Hard Cheese

Publisher's Weekly says: "Durling integrates laugh-out-loud humor into a scrupulously fair locked-room mystery." Gunnar Bergman, a detective sergeant in a small Swedish town, is called in to investigate the death of a resident of a shady boarding house. He makes the mistake of telling his father, Carl, all the details of the case, including the fact that the victim’s room was locked from the inside. Carl, a locked room enthusiast, is a member of a small club which meets regularly to discuss locked room classics. He and his fellow members gleefully seize on the case and apply chains of Ellery Queen style logic to devise a solution which Gunnar finds so hilarious he reads out extracts to his wife in bed. Meanwhile, he himself interprets the same set of clues to arrive at a totally different solution, through shoddy police work which follows the path of least resistance. It is left to a cheese-loving local doctor to interpret the clues in yet another way to solve the case and confront the murderer. Locked Room International translates and publishes the works of international impossible crime authors, past and present, including the French master, Paul Halter. For information about signed and lettered editions of all living authors, contact pugmire1@yahoo.com or go to www.mylri.com

The multi-talented Ulf Durling spent his professional life as a psychiatrist, wrote 16 crime novels and nearly 100 short stories and articles and now tours Sweden giving lectures on the benefits of reading about murder. He also plays bassoon in a symphony orchestra. "Hard Cheese" (as "Gammal Ost") was awarded Best Debut Novel by the Swedish Academy of Crime Fiction in 1971 and is now regarded as a classic. Ulf Durling's style has been called an unusual cross between Patricia Highsmith and P.G. Wodehouse.