#533: “Magicians have an advantage; they never have to reveal the trick” – An Interview with James Scott Byrnside

June 1, 2019June 6, 2019 / JJ / 9 Comments

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.

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#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

May 18, 2019November 26, 2025 / JJ / 54 Comments

Slowly, slowly I work my way through the Otto Penzler-edited Woo Whatta Lotta Locked Room Mysteries (2014) — it’s not really a convenient size to dip into — and, since my chronological reading of Ellery Queen is going so well, it seemed time to take on this impossible disappearance story. Or so I thought…

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#497: Plus ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose dans L’onzieme Petit Negre (1977) de Jacquemard-Sénécal [trans. Gordon Latta 1979]

February 9, 2019February 8, 2019 / JJ / 18 Comments

For a book set against the backdrop of a play based on one of Agatha Christie’s most famous works, and featuring a detective the front flap tells us is “unparalleled even by Hercule Poirot”, there’s more than a passing whiff of Ngaio Marsh about this one.

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#485: “What I say is, is it wise or necessary to rake up things?” – Memory as Evidence in Elephants Can Remember (1972) by Agatha Christie

January 12, 2019January 6, 2019 / JJ / 42 Comments

You’ve heard of Elephants Can Remember (1972): it’s the final time Hercule Poirot investigates a case at Agatha Christie’s direction, written in the final stretch of her career when everything she did was awful and without merit. Not even I could find something positive to say about it…could I?

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#464: The Wrong Stuff – Patience and the Detective Story via Station (2008) by Johanna Stokes and Leno Carvalho

November 24, 2018November 23, 2018 / JJ / 10 Comments

I was lured into Station by its format as much as its premise: a graphic novel telling a tale of murder on the International Space Station.

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#453: The Criminous Alphabet – A is for…Audience

October 30, 2018March 16, 2020 / JJ / 34 Comments

There’s a philosophical debate in Mathematics about whether mathematics itself pre-exists and is simply discovered as we progress into new areas or whether it is created as we go along and so each new discovery is less about having discovered something and more about having created it.

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#450: The Criminous Alphabet – A is for…Anticlimax

October 23, 2018March 16, 2020 / JJ / 22 Comments

Noah Stewart, one of the most knowledgable people currently blogging on the subject of GAD, once said that Romance and Detection are the two genres wherein the ending is never in doubt before you’ve even read the first page (I’m paraphrasing, of course — Noah would never put anything that pompously).

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#447: The Criminous Alphabet – A is for…Alibi [Part 2 of 2]

October 16, 2018October 15, 2018 / JJ / 3 Comments

Last week I talked — at great length — about the alibi in crime and detective fiction as utilised by the criminal working alone. This week, I’ll hopefully find as much (or, depending on your feelings about last week’s post, maybe less) to say where more than one criminal is involved, and then if there’s time I’ll diverge into crimes where there is no alibi.

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#440: The Hollow Case of the Distressed Lady in A Different Kind of Evil (2018) by Andrew Wilson

September 29, 2018September 21, 2018 / JJ / 14 Comments

Andrew Wilson’s first novel featuring Agatha Christie, A Talent for Murder (2017), met with positive reviews but seemed rather more Highsmithian than detection in concept (perhaps unsurprising, as Wilson has written a biography of Patricia Highsmith) and so I passed it over. And then John Norris — patron saint of the obscure, the forgotten, and the damned-near impossible-to-find — posted this rave review of the follow-up, A Different Kind of Evil (2018), and definitely caught my interest.

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#436: “I am in my own way an emissary of justice” – A Long Goodbye to Aunt Jane in Nemesis (1971) by Agatha Christie

September 15, 2018March 16, 2026 / JJ / 40 Comments

After 41 years, 12 novels, and 20 short stories, Nemesis (1971) represents the end of the road for Agatha Christie and her spinster detective Miss Jane Marple. Marple herself would survive her creator in the posthumously-published Sleeping Murder (1976), but since that was written decades prior — and the collection Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979) consists of uncollected stories from much earlier in Christie’s career — this the final time they would have together.

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