The Tuesday Night Bloggers
#189: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Back to the Beginning with Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
The first month of 2017 sees The Tuesday Night Bloggers — again, it’s not a closed group, you’re welcome to pitch in whenever you like — reflecting on firsts, debuts, starting points, and anything else that lends itself to the beginning of something (provided it’s detective fiction-related, of course). So I thought I’d get all dewy-eyed over not just my first Christie but also my first classic detective novel ever, the entry-level drug that started me on this path to blogging, obsessing over obscure classics, and spending every spare moment in second-hand bookshops.
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#181: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Strangers in Strange Lands: When East Comes West…
Alongside classic detective fiction and locked room/impossible crime mysteries of every date, stripe, and hue, I read a moderate amount of both classic and modern SF. And as much as I rejoice in the closedness of the ‘rules’ of detective fiction, I take equal delight in the free-form craziness that can open up in front of you in excellent SF.
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#178: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Clewing, and Other Subtle Arts of the Detective Story
As the saying goes, man plans and God laughs. In last week’s Tuesday Night Bloggers post I offered a tantalising glimpse into a possible future with the line “Next week, if all goes to plan: France,” and has all gone to plan? Of course not. So repack your bags, everyone, because this week we’re off to…
#175: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – In Media Res: Case Closed vols. 1-5 (1994) by Gosho Aoyama
For December, those of us who collect once a week under the banner of The Tuesday Night Bloggers (it’s an open thing, by the way, so please do get involved if you’re moved to) are looking at anything which falls under the term ‘foreign mysteries’ — be that mysteries in translation, or anything set outside of the traditional Golden Age habitat of the UK or the USA. And today I’m looking at Gosho Aoyama’s Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) manga from Japan.
#169: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Man and Superman: Refining the Protagonist in John Dickson Carr’s Historical Mysteries
With the great man’s 110th birthday looming tomorrow — I hope everyone has got their suits dry-cleaned (I’m not the only one who blogs while in full formal dress, right?) — I thought I’d look at an aspect of John Dickson Carr’s writing that came to my attention recently upon reading The Devil in Velvet, namely his use of a modern-day protagonist thrown back into the past.
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#165: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Finding Satan in the Subtleties (if not in the book) of The Devil in Velvet (1951) by John Dickson Carr
John Dickson Carr — arguably the finest detective novelist of all time, famed for the intricacy of his mystery schemes, and especially his impossible crimes, right? So, like, what if he were to write a novel with virtually no mystery, no detection, no impossibility, and a large number of men wearing silly wigs? That’d be weird, right? Welcome, one and all, to The Devil in Velvet!
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#162: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Meta-Fictional Historical Deconstruction in Magpie Murders (2016) by Anthony Horowitz
Anthony Horowitz is probably my favourite contemporary author of detective fiction, as his superb Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk (2011) and its genuinely exceptional follow-up Moriarty (2014) displayed an affinity for both the milieu of Holmes and the necessary misdirection and construction of a blistering plot that blindsides you at will which seems to elude many who try to walk this path these days. His earlier novel The Killing Joke (2004) isn’t really detective fiction per se, but shows a playfulness with narrative that is aware of many of the tropes of genre fiction and is worth mentioning here precisely because of how much it foreshadowed the work he does in Magpie Murders when it comes to deconstructing the classical detective and his ilk.
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#160: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Who Can You Trust? Verisimilitude in Paul Doherty’s A Murder in Thebes (1998)
When you stop to think about it, the notion of ‘within living memory’ is a fascinating concept. Very few of us possess the peremptory nature required to call someone a liar to their face, but the idea that something is more accurately recalled when it is within living memory is somewhat false — yes it is recalled, but the precise accuracy of any memory is subject to all sorts of caveats, not least of which are situational bias, subsequent events, personal investment, personal protection, personal interpretation, and the situation that recalled the memory in the first place. Nevertheless, as any historian will tell you, a straw poll of enough people will reproduce a fairly unbiased picture of any event within living memory, and so a range of sources often gives the clearest picture.
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#157: The Tuesday Night Bloggers — A Background of History in The Red Widow Murders (1935) by Carter Dickson
“The story of the Widow’s Room…begins in the month of August, and in the city of Paris, and in the year 1792. It begins with the Terror, but it has not ended yet.”
The Invisible Event 