The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth

The 11 short stories in this stellar collection by the undeservedly obscure Cornier (1898%E2%80%931976) feature Barnabas Hildreth (aka the Blank Monk), an enigmatic British Intelligence agent. The cases, narrated by a newspaper editor named Ingram, offer some of the most baffling situations outside of John Dickson Carr's work. The title tale has Hildreth attempting to explain how someone could be wounded by a bullet fired over 200 years earlier, but the other stories are hardly less fantastic. In "The Catastrophe in Clay," for example, a man is mysteriously transformed into stone after a strange blue ball hurtles to earth nearby. As with many impossible crime tales, it's better to journey than to arrive at the answer, but the consistent ingenuity of the setups and resolutions justify Ellery Queen's labeling Cornier's work "one of the great series of modern detective stories." (Sept.)