Review – As If By Magic

Posted December 2, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

As If By Magic

by Martin Edwards (editor)

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Short Stories
Pages: 349
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Impossible crime stories have delighted readers since the invention of detective fiction as puzzle-lovers sought more cerebral entertainment. Following on from Miraculous Mysteries, CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards brings together a whole new casebook of mystifying locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. Featuring more great stories by John Dickson Carr, Julian Symons and Margery Allingham alongside newly rediscovered writers, this selection of stories will bring you more insight into one of the most celebrated and dazzling sub-genres of detective fiction.

I’m not always one for locked room mysteries, I must admit, but the latest British Library Crime Classics collection, As If By Magic, was actually pretty fun. It’s edited by Martin Edwards and has the usual format of short introductions before each story, though this one is opened and closed by a John Dickson Carr story. That feels only appropriate given his influence on the genre!

There is a repeat story that’s used in another collection (“The Coulman Handicap” is in a different British Library collection, not sure which), but otherwise they were all new to me, and there were some ingenious ones. Also far-fetched, of course, but that’s part of the territory with locked room mysteries. It was especially bad with (spoilers for one story ahead) the one where a pistol was shot into a tree and then the bullet fired itself at a man two hundred years later when he burned wood from that tree — though I did kinda enjoy that that one, of course, wasn’t a crime at all.

Overall, pretty fun, though that final Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr) story does strike quite the macabre note, sheesh!

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)