My slow cataloguing of the Sherlock Holmes short stories from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle progresses to the second collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894).
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Christmas creeps ever-closer, and every year I promise myself I’ll read and review some festive mysteries…then I forget and review them in springtime instead. But The Christmas Appeal (2023) by Janice Hallett…that’s positively screaming for a December review. So let’s look at it in November.
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Published approximately a year ago, this translation of Un Assassin, Ça Va Ça Vient (1981) as Death on Bastille Day kept eluding my attention if only because I was holding out for a paperback edition. The vagaries of publishing have restricted it to Kindle only, however, and so I come to this story of a man in two places at the same time — dancing in front of some witnesses, while committing a murder in front of another — rather belatedly. And while I’m grateful for the opportunity to have read it, as with all translated works, I can’t help but feel that it would make an excellent short story, lacking as it does sufficient intrigue to support its far from excessive length.
Situation vacant: creepy house with forbidden annexe seeks youthful governess to act naively with light menacing; 4 bed, six bath, plenty of free time in the afternoons.
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Bodies from the Library 6 (2023) represents another delightful foray into the neglected and forgotten stories from many of the luminaries of the Golden Age, as editor Tony Medawar puts his enviable genre awareness to wonderful use bringing yet more gems to public attention.
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An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman meet at university, where they form a club with the intention of talking about unsolved crimes. Several years later, in the manner of these undertakings in fiction, they stumble upon a fresh case and decide to take it on…only to realise that they’re mixed up in something Much Bigger Than They Imagined. Fortunately, Hugh Marsden is the ward of legendary Scotland Yard man Sir Arthur Sinclair (ret’d.) and they’re able to enlist that great personage in their predicament. Less fortunately, Sinclair has been ill for some years now, and his powers appear to be on the wane. And danger circles ever-closer…
The best Sherlock Holmes stories take unusual events and spin them into an interesting and unexpected pattern. And then there are the…less than best.
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Pirates! Sunken ships! Mysterious treasure! A race to unscramble a message from beyond the grave! I promise you that The Secret of Phantom Lake (1973) by William Arden, the nineteenth title in the Three Investigators series, contains all these things. So why the hell is there a cowboy on the front cover?
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When Dee Allison’s itinerant uncle Jonas Breen pulls one of his sudden appearing acts and then promptly dies, leaving the overwhelming majority of his fortune to his newly-on-the-scene 18 year-old daughter Laila, the problems sown in the family are only just beginning. When the unworldly Laila runs away from home, unaware that she has eaten poisoned food which has already killed their housekeeper, Dee and her fiancée Andy Talbot are in a race against time to find the young woman before she, too, succumbs. And with some elements of the family possibly happier if Laila were dead, since that would solve their own financial woes, well, then you have a plot on the boil.
For Tuesdays in November we return to the Sherlock Holmes canon, as I continue my self-appointed task of revisiting all the stories featuring the character written by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.
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The Invisible Event 