#534: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Opening Night Murders (2019) by James Scott Byrnside
I started 2019 on The Invisible Event by sharing the wonderful news that Goodnight Irene (2018) by James Scott Byrnside was a modern impossible crime novel we had legitimate reason to get excited about. And, excitingly, the end of that book promised a follow-up — titled Nemesis at the time — in 2019. And, one title-change later, no doubt on account of some has-been getting there first, here we are.
Continue reading
#533: “Magicians have an advantage; they never have to reveal the trick” – An Interview with James Scott Byrnside
Back in December 2015 I read and reviewed Matt Ingwalson’s first two self-published Owl and Raccoon novellas and, impressed with their quality, undertook what has since become my Adventures in Self-Publishing in which I work through impossible crime fiction following a non-trad route to its audience.
Continue reading
#532: Murder Among the Angells (1932) by Roger Scarlett
TomCat has been urging me to read this fourth novel from Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page’s ‘Roger Scarlett’ nom de plume for a while now, not least on account of our shared enthusiasm for impossible crimes. But I’m a stickler for my Ways and so have worked my way to it chronologically, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing the first three novels improve in style, scope, scheme, and substance from book to book. Here again, then, is another murder amidst a tightly-packed coterie of suspects in one of Boston’s mansions, with again enough cross-purposes, desires, and hidden intentions to make any one of them a killer…so whodunnit?
Continue reading
#531: Going Home – Black & Blue (1997) by Ian Rankin
Since four Tuesdays in the month only allow me four books as part of this Going Home series, today we finish the current run. But I’ve enjoyed rereading these books and will doubtless return to this concept at some future point.
Continue reading
#530: Serving Up a, uhm, Verger’s, er, Breakfast – The Montague Egg Stories of Dorothy L. Sayers (1933-36)
Dorothy Leigh Sayers is undoubtedly one of the most influential and enduring writers to emerge from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction — as a founding member of the Detection Club and the creator of one of last century’s best known amateur sleuths she was in at the blood of the formulation of GAD and has remained hugely popular ever since.
Continue reading
#529: Down Among the Dead Men, a.k.a. The Sunken Sailor (1961) by Patricia Moyes
I don’t think anyone would doubt that I’m out of my stated era of the Golden Age reviewing a book from 1961, and there isn’t even an impossibility in this one to justify it on those grounds. But Patricia Moyes’ debut Dead Men Don’t Ski (1959) was clothed in the fashions of GAD, and the series bears further investigation for that alone. This second novel is afflicted a little by the narrative periphrasis that betokens later-era crime writing — chapter one should be called ‘Here’s the Cast’ and chapter two ‘Sure, I Understand Sailing, But I Don’t Know How to Communicate It (Glossary of Terms)’ — but, once past that, things improve significantly.
Continue reading
#528: Going Home – Blood Work (1998) by Michael Connelly
Another week, another look at a book which put me on the path to the classic detection obsession which occupies my every waking moment.
Continue reading
#527: Plotting the Perfect Crime – Potential and Pay-Off via The House of Haunts, a.k.a. The Lamp of God (1935) by Ellery Queen
