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.
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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.
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It is interesting to me that I’ve delved into the career of Walter S. Masterman somewhat contemporaneously with that of Edgar Wallace; the men were briefly literary contemporaries, of course, but they also share a looseness of structure that means you’re never sure if you’re on the verge of a masterpiece, always one sentence or clever idea from being wrong-footed…but equally you always feel one sentence away from what seems to have the seeds of genius turning out to be utter codswallop. It’s a tightrope I’m not sure either man meant to walk, no doubt genuinely trying their best with everything they wrote, but the similarity helps for some reason when, as with The Wrong Verdict (1937), all the promise collapses in a heap.
I first read The Case of the Baited Hook (1940), the sixteenth novel by Erle Stanley Gardner to feature go-fast-and-hit-hard attorney Perry Mason, back in about 2002. Its recent republishing in the American Mystery Classics range, then, was a chance to revisit it — an intriguing prospect, given that I was even vaguer on the events herein than usual.
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The next couple of years will see me read the final few titles by a bunch of authors I’ve come to very much enjoy: I have five novels by Freeman Wills Crofts remaining, five by J.J. Connington, and now, having read Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes (1933), six by R. Austin Freeman. So my enjoyment of these books — and their later books are still proving enjoyable, though I appreciate that may not continue, with John Dickson Carr‘s work already stumbling into that slough of despond — is tinged with melancholy. It’s been such fun, and I don’t want it to end; and I especially don’t want it to end on a damp squib of turgid prose and bumbling plot mechanics.
I hold John Sladek’s second and final detective novel Invisible Green (1977) in very high regard indeed, but have not read his first, the slightly less successful Black Aura (1974), for well over a decade. It’s pretty incredible that something which gave so much air to three baffling impossibilities was written as late as 1974 at all, and so revisiting it and finding a book which doesn’t quite fulfil the expectations of any idiom — it’s too puzzle-focussed for the gritty style that was popular at the time, but too nebulously handled to satisfy true puzzle heads — isn’t really a surprise. There’s still some enjoyable stuff in here, but this is very much the apprentice work for the masterpiece Sladek would produce three years later.
A collection of short stories, each part of an overall arc, My Grandfather, the Master Detective (2023) by Masateru Konishi is yet another intriguing Japanese mystery carried over into English by Louise Heal Kawai for our enjoyment.
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When The Invisible Event hit 1,000 posts — ahh, back in the day — I put up a list of 100 recommended impossible crime novels and short story collections for those of you wishing to be a little more discerning when reading the best subgenre in the world. TomCat was disgruntled with my inclusion of Too Many Magicians (1967) by Randall Garrett, but I stood by it as an interesting take on both the crossover mystery and the impossible crime, with a neat little, expectation-subverting idea at is core, and I vowed to reread it in due course to reinforce these impressions. Well, I’ve reread it now, and while I stand by the locked room murder as clever and fun, the book itself is frankly so tedious that I wonder how I ever saw anything in it in the first place.
The Invisible Event 