Three weeks ago I finally caught up with ‘The Dashing Joker’ (2001) by Ashibe Taku in an old Ellery Queen Mystery magazine. This week, I finally run ‘Sacrifice in White’ (2012) by Qinwen Sun to earth in another, more recent EQMM, the January/February 2024 issue.
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I first read The Kennel Murder Case (1933), the sixth book by S.S. van Dine to feature the love-him-or-hate-him amateur sleuth Philo Vance, when in the initial thralls of having discovered the impossible crime. I tore through it, remember little of the impression it left on me, and doubtless threw it aside for the next adventure. So returning to it 20 years later, in sequence with the other Philo Vance novels, is not so much a homecoming as finally a chance to do the book justice. And I really did remember very little, just the broad strokes of the mechanism for the locked room which opens the book and the fact that it contained a dog…so this second read might as well be a first one.
Well, the penultimate Lord Darcy story was fucking awful, so the final one has to end things on a more positive note, right? Right?
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Firstly, no: I have no idea what the cover of this 1973 pocket edition of The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1934) by Erle Stanley Gardner is about. This sixth novel to feature the sharp-brained lawyer Perry Mason does involve a shooting, but never anything close to the scene depicted on the front. Mind you, the photograph isn’t even in focus, so maybe we shouldn’t dwell on it too much.
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The metafictional world inhabited by Anthony Horowitz in this series, where he plays Watson to the mysterious, ingenious ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne, kicks up a notch in sixth title A Deadly Episode (2026). A film is being made of the first book, The Word is Murder (2017), and early on Horowitz reflects on its being set in Hastings when the events on the book took place 60 miles away in Deal: “I thought it was questionable to take a real tragedy and real pain and to fictionalise it by changing the location”. It’s a sly joke — if ‘joke’ is the word, which I suspect it isn’t — and it speaks to the confidence Horowitz is finding as this series progresses.
With an uptick in quality in the previous two Lord Darcy short stories, I was very much looking forward to the penultimate one — also the longest, by a significant amount — continuing this trend. And, wow, was I mistaken.
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The idea of a collection of Golden Age short stories based around a theme of animals seemed like an unusual one, until I remembered that one of the genre’s foundational short stories and one of its most famous novels both have animals in fairly central roles. So that’s all right, then.
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“There were moments when the police felt like giving up their attempt to find among the scores who hated or feared Emily Purvice the one who had killed her”. That sums up At Death’s Door (1955), the first novel to feature crime-solving History teacher Carolus Deene by Leo Bruce, pretty well: Mrs. Purvice has her claws into the finer business of more than a few people in Newminster, and when she’s found beaten over the head in the back room of her shop late one evening, no-one is surprised or especially grieved. But whodunnit? The parson? Her wastrel son? The recently-released borstal boy? The two women running the pet shop next door? The list goes on and on.
And so, a new-to-me story from Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy oeuvre, since I definitely didn’t read these last three in this collection at first encounter (no, I’m not sure why).
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Certain so-called friends of mine have made a point of telling me that back issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine are available at their local library. My library, while cool, is not quite that cool, and so it’s taken me a while to track down some stories published therein, including this one from the September/October 2020 edition.
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The Invisible Event 