Amateur Detective

#1186: A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering (2024) by Andrew Hunter Murray

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Beginners Guide to Breaking and Entering

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Shirley Ballas. Richard Coles. Susie Dent. Richard Osman. Robert Rinder.  These days, if you want to publish a crime novel, it clearly helps to be a UK media personality.  And why not?  Publishing’s an uncertain business, and an existing following should hopefully convert into sales — good luck to them, I say. Add to the above journalist, podcaster, TV-version-of-his-podcaster Andrew Hunter Murray, whose third novel, A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering (2024), finds him crossing into the sort of genre territory that captures my attention. And while not perhaps leaning as hard into logical reasoning as I’d prefer, there’s much here to enjoy.

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#1180: The Devil’s Flute Murders (1953) by Seishi Yokomizo [trans. Jim Rion 2023]

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Devil's Flute Murders

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After what felt like a run of fairly light reading, I found myself in the mood for something a little denser, and boy does The Devil’s Flute Murders (1953), the fifth title by Seishi Yokomizo to be published in English by Pushkin Vertigo, deliver on that front. We start with a mass poisoning in a jewellery store, then move onto the disappearance of a member of the nobility who turns up dead…only for his family to doubt his demise and pull amateur genius detective Kosuke Kindaichi into a superbly atmospheric divining ceremony that culminates in a gruesome locked room murder. Yup, the opening third of this book is, pleasingly, something of a whirligig.

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#1169: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #22: Murder by Candlelight (2024) by Faith Martin

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I really rather enjoyed Faith Martin’s impossible crime novel The Castle Mystery (2019) when I read it back in 2019, so stumbling over a new hardback by her at my local library — and learning that Murder by Candlelight (2024) features a murdered body discovered in a sealed room — was a very pleasant surprise.

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#1168: Patrick Butler for the Defence (1956) by John Dickson Carr

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Patrick Butler for the Defence

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It is perhaps fitting — though, I assure you, completely accidental — that a locked room murder in a novel by John Dickson Carr, doyen of the apparently undoable nevertheless rationally explained, is the focus of the 500th post on this blog to be tagged “impossible crimes“.  Sure, upon realising this I could have chosen one of Carr’s acknowledged masterpieces to reread, but I enjoyed the divisive barrister Patrick Butler, K.C. at first encounter, and was intrigued to see how the character fared without the support of Carr’s frequent and best sleuth, Dr. Gideon Fell. And, having given up on the two Carr novels I tried to read prior to this, I’m pleased to report that I enjoyed a fair amount of what Carr did here.

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#1140: The Rose of Death (1934) by Walter S. Masterman

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Rose of Death

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An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman meet at university, where they form a club with the intention of talking about unsolved crimes. Several years later, in the manner of these undertakings in fiction, they stumble upon a fresh case and decide to take it on…only to realise that they’re mixed up in something Much Bigger Than They Imagined. Fortunately, Hugh Marsden is the ward of legendary Scotland Yard man Sir Arthur Sinclair (ret’d.) and they’re able to enlist that great personage in their predicament. Less fortunately, Sinclair has been ill for some years now, and his powers appear to be on the wane. And danger circles ever-closer…

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#1132: The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943) by Erle Stanley Gardner

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Case of the Smoking Chimney

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While you’ve hopefully been enjoying the regular reviews on The Invisible Event, I’ve been sweating bullets over the fact that I hit a seeming unpassable patch of reader’s block and haven’t read anything for nearly a month. Then Brad suggested that some Erle Stanley Gardner might help me out as it has done recently for him and, well, here we are. Mistakenly believing The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943) to be the first of Gardner’s two novels featuring the disreputable Gramps Wiggins I picked it up and spent a very happy day in its pages, and while it reaffirmed much of what I like about Gardner’s writing the book also bears many of the man’s flaws.

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#1070: Twice Round the Clock (1935) by Billie Houston

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Twice Round the Clock

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The core framing of Billie Houston’s sole crime novel Twice Round the Clock (1935) — a murdered man discovered in the opening scene, before we jump back in time twelve hours and see events that lead up to the murder, then the twelve hours that follow the discovery — is hardly new, but the book is written with a fresh eye, and such clear lines in its character and narrative that it’s difficult not to enjoy. Don’t come for the detection or clues, which are scanty, but those of you who enjoyed Death of Anton (1936) by Alan Melville, another British Library Crime Classic, will find this equally to your liking for its clear setting, distinct characters, and occasionally unusual ideas.

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#1052: The Mysterious Mr. Badman (1934) by W.F. Harvey

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Mysterious Mr Badman

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The expertly-curated British Library Crime Classics series continues to diversify with crowd-pleasing reissues of Anthony Berkeley, Christianna Brand, and John Dickson Carr, never-heard-of-em delights like Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls and Death of Anton (1936) by Alan Melville, and stirring in a Freeman Wills Crofts or a few E.C.R. Loracs along the way.  And The Mysterious Mr. Badman (1934) by W.F. Harvey definitely falls into the middle category, because ask 100 people if they’d heard of it before this reissue and maybe three would say they had, two of whom would be lying to look cool. But a delight it is, and welcome it most certainly is.

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