When I took a bit of a blogging break at the end of 2021, I finally found time to watch some TV and caught up with the first two seasons of Castle, the US mystery show starring Nathan Fillion as hyper-successful crime writer Richard Castle and Stana Katic as Kate Beckett, the NYPD detective he ends up shadowing for ‘research’ (which swiftly develops into a ‘will they/won’t they’ thing — spoilers: they definitely will, probably in season 5).
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#877: Give ‘Em Enough Tropes – Genre Conventions in Writing The Red Death Murders (2022)
I promise this blog isn’t going to devolve into me pushing my debut novel — The Red Death Murders (2022) by Jim Noy, now available at your local Amazon site — every weekend, but please bear with me while I talk about it from time to time. And given that it leans heavily into many of the tropes that betoken the Golden Age, I thought I’d discuss a few of them today — no spoilers, obvs.
Continue reading#874: Department of Self-Promotion – The Red Death Murders (2022) by Jim Noy
Hello, everyone. I’ve written a novel. It’s called The Red Death Murders (2022), and should appear on your local Amazon franchise at any minute if it hasn’t already.
Continue reading#852: Death of the Reader x The Invisible Event – Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe [Chapters 10 to 14]
The final week of the Death of the Reader boys picking their way through Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe, and the reckoning is upon us: how close were they with the solution they proposed in last week’s show?
Continue reading#848: Death of the Reader x The Invisible Event – Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe [Chapters 6 to 9]
Another Monday, another chance to listen to Felix ‘Flex’ Flexerton and Herman ‘Herds’ Herdley as they read Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe in sections and I attempt to entice them away from the confident groove they settled into last week.
Continue reading#844: Death of the Reader x The Invisible Event – Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe [Chapters 1 to 5]
You may remember that I recently reviewed Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe — but what you won’t know until now is that I was rereading it in part because I’d been invited onto Death of the Reader to talk about it.
Continue reading#795: Cryptic Crossword – Golden Age Detectives Edition
A couple of weeks ago, a clue turned up in my cryptic crossword — Fictional detective satisfied about a vandalised rig [7] — and, once I’d solved it, got me thinking. Again.
Continue reading#790: On the Morals of Golden Age Detective Fiction, via Crime and Detection [ss] (1926) ed. E.M. Wrong
That title is doing a lot of work, isn’t it? Fair warning: this goes on a bit.
At the online Bodies from the Library conference last weekend, I gave a talk inspired in part by E.M. Wrong’s introduction to the 1926 anthology Crime and Detection. And, in addition to coining the term “Wellington of detection” that inspired the thinking I laid out last weekend, there is plenty of material in that piece of prose to get the cogs turning.
Continue reading#771: Spoiler Warning – Coming in April, July, and October…
A quick recap for the unfamiliar: every three months, Moira, Brad, and I read an Agatha Christie book, discuss it in full spoiler-rich detail, and post a recording of that discussion here. I tell you in advance which book it is going to be, and you are invited to read along at home and then listen in to agree or disagree with our feelings.
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