I’ve not watched Columbo — in which Peter Falk’s eponymous, crumpled Lieutenant outwits murderers the viewer has watched commit and then cover up their crimes — in years, and would probably have gone years more but for stumbling over two references in a week to ‘Any Old Port in a Storm’ (1973) apparently being the very pinnacle of the long-running series. So, let’s take a look.
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Just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, don’t judge Captain Cut-Throat (1955) — John Dickson Carr’s breathless tale of Napoleonic-era espionage and swagger — by its first chapter. The opening to this otherwise very enjoyable story took me three attempts to conquer, as Carr really wants you to know he’s done his research and so crams in too much detail with insufficient focus, leaving me floundering and fearful…a feeling no doubt amplified by my having given up on the two books he published prior to this because they seemed too diffuse to be worth persevering with. Push on, and this soon becomes a propulsive and delightfully plotted romp for the majority of its length.
Seven cases from the extended adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as Sherlockian superfan Nick Cardillo indulges in adding to the reminiscences of Dr. John Watson.
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I’ll let you in on a secret: much as I struggle to read two books by the same author close together, there are certain writers whose diversity of approach enables me to sidestep this consideration. One such personage is Erle Stanley Gardner, and I’m starting to suspect that E.C.R. Lorac might be another. Lorac’s country-set novels featuring Inspector Robert Macdonald are very different beasts to his London-based cases, and Death of an Author (1935) — not featuring Macdonald at all — is different again: a zesty, propulsive, and supremely clever little puzzler dug out from seemingly inescapable obscurity by the British Library for our not inconsiderable enjoyment.
I’m slowly working my way up to the newly-translated Paul Halter novel The Siren’s Call (1998, tr. 2023), but there’s the small matter of these two short stories to deal with first, translated by John Pugmire and drawn here from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
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“On the final two days of November, two men and two women shall perish in Magan…” — so sayeth the seer Sakimi, who has a fifty-year streak of being right about these things; thus, anyone in Magan would do well to clear out for the last two days of November. Just a shame that no-one told the nine people who have travelled to Magan at the end of November, some of them specifically to meet Sakimi, and that the message is only relayed as the sole bridge out of town goes up in flames. But, c’mon, prophecy belongs with zombies in the world of cheap and tawdry science fiction, so there’s no way that anyone is really at any risk….is there?
TomCat has been singing the praises of Roger Ormerod for a while now, and, sure, TomCat has questionable taste some of the time, but let’s see if Ormerod warrants the praise, eh? And so, Time to Kill (1974), the first novel to feature Birmingham-based Detective Sergeant David Mallin.
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When Derek Fordingbridge, long-supposed-dead heir to the family fortune, apparently resurfaces, his face mutilated in the war and all other identifying characteristics similarly compromised, his uncle Paul is naturally sceptical. When this re-emergence is followed hard upon by the murder of the old family retainer who cared deeply for Derek and the theft of Derek’s diaries from family pile Foxhills…well, it’s almost like we’re in a classically-styled piece of detective fiction, eh? Thankfully Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield is in the area and ready to help out Inspector Armadale with his investigations into which of two possible interpretations this should be taken as.
I’ve heard much about the quality of the 1957 screen version of Witness for the Prosecution, based on the play which was spun from the story of the same name by Agatha Christie. Well, consider this me bowing to peer pressure as I finally check it out to see what all the fuss is about.
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“This is the sort of thing we came to the country to get away from,” Jake Justus laments when, being given a tour of the Jackson County Courthouse in Wisconsin, the dead body of ex-Senator Gerald L. Peveley rolls down an emergency stairwell and lands at his feet. And with the D.A. insisting that “nobody here could have murdered him [because] we all know each other” it’s only a matter of time before Jake finds himself arrested and his wife Helene must enlist the services of Chicago-based lawyer John J. Malone, who has joined the Justuses on four previous murder investigations, to dig them out of trouble…a task that will only get harder as the murders in the town multiply.
The Invisible Event 