Just a quick note to let you know that I have once again been a guest on Caroline Crampton’s highly entertaining Shedunnit podcast, this time discussing the novel The Sanfield Scandal (1929) by Richard Keverne.
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Being something of a fan of the mystery writer Herbert Brean, I am ever on the lookout for work by him, especially the short stories ‘Murder Buys a Ticket’, a.k.a. ‘Nine Hours Late on the Opening Run’ (1941) and ‘The Man Who Talked with Spirits’ (1943) listed in Adey. In these searches, I recently discovered that Brean acted as editor for The Mystery Writer’s Handbook (1956), in which members of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) provided advice for people looking to write “detective, suspense, mystery, and crime stories”.
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Look, it took me a long time to appreciate the intelligence of the inverted mystery, in which we know who committed the crime and have to watch both them struggle over it and their eventual discoverer working out the threads of the case. But the important thing is that I got there in the end.
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Having now read — and in some cases, reread — all eight of Leo Bruce’s novels to feature sometime Sergeant William Beef, my ordered mind inevitably moves to ranking them.
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I don’t make a reading round-up post an annual occurrence on The Invisible Event, but particularly wanted to do one today if only because I read 164 books in 2025, which is the most in a single year in the existing archives.
Continue readingWhile I wasn’t entirely sure what the focus of this blog would be when I started it — I knew there would be impossible crimes, but had no idea otherwise — I’d have been surprised if you told me I’d end up doing so much reading of and writing about mysteries for 9 to 12 year-olds.
Continue readingI recently lamented that I don’t really do much in the way of think-pieces on The Invisible Event any more, and some of you in the comments were like ‘Yeah, so do them again, then, idiot’. So here goes.
Continue readingWith Libby at Solving Mystery of Murder continuing to struggle with the work of French maestro of the impossible crime Paul Halter, and with no new Halter titles on the horizon for a little while at least, I got to reflecting on the titles that John Pugmire so selflessly translated under his Locked Room International banner for two decades before his death last year.
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Something a little different today: knowing that I’m a fan of the Australian dramatist and novelist Malcolm ‘Max’ Afford, Tony Medawar — the closest thing the GAD firmament has to Indiana Jones — sent me a selection of Afford’s thus-far-uncollected short fiction, as found in a variety of Australian publications from the Golden Age, and I’ve read them and am going to write a little about each one.
Continue readingLast year my book club picked our favourite 1930s mysteries, and earlier this year we moved on a decade and each selected a top 10 for the 1940s. So, well, here’s mine.
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