My first two excursions into the 13 Crimes of Science Fiction [ss] (1977) anthology haven’t exactly been roaring successes. Might some actual detective work find things more to my liking?
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The Roland Lacourbe-curated list of 100 impossible crime novels has held quite a sway in my reading life. Hell, I got one of the titles on it reprinted purely so I could read it myself. Until John Pugmire’s death, Locked Room International did a stalwart job bringing many of the foreign-language titles into English…but still some books on the list seemed frustratingly out of reach, no more so than Into Thin Air (1928) by Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk.
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It is interesting to me that I’ve delved into the career of Walter S. Masterman somewhat contemporaneously with that of Edgar Wallace; the men were briefly literary contemporaries, of course, but they also share a looseness of structure that means you’re never sure if you’re on the verge of a masterpiece, always one sentence or clever idea from being wrong-footed…but equally you always feel one sentence away from what seems to have the seeds of genius turning out to be utter codswallop. It’s a tightrope I’m not sure either man meant to walk, no doubt genuinely trying their best with everything they wrote, but the similarity helps for some reason when, as with The Wrong Verdict (1937), all the promise collapses in a heap.
A second delve into The 13 Crimes of Science Fiction [ss] (1979), as I explore the possibilities of another crossover mystery.
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I first read The Case of the Baited Hook (1940), the sixteenth novel by Erle Stanley Gardner to feature go-fast-and-hit-hard attorney Perry Mason, back in about 2002. Its recent republishing in the American Mystery Classics range, then, was a chance to revisit it — an intriguing prospect, given that I was even vaguer on the events herein than usual.
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The next couple of years will see me read the final few titles by a bunch of authors I’ve come to very much enjoy: I have five novels by Freeman Wills Crofts remaining, five by J.J. Connington, and now, having read Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes (1933), six by R. Austin Freeman. So my enjoyment of these books — and their later books are still proving enjoyable, though I appreciate that may not continue, with John Dickson Carr‘s work already stumbling into that slough of despond — is tinged with melancholy. It’s been such fun, and I don’t want it to end; and I especially don’t want it to end on a damp squib of turgid prose and bumbling plot mechanics.
I am a fan of a good crossover mystery, in which the tenets of crime and detection are placed into a science fiction/Fantasy milieu. So when I heard of a collection called The 13 Crimes of Science Fiction [ss] (1979), you’re darn tootin’ it was only a matter of time before I got to it.
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Look, it took me a long time to appreciate the intelligence of the inverted mystery, in which we know who committed the crime and have to watch both them struggle over it and their eventual discoverer working out the threads of the case. But the important thing is that I got there in the end.
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I hold John Sladek’s second and final detective novel Invisible Green (1977) in very high regard indeed, but have not read his first, the slightly less successful Black Aura (1974), for well over a decade. It’s pretty incredible that something which gave so much air to three baffling impossibilities was written as late as 1974 at all, and so revisiting it and finding a book which doesn’t quite fulfil the expectations of any idiom — it’s too puzzle-focussed for the gritty style that was popular at the time, but too nebulously handled to satisfy true puzzle heads — isn’t really a surprise. There’s still some enjoyable stuff in here, but this is very much the apprentice work for the masterpiece Sladek would produce three years later.
Another Choose Your Own Adventure-style mystery, this one aimed at the younger market. So how does it stack up in comparison to the other two I’ve tried thus far, which were more clearly for grown-ups?
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The Invisible Event 