Amateur Detective
#498: Little Fictions – The Uncollected Paul Halter: ‘The Gong of Doom’ (2010) and ‘The Man With the Face of Clay’ (2011) [trans. John Pugmire 2010/2012]
With Paul Halter’s debut novel The Fourth Door (1987) being the subject of my 500th post this coming weekend, it’s time to dive into two more of his short stories from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
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#496: The Beast Must Die (1938) by Nicholas Blake
“I am going to kill a man” — it must surely be the most famous opening line in the whole firmament of Golden Age detective fiction, and but for Sherlock Holmes and “the” woman I’d suggest the famousest opening line in all detection ever. When Aidan at Mysteries Ahoy! and I realised we were reading this near-contemporaneously, he kindly agreed to delay his review by a week that we might publish our thoughts as simultaneously as possible — I’ve not read his review as I write this, but I will by the time you’re reading it, and I am fascinated to find out how successfully he feels the game is played after that wonderful opening serve.
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#492: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Where’s the Beef? (2014) by Deb Pines
I thought it would be nice to mix things up in these Adventures in Self-Publishing with a gentle disappearance story. Little did I anticipate the red hot Scrabble action we’d get along the way.
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#490: It Howls at Night (1937) by Norman Berrow
The detective novel often requests that you, the reader, swallow some fairly difficult concepts in order to fully engage with it — that someone can organically devise the methods of murder and misdirection depicted within, for instance, or that the mechanical solutions sometimes put froward do actually work in the manner described. However, the delightfully creative Norman Berrow, in his werewolf-on-the-prowl novel It Howls at Night (1937), demands of you the greatest degree of forbearance I’ve yet encountered, a hurdle some may struggle to overcome, in requiring you to believe that a man would actually go by the name of ‘Pongo Slazenger’.
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#489: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Patricide (2016) by Kim Ekemar
Another Tuesday, another death in unfathomable circumstances from an author who sought a non-traditional route to press, this time from artist, photographer, and poet Kim Ekemar.
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#488: A Murder is Announced – Case for Eight Detectives in The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018) by Stuart Turton
For once, I, on my blog typically concerned with titles from some 60 to 80 years ago, am allowing external factors to influence me here. Not just in looking at a book published during my own lifetime (that happens not infrequently) but one that’s been in the news of late, too.
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#487: The Polferry Riddle, a.k.a. The Choice (1931) by Philip MacDonald
For now, like, the fourth time in my experience — and the second involving a book by Philip MacDonald — the Roland Lacourbe-curated list of 100 excellent impossible crime novels has disgorged a title which is not in any way an impossible crime. I’m still fully capab- (hang on, carry the one…then minus…yup, you’re good) fully capable of enjoying a book which is sans-impossibility, but I find it weird that a list compiled by such eminent heads includes so many books that don’t qualify. The simplicity of MacDonald’s own narratives should be a giveaway anyway, since he’s really not about the complexities or misdirection, sticking more to a simpler, thriller-tinged path.
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#483: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Locked Room Murder (2016) by Nancy McGovern
The Invisible Event 