Author: JJ

#359: Minor Felonies – The Secret of the Old Clock (1930) by Carolyn Keene [rev. Harriet Adams 1959]

/ JJ / 52 Comments

Secret of the Old Clock
Well, well, well, even at my time in life there’s still much to be learned.  For instance, I did not know that Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew mysteries, wasn’t an actual person but instead a syndicate a la the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators authors (the key difference being that they never put any author name on the cover).

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#358: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Untouchable (2016) by Robert Innes

/ JJ / 15 Comments

Untouchable

I’d promised TomCat that I’d attempt to find a quality modern locked room mystery this week, but the book I was going to look at — Lord Darcyverse continuation novel Ten Little Wizards (1988) by Michael Kurland — has (miraculously…?) vanished.  So instead, here’s a revival of another occasional series: a selective pick through some self-published impossible crime stories in search of the gold that doubtless exists there somewhere.

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#357: Dead Man Control (1936) by Helen Reilly

/ JJ / 18 Comments

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We are 30 pages into Dead Man Control (1936) when the case is sealed up beyond any doubt: a millionaire shot dead in his study, the door locked and bolted on the inside, his new, much younger wife unconscious on the floor (her fingerprints on the gun, too), no hiding places, and freshly fallen snow on all the window-ledges to preclude the clandestine exit of anyone else who could have been present.  Clearly the wife dunnit, and everyone can go home early today.  So therefore Inspector Christopher McKee has to be summoned back to New York from his holiday in England because…er, it looks too easy?  And as he investigates, secrets there was no reason to suspect begin to spill out…

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#356: Minor Felonies – Young Robin Brand, Detective (1947) by Freeman Wills Crofts

/ JJ / 41 Comments

The thirty-first novel Freeman Wills Crofts published in his career was this novel for younger readers.  Let that sink in a moment.  Captain Dryasdust encroaching on Enid Blyton’s territory seems about as likely as Blyton herself trying her hand at Raymond Chandler’s metaphor-laden hard-edged novels of moral decay…the difference being that Crofts actually tried it.

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#355: Change a Letter, Alter the Plot

/ JJ / 44 Comments

Paws

If you’ve been paying attention, especially to my comments left both here and elsewhere, you’ll be aware that my typing is rather famously variable.  90% of the time I’m good, but that other 10% — man, some errors there are.  Writing something recently, I made reference to the novel Five Little Pugs by Agatha Christie and then — catching myself in time to correct it — I had a thought…

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#354: Death in the House of Rain (2006) by Szu-Yen Lin [trans. ibid 2017]

/ JJ / 37 Comments

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Gather everyone together in a closed, isolated location, then kill ’em off one by one.  Yup, at heart Death in the House of Rain (2006) is simply a marvellous instauration of this most spavined of classic detective fiction framings.  The ingredients are familiar — take a remote mansion of obscure design, a landslide, a rain storm, and ten near-strangers, then add some baffling murders and stir — and this familiarity is invested with the vim and vigour that continues to breathe new life into the possibilities these recurrent trappings allow.  In short, it is superb; chalk up another win for Locked Room International and fans of impossible crimes.

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#352: The Chinese Jar Mystery, a.k.a. Black Hawthorn (1934) by John Stephen Strange

/ JJ / 13 Comments

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If there’s one setback to the profligacy of quality GAD blogs now found online, it’s that very little in my reading gets to take me by surprise any more.  Something good tends to get shouted about (this is, after all, why we’re here) and then others buy it and shout or grumble as they see fit…but we’ve gone in with a ringing endorsement in our ears beforehand.  I’m not complaining, it’s a lovely problem to have — and I contribute to this as much as anyone — but I was moved to reflect on picking this for review that it’s one book on my TBR that I knew nothing about. So now allow me to pre-prejudice the experience for the rest of you…

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