#90: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Running Around with the Circus in Leo Bruce’s Case with Four Clowns (1939)

May 24, 2016December 5, 2025 / JJ / 18 Comments

For my final post in this month’s Tuesday Night Bloggers focus on travel in Golden Age crime novels, I thought I’d deviate from the implicit notion of holiday in travel and instead look at itinerancy as explored in Leo Bruce’s fourth Sergeant Beef novel, Case with Four Clowns. Last week I wrote about how John Dickson Carr made the aspect of travelling central to the mystery he created with ‘Cabin B-13’, and arguably Bruce does a similar thing here, albeit coming from a slightly different perspective and playing up to the travel aspect in a slightly more subtle way.

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#87: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – All-But-One Aboard for John Dickson Carr’s ‘Cabin B-13’

May 17, 2016 / JJ / 16 Comments

While Cabin B-13 became the name of the series of radio plays written by John Dickson Carr, I’m using the Tuesday Night Bloggers’ chosen topic of travel to look at the original play of that title which was broadcast on 9th November 1943 for the radio series Suspense (if you’ve 25 minutes to spare, you can check it out for yourself here) and from which that later series was inspired. If it also gives me a chance to cast some light in the direction of Carr’s oft-overlooked radio work, well, more’s the better.

It’s described in its own broadcast as a tale looking at “strange – very strange – happenings aboard an ocean liner” and set in “happier peace-time days” as newlyweds Ricky and Anne prepare to go on honeymoon in Europe. They deposit their bags in the titular cabin, Anne goes onto the deck to watch as ship leaves New York…and returns to find not only that her bags are in a different room – one booked in her maiden name, no less – but also that the room she originally used doesn’t exist, and with witnesses swearing that she was never in the presence of her husband to begin with.

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#84: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Sherlockian Impossibilities of John Dickson Carr – II: ‘The Adventure of the Sealed Room’ (1953)

May 10, 2016 / JJ / 1 Comment

I’m guilty of sedition here: this isn’t technically part of the Tuesday Night Bloggers – they’re looking at travel in classic crime this month – but rather my own delayed TNB post on John Dickson Carr from March before I was sidelined. But, y’know how it is, it’s the second one looking at Carr’s Sherlock Holmes stories and so I feel I should probably post it on a Tuesday if only for internal consistency…my apologies for any confusion (though I suppose I cam writing about a Carr trip…). Just look upon this as my Never Say Never Again.

I talked about the origin of these stories in my first post on this topic, so let’s get straight on with it: this story is built on the reference to a case “of Colonel Warburton’s madness” made at the start of ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ and so it’s appropriate that it begins in much the same way: someone in distress seeks out Watson (then for his doctoring, now seemingly because he knows Holmes) and is thus ushered into the Great Presence. It’s here that the story plays its most interesting card, as Holmes is rather short with the unfortunate Cora Murray who has just had a Colonel Warburton seemingly shoot himself and his wife while locked together in his study in the house where they all reside:

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#79: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Sherlockian Impossibilities of John Dickson Carr – I: ‘The Adventure of the Highgate Miracle’ (1953)

March 8, 2016March 8, 2016 / JJ / 12 Comments

In the early 1950s, John Dickson Carr collaborated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s youngest son Adrian on six stories featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. These were published in various magazines before being collected together and published as either The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (as my edition – featured below – is, also containing six stories solely from the pen of Conan Doyle, Jr.) or The Further Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, separate from Conan Doyle, Jr.’s stories which were themselves published as The Exploits. Are you keeping up?

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#77: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – An appeal to the senses in Carter Dickson’s ‘Blind Man’s Hood’ (1938)

March 1, 2016January 25, 2017 / JJ / 29 Comments

The Tuesday Night Bloggers, you’ll doubtless be aware, is an opt-in group of Golden Age crime fiction enthusiasts who look at the work of a different classic author each month. And with (Colonel) March being dedicated to John Dickson Carr – the single finest proponent of detective fiction ever to take up the craft, no arguments – I thought it about time I rolled up my sleeves and contributed something to this superb endeavour (also, two people asked me if I was going to get involved and I am nothing if not helpless in the face of my own vanity).

The difficulty is knowing quite where to start. I am an avowed disciple of Carr, but a lot of his work is still ridiculously out of print and so if I’m recommending something you then have to search for months to find it may dampen your enthusiasm for it somewhat. And then I remembered that the recently-published compendium of impossibilities that is The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries contains two stories by Carr and that the second of these – ‘Blind Man’s Hood’, first published in 1938 under his Carter Dickson pseudonym – highlights much of what I love about his writing.

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