The Tuesday Night Bloggers
#513: Minor Felonies – The Case of the Missing Message (1959) by Charles Spain Verral
The Three Investigators had Jupiter Jones, the Five Find-Outers had Fatty, and the Benton and Carson International Detective Agency had Barclay ‘Brains’ Benton. Welcome to the first of their six cases, from the same Whitman stable that brought us The Power Boys from a fortnight back.
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#510: Minor Felonies – The Mad Scientists’ Club [ss] (1965) by Bertrand R. Brinley
This collection is composed of seven fun, light-hearted stories of youthful shenanigans perpetrated in the smalltown Americana of Mammoth Falls. Sure, it’s not strictly detection, but the prospect of actual, y’know, science in the Mad Scientists’ Club’s adventures seemed to warrant investigation.
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#507: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Haunted Skyscraper (1964) by Mel Lyle
After March was filled with more social engagements than a debutante’s coming out Season, I’m back with a series that sounds like — though thankfully is not — some sort of Alt-Right recruitment pamphlet.
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#504: Little Fictions – ‘The Helm of Hades’ (2019) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2019] + Ranking the Translated Short Stories
Who doesn’t love a list? No-one who matters, that’s who. And since I’ve now read all twenty of the translated short stories of Paul Halter it seems inevitable that I should have my own preferences laid out for everyone to disagree with.
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#501: Little Fictions – The Uncollected Paul Halter: ‘The Wolf of Fenrir’ (2014) and ‘The Scarecrow’s Revenge’ (2015) [trans. John Pugmire 2015/2016]
Right, here we go: the final two Paul Halter stories from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine previously unreviewed on this blog. Oh, hang on a minute, what am I going to do next Tuesday…?
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#498: Little Fictions – The Uncollected Paul Halter: ‘The Gong of Doom’ (2010) and ‘The Man With the Face of Clay’ (2011) [trans. John Pugmire 2010/2012]
With Paul Halter’s debut novel The Fourth Door (1987) being the subject of my 500th post this coming weekend, it’s time to dive into two more of his short stories from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
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#495: Little Fictions – The Uncollected Paul Halter: ‘Nausicaa’s Ball’ (2004) and ‘The Robber’s Grave’ (2007) [trans. John Pugmire & Robert Adey 2008/2007]
My five-hundredth post approacheth — a reread and re-evaluation of The Fourth Door (1987), the debut novel of M. Paul Halter, of whom I am quite the fan — and so Tuesdays in February will focus on the six translated Halter stories featured in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine that have yet to be collected into a second English-language anthology.
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#477: Minor Felonies – Who Stole Uncle Sam? (2008) by Martha Freeman
Sometimes you like a book more for the way it’s written than the actual content, an attitude that would generally sum up my feelings on the works of Josephine Tey. This third entry in Martha Freeman’s Chickadee Court mystery series is one such book.
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#474: Minor Felonies – The Last Chance Hotel (2018) by Nicki Thornton
The Invisible Event 