"The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ashley Mike, Edwards Martin, Ellis Kate, Frazer Margaret, Carr John Dickson,...)

OUT OF HIS HEAD by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

This story and the next three are a little group of early impossible crime stories to give a flavour of the past. In fact this story is one of the very earliest, the second only after Poe’s“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, to feature an amateur detective seeking to solve a locked-room murder. The story is a self-contained episode in the rather rambling novel Out of His Head (1862). Thomas Bailey Aldrich(1836-1907)was an American poet, author and editor – he edited the Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890. He wrote a number of stylish and idiosyncratic novels and stories of which the most popular in his day was“Marjorie Daw”(1873)about a man who falls in love with a girl he later discovers never existed. In The Stillwater Tragedy (1880),Aldrich introduced a private detective some years before Doyle created Sherlock Holmes. Although the following is the oldest story in this anthology, it remains remarkably fresh today, a testament to Aldrich’s skills and inventiveness.