#1344: The Spiral Staircase, a.k.a. Some Must Watch (1933) by Ethel Lina White

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Thanks to the ongoing efforts of the wonderful British Library Crime Classics range, I have an improving impression of the work of Ethel Lina White — the excellent ‘Water Running Out’ (1927) was included in the Crimes of Cymru [ss] (2023) collection and The Wheel Spins (1936) was a superb little thriller which did well with its highly appealing setup. All of which saw me snap up a copy of The Spiral Staircase, a.k.a. Some Must Watch (1933) when one drifted into my orbit, and, well, this shows again how effective White can be with a small number of people in a restricted setting…even if, at times, she’d rather have them get together and talk over old ground instead of getting on with the story.

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#1341: Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife (2025) by Martin Edwards

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“[H]ow stressful can this game really be? A few nights in a peaceful hamlet at Christmas, trying to make sense of a puzzle? What could possibly go wrong?”. Well, an unseasonally heavy snowfall could maroon everyone, and then a murderer could start picking off the isolated denizens of the peaceful hamlet of Midwinter. But, if they can survive the slaughter, the six people who have been invited by the Midwinter Trust to take part in the competition, called Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, are unlikely to want to leave because the prize they can win is…well it’s fabulous, isn’t it? It must be. Although, now you come to mention it, what is the prize?

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#1340: Little Fictions – ‘The Eyes Have It’ (1964) by Randall Garrett

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Perhaps two decades a go, I read some, but not all, of the Lord Darcy series of stories by Randall Garrett, in which detection is augmented with magic. And I’ve been telling people they’re good ever since. So for Tuesdays this, and another as-yet-undetermined future, month let’s take this Fantasy Masterworks volume of the complete stories — 10 shorts, and the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) — and see how they stand up.

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#1338: The Black Angel (1943) by Cornell Woolrich

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It’s been over two years since I reviewed any Cornell Woolrich, which seems incredible when you consider how completely I loved his work when he first started appearing on The Invisible Event. But, well, behind the scenes I’ve struggled through some of his stuff — the doom-drenched but ooooooverlong The Black Alibi (1942) and the somewhat tedious, Francis Nevins-edited Night and Fear [ss] (2004) collection — and lost the name of action, so to speak. But you can’t keep a good fan down, and so it’s back to the novels and The Black Angel (1943), which interestingly finds a new way to explore themes and approaches that would seem to recur throughout Woolrich’s oeuvre.

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#1335: The Man Who Slept All Day (1942) by Craig Rice [a.p.a. by Michael Venning]

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Reading her novels chronologically, I’m moved to declare that 1942 was a big year for Craig Rice. Prior to then, she had written five fast-moving, wildly inventive mysteries featuring wisecracking lawyer John J. Malone and Jake and Helene Justus, but 1942 saw Rice diversify with (not necessarily in this order) a Malone novel in The Big Midget Murders (1942) that ramped up plot complexity, The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942) taking on a new setting with a more dim-bulb presence at its core, atmosphere overwhelming the slow-moving Telefair (1942) and now, with The Man Who Slept All Day (1942), long character-work taking over from plot mechanics so that you really do care about the people involved. That noise you hear is the stretching of some wings.

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