Radio Kills

THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF ROARING TWENTIES WHODUNNITS.
Edited by Mike Ashley.
Running Press.
2004. 512 pages.

Mike Ashley's anthology contains several locked-room/impossible crime stories, including (see Contents below) one by Edward D. Hoch.

About Grenville Robbins's "The Broadcast Murder" Ashley notes:

. . . this story, written and published in 1928, is, as far as I know, the first radio murder mystery—certainly the first 'locked room' one. [Page 357]

They should have filmed Robbins's story. Instead we have Val Gielgud's DEATH AT A BROADCAST (1934), which lacks the intellectual frisson that a locked room problem would have added.

Contents:
Foreword: "The Crazy Age" by Mike Ashley
"Timor Mortis" by Annette Meyers
"Brave New Murder" by H. R. F. Keating
"So Beautiful, So Dead" by Robert J. Randisi
" 'There would have been murder' " by Ian Morson
"Someone" by Michael Collins
"Kiss the Razor’s Edge" by Mike Stotter
"Thoroughly Modern Millinery" by Marilyn Todd
"The Day of Two Cars" by Gillian Linscott
"The Hope of the World" by Mat Coward
"Bullets" by Peter Lovesey
"He Couldn’t Fly" by Michael Kurland
"Putting Crime Over" by Hulbert Footner
"Valentino’s Valediction" by Amy Myers
"Skip" by Edward Marston
"The Broadcast Murder" by Grenville Robbins
"For the Benefit of Mr Means" by Christine Matthews
"Without Fire" by Tom Holt
"The Austin Murder Case" by Jon L. Breen
"The Man Who Scared the Bank" by Archibald Pechey
"A Pebble for Papa" by Max Allan Collins & Matthew V. Clemens
"Beyond the Call of Beauty" by Will Murray
"The Problem of the Tin Goose" by Edward D. Hoch
"I’ll Never Play Detective Again" by Cornell Woolrich.

Category: Detective fiction