Partners in Crime (The Tommy & Tuppence stories by Agatha Christie)

(This is a translation of the preface I wrote for this collection.)

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are the detectives in this third volume of Agatha Christie's collected short fiction. All these tales about this cheerful couple were written in one go (though one of them was published a few years later) and have an overarching plot where Tommy & Tuppence are asked by the secret service to run a detective agency because it's supposed to be a meeting place for foreign agents.

The stories were written in the middle of the 20s and are typical of their time in many ways. But the most remarkable thing about them is that Christie lets each tale be a pastiche of other - at this time - famous mystery novelists.

Because of the overarching plot, the stories are not presented in chronological order but in the order they were published in the first edition of the English collection "Partners in Crime". The first two chapters, "A Fairy in the Flat" and "A Pot of Tea" are pure introductions to the collection and it's only in the second one where our detectives get to use their brain cells. It's a slight story, but a good enough introduction for the reader.

"The Affair of the Pink Pearl" is meatier. In this case, T&T emulate R. Austin Freeman's scientific detective Dr. Thorndyke (though we get a quick reference to Sherlock Holmes at the very beginning). Tommy gets to prove his stuff in this enjoyable story.

In "The Adventure of the Sinister Stranger", the titular character turns up in the detective agency with a somewhat transparent story, and Tommy jumps into a suspected trap with both eyes open. In this story, today's almost forgotten Okewood brothers by Valentine Williams are parodied. Compared to many of the other featured stories, this tale relates more tightly to the overarching plot - which is to its disadvantage since the problem solving parts are put on the backburner.

We leave the adventure genre for a return to something more mystery-like in "Finessing the King". It is Isabel Ostrander's McCarty and Riordan that T&T try to imitate here. After Tommy got to be the hero of the previous stories, Tuppence is the one to make the breakthrough here.

In the following story, "The Case of the Missing Lady", Tommy & Tuppence get to be Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The solution to the mystery that Tuppence finds is probably as surprising to the reader as it is to our problem solvers.

"Blind Man's Buff" is yet again a return to adventure and a return to the overarching plot. Tommy tries to imitate Clinton H. Stagg's blind detective Thornley Colton when he is kidnapped and needs to somehow outwit his abductors.

Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton's gentle detective, should be familiar to the modern reader. He is the one who inspires the solution that Tommy cleverly reaches in "The Man in the Mist".

Christie continues to vacillate between mysteries and adventure stories. We get an example of the latter in "The Crackler" where Tommy is yet again abducted, this time by a gang of forgers. This time, it's Edgar Wallace's "The Busies" who are parodied.

We get one of the best stories of the collection in "The Sunningdale Mystery". Tommy imitates "The Old Man in the Corner", the Baroness Orczy's problem solver, and from a number of newspaper reports he reaches the solution needed to apprehend the villain of the piece.

In "The House of Lurking Death", it is A. E. W. Mason's Inspector Hanaud who is the inspiration for the solution. It is yet again Tuppence who proves herself in one of the more exciting stories in this collection.

Freeman Wills Crofts's Inspector French usually solves cases which involve ironclad alibis, and of course it is he who is emulated by our problem solvers in "The Unbreakable Alibi". The reader needs to be in a tolerant mood to accept the solution Christie presents.

"The Clergyman’s Daughter" uses Anthony Berkeley's detective Roger Sheringham as its model for our problem solvers. Tommy & Tuppence get to go on the usual treasure hunt where they need to interpret clues to reach their target. Again Tuppence gets to show her stuff.

Next is "The Ambassador’s Boots" where the detective Reggie Fortune (by H. C. Bailey) is the guiding star. It's a rather slight story where the plot feels rather random.

The final story "The Man Who Was No. 16" is a return to the adventure thriller genre, and the overarching plot is resolved. Funnily enough, Tommy and Tuppence get to parody Christie's own Hercule Poirot, and for a change Tuppence is the one to get kidnapped. When Tommy has used his little grey cells he finally manages to find her, and that also means that they manage to apprehend the gang of villains who were the original reason for T&T to run their detective agency.

Conclusion

This collection is more enjoyable if the reader has a working knowledge of at least half the detectives that Christie imitates and parodies, because to be honest most stories here are fairly slight. A couple are readable on their own ("Pink Pearl", "The Man in the Mist", "The Sunningdale Mystery" and "The House of Lurking Death"), but those who have a higher tolerance for 20s adventure thrillers will probably enjoy the rest more than I do.

Another drawback, for this project at least, is that there are no impossible crimes in this volume, so I don't get anything new to add. Still, these tales are easy reads and Christie's enthusiasm is apparent throughout the collection. And T&T are always a joy to read about. I'd recommend this book to a Christie fan, but not to someone who's never read her before.

The Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie

(This is a translation of the preface I wrote for this second volume of Agatha Christie short stories.)

In volume 2 of Agatha Christie's collected short stories we get to know the author's second big problem solver, miss Jane Marple. In all, Christe wrote 20 short stories about the old lady, most of them from the end of the 1920s.

Between 1927 and 1931 she wrote 13 short stories for the British magazine Story-Teller. The first twelve of these have a common theme where the guests at a dinner party tell each other criminal anecdotes, and at the end Miss Marple gets to show off and explain the circumstances. These thirteen stories were later collected as "The Thirteen Problems". The other seven short stories are mainly from the 1930s and early 1940s.

In this volume, like the one for Poirot, the stories are not presented in publication order but rather in an internal chronological order (according to "The Life and Times of Miss Marple" by Anne Hart).

We start off with "The Tuesday Night Club" where the guests at the first dinner party are introduced. A nice little story, where the reader needs to be well versed in British nursery rhymes to be able to solve the problem.

Next is another example where Christie tackles an impossible mystery, "The Idol House of Astarte". A very good example of the genre and one of her cleverest Miss Marple stories.

"Ingots of Gold" is more of an adventure tale. I kind of enjoy it simply because it breaks up the mood. Otherwise, not the best of Christie's stories.

"The Blood-Stained Pavement", like its predecessor, takes place in Cornwall, and is somewhat reminiscent of the Poirot short story "Triangle at Rhodes". This comparison is not wholly to this story's advantage.

 "Motive vs. Opportunity" is probably the most easily solved mystery in this collection. The astute reader should have no problem to find the solution, which makes this story a bit of a disappointment.

"The Thumb-Mark of St. Peter" is one of many Christie tales which revolve around the spreading of gossip after a mysterious death. An all right story, nothing more.

With "The Blue Geranium" we're introduced to a new dinner company. Otherwise, the set-up is just the same as in the previous six stories. This is another rather clever least likely suspect story - and an impossible mystery, though that part is not played up at all.

The story "The Companion" has a murder motive that reminds you of many other Christie stories, and an avid Christie reader shouldn't find it too hard to see through the author's tricks.

In "The Four Suspects" we suddenly find ourselves in a spy tale, though disguised as a fair play mystery. Miss Marple produces a surprising culptrit, but surely there aren't very many clues here?

"A Christmas Tragedy" takes place in a hotel where Miss Marple has to crush a seemingly ironclad alibi, so it's another impossible mystery. The solution has some similarities with a certain Poirot novel, though they differ in a very important respect. This is one of the better stories here.

"The Herb of Death" has some similarities with the novel "Postern of Fate", and it has to be said that the solution is produced from the flimsiest of clues.

The final of the twelve dinner party stories is "The Affair at the Bungalow", which to be honest is quite confusing - not unlike the person who's telling the anecdote. Not the best story to finish this suite with.

After these tales, Christie rounded out her first Marple collection with "Death by Drowning". It reuses sir Henry Clithering from the earlier twelve stories, but takes place "in real time". Miss Marple asks sir Henry to investigate a death where she fears the wrong person is going to be accused of murder. Of course, she turns out to be right at the end. The main problem here is perhaps that Miss Marple herself is absent from a great part of the story.

The next story, "Miss Marple Tells a Story" has a chequered history, as it was originally written to be read on a radio broadcast, by Christie herself. This is also the only story which has Miss Marple herself as the narrator. It is somewhat reminiscent of "A Christmas Tragedy" since it's another impossible mystery taking place in a hotel. Another clever and enjoyable story, though I'd say it's impossible to find the killer here, because they're hardly in the story at all.

"The Case of the Caretaker" reminds me a bit of the first twelve stories insofar as Miss Marple has to solve a mystery which she is told about. There are some similarities here to the novel "Endless Night".

"Tape-Measure Murder" has a solution where the surprise hinges on Christie's clever storytelling technique. The reader needs to be on his toes to solve it before Miss Marple does.

We get one of the better stories of this collection in "The Case of the Perfect Maid". Miss Marple has to help out a servant girl who's been dismissed for something she didn't do. And of course it turns out that there is something more serious behind it all.

Next is one of those treasure hunt stories that Christie enjoyed, in the form of "Strange Jest". Miss Marple has to find out where an old uncle's fortune is hidden. Another tale where knowledge of old English idioms is to the reader's help.

"Sanctuary" is the longest of the Marple short stories, and also one of the most enjoyable ones. Here we return to the village of Chipping Cleghorn, the scene of the crime in "A Murder is Announced". A man dies on the church steps and Miss Marple needs to find out why he asked for sanctuary before shuffling off his mortal coil.

The final story here is "Greenshaw’s Folly". Another impossible crime solved by Miss Marple. The solution is actually quite clever, but I'm not sure how Miss Marple actually reached it. Surely she didn't just guess?

Conclusion

Miss Marple is the same in her short stories as she is in the novels. There is less of a focus on fair clueing. The first twelve stories are therefore perfectly suited to her, because there is no need there to produce any clues - we just accept that Miss Marple's explanations are the correct ones.

As for the impossible crimes here, all of them (with the exception of "The Idol House of Astarte") has some kind of problem, mainly in the fair play aspect. But most of them have a very clever explanation of the impossibility, which still makes them eminently readable.

Therefore, the only one I'll skip is "The Blue Geranium", because the impossibility isn't even addressed in the story. That leaves "Astarte", "A Christmas Tragedy", "Miss Marple Tells a Story" and "Greenshaw’s Folly" for inclusion in my project.

The Poirot stories by Agatha Christie

(This is a translation of the preface I've written to this collection of stories.)

This first volume of Agatha Christie's collected short fiction contains all Hercule Poirot's appearances in this smaller format. The bulk of the stories with Poirot as detective were written during the 1920s, and mainly in 1923, when Christie was commissioned to write a whole bunch of short stories for the magazine Sketch.

The first 24 stories here (as well as "Christmas Adventure" that appears a bit later) were first published in that magazine during 1923. They were thus written during Christie's early period as a writer, when her enthusiasm was at the highest level. (Remember that this should not be confused with Christie being at the top of her powers - that came later.) The stories have a fairly uniform and consistent quality, but obviously some stand out as more inspired than the rest. They are also of similar length.

In this volume the stories are ordered as they occurred in Poirot's career (according to "The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot" by Anne Hart). And therefore, the first story here is "The Chocolate Box", where Poirot tells his friend Arthur Hastings about his greatest failure. A somewhat slight story that sets a tone for what's to come.

Next is "The Kidnapped Prime Minister" which takes place just after the first novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles". Christie's attempt at misdirection works well as long as you do not think too hard about things, because that will give you the only possible solution.

In "The Lemesurier Inheritance", Christie succeeds better with her misdirection. Many readers will reach the same false solution as Hastings does.

After that we get to "The Affair at the Victory Ball", one of the highlights of the collection. With just a few pages at her disposal, Christie still manages to cram the story with action.

"The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim" is an obvious homage to Sherlock Holmes where Christie uses exactly the same solution as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did. So, not too hard to see through for the experienced mystery reader.

With "The Plymouth Express" Christie returns to her highest levels. This short story would later be expanded and rejigged into the novel "The Mystery of the Blue Train" (which not as successful as this shorter version, to be honest).

Then we come to "The Adventure of the Cheap Flat" where we get one of those special Christie things - the detective attach importance to a minor detail that no one else finds important.

"The Submarine Plans" is another one of those short stories that Christie later decided to reformat. In this case it was rewritten into the novella "The Incredible Theft". We'll return to that later in this collection.

Poirot accepts a case that appears quite banal at first sight in "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook", but when we reach the end it turns out that a much more dastardly crime has been solved through his contribution.

In "The Cornish Mystery", Poirot arrives too late to avert the tragedy he has already seen a glimmer of. A clever example of the least likely suspect.

It was likewise impossible to avert "The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor", since Poirot is not called in until after the fact. The 20s' emerging fascination for psychology gets an appearance here.

"The Mystery at Hunter's Lodge" is reminiscent of the previous tale in some respects, and the reader should be able to steer his suspicions in the right direction if he reads them immediately after each other.

The 20s weren't only the decade of emerging psychology, but also the decade of egyptology. In "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb", even Poirot has to solve one of the many Egyptian curses that seem to strike the poor archaeologists. The solution is somewhat far-fetched, and Poirot has to produce a couple of rabbits from his hat.

In "The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan", Poirot needs to figure out who stole mrs Opalsen's pearls. Because surely it cannot be the only suspect, the maid!

Next is the shortest of all these tales, "The Market Basing Mystery". This is yet another story that was extended by Christie. The longer version, "Murder in the Mews", comes later in this volume.

The next story is "The King of Clubs", where Hastings's reasoning as usual is wrong. On the whole, a clever little tale.

In "The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman" Poirot gets tangled in typical 20s prejudices and gets to clean them up a bit. Now, a couple of decades later, this story appears a bit slight.

"The Double Clue" is our first encounter with Hercule Poirot's nemesis, the Countess Vera Rossakoff, who will appear later in both the novel "The Big Four" and the short story "The Capture of Cerberus". The salient clue is a fairly common one, and a reader who's well versed in mystery history shouldn't find it too hard to find the villain of the piece before Poirot does.

Just like Ellery Queen did, Agatha Christie wrote her own kidnap story where a young boy is kidnapped. "The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly" is surely a better tale than Queen's attempt, "Child Missing."

Hastings's sense of fair play gets a small rebuke in "The Case of the Missing Will". Surely we all agree with Poirot in his supposition towards the end? A clever treasure hunt where Poirot as usual gets to excel.

In "The Lost Mine", Poirot tells Hastings about an earlier case. There are heaps of sinister Chinamen and opium dens, and no one in their right mind would call this one of the highlights of this collection.

"The $1,000,000 Bond Robbery" is one of Christie's all too few forays into impossible crimes, but she acquits herself well here. Poirot has to solve a case where the bonds have disappeared even though they were watched every second.

Poirot has to investigate a case of blackmail in "The Case of the Veiled Lady". He gets to show his sleight of hand and cleverness on the way to a surprising dénouement.

In "The Adventure of the Western Star" Hastings tries to show off with expected results. The short story is possibly a bit too slight for its own good, but there's still something charming about how Christie uses small means to toy with the reader's expectations.

"Double Sin" is the first short story that isn't from the large batch commissioned by Sketch. The astute reader will pick up on this because Hastings no longer shares a flat with Poirot. Nevertheless, they go on a coach trip and end up investigating a theft which Poirot solves impressively. This is the last story featuring Hastings for quite a while.

The final tale from the Sketch batch is "Christmas Adventure", but no Hastings as far as we can see. Instead, Poirot is celebrating Christmas at a country manor. He runs into priceless jewels and mysterious deaths. An atmospheric story which would later be extended to almost double length, in the form of "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding".

There's been a murder in "The Third Floor Flat" of the building where Poirot has his residence. He gets involved in the investigation, and of course easily finds the somewhat surprising culprit.

So far, all stories have been of more or less uniform length, but "The Under Dog" gives us a longer and meatier tale from Christie in the form of a novella. Poirot investigates the murder in the Tower Room and finds a surprising killer.

"Wasps’ Nest" has a somewhat different setup, where Poirot manages to prevent not only one but two deaths. A clever and atmospheric short story.

In "The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest", someone is found murdered inside the titular chest. Hastings makes a shortlived comeback here (this is his final appearance in a short story), and the entire story seems like a throwback to the format of the first short stories. The tale would later be extended and rewritten (and Hastings replaced by Poirot's secretary Miss Lemon) with a new title: "The Mystery of The Spanish Chest". This novella appears later in this volume.

"How Does Your Garden Grow?" is yet another one of those tales where Poirot receives a letter from someone asking for his help, but he arrives too late to prevent a death. A rather nifty little story where the reader might want to be well-versed in English nursery rhymes.

Another impossible mystery appears in "The Second Gong", where Poirot needs to solve a case where a country squire has been murdered in a locked room. A clever story with some fireworks in the solution. This is another short story that was later extensively rewritten into "Dead Man’s Mirror". (It appears later in this collection.)

"Problem at Sea" is the first of two short stories giving us a Poirot on holiday. This time he is out on a cruise. He has to solve an impossible crime where a woman is murdered in her locked cabin. The astute reader will probably not be fooled by Christie's little trick.

In the next tale, Poirot has apparently left the cruise. Instead, he has to deal with a "Triangle at Rhodes". As usual, not all is as it appears, and Poirot has to sort out the tangled webs of relationships after a woman has been poisoned. The question is if Christie doesn't go too far in her misdirections to hide the real relationships. You cannot blame a reader who isn't able to see through the tangle.

"Murder in the Mews" has already been mentioned as a longer version of "The Market Basing Tragedy". It is also one of Christie's experiments in impossible mysteries. This is clearly the better variant, and in this longer format Christie has the opportunity to get in more background to the plot than the rather shallow description we had in the earlier, shorter story.

We return to the shorter format with "Yellow Iris" (which was later rewritten into a novel not featuring Poirot - "Sparkling Cyanide"). Compared to this novel, the short story feels a bit truncated, and actually no crime is ever committed here - Poirot manages to prevent it. But the main plot idea is clever.

We continue to vary the length of stories with the novella "The Dream". Poirot gets to solve another impossible mystery - a crime where the victim had dreamed what was about to happen! The misdirection is not bad, but it has to be said that the murderer has some help from coincidence.

"Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds" is the last "regular" short story in this collection. Poirot is having dinner with an old friend, and one of the other dinner guests dies a short time later. Poirot suspects foul play and finds a surprising crime when he begins investigating.

"Poirot and the Regatta mystery" is a short story that would later be rewritten with another of Christie's series detectives, Parker Pyne, as the problem solver. These two variants are very similar - Christie more or less settled with only changing the names. The story itself is fairly clever - and features an impossible crime! - but one does have to wonder about those dinner guests' observation skills...

The following twelve short stories are all from the collection "The Labours of Hercules" and are a suite of tales with an overarching theme. Poirot decides to retire and to round off his career by figuratively following in his namesake Hercules's footsteps and solve twelve crimes in his spirit. The stories in question are written with a light hand and none of them can be described as a classic. But the main idea is solid, and obviously there's nothing wrong with Poirot's little grey cells.

This collection is rounded out by four tales that are "extended" versions of earlier short stories. "Dead Man’s Mirror" is the first and best of them. It's overall one of Christie's very best stories, with a clever impossible mystery and a correspondingly clever solution. It's also quite different from its precursor which means that they can both be read without one spoiling the other.

Next is "The Incredible Theft", a longer variant of "The Submarine Plans". As opposed to "Dead Man's Mirror", this story is very similar to its predecessor and thus doesn't give the reader much more despite the extra amount of pages.

"The Mystery of The Spanish Chest" has replaced the original Hastings with Miss Lemon. Otherwise, this story follows its predecessor "The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest" very closely.

And the final story of this collection is "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding". This too is quite reminiscent of its earlier variant "Christmas Adventure" with the same main plot, but there is a larger focus on the Christmas atmosphere, which makes this version more charming.

Conclusion

Christie doesn't have too many impossible crimes in her oeuvre, but there's still a handful here: "The $1,000,000 Bond Robbery", "The Dream", "The Second Gong"/"Dead Man's Mirror", "Poirot and the Regatta Mystery", "Problem at Sea" and "The Tragedy at Market Basing"/"Murder in the Mews".

They are all fairly good (with "Dead Man's Mirror" being the outstanding story and "The Regatta Mystery" being the slightest). For the time being, I've decided to include them all in my impossible mystery project, and since Christie is at her best when she has more space I'll probably use the longer version in the two applicable cases.

The short stories of Christie, Carr and Queen

With the post on Edward D. Hoch's "All But Impossible", we've now gone through those short story collections that I've mined for impossible crime stories. The mystery savvy of you will find that some names are missing, and none more so - I guess - than Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie.

(Some of you will probably want to know why Chesterton and Futrelle haven't been referenced either, but we'll get to them later. Promise. And if you've any suggestions of other good impossible crime collections, I won't mind getting tips in the comments...)

If you've followed this blog (and read some of my comments on other people's blogs), you will by now know that some time ago, I translated all short stories by Queen, Carr, Christie (and also Clayton Rawson, who has already been featured here with his two collections) into Swedish, because I wanted everything from these three giants to be available in my mother tongue.

While doing so, I also took the time to shuffle the stories around a bit, because for both Carr and Christie (and to some extent Ellery Queen), the available collections are a bit haphazard, featuring stories that are unconnected and very different, content-wise, chronologically and thematically. Christie admittedly has a couple that work rather well (e.g. "The Labours of Hercules" and "Partners in Crime"), but while some of the others are thematically linked at least by featured detective, they do not feature everything with the detective in question (cf. "Parker Pyne Investigates", "The Mysterious Mr. Quin", "Poirot Investigates"). Carr's collections are generally even worse.

So instead of going through each of these three authors' somewhat arbitrary collections I will use my own edited collections as the basis of the coming posts. We'll begin here with a quick runthrough of what these modified editions actually contain.

Agatha Christie

When I'd finished I ended up with seven different Christie collections. The first one collects all of Poirot's appearances in the shorter format (and is obviously a huge tome, since he is the most common protagonist in Christie's short fiction). In all, there are 55 Poirot short stories.

The second collection has all Miss Marple stories, as I'm sure you could guess. It's a somewhat slimmer collection, but still features 20 stories in all. Volume no. 3 is actually just "Partners in Crime", which features all 15 of the short stories with Tommy & Tuppence.

As for the fourth and fifth collections, they are simply expanded versions of "Parker Pyne investigates" and "The Mysterious Mr. Quin" respectively, where I've added the two stories featuring each detective that were not originally in those volumes, making them both 14 stories long.

The sixth collection features all mystery and adventure short stories published by Christie, having none of the aforementioned detectives as their main character. (One or two does use a minor character from elsewhere in Christie's canon, but I've chosen to ignore that.) There are only 12 stories here.

The seventh and final Christie volume collects stories that cannot be said to be mysteries. They are romances, horror or supernatural. This is the second largest volume of stories, featuring 24 stories in all.

John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson

When it comes to the collections of Carr's short fiction, I've chosen to ignore whether they were published as Carr or Dickson, because frankly, there seems to be no general rule for what type of fiction was published as either. (Of course, Dr. Fell stories were published under the author's real name, while the Colonel March and Henry Merrivale stories appeared under the Dickson pseudonym.) Instead, I've created three volumes of short stories, somewhat based on the later anthologies "Fell and Foul Play" and "Merrivale, March & Murder".

The first collection uses all four Bencolin stories and adds all Carr's short stories that are historical mysteries and/or supernatural/horror stories, making a total of 14 stories. I've put all March and Merrivale stories in the second volume (11 stories in all). And finally, the third collection is where we find the five Dr. Fell stories, as well as those mystery stories that are set in present time where none of the main detectives are featured. That makes another 11 stories.

Ellery Queen

When it comes to Queen, I almost left the first three collections untouched. Almost? Yes, well. "Calendar of Crime" is entirely untouched, since that is a themed collection that works well as is.

As for "Adventures" and "New Adventures", they contain stories that were written close to each other chronologically, but since I'm kinda anal about things like that, I decided to shuffle the stories around so they are actually in chronological order inside the collection as well. That means that in "New Adventures" we get to see Queen change from the more rigid period one writers into the slicker period two Hollywood screenplay wannabe authors.

However, when it comes to the rest of Queen's short fiction, I made a jumble of everything in order to get them more thematic. I did, however, try to keep the title of the original collections.

So the fourth collection is QBI - Queen's Bureau of Investigation. The original collection made some kind of concession to having a theme by assigning the different stories to different police departments ("Department of Blackmail", "Department of Murder" etc.) For some reason, a couple of such stories were published in a later collection. I made the tough editor's choice (yeah right!) of moving those stories here...

The fifth volume is Q.E.D. - Queen's Experiments in Detection. What I created here is a sort of hodgepodge of this and that. The stories in QBI were all very short, just a few pages each. But in the same timeframe, the authors also wrote some longer stories; in some cases they could arguably be called novellas. There were also a couple of shorter ones that were not tied into the whole QBI theme. Those stories are the ones featured in this collection.

The sixth collection I called Ellery Queen's Journal of Crime, because it really is just a catch-all for everything that didn't really fit in the previous volumes. They are all from the later period of Queen's writing. There are some longer stories, and also a brace of shorter ones, the shorter ones featuring the so called Mystery Club. There are also another couple of stories with a challenge to the reader, and finally I included the only story which doesn't feature Ellery Queen the detective, "Terror Town". As you can see, it's sort of a mess...

Conclusion

This project was a fairly huge one, as I'm sure you can imagine. When it came to Christie, quite a lot of the stories had been translated into Swedish (there are several Swedish Christie collections), so there weren't that many that I had to translate myself. It was mainly T&T, Parker Pyne and some of the non-series stories that I had to translate.

(Of course, some ten years later someone finally had the bright idea of publishing "Partners in Crime" in Swedish, but by then I'd already translated them all, so I kept my own versions.)

However, when it came to Carr and Queen, none of them have any true collections of stories, though there are admittedly quite a few translated stories in anthologies as well as in Swedish magazines. I did have to translate at least one third of their short fiction.

It was quite a fun undertaking, though. I'm very glad to have finished the whole project and now I have everything available in an eBook format whenever I want.

In coming posts here on the blog, I will go through these collections more closely so we can see what stories I intend to use in my new impossible mystery project.

All But Impossible - Edward D. Hoch

The fourth volume of Dr. Sam Hawthornes cases contains the penultimate batch of stories about the good doctor. All signs point to the fifth and final collection to be published by Crippen & Landru in the not too far future, something we all look forward to, I think.

In these tales we get to follow Dr. Sam and his new nurse Mary throughout the late 30s and the march towards WWII. It's fair to say that Mary has a bigger role to play than Sam's previous nurse, April. Sometimes, it's even Mary who explains the impossibilities. It's interesting to follow this development through the stories.

Interestingly, the book shares its name with an anthology edited by Mr. Hoch. We'll return to that anthology later, I promise.

The first story is "... the Country Church". Sam is invited to the christening of former nurse April's first child, young Sam. Dr. Sam is going to be the godfather of the child, and together with the godmother - an old friend of April's - they carry the infant into the church in a bassinet which is put down on the pew next to them. However, when they are about to bring the baby to the blessing, there's just a doll in the bassinet.

So, a problem that hits close to home for Dr. Sam who now has to help his old friend to find out who took the baby, and how it wsa done. The impossibility isn't all that hard to solve, so it's good that Hoch imbues the story with some extra tension for Sam, knowing the victims as he does.

In "... the Grange Hall", a jazz band has come to Northmont to play on a dance hosted by the Northmont Hospital. One of Sam's doctor colleagues is an old friend of the trumpet player, and after the performance, they have a private conversation in an adjoining room. However, during that conversation, the trumpet player dies, and Sam's friend is found with a hypodermic needle in his hand.

This is another one of those stories that only becomes impossible if we believe the witnesses, but since it's Sam's old friend and colleague I guess we have to. The solution, it must be said, is actually pretty damn good, and well hidden. Hoch manages to pack in quite a deal into a short story.

"... the Vanishing Salesman" is a bit different to the usual Hawthorne fare, and also a homage to the famous Doyle throwaway line about "James Phillimore, who went back to collect his umbrella and vanished without a trace". In this story, it's a salesman who manages to vanish on the porch of a house while Dr. Sam has him in his sights - twice! But he's not the one who turns up dead, it's a different man.

An all right story, this, nothing more. It's obvious who the villain is - Hoch doesn't even care to disguise it - and I think the explanation of the impossibility is a bit far-fetched. Dr Sam should be seasoned enough to pick up on it almost from the beginning, since he was the witness and everything.

"... the Leather Man" is a bit more like it, though. Northmont is haunted by stories about the so called Leather Man, a man wandered around the northeastern part of the USA some 30 years ago. Dr. Sam comes across another wanderer, and they take a room in an inn. When Sam wakes up the following morning, his wanderer friend has disappeared and none of the people they came across the day before will acknowledge that he and Dr. Sam were together.

That's a pretty good impossibility, you gotta admit. And the solution is really good as well. Perhaps a little bit obvious, but I was still scratching my head with only three pages to go. Interestingly, the main part of the story is only tangentially related to a crime. One of the highlights of this volume.

Dr. Hawthorne has to search for a room that vanishes in "... the Phantom Parlor". He gets a phone call from a young girl who's living with her aunt. The aunt is worried about her niece's mental behaviour, and when the girl maintains that she's been up at night and seen a room in the house that simply isn't there the next day, Sam must decide who to believe.

So, is it an impossibility or just an imaginative young girl? The answer becomes fairly obvious after a while, and I'm sure you can guess which it is. But Hoch sets it up beautifully and the explanation is nicely and very fairly clued.

Then we come to "... the Poisoned Pool". Dr. Sam and nurse Mary are invited to Ernest Holland, the local newspaper publisher who's having a clambake. While they're chatting with the guests, the publisher's brother Philip suddenly appears from the swimming pool, which was previously empty. The two brothers argue, and Philip says that he will repeat the impossibility by diving into the pool and then disappear. He does dive into it, but when the guests come closer, he's lying dead at the bottom of the pool - with no one anywhere near.

Another really great impossibility (or rather two), which might just be an homage to a certain John Dickson Carr story. The explanation for these situations are wonderfully imaginative in all its simplicity.

In "... the Missing Roadhouse", a farmer and his wife have been out dancing, and perhaps drinking a glass or five, and on the way home they're getting a bit lost. While on their way, they come across a roadhouse they've never seen before. While turning their car around in the dark, they hit a man with their car. They transport the man to the hospital, but when the police go to find witnesses at the roadhouse, it's vanished!

The solution here is just a bit far-fetched. I think even a somewhat drunk driver would be able to see exactly what the roadhouse was. But the final culprit of the story was well hidden and Hoch managed to pull off a surprise there. So all in all, the story's still a success.

The following tale, "... the Country Mailbox", gives Dr. Sam a problem where he needs to find out why three delivered book packages have disappeared from a mailbox. The problem is compounded when the next package turns out to be a bomb, killing the recepient.

A very nice problem with just enough entanglements to keep this reader on his toes the entire time. I liked the separate explanations that made up a fulfilling whole.

And then we have yet another highlight in "... the Crowded Cemetery". It seems Dr. Sam is a member of the board at the Spring Glen Cemetery - of course he is - and some of the graves are threatened due to rising water in the nearby creek. So, the graveyard workers are ordered to dig up some of the graves to save the remains and re-inter them somewhere else. However, during the digging one Sam notices some blood on one of the coffins. They open it, and inside is one of the other board members.

As you can see, we get yet another fine impossibility here. And the solution lives up to it. There's just one minor detail - the clue that finally points out who the murderer is - that I think is a bit too flimsy. Still, Hoch is definitely on a roll with some great stories here.

In "... the Enormous Owl", Dr. Sam is called out to a farm when it turns out that the farmer has been killed. He is lying alone on a field with a crushed chest, and there are some bird feathers on his body. Could it be an owl that killed him? How else could he have ended up there?

I'm sorry, but I don't see any impossibility in this story. I mean, if there's nothing that could have killed the man on the field, surely the explanation for what happened is obvious? Still, Hoch manages to get in a couple of twists and turns that keeps the reader guessing as far as the murderer goes. So, as a mystery story, it's a good one, but I wouldn't ever call it impossible.

"... the Miraculous Jar" is a bit better in that respect. Sam and Mary are visiting with a couple who recently returned from a visit in the Middle East, where they bought a jar. A woman at the gathering fills the jar with water and both she and Sam drink from it. Soon after the gathering has ended, the woman calls Sam suspecting she has been poisoned. And sure enough, when Sam returns he finds her dead, and the water in the jar has turned into poisoned wine!

Fortunately, there's also no footprints around the house, which explains why this is an impossible story. The murderer could be a bit better hidden, but the rest of the solution is very imaginative.

In "... the Enchanted Terrace", Dr. Sam is at the home of a Ken Ainscott who's got a backyard terrace which is said to be haunted. One evening Dr. Sam is following right behind Ken out on the terrace, and he just disappears, right in front of Sam's eyes!

And then he turns up dead, as I'm sure you could guess. This is to be honest a bit poor, at least solution-wise. I like the build-up to the impossible situation, but it's unfortunately much too easy to spot the killer (there's really only one person you can suspect) and I think the solution to the disappearance is pretty much crap. There's absolutely no way it would have gone so quickly that Sam didn't notice what was happening, at least not the way Hoch describes it. Still, it IS an imaginative way to dispose of a body.

"... the Unfound Door" has another imaginative setup. Sam is visiting a community of nuns together with the mayor of Northmont. Mayor Stokes is out in the garden conversing with the nuns while Sam is making his way over to them. Sam looks away for a moment, and when he looks back the mayor has disappeared, and none of the nuns will confirm that he was there at all.

Yes, you guessed it, it didn't turn out well for the mayor. The most hazardous job in Northmont. I'm in two minds about this story. The solution to the impossible disappearance isn't particularly bad, if perhaps not wholly original. But the reason for the nuns' behaviour is flimsy at best. I mean, come on.

"The Second Problem of the Covered Bridge" is the only Hawthorne story with a slight variation in the title, and that's because Hoch is writing a homage to his own first Dr. Sam story. Northmont is celebrating its centennial, and for some reason, the town has decided that Dr. Sam's first case needs to be re-enacted. So the new mayor is taking the place of the murder victim of that case and drives out onto the covered bridge. This time, however, everyone is watching him drive his horse and cart. And then suddenly a shot rings out and the mayor falls down, dead.

Hazardous, I said? It's literally lethal... I think Hoch had to go through a bit much manoeuvring here to set everything up to look like his first Hawthorne story, but if you can look past that it's quite a fine story. The explanation works, it's actually got a fairly elaborate background that Hoch handles well, and I guess in the end I can accept why the perpetrator did what he did.

We end this volume with "... the Scarecrow Congress". The new mayor announces a competition for the best scarecrow, so several inhabitants exhibit their scarecrows in Congress Park. Meanwhile, Dr. Sam gets a visit from one of the contestants who's telling him about a breakin during the past night. Just one hour later, the contestant turns up dead - inside one of the scarecrows in the park.

Now, there's only one explanation to how a corpse can turn up inside a scarecrow that's been hanging where everyone could see it the whole time. And yet Hoch got me so bamboozled that I didn't stumble upon it. This was a really good story to end the collection with.

Conclusion

Compared with the previous volume, this was a definite step up. There are several really great mysteries here. If I had to rank the four volumes of Hawthorne stories, I might actually rank this first. It's a toss-up between this and collection no. 2, "More Things Impossible". There are one or two low points here, but out of fifteen stories that's not particularly bad.

They will all go into my project, and then I'll have to evaluate whether the non-impossible ones are eligible at all, once I've gathered (and translated) all stories that I want.

The Puzzle Doctor liked this volume as well over on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel: https://classicmystery.wordpress.com/2017/11/10/all-but-impossible-by-edward-d-hoch/

Banner Deadlines - Joseph Commings

I don't know if I'd call Commings an unsung hero in the impossible mystery genre. He was for a long while, but he's had a bit of an upsurge over the last few decades. Still, he should be much better known.

It's unfortunate that this volume, wonderful as it is, is still the only collection of Joseph Commings's stories. His stories are not all top-notch, but their overall quality is still better than most writers. What can be said about "Banner Deadlines" is that it's a good cross-section of stories featuring the irascible senator Brooks U. Banner.

This volume, like so many other worthy short story collections, was published by Crippen & Landru. According to the bibliography towards the end of the book, there are still nineteen uncollected Banner stories. Is it too much to wish for that C&L publish a second volume with these nineteen tales?

This volume gets under way with "Murder Under Glass", where the good senator is invited to a dinner party. A few days later, his host is found murdered inside a glass dome which is so heavy no human could ever lift it.

The impossible situation is to die for - hrm - but the solution hardly lives up to that. It's easy to see that Commings was still heavily influenced by pulps here. Characters use typical slang and there's an urgency and haste to everything. The leg bit - if you've read it, you'll know what I mean - is a pretty tired way of explaining impossibilities. So, all in all, I was a bit disappointed, but the impossibility itself is still impressive.

We move on to "Fingerprint Ghost". Banner overhears a conversation in his club about a doctor who has been stabbed to death in his office. A medium promised to bring back his ghost to name his killer, but didn't succeed. Now a magician has challenged the medium that he can do exactly the same as the medium, with everyone present sitting in straitjackets to prove that he has no accomplice. Of course, the magician is murdered during this second seance...

You've got to hand it to Commings, he knows how to create great impossible scenarios. At the same time, he's still not perfected his ways to explain these scenarios. Again, I felt a bit let down by the solution he offers here. I especially question why the murdered man wouldn't actually call out when he realised that something fishy was going on. Commings just skates by that bit and handwaves it, hoping the reader won't catch it.

In the next tale, "The Spectre on the Lake", senator Banner is holidaying by Mad Moon Lake, and he takes an interest in some of his fellow guests. Rightly so, because one day two of them row out to the middle of the lake and they are both shot in full sight of all the other guests. As you've guessed, no one could have shot them.

Another lovely set up here, and this time Commings gets it all to work. He plants the important clue out in the open, and I think the solution would work in real life as well. If I have to complain about something, it might be the motive, which was a bit flimsy, but that's just a minor thing.

"The Black Friar Murders" is one of the longer stories in the collection . Banner is on another vacation - this time it's Thanksgiving - and is travelling by train to visit an old friend. One of the guests seems to have got lost while visiting an old cloister, and everyone goes there to collect her. While there, some of the party see the ghost of an old monk vanish from a cell, and of course the guest is found dead.

This is a more elaborate setup than we've seen previously, and the pulpy characteristics are very much to the fore - especially in some of the early train scenes where Banner meets a young woman. Holy smokes, that's some dated conversation. But that doesn't matter in the end, because the whole impossible situation in the cloister is great. The solution works well and we get a very unlikely killer. It's all very nicely done.

"Ghost in the Gallery" has a great opening line: "That afternoon Linda Carewe poisoned her husband." And yet, just a few minutes later she and her lover see the supposedly dead husband in an old gallery. They see him standing in an office, and when they enter, a woman is lying dead inside.

Another great impossibility, and the only real drawback here is that there are almost no suspects to choose from, so in the end spotting the killer is not that hard. But this is on the whole a truly successful story. It seems Commings has hit his stride by now.

And it continues with "Death by Black Magic", where a magician is showing Banner how to vanish from a cabinet. But he never appears again, and once he does it's not as a living being.

Having magicians in an impossible mystery almost always elevates them. And this is no exception. We get a wonderful story here with an impossible vanishing which turns into an impossible murder. And it's all tied up wonderfully with a perfect explanation.

In "Murderer's Progress" we return to senator Banner's club where five men hatch a plan to fool Banner into the next century. They device an impossible situation of their own, where one of them disappear after having been seen chatting with a friend in a closed room. But the plan backfires when another one of them is found dead at home.

It's a pretty good set-up, admittedly. I do get a bit wary with this type of impossibility which hinges on a witness not seeing something that should be fairly obvious. On the other hand, I do think that Commings does enough with the whole description that the reader should also pick up on the crux of the impossibility. So, it's still a good story, it just feels like a bit of a letdown since there have been several great stories before this one.

"Castanets, Canaries and Murder" follows, and here we have a man killed in a film studio. He's stabbed in the back, and the whole thing is caught on camera. No one is seen near the murdered man.

The explanation is very simple, but also a bit technical. So a bit similar to for example Arthur Porges's stories. The main problem is that there is almost too much background here - the story feels a bit padded out, and the impossibility doesn't occur until the final few pages of the story.

"The X Street Murders" is possibly Commings's most famous mystery. A woman enters an office with an envelope she's going to deliver to the occupant. Two visitors in the anteroom see her speaking to him, but suddenly three shots ring out. The man is murdered, but somehow the recently fired weapon is found inside the envelope.

Now, without all those trappings above, this mystery would be as easy to solve as... I don't know. It would be super easy. But that's the difference between a bad and a good story. Here we get to go through a couple of extra impossibilities just to get to the crux of the matter. One thing I don't like is lying witnesses, though. That detracts a bit from the greatness of the rest.

Banner's automobile breaks down at the beginning of "Hangman's House", and he is picked up by a party of four. Unfortunately, the weather is so bad, they have to stop. Luckily they find an old mansion where they can seek shelter. Coincidence or not, it turns out that the mansion used to belong to one of the four passengers. Even more coincidentally, he soon turns up dead - hanging from the old chandelier in the huge ballroom. And there are no footprints leading out to him...

It's all a bit coincidental this, as you probably gathered. The crime also has one of the more ludicrous solutions I've seen for a while. I said this about one of the Hal White stories in an earlier post - "it's awesome and super stupid at the same time". That description fits this story perfectly as well.

In "The Giant's Sword", a wealthy widow buys an old painting from an art dealer. However, when it's delivered to her, it turns out to be fake. Unfortunately, when she returns to have it out with the art dealer, he turns out to be dead in his office, with a sword plunged so deep into his chest, it's impossible for a human to have done it.

A pretty good impossibility here, and the solution is quite nice as well. Again, the only minor drawback is that there are too few characters in the story so the killer feels fairly obvious, but as I said, just a minor quibble.

"Stairway to Nowhere" was written in collaboration with Edward D. Hoch, which immediately raises hopes for a top impossibility. What we get is a young man who sees his girlfriend go in through the door to her house. He hears her walk up the stairs, but when he follows, he cannot see her and she is nowhere to be found at the top of the stairs.

Those hopes were not dashed. This is a great story with a great impossible disappearance, and a wonderfully simple explanation that just turns everything around. The rest of the plot of the story isn't quite as good - there's some stuff about museum theft where the culprit is rather easily spotted - but until the impossibility is solved, the reader just can't put everything together.

In "The Vampire in the Iron Mask" we get a story set in France. Banner travels there to present a medal to an old underground fighter, but what he gets is an impossible mystery where it seems a vampire with an iron mask has killed a young boy who was in a cemetary with two friends - at least, that's the story the two other boys come up with. There's also an added impossibility where someone seems to have entered one of the closed tombs.

I wasn't particularly impressed with this story. First, the whole vampire bit is a bit hokey, and the explanation for the mask is just bad. And then the explanation for the young boy's death is a pretty big disappointment as well. The second murder and the solution to that is what saves the story to some extent, because that bit is clever.

The final story here is "The Whispering Gallery". The Great Zeno challenges senator Banner to a magician's challenge, where both men put on a show for an orphanage full of kids. The next day, Banner gets a call from the house's owner who tells him that someone has shot a bullet through a portrait, but when Banner gets there he has disappeared.

Now, that's more like it. Lots of twists and turns on the way and a pretty darn good impossibility with a simple explanation that just might be spotted by the wary reader. Commings does his best to hide it by piling on more and more stuff, and largely I find that he succeeds.

Conclusion

Commings is great att creating impossible situations. He's just a tad worse at creating explanations that work just as well. But in those instances where he does - and most of these stories are such instances - you'll just marvel at the whole thing.

There are a few minor disappointments here, and the chief one is "Vampire", but just like Edward D. Hoch Commings is a master at creating something worthwhile in each story, so I think in the end I will use all of them in my project.

Nothing Is Impossible - Edward D. Hoch

And so we reach the third volume of Dr. Sam Hawthorne stories. These stories are set in the early to mid 30s, and we get to follow the world on the road to war, as it appears to an inhabitant in a small town in north eastern USA.

We also get to follow Dr. Sam's private life - well, at least we get to follow his nurse problems, because his trusted April quits in this volume, and then he has to find a new one. But most of all, we get fifteen impossible crime stories, and that's what we're here to enjoy.

The first story is "... the Graveyard Picnic". Dr. Sam is burying one of his patients. While in the cemetary, he bumps into a young man and woman who are having a little picnic. When Sam approaches them, the woman starts and runs away, in the end falling into the rushing creek.

This story is a bit different from other Dr. Sam cases, because there's no immediate impossible situation for him to solve, it's more of an inexplicable one. There are also several different loose plot points that are only tied together towards the end. It's still a good read, though.

"... the Crying Room" follows. Here the new mayor of Northmont is killed in the titular room at the opening of Northmont's first cinema. He enters the room with Dr. Sam, and suddenly a gunshot rings out, hitting him, even though no one else was present. To compound everything, the day before a man died after confessing to the murder of the mayor.

So, another indication why you wouldn't want to ever be mayor of Northmont... The impossibility is quite fun, but the way it's written, it's fairly easy to spot who's behind it all. Still, I enjoyed the whole setup and the solution is quite fitting.

In "... the Fatal Fireworks" we get another Fourth of July crime. Two brothers own a garage together, but another businessman is trying to get them to sell it. On the National holiday the younger brother is about to set some fireworks off that he just took out of the cabinet, but he can't get the matches to work. The brother goes to help out, but somehow the firecrackers have now turned into a bigger explosive device, killing the older brother and seriously injuring the younger one.

Again, the impossibility is a minor thing in this story - how did the firecrackers turn into dynamite? It's a bit unfortunate, since the impossibilities are the big draw of the Hawthorne stories. For the rest, it's relatively easy to find who the culprit is. Hoch pads it out a bit with FBI agents and whatnot, but the story doesn't quite work, to my mind.

A woman artist is killed in "... the Unfinished Painting". She'd been working alone in her studio since her husband left her earlier the same day, and the room was locked and her housekeeper heard her move about before the murder.

This is a setup we all recognise from many, many other impossible mysteries, and there's really never any doubt about who the murderer is. But Hoch still manages to throw in enough here that the reader cannot ever be completely sure he's not drawing the wrong conclusion.

In "... the Sealed Bottle", Northmont's first cafe is opening. Northmont's new mayor is there with other luminaries, including Dr. Sam, to celebrate. The woman who owns the cafe opens a new sealed sherry bottle and pours a glass to the mayor, but when he drinks it he falls to the floor, poisoned.

To be honest, this is the first original impossible situation we get in this volume. But what a great setup! And the final page is quite nicely written by Hoch - I got a bit of a chill there. Is there still anyone who wants to become mayor of Northmont?

The circus is coming to town in "... the Invisible Acrobat". A troop of trapeze artists are doing their routine when suddenly one of them vanishes in the middle of the performance. Just a day later, his body turns up in a nearby farm - killed.

After a bit of a lull during the early stories in this collection, Hoch is turning on the heat now, because this is another excellent tale with a great impossibility. Sure, the explanation of the impossible disappearance is exactly what I think everyone will suspect, but there's still that whole bit of where the acrobat went and how he turned up dead the next day to explain. Another great story.

"... the Curing Barn" is used by one of the tobacco companies in Northmont. One day, there is a power cut and the owner has his throat cut while surrounded by two of his closest men. And yet none of them saw anything, and the weapon has disappeared!

This is another good 'un. A bit more run of the mill than the previous two stories, perhaps, but Hoch can always be relied on to come up with the goods. In this case, while I'm sure most of you will spot the killer, the explanation for the vanished knife is the really great bit.

When you read the title "... the Snowbound Cabin", you're already bound to get your hopes up for another great winter impossibility. In this case, Dr. Sam and his nurse April are taking a few days off and they travel in his car to an inn in New Hampshire. While there, they go out for a walk with the innkeeper and come across a dead man in a cabin. And guess what, there are no tracks leading to or from the cabin!

We get offered the obvious solution here, but it's a false solution, so Sam has to do some more digging before finding the correct one. That solution is a bit of a stretch, but I guess I can just about accept that the killer could do it. But it's rather coincidental that he then botches the whole suicide plan...

Nurse April leaves Dr. Sam in "... the Thunder Room", so he employs a new one, May (yes, all the obvious jokes are referenced in the story). However, during a thunderstorm - which scares May terribly - a man is killed, and the wife is confident that the killer was May.

So, not a terribly good start to that partnership, and in fact, nurse May isn't Sam's employee after this story. The solution to the impossibility is one of those "Nah, wouldn't ever work in real life", and thus a bit of a disappointment.

In "... the Black Roadster", a gang of robbers hit the Northmont Bank, driving off in a getaway car. When the sheriff and Dr. Sam enter the bank, they find the manager shot to death.

This is hardly an impossible mystery at all. The only marginally impossible thing is what happened to the getaway car, but that's only an impossibility because of the way Hoch decided to end the tale. But otherwise, this is a fine mystery. Dr. Sam even gets the whole thing wrong, and his new acquaintance Mary gets to shine instead.

"... the Two Birthmarks" is the next tale of the collection, wherein Dr. Sam is showing his new nurse around the hospital. They meet a few of the patients, and then go to take in a show where they find a ventriloquist with a dummy that looks just like one of the patients. Someone takes a hammer to the dummy, crushing its head, and the next day, Dr. Sam is informed that someone attacked the hospital patient the same night. A nurse goes missing, and is later found dead.

So, an interesting and quite original setup here. However, I never really had any doubt as to what was going on. The main thread of the investigation stood clear to me. But Hoch still managed to work in some extra stuff that kept me guessing, so I still enjoyed the whole thing.

During one of Dr. Sam's visits "... the Dying Patient" suddenly dies from poison, and now he has to start another investigation to clear himself from suspicion.

Since it was Dr. Sam himself who administered the glass of water and the pill she was taking, only we as readers (and he himself) know that it's an impossible mystery. Hoch does good here. Because of the setup, there's not many who could have killed the old lady, and yet he still manages to pull of a bit of a surprise with the whole situation. All in all, I found it pretty good.

In "... the Protected Farmhouse", a man is killed inside his own home which is surrounded by several fences, and to top it all off there was an FBI man sitting guard outside the house the entire time - and yet he saw no one who entered the house.

One of the main problems with short stories is that if the author puts in some extraneous characters who do things that seem totally separate from the main plot, either they'll turn out be just that, utterly irrelevant, which is incredibly irritating to the reader, or it will be the other alternative - that they are implicated in the crime, and that can never come as a true surprise to the reader. As you might guess, this story is one example of that. And that's unfortunate, because the impossible situation is great, and on the whole, I think that Hoch creates a solution that lives up to it. Okay, the motive for creating the impossible situation is admittedly crap, but otherwise it works out nicely.

"... the Haunted Teepee" is one of Hoch's crossover stories. Here, we get a meeting between Dr. Sam and Ben Snow, another of Hoch's main problem solvers. Hawthorne gets a visit from Snow who's heard that the former has a good reputation for solving impossible crimes. So Snow tells a tale from 1890, when he was riding through the Dakota plains. He's invited to stay with a band of Sioux indians, who tell him stories about the chiefs teepee - about how it's haunted and how men have died inside it. Then during the night the chief dies in his teepee, and only his daughter-in-law was present. Yet she saw nothing.

It's fun to get this type of story (Hoch has written one or two others), but the solution to at least one of the deaths isn't that hard to figure out. Since Ben Snow is supposed to be a good detective as well, it does beg the question how he couldn't solve it himself. But the whole story is quite involved, so I guess I'll forgive him.

The final story of this collection is "... the Blue Bicycle", where some teenagers are out riding their bikes. One of them speeds ahead a bit, but when the others go around the turn they can only see her bicycle lying along the road and she is nowhere to be found. Several days later, a young woman is found dead, but it's not the same girl...

This is a pretty damn good impossibility, with an equally fine solution. Hoch manages to get you guessing the entire way through and gets in a surprise or two along the way as well. A fine way to end this volume.

Conclusion

This might be the most uneven of the Hawthorne collections. As I've said before about Hoch, he will always have something in his stories that makes them worthwhile, but some of the earlier stories in this volume are a bit slight, to be honest.

Still, as you've probably guessed, I'd find it hard to remove one of the Hawthorne stories from my impossible collection, because they form a great whole. So again, the plan is to use them all.

Over on Beneath the Stains of Time, TomCat had this to say about this volume: http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.se/2016/01/far-from-impossible.html

The PuzzleDoctor over on In Search of the Classical Mystery Novel is quite agreed with both TomCat and me: https://classicmystery.wordpress.com/2015/04/04/nothing-is-impossible-further-problems-of-dr-sam-hawthorne-by-edward-d-hoch/