A title like The Door with Seven Locks (1926) suggests all manner of locked room excitement, hopefully resulting is some impossible crime shenanigans. So imagine my surprise when this ended up being little more than a straight thriller with some (perhaps not unexpectedly, this is Edgar Wallace after all) weird ideas at its core.
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Hard to believe, I know, but I had a life before this blog, and in that life I read The Case with Nine Solutions (1928) by J.J. Connington and was mildly disappointed that those ‘solutions’ were merely permutations on the interpretations put on two deaths and not a Poisoned Chocolates Case-esque reinterpretation of available information to give a nonet of distinct answers to explain away events. Beyond that, I remembered very little about it and so, now more versed in Connington’s writing, I return — making this the fifth Connington novel I’ve read in the last 12 months, which is probably enough to convince me that I’m now a fan.
I think ‘The Speckled Band’ (1892) is perhaps the most fun Arthur Conan Doyle ever had writing about his most famous creation.
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Sixteen stories from Christianna Brand, who, thanks to the likes of the excellent Bodies from the Library (2018-present) series and the British Library Crime Classics range, has enjoyed something of a resurgence of late. So, how do these stack up?
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I’m in a confusing place with Margery Allingham. I definitely read three of her books when I started getting into Golden Age detective fiction, one of which, I’m almost certain, was The Beckoning Lady (1955) and very hard work indeed. A few years passed, and I next thoroughly enjoyed the amoral ingenuity of Police at the Funeral (1931) before stumbling badly over Flowers for the Judge (1936) and sort of abandoning her, faintly dissatisfied. So when The Case of the Late Pig (1937) passed into my hands, the mere 132 pages of this Penguin edition commended themselves as an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the author and see how things go.
A fixture of Christmas crime story anthologies throughout history; but is it any good?
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I first watched 12 Angry Men (1957) some 20-odd years ago and was delighted, as a callow teenager, to find it more than living up to its reputation. So, 20-odd years on, does it stand up to a second viewing?
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Tom Mead is that rare thing these days: an author writing detective fiction in the classic tradition with some actual interest in the classic tradition of detective fiction. When he peppers the text of Death and the Conjuror (2022), his very entertaining and easy-to-read debut novel, with references to the work of R. Austin Freeman, G.K. Chesterton, Melville Davisson Post and others, you know it’s the result of time spent reading the genre rather than a few quick Google searches to give him credibility. And when he plays the games of identity and location as well as he does here, you also know he’s having a joyous time playing in his favourite sandbox…and wonderful it is to see.
Sometimes revisiting the classics is a real chore, y’know? And sometimes, like today, it’s a complete delight.
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Having just completed a look at the Murder in the Mews (1937) collection by Agatha Christie, let’s turn our attention to “the Crow’s Nest business” referenced by Mr. Satterthwaite therein.
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