The Tuesday Night Bloggers

#316: Stand Back, Detective Novelist at Work in The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) by Enid Blyton

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Invisible Thief

No discussion of children’s literature is complete without at least a passing reference to the 14,762 books Enid Blyton wrote in her career.  Somehow I’d heard of this one and its implied impossible disappearance, and it seemed perfect for my Tuesday posts in November on precisely this type of book.  Generally you know what to expect from Blyton — a poorly-dated whiff of imperialism, comfortable middle-class adventures, ginger beer — but prepare for a bit of a shock: the rigour of the detection in this is something to behold.

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#310: An Intriguing Introduction to Impossibilities in Alice Jones: The Impossible Clue (2016) by Sarah Rubin

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alice-jones

Each month I’m picking a topic or a theme for my Tuesday posts, and for November — inspired by my recent discovery of The Three Investigators,  Robin Stevens, and the excellent Mystery & Mayhem collection — it’s going to be detective novels for younger readers.  I have what I hope will be four very different books lined up, starting with this impossible disappearance.

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#306: The Realm of the Impossible [ss] (2017) eds. John Pugmire and Brian Skupin – The Real Life Impossibilities

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Realm of the Impossible

This coming Tuesday sees the final instalment in my month-long look at Locked Room International’s multi-national impossible crime short story collection, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to address an oversight Puzzle Doctor, TomCat, and I have all been guilty of: the 12 real-life cases also contained within.

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#290: 2 Tuesday Night 2 Bloggers – This Time It’s Personal…

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vector-calendar-tuesday-m-1311

Guys, I miss The Tuesday Night Bloggers; the passing of Agatha Christie’s 127th birthday last week really brought this home to me.  For the uninitiated, the TNBs was essentially an autonomous collective of bloggers who would pick a topic each month and put up a blog post on that topic on, well, the relevant Tuesdays.  It came out of the celebration of Christie’s 125th birthday — I was but a wee nascent glint in the internet’s eye at the time — and continued in various forms up until possibly March or so of this year, since when it seems to’ve been on indefinite hiatus.

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