#647: Spoiler Warning 13 – The Box Office Murders, a.k.a. The Purple Sickle Murders (1929) by Freeman Wills Crofts
#646: The D.A. Takes a Chance (1948) by Erle Stanley Gardner
I’ve always thought of 1950 as a watermark year in the career of Erle Stanley Gardner. It’s arguably the point at which prevailing literary trends started to diverge meaningfully from the style of writing Gardner had staked out for himself. Post-1950 his Perry Mason series is a catalogue of steadily-diminishing returns, being somewhat preserved in aspic in its early-1930s incarnation, and the escapades of Donald Lam and Bertha Cool are saved only by Gardner’s many talents in not allowing that series to ever be easily pigeonholed. But for me the most compelling evidence that 1950 was meaningful for ESG is how Doug Selby never saw the light of day again after 1949.
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#645: Minor Felonies – Agatha Oddly: The Secret Key (2018) by Lena Jones
In the early 1900s, Edward Stratemeyer devised the Stratemeyer Syndicate of children’s books, where multiple volumes of the same series could be written by various authors and published under a common nom de plume. Two of its more famous alumni were The Hardy Boys by ‘Franklin W. Dixon’ and the Nancy Drew mysteries by ‘Carolyn Keene’.
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#644: A Hundred Thousand Dragons (2010) by Dolores Gordon-Smith
When Jack Haldean encounters Durant Craig in the lounge at Claridge’s hotel, the latter apparently carries a grievance from their war days and offers up a volley of abuse before storming out. Haldean refuses to disclose the reason for Craig’s outburst — offering only that “I let him down rather badly once…I deserve it” — and instead seems keen to forget the meeting. When a mysterious car accident during a fancy dress party raises the possibility of murder, it’s not long before Halden and Superintendent Ashley find themselves investigating a menage that involves one Durant Craig…and so it seems that Jack Haldean has a reckoning with the misdeeds of his past.
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#643: Minor Felonies – Waste of Space (2018) by Stuart Gibbs
I’ve mentioned before how I grew up reading a lot of SF — Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula Le Guin, Larry Niven, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith — and how certain authors like Philip K. Dick, Sheri S. Tepper, and Connie Willis still delight me in my dotage.
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#642: Who Would Fardels Bear to Grunt and Sweat Under a Weary Life…? – On the Subtle Art of Knowing When Not to Read a Book
I am here entirely by choice (blogging, I mean — I don’t wish to give the impression that I summoned myself into existence through an act of will), because I love books, and I love writing, reading, and talking about books. But sometimes that gets tested.
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#641: Killed on the Rocks (1990) by William L. DeAndrea
The brain works in funny ways. TomCat has been a champion of Killed on the Rocks (1990), the sixth novel to feature William L. DeAndrea’s semi-amateur sleuth Matt Cobb, for as long as I can remember. I learned of this book from TC’s list of favourite impossible crime novels, and was delighted to find a copy about 16 months ago, but it would have sat on my shelves for a long time yet — because, dude, my TBR is haunting — had I not learned, quite by accident, that DeAndrea himself died at the tragically tender age of 44. I can’t explain the logic, but I suddenly had the urge to read this, and the desire to enjoy it…and now I’ve done both.
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#640: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Missing Necklace (1947) by Enid Blyton
Here we go again, with Fatty, Pip, Bets, Larry, and Daisy (and Buster, of course) up against Mr. Goon in the race to solve yet another mystery. And yet for all its familiar elements, change is afoot…
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#639: “Nothing is so sad as the devastation wrought by age” – Going Out in Style(s) with Curtain (1975) by Agatha Christie
The Invisible Event 