#198: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The First Lines of First Impossible Crimes…

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The ab ovo examination of my reading in these Tuesday Night Bloggers posts over the last few weeks has been very enjoyable, but let’s move on to something else for the end of the month: you’re tired, it’s doubtless dark and/or cold outside if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, and now you’re even more miserable thinking about the wall-to-wall sunshine and free drinks doubtless being doled out in the Southern Hemisphere.  And the last thing you really want is me being all uncouth about stuff and my life and things.

So, for distraction, a quiz!

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#195: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – My First Five Impossible Crimes…

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Much like being stuck with that one relative who wishes to recount every event of note from their life regardless of how interested you appear, my reminiscing about the beginnings of my detective fiction reading continues.  This week, with my oft-mentioned fondness for an impossible crime, I’m going to attempt to recall the first few, faltering steps I made into the subgenre.  So, let’s see now…

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#192: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – First Steps Into the Woods with Orion’s Crime Masterworks…

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Last week I talked about my first encounter with both Agatha Christie and classic detective fiction, and it got me all reflective about how things built from there and brought us to the point where via magic of some sort you’re reading words that I’ve written and anticipating that this will have something to do with classic crime and detective fiction any minute now…

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#189: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Back to the Beginning with Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

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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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#175: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – In Media Res: Case Closed vols. 1-5 (1994) by Gosho Aoyama

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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.

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#169: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Man and Superman: Refining the Protagonist in John Dickson Carr’s Historical Mysteries

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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

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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

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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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