In the back of my mind when I started The Invisible Event was the idea that exactly half of what I’d post about would feature impossible crimes, locked room mysteries, and/or miracle problems — and although this proportion started an irreversible slide after the first 500 or so posts, the impossible crime remains my first love.
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We approach the sharp end of things now, with 64 names reduced now to a mere eight, and only three rounds of voting before the legally-binding World’s Favourite Golden Age Sleuth is crowned.
Continue readingAnd then there were 32 — the first round of this vote to find the most popular sleuth of detective fiction’s Golden Age having whittled the original 64 names down to half that number, and the votes available for one week from today due to halve it again. So, who survived and who is out of the running?
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You may remember — and I won’t blame you if you don’t — that back in October 2019 I was lucky enough to get cover designer Abi Salvesen to explain her process in researching and creating the covers for two John Dickson Carr reprints put out by Polygon Books.
Continue readingRight, you probably know the drill by now: 100+ sleuths nominated, top 64 chosen, the top half of 32 already voted on…today you’re voting on the bottom half of the first round.
Continue readingOver one hundred names were nominated. The top 64 have been sifted. Today we begin the process of finding the favourite sleuth of detective fiction’s Golden Age (precise dates pending, but we’re saying 1920-45).
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Here’s something I’ve been curious about, and probably only now have the time and energy to think about organising: who is the most popular detective character of the genre’s Golden Age?
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With the sixteenth to twenty-fourth novels by Freeman Wills Crofts to feature his series detective Chief Inspector Joseph French due to be republished between now and January 2023 (well, #18, Antidote to Venom (1938), is already available from the British Library) it occurred to me that people might be looking for advice about the first fifteen — all, incredibly, in print.
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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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