The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

Perfectly Impossible by Mike Ashley

Welcome to my second anthology of impossible crimes and seemingly unsolvable mysteries. If you’ve read the first, The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes, you’ll have some idea what to expect. There’s a fair amount of the same here – but this time there’s an extra twist. I’ve included some seemingly perfect crimes as well.

Of course the true perfect crime would have been undetectable. There may have been many committed over the centuries, we’d just never know. They might have been regarded as accidents or disappearances or utterly unsolvable.

It’s that unsolvable part where the perfect crime meets the impossible one and where I’ve had some fun in selecting the stories for this anthology. You’ll find some impossible crimes that were far from perfect, and you’ll find a few perfect crimes that weren’t really impossible, but you’ll also find plenty that are both – or as close as you’ll get. It’s not much fun if the police or detectives are completely baffled. The delight in these stories is unravelling the puzzle and trying to work out what on earth happened.

Here are some of the puzzles you’ll encounter:

a man alone in an all – glass phone booth, clearly visible and with no one near him, is killed by an ice pick.

a man sitting alone in a room is shot by a bullet fired only once and that was over 200 years ago.

a man enters a cable-car carriage alone and is visible the entire journey but is found dead when he reaches the bottom.

a man vanishes at the top of the Indian rope trick and is found dead miles away.

a dead man continues to receive mail in response to letters apparently written by him after he’d died.

There are plenty more like those. We start the anthology with a crime so impossible that it’s damned near perfect, and end with one that is so perfect that it’s impossible to solve.

As ever the anthology includes several brand new stories never previously published, plus a range of extremely rare stories, many never reprinted since their first appearance in increasingly rare magazines. This time I’ve avoided using any stories by the more obvious authors. Most of the works of John Dickson Carr (whose centenary coincides with the publication of this book), or Jacques Futrelle, for instance, are either in print or may easily be found on the second-hand market. The same applies to the Father Brown stories by G.K. Chesterton, many of which fall into the “impossible mystery” field. Instead I’ve gone for the rare and ingenious.

The task would have been far harder had it not been for Robert Adey’s invaluable reference work Locked Room Murders (second edition, 1991), which I would recommend to all devotees of the baffling and unsolvable. I must also thank Steve Lewis, whose additions to Adey’s compendium also proved invaluable. Generally, in both this volume and my earlier one, I have avoided stories previously included in anthologies. Anthologies of impossible mysteries are rare, so for those interested I would heartily recommend the following: The Art of the Impossible by Jack Adrian and Robert Adey (1990), Death Locked In by Douglas G. Greene and Robert Adey (1987), Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries by Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh and Martin Greenberg (1982), Whodunit? Houdini? by Otto Penzler (1976) Locked Room Puzzles by Martin Greenberg and Bill Pronzini (1986), and All But Impossible! by Edward D. Hoch (1981).

That’s more than enough to set your brain reeling. So settle down, get your deductive powers honed and see if you can solve the perfectly impossible.

Mike Ashley

February 2006