A bit of pre-Christmas podcasting for you, as I sit down with Jack Anderson, author of The Return of Moriarty (2025) which, honestly now, is probably the very best Sherlock Holmes universe pastiche I’ve ever read.
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For as long as he can remember, 16 year-old Hisataro Oba has found himself randomly, several times a month, caught in a time loop he dubs The Trap: waking up on the same day nine times in a row, with only the events of the final day of the loop becoming the canon version of the day for everyone else in existence. Having realised this, and in part as a coping mechanism, he has been able to exploit The Trap — cheat on a test, win a bet, etc. — but now things are different. Because now a murder has been committed and he would like, if possible, to avert it in the ninth and final version so that it does not become the reality for everyone else.
Donning my waders to enter the fetid waters of Sherlock Holmes pastichery, I was prepared to kiss a lot of frogs on the way to a prince or two. But with The Return of Moriarty (2025) by Jack Anderson I’ve stumbled over a very handsome prince indeed far sooner than I’d ever hope — put simply, it’s wonderful, and if you’re a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes universe then you need a copy of this book in your life.
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One haunted house. One impossible crime. One killer weekend. Thus runs the promise on the front cover of Murder Most Haunted (2025), the debut novel of Emma Mason, and that was enough to get in on my TBR as a modern example of the impossible crime that we’re no longer pretending I read just for TomCat‘s sake. So, did it deliver on those promises?
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In five days, Daniel Bronson will be hanged for the murder of regional ne’er-do-well Blackatter, found shot through the back of the head with the insensible, gun-clutching Bronson nearby. And while “no man so near the gallows can be called alive” his wife Selma refuses to think of him as dead yet and approaches Anthony Gethryn to see if he can, “months after the thing was done, when even witnesses’ memories are getting hazy and any scent there might’ve been at the time’s vanished long ago”, find the evidence that would clear Bronson of the crime which Selma simply does not believe he committed. And, well, how could Colonel Gethryn ever live with himself if he didn’t at least try?
I stumbled over the Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018) collection, in which thirteen authors offer wildly varying alternative versions of Sherlock Holmes, when searching for more criminous tales by Jonathan Maberry, one of the highlights of the C. Auguste Dupin-extending collection Beyond Rue Morgue [ss] (2013).
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Intrigued by the apparent swathe — maybe I’m exaggerating it in my mind, but there do seem to be a lot of them at present — of Choose Your Own Adventure-style mystery books coming into the market in recent months, I undertook to try one. And having found Antony Johnston’s The Dog-Sitter Detective Plays Dead (2025) an easy read, it is to his contribution, Can You Solve the Murder? (2025), that I turn.
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Having written six fast-paced and energetically witty mysteries featuring Jake and Helene Justus and their lawyer friend John J. Malone, Craig Rice decided that 1942 would be a year of experimentation. Some worked, some was hard work, and some was probably successful if you like that kind of thing. Thankfully, 1943 saw her return to Malone & Co., though the ghost of experimentation wasn’t completely laid and a little of the need to innovate — no bad attitude, not if you see yourself in writing for a while — carried through to Having Wonderful Crime (1943). So Jake, Helene, and Malone decamp to New York rather than Chicago, but murders happen in the Big Apple too, and before long we’re caught up in one.
When A. Carver published The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023) close to Christmas 2023, I was caught off-guard: with that title, one feels it should be read in the Winter, and I try to be about four to five weeks ahead on my blogging and so it had to wait until 2024. Then I just…didn’t read it in 2024, so Winter 2025 finally comes to the rescue
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I have, in my limited exposure to his work, come to quite enjoy the thrillerish tendencies of Horatio Edgar Wallace. You don’t come to him for solid plotting, intelligent detection, or subtle clewing, but there’s a brand of creativity he brings to his wild schemes that is difficult to find elsewhere.
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The Invisible Event 