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.