Spoiler Warning

#201: For Carr vs. Christie – Start Your Engines…

/ JJ / 23 Comments

carr-vs-christie

Okay, the results of the vote for your collective choice of the best individual novel by John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie are in, and it’s now fixed which two need to be read for the head-to-head comparison that Brad and I have planned for April.  So, after over 100 votes in each poll (though not a multiple of three in either case, despite having three votes per author…) counting down the top five, we have…

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#197: Spoiler Warning – Coming in April: The Best of Christie vs. The Best of Carr + Your Help Needed

/ JJ / 33 Comments

carr-vs-christie

Following the spoiler-filled discussion about John Dickson Carr’s The Ten Teacups last week, I’d like to make a slightly regular feature of that kind of thing because, well, some excellent points were raised and I enjoyed it immensely.  Since my good friend Brad of AhSweetMysteryBlog and I have been throwing about the idea of a Carr vs. Christie post for a while now, that seems like the sensible place to go next.  Not with the intent of picking who is best — that’s Carr, obviously 😉 — but more to compare these two and see where they meet, where they diverge, and what we think can be said about the two finest proponents of the detective novel art.

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#194: Spoiler Warning 1 – The Ten Teacups, a.k.a. The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) by Carter Dickson

/ JJ / 46 Comments

spoiler-warning

In what I’m hoping will be the first of a semi-occasional series — look, I’ve made a special header image for it and everything — we are here today to discuss the 1937 impossible crime novel The Ten Teacups, published in the U.S.A. as The Peacock Feather Murders, from John Dickson Carr under his Carter Dickson nom de plume.  Puzzle Doctor, wrangler of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, kindly agreed to reread this one and then exchange some thoughts on aspects of the precise details and workings of the book, and the results of our efforts are below.  Suffice to say, if you click to read more of this, there are guaranteed massive spoilers from this point on; don’t say I didn’t warn you…

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