Woo!
#183: Merry Christmas!
Whether Christmas is your thing or not, I hope everyone has a relaxed, happy, restful, and caring period of calm at the heart of this festive season. It’s great fun discussing books here (and elsewhere) with all y’all, and I wish for you all a solicitous few days to ensure you’re taking care of yourselves out there.
And then get back reading, dudes. There’s still so much to talk about…
Merry Christmas, everybody; see you soon.
#170: Dark of the Mood – Atmosphere in the Work of John Dickson Carr
Half a lifetime ago, I put up this post looking at the consistency of language across the Sherlock Holmes canon, and for my first post today in celebration of John Dickson Carr’s 110th birthday — a second post will be going up later today, then a round-up of the posts I’m kinda just trusting that other people are doing will go up this evening — I thought I’d utilise a similar approach to analyse an aspect of Carr’s writing that is often much-discussed: his use of atmosphere.
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#168: Death on the Radio – John Dickson Carr and ‘Murder by Experts’
Since reading Max Afford’s radio-set mystery The Dead Are Blind, I’ve had a new-found appreciation for the art of creating radio drama, especially during the age when radio held such a huge sway in the homes of most people. My interest in detective fiction from this era inevitably lead to some passing awareness of the serials produced at this time, but Afford’s novel really brought home the level of technical expertise required to produce something so much more complex than simply four people sitting at a microphone with a script.
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#166: One Week Until #Carr110 – Some Links to Help You…
The time is nearly upon us! Banish next week’s post-Thanksgiving blues by getting involved in the celebration of John Dickson Carr’s 110th birthday on 30th November. Post an article, review, discussion piece, poem, comparison, or anything you damn well please about Carr, put the link in the comments here, and I’ll collect everything together for summing-up post at the end of the day.
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#156: A Reminder — #Carr110 — One Month to Go!
Just a quick reminder that John Dickson Carr will be 110 on 30th November, so if anyone wishes to post anything Carr-related on that day I’ll collect everything in a summing up post here. I’ll put up yet another reminder closer to the day itself, and if anyone wishes to contribute they can just leave a link in the comments somewhere and I’ll go around and sweep up as required.
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#155: Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums – Publication Day!
It’s finally here!
Nearly 3 months after being announced, running to 15 stories and 115,421 words, Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums is finished, and this post is here to announce that it’s ready for you to download for free!
And, yes, you read that correctly — all 15 of the original stories are included, thanks to a frankly amazing intervention by John Grant (he of the massively entertaining Noirish blog) who offered his help in sorting out the two stories I wasn’t going to have the time to get into shape…and then managed to do them in, like, zero seconds flat.
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#151: Harper Collins’ The Detective Club Republishing The Conjure-Man Dies (1932) by Rudolph Fisher!
Well, well, well, more good news: following the emergence of Erle Stanley Gardner’s missing Cool and Lam novel, it transpires that another classic — and one I’ve personally been trying to find for a while now — is also due back into circulation.
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#139: Hard Case Crime Publishing ‘Lost’ Erle Staney Gardner Novel!
The Invisible Event 