Let’s take a moment to reflect on what Tony Medawar has done in recent years for GAD fans, with Wicked Spirits (2024) being the eighth collection of lost, forgotten, and so-rare-they-doubt-their-own-existence stories by GAD luminaries Medawar has edited under the …from the Library label. Whether we get any more after this or not, and I sincerely hope we do, it’s a wonderful body of work, and only the tip of an iceberg of effort he has been putting in for decades now.
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Janice Hallett fairly set the crime fiction firmament a-gaggle with her debut The Appeal (2021), a story of murder in a community theatre group told via emails and texts. Her third novel, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (2023), was, to my thinking, even more successful again, not least because of how it stirred in a speculative plot about the Antichrist and a forthcoming apocalypse so confidently, again told via various media rather than in straight prose. So when her fourth novel The Examiner (2024) was announced, I was at the head of the (library) queue, and, well, we might be in an her-odd-numbered-novels-are-the-good-ones situation.
Having thoroughly enjoyed the hard-edged cynicism of P.I. Peter Chambers in Death on the Double (1957), which had an impossible crime in it just to add to the fun, I sought out Too French and Too Deadly, a.k.a. The Narrowing Lust (1955) due to Adey promising me similarly impossible happenings.
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Having previously had a new business undertaking result in murder in Fatal Venture (1939), and having dealt in business manipulation in The End of Andrew Harrison (1938), Freeman Wills Crofts once again mixes his earlier experiences to bring us something similar to before but deliberately different enough to matter with James Tarrant, Adventurer, a.k.a. Circumstantial Evidence (1941). And so we have our eponymous chemist setting out “adventuring himself on a flowing tide, and instead [finding] himself floating in circles in a backwater,” and coming up with a canny idea to ride on the tails of a successful patent medicine brand. What could possibly go wrong?
I try to keep a weather eye on modern crime fiction publications, mainly so that anything which sounds like it might contain an impossible crime can be tried out in this occasional undertaking where we all pretend that I’m only reading them so I can recommend one to TomCat. But Black Lake Manor (2022) by Guy Morpuss, well, I sort of went looking for this one…
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There were, I think, few people more excited than me when it was announced that Moonstone Press would be republishing the complete mystery fiction of James Ronald. I’ve been adding to my existing posts with quick reviews of the novellas and short stories included in earlier volumes, but fifth volume The Dark Angel (1930) marks the first time that I’m reading a new-to-me James Ronald novel, one that I would in all probability have had no opportunity to experience but for the excellent collaboration of Moonstone and Chris Verner. And a selfless old lady receiving a demand to pay £5,000 (£400,000 in today’s money) is exactly the sort of pulpy setup Ronald could doubtless spin to entertaining ends.
A recent reflection on the Orion Crime Masterworks series that first got me into classic-era crime and detective fiction has brought me back to Double Indemnity (1936) by James M. Cain, the sixth title in that series and my first proper encounter with anything Noir-ish on the page.
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With their gloomy house in isolated woodland, overlooking a dreary bay and containing a mask from Japanese Noh theatre that is rumoured to carry a curse, it’s frankly amazing that no-one in the Chizui family — “[r]iven by mutual suspicion, hatred and a sheer failure to understand one another…” — has been found murdered in a locked room before. Thankfully, hard upon the return of Hiroyuki Ishikari to the area, ostensible head of the family Taijiro is found thus slain, and mystery fan Akimitsu Takagi is on hand to help dig to the bottom of the tangled skein that will see yet more of the clan wiped out in the days that follows. Though how much use he’ll be is up for debate.
The inverted mystery has been tickling my brain recently, and I got to thinking that I’d very much like to rewatch Alfred Hitchock’s Rope (1948). But the closest thing I could find on the various platforms available to me — without shelling out any money, you understand, which must be saved for essentials like books and coffee — was the similarly-inverted Dial M for Murder (1954), which I last watched before the need to shave had descended upon me. So, well, why not?
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Apparently, you either love Philo Vance — dilettante, bon vivant, sleuth — or you wish to give him the much-vaunted “kick in the pance”. I, having read his sixth investigation The Kennel Murder Case (1933) some ten-plus years ago, don’t remember having any opinion on the man at all, so when the American Mystery Classics range put out its usual high-quality version of The Benson Murder Case (1926), debut of Vance and author S.S. van Dine alike, an opportunity was to be seized. And so, encouraged by some comments made to me at the recent Bodies from the Library conference, here we are. And it all went rather well, don’t’cha’know.
The Invisible Event 