I spend every year literarily mixed up in murder. Notice I said "literarily," not "literally." Of the multitude of novels and short stories I read annually, relatively few are not of the mystery/detection/suspense variety. But then my fiction diet has always contained generous helpings of crime and mystification.

Yes, I’m an unregenerate, unapologetic fan of the mystery genre, probably since I was seven or eight, when my mother bought me the first two books in the Hardy Boys series. Several years later, I discovered Conan Doyle (I still remember being thoroughly captivated and happily chilled by Watson’s eerie description of the moors in The Hound of the Baskervilles), though I never became the rabid Sherlockian some mystery fans seem to be. Subsequently, I graduated to the puzzles woven by Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner, then to the "hardboiled poetry" of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. The latter two remain among my all-time favorites.

My father’s bedside table was always stacked with books. Through him I was introduced to some of the paperback authors who have become highly collectible today. (Paperbacks cost a quarter or thirty-five cents back then; now some of them fetch hefty prices their authors would have loved to earn royalties on.) Among them were Richard S. Prather’s hilarious Shell Scott mysteries, Stephen Marlowe’s tales about "international" private eye Chester Drum, the Matt Helm espionage novels of Donald Hamilton, and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee adventures. Because of my father’s tastes, I discovered Ian Fleming’s James Bond before President Kennedy made him a household name. Having read a lot of Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu novels, I was instantly intrigued by the title Dr. No and its back-cover blurb: "British secret agent James Bond tangles with a honey blonde and a six-foot-six madman with a mania for lust and torture." What better way to start a morning? I sprawled out on my bed, started reading, and didn’t stop till I finished the book that afternoon.

My venture into the hardboiled realms ultimately steered me away from the more traditional whodunits with their English country houses à la Christie or New York mansions à la S.S. Van Dine. The "mean streets" of a Dashiell Hammett were more credible, and the tough detectives who traveled them a lot more realistically drawn than the haughty, eccentric amateurs or professionals of the "traditional” school.

But occasionally I leavened my rugged diet with a traditional and thus discovered the prolific John Dickson Carr, who reawakened my pleasure in the classic fairly-clued puzzler. Although his novels were "veddy British" in setting and style, Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and educated at Haverford College. Some of his earliest detective stories were published in The Haverfordian and introduced French sleuth Henri Bencolin, who later figured in four novels. Carr’s better-known detectives were the Chestertonian Dr. Gideon Fell and, appearing under the author’s Carter Dickson pseudonym, the cantankerously comical Sir Henry Merrivale.

Carr was the undisputed master of the "impossible crime" tale, my favorite type of traditional. More than any other writer in the detective field, Carr successfully wrought variations on the locked-room problem and other seemingly impossible situations with a distinctive flair for eerie atmospheres and page-turning suspense. His "best" has often been debated, but in a poll of mystery writers, editors, critics and readers conducted in the early 1980s, The Three Coffins emerged by a huge margin as the "greatest" impossible crime story of all time.

The novel poses two bafflers. The first is a murder committed in a room bolted on the inside, from which, apart from the door, there is no possible exit for the killer. The second is the murder at close range of a man in the middle of a snow-covered street with witnesses nearby. The only footprints in the surrounding snow are the victim’s. Who committed the murders--and how did he or she escape undetected?

In The Man Who Could Not Shudder, a gun floats off a wall, aims and kills in the presence of witnesses. The victim in He Who Whispers is stabbed to death at a time when nobody could have gotten near him. In A Graveyard to Let , a man dives into a swimming pool--and vanishes. These are but a few of many Carr/Dickson gems.

Although many excellent impossible crime stories have been written since Poe invented the form, the one that equals Carr at his best is Hake Talbot’s Rim of the Pit . Like Carr at his most macabre and atmospheric, Talbot hints at supernatural explanations for the bizarre series of events that follow one upon another, chapter after chapter, until the reader, despite knowing their eventual elucidation will be rationally based, is almost convinced that only a supernatural agency could be responsible for them.

Other titles worth exploring include Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room ; Clayton Rawson’s Death From a Top Hat , The Headless Lady, The Footprints on the Ceiling , and No Coffin for the Corpse ; Jonathan Latimer’s Headed for a Hearse, The Dead Don’t Care , and The Search for My Great Uncle’s Head ; Edmund Crispin’s The Case of the Gilded Fly, Swan Song , and The Moving Toyshop ; Anthony Boucher’s Nine Times Nine and Rocket to the Morgue ; and Ellery Queen’s The Door Between and The King is Dead .

The difficulty will be in finding them; many of these titles are, regrettably, out of print. You may have luck unearthing some in your local library, used-book shops, or finding them online at abebooks.com, Half.com or in e-Bay auctions. John Dickson Carr called the detective story "the grandest game in the world." Read some of these and you’ll understand why.

Now if only the local police department would encounter a real-life impossible crime and enlist me as a "talented amateur" to help solve it…. Never mind. That’s a whole other fantasy.