#422: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943) by Enid Blyton

August 7, 2018February 27, 2021 / JJ / 21 Comments

As is my standard modus operandi, I started Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers series midway through with something featuring an impossible crime, and now return to the beginning to read them in order.

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#419: The Wants – Five Books I Am Excited About

July 31, 2018July 30, 2018 / JJ / 39 Comments

After a month of possibly pie-in-the-sky hoping (hey, a full reprint of someone may be right around the corner, you never know…), let’s finish on a more positive note. This week, stuff that’s actually happening in the future and about which I have many reasons to be hopeful.

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#416: The Wants – Five Books I Wish Had Ended Differently

July 24, 2018July 23, 2018 / JJ / 28 Comments

As a GAD reader, there’s little more satisfying than closing a book that came through on its promise — the ingenious impossibilitiy was ingenious, the baffling alibi trick was smartly worked, the clues stuck their heads out at you from all over the place, and the detective summed it all up with an added twist just to prove how dolt-headed you, the reader, are.

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#413: The Wants – Five Books on My TBR I Know Nothing About

July 17, 2018July 19, 2025 / JJ / 41 Comments

If you’re anything like me, well, how do you manage? But also you probably have a book-buying compulsion which so-called “specialists” refuse to diagnose as a medical condition despite the prospect of going two weeks without adding to your TBR being sufficient to make you rush out and do something regrettable like snatching up a Gladys Mitchell omnibus.

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#410: The Wants – Five Authors in Need of a Second English Translation

July 10, 2018July 10, 2018 / JJ / 33 Comments

Last week it was authors whose entire catalogues I’d love to see reprinted; this week I’ll set my sights a little lower: I’d like to see even just one more book by any of the following made available.

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#407: The Wants – Five Authors I’d Love to See Completely Reprinted

July 3, 2018September 4, 2026 / JJ / 75 Comments

You’ll of course be aware that the birth stone for July is the ruby which — apologies for going over something we all know — signifies contentment. And so for Tuesdays in July I shall be putting forth a series of lists that, as a GAD fan, would go some way to enhancing my own content with the world.

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#404: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Black Ledger’, a.k.a. ‘The Mysterious Black Ledger’ (1952) and ‘Diamonds in Paradise’ (1954)

June 26, 2018June 25, 2018 / JJ / 36 Comments

To finish off this month looking at some of the impossible crime short stories of Ellery Queen — which started without an impossibility, went verbosely downhill, and then improved significantly — I’m again looking at two stories since both are pretty darn short. And so…

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#401: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Three Widows’, a.k.a. ‘Murder Without Clues’ (1950) and ‘Double Your Money’, a.k.a. ‘The Vanishing Wizard’ (1951)

June 19, 2018June 18, 2018 / JJ / 40 Comments

Okay, the first one of these I took on wasn’t an impossible crime, and the second wasn’t any good. So, a new collection, shorter stories — hence two this week — how did we get on?

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#399: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Adventure of the Dauphin’s Doll’, a.k.a. ‘With the Compliments of Comus’ (1948)

June 12, 2018June 12, 2018 / JJ / 33 Comments

After the disappointment of last week’s ‘The Adventure of the Dead Cat’ (1946) not actually being an impossible crime story, I return this week to Calendar of Crime (1952) by Ellery Queen for the final story in the collection, Christmastime impossible theft ‘The Adventure of the Dauphin’s Doll’ (1948). Let’s hope we fare a little better this time around, eh?

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#396: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Adventure of the Dead Cat’, a.k.a. ‘The Halloween Mystery’ (1946)

June 5, 2018June 4, 2018 / JJ / 83 Comments

Sometimes you go through every story in a collection and review them all. Sometimes you just want to talk about one of them. To engage in the second of these on a more thematic basis, I shall use my Tuesday posts this month to launch an occasional series of Little Fictions posts, and spend June with some of the impossible crime short stories written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee under their Ellery Queen nom de plume.

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