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Your typical Freeman Wills Crofts protagonist — fallen on hard times, usually following the death of a loved one — young widow Julia Langley enters into a marriage of convenience with solicitor Richard Elton. He will provide for her daughter Mollie, and she will run his house, Chalfont, as hostess for social events that singularly fail to win his unprepossessing personality the acceptance he so craves. And so, Julia falls in love with wealthy novelist Frank Cox, throwing a wrench into the works of her agreeable if not desirable arrangement, and before long someone in the Elton ménage is found murdered and the various secrets in the household start to creep out.
Author: JJ
#1310: Mining Mount TBR – Face Value, a.k.a. The Hanging Doll Murder (1983) by Roger Ormerod
I’m doing Roger Ormerod a slight disservice here, by lumping him into this tranche of Mining Mount TBR. See, this series is an initiative by which I get to finally scrape books off my TBR that have been clinging there for arguably too long, and Ormerod has been so entertaining thus far that I was always going to read more by him. So wherefore his involvement here?
Continue reading#1309: Murderers Make Mistakes – Sudden Death Aplenty in Six Against the Yard [ss] (1936)
Today is the tenth Bodies from the Library Conference, at which, until other considerations intervened, I was due to present on the topic of inverted mysteries. And you can bet I would at some point have talked about Six Against the Yard (1936), in which six crime writers put their ‘perfect murder’ on paper and ex-CID man Superintendent Cornish picked holes in their plans.
Continue reading#1308: You’d Look Better as a Ghost (2023) by Joanna Wallace
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Like The Serial Killers’ Club (2006) by Jeff Povey and the Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004-15) series by Jeff Lindsay, Joanna Wallace’s debut You’d Look Better as a Ghost (2023) takes on the challenge of seeing the world through a serial killer’s eyes. Wallace, though, takes the far harder route of not trying to justify her killer’s murderous urges by having them only kill ‘bad people’, and instead invites you to spend nearly 400 pages with Claire, who is unhinged enough to murder a man who accidentally emailed her incorrect information, and who blithely admits that she “like[s] to peel the skin off queue-jumpers”. It shouldn’t work. But, thanks in no small way to some pitch-black humour, boy, does it.
#1307: Mining Mount TBR – Murder Most Ingenious (1962) by Kip Chase
Another Tuesday in June, another book which has lingered on my TBR, and, coincidentally, another impossible crime. So, does Murder Most Ingenious (1962) by Kip Chase live up to its own self-confident billing? Sort of.
Continue reading#1306: “Ain’t nothin’ like this ever happened in Northmont afore!” – Diagnosis: Impossible: The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne [ss] (2000) by Edward D. Hoch
You don’t write as much as Edward D. Hoch without hitting the bull’s-eye a few times, so I’m finally doing what I should have done all along and starting the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series from the beginning, with this first collection, Diagnosis: Impossible (2000), a tranche of 12 stories initially published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine between 1974 and 1978.
Continue reading#1305: Casual Slaughters (1935) by James Quince
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I’m not entirely sure where Casual Slaughters (1935) by James Quince first came to my attention, but it might have been this list of 150 largely very good detective novels, compiled by Curtis Evans back in 2010. And since Curtis and I recently agreed about The Dead Man’s Knock (1958) by John Dickson Carr, and since Oreon Books recently reprinted Casual Slaughters and I bought a copy while visiting at the excellent Bodies in the Bookshop in Cambridge, well, the time seemed ripe to pull it out of my TBR to see how I fare. And, as if I needed more convincing, Quince’s title is from Hamlet, this blog takes its name from Hamlet…seriously, could the universe be aligning more?
#1304: Mining Mount TBR – McNally’s Folly (2000) by Vincent Lardo
Another book, bought because I understood it to contain an impossible crime, which has been left lingering on my TBR because it’s a later entry in a series I’ve not otherwise read. More than that, this is a continuation novel, so not even by the series’ original author.
Continue reading#1302: The Avenger Strikes (1936) by Walter S. Masterman
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Not to split hairs, but if you receive an anonymous note on the 1st June telling you that you have thirteen days to live, the person threatening your life is going to kill you on 14th June, not the 13th. Either way, the wealthy George Hayling waits the best part of a week, receiving one note a day along similar lines — including a threat to poison his dog, which is duly carried out — before consulting the police. As luck would have it, he’s ushered into the office of Chief Inspector Floyd just as that worthy is completing a discussion with the esteemed Sir Arthur Sinclair, and something about Hayling’s case piques Sinclair’s interest. Only, with so little time remaining, can Sinclair keep the man alive?









