#1503: Tread Softly (1937) by Brian Flynn

/ JJ / 2 Comments


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.

Continue reading →

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

/ JJ / 2 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

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

/ JJ / 2 Comments

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?

Continue reading →

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

/ JJ / 16 Comments


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.

Continue reading →

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

/ JJ / 4 Comments

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).

Continue reading →

#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

/ JJ / 9 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

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

/ JJ / 6 Comments


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.

Continue reading →

#1496: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘About the Disappearance of Agatha King’ (1939) by Anthony Abbot

/ JJ / 5 Comments

Neither of the two novels I’ve read by Anthony Abbot have exactly thrilled me, but the guy clearly has some good ideas — ideas that, I can’t help but feel, get a little diluted in the need to expand them up to novel length. So the opportunity to read the short story ‘About the Disappearance of Agatha King’ (1939) — listed in Adey — was too tempting to pass up.

Continue reading →

#1495: “It’s going to be a long, hard haul, you know…” – When the Old Man Died (1991) by Roger Ormerod

/ JJ / 8 Comments

It’s been a while since I read anything by Roger Ormerod, and that’s in part because I can’t quite decide how I feel about his work. Yes, he puts forwards some intriguing ideas and has resolved a few impossibilities very neatly, but at the same time there’s no real detection and the books always seem to sag heavily in the middle…so can the much-recommended When the Old Man Died (1991) reverse those impressions?

Continue reading →

#1494: The Five Matchboxes (1948) by John Russell Fearn

/ JJ / 11 Comments


I may not yet share TomCat’s love of John Russell Fearn, but I also won’t deny that in the little I’ve read by the man he’s shown enough spirit to warrant further investigation. Blame, then, my never-ending TBR for the multiple years it’s taken me to get back to him, with The Five Matchboxes (1948) patiently waiting on my Kindle with nary a word of complaint. Much to my surprise and delight, it was an impossible crime, too, with stockbroker Granville Collins shot in his office when there was no-one around and no way to shoot him from outside. Can Chief Superintendent Mortimer Garth get to the bottom of this without his dyspepsia distracting him too greatly?

Continue reading →