A collection of 11 non-canonical takes on Sherlock Holmes by eleven different authors, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1985) has lingered long on my shelf, and its day in the sun is finally here.
Continue reading
Well, the penultimate Lord Darcy story was fucking awful, so the final one has to end things on a more positive note, right? Right?
Continue readingWith an uptick in quality in the previous two Lord Darcy short stories, I was very much looking forward to the penultimate one — also the longest, by a significant amount — continuing this trend. And, wow, was I mistaken.
Continue readingAnd so, a new-to-me story from Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy oeuvre, since I definitely didn’t read these last three in this collection at first encounter (no, I’m not sure why).
Continue readingUpon first encounter, some 15 years ago, I left four of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories unread for reasons which now elude me; and those reasons seem even more elusive when you realise that the last one I did read was possibly the strongest of the lot.
Continue readingFive Tuesdays in June means that I have sufficient time and space to read and write about the five remaining Lord Darcy short stories by Randall Garrett which, given that I reviewed the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) back in January, means the full canon will then be covered on The Invisible Event.
Continue reading
I find my books by various means, but this might be the first time I’ve taken advice from YouTube: this video recommending 15 Criminally Underrated Mystery Books was shared in the Facebook GAD group, and mentioned The World’s Greatest Detective (2017) by Caroline Carlson, with the promise of some impossible crimes amidst the youthful crime-solving…how could I resist?
Continue reading
Post-2001, doesn’t a title like Attack on the Tower of London (2004), with the associated implications of terrorism, sound a little beyond the calling of a juvenile ice hockey team?
Continue reading
In a pure coincidence of timing, I read the first of Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes novels, Death Cloud (2010), at about the time a series based on the books was announced by Amazon. The trailer, however, seemed to share ‘teenage Sherlock Holmes’ with the books — “teenage” in Hollywood meaning “played by someone who’s nearly 30 years old” — and nothing more, so let’s get onto the second volume today instead.
Continue reading
P.G. Bell’s first Fairy Tale Murder Mystery, The Beanstalk Murder (2024), was so damn entertaining and so well-plotted that you bet I was going to jump on the follow-up, The Big Bad Wolf Murder (2025), as soon as I could. Indeed, as a glimpse behind the blogging curtain: I read this second book before the review of that first one had even appeared on the blog. Hairy Aaron!
Continue reading
The Invisible Event 