#402: The Affair of the Bottled Deuce (1958) by Harry Stephen Keeler

June 21, 2018June 18, 2018 / JJ / 11 Comments

Emboldened by the experience of The Rynox Mystery (1930) by Philip MacDonald from last week — an author with whom I started poorly and have come to really enjoy — I turn to Harry Stephen Keeler. The only other Keeler I’ve read to date was…fine, and I’ve been admittedly reluctant to begin this despite its locked room murder being why I bought it in the first place. The superb introduction from Francis M. Nevins explains how and why this was unpublished in Keeler’s lifetime and only came into public being through Keelerite Fender Tucker’s Ramble House imprint in 2005. As you gather from my rating, I’m of the opinion the public would’ve coped perfectly fine without it.

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#400: The Rynox Mystery (1930) by Philip MacDonald

June 14, 2018July 28, 2021 / JJ / 27 Comments

Well, who’d’ve thought it, eh? Philip MacDonald first featured in my reading life in 1-star ignominy, and here he is not just beating all-comers to feature my 400th blog post, but doing so with a book that I — against my better judgement, nature, and previous standards — unabashedly loved with every fibre of my being. Quite the turnaround, and part of why I persevere with intially-disappointing authors. Just to clear something up from the off: no, I would not classify this as an impossible crime, despite its inclusion on the Ronald Lacourbe list being what brought it to my attention in the first place, but that’s hardly the first time this has happened….

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#398: The Cult of Celebrity in Full Swing in Passenger to Frankfurt (1970) by Agatha Christie

June 9, 2018June 26, 2025 / JJ / 29 Comments

A brief search of the interwebs reveals that David Beckham has thirty, Britney Spears twenty-three, Christina Aguilera fifteen, Beyoncé fourteen, Katy Perry 9, and Ariana Grande a mere 5 — it’s not my area of expertise, however, so some of those numbers may be a little out.

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#397: The Back Bay Murders (1930) by Roger Scarlett

June 7, 2018December 5, 2019 / JJ / 16 Comments

Whatever I thought of this book, I was committed to reading more of Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page’s Roger Scarlett mysteries as I had already bought volume 2 of the Coachwhip reissues — comprising the novels Cat’s Paw (1931) and Murder Among the Angells (1932). Impetuous? I prefer optimistic: the promise on display in their debut augured well for their future, and I believed remuneration would be found somewhere in these pages. So it’s either my own foresight or my stubborn inability to admit a mistake that sees me having a hugely enjoyable time with this one…I shall leave it to the reader to choose.

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#395: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #6: Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (2010) by Lee Goldberg

June 2, 2018June 12, 2021 / JJ / 20 Comments

I can’t claim to’ve watched swathes of the TV series Monk — starring the wonderfully talented Tony Shalhoub as the eponymous consultant to the San Francisco Police Department — but I always enjoyed its creativity when I did catch it (an episode in which a musical birthday card contributes to the solving of a crime stands out in my memory).

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#394: The D.A. Goes to Trial (1940) by Erle Stanley Gardner

May 31, 2018April 30, 2020 / JJ / 19 Comments

I maintain that the Doug Selby novels of Erle Stanley Gardner stand as probably his best work, and only the genius of Raymond Burr, that awesome theme music, and the fact that the Perry Mason novels outnumber the Selby ones by a mind-blowing 9:1 ratio have led to the relative obscurity of this better series. “What about the Cool and Lam books?” you want to know? Well, as soon as I’m done with Selby I’m going to go and read all 30 of those in order, too, because probably two-thirds of them eluded me back when I started reading Gardner and so there are plenty of gaps to fill. So officially the jury is still out, but the Selby books remain fabulous nonetheless.

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#392: A Fight to the Finnish – Promise and Delivery in Cruel is the Night (2013) by Karo Hämäläinen [trans. Owen Witesman 2017]

May 26, 2018May 26, 2018 / JJ / 15 Comments

We GAD bloggers are a tight-knit bunch. Cut one of us, does another not bleed? Take aim at Kate’s praise of John Rhode, will Puzzle Doctor not leap in front of the bullet? And when the most adventurous among us — I refer, of course to Grand Viscount Bradley Friedman, LLC — ventures of into hitherto unexamined climes, do we not follow, fearful of what hackneyed plot elements may be reheated and served up to his delicate palate as fresh fare?

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#391: Fatal Descent, a.k.a. Drop to His Death (1939) by John Rhode and Carter Dickson

May 24, 2018May 25, 2018 / JJ / 50 Comments

In the style of Sesame Street, today’s review is brought to you by In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel‘s Puzzle Doctor, who kindly leant me this book following years of me failing to find an affordable copy. And, boy, what an exciting prospect it is: no mere “one chapter each” in the style of ‘Behind the Screen’ (1930), ‘The Scoop’ (1931), or The Floating Admiral (1932), this is a proper collaboration between two of the Golden Age’s titans: Carter Dickson, a.k.a. John Dickson Carr, and John Rhode, a.k.a. Miles Burton — two gentlemen who individually devised a greater library of brilliant means of criminal dispatch than almost any other pair you’d care to name.

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#390: Minor Felonies – Feel the Fear (2014) by Lauren Child

May 22, 2018May 23, 2018 / JJ / 2 Comments

I apologise if I appear to be giving some import to my own fevered speculations here, but a few weeks ago I wrote that “I absolutely commend the role literature plays in helping people, young or otherwise, make sense of the world around them, but it’s also nice that sometimes a novel about a couple of 11 year-olds solving a murder can just be about a couple of 11 year-olds solving a murder”. I referenced it once already, and now I’m doing it again. Yeesh, my ego.

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#388: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery (1926) by Freeman Wills Crofts

May 17, 2018January 28, 2021 / JJ / 28 Comments

I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive into another complex alibi problem so soon after Cut Throat (1932) by Christopher Bush. But if anyone can convince me of the joys of alibi-breaking it’s Freeman Wills Crofts, and so off I went in hope of some fiendish minutiae to get the brain cogitating with possibilities. As it happens, I need not have worried — there is no complex alibi-breaking here. Sure, there’s a grand mix of ratiocination and weighing the odds on the way to intelligent deductive work, but this is decidedly a ‘wrong man on the run’-style thriller before it’s a novel of routine. Were pithiness my forte, I’d probably make an ‘Alfred Hitchcrofts’ reference.

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