The Tuesday Night Bloggers
#117: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Underwhelming Origins of Ellery Queen in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929)
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
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)
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
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!
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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#104: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Light and Shade of Gervase Fen
Okay, so I’m going to do my best to stay on-task today; none of these wild flights of fancy. A discussion of Golden Age academic mystery and nothing more. And since I already have my post sorted for next Tuesday, and that’s the final week in June, it has to be now that I engage in some discussion about Edmund Crispin and the irrepressible Gervase Fen. Continue reading
#99: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Life Imitating Art in ‘The Day the Children Vanished’ (1958) by Hugh Pentecost
It’s possibly a bit of an ask to cram this into the ‘academic mystery’ box as required by this month’s Tuesday Night Bloggers, but there’s too much of interest here not to look at. And the story does concern the seemingly-impossible disappearance of a group of children on their way home from school and so is probably just about allowable.
Nine young children in a station-wagon-acting-as-school-bus are being driven from their school to the nearby town where they live, a route which includes the ‘dugway’ road cut into the rock face between the two towns. The car is seen entering the dugway, the father of two of the children on board drives past it in the opposite direction and so is able to vouch for its presence…but it never emerges at the other side. A close inspection of the road reveals no evidence of the car having crashed through any barriers, the ice-covered lake below shows no breakages or disturbance to its surface, and the steepness of the rockface and density of the forestry thereon precludes any off-road antics even if the car was able to somehow pass through a safety barrier without leaving a mark.
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#96: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Educatin’ the Pulps in Robert O. Saber’s The Black Dark Murders (1949)
The Invisible Event 