Listen, if I was a lawyer and someone had built a replica of a house cursed by werewolves in an isolated location called Solitude Mountain, there’s no hourly rate in the world that would get me driving there for a spooky weekend.
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On the evening of 21st December, a group of carollers — or “waits”, a turn of phrase that was new to me — organised by the formidable Mrs. de Frayne are stopping and singing at prime spots in the small town of Paulsfield while collectors go door-to-door to raise money for the local hospital. Already struggling to keep to their strict timetable, things are frustrated further when Mr. Vavasour, one of the collectors, does not return from his allocated stretch of road, and so the party moves on without him, assuming that he has gone home. And later that evening, Mrs. Vavasour phones the De Fraynes to enquire after her husband, worried because he has not yet come home from the carolling…
Another exclusive boarding school, another murderer on the loose — if mysteries for younger readers are anything to go by, put your kids in the local comp to keep them safe.
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“Twelve mystery masterpieces by the maestro” promises the back cover of Tales of the Black Widowers (1974), the first collection featuring Isaac Asimov’s puzzle-solving dining club, and given that Asimov says in the introduction that his “detective ideal is Hercule Poirot and his little gray cells” it seems like it might not be an empty promise…
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I’ve probably, at some point in this blog, been less invested in the outcome of a mystery than I was while reading Miss Pinkerton (1932) by Mary Roberts Rinehart, but rarely have I dreaded the oncoming pages as much as I did here. When the second death occurs at the two-thirds point, I felt my heart sink when I realised that approximately 486,000 pages of this 237-page novel remained and that, as much as I admired the pluck of Miss Hilda Adams, a private nurse called in by Inspector Patton to keep an eye on suspects in a murder case whenever the police aren’t able to be quite so free in their investigations, I just didn’t care any more and probably never had.
Henry Bedford-Jones wrote several hundred pulp stories under at least a dozen noms de plume, but this is my first encounter with his work…and a most intriguing encounter it turned out to be, with these four stories about dead-man-for-hire James F. Bronson.
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The second novel to feature Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield, Tragedy at Ravensthorpe (1927) joins the likes of The Wintringham Mystery (1927) by Anthony Berkeley in a subgenre I like to think of as Frustrated Japes: someone plans something as a bit of a lark — here the theft of some valuable medallions during a masquerade ball at the eponymous country pile — only for another party to interrupt the undertaking and turn things in an unexpectedly more sinister direction. Thankfully, what results is another zesty, energetic, well-clued mystery from Connington’s pen, albeit one which won’t linger in the memory.
While not strictly about the Golden Age, this endlessly quotable little book (“The aristocracy have three passions: inbreeding, collecting stolen artifacts, and engaging in recreational violence.”) is clearly written with Golden Age tropes in mind and, since its tongue is wedged so firmly in its cheek, certainly warrants a closer look.
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The Invisible Event 