Another tale of professional thief Lester Leith (hey, that rhymes…!), and another impossible crime. Who knew that Erle Stanley Gardner dabbled in the best subgenre in the world so frequently?
Continue reading
Seven cases from the extended adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as Sherlockian superfan Nick Cardillo indulges in adding to the reminiscences of Dr. John Watson.
Continue reading
I’ll let you in on a secret: much as I struggle to read two books by the same author close together, there are certain writers whose diversity of approach enables me to sidestep this consideration. One such personage is Erle Stanley Gardner, and I’m starting to suspect that E.C.R. Lorac might be another. Lorac’s country-set novels featuring Inspector Robert Macdonald are very different beasts to his London-based cases, and Death of an Author (1935) — not featuring Macdonald at all — is different again: a zesty, propulsive, and supremely clever little puzzler dug out from seemingly inescapable obscurity by the British Library for our not inconsiderable enjoyment.
I’m very much enjoying the company of Lester Leith, Erle Stanley Gardner’s gentleman scoundrel who, having extracted from criminals their ill-gotten gains, takes a small cut and passes the balance onto worthy causes.
Continue reading
I’m slowly working my way up to the newly-translated Paul Halter novel The Siren’s Call (1998, tr. 2023), but there’s the small matter of these two short stories to deal with first, translated by John Pugmire and drawn here from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
Continue reading
“On the final two days of November, two men and two women shall perish in Magan…” — so sayeth the seer Sakimi, who has a fifty-year streak of being right about these things; thus, anyone in Magan would do well to clear out for the last two days of November. Just a shame that no-one told the nine people who have travelled to Magan at the end of November, some of them specifically to meet Sakimi, and that the message is only relayed as the sole bridge out of town goes up in flames. But, c’mon, prophecy belongs with zombies in the world of cheap and tawdry science fiction, so there’s no way that anyone is really at any risk….is there?
Send a thief to catch a thief, eh? And then try to catch that second thief and frame him for the theft done by the original thief? Sir, you’re not playing very fairly with Lester Leith.
Continue reading
TomCat has been singing the praises of Roger Ormerod for a while now, and, sure, TomCat has questionable taste some of the time, but let’s see if Ormerod warrants the praise, eh? And so, Time to Kill (1974), the first novel to feature Birmingham-based Detective Sergeant David Mallin.
Continue reading
When Derek Fordingbridge, long-supposed-dead heir to the family fortune, apparently resurfaces, his face mutilated in the war and all other identifying characteristics similarly compromised, his uncle Paul is naturally sceptical. When this re-emergence is followed hard upon by the murder of the old family retainer who cared deeply for Derek and the theft of Derek’s diaries from family pile Foxhills…well, it’s almost like we’re in a classically-styled piece of detective fiction, eh? Thankfully Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield is in the area and ready to help out Inspector Armadale with his investigations into which of two possible interpretations this should be taken as.
Five Tuesdays in August, five stories about gentleman scoundrel Lester Leith from the pen of Erle Stanley Gardner — synergy.
Continue reading
The Invisible Event 