#372: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 2

April 10, 2018April 11, 2018 / JJ / 7 Comments

Another week, another set of posts from our GAD blogging collective, running down their own personal favourites of the great detectives of fiction.

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#371: Lightning Strikes Twice in ‘Z is for Zombie’ (1937) by Theodore Roscoe

April 7, 2018April 6, 2018 / JJ / 8 Comments

It’s just over a year since Bold Venture Press republished Theodore Roscoe’s Murder on the Way! (1935), in which I was fortunate enough to have a hand. As luck would have it, I recently acquired a copy of Roscoe’s equally zombie-centric and Haiti-set ‘Z is for Zombie’ (1937) and thought the two might bear some comparison.

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#370: The Reader is Warned (1939) by Carter Dickson

April 5, 2018March 12, 2025 / JJ / 42 Comments

I will admit the chance that I am overrating this book slightly, but, dude, I loved it. The central premise — that Herman Pennik can both read the minds of others and kill people just by thinking about them, using a hitherto-unexplored scientific principle he calls Teleforce — has the absurdity of overwroughtness that distinguishes the Henry Merrivale books under John Dickson Carr’s Carter Dickson nom de plume (see: The Unicorn Murders (1935), The Punch and Judy Murders (1936), etc). But Carr plays it remarkably straight, keeping his phantasmagorical flourishes to a minimum and concentrating on plot and glorious atmosphere.

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#369: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 1

April 3, 2018April 22, 2018 / JJ / 13 Comments

The Tuesday Night Bloggers — an autonomous collective of GAD bloggers who unite around a common theme — have returned! To tie in with the release of The 100 Greatest Literary Detectives in a few weeks, a compendium to which our very own Kate Jackson has contributed an entry, everyone is picking and writing about their own favourite sleuths this month.

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#368: Going Great Gunns – The Greatest Mystery Writer You’ve Never Heard Of: A Guest Post by Ryan O’Neill

April 1, 2018March 30, 2018 / JJ / 12 Comments

Claudia Gunn at ‘Mysteriosa’, December 1908

Something a little different today: ahead of the UK publication of his superb biography of forgotten Australian authors, Ryan O’Neill has kindly agreed to share some information about one of the authors featured therein — the neglected detective fiction great Dame Claudia Gunn…

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#367: Old Tricks, New Dog – ‘The Ghost of the Badminton Court’ (2004) by Szu-Yen Lin [trans. Szu-Yen Lin & John Pugmire 2014]

March 31, 2018April 3, 2018 / JJ / 11 Comments

Following the hugely enjoyable and terrifyingly ingenious machinations of Szu-Yen Lin’s Death in the House of Rain (2006), published in English last year by Locked Room International, I was delighted to discover that another Lin story was available in English, ‘The Ghost of the Badminton Court’ from the August 2014 edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

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#366: The Double Alibi (1934) by Noël Vindry [trans. John Pugmire 2018]

March 29, 2018September 21, 2023 / JJ / 31 Comments

Disclosure: I proof-read this book for Locked Room International in February 2018.

There will come a time when my love of the puzzle novel will result in me having to recuse myself where reviews are concerned, I think, because my response to the machinations of the most complex of GAD is simply not that of a normal human being. Until such a time, however, I shall continue to frolic and bask in the joy of the likes of Noel Vindry and his pattern-obsessed kin because, frankly, it’s just so much fun. The Double Alibi (1934) is doubtless the most twisty yet translated into English by John Pugmire, and if anything approaching this level of ingenuity remains then, dude, I hope we get to see that as well.

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#365: Minor Felonies – Welcome to Danger, a.k.a. Danger Unlimited (1949) by Christianna Brand

March 27, 2018March 27, 2018 / JJ / 9 Comments

Every so often someone will email me to let me know of books that may pique my interest: Kate at CrossExaminingCrime has brought several Freeman Wills Croftses to my attention, and Ben of The Green Capsule has also informed me of some bargains, including today’s title that, it’s fair to say, we’re still not sure who was most excited to discover existed.

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#364: An Egyptian Chinese Puzzle in The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy (1965) by Robert Arthur

March 24, 2018March 22, 2018 / JJ / 21 Comments

So, here I am in the throes of a month of Tuesdays posts looking at GAD-era YA novels and — boom! — here’s a YA novel on a Saturday?! What on earth…?

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#363: The Beacon Hill Murders (1930) by Roger Scarlett

March 22, 2018December 5, 2019 / JJ / 36 Comments

The classic GAD puzzle plot being the complex and obstreperous beast it is, we should not be surprised that sometimes it took two brains to wrestle in into readable shape (under a single name so as to simplify things) — Ellery Queen, Francis Beeding, Kelley Roos, Patrick Quentin, etc. Now, thanks to the work of Coachwhip and Curtis Evans, we can all add another collaborative nom de plume to our libraries with Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page’s Roger Scarlett and their Boston-set country house conundra. And, as with their distinguished kin, they prove to have an equally troublesome first swing at this while also showing a huge amount of promise.

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