I like crossover mysteries, I like stories about time travel — these two being combined in the short-lived Anthony Horowitz series Crime Traveller (1997) — and I like juvenile mysteries. So a juvenile crossover mystery in which twins can affect the flow of time should be right up my street. Should be.
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It is an oft-repeated lament in the halls of Golden Age fandom that, with the authors from that era all being, y’know, dead, we’re always reading a closed set of books. And the wish is to come across some new corpus of work that we can throw ourselves into in the years ahead. Well, it’s not GAD, but with Friday Barnes: Girl Detective (2014) by R.A. Spratt I’ve definitely found a long-running series I can get very excited about.
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It was over three years ago that I read The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006), the first of Nancy Springer’s books featuring Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister Enola, and while I didn’t hate it I also clearly didn’t feel the need to rush back to the series. So here with are with a belated look at second title The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (2007).
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Neither of the two novels I’ve read by Anthony Abbot have exactly thrilled me, but the guy clearly has some good ideas — ideas that, I can’t help but feel, get a little diluted in the need to expand them up to novel length. So the opportunity to read the short story ‘About the Disappearance of Agatha King’ (1939) — listed in Adey — was too tempting to pass up.
Continue readingIt’s true that, with a self-imposed target of three posts a week all year long, I can sometimes lose a little perspective on the playfulness of this genre I love so dearly. And sometimes it’s good to be reminded that these sorts of things are supposed to be fun, y’know? Which rather neatly brings us to ‘The Locked Room’ (1972) by John Sladek.
Continue readingHaving thoroughly enjoyed some of the entries Dennis Lynds wrote as William Arden in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, I was surprised and curious when I discovered that he had written an impossible crime story listed in Adey, ‘The Bizarre Case Expert’ (1970). Rigour isn’t always Arden’s jam, so how did he apply himself here?
Continue readingTwenty-Twenty-Six has been a big year for me finally tracking down long-sought stories of murder. First there was Into Thin Air (1928) by Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk, then The Tube (1958) by Boileau-Narcejac, and now I’ve finally run a copy of ‘Death Buys a Ticket’, a.k.a. ‘Nine Hours Late on the Opening Run’ (1941) by Herbert Brean to ground. Very soon there will be nothing left to read.
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Fourteen alternative takes on the Great Detective — editor Sebastian Wolfe is unable to distinguish “parodies, pastiches and burlesques” from each other — fill out The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1989). No, not the Ellery Queen one. This is different.
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I thoroughly enjoyed the very readable set of stories collected in Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018), which gave a variety of almost crossover mystery interpretations to the Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson pastiche. So I’m back for the original volume in this brace to see what other twists have been put on that classic and enduring setup.
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Hand on heart, I honestly believed I had read The Infernal Device (1978), the first of five books about Professor James Moriarty written by Michael Kurland, before now. Hell, I have talked about this book at length with various people, recommending it to them in very strong terms. So to pick it up and discover that, nope, I have never encountered this particular story — and that it’s so dull I was forgetting swathes of it as I read it, not that it mattered — was something of a shock.
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The Invisible Event 