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THE BAFFLE BOOK
Calling all mystery puzzle fans! The “brilliant” and baffling puzzle book that launched the “solve-it-yourself” mystery craze of the 1920s and ’30s (New York Times). Thirty (30) short crime problems incorporate all the clues needed to find their solutions.
Penzler Publishers/AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS * February 2026 * 240 pages
While its contemporaries, Father Brown and Hercule Poirot among them, have become household names, THE BAFFLE BOOK is possibly one of the most influential mystery books ever written.
Four years before Ripley’s Minute Mysteries, decades before Clue, and nearly a century before Murdle, Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay invited the reader - and the readerʻs friends - to test their crime-solving mettle by solving a series of small, puzzling mysteries (“baffles”). Its release led to phenomenal success, multiple sequels, and the explosion of this genre of solve-it-yourself mysteries. THE BAFFLE BOOK has it all: diagrams, fingerprints, signatures, maps, and more. And it presents itself, not as a solitary task, but as a social event:
These baffles are an embodiment of the genreʻs highest principles:
Out of darkness into the light: each BAFFLE BOOK mystery has an unequivocally clear answer
The soul of detective fiction is not complexity but simplicity: each BAFFLE BOOK mystery puzzle reduces the complexity of the problem down to a simple, clear solution - more like Columbo than Sherlock, more concerned with letting you feel ahead of the detective rather than with dazzling you with his intellect.
The fact or figure ex-plaining everything should be a familiar fact or figure: there is no one clue that opens up the whole case snuck into the book in the least noticeable of ways. BAFFLE BOOKclues are laid out so clearly, and the body of text they are hidden in is so small, that there’s really no place for them to hide.
Any clue in a mystery must have a justifiable presence in the story: the readerʻs instinct is to stay suspicious, so the BAFFLE BOOK uses the twist of the puzzle form to bury the perfect misleading explanation that justifies the presence of any clue. Itʻs the difference between a long-winded joke and a short one where you just donʻt see it coming.
The detective story, like every literary form, starts with a complete idea so it is impossible to construct a mystery puzzle without knowing the solution: weʻve all read a detective or mystery stories to the end and decided the solution was ridiculous - like the writer him/herself had no idea whodunit when they started writing. Each of the BAFFLE BOOK mysteries is complete, concrete and unassailable.
Sure, itʻs great to feel like a brainiac when you solve one of these baffles, but there is a special delight in racing friends to solve a case—or solving one together. Wren and McKay understood this so presented THE BAFFLE BOOK not as a challenge to the ego, but as a social springboard. In our socially strained times, itʻs just what the mystery doctor ordered.
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