The Tuesday Night Bloggers
#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.”
Upon reflection, it’s fairly astounding that John Dickson Carr published novels for 20 years before finally writing his first ‘true’ historical tale with The Bride of Newgate in 1950. Throughout so much of his early work there is a miasma of the past pushing through, and a revelling in the detail of such times that threatens to overload the present story as Carr seems far more interested in dumping as much detail as possible from, say, the French Revolution upon you so that the Weight of History can be added to the press of his peculiarly heady tales of mystery and imagination.
Continue reading
#153: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Five to Try…But What’s the Theme?
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?
Continue reading
#149: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – A Plague of Flaming Phantoms…
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.
Continue reading
#146: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Invoking the Dreads Through Killer Threads
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.
Continue reading
#143: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Cross-Dressing the Genre in Inherit the Stars (1977) by James P. Hogan
Our theme is Crime in Costume for the TNBs this month, and I’m interpreting that laterally and looking at James P. Hogan’s unabashedly scientific debut which is essentially a good old-fashioned impossible crime decorated and disguised in SF trappings.
Continue reading
#137: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Threat Escalation for Younger Readers in Enid Blyton’s Five Get Into a Fix (1958)
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.
Continue reading
#117: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Underwhelming Origins of Ellery Queen in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929)
The Invisible Event 