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.