Author: JJ

#866: Little Fictions/The Cornerstones – The Amateur Cracksman, a.k.a. Raffles [ss] (1899) by E.W. Hornung

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As discussed previously, Tuesdays in February will feature four collections of short stories on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list, selected on account of my ever-growing interest in what the genre looked like before the advent of the Golden Age in (no arguments here…) 1920. Confusingly, my 1950 green Penguin paperback of gentleman thief Raffles stories by E.W. Hornung shown above contains 14 tales, only the first eight of which concern us today, comprising as they do the first collection to feature the character, The Amateur Cracksman (1899).

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#865: There Is Nothing Either Good or Bad, But Thinking Makes It So – Examining the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones List

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If you’ve met me, firstly I apologise, and secondly it’ll come as no surprise that I have a tendency to ruminate on that which many others pass over without so much as a backward glance. Previously this resulted in me writing something in the region of 25,000 words on the Knox Decalogue, and today I’m going to turn my eye upon the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list. Prepare thyself…

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#864: The Invisible Host, a.k.a. The Ninth Guest (1930) by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning

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Invisible Host

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An unknown host invites a disparate group of people to an isolated location, and then informs them of the plan to kill them one by one; accusation and counter-accusation is high on the agenda, but the deaths come regularly no matter what our invitees do. That The Invisible Host (1930) by husband-and-wife team Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning shares some core DNA with And Then There Were None (1939) by Agatha Christie isn’t in doubt. What makes this fascinating reading, quite apart from its brisk pace and very entertaining setup, is seeing how different minds develop the same base ingredients.

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#863: Minor Felonies – Premeditated Myrtle (2020) by Elizabeth C. Bunce

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On page 110 of 355 of Elizabeth C. Bunce’s Premeditated Myrtle (2020) we learn that 12 year-old Myrtle Hardcastle starts reading novels in the middle because “beginnings were often boring”. Thankfully the unproved murder on which the entire book to that point has hung is finally suspected a few pages later and the book comes to life at last, but there’s an uncomfortably meta air to the criticism at the time.

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#862: “All roads lead to death. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.” – The 5 False Suicides (2021) by James Scott Byrnside

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I haven’t pursued any Adventures in Self-Publishing, in which I read and review self-published works featuring impossible crimes, since October 2020. Well, the good news is that James Scott Byrnside, star pupil of the AiSP Academy, released his fourth book in December 2021, and so now we can saddle up the horse again and get adventurin’.

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#861: The Man Who Died Twice (2021) by Richard Osman

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Man Who Died Twice

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Anyone who didn’t buy Richard Osman’s second novel The Man Who Died Twice (2021) when it came out last year probably got it for Christmas, and you’ve doubtless read it by now. I actually read it just before Christmas, but it’s taken me a long time to order my thoughts regarding this second visit to the septuagenarian denizens of Cooper’s Chase retirement village. On one hand, I can see how millions of people around the world will be completely charmed by Osman’s whimsy; on the other, the plot here only really occupies the last 70 pages, with the rest of the book filled out by padding of the most egregious hue and stripe.

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#859: “You’re a wicked man to be thinking such things…” – Shooting Script and Other Mysteries [ss] (2021) by William Link and Richard Levinson [ed. Joseph Goodrich]

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William Link and Richard Levinson are undoubtedly best known today for their work done in creating TV crime-fighters Lieutenant Columbo, Jessica Fletcher, Joe Mannix, and Alexander and Leonard Blacke, as well as for a host of guest writing spots on other classic crime shows from the 1950s onwards. Shooting Script and Other Mysteries (2021) collects 17 stories by the pair that were published over a period of twelve years, mostly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

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#858: The Bride Wore Black, a.k.a. Beware the Lady (1940) by Cornell Woolrich

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Bride Wore Black

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Past Jim has a lot to answer for — this haircut, for one, or that fact that I cannot forget the embarrassment of 11:48am on 4th June 1997 — but my current frustration with him is how easily and summarily he dismissed the writing of Cornell Woolrich after reading the Nightwebs (1971) collection as part of the Orion Crime Masterworks series. Had Past Jim possessed a little more discernment (or, dare I say it, maturity), I could have been loving Woolrich’s work for the last two decades instead of coming to it so late. Yes, I got here eventually, via some short stories, some novellas, and a couple of American Mystery Classics reissues, but what is life without something to lament?

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#857: Minor Felonies – The Secret Detectives (2021) by Ella Risbridger

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While far from his best work, The Blind Barber (1934) by John Dickson Carr does contain the brilliant problem of a corpse appearing on a passenger liner mid-voyage with no passenger or crew member apparently having died to provide it. Ella Risbridger’s juvenile mystery debut The Secret Detectives (2021) works from the same principle, with 11 year-old Isobel Petty seeing someone thrown overboard one stormy night…and yet the next morning no-one is missing.

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