There’s been a some confusing talk of horses here lately, so let’s abandon that metaphor for now and turn to an author who is often entertaining without any weighty expectations of being good: cue Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace and The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1918).
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As my grandfather used to say, “When you fall off the horse, get back on the horse”. And that’s why he lost his job and the Health and Safety Officer at that horse riding school. But the fact remains that lately I’ve had some disheartening reading experiences with favoured authors — John Dickson Carr, J.J. Connington, Freeman Wills Crofts, A.A. Fair, Craig Rice, Cornell Woolrich — and so the tempting thing is to leave them alone for a while, wait for that memory to fade, and then return. But, no, I’m not doing that, I’m reading Connington again now, because why not? That’s what the horse is here. It was a metaphorical horse all along.
It’s happened to us all: you’re minding your own business in a second-hand bookshop, and suddenly you stumble over 17 volumes of a juvenile mystery series you’ve never heard off…and a Three Investigators-adjacent-sounding juvenile mystery series, at that.
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A posthumous collection occasionally wrong billed as “Twenty-six stories featuring Gervase Fen” (there should really be, at least, a comma after ‘stories’, since series detective Fen isn’t in all of them), Fen Country (1979) was, I believe, the first collection of Edmund Crispin’s short fiction I read. And now I’m back, to get some thoughts on record.
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I was one of many Golden Age fans who was quite excited when Orion’s now-defunct Murder Room acquired the rights to the novels of Henry Wade. And I was one of many Golden Age fans who signally failed to buy any of those titles and read and review them, which in part resulted in the aforementioned defunctness. But when titles began to vanish from availability, I snapped a couple up, including Constable, Guard Thyself! (1934) on the understanding that it presented an example of my favourite subgenre, the impossible crime. So, now that you can’t buy it for yourself, I’m here to say that, yeah, it’s fine, and that Wade, like J.J. Connington, presents enough of interest in his procedural approach to warrant further reading.
Sometimes I feel like a curmudgeon for not liking a book — books do many things, and one book can be something entirely different to so many people, that it feels rather lousy when something just passes you by entirely.
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Ordinarily, I go looking for modern impossible crime novels, under the guise of filtering out something worthwhile for TomCat to try. But the Dog Sitter Detective Plays Dead (2025) by Antony Johnston was, perhaps appropriately, fetched and brought to me.
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I’ve somehow managed to get this far into the Golden Age without reading any Francis Beeding, the nom de plume jointly adopted by John Palmer and Hilary St. George Saunders, but then it’s only a recent spate of Merlin Classic Crime ebook publications which has made them accessible. So let’s start our acquaintanceship off with The Norwich Victims (1932), one of Beeding’s 30-some novels — an inverted mystery that has been highly praised in many other quarters in the GAD fandom. And I can see why: it’s a genuine inverted tale, for one, and contains some clever ideas that wring much from the apparently uninspiring setup…a staunch lesson to anyone who thinks that knowing the murderer early on in some way hamstrings a mystery plot.
An aristocratic family, a big house in which an aged relative resides, everyone converging for a party, said elderly relative being the victim of a crime, a precocious young girl keen to investigate, rumours of a family treasure hidden in the grounds…lordy, I hope I’m not reading The Swifts (2023) again.
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Having recently enjoyed the very witty Murder at the Castle (2021) by David Safier, which turned former German Chancellor Angela Merkel into an amateur sleuth, I went searching for more droll German crime fiction and, just as it’s turned into a series by Netflix, stumbled over the recently-translated Murder Mindfully (2019) by Karsten Dusse.
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The Invisible Event 