cover image Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner

Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner

Joseph Commings. Crippen & Landru Publishers, $19 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-885941-97-8

Fans of John Dickson Carr's ingenious impossible crime stories will delight in Joseph Commings's Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner, a masterful collection of short stories, one previously unpublished, combining terrifying, seemingly supernatural murders with elegant, logical fair-play solutions. The eccentric sleuth will remind many of Carr's ribald, shrewd and idiosyncratic Sir Henry Merrivale, and the confounding situations-including a vampire wearing an iron mask, a black friar who vanishes from a locked cell and a smoking gun fired through a sealed envelope without leaving a hole-rank with some of the best efforts of locked-room masters such as Clayton Rawson, Hake Talbot and Peter Godfrey.