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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Astoundingly, Who Killed Father Christmas? (2023) is the fifth collection of seasonal mysteries collated by Martin Edwards for the British Library Crime Classics range. And, with the BL kind enough to provide me with a review copy, it seemed like the perfect excuse to start some Christmas reading a little earlier than planned.
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In these classic reprint-rich days, the work of Tom Mead — not just recycling the past, but building upon it by paying informed homage — feels like a breath of fresh air. His debut Death and the Conjuror (2022) was a genuine puzzle plot filled with the playfulness of this most spirited of genres, and if sophomore effort The Murder Wheel (2023) isn’t quite as successful, Mead deserves huge credit for the love he brings to his writing — and how superbly readable that writing is, never feeling weighed down by an excess of referencing or the weight of the history he is so lovingly revisiting. This is still bags of fun, and bodes well for what I hope is going to be a long and storied career.
I’m pretty sure that Sealed Room Murder (1941), the eighth and final novel by Rupert Penny to feature Chief Inspector Edward Beale, was only the second-ever book I read from Ramble House, and it made me an instant fan of Penny. So now I return to it to get my thoughts on record, and see whether I’ve been remiss in singing its praises for all these years.
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While you’ve hopefully been enjoying the regular reviews on The Invisible Event, I’ve been sweating bullets over the fact that I hit a seeming unpassable patch of reader’s block and haven’t read anything for nearly a month. Then Brad suggested that some Erle Stanley Gardner might help me out as it has done recently for him and, well, here we are. Mistakenly believing The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943) to be the first of Gardner’s two novels featuring the disreputable Gramps Wiggins I picked it up and spent a very happy day in its pages, and while it reaffirmed much of what I like about Gardner’s writing the book also bears many of the man’s flaws.
On one hand, the artwork promoting The Detention Detectives (2023) by Lis Jardine is excessively twee, even by the standards of juvenile fiction; on the other, the author bio mentions that her life has “been shaped by a fierce passion for…Golden Age crime”. Thus, recalling that adage about books and covers, I ventured forth.
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I’ve written previously about The Red Widow Murders (1935) — John Dickson Carr’s first take on the Room That Kills, originally published under his Carter Dickson nom de plume — but this American Mystery Classics reissue is a chance to look at the book more broadly and attach a star value to it. This third reading reinforced my impression that it’s perhaps too busy a book, redolent with the enthusiasm the youthful Carr brought to his early efforts when his eagerness outweighed his skill with juggling plot, but reading it three times also give me a good perspective on its many successes, not least of which is just how busy Carr manages to make it.
Lying in the Deep (2023) by Diana Urban was brought to my attention by a piece the author wrote on CrimeReads in which she said that she had taken the setup and some “iconic plot beats” from Death on the Nile (1938) by Agatha Christie in order to inform the structure of her own book. Holy lawsuit, Batman, colour me intrigued.
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