The Tuesday Night Bloggers
#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.”
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.
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#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?
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#149: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – A Plague of Flaming Phantoms…
The Invisible Event 