Author: JJ
#168: Death on the Radio – John Dickson Carr and ‘Murder by Experts’
Since reading Max Afford’s radio-set mystery The Dead Are Blind, I’ve had a new-found appreciation for the art of creating radio drama, especially during the age when radio held such a huge sway in the homes of most people. My interest in detective fiction from this era inevitably lead to some passing awareness of the serials produced at this time, but Afford’s novel really brought home the level of technical expertise required to produce something so much more complex than simply four people sitting at a microphone with a script.
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#167: Case in the Clinic (1941) by E.C.R. Lorac
Given the number of people who applied themselves to the challenge of writing a novel of detection during the Golden Age (precise dates pending…), it is to be expected that a fair number of wonderful novels, plots, ideas, and authors will have been lost in the tidal wave of creativity. Through the continued efforts of publishers like Ramble House — who were reprinting this stuff before it was cool again — we’ve been able to rediscover Max Afford, Norman Berrow, Rupert Penny, Hake Talbot, and others, and it’s this path of frank fabulousness that has brought me now to E.C.R. Lorac, author of some 70-odd novels under a couple of pseudonyms. Does she belong in the realm of How In The Hell Is This Stuff Overlooked? Well, on this evidence…maybe.
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#166: One Week Until #Carr110 – Some Links to Help You…
The time is nearly upon us! Banish next week’s post-Thanksgiving blues by getting involved in the celebration of John Dickson Carr’s 110th birthday on 30th November. Post an article, review, discussion piece, poem, comparison, or anything you damn well please about Carr, put the link in the comments here, and I’ll collect everything together for summing-up post at the end of the day.
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#165: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Finding Satan in the Subtleties (if not in the book) of The Devil in Velvet (1951) by John Dickson Carr
John Dickson Carr — arguably the finest detective novelist of all time, famed for the intricacy of his mystery schemes, and especially his impossible crimes, right? So, like, what if he were to write a novel with virtually no mystery, no detection, no impossibility, and a large number of men wearing silly wigs? That’d be weird, right? Welcome, one and all, to The Devil in Velvet!
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#164: On Failing to Engage with “the Swedish John Dickson Carr” – Deadly Reunion (1975) by Jan Ekström [trans. Joan Tate 1983]
Given that John Dickson Carr — who would have been 110 at the end of the month, folks — published seventy-eight books over a 41 year career that encompassed such joys as Till Death Do Us Part and such nadirs as Papa La-Bas, there’s probably no-one who couldn’t be compared to him at some point in his career. So when Swedish writer Jan Ekström’s 1975 novel Ättestupan is translated into English and the synopsis opens with the tantalising promise ‘Often called the Swedish John Dickson Carr…’ well, you’re going to get a lot of peoples’ attentions even though it doesn’t at first glance really tell you anything.
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#163: The Spaniard’s Thumb (1949) by Norman Berrow
We should be thankful that Norman Berrow left behind him such wonderful novels as these that make it almost possible to get a glimpse into the workings of his mind. I mean, who else would predicate a novel on the grounds of a giant disembodied thumb vengefully crushing to death anyone who ventures into its lair? It’s a setup too barmy for John Dickson Carr’s fertile impossibilities, too outré for the straight-laced world of Agatha Christie, Miles Burton, Christianna Brand, and their ilk, and doesn’t have enough train journeys for Freeman Wills Crofts. It’s too comedic and explicit for the standard horror get-up of M.R. James or those who followed him…honestly, had Berrow not written this there’s really no-one else who could have.
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#162: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Meta-Fictional Historical Deconstruction in Magpie Murders (2016) by Anthony Horowitz
Anthony Horowitz is probably my favourite contemporary author of detective fiction, as his superb Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk (2011) and its genuinely exceptional follow-up Moriarty (2014) displayed an affinity for both the milieu of Holmes and the necessary misdirection and construction of a blistering plot that blindsides you at will which seems to elude many who try to walk this path these days. His earlier novel The Killing Joke (2004) isn’t really detective fiction per se, but shows a playfulness with narrative that is aware of many of the tropes of genre fiction and is worth mentioning here precisely because of how much it foreshadowed the work he does in Magpie Murders when it comes to deconstructing the classical detective and his ilk.
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#161: Hawk & Fisher (1990) by Simon R. Green
As a parody of the detective novel, the maverick cop genre, and the low Fantasy genre, Simon R. Green’s Hawk & Fisher takes quite some beating — it is an honestly hilarious take on the tropes of three. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much since reading…well, possibly anything; almost every page contains some wonderful joke or savage undercutting of the false sincerity of the situations encountered, not unlike William Goldman’s timeless The Princess Bride. For instance, Hawk is supposedly an expert in hand-to-hand combat with an axe, but he has only one functioning eye and therefore must lack any depth perception; it’s an absolutely genius piece of subversion, and such examples are rife. The only problem is that I have a sneaking suspicion — only a sneaking one, mind — that this book is in fact supposed to be taken seriously. Very Seriously Indeed.
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#160: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Who Can You Trust? Verisimilitude in Paul Doherty’s A Murder in Thebes (1998)
