John Sladek is better known these days as a furiously inventive author of decidedly loopy SF — and I mean that as a compliment — but he did publish two detectives novels in the 1970s that each contained several impossibilities. The first, #123: Not With a Bang by Matt Ingwalson
So, following Matt Ingwalson’s writing of the first ever guest post here on The Invisible Event, I’m now duty-bound to recommend his third Owl and Raccoon story, right? I mean, sheesh, it’d be awkward if I lay into this. Let’s get that out of the way, then: is this good? No, it’s not good. It’s wonderful.
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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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#121: On the Many Wonderful Faces of Dr. John H. Watson, MD – Part 2 of 2
So, as established yesterday, there’s much more scope in Watson than there is in Holmes. The obvious question then becomes: So what do you do with this?
Take the simple cosmetic changes out of the equation — the casting of Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson in the US series Elementary, for instance, easily one of the least disruptive changes it’s possible to get away with — and what you’re left with is the fact that Watson, being our entry into the Holmesiverse, is allowed to do anything that reflects the experience and perspective of the reader. As discussed yesterday, there are aspects of the character, the constants I referred to, that don’t become him — making him the proprietor of a burgeoning dog-walking business, or a respected scholar of nineteenth century Gothic poetry, or giving him a form of OCD which means he must always cross his legs in the opposite manner to Holmes unless it’s a Tuesday in which case…, etc — but let’s put this aside as given and look at the way certain authors have expanded on Watson without desecrating him beyond all recognition.
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#120: On the Many Wonderful Faces of Dr. John H. Watson, MD – Part 1 of 2
Lately I’ve read an unusually high concentration of Holmes pastiches — Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary (not good), Stephen King’s ‘A Doctor’s Case’ (not terrible), Colin Dexter’s ‘A Case of Mis-Identity’ (extremely good), Michael Kurland’s The Infernal Device (loadsa fun), Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range (fabulous) and a superb piece of unpublished fan fiction sent to me via email — and it’s made me realise that while Watson, and specifically the Watsonian voice, is vital in undertaking Holmes, no-one can quite agree what Watson is, how he should be written, and this makes him far and away the more interesting of the two men when it comes to analysis.
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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…
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#118: Jack Glass (2012) by Adam Roberts
“The impulse for this novel,” says Adam Roberts “was a desire to collide together some of the conventions of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction and ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction, with the emphasis more on the latter than the former.” Well, count me in! Sure, the authors he then cites (Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Innes) don’t all fill me with delight, but this is a collision of my two favourite genres plus impossible crimes — how could I pass it up?! And it would have passed me by entirely had not blog-commenter ravenking81 brought it to my attention, so my most genuine thanks for that; at its best it’s a fascinatingly successful attempt at merging the two genres in a way that recalls both Isaac Asimov and John Dickson Carr, who, y’know, are the two finest authors to have worked in their respective genres. So that’s a good thing. By definition, however, it is not always at its best. Continue reading
#117: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Underwhelming Origins of Ellery Queen in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929)
The Invisible Event 