Author’s Note

I’ve always loved the Golden Age of detective fiction, when puzzle plot mysteries and short stories were popular. Authors like John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, and Ellery Queen (the pseudonym for Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee) took the challenge to readers even further, often writing locked room or otherwise impossible crime stories (the definition of which is explained by Doug Greene in the Foreword).

From the time I sat down to write my first short story, I knew it would be this type of “fair play” puzzle plot, where the writer plays fair with the reader by planting all the clues in plain sight. I wasn’t sure if I was a skilled enough writer yet to successfully write an impossible crime story, but I knew I wanted to try. I wrote “The Shadow of the River” in longhand one afternoon at the San Francisco Public Library. It was a simple twist, but I was so proud of finishing that story that I submitted it to an anthology competition of blind submissions—where it was accepted. My subsequent stories became more complex as I became a better storyteller, and I always challenged myself to come up with an impossible crime twist that would baffle readers as they had fun trying to figure it out.

While Doug Greene and I were chatting at Malice Domestic last year, he asked me about the locked room methods I used in my stories. I hadn’t realized until that moment that each of my stories used a different method, each of them one of the methods laid out by John Dickson Carr in his famous Locked Room Lecture. I had pushed myself to make each story surprising and different, but I hadn’t realized just how much I was following in the tradition of the authors who’d inspired me.

So now I will issue my own challenge to you, the reader: Did you spot the different methods used in each story as they followed the categories of the famous Locked Room Lecture? Hint: There’s at least one story that features more than one method.

And one more challenge: There are several “Easter eggs” hidden in these stories—fun hidden references to literary characters and authors I love. Fans of Elizabeth Peters, Aaron Elkins, and Juliet Blackwell, I hope you caught the nods to these fabulous authors.

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