A translator's trials and tribulations

Things will inevitably slow down here on the blog now, as the main part of my impossible project has now been dissected and discussed from beginning to end, with the last three posts being some kind of abstract presenting you with the most important and the greatest short stories of the genre.

There will be follow-ups where I try to see what would happen if I were to try to create my own anthologies of the material, but so as not to burn myself out (nor any patient reader of this blog) on the impossible mystery genre - as if that could happen! - such follow-ups will have to wait.

So, what instead? Well, to begin with we'll go on a tangent from this project. During the course of my postings here you'll probably have seen that I am also in the process of translating the bulk of these stories. This translation project is entirely for myself - at this moment.

I've been doing this translating thing since at least the late 90s, when I began by translating all Agatha Christie short stories into Swedish. All her novels were already translated, and there were maybe 50 short stories or so that hadn't been translated. I just thought that they really should be, if for nothing else than just so I could read them in my own language.

This means that it is something done entirely for my own pleasure, and I try to make it as pleasurable for myself as well. After all, if it's something I'll probably never see any kind of remuneration from, I don't want it to get boring as well...

Not that I'd mind if someone would give me some...

What I try to do is to vary my translations a bit, skipping from a story by one author to another. I also try to have two different stories going at the same time, so I can switch over when I've grown tired of one author's particular writing tics. This is to the advantage of my peace of mind, but to the detriment of speedy translations. Because if I'd concentrate on one author and translate all their stories and then move on to another, I'd get more and more used to that author's shtick and that would make translating it easier. But more boring, as I said.

My main problem as a translator is that I'm too faithful to the original English text, which means that some turns of phrase sound less idiomatic in Swedish than they would if they were originally spoken or written by a Swedish speaker. It's not a huge problem, because most Swedes speak English rather well and their speech and writing is quite influenced by English anyway. Still it's something I'd like to move away from more.

Swedes are generally better at English than this

How does this translating lark work then? Well, I sit in front of the computer with a word processing programme (I refuse to use the word "app" for things I have on my computer - apps are for smartphones and tablets) with the English story in front of me on the desk. I'm fairly proficient in the English language (I hope you'll agree), so generally I just go along merrily. When I stumble on a word I'll just go over to Google translate and in 99 % of all cases they'll help me out so I can continue. The remaining 1 % - often specialised words that don't feature in a general thesaurus - can almost always be solved by some extra googling and/or visits to Wikipedia.

I'll shamefacedly admit that sometimes I will actually skip translating a word if it hasn't been solved by the above measures. After all, some words have no importance in the big picture of telling the story, they just add colour to the whole thing. This is just a last resort though, and of course it doesn't apply when the word in question actually has an importance to the plot.

The hardest thing to translate are word clues, particularly riddles and clues for some kind of treasure hunt. Sometimes it's possible to make them into Swedish ones, but problems arise when a clue is supposed to be interpreted in more ways than one in order to create false leads. It has happened that I had to give up and just used the English clue as is.

This was fairly hard to translate, for example.

Another fairly interesting and difficult thing which arises from translating mystery stories is the fact that sometimes things are revealed in a story that are later shown to have a very different meaning. Because I am translating the stories on the go, without actually re-reading them immediately before starting - another thing I do to keep the work less boring - sometimes I will notice that something I translated a certain way earlier on will have to be changed now to comply with the intended meaning of the author.

Translating a regular short story (say between 10 and 15 pages) takes me two-three days. Of course that's not eight work hours a day. The way I work with the translations - and the fact that I actually hold a real job as well - means that I'll just put in at the most a couple of hours translation work with a particular story a day. I might do four or five pages in one sitting before moving on to doing some real work or simply to another story or just some regular procrastination. And one such sitting will probably take between half an hour and one hour. And I don't do any translating during the weekends.

As I've been doing this translating thing for quite a long time now, any time I read a story in English I will invariably find myself translating everything in my head as I read it. It makes for a quite annoying reading habit...

What am I translating at the moment then? Well, I just finished James Yaffe's "Department of Impossible Crimes" yesterday. It was a fairly easy translation, where the only potential problem lay in the crossword puzzle clue. But since that was a very straightforward clue I didn't need to do any restructuring and could simply focus on translating it as is. I'm also in the middle of translating Joe Commings's "X Street Murders", which hade a few boring ballistic related terms that I shortened down, and as I've finished the Yaffe story I'll soon start on to Ed Hoch's "The Problem of the Pink Post Office".

Anyway, time to round off a fairly useless placeholder post. I hope you found it moderately interesting to consider what a translator has to go through, even if it's just a hobby.

The best of the rest

This third and final instalment will collect those stories that a mystery buff will need to have read to get a full understanding of the impossible mystery genre. So only if you've read the stories in my last three posts can you know whether you're actually an impossible mystery fan. :)

Some of the below stories are out and out classics, and some are quite innovative to boot. Others are just great stories that bring solid surprises to the reader. And yet others belong to both categories. Bolded titles are classics, titles in italics indicate truly great stories, a must-read for any mystery fan. If a story got neither bolded nor italicised, it's still a great story that I really think you should read. But you can wait till you've read the rest...

Edgar Jepson & Robert Eustace	The Tea Leaf	1925
G. D. H. Cole & Margaret Cole	In a Telephone Cabinet	1928
Nicholas Olde	Invisible Weapon	1928
Ronald Knox	Solved by Inspection	1931
Lord Dunsany	The Two Bottles of Relish	1932
Vincent Cornier	Duel of Shadows	1934
Ellery Queen	Lamp of God	1935
Agatha Christie	The Dream	1937
Agatha Christie	Dead Man's Mirror	1937
Cornell Woolrich	The Room with Something Wrong	1938
Ellery Queen	The Dauphin's Doll	1948
Fredric Brown	The Laughing Butcher	1948
Helen McCloy	Through a Glass, Darkly	1948
Peter Godfrey	Newtonian Egg	1951
Hugh Pentecost	The Day the Children Vanished	1958
John F. Suter	The Impossible Theft	1964
Stephen Barr	The Locked House	1965
William Krohn	The Impossible Murder of Dr Satanus	1965
Christianna Brand	The Gemminy Crickets Case	1968
Peter Godfrey	Flung-Back Lid	1979
H. Edward Hunsberger	Eternally Yours	1985
Peter Lovesey	Amorous Corpse	2000
J. A. Konrath	On the Rocks	2004
Soji Shimada	The Locked House of Pythagoras	2013
Rintarō Norizuki	The Lure of the Green Door	2014
Szu-Yen Lin	The Miracle on Christmas Eve	2016

The rest of the stories from my original list - those that haven't been featured in these last three posts - are just indications of what I think are enjoyable impossible mystery stories. They won't always be to everyone's taste - I mean, TomCat doesn't like John Basye Price's "Death and the Rope Trick", and he's still pretty well versed in impossible mysteries - but generally they're all worthwhile as mysteries.

Impossible mystery masterpieces

In keeping with the frightful punning the headline of this post has a double meaning. This post will certainly contain a list of masterpieces within the impossible mystery genre, but also ensure that they are pieces by impossible mystery masters, which I think is an important distinction to make.

So what is then an impossibly mystery master? My definition would be that such a person would have to be one of the following:

1) an author who is not very prolific but wrote (almost) exclusively in the impossible mystery field, e.g. Hake Talbot, John Sladek, Clyde B. Clason, Joseph Commings, Clayton Rawson
2) a more prolific author where if not the majority, then at least a significant portion of his or her contribution to the mystery genre is in the impossible mystery field, e.g. John Dickson Carr, Edward D. Hoch, Bill Pronzini, Arthur Porges, Paul Halter

I think it's worthwhile to use this second meaning, because it means that folks like Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen - who most certainly are mystery masters - do not fall into this category. It also removes several one-off stories that are really great but can be saved for another post. This poor blogger needs to scale down on the number of stories to make the posts more manageable...

But because of the first meaning of the headline, these stories need to be masterpieces, we cannot just dump everything written by the authors mentioned above here. It needs to be their very best works - the tales you can return to later when you're a seasoned impossible mystery expert (hrmph) and still find things to enjoy and be impressed with.

Therefore, I present to you this curated list. I've tried to keep it to at most five stories by each author, though in some cases that was extremely hard to do... I've bolded one story from each author that I think you should try out, if you absolutely must limit yourself to just one.

Arthur Porges	Coffee Break	1964
Arthur Porges	Murder of a Priest	1967
Arthur Porges	No Killer Has Wings	1960
Bill Pronzini	Cloud Cracker	1994
Bill Pronzini	Proof of Guilt	1973
Bill Pronzini	The Arrowmont Prison Riddle	1976
Bill Pronzini	Thin Air	1979
C. Daly King	The Episode of the Vanishing Harp	1935
Clayton Rawson	From Another World	1948
Clayton Rawson	Off the Face of the Earth	1949
Stuart Towne	Death out of Thin Air	1940
Stuart Towne	Ghost of the Undead	1940
Edward D. Hoch	Captain Leopold and the Ghost Killer	1974
Edward D. Hoch	The 'Impossible' Impossible Murder	1968
Edward D. Hoch	The Leopold Locked Room	1971
Edward D. Hoch	The Long Way Down	1965
Edward D. Hoch	The Vanishing of Velma	1969
Hake Talbot	The Other Side	1990
John Dickson Carr	Persons and Things Unknown	1938
John Dickson Carr	The Silver Curtain	1939
John Dickson Carr	The House in Goblin Wood	1947
John Dickson Carr	The Third Bullet	1937
John Dickson Carr	The Wrong Problem	1936
John Sladek	By an Unknown Hand	1972
Joseph Commings	The Black Friar Murders	1948
Joseph Commings	Death by Black Magic	1948
Joseph Commings	Ghost in the Gallery	1949
Joseph Commings	The X Street Murders	1962
Joseph Commings & Edward D. Hoch	Stairway to Nowhere	1979
Paul Halter	Jacob's Ladder	2014
Paul Halter	Murder in Cognac	1999
Paul Halter	The Abominable Snowman	2002
Paul Halter	The Flower Girl	1998
Paul Halter	The Tunnel of Death	1993

This might be the best list of impossible crime stories I've ever seen, if I may say so myself... I'd recommend any of these stories to anyone who wanted to see what an impossible mystery short story might be like.

Pioneers and innovators - the impossible mysteries BC

This category of stories contains the stuff from the 1800s and early 1900s. It's a bit arbitrary where to draw the line. Many will say that E. C. Bentley was the author who brought the mystery genre into the modern era (for whatever meaning of "modern" that you want to use) by writing "Trent's Last Case". Then, a few years later Agatha Christie began her career and nothing was ever the same.

However, since "Trent's Last Case" is a novel, it's not applicable here. And so I find it better to use Agatha Christie's first short stories, published in 1923, as the benchmark for when the modern era began. That means that for this category of stories everything published up to 1922 is eligible, because that is what BC means in this context: Before Christ, i.e.

Those of you who are still here after that last sentence can look forward to a varied bunch of stories in this category. I'm not going to say that these are all great stories, because most of them are not. However, they are all classics of the genre, and anyone with a passing interest in impossible mysteries should definitely have read at least the bolded stories below.

Edgar Allan Poe	The Murders on the Rue Morgue	1841
Edgar Allan Poe	The Purloined Letter	1844
Arthur Conan Doyle	The Speckled Band	1892
Arthur Conan Doyle	The Lost Special	1898
Samuel Hopkins Adams	The Flying Death	1903
Victor L. Whitechurch	Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture	1905
Jacques Futrelle	The Problem of Cell 13	1907
Jacques Futrelle	The Missing Necklace	1908
Freeman Wills Crofts	The Mystery of the Sleeping-Car Express	1909
R. Austin Freeman	The Aluminium Dagger	1909
G. K. Chesterton	The Invisible Man	1911
G. K. Chesterton	The Secret Garden	1911
Melville Davisson Post	The Doomdorf Mystery	1914
Ernest Bramah	The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage	1914
Edgar Wallace	The Missing Romney	1919
Arthur Conan Doyle	Thor Bridge	1922
Jacques Futrelle	An Absence of Air	1922

I'm going so far as to say that most of these bolded stories border on the ridiculous in some aspects, but their importance to the genre can still not be overstated. Poe's two stories are the trailblazers of the two sub-genres of impossible mysteries - locked rooms ("Rue Morgue") and into thin air ("Purloined Letter"). Doyle's first two stories take these two subgenres and refine them. To be honest, just when writing this I realise that Doyle's stories are quite similar to the Poe stories in many respects apart from just being locked rooms or into thin air stories. "The Speckled Band" in particular owes a lot to "Rue Morgue".

The bolded stories by Futrelle, Chesterton and Post all have huge problems, but are still highly innovative in their approach to the impossible mystery genre. Freeman's and Wallace's stories are better as stories, and still manage to be fairly innovative in different respects.

As for the other stories here, I think many of them are actually better than the once I've marked as classics. They're generally not as well known, but are potentially better reads. If you've read what I've written before on the topic of these early impossible mystery tales, you'll know that I'm generally quite critical of them - the later, more modern era is much more satisfying to me. But the stories I've chosen above are still very enjoyable despite the drawbacks of this early era.

The full list of impossible mystery short stories

This will be a fairly boring post, because it'll mainly consist of the list of all those short stories that I identified as good and/or important enough to belong to the ultimate selection of impossible mystery stories. But I guess it's good to have them all in one place so it's easy to refer to the list whenever necessary.

First one other thing though. One of the stories I selected is "Dnr 94.028.72- Mord" by Jan Ekström, mainly because of its great setup. Just the other day I managed to find out that this story has actually been translated into English, so if anyone wants to check it out it's possible to do so. It was published in the anthology "Locked Rooms and Open Spaces", published by Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, which seems to be a collection of Swedish locked room mysteries. I've not read it myself, but Ekström's story is good enough that you might want to seek it out. As a bonus you'll get around 10 other stories that might be worth the price of admission...

Anyway, back to this big list. In the end, I selected a whopping 212 stories. And that's not all, because then there's all the Dr. Hawthorne stories by Ed Hoch, where I have a hard time selecting which should be discarded... Even if I manage to cull them down to a more manageable number, I'm sure there'll be another 20-30 stories to add to the list.

The list is ordered chronologically after publication year. That's a bit misleading, because some stories weren't published until long after they were written - and some of the other stories are written as pastiches of earlier times, so reading them in this order would not necessarily mean that you go from old-fashioned stuff to more modern writings, though the general trend is obviously in that direction. I was happily surprised to see that there's so many stories from recent years. For all my griping about modern mysteries, it's apparent that the subgenre is alive and well.

In coming posts, I will try to divide these stories in different groups according to various criteria that I think are useful. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Enjoy this list instead. And please alert me if you spot any mistakes.

Edgar Allan Poe	The Murders on the Rue Morgue	1841
Edgar Allan Poe	The Purloined Letter	1844
Arthur Conan Doyle	The Speckled Band	1892
Arthur Conan Doyle	The Lost Special	1898
Samuel Hopkins Adams	The Flying Death	1903
Victor L. Whitechurch	Sir Gilbert Murrell's Picture	1905
Jacques Futrelle	The Problem of Cell 13	1907
Jacques Futrelle	The Missing Necklace	1908
Freeman Wills Crofts	The Mystery of the Sleeping-Car Express	1909
R. Austin Freeman	Aluminium Dagger	1909
G. K. Chesterton	The Invisible Man	1911
G. K. Chesterton	The Secret Garden	1911
Melville Davisson Post	The Doomdorf Mystery	1914
Ernest Bramah	The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage	1914
Edgar Wallace	Missing Romney	1919
Arthur Conan Doyle	Thor Bridge	1922
Jacques Futrelle	Absence of Air	1922
Agatha Christie	The $1,000,000 Bond Robbery	1923
Agatha Christie	The Sign in the Sky	1925
Agatha Christie	At the Bells and Motley	1925
Edgar Jepson & Robert Eustace	The Tea Leaf	1925
G. K. Chesterton	The Oracle of the Dog	1926
G. K. Chesterton	The Vanishing of Vaudrey	1927
Agatha Christie	Temple of Astarte	1928
G. D. H. Cole & Margaret Cole	In a Telephone Cabinet	1928
Grenville Robbins	Broadcast Murder	1928
John Dickson Carr	The Murder in Number Four	1928
Nicholas Olde	Invisible Weapon	1928
MacKinlay Kantor	The Strange Case of Steinkelwintz	1929
Agatha Christie	A Christmas Tragedy	1930
Ronald Knox	Solved by Inspection	1931
Lord Dunsany	The Two Bottles of Relish	1932
Dorothy L. Sayers	The Poisoned Dow '08	1933
Vincent Cornier	Duel of Shadows	1934
Agatha Christie	Problem at Sea	1935
Agatha Christie	Miss Marple Tells a Story	1935
C. Daly King	Codex' Curse	1935
C. Daly King	Nail and Requiem	1935
C. Daly King	Vanishing Harp	1935
Ellery Queen	House of Darkness	1935
Ellery Queen	Lamp of God	1935
Agatha Christie	Poirot and the Regatta Mystery	1936
Agatha Christie	Murder in the Mews	1936
John Dickson Carr	The Wrong Problem	1936
Agatha Christie	The Dream	1937
Agatha Christie	Dead Man's Mirror	1937
John Dickson Carr	Blind Man's Hood	1937
John Dickson Carr	The Third Bullet	1937
Margery Allingham	The Border-Line Case	1937
Cornell Woolrich	The Room with Something Wrong	1938
John Dickson Carr	Persons and Things Unknown	1938
John Dickson Carr	Crime in Nobody's Room	1938
John Dickson Carr	King Arthur's Chair	1938
E. C. Bentley	The Flying Shot	1939
John Dickson Carr	Silver Curtain	1939
John Dickson Carr	Emtpy Flat	1939
John Dickson Carr	The Diamond Pentacle	1939
John Dickson Carr	Strictly Diplomatic	1939
John Dickson Carr	The Proverbial Murder	1940
Stuart Towne	Ghost of the Undead	1940
Stuart Towne	Death out of Thin Air	1940
Stuart Towne	Claws of Satan	1940
Stuart Towne	The Enchanted Dagger	1940
Craig Rice	His Heart Could Break	1943
James Yaffe	Department of Impossible Crimes	1943
C. Daly King	Little Girl Who Wasn't There	1944
James Yaffe	The Problem of the Emperor's Mushrooms	1945
Leonard Thompson	Close Shave	1946
Ngaio Marsh	I Can Find My Way Out	1946
John Dickson Carr	The House in Goblin Wood	1947
Joseph Commings	Fingerprint Ghost	1947
Joseph Commings	Murder Under Glass	1947
Joseph Commings	Spectre on the Lake	1947
Manly Wade Wellman	A Knife Between Brothers	1947
Clayton Rawson	From Another World	1948
Ellery Queen	The Dauphin's Doll	1948
Fredric Brown	The Laughing Butcher	1948
Helen McCloy	Through a Glass, Darkly	1948
Joseph Commings	Black Friar Murders	1948
Joseph Commings	Death by Black Magic	1948
Clayton Rawson	Off the Face of the Earth	1949
Edmund Crispin	Beware of the Trains	1949
Joseph Commings	Ghost in the Gallery	1949
Judson Philips	Room Number 23	1949
Thomas Flanagan	The Fine Italian Hand	1949
Edmund Crispin	Name on the Window	1950
Ellery Queen	Double Your Money	1951
Peter Godfrey	Newtonian Egg	1951
Vincent Cornier	O Time, In Your Flight	1951
Afonso Carreiro	Lying Dead and Turning Cold	1952
Ellery Queen	Snowball in July	1952
Anthony Boucher	The Anomaly of the Empty Man	1953
Adrian Conan Doyle & John Dickson Carr	The Adventure of the Sealed Room	1954
John Basye Price	Death and the Rope Trick	1954
Edmund Crispin	A Country to Sell	1955
Edward D. Hoch	The Man from Nowhere	1956
Edward D. Hoch	The Hoofs of Satan	1956
John Dickson Carr	Ministry of Miracles	1956
Agatha Christie	Greenshaw’s Folly	1957
Joseph Commings	Serenade to a Killer	1957
Christianna Brand	Cyanide in the Sun	1958
Clayton Rawson	Nothing Is Impossible	1958
Clayton Rawson	Miracles - All in the Day's Work	1958
Hugh Pentecost	The Day the Children Vanished	1958
Poul Anderson	The Martian Crown Jewels	1958
Samuel W. Taylor	Deadfall	1958
Edward D. Hoch	Sword for a Sinner	1959
Theodore Mathieson	Leonardo da Vinci, Detective	1959
Anthony Boucher	Gandolphus	1960
Arthur Porges	Horse-Collar Homicide	1960
Arthur Porges	No Killer Has Wings	1960
Edmund Crispin	Too Clever for Scotland Yard	1960
Joseph Commings	Murderer's Progress	1960
Arthur Porges	A Puzzle in the Sand	1961
Julian Symons	As If By Magic	1961
Joseph Commings	Castanets, Canaries and Murder	1962
Joseph Commings	The X Street Murders	1962
Joseph Commings	Hangman's House	1962
Arthur Porges	Birds of One Feather	1963
Joseph Commings	The Giant's Sword	1963
Arthur Porges	Coffee Break	1964
John F. Suter	The Impossible Theft	1964
Michael Collins	No Way Out	1964
Edward D. Hoch	The Long Way Down	1965
Stephen Barr	The Locked House	1965
William Krohn	Dr Satanus	1965
Arthur Porges	The Scientist and the Vanished Weapon	1966
Joseph Commings	The Glass Gravestone	1966
Michael Harrison	The Facts in the Case of the Missing Diplomat	1966
Arthur Porges	The Scientist and the Multiple Murder	1967
Arthur Porges	The Scientist and the Invisible Safe	1967
Arthur Porges	Murder of a Priest	1967
Harry Kemelman	The Man on the Ladder	1967
John Lutz	The Crooked Picture	1967
Stanley Ellin	The Twelfth Statue	1967
Anthony Boucher	The Smoke-Filled Locked Room	1968
Christianna Brand	The Gemminy Crickets Case	1968
Edward D. Hoch	The Magic Bullet	1968
Edward D. Hoch	The 'Impossible' Impossible Murder	1968
William Brittain	Mr. Strang Takes a Field Trip	1968
Edward D. Hoch	The Vanishing of Velma	1969
Edward D. Hoch	The Leopold Locked Room	1971
Jeffrey Wallmann	Now You See Her	1971
Edward D. Hoch	A Melee of Diamonds	1972
Bill Pronzini	Proof of Guilt	1973
Jan Ekström	Reg. No. 94.028/72 Murder	1973
Arthur Porges	The Scientist and the Exterminator	1974
Edward D. Hoch	Captain Leopold and the Ghost Killer	1974
William Brittain	The Impossible Footprint	1974
Arthur Porges	The Scientist and the Missing Pistol	1975
Edward D. Hoch	The Theft of the Bermuda Penny	1975
Edward D. Hoch	The Theft of the Venetian Window	1975
Bill Pronzini	The Arrowmont Prison Riddle	1976
Edward D. Hoch	Impossible Murder	1976
William Brittain	Mr. Strang Accepts a Challenge	1976
Jack Ritchie	Box in a Box	1977
Bill Pronzini	Pulp Connection	1978
Bill Pronzini	Thin Air	1979
Joseph Commings & Edward D. Hoch	Stairway to Nowhere	1979
Peter Godfrey	Flung-Back Lid	1979
Bill Pronzini	Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?	1980
J. F. Peirce	The Magician's Wife	1981
Edward D. Hoch	The Witch of Park Avenue	1982
Edward D. Hoch	The Theft of the White Queen's Menu	1983
Edward D. Hoch	The Vanished Steamboat	1984
Joseph Commings	The Vampire in the Iron Mask	1984
H. Edward Hunsberger	Eternally Yours	1985
Edward D. Hoch	The Return of the Speckled Band	1987
Stephen King	The Doctor's Case	1987
William F. Smith	Almost Perfect Crime	1987
Paul Halter	The Dead Dance at Night	1988
Hake Talbot	The Other Side	1990
Paul Halter	The Night of the Wolf	1990
Paul Halter	The Tunnel of Death	1993
Bill Pronzini	Cloud Cracker	1994
Bill Pronzini	Desert Limited	1995
Bill Pronzini	Horseshoe Nail	1997
Edward D. Hoch	Shower of Daggers	1997
Lynne Wood Block & Lawrence Block	Burglar Who Smelled Smoke	1997
Bill Pronzini	Medium Rare	1998
Paul Halter	The Call of the Lorelei	1998
Paul Halter	The Flower Girl	1998
Paul Halter	Murder in Cognac	1999
Amy Myers	Murder Strips Off	2000
Edward Marston	Blind Eyes	2000
Kate Ellis	Odour of Sanctity	2000
Margaret Frazer	Traveller's Tale	2000
Michael Kurland	Stolen Saint Simon	2000
Paul Halter	The Cleaver	2000
Peter Lovesey	Amorous Corpse	2000
Peter Tremayne	Murder in the Air	2000
Susanna Gregory	Ice Elation	2000
Paul Halter	The Abominable Snowman	2002
Paul Halter	The Robber's Grave	2002
J. A. Konrath	On the Rocks	2004
Joseph Commings	The Whispering Gallery	2004
Edward D. Hoch	The Gravesend Trumpet	2005
J. A. Konrath	With a Twist	2005
Bill Pronzini	Devil's Brew	2006
Bill Pronzini	The Carville Ghost	2007
Edward D. Hoch	Gypsy Gold	2007
Maria Hudgins	Murder on the London Eye	2007
Hal White	Murder at an Island Mansion	2008
Hal White	Murder in a Sealed Loft	2008
Paul Halter	Nausicaa's Ball	2008
Arthur Porges	The Scientist and the Poisoner	2009
Arthur Porges	The Scientist and the Heavenly Alibi	2009
Soji Shimada	The Locked House of Pythagoras	2013
Paul Halter	Jacob's Ladder	2014
Rintarō Norizuki	The Lure of the Green Door	2014
Szu-Yen Lin	The Miracle on Christmas Eve	2016
Jochen Füseler	The Witch Doctor's Revenge	2017
Pietro de Palma	The Barese Mystery	2017
Edward D. Hoch	The Hawthorne mysteries	1974-2008