#1482: Death of Cold (1956) by Leo Bruce

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When the mayor of Oldhaven apparently leaves the local pier one evening without gathering in his fishing paraphernalia, initially it seems like he may have just been forgetful: his daughter was due to give birth, after all, so he had other things on his mind. Then his body is discovered the following day “sprawl[ed] hideously across the beach…a bloated and gruesome sight” and it looks like something might be afoot. He was, after all, visited by six different people while fishing, so could one of them have had motive to push him into the water? Luckily crime-solving History teacher Carolus Deene is in town, and is prepared to investigate…

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#1481: No Police Like Holmes – Baker Street Irregulars [ss] (2017) ed. Michael A. Ventrella & Jonathan Maberry

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I thoroughly enjoyed the very readable set of stories collected in Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018), which gave a variety of almost crossover mystery interpretations to the Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson pastiche. So I’m back for the original volume in this brace to see what other twists have been put on that classic and enduring setup.

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#1479: Ghost of a Chance (1947) by Kelley Roos

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One of the especially lovely things about having a blog is when someone discovers an old post and restarts a conversation from, like, eight years ago. It was a key reason I opted for blogging ahead of other online options, since everyone reads books at their own rate and should be able to discuss them when they’re ready (I, for instance, am months and years away from reading a book that you, dear reader, already absolutely love). So when a representative of Digital Parchment Press cropped up on an old post to let me know that reprints of the wonderfully witty Kelley Roos novels and novellas were in the works, well, I was delighted, to put it mildly.

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#1478: No Police Like Holmes – The Infernal Device (1978) by Michael Kurland

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Hand on heart, I honestly believed I had read The Infernal Device (1978), the first of five books about Professor James Moriarty written by Michael Kurland, before now. Hell, I have talked about this book at length with various people, recommending it to them in very strong terms. So to pick it up and discover that, nope, I have never encountered this particular story — and that it’s so dull I was forgetting swathes of it as I read it, not that it mattered — was something of a shock.

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#1476: The Counsellor (1939) by J.J. Connington

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J.J. Connington would, from time to time, fancy a bit of a break from his usual sleuth, Sir Clinton Driffield, and the outcome of these meanderings leave something to be desired. The bland Supt. Ross got a brace of novels to himself — the awful The Eye in the Museum (1929) and The Two Tickets Puzzle (1930), which is better because anything would be — and radio host Mark Brand similarly got two books of his own: the execrable The Four Defences (1940) and today’s read, his debut appearance, The Counsellor (1939) which is better than his sophomore case, but, well, no wonder Brand has a short career; Driffield would have solved this in a third of the time.

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#1473: The Kennel Murder Case (1933) by S.S. van Dine

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I first read The Kennel Murder Case (1933), the sixth book by S.S. van Dine to feature the love-him-or-hate-him amateur sleuth Philo Vance, when in the initial thralls of having discovered the impossible crime. I tore through it, remember little of the impression it left on me, and doubtless threw it aside for the next adventure. So returning to it 20 years later, in sequence with the other Philo Vance novels, is not so much a homecoming as finally a chance to do the book justice. And I really did remember very little, just the broad strokes of the mechanism for the locked room which opens the book and the fact that it contained a dog…so this second read might as well be a first one.

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