#568: Adventures in Self-Publishing – An Invitation to Murder (2019) by A.G. Barnett
Confidence and competence are, I think, the two qualities I’d like an author to exhibit if they’re going to ask for money for their work. The confidence to know they’ve written something well, and the competence to be at least moderately schooled in things like continuity, how to use the language they’re writing in, and how to place and build ideas around their core structure.
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#567: The Men Who Explain Miracles – Episode 10.2: Partners in Crime, or: Some Personal Reflections on the Work of Agatha Christie
When is a podcast with a focus on impossible crimes not a podcast with a focus on impossible crimes? Well, frankly, today.
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#566: The Terror in the Fog (1938) by Norman Berrow
Bill Hamilton, having previously chased hashish smugglers and a werewolf (separately) around Spain, now finds himself in his homestead of Gibraltar contending with a “London particular” fog, three murdered men hanging from the rafters of an abandoned storehouse, and a mysteriously faceless nun intent on causing all manner of havoc. Yes, The Terror in the Fog (1938) is quite unmistakably a Norman Berrow novel — this mixture of superstition and cold, hard murder is Berrow’s bailiwick, and here are glimpses of the very fine novels he would go on to produce — and from early on it feels by far the most confident of his career to this point.
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#565: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Castle Mystery (2019) by Faith Martin [a.p.a. An Invisible Murder (2012) by Joyce Cato]
Another week, another debate brewing over precisely how “self-published” a book is when it’s been put out under the auspices of Joffe Books, who at least appear to be a bit more of a traditional setup than has featured in these AiSP before.
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#564: The Men Who Explain Miracles – Episode 10.1: The Impossible Crime Novels of Agatha Christie
With the self-imposed “every two months” deadline for episodes being a little difficult to maintain, it nevertheless gives me great pleasure to present to you today a new episode of our increasingly-occasional podcast The Men Who Explain Miracles.
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#563: The Rose in Darkness (1979) by Christianna Brand
I don’t think I’ve ever disliked the cast of a novel as much as I disliked the core group of The Rose in Darkness (1979) by Christianna Brand. Goddamn, what a bunch of self-centred, self-congratulatory, self-satisfied, smug, pretentious, vacuous, condescending, poseur, low-rent hipster prigs. You say ‘bohemian’, I say ‘unbearable’ — were people really like this in the Seventies? And, because Brand does her usual thing of telling you up front that there’s one victim and one killer, you know that once the body turns up you’re stuck with the rest of them until the end. Good heavens, there’s never a serial killer around when you need one.
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#562: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Leviathan’s Resting Place (2019) by DWaM
Otto Reylands, multi-millionaire, has been receiving threatening letters, as is the wont of multi-millionaires in fiction (and perhaps reality, I have no experience at either end). Letters accusing him of chicanery and deception. Letters accompanied by photos of a dead woman…
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#561: Thinking Too Precisely on th’ Event – Clued and Unclued Detective Fiction, or: The Active and the Passive Detective-Reader
The Invisible Event 