson Carr would've definitely approved!

This one competes with Huge Pentecost's "The Day the Children Vanished" as the standout story of this anthology.

Box in a Box by Jack Ritchie

This story, in which a man is discovered unconscious next to his dead wife, inside a locked bedroom, and the solution the detective comes up with is only acceptable because Jack Ritchie had his tongue firmly placed in his cheek – and that's how it should be done if you're going to present the reader a hackneyed explanation like that. Yes, I'm looking at you Lillian de la Torre!  

The Number 12 Jinx by Jon L. Breen

I don't know the first thing about baseball, but this story has me intrigued and from what I gather, it’s part of an entire series of puzzle-orientated sports mysteries featuring Ed Gorgan – a major league umpire who regular sheds his sports cap for a deerstalker. In this story he look into a baseball player who, after insisting on playing as the club's jinxed number 12, disappeared under baffling circumstances. Good story, but not the most solvable one of the collection if you're absolutely clueless about the game – like yours truly.

Crippen and Landru (who else?) put out an entire collection under the title Kill the Umpire: The Calls of Ed Gorgan (2003). I think I might take a swing at this collection in the near future. It could be fun and at leasts provides a change of pace

The Magician's Wife by J.F. Peirce

The titular magician makes the equally titular wife disappear in front of a captivated crowd of policeman and their assistant, his sister-in-law, accuses him of having murdered her sister. Nothing really special, but fun enough to read.  

The Problem of the Covered Bridge by Edward D. Hoch

This is the first recorded case of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a small town medical practitioner who constantly runs into seemingly impossible murders in the small town of Northmont (Jessica Fletcher has nothing on him!), and this story has him arriving in town and setting up his practice. But the problem that requires his attention the most is the inexplicable vanishing of a horse-and-buggy from a covered bridge. The story is OK, but Hoch hadn't found his stride yet with this series. He threw some really good and even more baffling miracle problems at Dr. Hawthorne as the series progressed. I'm particular fond of "The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery," which was also the first Hoch story I ever read.

There are two collections from this series available: Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) and More Things Impossible (2006). A third collection, Nothing is Impossible (20??), is planned for the very near future.