The Tuesday Night Bloggers

#153: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Five to Try…But What’s the Theme?

/ JJ / 14 Comments

tnbs-costume

In what might actually be the first time I’ve contributed to a full month of TNB posts — woo! Mr. Commitment! — I thought I’d finish off with my first Five to Try in a little while on the subject of Crime in Costume.  But, this being a blog about detective fiction, I thought I’d leave it up to you to deduce the theme inside of this framing which links all these books together.

The first person to correctly work it out gets…a prize of some sort.  Tell you what, they’ll win a pre-publication copy of Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums, personally emailed to them by me.  So as, y’know, to save them waiting an extra three or four days and having to click on a link to download it themselves.  I know, I know, I’m too kind.  Tell you what — to make it nice and unique, I’ll even add a bit to the introduction about how this was won in a competition on the blog.  That makes it a bit more special, eh?

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#149: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – A Plague of Flaming Phantoms…

/ JJ / 7 Comments

tnbs-costume

Gentle readers, you are witnessing peak blog efficiency: not only am I about to contribute another post to this month’s Tuesday Night Bloggers topic of Crime in Costume, I’m also going to contribute to the Crimes of the Century over at Past Offences which is going all 1907 this month, and I’m going to work in yet another plug for Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums (due out later this month, most likely).  If I can work out a way to cross another item of my Vintage Bingo Scavenger Hunt, too, I’ll probably have to retire out of sheer awesomeness.

And how am I going to do all this at once?  One word: ghosts.

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#146: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Invoking the Dreads Through Killer Threads

/ JJ / 6 Comments

tnbs-costume

It’s doubtless a result of the generation I’m from that when I think about fictional murderers wearing distinctive costumes the first jump my mind makes is to the Ghostface killers of Wes Craven’s Scream films.  If you’re a little older than me, you may go for Freddy Krueger’s striped jumper, and if you’re younger than me I have no idea what you might pick because I have lost track of whatever passes for popular culture these days, but for me it’s Ghostface.

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#137: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Threat Escalation for Younger Readers in Enid Blyton’s Five Get Into a Fix (1958)

/ JJ / 8 Comments

TNBs Children

In much the same way that Hercule Poirot, Peter Wimsey, Roger Sheringham, and all other unofficial detectives of the Golden Age were unable to step out of their front doors without stumbling into some criminal enterprise, so The Three Investigators, The Hardy Boys, The Secret Seven, The Famous Five, and all others of their ilk always found themselves embroiled in shenanigans of one kind or another no matter where they went.

Yes!  The Tuesday Night Bloggers have returned!  And this month’s topic is Children in Crime; be they victims, perpetrators, bystanders, or sleuths, we’re onto it.  And with Blyton’s forays into youthful adventure among the most popular of this kind of thing, I thought I’d take a look at one and see what occurred to me.

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#117: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Underwhelming Origins of Ellery Queen in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929)

/ JJ / 31 Comments

TNBs Poison

General summer unavailability is resulting in the Tuesday Night Bloggers having August off (that’s what they’ve told me, anyway…) and so this final week of ‘Poison’ posts is an opportunity to right a wrong and launch on a new undertaking in my reading life.  In short, to restart the Ellery Queen canon — all 40 (by my count) novels that had input from Dannay and/or Lee — from the very beginning, starting here with their first novel, the poisoning tale The Roman Hat Mystery.

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#113: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – A Circular Tour Through My Brain as I Attempt to Read ‘The Poisoned Dow ’08’ (1933) by Dorothy L. Sayers

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TNBs Poison

It being the ever-approaching end of the academic year, I’ve tended to focus on short stories for these Tuesday Night Bloggers posts on poison because I simply haven’t had the time to read more than one book a week, and I need to keep those for my Thursday reviews.  So this week I thought I’d take on one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ short stories featuring her other sleuth, the purveyor of fine wines that is Mr. Montague Egg.  This is another one taken from The Big Ol’ Black Lizard Book of Wowsa That’s a Lot of Stories Massive Gigantic Compendium of Impossible Crimes But for Some Reason They’ve Included A Huge Section of Surely the Most Anthologised Stories of All Time, and so once again it has an impossible element.  Yes, I am nothing if not fond of playing to type.

And then something interesting happened…

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#111: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – P.G. Wodehouse Defames the Detective Story in ‘Death at the Excelsior’ (1914)

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TNBs Poison

P.G. Wodehouse, like A.A. Milne, was clearly not a fan of his first name.  Also, both gentlemen are primarily known as writers of a particular type, style, or genre but nevertheless had a stab at a crime story just to keep their eye in, like.  Milne’s novel The Red House Mystery (1922) was mocked by Raymond Chandler but is actually a very readable first attempt that makes me wonder what else he could have produced had he persevered within the genre.  Contrariwise, Wodehouse’s ‘Death at the Excelsior’ (1914) is a poisoning tale in a boarding house that does just about everything wrong.

So let’s have a look at that, then… Continue reading →

#109: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Problem with Poison via ‘Poison Can be Puzzling’ (1944) by Max Afford

/ JJ / 9 Comments

TNBs Poison

It’s Max Afford Week on The Invisible Event…not through any design, but purely because I selected his novel The Dead Are Blind (1937) as my review this coming Thursday and the Tuesday Night Bloggers’ chosen topic of ‘Poison’ gives me the chance to look at one of the three short stories in the Ramble House collection Two Locked-Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn.  But, hey, that’s no bad thing, as Afford is one of my discoveries of the last year or so and it’s always nice to shine a little light his way.

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#105: For Tau Day – John Dingbats Carr!

/ JJ / 13 Comments

So in March this would have worked perfectly – the Tuesday Night Bloggers were looking at the novels of John Dickson Carr and with March 14th being Pi Day (albeit on a Monday, but that’s a mere trifle) I started putting this together.  Then my hand injury intervened and I had to shelve it,  much to my own consternation.

Today, however, is Tau Day, which is almost as good (though the mathematician in me wants to point out that pi makes a damn sight more sense as a constant…) and gives me the chance to put my work to good use, so here we go: dingbats of John Dickson Carr books using letters of the Greek alphabet (SPOILER: I am something of a nerd in real life)!

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