#676: The Heel of Achilles (1950) by E. & M.A. Radford
When a man wrongly implicated in criminous deeds finds himself at the mercy of a blackmailer, is pushed to the limit by the blackmailer’s avarice, kills said blackmailer and goes to great lengths to cover up the crime only to find himself pursued by a highly-observant criminologist…you’re not the only one getting Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930) vibes. And, Pottermack being one of my most delighted discoveries of the last couple of years, you’d expect The Heel of Achilles (1950) by E. & M.A. Radford to suffer by comparison, but it is in fact simply proof of how much richness the Golden Age was able to find in the same material.
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#675: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Atmosphere (2018) by Robert Innes
As we approach the (current?) end of Rob Innes’ Blake Harte series of impossible crime stories, I have to confess that one of its major successes has been getting me, a man who will take a finely-crafted plot over minutely-observed character, engaged in the lives of his core cast.
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#674: In GAD We Trust – Episode 5: GAD in the Time of COVID-19 [w’ Brad @ AhSweetMysteryBlog]
As the COVID-19 pandemic rolls into its 348th week, Brad from AhSweetMysteryBlog is here with some salutary advice.
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#673: Cut and Run (1941) by Martin Tanner
We tend to take it for granted that authors like John Dickson Carr and John Rhode created noms de plume effectively to enable them to produce double the amount of their usual fiction. Central character names aside, Rhode’s works don’t really differ from ‘Miles Burton’s nor Carr’s from that of ‘Carter Dickson’. You’d think they’d want a day off every now and then (and their critics might suggest they could have used one). One would expect a new identity to be quite freeing — see Agatha Christie occasionally escaping into the social concerns of ‘Mary Westmacott’, or Anthony Berkeley rearranging his palette as ‘Francis Iles’ — a chance to experiment in private, as it were.
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#672: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder by Magic (2017) by Paul Tomlinson
Typical, eh? You wait years for a blog to talk about magic, and then suddenly three posts come along at once: the most recent In GAD We Trust episode with John Norris, and two self-published impossible crime stories — one this week, and one next. Sure, that’s stretching the definition of “at once” to an Orwellian degree, but that’s how I apparently roll.
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#671: “At this point, everything seems too far-fetched to be taken seriously…” – The Invisible Circle (1996) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2014]
