At our last library sale, I was happy to snap up Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries one of the American Mystery Classics that Otto Penzler edits, and it was basically brand new without a crease in the spine. One of my goals for 2024 was to read a locked room mystery, and I didn't complete it, but I've already finished Tom Mead's Death and the Conjuror, so this will be my second of the year in only February for 2025.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a locked room mystery, the synopsis on the back gives a good description:
For devotees of the Golden Age mystery, the impossible crime story represents the period's purest form: it presents the reader with a baffling scenario (a corpse discovered in a windowless room locked from the inside, perhaps), lays out a set of increasingly confounding clues, and swiftly delivers an ingenious and satisfying solution. during the years between the two world wars, the best writers in the genre strove to outdo one another with such unfathomable crime scenes and brilliant explanations, and the puzzling and clever tales they produced in those brief decades remain unmatched to this day.
Among the Americans, some of these authors are still household names, inextricably linked to the locked room mysteries they devised: John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Clayton Dawson, Stuart Palmer. Others, associated with different styles of crime fiction, also produced great works - authors including Frederic Brown, MacKinley Cantor, Craig Rice, and Cornell Woolrich, to name a few.
Selected by Edgar Award-winning mystery expert and anthologist Otto Penzler, the fourteen stories in this volume present a delightful mix of well-known writers and unjustly-forgotten masters, highlighting the best of the American impossible crime story.
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