#623: Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930) by R. Austin Freeman

January 23, 2020January 23, 2020 / JJ / 13 Comments

When digging his garden to lay a foundation for a new sundial, quiet, unostentatious bachelor Marcus Pottermack uncovers a previously-unknown well. That same day, he receives yet another demand for money from the man who is blackmailing him, and it’s only a matter of time before one problem is used to solve the other. And when curiosities about the man’s disappearance are raised in passing with Dr. John Thorndyke, it’s only a matter of time before that pillar of truth is on the trail of quiet, unostentatious Marcus Pottermack. And yet, for all its conventional-sounding setup, Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930) is a delightfully unconventional inverted mystery.

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#622: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Phantom Ragdoll (2019) by DWaM

January 21, 2020January 21, 2020 / JJ / 12 Comments

The joy of self-publishing must be the freedom to live or die solely on your own efforts. There’s most likely no-one looking over your shoulder to advise you, and while that may be the key factor that ruins a lot of SP fiction, if you can get it right on your own I imagine it’s rather thrilling.

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#621: The Borrowers Afield in The Mystery of the Moaning Cave (1968) by William Arden

January 18, 2020January 18, 2020 / JJ / 6 Comments

As the current glut of Golden Age detective fiction reprints is making us all aware, copyrights can be a tricky thing. An author’s intellectual property is the characters and plots they create, and allowing others to have access to them is correctly something which is very closely guarded.

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#620: The D.A. Breaks a Seal (1946) by Erle Stanley Gardner

January 16, 2020January 16, 2020 / JJ / 7 Comments

In a recent conversation on the GAD Facebook group, I was reminded that I haven’t read any of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Doug Selby novels in a while. In fact, it’s been a year — where does the time go? So, Project One for 2020 is to get these Selby novels finished so that I can move on to the 30 cases featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. And then the eighty-four Perry Mason cases, which, at this rate, will keep me in blogging material until I’m about 146 years old. But, for today and my belated return to Gardner’s world, we enter a very different Madison County: one where D.A Doug Selby isn’t the D.A — I suppose The Guy Who Used to Be D.A. Breaks a Seal just ain’t that catchy…

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#619: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Royal Baths Murder (2019) by J.R. Ellis

January 14, 2020January 12, 2020 / JJ / 6 Comments

It had been my intention to read one of J.R. Ellis’ earlier Yorkshire-set impossible crime novels after reading his third, The Murder at Redmire Hall (2018), last year. But then he released a fourth and, well, the best laid plans…

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#618: Going Home – Dark Hollow (2000) by John Connolly

January 11, 2020January 7, 2020 / JJ / 2 Comments

I did a month of Going Home posts — looking at the contemporary fiction that had steered me onto the more classic detection path now walk — last May, and rather enjoyed revisiting some influential (for me) books and happy memories.

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#617: The Black Honeymoon (1944) by Constance and Gwenyth Little [a.p.a by Conyth Little]

January 9, 2020January 9, 2020 / JJ / 21 Comments

Sisters Constance and Gwenyth Little occupy an unusual place in the firmament of GAD. Together they wrote 21 novels and, thanks to the Rue Morgue Press reissuing them in the early 2000s, there’s sufficient awareness around them for the term “forgotten” to be thoroughly inappropriate…but you’d have to be a genre nerd to name more than a handful of their books. Their lack of a series character and the fact that they wrote no short stories (and a single novella, presumably harder to anthologise) doubtless play a part, but I think more telling is the fact that they’re remarkably difficult to pigeonhole. You’re never quite sure what you’re getting, and that cuts both ways.

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