What’s a mind-blower? You might think it’s a surprise ending, but not necessarily. With your typical surprise ending, if you know in advance it’s going to be a surprise, then you can usually figure out what the surprise is going to be. Although some of the 5 short stories below do have surprises, knowing that won’t help you. And a couple of them don’t exactly have a surprise ending so much as an upsetting of all your expectations, leaving you flailing your arms with nothing to hold on to at the end.

Here are five of the best mind-blowers ever written.

“A Passage to Benares”, by T.S. Stribling, from Clues of the Caribbees, Dover 1977

For the most part, Stribling’s stories about Dr. Henry Poggioli, a psychologist and world traveler, were pretty good: a little wordy perhaps, and notable more for the exotic settings and Poggioli’s opinions then anything else. But in A Passage to Benares he excelled himself, and most other writers too. It’s a tour de force in the true sense of the term, and available in a long-lasting and inexpensive Dover edition.

 

“The Garden of Forking Paths”, by Jorge Luis Borges in Borges: Collected Fictions, Penguin, 1999

This is one of those seminal stories that influenced so much of popular culture that anyone reading it today may not understand how innovative it was at the time. It has two wonderfully clever ideas, anticipated a major quantum physics hypothesis which became a standard science fiction trope, and inspired a generation of writers like Umberto Eco.

 

“Witness for the Prosecution”, by Agatha Christie, Witness For The Prosecution and other stories, St. Martin’s , 2001

This was a short story, a play, and a fantastic movie starring Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, and Tyrone Power. But all of these are over 60 years old now, and a lot of people haven’t read or viewed any of the versions, perhaps thinking that what was amazing in the 1940’s couldn’t still be amazing today.

Be amazed.

 

“The Secret Garden”, by G.K. Chesteron, from The Complete Father Brown, many, many editions

Chesterton’s Father Brown stories are unquestionably the finest single author achievement in the short story length outside of the work done by a man named Doyle. In this story a man is beheaded, apparently alone in a garden. It had a profound influence on John Dickson Carr, who re-used the situation for his first novel, albeit with a different solution. The paragraph right after Father Brown has first stunned you with what has actually happened is one of the best in all detective fiction, and Carr vainly tried to duplicate its effect throughout his career.

It helps to have read the first Father Brown story, The Blue Cross, before you read this one.

 

“The Oblong Room”, by Edward D. Hoch, from Leopold’s Way, Southern Illinois University Press, 1985

What was the friend of the victim doing, locked in a room with the body for three days after the death? This story serves as a reminder that, just like Erle Stanley Gardner, Edward D. Hoch was not just a fiction factory, but a brilliant, brilliant writer.

I like to support writers and publishers by buying books new. And if I’m buying a book for collectible reasons they I hunt around for the best copy. But sometimes I just need a reading copy of an old book, or maybe I don’t even need to own it—I just want to read it once.

Here’s what I do when I’m shopping for older or out-of-print books that aren’t at my local bookstore to get them as cheaply as possible.

Looking for a book? Hate to spend money? Read on!

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1. The Library (Part 1)

Well, sure. Everybody knows you can borrow a book from the library for nothing, so long as you bring it back on time. But don’t forget that a lot of mysteries are published in large print editions, which are often shelved in a different location from the regular mysteries. So if you don’t see what you’re looking for on the shelf, check the card catalogue or ask the librarian where the large print books are.

2. Garage Sales

Even though you can get books really cheap at garage sales (or tag sales, or yard sales, or whatever your local term is), you could spend a lifetime looking for a particular book this way.

So here’s a tip. If you’re looking for a particular book and haven’t been able to find it, find out the author’s hometown, and if you’re ever nearby, check out the local garage sales. There are often more books near where an author lived due to local interest, and you might get lucky.

3. Friends

Borrow a book from a friend. You probably won’t even have to give it back. What’s that? You say you would never do that? Liar.

4. ABE

Is it possible that you’re a booklover with an internet connection and you don’t use ABE? I doubt it. But just in case, here’s the scoop. ABE is the Advanced Book Exchange, and it’s the top place online to buy used books. They have a tremendous selection, a great range of prices, and accurate book condition descriptions. It’s surprising how often you can find a real bargain here.

http://www.abebooks.com

5. Biblion

Looking for a book originally published in the

UK? You might do better using Biblion, which started as an antique book store in

London, where many book dealers shared space. They’ve now partnered with biblio.com to provide a searchable service online. Many of these dealers are also on ABE, but not all of them.

http://www.biblion.co.uk

6. Amazon

If you want a popular title, check out amazon.com, or your local amazon, for the best deal. You won’t find any scarce titles here, but let’s say you were looking for copies of Charlotte Armstrong’s The Balloon Man and Raymond Chandler’s The High Window. As I write this you can get The Balloon Man for 31 cents, and The High Window is going for as little as $2.14.

Another tip, especially for high-priced books. Check out amazon in other countries. Sometimes there are cheaper copies floating around at amazon.fr or amazon.de, for example.

7. The Library (Part 2)

So you checked, and the book wasn’t in your local library. Did you give up? Don’t forget about interlibrary loans. Use the computers in your library, or ask your librarian to search for the book throughout the local library system. They will be happy to acquire the book from another library for you. In the US and Canada, you can get a book from any other public library in the country. In the UK, in the London area, you can get a book from any book in the
London system, at least. I haven’t tried a broader search than that.

8. Ebay

Ebay has books, too. But something to remember is that a lot of Ebay sellers don’t take care to get the details right. So you should try simple spelling mistakes and typos in your search if you don’t find what you’re looking for right away.

Let’s say you wanted a copy of a Nero Wolfe book, In the Best Families. Searching on “Nero Wolfe” turns up several copies. But if you also search on “Nero Wolf” you’ll find another copy at $2.50 that you would have missed otherwise.

9. Powell’s

Powell’s is one of the world’s largest independent sellers of books, and their strong bricks and mortar heritage comes through on the site. More than any other site, Powell’s makes it easy to browse as if you’re in a bookstore. You can easily see New Arrivals, sale books, and books in categories (as though on table display in a store) such as “Agatha Award Winners” “Doyle Pastiches”, or “Endcap” (for featured books). Check out the “$7 or Less” category for bargains. .And of course they have an outstanding search service so you can find what you’re looking for, with as many publication details about the books as Amazon has.

http://www.powells.com

10. The Library (Part 3)

You really can’t beat the library, and why would you try? If it’s not at your local branch, or in your local system, you can probably still get the book you’re looking for. Ask your librarian to help you search your countries national library archive for the book. In the US, it’s the Library of Congress in Washington. In Canada it’s Collections Canada in Toronto, and in England, it’s the British Library. The book that’s not in one of those three places is rare indeed.

Depending on the book, it can either be shipped to your library for you to pick up, or you might have to actually travel to London, Washington, or Toronto to read it. When I lived in England, I spent many a pleasant afternoon at the British Library reading rare books that I would never have been able to buy.

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There are only two books I haven’t been able to find in the past twenty years either at a bargain price, or at the library for free. And I’m not even sure that one of those books actually exists… but that’s a story for another time.Happy Hunting!

Some people can’t, or choose not to, get published through traditional channels. The conventional wisdom is that most of these stories could not, and should not, be published simply because they’re bad. While finding a publisher can be hard, if you have a good story, well-written, then you’ll eventually be published. Anyone stooping to self-publishing is either too impatient or too egotistical to go through the process, and they don’t do themselves any favors, because they’re putting out unedited work that will never be distributed to readers.

Well, is it really that bad? I’ve dipped my toe into the pool of self-publishing. For the best possible results, I’ve selected stories in one of the sub-genres I love: the locked-room mystery.

First up is “The Cruise Ship Murder” by Jean Marie Stine, a short story in audiobook form. It’s described as follows:

Classic Locked-Room Mystery and Romance! In this widely reprinted romantic mystery short story by Jean Marie Stine, Dr. Devlin Blake thinks the life of a doctor on a cruise ship will be exciting and romantic. But at first he finds his duties aboard the Pacific Princess dull and monotonous. Then he is called on to solve an “impossible” locked-room murder!

This downloadable audio file contains both the short story and “the author’s homage to John Dickson Carr, the legendary mystery novelist who helped define the “locked room” mystery and the Golden Age of detection.

The homage to Carr actually comes in three ways: the locked room plot, the cabin number, and a post-story summary of Carr’s career.

First: the locked room. A man is found dead on a ship in Cabin A-13, locked from the inside, a knife in his back. His wife is in the cabin with him, but the reader knows she is innocent. So how was the man killed?

It’s a version of the situation in Carr’s (writing as Carter Dickson) The Judas Window, certainly one of the top 5 locked rooms ever. But nothing new is brought to it here, so I’m not sure Carr is getting a tribute so much as Stine is getting a free plot. And the clue that theoretically “proves” who the murderer is has a hole you could navigate a cruise ship through.

Second: the Cabin number. Carr became well-known for his novels, but during World War II embarked on a second career writing radio plays. One of his most famous was The Mystery of Cabin B-13, a brilliant and practical variation on the Paris Exposition story. Here Stine has the action take place in Cabin A-13, but otherwise there is no connection.

Third: the summary of Carr’s career at the end. This is a by-the-numbers overview of Carr which could be useful to readers (listeners) who’ve never heard of him. Sadly, the narrator reads the wrong title for The Judas Window, the novel on which this short story is based.

All in all, this story gave me little faith in self-published works.

My second expedition took me to the book Alias: Simon Hawkes: The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in New York, by Phillip Carraher. These are stories supposedly taken from Watson’s notes about what Holmes did after the struggle with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls and before his reappearance in The Empty House. Apparently he took the alias Simon Hawkes and lived in Manhattan.

Holmes later told Watson of these adventures, but Watson never wrote stories based on them. So Carraher is free to write about Holmes (Hawkes) without trying to duplicate Doyle’s writing style.

The plots are terrific! Carraher has two locked room mysteries here, and both are clever. In “The Adventure of the Magic Alibi” the killer is locked in a room at the time the murder occurs outside the room, and in “The Adventure of the Glass Room” two victims are found dead inside a glass room, which is inside a second locked room! Both are well worth reading.

The problems? Well, I believe this is a case where the author would have been better served by traditional publishing. The text is riddled with typos, including the misspelling of the detective’s name, which really leaps out at you. “Magic Alibi” is actually a novella, but should have been a short story. An editor would likely have removed the tedious middle section which is so long that you figure out the solution to the mystery before it’s over. And if we hadn’t been told that these were Holmes stories, we would have no idea, since there is no indication of it from the detective’s methods or manner. 

Of course traditional publishing is no guarantee of quality either, and I’ve read many stories published in national magazines and major anthologies that are worse than Carraher’s—minus the typos. I have no idea if he’s submitting his stories to traditional publishers, but he should be.

So that’s a look at two self-published works. Hardly a comprehensive or fair overview, so I’ll do some more in the future.

The game is afoot! There are few phrases in the mystery genre that are so recognizable and so quoted. But what does it really mean?

First, the sources. In perhaps the most exciting start to any Holmes story, Watson is awakened by Holmes in the middle of the night at the beginning of “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”:

“Come, Watson, come!” he cried. “The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”

The phrase was first popularized by Shakespeare, most notably as used in the famously rousing St. Crispin’s Day exhortation to the troops in Henry V:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips.
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’

Clearly this is a hunting metaphor, derived from the fox hunt. The “game” is in fact the fox, that is, the quarry or the prey. This can also be seen in Shakespeare’s other use of the term, in Henry IV Part 1; Act 1, Scene 3. Hotspur and Worcester are trying to convince Northumberland of the brilliance of their plan, but Northumberland points out to Hotspur:

“Before the game is afoot, thou still let’st slip.”

In other words: “But you’ve let the hounds off the leash before the fox is even loose, as you always do, you rash doofus!”

It’s almost certain that Doyle knew of the term from Shakespeare. As a staunch traditionalist, he defended Shakespeare against Johnny-come-lately’s like Shaw, and firmly believed in the beneficence of the British Empire. It’s pure speculation on my part, but it seems likely that the St. Crispin’s Day speech would have been one of his fondest passages.

Did Doyle use the phrase anywhere else? The newest and best canonical reference is Leslie Klinger’s New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Klinger says that Doyle used the phrase in only one other place, in The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge:

“I could tell by numerous subtle signs, which might have been lost
upon anyone but myself, that Holmes was on a hot scent. As
impassive as ever to the casual observer, there were none the
less a subdued eagerness and suggestion of tension in his
brightened eyes and brisker manner which assured me that the game was afoot.“

This is a direct comparison Holmes to a hound on the hunt, and certainly Doyle did this kind of thing all the time. If we take a further look at Abbey Grange, we see that the hunting references are used throughout, such as this one:

“We will draw the larger cover first.”

Klinger calls this “a shooting metaphor, meaning to draw the fox from his covert or temporary lair. When the animal ‘breaks cover,’ the hunt begins.” (pp 1179). But Klinger doesn’t comment on the meaning of “The game is afoot.”

I think it’s clear that Doyle was also using “The game is afoot” as a hunting metaphor. Nowadays the phrase is often used more generally to invoke excitement and the sense that something thrilling is about to start, and that what is about to start is some sort of game or challenge. Klinger even uses it as his sign-off in his introduction to The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, indicating that the reader can turn the page for the fun to start.

The new meaning has come about largely because of the word ‘game’ and its connotations in the mystery field. For many years when there was more emphasis on the puzzle mystery then there is now, the mystery was described as a game between the writer and the reader. Over time through the process of folk etymology the new meaning has begun to outshine the old.

I don’t imagine I’m the first person to consider the origin and meaning of this phrase. There’s got to be some article in the Baker Street Journal about it, or some essay somewhere by a Holmesian scholar. Does anyone know of one?

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Bonus Bookfling: The Klinger book is a wonderful resource. The annotations are knowledgeable and not intrusive. It’s easy to read the text without tripping over footnote references, and equally easy to find the annotations if you want them. See here for Jon L. Breen’s review in Mystery Scene.

A few years ago I noticed something mildly unusual about the titles of the Matt Scudder books by Lawrence Block. See if you notice the same thing. Here are the titles of the first four:

The Sins of the Fathers
Time to Murder and Create
In the Midst of Death
A Stab in the Dark

Block wrote these books about Scudder from 1976-1981. They were good, but didn’t appear to be leading to bestseller status. But then he wrote Eight Million Ways to Die, a seminal book in the field. Even at this point he thought he was done with the character, but he went on to write another classic, the prequel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, and it was off to the races. Here are the next four titles:

Eight Million Ways to Die
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes
Out on the Cutting Edge
A Ticket to the Boneyard

Notice anything yet? No? Then take a look at the next three:

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse
A Walk Among the Tombstones
The Devil Knows You’re Dead

That’s 11 books in a row with five words in the title! I noticed the pattern after book 7, and thought it was an interesting marketing choice. I can only think of one other writer who has gone for a series with the same number of words in the title. Robert Ludlum started with The Scarlatti Inheritance and followed up with The Osterman Weekend, The Matlock Paper, The Gemini Contenders… 17 three word titles in all during his lifetime, with more still continuing to appear after his death. S.S. Van Dine did it too, but his pattern involved more than just the number of words.

Here’s Scudder book number 12, which doesn’t conform:

A Long Line of Dead Men

When this book came out I wondered why they changed the pattern. I said to myself, “Why would they do that? 11 in a row, and then they changed it!” It would have been easy enough to call the book, for example, Long Line of Dead Men, or This is the 12^th Scudder, or even This Title Has Five Words. I mentioned it to a buddy of mine who also liked the Scudders, and he just looked at me like I was crazy.

But he was unfamiliar with the mystery world in general and unaware of the long tradition of using patterned or sequenced titles. Sue Grafton with her alphabet series, and Janet Evanovich with her One For the Money, Two For the Dough, etc., are the most direct examples, but other writers such as Van Dine, Ellery Queen, John D. MacDonald, and C.W. Grafton (yes, her father) were doing this kind of thing long ago.

So I decided to ask an editor I know, who can usually answer these kinds of questions. I said to her, “Why would they do that? 11 books in a row, and then they changed it!”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

She assured me it was a coincidence, and that no one else in the world would ever notice such a thing, and by the way, did I know I was crazy?

I was unruffled by this obviously uninspired opinion.

At the next Bouchercon (the World Mystery Convention) I saw Larry Block himself waiting for an elevator in the hotel lobby. I saw my chance to settle the matter and satisfy my curiosity. Knowing that the titles may have been chosen by his publishers I asked him, “Why would they do that? 11 books in a row, and then they changed it!”

He looked at me like I was crazy.

What do you think? What are the odds of 11 books in a row being published with five word titles? Has this ever happened before in the history of publishing? It had to be done on purpose, right?

Or am I just crazy?

In Mystery Scene’s 100^th issue I listed the 5 Most Ingenious Impossible Crimes. In fact, the list could have been called the 5 Most Entertaining Impossible Crimes, since I excluded some of the cleverest of these (The Three Coffins, for example) if they weren’t terrifically well written.

You can get that issue of Mystery Scene here. In the meantime here are the Next 5 Most Entertaining Impossible Crimes:

6. What a Body! By Alan Green (1950)

This won the Edgar award in 1950 for Best First Mystery, and I doubt there have been many firsts better than this one. Set at an exercise resort, this very funny book gently lampooned physical fitness enthusiasts, and the murder victim was the fittest and most enthusiastic of them all. The unusual and absolutely original impossible crime had the victim found dead in a locked room wearing pajamas with the pajamas covering the wound. Hard to explain but oh, so easy to read.

7. Have His Carcase, by Dorothy Sayers (1932)

Now let’s not have any arguments here. Sayers did write some very hard-to-get-through books, The Nine Tailors being the classic example. But she was one of the best idea generators the mystery has ever seen, and she also invigorated the form when she started the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane romance, which features in this book. It’s well-paced, fun, entirely original, and her insanely impressive knowledge of literature permeates without polluting. The puzzle here is a body found dead on a beach with no footprints to account for the murderer, and there is also no accounting for how Sayers came up with this brilliant idea.

8. Invisible Green, by John Sladek (1977)

This book would have made the Top 5 were it not for the fact that Sladek deliberately wrote it as a throwback to the Golden Age, and some of today’s readers may find it a bit stagey. In fact it’s a gentle parody of the classic puzzle novel, with not one but two impossible crimes: one is a murder in a locked room with a new kind of solution, and the other a murder that takes place while all the suspects are together in a room across town from the victim. An absolute gem.

9. Hard Tack, by Barb D’Amato (1991)

D’Amato loves the classic puzzle mystery, and has had several successes incorporating inventive ideas into the modern mystery thriller. This is one of her Cat Marsala “Hard” mysteries, and has journalist Cat on an ocean-going boat trip when one of the passengers is found with a slit throat in a locked (and guarded!) cabin. It was no small thing to come up with a brand new solution to the locked room mystery in 1991, but D’Amato pulled it off. And as with all the books in the “Hard” series, there’s a fantastic, nail-biting action scene at the end as Cat fights it out with the killer.

10. Whistle Up the Devil, by Derek Smith (1953)

A masterpiece of ingenuity. This is a sprightly tale of amateur detective Algy Lawrence and his attempt to prevent the impending murder of Roger Querrin. He fails, despite being one of three people guarding the murder room while the crime occurs. Another murder in a locked room follows – this one a killing of a prisoner in a locked cell. This is one of those Golden Age mysteries without much connection to police procedure and reality – Algy is buddies with the police superintendent and gets to do whatever he wants. But it’s fast, friendly, and fabulously, fiendishly clever. Watch out for a future blog dedicated to this book.