#757: Little Fictions – The Nine Mile Walk and Other Stories [ss] (1968) by Harry Kemelman

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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#748: Mining Mount TBR – The Curse of Khatra (1947) by T.C.H. Jacobs

Picture the scene: it is 1946 and T.C.H. Jacobs is discussing his next novel with his agent, lamenting “So many types of detective story have successful during this Golden Age, in what style should I write? Some scientific detection? A police procedural? A pulpy shocker? Should I have an amateur detective? A gentleman detective? A criminal gang?” and his agent leans forwards slowly, steeples his fingers, and says simply, “Yes”.

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#745: Mining Mount TBR – Menace for Doctor Morelle (1947) by Ernest Dudley

The joy of running this blog comes not from the screaming fans that hound my every step, nor the piles of untaxable cash that seemed to just appear from day one, but from the discussions it and others allow me to have with like-, and sometimes unlike-, minded enthusiasts of Golden Age detective fiction. What to do, then, when I have a book that probably no-one is going to want to talk about?

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