Author: JJ
#531: Going Home – Black & Blue (1997) by Ian Rankin
Since four Tuesdays in the month only allow me four books as part of this Going Home series, today we finish the current run. But I’ve enjoyed rereading these books and will doubtless return to this concept at some future point.
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#530: Serving Up a, uhm, Verger’s, er, Breakfast – The Montague Egg Stories of Dorothy L. Sayers (1933-36)
Dorothy Leigh Sayers is undoubtedly one of the most influential and enduring writers to emerge from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction — as a founding member of the Detection Club and the creator of one of last century’s best known amateur sleuths she was in at the blood of the formulation of GAD and has remained hugely popular ever since.
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#529: Down Among the Dead Men, a.k.a. The Sunken Sailor (1961) by Patricia Moyes
I don’t think anyone would doubt that I’m out of my stated era of the Golden Age reviewing a book from 1961, and there isn’t even an impossibility in this one to justify it on those grounds. But Patricia Moyes’ debut Dead Men Don’t Ski (1959) was clothed in the fashions of GAD, and the series bears further investigation for that alone. This second novel is afflicted a little by the narrative periphrasis that betokens later-era crime writing — chapter one should be called ‘Here’s the Cast’ and chapter two ‘Sure, I Understand Sailing, But I Don’t Know How to Communicate It (Glossary of Terms)’ — but, once past that, things improve significantly.
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#528: Going Home – Blood Work (1998) by Michael Connelly
Another week, another look at a book which put me on the path to the classic detection obsession which occupies my every waking moment.
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#527: Plotting the Perfect Crime – Potential and Pay-Off via The House of Haunts, a.k.a. The Lamp of God (1935) by Ellery Queen
Slowly, slowly I work my way through the Otto Penzler-edited Woo Whatta Lotta Locked Room Mysteries (2014) — it’s not really a convenient size to dip into — and, since my chronological reading of Ellery Queen is going so well, it seemed time to take on this impossible disappearance story. Or so I thought…
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#526: The Julius Caesar Murder Case (1935) by Wallace Irwin
This title had stuck in my memory from perusing Ramble House’s stable, and when I saw it listed in Locked Room Murders (2nd ed., 1992) — having not previously realised it was an impossible crime — I snapped it up. Then it cropped up in the comments of a post at Brad’s place and it was as if the stars had aligned. The dedication to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler “with the author’s feeling that in distance there is security” hints that you’re not getting the usual run-of-the-mill stuff, and the opening line introducing “Publius Manlius Scribo, star reporter and sports columnist on the Evening Tiber” in 44 B.C., heavily implies that you’re clearly not getting a slavishly faithful historical epic, either.
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#525: Going Home – Dead Meat (1993) by Philip Kerr
For the second look at novels which I suspect put me on the route to my persistent craving of a classic detection fix, we go back to an author I adored during what were probably his lean years and had moved on from once he regained his youthful popularity.
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#524: Spoiler Warning – Coming in July: The Moving Toyshop (1946) by Edmund Crispin
The Invisible Event 