A young woman vanishes without a trace from a cottage watched from all sides. Five butlers, all linked to impossible murders, face their own improbable doom at the annual club dinner. How was a bank-cashier, enjoying the radio at home alone, felled by a bullet fired 222 years prior? Today, ‘locked room mystery’ is too often used as shorthand for any kind of closed-circle detective story, but this collection of classic short mysteries is the real deal, where the question is not simply whodunit?, but howdunit? And for puzzle-obsessives and those who love to see how the greatest deceptions are unraveled, As If by Magic offers some of the most tantalising criminal conundrums ever devised. Gathering sixteen perplexing problems from a troupe of writers including obscure rediscoveries and legends of the Golden Age of Crime such as John Dickson Carr, Christianna Brand and Julian Symons, Martin Edwards sets the stage for one of the most entertaining anthologies of impossible and locked room mysteries in the history of the genre.