false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173120035m/248543.jpg 248543 1 <B>Penzler Pick, February 2001:</B> The very thing that first hooked me on mysteries long ago is the element most on display in this fat and satisfying volume: amazement. Not whodunit or why, but <I>how</I>. And that really means <I>wow</I>, as in, "Wow, I can't believe what I just read!" Such cases were originally the province of Edgar Allan Poe's Inspector Dupin, whose unraveling of such sensational "impossible" crimes as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" gave the reading public of an earlier era its appetite for gasp-inducing solutions. Just a few decades later the mystery genre had progressed to a more rational approach, with which Arthur Conan Doyle equipped Sherlock Holmes, though the crimes demanding our greatest sleuth's attention were highly fanciful more often than not. Snakes in airshafts menacing gentlewomen! Clubs restricted to redheaded fellows! Wow!<p> Next appeared the exceedingly baroque whimsies of John Dickson Carr, who eventually grew to feel the strain of being regarded as the Houdini of mystery literature. But before he saw his powers of invention begin to flag, Carr, who also wrote as Carter Dickson, had defined the subgenre of locked-room crime for all time, producing over 50 novels and dozens of short stories featuring some startling variations on the theme. <I>The Hollow Man</I>, published in the U.S. as <I>The Three Coffins</I>, is considered by experts to be this author's greatest achievement. It offers in the course of the story a seminal lecture about the locked-room crime.<p> In this bargain tome, Carr is represented by "The Silver Curtain," in which a man standing alone in a cul-de-sac is fatally stabbed in the back. From a less well-known writer, Clayton Rawson (a real-life magician as well as an authorial one), comes a tale written in response to a challenge by Carr, his friend and rival: make a man vanish from a phone booth. (He succeeds, of course.) Also on hand are four clever contemporary tricksters: Peter Lovesey, H.R.F. Keating, Lawrence Block, and Edward D. Hoch. There's almost <I>too</I> much entertainment value in these 29 tales assembled by veteran editor and mystery scholar Mike Ashley. "I've endeavored to bring together a collection of stories," he says, "that seem utterly baffling and where the solution is equally amazing." That's OK. Ration them, and you'll only savor them more. <I>--Otto Penzler</I> 240824 2000 Mammoth Book of Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (Mammoth) total:11|5:4|4:5|2:2| 11 44 17 1 5 0 false false Sat Apr 18 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 21 07:43:04 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 21 07:45:51 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Oct 15 12:24:00 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 15 12:24:00 -0700 2009 2 0 false false Fri Aug 28 22:27:09 -0700 2009 Fri Aug 28 22:27:09 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Tue Aug 25 07:48:07 -0700 2009 Tue Aug 25 07:48:07 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Mon Jul 27 18:44:53 -0700 2009 Mon Jul 27 18:44:53 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Thu Apr 09 14:33:16 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 09 14:33:23 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Sun Apr 05 08:00:23 -0700 2009 Sun Apr 05 08:00:23 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Sun Mar 22 16:10:06 -0700 2009 Sun Mar 22 17:06:34 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Thu Jan 15 08:25:30 -0800 2009 Thu Jan 15 08:25:30 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Sun Oct 26 12:05:37 -0700 2008 Sun Oct 26 12:05:37 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Sat Sep 27 11:19:02 -0700 2008 Sat Sep 27 12:14:28 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Wed Aug 20 10:31:00 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 20 10:31:00 -0700 2008 2 0 false false Sat Jun 14 23:11:51 -0700 2008 Sat Jun 14 23:11:51 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Wed Jun 11 11:56:51 -0700 2008 Wed Jun 11 11:56:51 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Thu Jun 05 08:11:57 -0700 2008 Thu Jun 05 08:11:57 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Sat Jan 26 15:58:03 -0800 2008 Sat Jan 26 15:58:03 -0800 2008 4 0 false false Thu Jul 17 06:38:34 -0700 2008 Wed Dec 19 13:14:19 -0800 2007 Thu Jul 17 06:38:34 -0700 2008 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=248543