Season 4 of Monk is upon us — well, upon the blog, because it aired 18 years ago and I’m only just catching up — and, since I’ve approached the three previous seasons in slightly different ways, let’s mix things up again and rank the sixteen episodes here from worst to best, eh?
Continue reading
Good heavens, after this second reading of Christianna Brand’s Suddenly at His Residence, a.k.a. The Crooked Wreath (1946) do I have plenty of Thoughts. Indeed, I have so many Thoughts that I’m deliberately writing about it on a Thursday so that my self-imposed 1,000 word limit stops me going on for about four times that length, to the enjoyment of no-one. So: Sir Richard March, tiring of the attitudes of his grandchildren, threatens to rewrite his will, retires to the lodge in the grounds of Swanswater Manor for this express purpose…and is discovered dead the following morning. Having been visited by various people throughout the previous evening, who actually poisoned him?
The return of my In GAD We Trust podcast, and a welcome return for Alasdair Beckett-King, comedian and now children’s author.
Continue reading
With considerations of the era taking Donald Lam out of the Cool and Lam Detective Agency, Bertha Cool is left to fend for herself when a blind man wishes to hire her services in tracking down a young woman who, he claims, has disappeared. It’s an unusual jumping-off point in itself, but the real delight here is how intelligently Erle Stanley Gardner, writing under his A.A. Fair nom de plume, explores and explains the way the blind man is able to identify so many different people — and how intelligently he is able to come to conclusions about the woman whose wellbeing is his concern. And then others start to express an interest in the same woman; and then someone is murdered…
Everyone enjoys a break from work, but when your job is to turn up somewhere and have a baffling crime occur, how can you guarantee you’re taking time off until after you’ve left? Hercule Poirot, Inspector Cockrill, Sir Henry Merrivale, Nigel Strangeways, and swathes of other classic era detectives have had their holidays interrupted by murder, and to this pantheon we can now add Montgomery Bonbon, he of the indefinable foreign accent and curious physical similarity to a ten year-old girl.
Continue reading
In much the same way that movies like Murder on the Orient Express (1974/2017) draw in audiences with their roster of famous names, this humorous take on the murder mystery first captured my attention on account of the sheer wealth of British comedic talent it had attracted. But, like, is it any good?
Continue reading
Having finally achieved all he has so long dreamed of, Larry Rock has just one lingering problem: one of the women from his chequered past must die in order to not stand in the way of his continued success. Realising that the balcony of his swank new apartment represents the perfect opportunity to kill someone and make it look like an accident, Larry throws a dinner party and invites his ex-wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife, his mistress, and his fiancée…and the whole city sits back and waits for the fur to fly while we, the reader, wait to find out whose body it was that dropped out of the sky in the prologue. As set-ups go, Follow As the Night (1950) by Pat McGerr takes some beating.
It was probably TomCat’s review of Murder Points a Finger (1953) by David Alexander which first put the book on my radar, but chances of finding it were slim and I’d forgotten any details by the time I did, much to my surprise, run a copy to earth last year.
Continue reading
It looks like I might be making these ‘Ten Favourite…’ lists a thing, having previously done fictional detectives and British Library reissues; today, we turn our attention to the great work done by Ramble House, publishers of an unusual mix of crime and weird fiction.
Continue reading
