Intrigued by the apparent swathe — maybe I’m exaggerating it in my mind, but there do seem to be a lot of them at present — of Choose Your Own Adventure-style mystery books coming into the market in recent months, I undertook to try one. And having found Antony Johnston’s The Dog-Sitter Detective Plays Dead (2025) an easy read, it is to his contribution, Can You Solve the Murder? (2025), that I turn.
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Having written six fast-paced and energetically witty mysteries featuring Jake and Helene Justus and their lawyer friend John J. Malone, Craig Rice decided that 1942 would be a year of experimentation. Some worked, some was hard work, and some was probably successful if you like that kind of thing. Thankfully, 1943 saw her return to Malone & Co., though the ghost of experimentation wasn’t completely laid and a little of the need to innovate — no bad attitude, not if you see yourself in writing for a while — carried through to Having Wonderful Crime (1943). So Jake, Helene, and Malone decamp to New York rather than Chicago, but murders happen in the Big Apple too, and before long we’re caught up in one.
When A. Carver published The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023) close to Christmas 2023, I was caught off-guard: with that title, one feels it should be read in the Winter, and I try to be about four to five weeks ahead on my blogging and so it had to wait until 2024. Then I just…didn’t read it in 2024, so Winter 2025 finally comes to the rescue
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I have, in my limited exposure to his work, come to quite enjoy the thrillerish tendencies of Horatio Edgar Wallace. You don’t come to him for solid plotting, intelligent detection, or subtle clewing, but there’s a brand of creativity he brings to his wild schemes that is difficult to find elsewhere.
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The Affair at Little Wokeham, a.k.a. Double Tragedy (1943), was the last of Freeman Wills Crofts’s books to be recently reprinted by Harper Collins in these lovely paperback editions. Fear not, I have acquired the rest of Crofts’s oeuvre — though if you have an unread House of Stratus edition of Death of a Train (1946), do get in touch — and shall indeed complete the Full Crofts here on The Invisible Event, but let’s spare a thought for what might have been: when the Inspector French TV show seemed a likely prospect, we could have had all of Crofts’s novels for grown-ups in bookshops in the 21st century. Alas, Utopia must remain a dream.
We’ve all been there, eh? One minute you’re imagining violent and fitting deaths for all the people who demean and annoy you on a daily basis, and the next those very same people are dying in front of you while you’re powerless to help. What? You’ve…not been there? Oh.
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Having previously poked their tongue into their cheeks with Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village (2021), Maureen Johnson and illustrator Jay Cooper turn their minds to committing crimes rather than evading them with The Creeping Hand Murder (2025). I have Brad to thank for bringing this to my attention, and, having recently held forth on the hiding of clues, it seemed the perfect opportunity to look at the inevitable use of the visual to communicate that which would be far more obvious, or difficult to convey subtly, in prose.
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It’s fairly incredible to me that I have a copy of The Sealed Room Murder (1934), originally published by James Ronald under his Michael Crombie nom de plume, at all. Only the recent efforts of Chris Verner and Moonstone Press to bring Ronald’s criminous oeuvre back into print for sensible money have made this and others available to fans like me without endless connections and deep pockets, and I remain extremely grateful for their undertaking. The book, then, delivers largely what one has been able to come to expect from Ronald’s earlier, pulp-adjacent writing, with much thrill and little substance: fun, but not worth the sorts of money previously requested online.
Back in 2020 I read and largely enjoyed Jamie Probin’s novel The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) and the short story ‘The Episode of the Nine Monets’ (2020). The first was admittedly rather prolix, but it showed great promise and I’ve kept an eye out for his work ever since.
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Having adored the Ealing black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) as a teenager, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the novel from whence it sprang, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) by Roy Horniman. Thus, to the film do I return for the first time in easily 30 years to see if it holds up in the many ways I remembered it improving on its source material.
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