Author: JJ

#399: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Adventure of the Dauphin’s Doll’, a.k.a. ‘With the Compliments of Comus’ (1948)

/ JJ / 33 Comments

Calendar of Crime

After the disappointment of last week’s ‘The Adventure of the Dead Cat’ (1946) not actually being an impossible crime story, I return this week to Calendar of Crime (1952) by Ellery Queen for the final story in the collection, Christmastime impossible theft ‘The Adventure of the Dauphin’s Doll’ (1948).  Let’s hope we fare a little better this time around, eh?

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#397: The Back Bay Murders (1930) by Roger Scarlett

/ JJ / 16 Comments

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Whatever I thought of this book, I was committed to reading more of Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page’s Roger Scarlett mysteries as I had already bought volume 2 of the Coachwhip reissues — comprising the novels Cat’s Paw (1931) and Murder Among the Angells (1932).  Impetuous?  I prefer optimistic: the promise on display in their debut augured well for their future, and I believed remuneration would be found somewhere in these pages.  So it’s either my own foresight or my stubborn inability to admit a mistake that sees me having a hugely enjoyable time with this one…I shall leave it to the reader to choose.

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#396: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Adventure of the Dead Cat’, a.k.a. ‘The Halloween Mystery’ (1946)

/ JJ / 83 Comments

Calendar of Crime

Sometimes you go through every story in a collection and review them all.  Sometimes you just want to talk about one of them.  To engage in the second of these on a more thematic basis, I shall use my Tuesday posts this month to launch an occasional series of Little Fictions posts, and spend June with some of the impossible crime short stories written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee under their Ellery Queen nom de plume.

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#395: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #6: Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (2010) by Lee Goldberg

/ JJ / 20 Comments

Monk is Cleaned Out

I can’t claim to’ve watched swathes of the TV series Monk — starring the wonderfully talented Tony Shalhoub as the eponymous consultant to the San Francisco Police Department — but I always enjoyed its creativity when I did catch it (an episode in which a musical birthday card contributes to the solving of a crime stands out in my memory).

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#394: The D.A. Goes to Trial (1940) by Erle Stanley Gardner

/ JJ / 19 Comments

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I maintain that the Doug Selby novels of Erle Stanley Gardner stand as probably his best work, and only the genius of Raymond Burr, that awesome theme music, and the fact that the Perry Mason novels outnumber the Selby ones by a mind-blowing 9:1 ratio have led to the relative obscurity of this better series.  “What about the Cool and Lam books?” you want to know?  Well, as soon as I’m done with Selby I’m going to go and read all 30 of those in order, too, because probably two-thirds of them eluded me back when I started reading Gardner and so there are plenty of gaps to fill.  So officially the jury is still out, but the Selby books remain fabulous nonetheless.

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#393: Minor Felonies – Murder Most Unladylike, a.k.a. Murder is Bad Manners (2014) by Robin Stevens

/ JJ / 11 Comments

Murder Most Unladylike

It’s nearly 12 months since, at the Bodies from the Library conference in 2017, Dan casually mentioned that one of the Murder Most Unladylike books by Robin Stevens was a locked room mystery and so started me on a mildly-obsessive YA spiral that has taken in the detective talents of Enid Blyton, the beginning phases of Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, a selection of classic and modern juvenile mysteries, and, of course, an interview with Robin Stevens herself at the beginning of our podcast adventure.

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#392: A Fight to the Finnish – Promise and Delivery in Cruel is the Night (2013) by Karo Hämäläinen [trans. Owen Witesman 2017]

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Cruel is the Night

We GAD bloggers are a tight-knit bunch.  Cut one of us, does another not bleed?  Take aim at Kate’s praise of John Rhode, will Puzzle Doctor not leap in front of the bullet?  And when the most adventurous among us — I refer, of course to Grand Viscount Bradley Friedman, LLC — ventures of into hitherto unexamined climes, do we not follow, fearful of what hackneyed plot elements may be reheated and served up to his delicate palate as fresh fare?

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#391: Fatal Descent, a.k.a. Drop to His Death (1939) by John Rhode and Carter Dickson

/ JJ / 50 Comments

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In the style of Sesame Street, today’s review is brought to you by In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel‘s Puzzle Doctor, who kindly leant me this book following years of me failing to find an affordable copy.  And, boy, what an exciting prospect it is: no mere “one chapter each” in the style of ‘Behind the Screen’ (1930), ‘The Scoop’ (1931), or The Floating Admiral (1932), this is a proper collaboration between two of the Golden Age’s titans: Carter Dickson, a.k.a. John Dickson Carr, and John Rhode, a.k.a. Miles Burton — two gentlemen who individually devised a greater library of brilliant means of criminal dispatch than almost any other pair you’d care to name.

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#390: Minor Felonies – Feel the Fear (2014) by Lauren Child

/ JJ / 2 Comments

Feel the Fear

I apologise if I appear to be giving some import to my own fevered speculations here, but a few weeks ago I wrote that “I absolutely commend the role literature plays in helping people, young or otherwise, make sense of the world around them, but it’s also nice that sometimes a novel about a couple of 11 year-olds solving a murder can just be about a couple of 11 year-olds solving a murder”.  I referenced it once already, and now I’m doing it again.  Yeesh, my ego.

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