Woo!
#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!
Well, well, well, how’s this for a turn up: one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s early books from his A.A. Fair days is due to be published this December for the first time ever.
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#130: The Invisible Event is 1 – A Thank-you
It was one year ago today — after eighteen months lurking around the blogs of Noah, Puzzle Doctor, Rich, Sergio, and TomCat — that I finally settled on a title for an undertaking of my own, registered on WordPress, put up this opening salvo, and then sat back and thought…er, so what happens now?
What has happened is that a lot of you have turned up, embraced my almost deliberately awkward corner of detective fiction — virtually no living authors, nothing after 1959 that isn’t an obscure and dense puzzle, a rejection of a great deal of the accepted classics from the era I do deign to read…seriously, it’s a wonder anyone comes here at all — and have digested my ramblings, lurked around some, commented, engaged, cajoled, and generally encouraged me to keep writing about what I love.
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#122: Broken Bottles and Bloodspots: A guest post by Matt Ingwalson
Author photo: Chris Sessions
The Owl and Raccoon novellas of Matt Ingwalson update the impossible crime to a modern setting and, as I have said previously, are hugely recommended reading for anyone with an interest in a good story convincingly told. Ahead of the publication of the third story, Not With a Bang, I asked Matt if he would be willing to oblige us with an insight into his writing and he very kindly offered the following.
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#119: An Undertaking – Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums
So, earlier this week I put up this post lamenting the poor selection of stories for a ‘new’ locked room anthology edited by David Stuart Davies. In response, the internet’s resident doyen of all things locked room, TomCat over at Beneath the Stains of Time, put up this post suggesting an alternative list of equally out-of-copyright stories suggested by a look through Robert Adey’s Locked Room Murders. To wit:
I arranged an alternative line-up of fifteen titles for Classic Locked Room Mysteries or a hypothetical, non-existent anthology, called Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums…
The Invisible Event 