A second collection of the detective short stories of William Brittain from Crippen & Landru, The Man Who Solved Mysteries [ss] (2022) follows The Man Who Read Mysteries [ss] (2018), this time with all 24 stories featuring high school science teacher Leonard Strang.
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Immediately after being thoroughly exasperated by The Penrose Mystery (1936) by R. Austin Freeman, I picked up The Claws of the Cougar (1957) by Norman Berrow with low expectations — sorry, Norman — and breezed through it in a couple of hours of sheer delight. If authors are supposed to do their weakest work at the end of their career, no-one told Norman Berrow: this and preceding title The Lady’s in Danger (1955) are very strong, and he didn’t publish another new novel before his death in 1986 (Ghost House (1979) doesn’t count, since it was an edited version of Ghost House (1940) and we’ll find out what all that was about in due course).
I’ve been searching around for a juvenile mystery series not from the 21st century to take the place of the Five Find-Outers on the blog (I still have several Ken Holt books to read, it’s true, but I grew a little weary of those) and stumbled upon a reference to an impossible crime in the shape of The Locked Safe Mystery (1954), the second of fifteen juvenile mysteries by Norvin Pallas published between 1951 and 1967. And it’s in Skupin, so, well, why not?
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Perhaps the biggest conundrum at the heart of Golden Age detective fiction fandom is precisely when the Golden Age was. Some people say it started in 1913 with Trent’s Last Case (1913) by E.C. Bentley, but I’d argue that the relative paucity of titles between then and 1920, another suggest starting point, renders that book an outlier.
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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.
I like crossover mysteries, I like stories about time travel — these two being combined in the short-lived Anthony Horowitz series Crime Traveller (1997) — and I like juvenile mysteries. So a juvenile crossover mystery in which twins can affect the flow of time should be right up my street. Should be.
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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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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.
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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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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