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Old 2011-03-04, 13:09   Link #1087
rogerpepitone
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For people interested in Golden Age mysteries, I'll recommend:

_The Three Coffins_ and _The Nine Wrong Answers_ by John Dickson Carr.

Three Coffins has, IMO, red text done right; right at the beginning, the author states that several witnesses are not deliberately lying, but are describing everything as they saw it. It also has two solid impossible crimes. (In the first, one of those witnesses testifies that he saw the victim let a masked man into his room. The room's one door was under his continuous observation from that moment until they broke in. When they did enter, the victim was lying on the ground with a close-range gunshot wound to the chest. The window was open, but outside was untouched snow as far as the eye could see. In the second crime, three such witnesses testified that they heard a voice shout "The second bullet is for you.", followed by a gunshot. When they turned around, they found the second victim with a close-range gunshot wound, with only his own footprints in the snow; a gun with two bullets fired, matching the two bullets in the victims, was also nearby. The first victim regained consciousness the next day, managing to say "How did he get out of that room?" before expiring.)

_The Nine Wrong Answers_ managed to pull off a good action story, while still managing to answer the mysteries it posed. The footnotes pulled off red text / blue text right.
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