You may remember — and I won’t blame you if you don’t — that back in October 2019 I was lucky enough to get cover designer Abi Salvesen to explain her process in researching and creating the covers for two John Dickson Carr reprints put out by Polygon Books.
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Accompanying an architect in an examination of the faded ancestral pile of Cranbury Hall, prim solicitor Arthur Gilroy happens upon his wastrel half brother Oliver, with whom he has an interview later that evening, who is rather elliptical about the reason for his presence. The two part on not unfriendly terms and, soon after, a shot rings out that is attributed to poachers taking liberties on the ownerless land. But when Oliver fails to show up for their meeting, Arthur begins to suspect that “some mysterious tragedy had occurred”…and he might be right, since that shot turns out to have been merely the first attempt on Oliver’s life.
With the annual Bodies from the Library collections, which have brought long out-of-print stories of crime and detection back to public awareness, proving rightly popular, editor Tony Medawar turns his attention to another facet of genre fiction with the Ghosts from the Library (2022) collection, in which authors (mostly) better known for their stories of crime and detection have a go at generating some supernatural chills instead.
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Two Paul Halter books remain from my pre-blog my life, meaning I’ve read them but not put my thoughts down anywhere. Let us use this month of phantoms and superstition, then, to return to The Demon of Dartmoor (1993, tr. 2012).
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There really is no accounting for taste. When I read The New Sonia Wayward (1960) by Michael Innes following a rave review from Aidan, I found it rather wanting; now that I’ve read The Chocolate Cobweb (1948) by Charlotte Armstrong following a rave review from Aidan, I wonder if he praised it enough, because it’s very probably the best novel of pure domestic suspense that I’ve ever encountered. We can add this to the likes of The Voice of the Corpse (1948) by Max Murray on the list of Books I Should Not Like Yet Absolutely Loved, an experience so enjoyable that it stalled my reading for about a week since I had no idea what I could possibly follow it up with.
By the time Dennis Lehane started garnering public attention and huge critical praise for the likes of Mystic River (2001) and Shutter Island (2003) — helped, no doubt, by those two novels being filmed — I couldn’t help but feeling that he’d already done his best work with his first five novels, which featured Boston P.I.s Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.
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Right, you probably know the drill by now: 100+ sleuths nominated, top 64 chosen, the top half of 32 already voted on…today you’re voting on the bottom half of the first round.
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One stormy evening, the nebbishy, unworldly Alfred Austin of 57 Caldwell Road is phoned up and asked to take a message to his neighbour Mr. Carey at number 52, only to fight his way through the wind and the rain to be told upon arrival that no-one of that name lives there. When Austin’s wife arrives home later that same evening, she informs him that no-one of any name lives there, as the house has been empty since being built a year previously. The following morning, Alf sees a man with bloody hands leaving number 52 shortly before a dead body is discovered within…and that’s just the beginning of his problems.
Another dive into the past, as I revisit the crime novels of my youth which set me on the path to classic era detection.
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Pity the New Guy, who has to come in to an established IP and keep everything recognisably the same while also making changes that justify their hiring, like whoever has to reinvent James Bond now that Daniel Craig is done with the role (I have some ideas, by the way, if anyone at EON is reading). With The Three Investigators 14 books old, what could fourth author into the fray Mary Virginia Carey do to establish herself?
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