The Tuesday Night Bloggers
#468: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat (1944) by Enid Blyton
There’s clearly a Sophomore Clause for youthful detection collectives: Must Involve a Missing Animal. The Three Investigators sought a stuttering parrot, and now the Five Find-Outers are herding cats having solved a case of arson first time out.
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#465: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘The High House’ (1948) by Hake Talbot
Under the nom de plume Hake Talbot, the magician and author Henning Nelms published two novels and two short stories. Of the novels, The Hangman’s Handyman (1942) is generally overshadowed by the admittedly superior Rim of the Pit (1944); of the short stories, we tend to hear very little.
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#462: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘Too Many Motives’ (1930) by James Ronald
I’ve been able, in only the briefest of online searches, to find little on the British pulp writer James Ronald, but the small amount of his material I have read thus far has been very enjoyable.
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#459: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ (1956) by Boileau-Narcejac [trans. James Kirkup 1959]
My first experience of the French crime/suspense duo Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac was the recent Pushkin Press reissue of She Who Was No More (1952, tr. 2015) and…well, I didn’t love it. But Adey lists this novella and so back on the horse we clamber.
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#456: Little Fictions – Curiosities from Adey: ‘Solved by Inspection’ (1931) by Ronald Knox
Earlier this year, John Pugmire’s Locked Room International imprint answered the prayers of every impossible crime fan the world over by reprinting the genre reference bible Locked Room Murders (2nd ed., 1991) by Robert Adey, liberally revised by Mystery Scene co-publisher Brian Skupin.
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#453: The Criminous Alphabet – A is for…Audience
There’s a philosophical debate in Mathematics about whether mathematics itself pre-exists and is simply discovered as we progress into new areas or whether it is created as we go along and so each new discovery is less about having discovered something and more about having created it.
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#450: The Criminous Alphabet – A is for…Anticlimax
Noah Stewart, one of the most knowledgable people currently blogging on the subject of GAD, once said that Romance and Detection are the two genres wherein the ending is never in doubt before you’ve even read the first page (I’m paraphrasing, of course — Noah would never put anything that pompously).
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#447: The Criminous Alphabet – A is for…Alibi [Part 2 of 2]
The Invisible Event 