#64: Duck Season Death (c. 1955) by June Wright

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Duck Season DeathFull credit for my awareness of Australian author June Wright has to go to Kate over at CrossExaminingCrime, who reviewed Wright’s debut Murder in the Telephone Exchange last year and made it sound fabulous.  Rather than re-evaluate that book, I thought I’d go for one of Wright’s later efforts and so find myself with this, her…well, it’s a little complicated placing this in the timeline.  Derham Groves’ excellent introduction informs us that Wright wrote this after her fourth book – making it, you’re correct, her fifth – but this 2015 imprint is in fact its first publication as it was rejected by two publishers, so therefore it’s her seventh book as it comes after the six she published.  Oh, except she also had another book rejected, too, but the manuscript for that has been lost, so this is…hang on…carry the one…well, work it out for yourselves.  And in the grand tradition of Derek Smith’s Come to Paddington Fair and Hake Talbot’s vanished-from-history unnamed third novel, this joins my collection of “Seriously, this was rejected?” books that make one question precisely what or indeed if anyone was thinking at the time.

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#63: Death Invites You (1988) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2015]

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Disclosure: I proof-read this book for Locked Room International in October 2015.

Death Invites YouDeath Invites You, the third novel published by Paul Halter – who is swiftly gaining a deserved reputation as a deviser of baffling locked room puzzles – is based around the murder of man found dead in his study with the door bolted from the inside, seated at a table set for a meal.  The victim, Harold Vickers, is an author who has gained a deserved reputation as a deviser of baffling locked room puzzles and whose next novel –  Death Invites You – was due to feature a victim found dead in his study with the door bolted from the inside, seated at a table set for a meal.  It is unfortunately never revealed whether Vickers’ victim was an author of some repute working in the field of locked rooms and whose next novel was due to feature such a crime, but, given the hall of mirrors that you enter at the beginning of any Halter narrative, it frankly wouldn’t surprise me…

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#62: Death Invites You by Paul Halter is now available!

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Death Invites You

Being the massive Paul Halter fanboy that I am, it is with some delight that I belatedly realise the most recent translation of his from John Pugmire and Locked Room International is now available in print from a variety of sources and in e-book from your favourite rainforest-named purveyor of all things.

A locked-room murder of an expert in locked-room murders, I imagine this is how all crime writers would secretly love to go out.  It’s a fiendish little puzzle that I fully and very enthusiastically recommend, and I’ll get a review up in due course.  And it has that delightfully grotesque cover…what’s not to love?

Go, go quickly…

#61: The Footprints of Satan (1950) by Norman Berrow

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Footprints of SatanLacking as I do the talent to devise my own fictional impossible crime and solution, I take refuge in those authors who have done it time and again to such success.  The Footprints of Satan, my second Norman Berrow novel after the delightful surprise of The Bishop’s Sword, goes one even better: far from simply devising his own impossibility, he takes an unexplained one from real life, turns it to his own fictional purposes and then explains it away beautifully.  Both the foreword and the plot here make reference to an incident from 1855 and reported in no less august a publication than The Times in which a trail of hoof-marks appeared in the snow as if from a cloven-footed creature walking on its hind legs.

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#60: How a Lady Commits a Crime, and other reflections on And Then There Were None (2015)

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AttWN

I know, I know: I time my Sherlock Week so that it completely fails to capitalise on the BBC Christmas Special, and only now – several weeks after the event, when everyone else is well and truly done with it – only now do I get round to the BBC’s rather excellent adaptation of Agatha Christie’s island-based murder-fest.  Undaunted by my lack of riding the ever-shifting popular wave, there are some things I thought I’d write about.  Suffice to say, SPOILERS of all manner and sort follow; if you’re even later than me getting to this, you’re probably better off not reading any farther if you wish to view it completely pure (which, really, you should).  I’m discussing the adaptation here rather than the book, but they match so closely in all the key details that I’ll be ruining something for you if you’re hoping the book is massively different.  It isn’t.  And that is a wonderful thing. Continue reading →

#59: On Locked Rooms and Impossible Crimes in fiction – something of a ramble

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footprints

I was recently reading a book on the promise of it providing a locked room murder, to which I am rather partial.  When said murder arrived, it took on this approximate form: a large indoor hall with a free-standing stone chapel inside it which has one door and no windows or other points of ingress, a crowd witnesses a lady entering said chapel – which is deserted – alone and the doors are shut, only for them to be opened some time later and said lady found beaten, bruised and devoid of life.  It’s moderately classic in its setup and should therefore provide some interest, but once I read the details of the crime I gave up on the book and will not return to it (in fact, it’s already down the charity shop).

This is not due to any squeamishness on my part, or a particular problem I had with the writing or the characters – both were fine, if unexceptional – but rather just because it just wasn’t interesting.  It is hard to put this in words, which is why I imagine this post may run rather longer than usual, but there were simply no features of intrigue to me in that supposedly impossible murder.  And so I got to thinking…forget plot or prose or atmosphere, take away all the context of an impossible crime, particularly forget about the solutions: what makes an interesting fictional impossibility? Continue reading →

#58: The Problem of the Green Capsule, a.k.a. The Black Spectacles (1939) by John Dickson Carr

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Green CapsuleMarcus Chesney doesn’t have much faith in human observation.  To prove his point, he arranges to put on a short demonstration for three witnesses, after which he will ask them questions about what they saw – secure in the knowledge, he says, that they’ll get the answers wrong.  The demonstration goes ahead, as part of which a disguised figure enters the room…and poisons Chesney in front of everyone before vanishing.  It swiftly becomes apparent that the murderer must not only be responsible for a spate of recent poisonings in the village but must also have somehow been one of only four people.  The only problems are that one of them has a rock-solid alibi and the other three were all watching the performance…

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#57: It’s 2016, and the rules are changing…

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batman

It may come as some surprise to you that I am the Batman of classic crime blogging.  Not merely because this blog represents my true face that must remain hidden beneath a socially-acceptable façade, nor due to all posts being despatched from a convoluted series of secret caves beneath my gigantic mansion on the outskirts of a fictional city.  No, rather because for the opening couple of months of this undertaking I have stuck, dramatically, to a single rule – an immutable and unyielding precept that has underpinned practically everything I have posted.

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#56: End of 2015 Review – My Reading in Pictograms

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As I’ve only been blogging for a few months there doesn’t seem to be much point in a full blog review, but I thought I might look at my overall reading this year.  And who doesn’t love a pictogram?  No-one trustworthy, that’s who.

To begin with, here’s how my TBR at the start of the year fared:

 TBR 2015My book-by-book breakdown of tree books and ebooks throughout the year looks like this, including the nine I borrowed having finally joined the library:

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#55: The Human Flies (2010) by Hans Olav Lahlum [trans. Kari Dickson 2014]

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Human FliesFor those of you who lament the decline of the modern detective novel – and we are legion, to be sure – I have three words: Hans Olav Lahlum.  The Human Flies, his debut novel, is by no means perfect – it’s in need of a good edit, as there’s a tendency to repeat ad infinitum information gleaned and interpreted elsewhere – but it’s honestly about as close to a classically-motivated, -structured, and -executed novel as I imagine you’ll find in the 21st century.  The fact that it has almost the exact same setup as the likes of The Wooden Overcoat, The Black Shrouds and Our First Murder with a killing in a guest-house (here a small apartment block) of which one of the denizens is undoubtedly guilty certainly helps, but Lahlum is also smart enough to build on this base in very classical ways.  But for a few dates and key events – it is set in 1968 – this could almost have been written in the late 1940s.

To add to the fun, it also starts with an impossible murder: gunshots heard in an apartment, people rush to the scene before the killer would have chance to get away, and upon opening the locked door there’s a dead body but no killer, no weapon, and no other exit.  Cue detective Kolbjørn Kristiansen – that and his being blonde is pretty much all you’re told about him, so the nickname K2 may purely be a result of his initials rather than also his physical size – who swiftly finds himself out of his depth, as everyone in the building seems blameless, even given the victim’s relative celebrity and potential for enemies.  And then he gets a phone call…

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