Where next for Theodore Roscoe’s tales of small own life in upstate New York? Well, how about some Suspense?
Continue reading#953: Little Fictions – Four Corners, Volume 1: ‘I Was the Kid with the Drum’ (1937) by Theodore Roscoe
#952: Verdict of Twelve – All the Fun of the Fair in Crime on the Coast (1954)
Another collaborative effort in the style of Behind the Screen (1930) and The Scoop (1931), with six authors each taking up the challenge of continuing this story, published in instalments in the News Chronicle in 1954.
Continue reading#951: Murder in the Basement (1932) by Anthony Berkeley
One of my very favourite detective fiction tropes is the Unidentified Corpse. It’s at the heart of my favourite E.C.R. Lorac book, one of my favourite Freeman Wills Crofts books, and as a mainstay of the work of R. Austin Freeman is put to wonderful use both traditional and inverted. Murder in the Basement (1932) by Anthony Berkeley also invents the Whowasdunin?, giving us a cast of characters from which the corpse will be produced, and not divulging the identity of the victim until the halfway point. Thankfully, given Berkeley’s tendency to commit to a thought experiment regardless of whether the book that comes out of it is any good, he’s also written an entertaining and very witty novel along the way.
#950: Little Fictions – Four Corners, Volume 1: ‘Barber, Barber, Shave a Pig’ (1937) by Theodore Roscoe
Another tales of small town Americana from Theodore Roscoe, his time focussing on the effects of a crime on one man’s standing in the tiny community of Four Corners, the fictional town in upstate New York
Continue reading#949: Death in Five Boxes – Murder Begins at Home in No Flowers by Request (1953)
The Detection Club — a membership-by-election dining club for detective fiction writers, whose origins and early days were traced so entertainingly by Martin Edwards in The Golden Age of Murder (2015) — has produced several collaborative efforts down the years, and it’s to one of those that we turn today.
Continue reading#948: The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe (1938) by Erle Stanley Gardner
When charged with republishing the work of someone as prolific as Erle Stanley Gardner, the chief difficulty must surely be where to begin and where — crucially — to stop. As a creator of memorable, compelling, easily-communicated, and complex protagonists the man perhaps has no equal, but as a plotter his loosey-goosey tendencies can sometimes get the better of him…a fact demonstrated no more clearly than in the wild variation represented by the eighty-six Perry Mason books published between 1933 and 1973. So the (thus-far) four titles in that series put out by the American Mystery Classics range make interesting reading.
#947: Little Fictions – Four Corners, Volume 1: ‘Frivolous Sal’ (1937) by Theodore Roscoe
Given how much classic (and modern!) crime and detective fiction relies on the concept of Othering — identifying the person who doesn’t ‘fit’ in a situation, and hoping guilt can be pinned on them — it’s interesting to see Theodore Roscoe employ the concept in the story of ‘Frivolous’ Clariselle Allders.
Continue reading#946: Law and Order – Ranking the First Fifteen Inspector French Novels (1924-36) by Freeman Wills Crofts
With the sixteenth to twenty-fourth novels by Freeman Wills Crofts to feature his series detective Chief Inspector Joseph French due to be republished between now and January 2023 (well, #18, Antidote to Venom (1938), is already available from the British Library) it occurred to me that people might be looking for advice about the first fifteen — all, incredibly, in print.
Continue reading#945: Man Overboard!, a.k.a. Cold-Blooded Murder (1936) by Freeman Wills Crofts
Today sees the republication of Found Floating (1937), the twentieth of Freeman Wills Crofts’ novels and the sixteenth to feature (Chief) Inspector Joseph French, the first of eight reprints due between now and January 2023. And so let us turn our attention to Man Overboard, a.k.a. Cold-Blooded Murder (1936) — the fifteenth French novel and final entry in the last set of Crofts reprints — in which a man gets on a ferry in Belfast and is no longer aboard when it arrives in Liverpool…so what happened to him between those two points? Alas, in answering that question Crofts has written what is for me his first dud in 19 books.
#944: Little Fictions – Four Corners, Volume 1: ‘He Took Richmond’ (1937) by Theodore Roscoe
I had intended to read and review the stories in Four Corners, Volume 1 (2015) — written for pulp story magazine Argosy between 1937 and 1941 — on Tuesdays last month, but was operating under a fatal misapprehension: that eponymous “Four” refers to the town, not the number of stories in the volume, of which there are five. Thankfully, August 2022 came to the rescue, and here we go,
Continue reading
