Edmund Crispin produced a detective novel a year for eight years, steadily improving in grace, academic wit and technical virtuosity until he sounded rather like the improbable but attractive heir at once of Michael Innes and John Dickson Carr, with an occasional bequest from M. R. James and Groucho Marx. Then he stopped abruptly a dozen years ago. Since that time, we have had only his short stories to console us….

[The short stories in "Beware of the Trains" are very consoling indeed.] They are brief and lean—but far from slight—models of that rare form, the absolute fair-play puzzle. The devices are diabolically ingenious; the fairness is unexceptionable, and the stories are skillful, charming and adequately fleshed as fiction in addition to their virtues as deductive problems…. There are probably enough Crispin shorts for a second volume by now; let us pray for its prompt appearance...