James Scott Byrnside

Any discussion of Paul Halter's The Crimson Fog has to be done in two (very) distinct parts. We begin in 1887. A man goes back to his hometown to solve a decade-old impossible murder. Straight away, we get an entertaining series of narrative game playing. "Sidney" reveals a false identity to some characters, creates another… Continue reading The Crimson Fog

Advance praise for John Dickson Carr's Death-Watch: "Wall-to-wall dialogue!" "The meager traces of romance are cynically used in service of the puzzle, appearing only when necessary and resembling little in the way of true human emotion!" "The chess-piece characters don't learn anything, nor do they change throughout the course of the story. The same goes… Continue reading DEATH-WATCH

The first half of John Dickson Carr's It Walks By Night deals with the murder and its immediate aftermath. What a grand murder it is! A former athlete (who has only recently become a recluse) is found beheaded in the card room at Fenelli's restaurant. The room had two entrances, both of which were under… Continue reading It Walks By Night

When I bought the The Locked Room Reader , I thought I had only read one of the stories. As it turned out, I had read a few of them. (Damn you, early onset of Alzheimer's!) Nevertheless, I thought I'd write some impressions. Collections of shorts (be they stories or films) tend to vary in… Continue reading The Locked Room Reader

Paul Halter's The Phantom Passage has an audacious hook. It's London (1902), and people are reporting strange occurrences. The details are similar. A madman comes out of the fog to guide the victim down Kraken Street. This, in itself, is incredible--the street doesn't exist anymore. Along Kraken, they encounter a man selling grapes, a woman… Continue reading The Phantom Passage

Ianthe (God, we don't get many Ianthes nowadays, do we?) Jerrold's The Studio Crime is the sort of competent mystery I could learn a lesson or three from. Not that it's terribly inspired, but what it does, it does very well indeed. The familiar repartee between the fact-worshiping cop and the gut-feel-worshiping sleuth is especially… Continue reading The Studio Crime