#459: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ (1956) by Boileau-Narcejac [trans. James Kirkup 1959]

November 13, 2018June 6, 2026 / JJ / 4 Comments

My first experience of the French crime/suspense duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac was the recent Pushkin Press reissue of She Who Was No More (1952, tr. 2015) and…well, I didn’t love it. But Adey lists this novella and so back on the horse we clamber.

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#458: The Sleek Interpreters – Bringing the Young Holmes Brothers to Life in Mycroft and Sherlock (2018) by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

November 10, 2018March 16, 2026 / JJ / 10 Comments

Three years ago, when The Invisible Event was but a callow youth, I happened upon a Sherlock Holmes-universe novel co-written by someone who shared their name with NBA Hall-of-Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “Wow,” I thought, “that guy must hear the same thing all the time…” — and then it turned out that it actually was NBA Hall-of-Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and, well, I became even more interested.

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#457: Black Beadle (1939) by E.C.R. Lorac

November 8, 2018June 15, 2023 / JJ / 21 Comments

It comes to us all in the end: the moment that a prolific, tantalisingly-just-about-available author we’ve been low-key enjoying without ever really loving suddenly turns in an utter duffer of a book. It happened with the last Lorac I read — Slippery Staircase (1938) — and while Black Beadle (1939) doesn’t quite plow the same ignominious farrow, it’s not exactly leaps and bounds better. And yet Edith Rivett’s take on the standard GAD milieu is so atypical that while she’ll miss the mark on a few occasions, I don’t believe she’ll have written anything without any merit whatsoever. This is still a substandard effort, but with enough wrinkles to warrant attention.

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#456: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘Solved by Inspection’ (1931) by Ronald Knox

November 6, 2018August 28, 2023 / JJ / 45 Comments

Earlier this year, John Pugmire’s Locked Room International imprint answered the prayers of every impossible crime fan the world over by reprinting the genre reference bible Locked Room Murders (2nd ed., 1991) by Robert Adey, liberally revised by Mystery Scene co-publisher Brian Skupin.

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#455: With Reiterated Crimes He Might Heap on Himself Damnation – Failure (Holy) Writ Large in The Sinister Student (2016) by Kel Richards

November 3, 2018November 2, 2018 / JJ / 22 Comments

Had I gotten round to this sooner, it may have qualified as a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat attempt, but TomCat has already read this one and so really all that remained was to see if I was equally underwhelmed by it.

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#454: The Perjured Alibi (1935) by Walter S. Masterman

November 1, 2018September 22, 2022 / JJ / 3 Comments

I’m on a bit of a Ramble House kick at the moment: Rupert Penny, Norman Berrow, Walter S. Masterman, with E.C.R. Lorac coming soon. The Perjured Alibi (1935) is my third Masterman title to date, and I’d intended this to be where I’d make the decision whether or not to persevere with him. But, well, I have a copy of Robert Adey’s Locked Room Murders (1991) now and that’s got me thinking that I should at least give the remaining couple of impossibilities a go — especially as it turns out Ramble House have recently republished his debut The Wrong Letter (1926), which I’ve been after for a while. So it would be churlish to stop here…

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#453: The Criminous Alphabet – A is for…Audience

October 30, 2018March 16, 2020 / JJ / 34 Comments

There’s a philosophical debate in Mathematics about whether mathematics itself pre-exists and is simply discovered as we progress into new areas or whether it is created as we go along and so each new discovery is less about having discovered something and more about having created it.

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#452: (Almost) Everything in Its Right Place for The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure (1966) by Robert Arthur

October 27, 2018October 26, 2018 / JJ / 19 Comments

Much like last week, the intention had been to bring you another episode of the Men Who Explain Miracles podcast today, but, well, it seems we won’t get to that this month. And so let us return to the world of Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews and another mystery requiring their attentions.

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#451: The Smokers of Hashish (1934) by Norman Berrow

October 25, 2018October 24, 2018 / JJ / 11 Comments

Aaaah, Norman Berrow. Such highs, such lows, so much middle ground. I can’t think of anyone else who leaves me on such a knife-edge: with a few adjustments here and there Berrow could well have written some genre classics, and it’s often an agonising fascination waiting to see which way the book falls. So now we’re back at the very beginning with his first novel The Smokers of Hashish (1934), decidedly more adventure than detection, where he applies his chameleonic tendencies to some (ahem) intrigue in Tangier. As you may expect from a book of this era with this title, the result is pulpy fun, though with two neat moments to distinguish it.

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#450: The Criminous Alphabet – A is for…Anticlimax

October 23, 2018March 16, 2020 / JJ / 22 Comments

Noah Stewart, one of the most knowledgable people currently blogging on the subject of GAD, once said that Romance and Detection are the two genres wherein the ending is never in doubt before you’ve even read the first page (I’m paraphrasing, of course — Noah would never put anything that pompously).

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