You don’t write as much as Edward D. Hoch without hitting the bull’s-eye a few times, so I’m finally doing what I should have done all along and starting the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series from the beginning, with this first collection, Diagnosis: Impossible (2000), a tranche of 12 stories initially published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine between 1974 and 1978.
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I’m not entirely sure where Casual Slaughters (1935) by James Quince first came to my attention, but it might have been this list of 150 largely very good detective novels, compiled by Curtis Evans back in 2010. And since Curtis and I recently agreed about The Dead Man’s Knock (1958) by John Dickson Carr, and since Oreon Books recently reprinted Casual Slaughters and I bought a copy while visiting at the excellent Bodies in the Bookshop in Cambridge, well, the time seemed ripe to pull it out of my TBR to see how I fare. And, as if I needed more convincing, Quince’s title is from Hamlet, this blog takes its name from Hamlet…seriously, could the universe be aligning more?
I have been known to be something of an impatient reader. In the first half of this decade, I read 713 books — an average of 2.74 a week — all while maintaining the physique of a Greek god, fighting crime at night dressed as a badger, holding down a full time job as a lawyer for the downtrodden, and winning the last six series of Mastermind in a raft of ingenious disguises.
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In my very first post on this blog I shared the belief that G.K. Chesterton’s writing is “too verbose”, and I’ll confess that I’ve found him hard to enjoy in the past. But reading some stories with Countdown John got me thinking that maybe I could suffer to give him another go, and so here, eventually, we are.
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Last year my book club picked our favourite 1930s mysteries, and earlier this year we moved on a decade and each selected a top 10 for the 1940s. So, well, here’s mine.
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The first of (so far…) two volumes of William Brittain’s short fiction from Crippen & Landru, The Man Who Read Mysteries (2018) contains the eleven stories written under the non-series ‘The X Who Read [Author Name]’ titles and seven selections from editor Josh Pachter of the tales featuring crime-solving high school science teacher Leonard Strang.
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A posthumous collection occasionally wrong billed as “Twenty-six stories featuring Gervase Fen” (there should really be, at least, a comma after ‘stories’, since series detective Fen isn’t in all of them), Fen Country (1979) was, I believe, the first collection of Edmund Crispin’s short fiction I read. And now I’m back, to get some thoughts on record.
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Ordinarily, I go looking for modern impossible crime novels, under the guise of filtering out something worthwhile for TomCat to try. But the Dog Sitter Detective Plays Dead (2025) by Antony Johnston was, perhaps appropriately, fetched and brought to me.
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People will tell you that I don’t like the Brooks U. Banner stories of Joseph Commings. And, well, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
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Among the five books I have reread for Thursday reviews this January, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), the debut of the composer Bruce Montgomery under the name Edmund Crispin, is unique in that I wasn’t completely sure I could remember the guilty party. The method by which our corpse finds itself shot in a room to which there was no access and no open windows through which a bullet could be fired was dimly in my brain somewhere, but I had the very enjoyable experience of rereading something and being able to treat it as a genuine problem…trying to work out if my suspicions came from dim remembrance of the solution or were merely smelly fish. So that was fun.
