#1506: The Penrose Mystery (1936) by R. Austin Freeman

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I have to be honest: I don’t think I gave The Penrose Mystery (1936) by R. Austin Freeman quite a fair go. I’ve been struggling to find much enthusiasm for reading of late, and I think even the most sprightly and event-packed of novels would have felt like so much boggy ground. So Freeman’s slightly pedantic tone and recapitulatory telling was absolutely not going to work for me, and I should have realised this and not bothered. But the blog needs three posts a week, and so I persisted and had a lousy time; alas, I want to write about Freeman (broadly) chronologically, so I either wait five years to read this again, or I write it up now and admit the slight unfairness of my perspective.

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In GAD We Trust – Episode 38: The Second Coming of the Radio Mystery, via Done to Death (2026) by Brendon Connelly [w’ Brendon Connelly]

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The classic mystery has a rich hertitage on the radio, from the likes of Behind the Screen (1930) to ‘Cabin B-13’ (1943) to the readings of classic mysteries that proliferate to this day. So a brand new, fair play mystery on the radio could well be something to get excited about.

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#1503: Tread Softly (1937) by Brian Flynn

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If you follow the Golden Age blogosphere with any moderate interest, you’ll be aware of the love Puzzle Doctor has for Brian Flynn and the efforts he has gone to, via the wonderfully accommodating people at Dean Street Press, to get as much of Flynn’s work as possible republished. I’ve been slow in my adoption of Flynn it must be said — I couldn’t get on with The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye (1928), Murder en Route (1930), and one other title which escapes me now — but I’m back to give him another go in the form of the well-regarded twentieth novel to feature his amateur sleuth Anthony Bathurst, Tread Softly (1937). It…did not go well.

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#1502: Minor Felonies – Friday Barnes: Girl Detective (2014) by R.A. Spratt

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It is an oft-repeated lament in the halls of Golden Age fandom that, with the authors from that era all being, y’know, dead, we’re always reading a closed set of books. And the wish is to come across some new corpus of work that we can throw ourselves into in the years ahead. Well, it’s not GAD, but with Friday Barnes: Girl Detective (2014) by R.A. Spratt I’ve definitely found a long-running series I can get very excited about.

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#1501: “It looks like we’ve got our locked room mystery.” – Ten Little Wizards (1988) by Michael Kurland

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Having recently been unimpressed by both the sole novel in Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy corpus, Too Many Magicians (1967), and a pastiche novel by Michael Kurland, The Infernal Device (1978), the obvious next step is to read a pastiche novel in the Lord Darcy universe by the author of The Infernal Device, right?

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#1500: Murder in the House of Omari (2021) by Taku Ashibe [trans. Bryan Karetnyk 2025]

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It’s fair to say that, in my reading of crime and detective fiction, I generally like my plots fast-moving, my clues brilliantly baffling, and my detection rigorous. It has been known, though, for something a little more calculated in its pacing or with an absence of well-drawn detection to scratch an itch that only manifests once every blue moon. It was absolutely the case with The Devil’s Flute Murders (1953) by Seishi Yokomizo and, returning to the Land of the Rising Sun and the fiction brought therefrom by Pushkin Vertigo, it’s proved to be the case with Murder in the House of Omari (2021) by Taku Ashibe. Another time, in a different mood, this would not have worked for me at all, but, honestly, I delighted in practically every page of this.

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#1499: Minor Felonies – The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (2007) by Nancy Springer

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It was over three years ago that I read The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006), the first of Nancy Springer’s books featuring Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister Enola, and while I didn’t hate it I also clearly didn’t feel the need to rush back to the series. So here with are with a belated look at second title The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (2007).

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#1498: “You have a reputation for poking your nose into this sort of thing…” – Deep Waters: Mysteries on the Waves [ss] (2019) ed. Martin Edwards

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Sixteen salty seadogs sallying seaward in search of scurrilous…stuff, that’s what you’ll more or less find in Deep Waters [ss] (2019), another anthology of short fiction in the British Library Crime Classic series edited by the some-might-say-too-knowledgeable Martin Edwards.

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#1497: You Can Die Laughing (1957) by A.A. Fair

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Hired by Texan businessman Lawson C. Corning to find the whereabouts of Mrs. Yvonne Wells, the Cool and Lam Detective Agency has reason to believe that there might be more in back of the request than they’re told. Finding the woman’s house doesn’t prove too difficult, but her surly, uncommunicative husband is unwilling to help Donald Lam in his enquiries, and so Lam has to cast his net a little wider. Which is how he ends up at the next door neighbour’s house where Mrs. Raleigh tells him that she heard an argument in the Wells house a couple of nights before, and that Drury Wells then exited the house carrying a body.

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