Amateur Detective
#388: Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery (1926) by Freeman Wills Crofts
I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive into another complex alibi problem so soon after Cut Throat (1932) by Christopher Bush. But if anyone can convince me of the joys of alibi-breaking it’s Freeman Wills Crofts, and so off I went in hope of some fiendish minutiae to get the brain cogitating with possibilities. As it happens, I need not have worried — there is no complex alibi-breaking here. Sure, there’s a grand mix of ratiocination and weighing the odds on the way to intelligent deductive work, but this is decidedly a ‘wrong man on the run’-style thriller before it’s a novel of routine. Were pithiness my forte, I’d probably make an ‘Alfred Hitchcrofts’ reference.
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#385: Cut Throat (1932) by Christopher Bush
Flour, eggs, sugar, butter. Mix them, put them in the oven, you get a cake. But there are cakes and there are cakes. Equally, books. Give me a baffling murder, the precise focus of which shifts again and again like the first two sections of John Dickson Carr’s The Arabian Nights Murder (1936), and stir in a Croftian alibi trick and I should be in heaven. Alas, this is one of the bad cakes — the sort of well-intentioned thing your seven year-old nephew bakes and you take two bites from out of politeness and then put down and hope no-one brings back to your attention. Christopher Bush has taken promising ingredients and cooked us a turgid mess.
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#381: Minor Felonies – Mondays Are Murder (2009) and Dead Funny (2009) by Tanya Landman
Tuesdays in March were dedicated to YA detective fiction from the Golden Age — just here on this blog, I mean, you didn’t miss a memo or anything — and Tuesdays in May will be YA detective fiction from the 21st century. First up are Tanya Landman’s first two Poppy Fields novels, Mondays Are Murder and Dead Funny (both 2009).
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#378: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 4
Good heavens, it’s practically the end of the month already, and so this is the final week of the reforming Tuesday Night Bloggers (we’ll be back, I’m sure) in their exploration of the great detectives of fiction.
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#375: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 3
Another week– where does the time go, eh? — another serving of reflections on the Great Detectives of Fiction from the blogosphere…
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#372: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 2
Another week, another set of posts from our GAD blogging collective, running down their own personal favourites of the great detectives of fiction.
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#369: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 1
The Tuesday Night Bloggers — an autonomous collective of GAD bloggers who unite around a common theme — have returned! To tie in with the release of The 100 Greatest Literary Detectives in a few weeks, a compendium to which our very own Kate Jackson has contributed an entry, everyone is picking and writing about their own favourite sleuths this month.
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#345: Golden Age Detection 101 – The Amateur Detective
Recently, scouting the periodicals of the British Library for stories lest I undertake a second Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums, I found a small pamphlet entitled ‘Everythynge I Know About Detectyve Fiction’ which appears to have been self-published in a single volume around 1925 in an act of vanity by the author Captain Sir Hugh J. Lee Boryng-Payne Q.C. A.B.V. (certainly, on taking it to the desk, it didn’t appear to be on the library’s catalogue, so you may search for it online in vain…).
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#316: Stand Back, Detective Novelist at Work in The Mystery of the Invisible Thief (1950) by Enid Blyton
The Invisible Event 