I started watching Alfred Hitchcock’s films when I was probably 12 or 13, too young to appreciate their style but old enough to know when they slipped by in a blur of fun and excitement. And yet when I first watched Rear Window (1954) there was a sense of something special having just happened, something I didn’t really appreciate until I rewatched it a few years later.
Continue reading
The fifth case for dilettante Philo Vance, this time it is he who brings in District Attorney John F.X. Markham when approached by an Egyptologist who has stumbled upon the dead body of the man who funded his most recent exhibitions. Said body has been battered to death in the private home museum of Dr. Mindrum W.C. Bliss, another expert in the field, and there are plenty of murmurings about Egyptian curses and vengeful gods. So can “sworn enemy of the obvious and the trite” Vance pick his way through a murder that seems either too simple for words or too unearthly for any malefactor to ever be brought to book? Well, naturally he can — what sort of amateur detective would he be otherwise? — but how?
I recently acquired a boxset of 8 Maurice Leblanc novels and short story collections featuring his gentleman bastard Arsène Lupin, and so before I dig into those I thought I should revisit the first Leblanc book I read, the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone collection The Eight Strokes of the Clock [ss] (1922).
Continue reading
Despite enjoying a few standalone titles by Belgian minimalist Georges Simenon — thanks in no small part to the Orion Crime Masterworks series — I was left rather ambivalent by my first encounter with Inspector Jules Maigret in The Late Monsieur Gallet (1931). A recent comment on that post, however, directed me to a few titles which might be to my liking, and so here we are with Maigret Sets a Trap (1955), the forty-eighth of seventy-five books featuring the character. A serial killer has already murdered five women in the same Paris arrondissement, and while much of what follows feels very familiar, you also have to wonder if it was Simenon who established a pattern that others would so intently adhere to in the decades ahead.
Fifteen tales of murder and mystery centring around various athletic pastimes would, you imagine, be a fairly difficult undertaking to assemble, and so Martin Edwards is to be commended for finding enough to fill the pages of Settling Scores [ss] (2017) for the British Library Crime Classics series.
Continue reading
The fourteenth published tale by Erle Stanley Gardner about L.A. P.I.s Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, Some Women Won’t Wait (1953) marks the halfway point of my reading all thirty titles for the blog — ‘cos, y’know, there’s that unpublished one — very nearly five years after I started. And while I won’t say that the machine is starting to bleed to death here, it’s probably the simplest Cool and Lam case put on paper to date: relying essentially on a moment of misdirection akin to a classic novel of Golden Age detection rather than the imbrication of a variety of switchbacks that have been the hallmark of the series thus far.
Double Death (1939) — variously subtitled ‘An exercise in detection’ and ‘A murder story’ — is another example of the round-robin mystery that sells itself on a few big names and then brings in a few, er, less established authors to complete the endeavour.
Continue reading
Having completed Sergeant Wm. Beef, I turn to the other series of detective novels Rupert Croft-Cooke wrote under his Leo Bruce nom de plume, those featuring schoolmaster Carolus Deene. The books are not easy to find, however, and so I am reliant on the recentish reprints by Academy Chicago Publishers, who neglected the first three in the series and began with fourth title Dead Man’s Shoes (1958). And it’s to be hoped that those earlier books were overlooked due to rights rather than quality issues, because this first encounter with the crime-solving History master leaves me somewhat underwhelmed. This was written by the convention-busting creator of Sergeant Beef? Really?
Well, I am thoroughly enjoying revisiting the work of Anthony Berkeley, with Not to be Taken (1938) proving decidedly more fun at second assessment, and now his debut The Layton Court Mystery (1925) upgrading itself from ‘amusing but seriously flawed’ to ‘Holy hell, this is superb!’ after a reread. Indeed, I enjoyed this so much that I’m deliberately reviewing it on a Thursday so that I don’t go over my self-imposed 1,000 word limit, because I feel like I could talk about this book for weeks, and frankly no-one needs that. So, a gathering at a country pile, complete with one host found shot in the locked library…hit me with the classics.
The Roland Lacourbe-curated list of 100 impossible crime novels has held quite a sway in my reading life. Hell, I got one of the titles on it reprinted purely so I could read it myself. Until John Pugmire’s death, Locked Room International did a stalwart job bringing many of the foreign-language titles into English…but still some books on the list seemed frustratingly out of reach, no more so than Into Thin Air (1928) by Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk.
Continue reading
The Invisible Event 