I’ve had more than a dozen of my locked-room mystery short stories published, from my debut short story (which we shall never speak of again) to my Edgar Award short-listed “The Locked Room Library,” originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Now, for the first time, I’ve assumed the role of editor.
My co-editor Tom Mead and I are thrilled to share All the Crime in the World: Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Puzzles from Across the Globe, a new anthology published by Crippen & Landru in which we’ve gathered together 15 modern-day practitioners of impossible crimes. The anthology is published by Crippen & Landru and is now available!
How the anthology came about
Tom and I bonded over our shared love of John Dickson Carr, the undisputed master of the locked-room mystery, who wrote during the Golden Age of detective fiction and was a contemporary of Agatha Christie. We were also fans of each other’s impossible crime short stories. When we discovered that we each fantasized about editing an impossible crime anthology, we teamed up to make it happen!
We thought about our dream list of authors we wanted to include, and to our delight, nearly all of them said yes!
Here’s the final LIST OF authors and STORIES
Introduction by Douglas G. Greene
“The Body on the Rooftop” by Victor Bonini
“The Legacy” by Sulari Gentill
“The Allegory of the Five Senses” by Josh Pachter
“The Man Who Tried To Fly” by Anne van Doorn
“The Wabi Locked Room” by Yamaguchi Masaya
“Knock and Run” by Ovidia Yu
“The Price of Money” by S.A. Cosby
“The Fourth Guest” by James Scott Byrnside
“Don’t Look Back” by Martin Edwards
“In Broad Daylight, with Witnesses” by Christopher Huang
“The Hanged Man’s Bride” by Paul Halter
“Murder in Harvard Yard” by Shelly Dickson Carr
“A Distinctive Man” by Vaseem Khan
“The Problem of the Poison Garden” by Tom Mead and Gigi Pandian
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR ALL THE CRIME IN THE WORLD
“The cleverness and variety on display will thrill fans of classic detective fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review
Co-writing a short story
As for the story I co-wrote with Tom Mead, neither of us had co-written a story before, and we had so much fun collaborating on “The Problem of the Poison Garden.” Our sleuth, known simply as “the Professor,” must solve a decades-old crime in order to catch a clever present-day killer who’s committed a seemingly impossible crime in a walled poison garden.
Tom lives in England and I’m in California, but we were able to get together a couple of times in person when I was in the UK. We plotted in person, then each wrote sections of the story and went back and forth with editing.
Gigi Pandian and Tom Mead writing together at a cafe in Oxford, England.
It’s been such fun to see so many current authors discovering this genre that was most popular a century ago. Shelly Dickson Carr and S.A. Cosby are two authors in the anthology who love the genre, so they were two of the first people we asked.
Shelly Dickson Carr, S.A. Cosby, and Gigi Pandian at Bouchercon World Mystery Convention, 2019, bonding over a shared love of John Dickson Carr.
Long live the locked-room mystery!