Mary Virginia Carey would, in time, write more books in the Three Investigators series than any of the four other writers so employed, but got off to a slightly wobbly start with The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints (1971). So will her second title, The Mystery of the Singing Serpent (1972), find her on better form?
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The expertly-curated British Library Crime Classics series continues to diversify with crowd-pleasing reissues of Anthony Berkeley, Christianna Brand, and John Dickson Carr, never-heard-of-em delights like Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls and Death of Anton (1936) by Alan Melville, and stirring in a Freeman Wills Crofts or a few E.C.R. Loracs along the way. And The Mysterious Mr. Badman (1934) by W.F. Harvey definitely falls into the middle category, because ask 100 people if they’d heard of it before this reissue and maybe three would say they had, two of whom would be lying to look cool. But a delight it is, and welcome it most certainly is.
Quite some time ago, I was made a very generous gift of a random selection of old Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines and anthologies and, aside from the odd story, they’ve sat largely unread on my shelves since. Well, no more. From today, they will (probably) make regular appearances on The Invisible Event where longer or notable entries are concerned.
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It’s been a long road to The End of Andrew Harrison, a.k.a. The Futile Alibi (1938) by Freeman Wills Crofts. Back when I was fairly new to classic era detective fiction in general, and impossible crimes in particular, I heard rumours of this book — the first I’d ever heard of Crofts — but it turned out to be rather unavailable. I also heard that Crofts was dull, dull, dull, however, and so spent a long time avoiding him before finally taking the plunge, falling in love with his writing and reading 22 of his novels in broad chronology, in which time Andrew Harrison was reprinted by Harper Collins. And…that just about brings us up to date.
Another week, another reworked tale from Dame Agatha Christie, and another borderline impossibility.
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Eking out these recommended episodes of Elementary, having found a lot of joy in Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) and Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) solving mysteries in modern day New York, I’m amazed and mildly distressed to have reached the penultimate season already. What am I going to watch when I’m done?
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As someone who has recently found more joy in certain books upon rereading them, I appreciate the many ways context can affect how we respond to a book when we encounter it. And so when I say that I read Dancing with Death (1947) by Joan Coggin at the right time, I suppose it is to acknowledge that I was fortunate enough to be in the mood to appreciate its many subtle touches which might, at any other time, have passed me be entirely. It’s very much not my usual kind of thing, but a break from the norm is often encouraged and, in this case, turned out very well indeed. One is left to rue the fact that Coggin wrote only four books, that those books are hard to find, and that she spoils the solutions of two of them in the first chapter here.
One of the many lovely things about having read the overwhelming majority of Agatha Christie’s criminous novels and short stories before starting this blog is that they’re largely available for rereads, and so with my intended focus for Tuesdays in April proving unreadable I’m able to reach for the four novellas that make up the collection Murder in the Mews (1937).
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Perhaps April Fool’s Day isn’t the best scheduling of this post, but the recent experience of dragging my way through Helen Vardon’s Confession (1922) by R. Austin Freeman got me thinking about the literary detectives I’d follow to hell and back, and I figured that it might be worth expanding upon.
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