A nice bit of crossover here, with a juvenile mystery that’s also a self-published impossible crime novel easing the transition from Minor Felonies this month to another batch of Adventures in Self-Publishing in November.
Continue reading
Seventeen scenarios of skulduggery, stealing, and slaughter in the British Library Crime Classics range, all centred on London, the finest city on god’s green Earth, and selected by the ne plus ultra of classic crime appreciation, Martin Edwards.
Continue reading
Waking from a dream in which she was strangling her attractive new neighbour Lindy, Rosamund Fielding is suddenly confronted by her husband Geoffrey bearing the breathless news that Lindy has disappeared. Is there, then, anything in the all-too-vivid nightmare Rosamund was just having? And exactly how, given their long devotion and many shared perspectives, could someone like Lindy come between the Fieldings in so short a time and thus inspire such jealousy and hatred in the normally placid Rosamund? It is to the book’s credit that Celia Fremlin chooses to devote the first half of The Jealous One (1965) to that second question.
While it’s only the second book I’ve read in the Screech Owl series, Death Down Under (2001) by Roy MacGregor is in fact the fifteenth entry, and continues the tonal dissonance from my first encounter.
Continue reading
In my online book club, discussion turns from time to time to our favourite GAD novels of a particular decade. Having done the 1930s and the 1940s, we turned to the 1920s. And, since there’s an expectation of Agatha Christie being in the mix when discussing favourite GAD titles, I thought I’d return to what I remember to be my favourite from her first decade, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929).
Continue reading
Official Case #13 for the Cool & Lam Detective Agency, Top of the Heap (1952) finds A.A. Fair, nom de plume of Erle Stanley Gardner, on slick-but-unmemorable form — mixing ingredients in a way that is at once comfortably familiar for this series yet tries to ring a few changes at the same time. And while it’s certainly not a bad book, for this reader — an avowed fan of Gardner and Fair both — it all sort of fell apart in the closing stages in which so much surmise is piled up that it’s to be wondered whether some sort of meta-textual commentary on the concept of ‘solving’ a case is being offered. It’s not, but, wow, is Donald Lam ever out on a limb or five here, and it shows.
For the restraint alone in not calling this dog-as-detective story an ‘im-paw-sible crime’, this 14th entry in the Sebastian (Super Sleuth) series by Mary Blount Christian deserves checking out.
Continue reading
While I wasn’t entirely sure what the focus of this blog would be when I started it — I knew there would be impossible crimes, but had no idea otherwise — I’d have been surprised if you told me I’d end up doing so much reading of and writing about mysteries for 9 to 12 year-olds.
Continue reading
I’ll level with you: I’d been kind of dreading having to reread Case without a Corpse (1937), Leo Bruce’s second novel to feature the blunt-but-far-from-dense Sergeant William Beef. Memory told me that the novel was over-long, with a large proportion of it spent on an almost entirely pointless amount of investigation that any sensible reader would know is wasted effort because (rot13 for spoilers, if you’ve never read a book before) boivbhfyl Orrs unf gb or gur bar gb cebivqr gur pbeerpg fbyhgvba ng gur raq. And in rereading it for the first time in about 15 years I’ve discovered that, once again, my memory has been a little unkind, and the book holds up far better than anticipated.
Having fared wonderfully with Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers (and Dog), and faring as I am less well with the first three so-called ‘R’ Mysteries I’ve read so far, I was intrigued to see mentioned online that one of the Secret Seven novels was more of a clue-based mystery than its brethren…and so to the appropriately(?)-named Secret Seven Mystery (1957) does my attention turn.
Continue reading
The Invisible Event 