#1134: The Murder Wheel (2023) by Tom Mead

/ JJ / 14 Comments
Murder Wheel

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In these classic reprint-rich days, the work of Tom Mead — not just recycling the past, but building upon it by paying informed homage — feels like a breath of fresh air. His debut Death and the Conjuror (2022) was a genuine puzzle plot filled with the playfulness of this most spirited of genres, and if sophomore effort The Murder Wheel (2023) isn’t quite as successful, Mead deserves huge credit for the love he brings to his writing — and how superbly readable that writing is, never feeling weighed down by an excess of referencing or the weight of the history he is so lovingly revisiting. This is still bags of fun, and bodes well for what I hope is going to be a long and storied career.

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#1133: “I would detect with dignity or not at all.” – Sealed Room Murder (1941) by Rupert Penny

/ JJ / 6 Comments

I’m pretty sure that Sealed Room Murder (1941), the eighth and final novel by Rupert Penny to feature Chief Inspector Edward Beale, was only the second-ever book I read from Ramble House, and it made me an instant fan of Penny. So now I return to it to get my thoughts on record, and see whether I’ve been remiss in singing its praises for all these years.

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#1132: The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943) by Erle Stanley Gardner

/ JJ / 6 Comments
Case of the Smoking Chimney

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While you’ve hopefully been enjoying the regular reviews on The Invisible Event, I’ve been sweating bullets over the fact that I hit a seeming unpassable patch of reader’s block and haven’t read anything for nearly a month. Then Brad suggested that some Erle Stanley Gardner might help me out as it has done recently for him and, well, here we are. Mistakenly believing The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943) to be the first of Gardner’s two novels featuring the disreputable Gramps Wiggins I picked it up and spent a very happy day in its pages, and while it reaffirmed much of what I like about Gardner’s writing the book also bears many of the man’s flaws.

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#1130: The Red Widow Murders (1935) by John Dickson Carr [a.p.a. by Carter Dickson]

/ JJ / 26 Comments
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I’ve written previously about The Red Widow Murders (1935) — John Dickson Carr’s first take on the Room That Kills, originally published under his Carter Dickson nom de plume — but this American Mystery Classics reissue is a chance to look at the book more broadly and attach a star value to it. This third reading reinforced my impression that it’s perhaps too busy a book, redolent with the enthusiasm the youthful Carr brought to his early efforts when his eagerness outweighed his skill with juggling plot, but reading it three times also give me a good perspective on its many successes, not least of which is just how busy Carr manages to make it.

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#1127: Suddenly at His Residence, a.k.a. The Crooked Wreath (1946) by Christianna Brand

/ JJ / 13 Comments
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Good heavens, after this second reading of Christianna Brand’s Suddenly at His Residence, a.k.a. The Crooked Wreath (1946) do I have plenty of Thoughts.  Indeed, I have so many Thoughts that I’m deliberately writing about it on a Thursday so that my self-imposed 1,000 word limit stops me going on for about four times that length, to the enjoyment of no-one. So: Sir Richard March, tiring of the attitudes of his grandchildren, threatens to rewrite his will, retires to the lodge in the grounds of Swanswater Manor for this express purpose…and is discovered dead the following morning. Having been visited by various people throughout the previous evening, who actually poisoned him?

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