Author: JJ

#57: It’s 2016, and the rules are changing…

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batman

It may come as some surprise to you that I am the Batman of classic crime blogging.  Not merely because this blog represents my true face that must remain hidden beneath a socially-acceptable façade, nor due to all posts being despatched from a convoluted series of secret caves beneath my gigantic mansion on the outskirts of a fictional city.  No, rather because for the opening couple of months of this undertaking I have stuck, dramatically, to a single rule – an immutable and unyielding precept that has underpinned practically everything I have posted.

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#56: End of 2015 Review – My Reading in Pictograms

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As I’ve only been blogging for a few months there doesn’t seem to be much point in a full blog review, but I thought I might look at my overall reading this year.  And who doesn’t love a pictogram?  No-one trustworthy, that’s who.

To begin with, here’s how my TBR at the start of the year fared:

 TBR 2015My book-by-book breakdown of tree books and ebooks throughout the year looks like this, including the nine I borrowed having finally joined the library:

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#55: The Human Flies (2010) by Hans Olav Lahlum [trans. Kari Dickson 2014]

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Human FliesFor those of you who lament the decline of the modern detective novel – and we are legion, to be sure – I have three words: Hans Olav Lahlum.  The Human Flies, his debut novel, is by no means perfect – it’s in need of a good edit, as there’s a tendency to repeat ad infinitum information gleaned and interpreted elsewhere – but it’s honestly about as close to a classically-motivated, -structured, and -executed novel as I imagine you’ll find in the 21st century.  The fact that it has almost the exact same setup as the likes of The Wooden Overcoat, The Black Shrouds and Our First Murder with a killing in a guest-house (here a small apartment block) of which one of the denizens is undoubtedly guilty certainly helps, but Lahlum is also smart enough to build on this base in very classical ways.  But for a few dates and key events – it is set in 1968 – this could almost have been written in the late 1940s.

To add to the fun, it also starts with an impossible murder: gunshots heard in an apartment, people rush to the scene before the killer would have chance to get away, and upon opening the locked door there’s a dead body but no killer, no weapon, and no other exit.  Cue detective Kolbjørn Kristiansen – that and his being blonde is pretty much all you’re told about him, so the nickname K2 may purely be a result of his initials rather than also his physical size – who swiftly finds himself out of his depth, as everyone in the building seems blameless, even given the victim’s relative celebrity and potential for enemies.  And then he gets a phone call…

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#54: The Kings of Crime – IV: Erle Stanley Gardner, the King of Spades

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King Gardner

Bookends: The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933)/The Case of the Postponed Murder (1973)

Books published 1920-59: 97

The Case for the Crown

Diversity: Yes, you read that correctly: by my count (and I’ve cross-checked a couple of times just in case) Erle Stanley Gardner published ninety-seven books in the space of 39 years, and that’s not including short story collections and without considering the individual stories themselves – somewhere in the realm of 200 of them (Wikipedia informs me that Gardner set himself a target of 1.2 million words a year – 100,000 a month, approximately the total word-count of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – while writing short fiction for the pulps, many of them under pseudonyms).  With that much output comes one of two things: the same story, worn infinitely thin and threadbare through retelling, or a range of styles, approaches, forms, characters, and ideas that tell of an imagination on fire, quenched only by its own overflowing.

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#53: Merry Christmas!

/ JJ / 8 Comments

Book TreeA quick word from me before the festive craziness starts to wish a very happy, safe, peaceful, and relaxing Christmas to you all.  Many thanks for dropping by and getting involved in the few months The Invisible Event has been running – it’s been an absolute joy, and I feel immensely privileged to have had the discussion I’ve had with such passionate, knowledgeable, entertaining, and discerning people as yourselves.

Long may we continue!

#52: The Picture from the Past (1995) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2014]

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Picture from the Past largeA man seeing an old photograph of an unremarkable street scene on the cover of a book and being struck by an overpowering reaction of uncertain origin doesn’t sound like a promising start to an impossible crime novel.  However, it turns out that such an opinion is simply a sign of your lack of inventiveness, as Paul Halter can spin one hell of a tale from just that.  Well, okay, not just that, as there’s also the notorious Acid Bath Murderer going around destroying the remains of murder victims by pouring acid on them – and John Braid, our photo-phobic protagonist, is curiously unwilling to tell his young, trusting and rather new wife what he gets up to every day when he leaves the house.  And he’s rather keen on not letting his briefcase out of his sight…

Of course, Halter then complicates things further by throwing in a parallel narrative set some years previously in which the wife of a wealthy resident of a down-at-heel London suburb is murdered, tracing the impact of that murder upon the woman’s husband and children.  Clearly the two stories must be related, but how?  And who is responsible for the deaths in each thread? Continue reading →

#51: Two novellas – The Single Staircase (2012) and WDYG (2013) by Matt Ingwalson

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Single Staircase WDYG

“Self-published” is, I’d wager, the phrase most likely to strike fear into the heart of even the most ardent book-lover.   After all, that’s how we had Fifty Shades of Grey inflicted upon us, and the rise of ebooks (a great thing as far as I’m concerned, as look at the number of classic crime titles now available via that medium) has given new scope to the possibilities for getting a book out to an audience without first taking a detour via editors, proof-readers, fact-checkers, or any of the countless bastions of velleity that could previously be taken as read upon picking up a book.

However, just as Patrick Ness has shown us that not everything labelled YA need be treated disdainfully, so self-publishing will produce the odd gem, and Matt Ingwalson’s duo of impossible crime novellas featuring detectives Owl and Raccoon definitely fall into this category.  And, as it’s Christmas and you’re likely to be busy people, I’m flashing them up now as a recommendation for a couple of quick reads to fit in between the chaotic scenes of this festive period (or, y’know, any other time that suits).

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#50: The Kings of Crime – III: Anthony Berkeley, the King of Diamonds

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King Berkeley

Bookends: The Layton Court Mystery (1925)/Death in the House (1939)

Books published 1920-59: 21

The Case for the Crown

Diversity: Anthony Berkeley Cox’s commitment to the crime novel is evinced from his first appearance on the scene with the publication of locked-room stumper The Layton Court Mystery (1925) for which he didn’t even bother to make up a nom de plume.  Early versions of the book simply had the author listed as “?” – message: you want a puzzle, here’s a puzzle.  You were getting – before Carr, before Queen, before Christie was anything close to a household name – the promise of something that had mystery not just in its title but at its very heart (and the follow-up, The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926), was published as by The Author of The Layton Court Mystery!).  Sure, it was demystified shortly thereafter with the American publication (as Noah Stewart points out, it makes you wonder where it went on library shelves prior to that, doesn’t it?), but for a little while it was doubtless quite an intriguing notion – the crime novel as we know it was still in its very nascent stages, don’t forget, and while the content may not have quite matched the cover in that regard…well, more on that later. Continue reading →

#49: The Talkative Policeman (1936) by Rupert Penny

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Talkative PolicemanAaah, Christmas.  A time for cheer, goodwill to all men, on-trend ironic jumpers and spending time with the people you love.  Look around the crime fiction blogosphere and these loved ones include a tremendous number of murderers, victims, stooges, detectives and classic authors, and so for me the time is ripe for a return to my overriding obsessions: this week it’s Ernest Basil Charles Thornett’s turn as his debut under the guise of Rupert Penny with The Talkative Policeman.  And of course it’s a return to impossible crimes after a couple of weeks away with what the synopsis calls a “longer-than-usual impossible mystery,” and since Penny has written a couple of absolute doozys in this vein an extra bt of content is only to be a cause for celebration.  Clap hands.  Settle in.  Let’s go.

This was the second Penny I read after the wonderful Sealed Room Murder, and it’s fair to say that despite loving that I approached his debut with a little caution.  The puzzle plot is not something one typically excels at upon first attempt, so expecting the same level of craft from this tale of a blameless rural vicar found battered over the head in the woodland near his home would probably be unwise.  And while it may be true that the plot doesn’t quite hold up – we’ll get to that – there is enough quality here to see the germ of the author Penny would become. Continue reading →

#48: The Kings of Crime – II: Jim Thompson, the King of Clubs

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King Thompson

Bookends: Now and on Earth (1942)/King Blood (1973)

Books published 1920-59: 20

The Case for the Crown

Diversity: If you’re going to consider the hardboiled subgenre as part of the history of crime fiction – and you really, really should – the accepted wisdom says you go Chandler or Hammett or, at a push, James M. Cain.  I say that Jim Thompson did more than those erstwhile gentlemen combined and should be enthroned ahead of all three of them.  Chandler famously said of Hammett that he “gave crime back to the people who committed it for a reason”, but I feel this is more true of Thompson than of Sam: Hammett’s and Chandler’s way in was always their detective characters, who stumbled into something already in motion and acted in the way a detective is expected to.  Thompson, by contrast, gave us the petty losers, the cuckolded husbands, the big-dreaming small-town folk, the small-time grifters and any other number of subsections of society who had their own reasons for committing their crimes (sex was always a part of Thompson’s protagonists’ motivation) and made us feel their motives because – forget some fabulous inheritance, or a trust left to my wife who died so I married someone else and we’re pretending she’s the original, or the man who married my one true love and then made her miserable so she killed herself leaving me to avenge her – they were motives the ordinary man could understand, even experience themself. Continue reading →