I’m as surprised as you to see a new episode of my In GAD We Trust podcast, especially as I said on Thursday that there was unlikely to be one this weekend — well, okay, perhaps a I’m little less surprised than you, since I (sort of) planned, recorded, and (sort of) edited this, but you get the idea. However, on Thursday everything (sort of) came together and I was able to record this almost in one take and so here we are.
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Approximately five years ago, powered by a combination of ego and ignorance, I set about trying get Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe reprinted, based on its reputation as a cracker and its infuriating unavailability. To my frank surprise I succeeded, and it — and Roscoe’s Second World War-predicting I’ll Grind Their Bones (1936) — was republished by Bold Venture Press in 2017. Rereading it recently, it seemed due a reappraisal — well, an appraisal, really — since I edited the book without any notion of whether it was any good, and was too fixated on matters typographical to focus all that intently on, like, the plot and stuff.
I have read some dull books of late, but The Mystery of the Grinning Tiger (1956), the eleventh entry in Beryl and Sam Epstein’s series featuring teenage sleuths Ken Holt and Sandy Allen, might be the dullest yet.
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I can’t believe that there is a GAD enthusiast who doesn’t look forward to the annual Bodies from the Library collections so expertly curated by Tony Medawar. In bringing to public awareness some of the forgotten, neglected, or simply unknown stories that the great and the good of the form produced, these collections have become a source of great excitement, and a must-read for even the most ardent student of the Golden Age.
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“Please. Come quickly. Please. I’ve killed my husband.” — these words awaken the holidaying Mordecai Tremaine as he dozes on the beach below the clifftop holiday home of Helen Carthallow and her artist husband Adrian. More worryingly, the words are spoken by Helen herself and, accompanying her over the footbridge that is the house’s only connection to the mainland, Tremaine finds Adrian shot in the head and Helen insisting it’s all the result of a bit of playfulness gone very, very wrong. All this happening in the opening chapter of So Pretty a Problem (1950) by Francis Duncan seemed to bode well for an incident-packed puzzle plot…and then, well.
Where does Inspiration stop and Creativity, or its bastard twin Plagiarism, begin? This question is too deep for a review of a book aimed at 12 year-olds — and, indeed, for this blog in general — but it lingers around the edge of a lot of fiction simply because of the number of times recognisable real life events have been folded into entertainment (or, indeed, vice versa).
Continue readingGutsy of me to suggest, on my site dedicated to the discussion of Golden Age detective fiction, that a lot of the terminology used to talk about these stories is incorrect, eh? Well, thankfully I’m not the one trying to convince you; that job falls to Mr. Scott K. Ratner.
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Elderly mining magnate Michael Carmichael has died, leaving behind one of the great Terrible Wills of Fiction in which money is bequeathed to various relatives in reparation for indignities endured on his behalf or at his hands. But the heirs so-named, gathered in Carmichael’s home as directed in his will, not only deny these claims but also can’t seem to agree on who the man was to each of them — uncle, great-uncle, maybe a cousin of some hue or stripe — and investigator Mary Carner, brought along by pulchitrudinous shopgirl Veronica Carmichael, suspects that something fishy is going on. And then rising flood waters force everyone to stay the night. Cue chaos.
Another hols has rolled around — it’s Chriiiiiiiistmas — and the Five Find-Outers have all been laid up with colds and are worried that there might not be a mystery for them to solve before their impending return to their schools. And there isn’t, the end.
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A few weeks ago, when Shedunnit‘s Caroline Crampton and I discussed Watsons in fiction, she mentioned Agatha Christie’s England (2021), a project she had worked on for Herb Lester Associates mapping the locations of Agatha Christie’s UK-set mysteries. And then the lovely people at Herb Lester got in touch to ask if I’d like a copy, and here we are.
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