A few years ago, I got the Night Riviera sleeper train from London Paddington to Penzance. When we reached our destination, after a good night’s sleep, I was disappointed to discover that no-one had been bafflingly murdered while en route and that my skills as an amateur detective were not required.
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Sometimes I plan ahead — c.f. a review of a novel by R. Austin Freeman in the same week as a podcast episode about R. Austin Freeman — and sometimes I really should. Rest assured, it will haunt me for years that I didn’t review this updating of the Holmes/Watson dynamic in the same week as Anthony Boucher’s The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940).
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Last week we had a vanishing — two, in fact — and this week there’s another one. Am I trying to tell you something? No, no, that would be insane. Hahahahaha. Aha.
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The mystery for younger readers I reviewed last week was big on world and short on plot; this week, we redress that balance.
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It has long been a belief of mine that science fiction invented the interlinked trilogy — rarely seen better on the page than in Isaac Asimov’s first Foundation troika (1951-53) and on the screen in Episodes IV-VI (1977-83) of the Star Wars movie universe.
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Don’t be put off by the publication date — we’re deep in the Golden Age here, with the twelve stories in this collection originally published in 1934 and 1935. And, oh my, what a collection it is.
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A surgeon, a policeman, a psychiatrist, a mathematician, and a pathologist walk into a club — the foundation not of some esoteric wit but instead the Dilettante’s Club, a dinner-and-discussion group who meet fortnightly for their own entertainment. And when Professor Marcus Stubbs joins their number, those discussions take a frequent turn into the realm of the impossible crime.
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This week, eight stories featuring the unprepossessing Mr. John G. Reeder from the restlessly creative mind of Edgar Wallace.
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A little while back, I decided that short story collections don’t really merit an overall star rating since the stories should be considered individually. Thus, I stopped reviewing them on Thursdays and moved them to weekends. The upshot of this is that I now have a lot of unreviewed short story collections, so I’m going to pick out four single-author bundles to look at on Tuesdays in February. And first up is this collection recommended to me by Christian of Mysteries, Short and Sweet.
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