Locked and Loaded, Part 8: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

Back in 2020, I posted the first "Locked and Loaded" blog-post reviewing five, or six, randomly picked, usually uncollected short stories of the impossible variety and covered a 118 year period of short locked room mystery stories in the previous seven reviews – stretching from 1905 all the way up to 2023. So, as to be expected, the quality varies from story to story. However, the stories reviewed in the last two "Locked and Loaded" posts only had one really good short story, James H. Cobb's "Over the Edge" (2007). I wanted to do another one, before the end of the year, hoping to find another really good story or two. Fingers crossed!So, before delving into the stories making up part 8, you can find my previous "Locked and Loaded" reviews here: part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.The first story is James Yaffe's "Mr. Kiroshibu's Ashes," originally published in the March, 1944, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which he wrote when he was a 16-year-old locked room mystery enthusiast.…