On the day that a child is born into the ancient, vast Swift clan, the family Dictionary is placed before the new mother and, with her eyes closed, she opens it and runs her finger down the page until it settles “on the word and definition that would become her child’s name”. What Beth Lincoln chooses to do with this intriguing idea in her debut The Swifts (2023) is…a little confused.
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Another surprise episode of my increasingly-irregular podcast In GAD We Trust, this time featuring Mark Aldridge in discussion about his new book, Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert on Wickedness (2024).
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As has recently been remarked elsewhere, the superb modern raft of Golden Age reprints has been very kind to Anthony Berkeley. The form’s arch Innovator-in-Chief has seen some excellent titles brought back to public availability — The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Murder in the Basement (1932), Jumping Jenny (1933) — and one, in The Wintringham Mystery, a.k.a. Cicely Disappears (1927), rescued from the sort of obscurity that had reduced its existence almost to rumour. Still yet to see the light of day, however, is The Piccadilly Murder (1929), so a reread seemed due to see if it really was as good as I remember. And, yes, it very nearly is — except in one key regard, in which it’s even better.
After stumbling over the Five Find-Outers books and learning that there was more to Enid Blyton’s juvenile mysteries than a group of precocious youths seeing some lights in an unusual place and then stumbling over a smugglers’ plot, I turn my attention to her six ‘Barney’ mysteries which, I’m told, provided similar detectival delights.
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Sometimes the Holmes canon surprises me; I have very fond memories of certain stories, while others are almost a complete blank.
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I have in the past referred to The Punch and Judy Murders, a.k.a. The Magic Lantern Murders (1936) — the fifth book to feature Sir Henry ‘H.M.’ Merrivale under John Dickson Carr’s Carter Dickson nom de plume — as an underacknowledged masterpiece in the oeuvre of an author who produced more than his fair share of masterpieces in the genre. So let’s examine that, eh? That sort of claim can’t possibly backfire.
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I’ve read a lot of middle-of-the-road books lately, so thought I’d take away the pressure of expecting something to be good and read an author who is, at the very least, usually entertaining if nothing else. And so The Nameless Crime (1932), the next Walter S. Masterman title on my TBR, comes into its own. Masterman’s Victorian tendencies — you can imagine his novels filmed in flickery black and white, with title cards for dialogue — prove oddly comforting, despite his plot structure at time leaning into the more infuriating end of the spectrum, and any preconceptions going in tending to get lost in the melee. So how do we fare this time around? Not well.
Is this the the best title in the Sherlock Holmes canon? I don’t mean the best story, but rather the most intriguing combination of words put together to entice you in.
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Thirty stories from the pen of Cyril Hare, an author whose legal-themed novels leave me rather cold, but whose scattered short fiction I have encountered is typically very positive. So a chance to dig deeper into that his miniature plots is to be seized.
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Having researched and written a book in which a woman poisons several people, Victoria Hime inevitably ends up as the prime suspect when someone close to her is poisoned by the same means. The fact that several people came and went from the Himes’ house on the day of the poisoning is the only light offered to Los Angeles detective Lieutenant Richard Tuck, but while the method remains clear there’s the small matter of opportunity and motive…all of which keeps swinging back to Victoria, the case against her “signed, sealed, and delivered” at almost every turn. Except we, the reader, know she didn’t do it…so what really happened?
The Invisible Event 