Another modern novel which sounds like it might have an impossible crime at its core, sufficient reason for me to grab a copy — from the library, dear boy, I’m not made of money — and see if it’s worthy of TomCat‘s attention. I get no enjoyment from this whatsoever, you understand. And I do it for free!
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Recovering from a bout of jaundice, History master Carolus Deene is sent by his headmaster to sleepy Buddington, “famous for its population of rich and aged invalids” and the fact that “[t]here, alone in all England, the bath-chair survives as more than a relic”. There it is hoped that Deene will refrain from “jeopardizing the fair name of the Queen’s School by embroiling [him]self in detective work of a nature likely to result in unfortunate publicity”. Alas, immediately prior to his arrival, two elderly women are found strangled to death on the same night, the arrangement of their bodies suggesting some link. And Deene’s reputation precedes him to the point that he finds himself investigating almost against his will.
Another crime novel from my early-2000s reading that put me on the path to classic detection and hence this blog.
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Another collection from the British Library Crime Classics range, edited by Detection Club President Martin Edwards, this time focussing on mysteries based around books — what’s not to love?!
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I’m pretty sure that I’d rather, in the 24 novels of crime and detection Alfred Walter Stewart wrote as J.J. Connington, he took a few risks and so remained curious, but that doesn’t mean I’m always going to like what he wrote. And so to Murder Will Speak, a.k.a. For Murder Will Speak (1938), the thirteenth novel to feature Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield, and one that takes a slightly sideways steps in its telling which, while not always successful, at least fails in some interesting ways. Connington’s other experiments — The Eye in the Museum (1929), Gold Brick Island (1933), The Brandon Case (1934) — were certainly harder to read than this, and with a few pages chopped out this might have been more successful.
A potentially final visit to the work of Harlan Coben, who I got into in a big way in the early 2000s but who now, as my own tastes have moved on, occupies more a position of nostalgia than any sort of feeling of needing to continue to read him.
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A twenty-fourth case for Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, and the sixth time they’ve been directed by Mary Virginia Carey, The Mystery of Death Trap Mine (1976) marks very slight change of pace for the Three Investigators.
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For reasons beyond finding Puzzle for Fools (1936) merely okay, I’ve never quite been able to summon much enthusiasm for investigating the work of Jonathan Stagge/Patrick Quentin/Q. Patrick/etc. Maybe it’s all the pseudonyms, maybe it’s the fact that the names seem to hide an army of collaborators, maybe it’s their general unavailability…maybe it’s a combination of all of that. But The Scarlet Circle (1943) came recommended by someone (apologies, I get a lot of book recommendations) and, being newly minted in the American Mystery Classics range, there was no reason not to check it out. And, having read it, I’m still unenthusiastic about these guys, just now with more evidence.
Between 2016 and 2020, Robert Innes published 10 impossible crime novellas and one novel and then just…disappeared. And his sudden — thought not seemingly impossible — vanishment from the scene made me overlook his final published work, Dollhouse (2020), which I intend to correct today.
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I’ve written before about my experience with the DI John Rebus books by Ian Rankin, a series my changing tastes saw me vacate somewhere in the early 2000s, having read about fifteen of them. Well, I recently discovered that twenty-fifth entry Midnight and Blue (2024) contains an impossible crime, so let’s saddle up one more time and see how things play out. Purely for TomCat‘s benefit, you understand.
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The Invisible Event 