Author: JJ

#469: The Man Who Loved Clouds (1999) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2018]

/ JJ / 21 Comments

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The last time anyone tried to use the wind as a threatening murder weapon we got The Happening (2008) from the, er, mind of M. Night Shyamalan.  Nine years prior, however, Paul Halter had written about the small coastal village of Pickering in 1936, and the youthful, ethereal Stella Deverell predicting the deaths of locals ahead of the storms and winds that batter the vicinity.  And what Stella predicts comes to pass: not just deaths, but madness, relationships breaking down, and unforeseeable good fortune for fishermen.  Add in her own talents in making gold from rocks and vanishing without a trace and you’ve got an impossible crime tale on your hands…

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#467: Seven—And Death Makes Eight – The Game’s Afloat in The Last of Sheila (1973) [Scr. Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins; Dir. Herbert Ross]

/ JJ / 80 Comments

Last of Sheila, The

I’ve not reviewed a movie here on The Invisible Event before, but then The Last of Sheila (1973) is not your average movie.  I first became aware of it at the Bodies from the Library conference in 2017, when it was recommended as one of the few examples of a fair-play mystery in long format, and that was enough for me.

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#466: The Traces of Brillhart (1960) by Herbert Brean

/ JJ / 8 Comments

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Late one night, journalist William Deacon is surprised in his office by an old school friend with an unusual request.  Seemingly everywhere Archie Sinclair goes, people are talking about the singer-songwriter Brill Brillhart — the places they met with him, the dinners they’ve had with him, the appearances he’ll be making later that week — which wouldn’t be so weird if Sinclair didn’t have it on such good authority that Brillhart has been dead for the last two months.  So, would Deacon be willing to look into it?  And Deacon, with misgivings aplenty, agrees, and soon finds that Brillhart is indeed both dead and seemingly everywhere.  How can this be possible?

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#463: They Can’t Hang Me (1938) by James Ronald

/ JJ / 18 Comments

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My first encounter with James Ronald was via the puply and hugely entertaining Six Were to Die (1932), in which six business associates found their lives threatened by an ex-colleague they had wronged, and were killed one by one in ingenious ways.  Six years later, he wrote They Can’t Hang Me (1938), in which four business associates find their lives threatened by an ex-colleague they have wronged, and are killed one by one in ingenious ways.  And, hell, when the book is this good, I wouldn’t mind if he’d written this plot another 25 times.  In fact, I wish he had.  This, my friends, is a little beauty.

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#460: Dead Men Don’t Ski (1959) by Patricia Moyes

/ JJ / 34 Comments

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It’s fitting that Noah’s review of Dead Men Don’t Ski (1959), is what first brought the book to my attention, because the novel exemplifies for me a strata of fiction that I only got thinking about on account of Noah’s own, far superior, ruminations on the subject.  Much like Murder on Safari (1938) by Elspeth Huxley, contemporary familiarity with the milieu would probably see this classified as ‘cozy’ these days — but to do so would be to ignorantly overlook the newness of this sort of setting at the time of writing.  I’m tempted to call these Travelogue Mysteries, where the setting appeals as much as the crime on account of how novel it would have been at the time.

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