#354: Death in the House of Rain (2006) by Szu-Yen Lin [trans. ibid 2017]
Gather everyone together in a closed, isolated location, then kill ’em off one by one. Yup, at heart Death in the House of Rain (2006) is simply a marvellous instauration of this most spavined of classic detective fiction framings. The ingredients are familiar — take a remote mansion of obscure design, a landslide, a rain storm, and ten near-strangers, then add some baffling murders and stir — and this familiarity is invested with the vim and vigour that continues to breathe new life into the possibilities these recurrent trappings allow. In short, it is superb; chalk up another win for Locked Room International and fans of impossible crimes.
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#353: The Men Who Explain Miracles – Episode 4.3: The Edward D. Hoch ‘Best Impossible Crime Novels’ List of 1981 (Books 5 to 1)
Here we are, the third and final week of Dan and I using our podcast The Men Who Explain Miracles to look at the list of the 15 best impossible crime novels as curated by Ed Hoch in 1981.
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#352: The Chinese Jar Mystery, a.k.a. Black Hawthorn (1934) by John Stephen Strange
If there’s one setback to the profligacy of quality GAD blogs now found online, it’s that very little in my reading gets to take me by surprise any more. Something good tends to get shouted about (this is, after all, why we’re here) and then others buy it and shout or grumble as they see fit…but we’ve gone in with a ringing endorsement in our ears beforehand. I’m not complaining, it’s a lovely problem to have — and I contribute to this as much as anyone — but I was moved to reflect on picking this for review that it’s one book on my TBR that I knew nothing about. So now allow me to pre-prejudice the experience for the rest of you…
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#351: Golden Age Detection 101 – The Clues
Given their importance to the understanding of the historical impact of the genre, I share here another section of ‘Everythyne I Know About Detectyve Fiction’ (1925) by Admiral Lord Sir Hugh J. Lee Boryng-Payne E.S.P Cantab.
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#350: The Men Who Explain Miracles – Episode 4.2: The Edward D. Hoch ‘Best Impossible Crime Novels’ List of 1981 (Books 10 to 6)
Continuing our examination of the 15 best impossible crime novels of all time as compèred by Edward D. Hoch in 1981, here is the second of three episodes looking at the titles in question from Dan and myself in our occasional podcast The Men Who Explain Miracles.
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#349: Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls
Detective fiction’s Golden Age produced many very witty books — Case for Three Detectives (1936), etc — but Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls is to my mind the first time that the process of killing someone is genuinely funny. As a deployment of the detached third-person narrator it might represent the pinnacle of the genre. In many ways, this stands apart from the remainder of GAD in the way The Ladykillers (1955) stands apart from other Ealing comedies: it is savage and unsparing, and not afraid to show you the darkness beneath…but done with such a surety of touch that you don’t know whether a sentence is a joke or a profound truth until you finish it.
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#348: Golden Age Detection 101 – The Setting
