I can’t believe that there is a GAD enthusiast who doesn’t look forward to the annual Bodies from the Library collections so expertly curated by Tony Medawar. In bringing to public awareness some of the forgotten, neglected, or simply unknown stories that the great and the good of the form produced, these collections have become a source of great excitement, and a must-read for even the most ardent student of the Golden Age.
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“Please. Come quickly. Please. I’ve killed my husband.” — these words awaken the holidaying Mordecai Tremaine as he dozes on the beach below the clifftop holiday home of Helen Carthallow and her artist husband Adrian. More worryingly, the words are spoken by Helen herself and, accompanying her over the footbridge that is the house’s only connection to the mainland, Tremaine finds Adrian shot in the head and Helen insisting it’s all the result of a bit of playfulness gone very, very wrong. All this happening in the opening chapter of So Pretty a Problem (1950) by Francis Duncan seemed to bode well for an incident-packed puzzle plot…and then, well.
Where does Inspiration stop and Creativity, or its bastard twin Plagiarism, begin? This question is too deep for a review of a book aimed at 12 year-olds — and, indeed, for this blog in general — but it lingers around the edge of a lot of fiction simply because of the number of times recognisable real life events have been folded into entertainment (or, indeed, vice versa).
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Elderly mining magnate Michael Carmichael has died, leaving behind one of the great Terrible Wills of Fiction in which money is bequeathed to various relatives in reparation for indignities endured on his behalf or at his hands. But the heirs so-named, gathered in Carmichael’s home as directed in his will, not only deny these claims but also can’t seem to agree on who the man was to each of them — uncle, great-uncle, maybe a cousin of some hue or stripe — and investigator Mary Carner, brought along by pulchitrudinous shopgirl Veronica Carmichael, suspects that something fishy is going on. And then rising flood waters force everyone to stay the night. Cue chaos.
Another hols has rolled around — it’s Chriiiiiiiistmas — and the Five Find-Outers have all been laid up with colds and are worried that there might not be a mystery for them to solve before their impending return to their schools. And there isn’t, the end.
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A few weeks ago, when Shedunnit‘s Caroline Crampton and I discussed Watsons in fiction, she mentioned Agatha Christie’s England (2021), a project she had worked on for Herb Lester Associates mapping the locations of Agatha Christie’s UK-set mysteries. And then the lovely people at Herb Lester got in touch to ask if I’d like a copy, and here we are.
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“In all the cases I’ve been mixed up in,” muses Colonel Anthony Gethryn early on in The Crime Conductor (1932), “I can only remember two which I was pulled into from the outside. All the others I seemed to fall into”. Cue a knock at the door from a constable because the celebrated theatrical impressario Willington Sigsbee has been found drowned in his bathtub over the road, and Gethryn falls into yet another murder investigation. Locked bathroom door notwithstanding, Gethryn is suspicious partly on account of “why a bath was wanted at all” in the middle of the “slightly orgiastic party” Sigsbee was hosting, and so the household comes under suspicion. Cue The Yard…
Another ten cases for Idaville’s “Sherlock Holmes in sneakers”, Leroy ‘Encyclopedia’ Brown.
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Do not adjust your sets, The Appeal (2021) by Janice Hallett is a modern crime novel that does not contain an apparent impossibility…and yet here I am reading and reviewing it. I was struck by the idea behind this: essentially an update of The Documents in the Case (1930) by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, The Maze, a.k.a. Persons Unknown (1932) by Philip MacDonald, and the Dennis Wheatley “murder dossier” books that began with Murder Off Miami (1936), in which the story of a murder is told through emails, text messages, interview transcripts, and more. And as updates go, this is a very good one indeed — very cleverly written, very easy to read.
After a couple of attempts reading mysteries for older younger readers a few months ago, I think I’m happy that my niche is to be found in stories probably aimed at 12 year-olds — older than that, hormones get involved and there’s as much time spent swooning over someone as there is trying to solve all the, y’know, murders happening at their elite private school.
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The Invisible Event 