#1080: Our Splendours Are Menagerie – My Ten Favourite ‘New to Me’ British Library Crime Classics

June 24, 2023December 23, 2023 / JJ / 14 Comments

I looked at my ten favourite fictional sleuths a little while ago, and so, in honour of today’s Bodies from the Library conference at the British Library, here are my ten favourite novels that the excellent British Library Crime Classics range introduced me to.

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#1044: To Foe of Theirs I’m Deadly Foe… – My Ten Favourite Literary Detectives

April 1, 2023April 8, 2024 / JJ / 29 Comments

Perhaps April Fool’s Day isn’t the best scheduling of this post, but the recent experience of dragging my way through Helen Vardon’s Confession (1922) by R. Austin Freeman got me thinking about the literary detectives I’d follow to hell and back, and I figured that it might be worth expanding upon.

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#1000: A Locked Room Library – One Hundred Recommended Books

December 10, 2022January 23, 2025 / JJ / 88 Comments

In the back of my mind when I started The Invisible Event was the idea that exactly half of what I’d post about would feature impossible crimes, locked room mysteries, and/or miracle problems — and although this proportion started an irreversible slide after the first 500 or so posts, the impossible crime remains my first love.

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#594: The Punch and Judy Murders – A Case of Identity in Charade (1963) [Scr. Peter Stone; Dir. Stanley Donen]

November 16, 2019July 10, 2023 / JJ / 17 Comments

Approximately two months ago, Kate at CrossExaminingCrime invited a bunch of bloggers to contribute to a collaborative post on our favourite mystery movies. You can view the results here — without my contribution, because, despite being given plenty of warning, I couldn’t organise myself in time.

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#512: Policeman’s Lot – Ranking the Edward Beale Novels of Rupert Penny

April 13, 2019October 28, 2023 / JJ / 22 Comments

Thanks to the recent reprints by Ramble House, a few years ago I discovered the Chief Inspector Edward Beale books written by Ernest Thornett under the nom de plume Rupert Penny. Puzzle-dense and complex beyond belief, they were a joy to my pattern-obsessed brain and, having now read all eight of them, my mind immediately moves to the concept of placing them in a hierarchy.

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#434: Locked Room International is 30 – My Favourite 15 Books

September 8, 2018May 4, 2023 / JJ / 74 Comments

Some months ago, in our podcast The Men Who Explain Miracles, first myself and then Dan chose our fifteen favourite locked room novels of all time. In celebration of Locked Room International recently putting out their thirtieth fiction title, I have done essentially the same again, this time choosing solely from their catalogue: effectively, my personal picks for the ‘top half’ of their output to date.

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#424: Oh, Henry! – Ranking the First Ten Henry Merrivale Novels (1934-40) by Carter Dickson

August 11, 2018August 9, 2018 / JJ / 73 Comments

I have previously ranked the first ten Gideon Fell novels by John Dickson Carr, and having now read And So to Murder (1940) — the tenth of his novels to feature Sir Henry ‘H.M.’ Merrivale, written under the pseudonym Carter Dickson — it seems only sensible to do the same for this deca…tet.

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#412: On the Appeal of Impossible Crimes – At Death’s Door…

July 14, 2018July 15, 2018 / JJ / 11 Comments

I’ll he honest, I’m not really sure what this post is about. See, I’ve been mulling the appeal of the impossible crime novel for, well, years now, and having previously looked at what makes something an impossible crime the thing I’ve been mulling lately why the concept of an impossible crime is so appealing. This, then, is the end result of those lucubrations, unfocused as they are despite being pinned on a very small area of interest.

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#407: The Wants – Five Authors I’d Love to See Completely Reprinted

July 3, 2018July 3, 2018 / JJ / 68 Comments

You’ll of course be aware that the birth stone for July is the ruby which — apologies for going over something we all know — signifies contentment. And so for Tuesdays in July I shall be putting forth a series of lists that, as a GAD fan, would go some way to enhancing my own content with the world.

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#259: ‘The Yellow Book’ (2017) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2017] and Categorising No Footprints Murders

July 4, 2017February 26, 2019 / JJ / 71 Comments

Of late, I have found myself surrounded by invisible men. Entirely fictional, of course, but there have been a lot of them: shooting someone in an empty room in You’ll Die Laughing (1945) by Bruce Elliott, disappearing into darkness in I’ll Grind Their Bones (1936) by Theodore Roscoe, vanishing from rooms and beaches in Thursday’s forthcoming Wilders Walk Away (1948) by Herbert Brean, performing miracle appearances and disappearances as I reread Rim of the Pit (1944) by Hake Talbot…everywhere I look, people are vanishing.

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