William Brittain's short mystery stories

Continuing my adventures with vintage crime fiction, and an enjoyable new find: the cosy short stories of William Brittain, who was a regular contributor to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in the 1960s and 70s. These two collections (published by short-mystery specialists Crippen & Landru) include dozens of Mr Strang stories – about the deductive skills of an elderly, (mostly) gentle science teacher. My favourites so far include “Mr Strang Finds the Answers” (which is suspenseful, well-plotted but also strangely moving in its premise of Mr Strang having to figure out which of three students stole the answer keys for an upcoming exam - and bringing their fathers, also his ex-students, in for a chat), “Mr Strang versus the Snowman”, “Mr Strang Accepts a Challenge”, "Mr Strang Picks up the Pieces", "Mr Strang Sees a Play", and “Mr Strang, Armchair Detective”.

But there are also 11 stories from Brittain’s “Man Who Reads…” series (see the contents page here), and for very obvious reasons I leapt right into the first one, “The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr”. This is a concise tale about a young man, obsessed with John Dickson Carr, who sets about plotting a locked-room murder of his own. And does a very clever job of it too… until he doesn’t. Delightful stuff, with a superb closing sentence.

 

P.S. if you zoom in on the cover of The Man Who Read Mysteries, you’ll see that the book being read is Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage – which, coincidentally, I read just last week. Tribute-literature can be such fun when it’s well-executed and has a distinct personality of its own – as is the case here.