So, how best to explore The Malinsay Massacre (1938) by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links?
Continue reading#896: The Malinsay Massacre (1938) by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links: Week 2 – The Problem
The Tuesday Night Bloggers
#893: The Malinsay Massacre (1938) by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links: Week 1 – The Dossier
Whether or not you agree with the concept of detective fiction being a game, there can be little doubt that much has been done to play up to the game-esque elements of murder mysteries for well-nigh the last century.
Continue reading#890: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician (1958) by Bruce Campbell
With magicians being renowned as practitioners of misdirection and Vanishing canonically one of the ten types of impossible crime, you’re damn right I picked up twelfth Ken Holt book The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician (1958) by husband-and-wife team Sam and Beryl Epstein expecting some impossible shenanigans.
Continue reading#887: Minor Felonies – Framed! (2016) by James Ponti
#884: Minor Felonies – Poached (2014) by Stuart Gibbs
Expanding on a book by writing a sequel is a tricky proposition; you need to retain what made the first one (hopefully!) good and yet also give something new to make such an expansion worthwhile. Poached (2014), the second entry in Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle series, thankfully does some very good work in building on the world of first book Belly Up (2010)…and throws in an impossibly-vanished koala for good measure to spice up the intrigue.
Continue reading#881: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of Holly Lane (1953) by Enid Blyton
I don’t know if I’d rather the writers and series I love took risks and missed some of the time, or if it’s worse for them to settle into a sort of congenial predictability that’s less and less exciting though safely fine from book to book.
Continue reading#878: Minor Felonies – Kidnap on the California Comet (2020) by M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman [ill. Elisa Paganelli]
Following my recent podcast chat with M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, and the nomination of this very title for an Edgar award, let’s catch up with the Adventures on Trains series. “It’s unlikely we’ll encounter another adventure quite like the last one,” Nathaniel Bradshaw tells his nephew Harrison ‘Hal’ Beck as they take their seats on the California Comet. But we readers, aware that the title of this book is Kidnap on the California Comet (2020), know better…
Continue reading#875: Little Fictions/The Cornerstones – Two Bottles of Relish and Other Stories, a.k.a. The Little Tales of Smethers [ss] (1952) by Lord Dunsany
Well, look, it was bound to go wrong, wunnit? In four weeks of reading and writing about Cornerstone titles, assessing their merits and examining whether I felt they added anything to the corpus of detective fiction, I should have foreseen coming across one absolute dud. And trust me to get confident after three (largely) enjoyable weeks and leave this too late to replace with anything else, eh? Right, let’s get this over with.
Continue reading#872: Little Fictions/The Cornerstones – Max Carrados [ss] (1914) by Ernest Bramah
Max Carrados (1914) was the first collection of stories to feature Ernest Bramah’s eponymous aristocrat, blinded in an accident before deciding to turn his hand to detection, and another entry on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list. Certainly the concept of a blind detective is novel enough to capture the imagination, but does Bramah do enough with the potential here to warrant consideration as one of the foundational texts of detective fiction?
Continue reading#869: Little Fictions/The Cornerstones – The Silent Bullet [ss] (1912) by Arthur B. Reeve
Another week, another Cornerstone; this time, it’s “the American Sherlock Holmes” Craig Kennedy, creation of Arthur B. Reeve and a wildly popular character in his day.
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The Invisible Event 