I’ve read, in my general perusal of the crime and mystery genre, some of the Union Club mysteries by Isaac Asimov, but this collection of 30 of them was a chance to diver deeper into the canon, and so I snapped it up.
Continue reading
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.
A collection of 11 non-canonical takes on Sherlock Holmes by eleven different authors, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1985) has lingered long on my shelf, and its day in the sun is finally here.
Continue reading
Three weeks ago I finally caught up with ‘The Dashing Joker’ (2001) by Ashibe Taku in an old Ellery Queen Mystery magazine. This week, I finally run ‘Sacrifice in White’ (2012) by Qinwen Sun to earth in another, more recent EQMM, the January/February 2024 issue.
Continue reading
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.
Well, the penultimate Lord Darcy story was fucking awful, so the final one has to end things on a more positive note, right? Right?
Continue reading
Firstly, no: I have no idea what the cover of this 1973 pocket edition of The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1934) by Erle Stanley Gardner is about. This sixth novel to feature the sharp-brained lawyer Perry Mason does involve a shooting, but never anything close to the scene depicted on the front. Mind you, the photograph isn’t even in focus, so maybe we shouldn’t dwell on it too much.
Continue reading
The metafictional world inhabited by Anthony Horowitz in this series, where he plays Watson to the mysterious, ingenious ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne, kicks up a notch in sixth title A Deadly Episode (2026). A film is being made of the first book, The Word is Murder (2017), and early on Horowitz reflects on its being set in Hastings when the events on the book took place 60 miles away in Deal: “I thought it was questionable to take a real tragedy and real pain and to fictionalise it by changing the location”. It’s a sly joke — if ‘joke’ is the word, which I suspect it isn’t — and it speaks to the confidence Horowitz is finding as this series progresses.
With an uptick in quality in the previous two Lord Darcy short stories, I was very much looking forward to the penultimate one — also the longest, by a significant amount — continuing this trend. And, wow, was I mistaken.
Continue reading
The idea of a collection of Golden Age short stories based around a theme of animals seemed like an unusual one, until I remembered that one of the genre’s foundational short stories and one of its most famous novels both have animals in fairly central roles. So that’s all right, then.
Continue reading
The Invisible Event 