#687: Minor Felonies – Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries [ss] (1963): ‘The Mystery of the Man Who Evaporated’ by Robert Arthur
Having previously read two fabulous impossible crime stories by Robert Arthur, I was especially eager to see what he’d cooked up for this week’s tale.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 7: The Father Brown Stories of G.K. Chesterton [w’ John @ Countdown John’s Christie Journal]
This week on my Lockdown Podcast In GAD We Trust, the cream of G.K. Chesterton’s stories about his crime-solving Roman Catholic priest as selected by John who blogs at Countdown John’s Christie Journal.
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#685: The Murders in Praed Street (1928) by John Rhode
One evening, responding to a phone call from the local hospital requesting that he identify a man involved in an accident, Mr. James Tovey, Fruit and Vegetable Merchant on London’s Praed Street, discovers he’s the victim of a prank and that no such call was made by anyone at the hospital. On the short walk home, he encounters a group of men outside the local pub and…there endeth his story, for he is stabbed and dies shortly thereafter. With the group all claiming innocence, and talk of a scar-faced sailor seen in the vicinity, the event is put down to a senseless tragedy until circumstances link it to another death on the same stretch of road. And another. And another.
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#684: Minor Felonies – Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries [ss] (1963): ‘The Mystery of the Three Blind Mice’ by Robert Arthur
Last week we had the shortest mystery in this collection, this week it’s the longest.
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#683: “A terrible orgy of murder and crime, and it seems that we are not at the end of it yet.” – The Crimson Circle (1922) by Edgar Wallace
My TBR pile, like Norm Lindsay’s Magic Pudding, is an apparently self-aware, endlessly self-replicating source of nourishment that I will never, ever finish. I daren’t even let it out of my sight sometimes, because who knows what sort of nonsense it gets up to when I’m not looking?
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#682: In Whose Dim Shadow, a.k.a. The Tau Cross Mystery (1935) by J.J. Connington
In the comments of my review of The Sweepstake Murders (1931) by J.J. Connington, TomCat pointed out that the author’s sole impossible crime novel was among my recently-acquired bundle, and here we are. In Whose Dim Shadow, a.k.a. The Tau Cross Mystery (1935), however, begins with a shooting in an unlocked room in an unlocked flat that also has a set of footprints leading away from the open French windows and which forms the basis of the majority of the narrative. And a very entertaining narrative it is, too, only falling down when Connington shanghais pace for exposition, and struggling in the final straight due, in all likelihood, to external concerns.
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#681: Minor Felonies – Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries [ss] (1963): ‘The Mystery of the Seven Wrong Clocks’ by Robert Arthur
Another short conundrum from Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries (1963), which contains the following being covered this month:
1. ‘The Mystery of the Five Sinister Thefts’
2. ‘The Mystery of the Seven Wrong Clocks’
3. ‘The Mystery of the Three Blind Mice’
4. ‘The Mystery of the Man Who Evaporated’
5. ‘The Mystery of the Four Quarters’
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 6: Detective Fiction is Comedy [w’ Alasdair Beckett-King]
The Invisible Event 