It is my understanding that more than one collection of Roy Vickers’ inverted mystery stories have been put out under the title The Department of Dead Ends, but also that this The Department of Dead Ends (1949) is the first time it was done, with ten stories telling of ingenious murderers and the miniscule oversights that eventually caught them, thanks to the elephantine memory of that eponymous division.
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Having, at the end of previous book The Twist of a Knife (2022), signed up to relating at least three more cases following around ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne, Anthony Horowitz faces a problem: interesting murders are not determined by publishing deadlines. So, with a contractual obligation looming and no death on the horizon, Anthony asks Hawthorne for details of a past case, and Hawthorne obliges by slowly feeding him notes on the murder of Giles Kenworthy in Richmond some five years previously. Can Anthony make this format of mystery work for him? And is there an appropriate amount of peril in an investigation already signed, sealed, and delivered well before his involvement?
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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The Invisible Event 