Amateur Detective
#691: Off the Record (2010) by Dolores Gordon-Smith
You know the drill: two men in a meeting, a shot rings out, one of them is found with a bullet in him, the other holding the gun that fired it. Stir in a “But he was already dead when I got here!” and simmer until an associate of an-amateur-sleuth-with-a-friend-in-the-police asks them to get involved (usually for personal reasons). That Off the Record (2010) follows this recipe so perfectly is a credit to how perceptively Dolores Gordon-Smith has assimilated the Golden Age detective novel, because never does it feel just like we’re jumping through hoops for the sake of it. The setup is familiar, but never less than engagingly handled.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 7: The Father Brown Stories of G.K. Chesterton [w’ John @ Countdown John’s Christie Journal]
This week on my Lockdown Podcast In GAD We Trust, the cream of G.K. Chesterton’s stories about his crime-solving Roman Catholic priest as selected by John who blogs at Countdown John’s Christie Journal.
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#685: The Murders in Praed Street (1928) by John Rhode
One evening, responding to a phone call from the local hospital requesting that he identify a man involved in an accident, Mr. James Tovey, Fruit and Vegetable Merchant on London’s Praed Street, discovers he’s the victim of a prank and that no such call was made by anyone at the hospital. On the short walk home, he encounters a group of men outside the local pub and…there endeth his story, for he is stabbed and dies shortly thereafter. With the group all claiming innocence, and talk of a scar-faced sailor seen in the vicinity, the event is put down to a senseless tragedy until circumstances link it to another death on the same stretch of road. And another. And another.
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#683: “A terrible orgy of murder and crime, and it seems that we are not at the end of it yet” – The Crimson Circle (1922) by Edgar Wallace
My TBR pile, like Norm Lindsay’s Magic Pudding, is an apparently self-aware, endlessly self-replicating source of nourishment that I will never, ever finish. I daren’t even let it out of my sight sometimes, because who knows what sort of nonsense it gets up to when I’m not looking?
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#681: Minor Felonies – Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries [ss] (1963): ‘The Mystery of the Seven Wrong Clocks’ by Robert Arthur
Another short conundrum from Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries (1963), which contains the following being covered this month:
1. ‘The Mystery of the Five Sinister Thefts’
2. ‘The Mystery of the Seven Wrong Clocks’
3. ‘The Mystery of the Three Blind Mice’
4. ‘The Mystery of the Man Who Evaporated’
5. ‘The Mystery of the Four Quarters’
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 6: Detective Fiction is Comedy [w’ Alasdair Beckett-King]
It’s long been a tenet of mine that detective fiction and comedy have a great deal in common, and to pursue that this week via the medium of podcasting I’ve enlisted the help of comedian Alasdair Beckett-King.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 5: GAD in the Time of COVID-19 [w’ Brad @ AhSweetMysteryBlog]
As the COVID-19 pandemic rolls into its 348th week, Brad from AhSweetMysteryBlog is here with some salutary advice.
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#672: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder by Magic (2017) by Paul Tomlinson
Typical, eh? You wait years for a blog to talk about magic, and then suddenly three posts come along at once: the most recent In GAD We Trust episode with John Norris, and two self-published impossible crime stories — one this week, and one next. Sure, that’s stretching the definition of “at once” to an Orwellian degree, but that’s how I apparently roll.
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#671: “At this point, everything seems too far-fetched to be taken seriously…” – The Invisible Circle (1996) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2014]
