#434: Locked Room International is 30 – My Favourite 15 Books
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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#433: No Killer Has Wings: The Casebook of Dr. Joel Hoffman [ss] (1959-63) by Arthur Porges
Arthur Porges is an author who seems to’ve faded somewhat from memory despite (or maybe ‘on account of’) writing in a spread of genres. To myself, he’s of most interest as the creator of fiendishly ingenious impossible crime stories, and it was with much delight that I learned of Richard Simms’ on-going project to get all Porges’ short fiction reprinted…and with much impatience that I awaited the Joel Hoffman stories, having first encountered Porges through ‘No Killer Has Wings’ in a Mike Ashley-edited collection…and with much consternation that I admit it’s taken me far too long to get round to this collection since its publication in 2017.
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#432: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Ripples (2017) by Robert Innes
Over at AhSweetMysteryBlog, my good friend Brad is frequently heard to rue how he has — at the tender age of 27 — already read pretty much every single author with a large back catalogue who is likely to interest him, and how even in these GAD-reprint rich times it is unlikely that few if any such authors will emerge to capture his interest.
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#431: The D.A. Cooks a Goose (1942) by Erle Stanley Gardner
It is slightly over a year since I decided to reread the Doug Selby novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, and while I sort of imagined I’d be done by now — nine books into twelve months goes fairly easily — I had not counted on how much I enjoyed the ones I’d read first time around, and so how I would draw out this revisiting so as to enjoy them equally now. And, even more fun, it turns out that I hadn’t read this one (side note: does anyone actually read the synopses of authors they love in advance of reading the book? You’re gonna read it anyway, right, so why would it matter what it’s about?) — so it felt like a new Doug Selby novel even though, yes, no, I’m aware it isn’t.
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#430: Minor Felonies – Arsenic for Tea, a.k.a. Poison is Not Polite (2015) by Robin Stevens
Most people who write and publish one novel go on to complete a second, yet the second is often the one deemed ‘difficult’. I suppose it’s the not knowing whether a universe and characters previously deployed will stretch over another 100,000 words, or whether a writer used up all their good ideas on Book 1 and so Book 2 is likely to fall on drier ground.
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#429: The Men Who Explain Miracles – Episode 7.2: The Ages of John Dickson Carr
Greetings, and welcome back to episode 7 of our every-two-monthly (is there a word for that?) podcast The Men Who Explain Miracles, which this month we’re using to look at the career of John Dickson Carr.
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#428: Minor Felonies – Dying to be Famous (2009) and The Head is Dead (2009) by Tanya Landman
I’m back from holiday, and would you care to guess how many books I read whilst travelling around the USA for a fortnight? Pick a number, and then click to find out if you were close…
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#427: The Men Who Explain Miracles – Episode 7.1: The Ages of John Dickson Carr
