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

Rating:
Summary: Locked Room Conundrums
Review: The locked-door mystery appears to be a style of a bygone era and is rarely found nowadays. These intriguing types of mysteries usually involve a crime - usually a murder - involving a dead body discovered in a sealed room that is left in such a way that there can be no possible way for the murderer to have committed the crime and then gotten away undetected.

BANNER DEADLINES is a collection of exactly these types of locked-door short stories by Joseph Commings. They have been gathered from such old-time pulp magazines as 10-Story Detectives, Ten Detective Aces and Mystery Digest and put together in this wonderfully presented volume. The stories contained within range in publication date from as early as 1947 and as recently as 1984 and all feature New York Senator Brooks U. Banner, a huge, cigar chomping man with a passion for puzzles, magic and the art of criminal detection. He is loud, gruff and abrasive...and he solves some of the most impossible mysteries through 14 stories.

The book kicks off with a classic locked-room story involving a clearly murdered body found inside a room made entirely of glass and, most astoundingly, with no doors. Conundrums like these seem to be right up Senator Banner's alley as, story after story he is faced with the most perplexing crimes only to dispatch them with relative ease, usually revealing a delightful twist at the end.

As a taste of what you can expect among the stories, murders take place: at a séance; in a rowboat in the middle of a lake; inside a magician's escape box; in a cemetery; on a movie set; and, a personal favourite of mine, in an old haunted house. For the most part there are plenty of clues provided in each story to give you a chance at figuring out the puzzle, although vital clues are withheld in a couple of the stories until Banner makes his dramatic announcement about who the murderer is and how the crime was committed.

All in all this is a beautifully presented collection of intriguing mysteries that will send your mind bending in all sorts of directions as you try to solve the puzzles before Banner.


Rating:
Summary: THE GREAT SENATOR
Review: THIS ARE SHORT STORIES OF LOCKED ROOM MURDERS AND MYSTERIES, FROM THE GOLDEN AGE. ALL ARE VERY GOOD, AND THE READER WILL HAVE HOURS OF FUN. ANOTHER GREAT BOOK FROM CRIPPENLANDRU.