‘Hey,’ readers this blog aren’t saying ‘it’s been a while since Jim wrote about Monk, in which Tony Shalhoub plays an OCD-afflicted ex-police detective in San Francisco.’ Yeah, well I have them all on DVD — look, I scanned in the cover above and everything — but what I don’t have is a DVD player.
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Having had an unexpectedly delightful time with one of Ramble House’s loons in The Claws of the Cougar (1957) by Norman Berrow last week, I headed with similarly low expectations into another author from their stable, the equally-variable Walter S. Masterman. The Hunted Man (1938) is, incredibly, my fifteenth read by Masterman, and I still don’t really feel that I know him as an author, especially as this dramatically reverses the downward trend of the last couple of his I read. With about six of his books remaining to me, I’d be amazed if I didn’t read all his works, but there’s as good a chance of them all being superb as there is of every single one driving me to distraction. For god’s sake, Walter, pick a lane; please.
We started this month of Minor Felonies Tuesdays with one Sherlock Holmes pastiche, so let’s wrap it up with another before next month takes us back into Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. Thus, Black Ice (2011), the third entry in Andrew Lane’s series charting the development of a teenage Holmes into the resident of 221B Baker Street we all know and love.
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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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