The Locked Treehouse Murder

I’ve been nibbling at the edges of the “impossible crime” subgenre forever. But my best outing along that line is a soon-to-be-published short story with a locked room murder in a treehouse.

“Done with Mirrors” is the second adventure of Carlo Stuarti, my amateur detective who lives in the world of Sherlock Holmes. Stuarti is an Italian-born professional magician who claims to be much more – the rightful king of England, by descent from Bonnie Prince Charlie!

It’s his knowledge of the conjuror’s art, though, that helps him figure out how the seemingly impossible murder was “Done with Mirrors.”

Stuarti has his own “Watson” to narrate their adventures, American press agent Jack Barker. Like the young Sherlock Holmes, he lives on Montague Street.

Their first story, “Murder at Madame Tussaud’s,” appeared three years ago in the inaugural issue of Black Cat Mystery Magazine. The follow-up, which also features Holmes’s old friend Inspector Tobias Gregson, will appear this summer in an anthology called Sherlock Holmes and the Great Detectives. Most of the other stories pair Holmes with famous sleuths of the past, such as Father Brown, the Thinking Machine, and Dr. Thorndyke.

The publisher, Belanger Books, is a small press. As such, it’s using crowdsourcing to fund production. Please check out their Kickstarter page and see if it’s something you’d like to support. Here’s a link.