The Third Bullet and Other Stories

"“The House in Goblin Wood,” like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is a short story, not a novel. It’s one of the most famous of the impossible crime stories. I do think that because of the artificiality of the locked room concept, very often it works well in a short story, or as an element in a novel. If it’s a full-length novel very often the book itself is quite artificial, which can be fine, but it’s more of a challenge to keep the reader engaged. It’s written by Carter Dickson, which is a pen name of John Dickson Carr , an American writer who lived for a long time in England and was a great anglophile. He was very prolific in the 1930s and the 40s and wrote under a number of different pen names. He was the king of the locked room mystery. He read The Mystery of the Yellow Room as a boy and loved it and devoted himself to the locked room puzzle. He was hugely influential, and his best mysteries are very, very clever. “A locked room mystery, as the purists might regard it, is one where there’s a definite element of impossibility” He has a number of detectives. Some of his early writing, featuring Henri Bencolin, have been republished by the British Library in recent times. He also created a character called Dr. Gideon Fell, whose case, The Seat of the Scornful , has been republished recently. (Fell is modeled on GK Chesterton, who was also very keen on locked room mysteries and impossible crimes and the idea of paradox. I could easily have chosen a Father Brown story by Chesterton for this list, had I more than five to go with). Another character he created is Sir Henry Merrivale, who features in this short story. It’s a brilliant example of what you can do with a locked room or impossible crime puzzle in a short space. The mystery is very ingenious, the characterization is quite sharp, the atmosphere is fantastic. And the solution is great. There’s an absolutely chilling finale to it, the sort of thing you don’t really expect in a traditional golden age novel. It’s not in the least cozy, I think that’s fair to say. It’s a brilliant story. Yes, there were a lot of markets for short stories in that period. Going back to Sherlock Holmes, the Strand Magazine really grew on the back of those stories. It wasn’t really until after the First World War that novels came into the ascendant really, but short stories continued to be written and most of the great crime novelists have written good short stories as well, sometimes with an impossible crime element. For example, Agatha Christie wrote a few short stories with an impossible crime element. She wasn’t someone who specialized in the impossible crime story, and she didn’t write many, although she was a great friend of John Dickson. They were both members of the Detection Club and spent a lot of time socializing together. Yes, The Hollow Man is also a very ingenious and atmospheric novel with multiple impossible crime situations."