#45: The Kings of Crime – I: John Dickson Carr, the King of Hearts

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King Carr

Bookends: It Walks by Night (1930)/The Hungry Goblin (1971)

Books published 1920-59: 64

The Case for the Crown

Diversity: In a career spanning 41 years John Dickson Carr published seventy-six novels and collections of short stories, wrote a raft of mysteries for radio (many of which can be found here), penned the official biography of Arthur Conan Doyle and a non-fiction account of the mysterious murder of magistrate Edmund Godfrey, wrote a column for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and was made a member of the Detection Club as well as a Grand-Master of the Mystery Writers Of America.  He created two long-running and dearly-loved sleuths, and in his later career branched out into exquisitely-researched and detailed historical mysteries that weren’t afraid to veer into the nonsensical – the time travel element of Fire, Burn! (1957) – or the fantastical – invoking a deal with the Lucifer himself in The Devil in Velvet (1951) – if they served his purposes.

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#44: Who are the Kings of Crime?

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King

The Tuesday Night Bloggers – an opt-in blogging group initially started by ‘Passing Tramp’ Curtis Evans to commemorate Agatha Christie’s 125th birthday but since expanded to include a broader program of authors from the Golden Age – has produced a glorious range of diverse posts from a variety of contributors and perspectives.  Mostly I feel incapable of contributing anything half as interesting as what these guys and girls come up with, but Brad Friedman’s recent Ngaio Marsh-themed post on his excellent AhSweetMysteryBlog has got me thinking laterally about something he said, and so I’m going to run in my own direction with an idea that I’m curious about.

Any conversation about Marsh, see, veers into the debate over the Queens of Crime which is rife with obviously-Christie, pro-Sayers (hmmm), anti-Mitchell (yay!), possibly-Allingham (wooo!) debate, but Brad says that his personal “Queens of Crime” included John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen.  And I thought: hang on a minute, male monarchs?  There’s a word for that…

Because, who are the kings of crime fiction?

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#43: Owl of Darkness, a.k.a. Fly by Night (1942) by Max Afford

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Owl of DarknessRegular readers of this blog – hello, Mum – will be aware of how much I appreciate die-hard devotees like Fender Tucker and Tom and Enid Schantz, whose (respectively) Ramble House and Rue Morgue Press imprints have for years been keeping the kind of classics everyone had long forgotten about in print just for the love of them.  I won’t condescend to imply that everything they publish is of equal quality, but some of it is more equal than others and they have jointly brought some absolute delights to my attention.  Unfortunately the latter’s Smallbone Deceased (1950) by Michael Gilbert proved not to be my kind of thing and so I couldn’t really review it having not read it, but it does give me a chance to talk about Max Afford’s Owl of Darkness which is published by the former and I read in those bleak and hazy dark days I now think of as ‘pre-blog’.

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#42: Defining ‘Fair Play’ in detective fiction

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book stack

Partly because I’m feeling brave, and partly because it’s something that has niggled at the back of my mind given some recent reading experiences, I wanted to have a bit of a discussion – or, well, monologue – about what constitutes a fair play detective novel.  I shall attempt not to go the Full Knox, and I’m not imagining that anything I say will be remotely original, but it’s on my mind and it’s my understanding that this is how blogging works.  So…

I think I’m relatively safe in saying that for many people the appeal of the detective story is the opportunity to have a go at fitting the puzzle together before the author explains all at the end (differentiating here from the crime novel or the thriller, which for brevity’s sake we’ll simply say have different intentions).  It’s also quite secure ground to say that finding out you never had a chance of solving the mystery for whatever reason – insufficient clueing, frank lies on behalf of the author, etc – adversely affects one’s enjoyment of such books.  Having all the information there for you to colligate and deduce is what motivates a lot of said reading, but the precise nature of what constitutes a ‘fair play’ novel is somewhat hard to rigorously define.  I’ll suggest up front that my own conclusions probably won’t tally with your own, but that’s all part of the fun, what?

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#41: Vintage Mystery Cover Scavenger Hunt 2016

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Vintage Scavenger Hunt

You’re doubtless aware of the Vintage Mystery Bingo challenges offered by Bev Hankins over at My Reader’s Block, and with a full twelve months of blogging ahead of me in 2016 I’m declaring my entry into the latest of these, Vintage Mystery Cover Bingo.  I’ll allow Bev herself to explain:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to find as many objects on the scavenger hunt list as possible on the covers of the mystery books you read. As has been the case for Vintage Bingo you may play along in either the Golden or Silver Mystery Eras (or, for the more adventurous, both).

Being rather more of a Golden Age fan I’ll be doing the Golden Mystery era, though at my current rate of one review a week and a liberal helping of out-of-era locked room mysteries it remains to be seen how successful I shall be!

Vintage Golden Scavenger 2016

Nevertheless, I look forward to joining the ranks of Vintage Mystery Scavengers; it’s a great idea, and if anyone else fancies getting involved you have until the end of the year to sign up at Bev’s site.

Roll on my 2016 cover hunting…

#40: Hard Cheese (1971) by Ulf Durling [trans. Bertil Falk 2015]

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Hard CheeseJohn Pugmire’s continuing mission to bring us the best unheralded impossible crime stories from around the globe under the guise of Locked Room International now adds Sweden to Japan (Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders), France (Noel Vindry’s The House That Kills, Henry Cauvin’s The Killing Needle, plus ongoing translations of the wonderful Paul Halter) and England (Derek Smith’s criminally ignored Whistle up the Devil and Come to Paddington Fair).  Hard Cheese by Ulf Durling gives us something classically locked room – man dead in hotel room, door locked on the inside – and adds to it a knowing wink at just about every mystery convention going: the dying message, the inverted mystery, the had-I-but-known, the least likely suspect…even when these ideas aren’t being explicitly used, Durling is throwing out casual references to the tropes and traps of the genre.  Add name-checks to John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts and others, and clearly here is a man who knows whereof he writes.

The book is split into three unequal sections, each told by a different first-person narrator.  First up is Johan Lundgren, one of a trio of elderly gentlemen who meet weekly to discuss crime novels:

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#39: The Hog’s Back Mystery, a.k.a. The Strange Case of Dr. Earle (1933) by Freeman Wills Crofts

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Hog's BackThere is a branch of Mathematics known as combinatorics which studies the interactions of countably finite discrete sets.  Or, in English, it’s the formal study of combining things in all the possible ways they can be combined.  It’s a little bit like doing a jigsaw by picking up one piece and then going through the box to try every other piece to find one that fits with that piece, and then going through again to find another piece that fits with those two…and so on until you’ve finished the picture.  Approximately a third of the thesis I wrote in my final year of university was based in a combinatorial approach to solving a particular problem (I shall spare you the details), and the formalisation of what sounds like an exceptionally dull way to go about something took on for me a particular beauty in the context of all the mathematics I has studied to that point.

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#38: Five to Try – Short Story Collections

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Following my torrent of Sherlock Holmes I was tempted to do a ‘Five to Try’ on the short story collections, picking my favourite story from each.  But it’s not as if the Holmes canon doesn’t have enough words dedicated to it already, and thus I thought I’d opt for collections by other authors instead.

So, the rules: collections of short stories by a single author (no compendiums, wherein the quality always varies horrendously), readily available today…that just about covers it.  And so, alphabetically by author, we have:

Fen Country (1950-79) by Edmund Crispin

Fen CountryThe second of Crispin’s two short story collections, published posthumously.  My choice of the two because of the way a lot of the stories hinge on a very simple core idea – homonyms, for example – that might come across a gimmicky but manage in about six or seven pages to communicate setting, setup, event, outcome and misdirection.  Frankly no small feat! Yes, consequently the characters tend to suffer (the ebullient Fen is a curiously neutered presence in the stories in which he features) but for sheer inventive interpretation after inventive interpretation this is hard to beat.  And as an example of Crispin’s tight hold on the reins of his plots (which could, let’s face it, get a bit beyond him in his novels) this reinforces his reputation in a form that has often proved the undoing of lesser talents. [Available in ebook and thoroughly unattractive print form from Bloomsbury]

Recommended reading: ‘Death and Aunt Fancy’, ‘The Hunchback Cat’, ‘Outrage in Stepney’ Continue reading →

#37: The Bishop’s Sword (1948) by Norman Berrow

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Bishop's SwordIt is due to experiences akin to that of reading The Bishop’s Sword – a euphemism of a title if ever there was one, though here referring to a literal sword once owned by a bishop – that I started this blog in the first place.  Picking up a book with very little to go on (a cursory, and then slightly more thorough, search online revealed not a single review of this anywhere) and having it turn out to be an absolute joy is the kind of thing I have to share with someone though, while in no way dismissing the many fine qualities that they do possess, not the kind of thing my friends necessarily share my enthusiasm for.  And so I throw this to the interwebs, that you may be a way of enabling me to feel that someone who might be intrigued is going to share in this, and frankly you’re on to a corker if you decide to partake.  You are, of course, most welcome. Continue reading →

#36: The Impossible Crimes of Sherlock Holmes – III: The Problem of Thor Bridge

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Thor Bridge 1‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’ gives us the classic impossible crime setup of a body that has been shot in the head but without any sign of a weapon to hand…and then manages to appear not at all impossible by finding the murder weapon hidden in the most likely suspect’s room, also throwing in a note from the suspected murderer arranging to meet the victim at the place of their demise and at around the time they are suspected of being having died.  True, there are no footprints anywhere near the body, but – before you get too excited – “The ground was iron-hard, sir.  There were no traces at all.”  Oh, so that takes care of that, then.

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