Reviews
#510: Minor Felonies – The Mad Scientists’ Club [ss] (1965) by Bertrand R. Brinley
This collection is composed of seven fun, light-hearted stories of youthful shenanigans perpetrated in the smalltown Americana of Mammoth Falls. Sure, it’s not strictly detection, but the prospect of actual, y’know, science in the Mad Scientists’ Club’s adventures seemed to warrant investigation.
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#509: Fair-Play/Cipher – The Baffle Book (1930) by Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay [ed. F. Tennyson Jesse] Problems 1 to 7
You like puzzles, you like detective fiction, so you’d love a puzzle book about detective fiction. Lo, I give you The Baffle Book — originally running to at least three volumes from what I can ascertain, and here boasting two authors and an editor for reasons that will soon become clear.
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#508: Sweet Poison (1940) by Rupert Penny
The plan for April, since I was off gallivanting around during March and got virtually no reading at all done, had been to dig through some obscure books on my TBR and bring to light titles perhaps unjustly forgotten. But one, two, three duds passed in a row, and so instead I leap into the welcoming arms of Rupert Penny. Cue the swift vanishing of a box of chocolates and a bottle of potassium cyanide at Anstey Court boarding school, and the roping in of Chief Inspector Edward Beale by Assistant Commissioner Sir Francis Barton — whose son is a pupil — to figure out what malice, if any, is behind it all.
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#507: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Haunted Skyscraper (1964) by Mel Lyle
After March was filled with more social engagements than a debutante’s coming out Season, I’m back with a series that sounds like — though thankfully is not — some sort of Alt-Right recruitment pamphlet.
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#505: The Shop Window Murders (1930) by Vernon Loder
I shall refrain from pointing out the similarities between The Shop Window Murders (1930) by Vernon Loder and The French Powder Mystery (1930) by Ellery Queen — Nigel Moss does an excellent job of that in his introduction of this reprint, and you’ll want your money’s worth. In short order we get dead bodies in a display in a shop window, and after the initial surprise of revealed identity it’s not long before Detective Inspector Devenish and the avuncular Superintendent Melis are on the scene to untangle possibly the most baffling range of clues seen this side of an early-period Queen novel. Oh, er, sorry about that. No more, I promise.
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#504: Little Fictions – ‘The Helm of Hades’ (2019) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2019] + Ranking the Translated Short Stories
Who doesn’t love a list? No-one who matters, that’s who. And since I’ve now read all twenty of the translated short stories of Paul Halter it seems inevitable that I should have my own preferences laid out for everyone to disagree with.
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#502: The Door Between (1937) by Ellery Queen
Brad has threatened to drum me out of the GAD Club Members’ Bar for my lack of kow-towing to the work of Ellery Queen. In fairness, I really rather enjoyed Halfway House (1936), but here I am fighting for my rights. And I think he’s timed this deliberately, being well aware that The Door Between (1937) was up next for me, because Gordon’s beer is Eva MacClure, the heroine who finds herself at the centre of an impossible murder plot, one of the most frustrating perspective characters I’ve yet encountered. Goodness, she makes one positively ache for the company of Noel Wells from The Saltmarsh Murders (1932) by Gladys Mitchell.
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#501: Little Fictions – The Uncollected Paul Halter: ‘The Wolf of Fenrir’ (2014) and ‘The Scarecrow’s Revenge’ (2015) [trans. John Pugmire 2015/2016]
Right, here we go: the final two Paul Halter stories from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine previously unreviewed on this blog. Oh, hang on a minute, what am I going to do next Tuesday…?
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#500: Making an Entrance to Remember via The Fourth Door (1987) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 1999]
The Invisible Event 