It was after finishing Stuart Gibbs’ Moon Base Alpha trilogy that I turned my eye upon his FunJungle novels, wondering if he brought the same sense of open-handed clewing and enjoyable detection to his other books. And, as it happened, he had just published sixth FunJungle title Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (2020), in which a Tyrannosaurus skull disappears from muddy surrounds with no footprints to account for its removal. Colour me intrigued…
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Another case for Fatty, Bets, Daisy, Larry, and Pip, albeit one that rings a few minor changes…
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My slow cataloguing of the Sherlock Holmes short stories from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle progresses to the second collection, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894).
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Situation vacant: creepy house with forbidden annexe seeks youthful governess to act naively with light menacing; 4 bed, six bath, plenty of free time in the afternoons.
Continue readingThe best Sherlock Holmes stories take unusual events and spin them into an interesting and unexpected pattern. And then there are the…less than best.
Continue readingFor Tuesdays in November we return to the Sherlock Holmes canon, as I continue my self-appointed task of revisiting all the stories featuring the character written by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.
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On one hand, the artwork promoting The Detention Detectives (2023) by Lis Jardine is excessively twee, even by the standards of juvenile fiction; on the other, the author bio mentions that her life has “been shaped by a fierce passion for…Golden Age crime”. Thus, recalling that adage about books and covers, I ventured forth.
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Lying in the Deep (2023) by Diana Urban was brought to my attention by a piece the author wrote on CrimeReads in which she said that she had taken the setup and some “iconic plot beats” from Death on the Nile (1938) by Agatha Christie in order to inform the structure of her own book. Holy lawsuit, Batman, colour me intrigued.
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Everyone enjoys a break from work, but when your job is to turn up somewhere and have a baffling crime occur, how can you guarantee you’re taking time off until after you’ve left? Hercule Poirot, Inspector Cockrill, Sir Henry Merrivale, Nigel Strangeways, and swathes of other classic era detectives have had their holidays interrupted by murder, and to this pantheon we can now add Montgomery Bonbon, he of the indefinable foreign accent and curious physical similarity to a ten year-old girl.
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The Invisible Event 