Author: JJ
#148: So, Like, What Is an Impossible Crime or a Locked Room Mystery?
Recent experiences of reading Darkness at Pemberley by T.H. White and What a Body! by Alan Green — oh my days, I’ve only just noticed that they’re both named after colours… — have made me wonder on the above question. See, both are listed here, on a compendium of the best ever locked room mysteries voted on by an international collection of people who know about this stuff, and both are listed here, on a rundown of the favourite locked room mysteries by resident blogosphere expert TomCat…yet personally, in the face of public opinion from such well-informed and respected sources, I’m reluctant to consider either of them as locked room mysteries. Even taking my famously contrary nature out of the equation…what the hell?
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#147: What a Body! (1949) by Alan Green
I dunno, I’m starting to think it’s me. For the second time in just over a month — the first being with T.H. White’s Darkness at Pemberley — I’ve read a novel famed for its impossible murder plot and come away going “Well, yeah, but that’s not really an impossible crime, though, is it.” The shooting of millionaire health guru Merlin Broadstone on the fourth floor of his hotel on his exclusive island health farm presents a couple of interesting points, but the fact that he was shot through an open window and that an obvious deduction is ignored for pretty much the entire duration of the case precludes any impossibility in my mind. One perplexing occurrence and the characters failing to consider a particular set of circumstances doesn’t make it an impossible crime. Maybe I’m too narrow-minded, but this doesn’t fly for me.
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#146: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Invoking the Dreads Through Killer Threads
It’s doubtless a result of the generation I’m from that when I think about fictional murderers wearing distinctive costumes the first jump my mind makes is to the Ghostface killers of Wes Craven’s Scream films. If you’re a little older than me, you may go for Freddy Krueger’s striped jumper, and if you’re younger than me I have no idea what you might pick because I have lost track of whatever passes for popular culture these days, but for me it’s Ghostface.
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#145: Some Reflections on Editing ‘The Mystery of the Locked Room’ (1905) by Tom Gallon
Believe it or believe it not — though in all likelihood you’ve actually forgotten about it — Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums is nearly ready. Version 1.0, containing 13 of the intended original 15 stories, should be available by the end of the month, missing two stories because the process of wrangling them into shape when it’s just me, TomCat, and our spare time is proving rather more long-winded than previously thought. A v1.1 may be available at a later date once I’ve got these two remaining stories edited into readable form, but I figure most of something is better than all of nothing.
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#144: The Corpse in the Waxworks, a.k.a. The Waxworks Murder (1932) by John Dickson Carr
The penultimate case for John Dickson Carr’s first sleuth, Henri Bencolin, opens with a wonderful demonstration of the reputation which that juggernaut of justice enjoys among the less salubrious sections of French society: ‘Bencolin was not wearing his evening clothes, and so they knew that nobody was in danger.’ The palpable sense of relief this engenders in all who see him as he travels from tavern to tavern captures the character with a clarity that shows how much Carr grew as an author over his opening five books, and augurs well for the Fellian delights that would follow soon upon the heels of this as Carr hared his way up the detective fiction firmament and into history. And it sets the scene nicely for a deceptively complex little book that almost feels like a short story in its setup, but is wrought into something more by the expert pacing Carr has honed in the couple of short years since It Walks By Night (1930), showing here his emerging talent for taking a situation that many others would struggle to fill 20 pages with and making every nuance and moment of its 188 pages count.
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#143: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Cross-Dressing the Genre in Inherit the Stars (1977) by James P. Hogan
Our theme is Crime in Costume for the TNBs this month, and I’m interpreting that laterally and looking at James P. Hogan’s unabashedly scientific debut which is essentially a good old-fashioned impossible crime decorated and disguised in SF trappings.
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#142: John Dickson Carr is Going to be 110 – Call for Submissions!
Apologies for my recent blogging absence; a combination of what I understand are referred to as ‘IRL’ circumstances and the fact that everything I picked up and tried to read was absolute dreck put something of a kibosh on things. The sensible thing seemed to be just to write off September and move on. So now I’m back with the oft-cited classic — and so inevitably hard-to-find outside of the USA, where the lovely Mysterious Press have published it — locked room mystery Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand. Why this one? Well, it’s supposed to be awesome and I’m trying to get into Brand, having been thoroughly meh’d by 
