These mystery novels are so clever they deserve a second read

Over the years, I’ve read plenty of ingenious mystery novels twice, but John Dickson Carr’s “The Three Coffins” is among the very few I’ve enjoyed three times. This fall, Penzler Publishers has reprinted this greatest of locked-room whodunits as an American Mystery Classic, where it joins a diverse series that includes - to mention only the most recent offerings - Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “The Door,” Dorothy B. Hughes’s “The Fallen Sparrow” and Ellery Queen’s “Cat of Many Tails.”

Among the standout pleasures of Carr’s 1935 novel are two scenes of sheer chutzpah. In the first, as three horrified witnesses look on, a man is suddenly shot dead at point-blank range while standing alone in the middle of a deserted street - and the only footprints in the freshly fallen snow are the victim’s own. How was it done? Later, Carr’s recurring detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, brazenly admits he’s a fictional character, then proceeds to present his “Locked-Room Lecture,” which tabulates the myriad ways to commit a seemingly impossible crime.

While Carr devoted his narrative legerdemain to novels, Edward D. Hoch applied comparable ingenuity to the short story. Crippen & Landru have previously issued more than a dozen collections of the Dr. Sam Hawthorne, Captain Leopold and Simon Ark “howdonits,” in which the solution to an enigmatic crime largely depends on determining the method by which it was carried out. In “The Will o’ the Wisp Mystery,” Hoch further challenges himself by interlacing six clever short mysteries so that they perform double duty as small pieces in a much larger puzzle.

Here’s the premise: When a prison van is hijacked, six convicts escape and seemingly vanish. Frustrated, the government calls in a dogged “man hunter” named David Piper to track them down. Each escapee is allocated a story of his or her own. Before long, though, Piper notices unexpected connections among the five men and one woman, eventually deducing that the mass getaway served to disguise a truly sinister purpose. Besides the six-part “Will o’ the Wisp Mystery,” this latest Hoch collection also includes seven mysteries solved by Father David Noone.

In our own time, Tom Mead has been widely acclaimed for his three novels featuring the magician detective Joseph Spector. But Mead has also been writing short stories, 11 of which make up another attractive Crippen & Landru volume, “The Indian Rope Trick and Other Violent Entertainments.” In the title story, the celebrated illusion receives an unexpectedly deadly twist, while in “The Octagonal Room,” a student of the occult becomes obsessed with an eerie chamber that appears to cause his gruesome death. “The Problem of the Velvet Mask,” rich in misdirection, is a complicated study of revenge for a past injustice. All the murder methods are suitably ingenious, even dizzyingly so, but to my mind sometimes insufficiently clued.

A masterpiece of film noir, “Sudden Fear” earned Oscar nominations in 1953 for two of its stars, Joan Crawford and Jack Palance. Surprisingly, the suspense novel it’s based on, by Edna Sherry, hadn’t been easy to find until Stark House Press published a reprint last year. In atmosphere and plot, Sherry’s tense psychological thriller resembles a mashup of three movie classics about wealth, ambition and vanity: “Sunset Boulevard,” “Suspicion” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

It begins when a highly successful playwright, the self-absorbed Myra Hudson, falls in love with and marries a good-looking, sweet-talking young actor, 15 years her junior, named Lester Blaine. A year or so into their marriage, the couple rescue the stunningly beautiful Irma Neves from drowning. Wanting to see this self-confessed gold digger in action, Myra helps Irma to enter high society, where she enchants a series of well-to-do men but seems strangely reluctant to accept any of their marriage proposals. At this point, Myra learns, by a lucky chance, that she has been grossly deceived. With this new knowledge, she draws up plans for coldly executed revenge.

While the above precis already hints too much, this edition’s introduction by mystery scholar Curtis Evans reveals even more. So you might want to read his essay after taking in the multiple shocks of the book’s final pages. Note that Stark House has also reprinted several of Sherry’s other suspense novels.

If you recognize the name W.F. Harvey, you may wonder why the author of such horror classics as “August Heat” and “The Beast with Five Fingers” wrote a “Yorkshire Bibliomystery.” According to Martin Edwards in his introduction to “The Mysterious Mr. Badman,” lately reissued as a British Library Crime Classic, this was Harvey’s only mystery novel.

It is, in fact, only partly a whodunit and more a cozy thriller. The elderly businessman Athelstan Digby, on holiday in a small village, agrees to mind the local bookshop while its owners attend a funeral. Over the course of a few hours, three different customers enter, asking - unsuccessfully - for John Bunyan’s “The Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” a homiletic dialogue about sin and redemption. Then, just before closing time, a young boy arrives with a parcel of books being donated to the shop by a Miss Diana Conyers. Among them is a copy of “The Life and Death of Mr. Badman.”

In due course, Mr. Digby discovers why Bunyan’s book is so desirable, uncovers a plot to destroy a distinguished cabinet minister and, more incidentally, helps foster the growing love between Diana Conyers and the young Dr. Pickering. One plot twist closely resembles an early Roald Dahl short story, while the main villain could have stepped out of John Buchan’s “The Three Hostages.” All in all, a pleasant enough read, but Harvey was wise to stick with horror stories.

R.B. Russell’s “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” (Tartarus Press) more deftly blends mystery with contemporary bibliophilia, snarky online discussion groups, hallucinatory time-slips and a pervasive sense of the uncanny. The novel opens when the body of Catherine Richards, the literary executor of the occult novelist Cyril Heldman, apparently falls from the sky and lands on the roof of the house inhabited by an old university friend, Tanya Sewell. Neither Tanya nor her husband, Tom, can explain any of this. Catherine’s will then reveals that she has bequeathed her home and its contents to Tanya.

But why? It appears that Catherine had become a hoarder, leaving barely enough room to move about Stream Cottage because of all the books, piled-up newspapers and detritus. Yet is it all just trash? A book dealer named Nichols keeps stopping by, eager to acquire any Heldman material that might turn up. He is particularly interested in the occult writer’s manuscripts and a certain small black stone with strange carvings on it.

As Tanya tries to figure out what really happened to Catherine - is she in fact dead? - the novel increasingly blurs past and present, reality and dream. This is mystery as metaphysical conundrum. Readers of supernatural literature will further delight in several insider references, such as one plot element that recalls the central conceit of a novel by Walter de la Mare.

At this time of year, customers of New York’s Mysterious Bookshop are given a small present: a booklet containing a story, set during the holiday season and featuring at least one scene taking place in this headquarters for all things criminous. Edited by proprietor Otto Penzler, “Christmas Crimes at the Mysterious Bookshop” collects 12 of those stories in one hardback volume.

Jason Starr leads off with “Black Christmas,” in which a disturbingly obsessed narrator recalls a love affair that goes bad. Loren D. Estleman’s “Wolfe Trap” highlights private investigator Claudius Lyons, who models himself after Rex Stout’s plus-size, orchid-loving Nero Wolfe. Ace Atkins’s “Secret Santa” focuses on a washed-up thriller writer who meets his greatest fan. Other authors featured include Jeffery Deaver, Laura Lippman, Lyndsay Faye and Thomas Perry. The collection closes with Martin Edwards’s appropriately named “End Game,” in which a failing writer tells a ghost story to his wife and agent on Christmas Eve. It’s a chilling enough tale, about an accursed manuscript of Charles Dickens’s “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” but Edwards reserves some last-minute surprises for both his characters and his readers.

For which we are, paradoxically, grateful. A mystery that doesn’t surprise is hardly a mystery at all, and even a study in suspense like “Sudden Fear” relies on one noirish twist after another. In some cases, the author’s final revelations are actually so unexpected or breathtaking that you might want to read the book twice, or even three times, if only to discover the carefully planted clues and subtleties that might have been detected the first time round - but almost never are.