Author: JJ
#238: Fair-Play Detective Fiction 101 – The Vote!
The titles have been declared, now we simply have to pick a top ten of detective fiction novels that display fair-play and the declaration of clues at its best.
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#237: Death of an Airman (1934) by Christopher St. John Sprigg
An experienced pilot crashes his plane and dies, and at the inquest the jury returns a verdict of ‘death by misadventure’. They’re correct, and there’s nothing else to investigate. Nah, I’m kidding, of course — we’re deep in the Golden Age here, so it has to be more complicated than that, and before you know it there are amateur sleuths, mistaken identities, re-examination of bodies, codes, intrigue, and the threat of more murder zipping around like so many flies at a picnic. As an exemplar of what the Golden Age did so well, Death of an Airman joins Death of Anton as a virtual textbook for the beginner, and as such marks another superb entry in the British Library Crime Classics series.
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#236: Ellery Queen in Order at The Invisible Event + Murder on the (Givea)Way! Winner
A little while ago I read The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), the debut novel by Ellery Queen, the nom de plume of cousins Daniel Nathan and Emanuel Lepofsky, in turn better known as Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. I didn’t love it, but I’ve read about ten Ellery Queen books and found a lot to enjoy in some of them, and a great many people whose opinions I value assert that the work done by these two under this name was vital to the development of the genre.
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#235: Fair-Play Detective Fiction 101 – What Are the Essential Texts?
Of late, I have done a moderate amount of pontificating here on The Invisible Event about topics related to fair-play detective fiction: first talking about rules, and then trying to explain how I see the idea of disclosure. Partly this was because it’s the sort of thing I’m happy to do for fun — hello, I’m a nerd — but, in truth, there was a larger intention behind it providing no-one could see any massive flaws in my thinking.
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#234: The Baddington Horror (1934) by Walter S. Masterman
I love a country house mystery, especially those with a body on page one. So when the murder of ex-judge Sir Ernest Ferber in his private garden by man he sentenced harshly and the subsequent suicide of his assailant at the scene is communicated in the opening ten lines of The Baddington Horror, we’re off to a very good start. To my understanding, Walter S. Masterman wrote as many ‘weird tales’ as he did novels of detection, and so it was always a little uncertain what I was going to get here. But the first chapter could not be more Golden Age detection if it tried: murdered aristocrat, retired amateur detective who takes an interest, two big coincidences, and away we go…
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#233: Murder on the (Givea)Way!
As I may have mentioned before, thanks to the wonderful people at Bold Venture Press I was, ahem, involved in the republication of Theodore Roscoe’s 1935 impossible crime zombie uprising novel Murder on the Way!.
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#232: Spoiler Warning – Coming in July: Rim of the Pit (1944) by Hake Talbot
Following on from the spoiler-filled deconstruction of He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr and Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, I’m going ahead with another spoiler-filled deconstruction in the next couple of months, this time of Hake Talbot’s impossibility-laden masterpiece Rim of the Pit (1944).
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#231: Antidote to Venom (1938) by Freeman Wills Crofts
The reputation for being something of an interminable bore that still dogs Freeman Wills Crofts some 60 years after his death wants for evidence in Antidote to Venom. We’re about halfway through when the murder occurs, by which point you’ve had not only a highly sympathetic portrait of the central man in the affair, but also the convincing use of minor characters to create the situation in a way that relies on coincidence without feeling forced, an allusion to the Sherlock Holmes canon, and two — count ’em — legitimate jokes. It is spry, focussed, beautifully rich in intrigue and heartbreak, and balances its inverted and traditional elements perfectly. And when the investigation starts…oh, boy, are you in for a treat.
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#230: Detective Fiction is a Joke…
Bear with me here, I want to tell you one of my all-time favourite jokes; remain calm, it is not rude (I’m too much the gentleman for that):
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