Perhaps April Fool’s Day isn’t the best scheduling of this post, but the recent experience of dragging my way through Helen Vardon’s Confession (1922) by R. Austin Freeman got me thinking about the literary detectives I’d follow to hell and back, and I figured that it might be worth expanding upon.
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Epitaph for a Spy (1938) places me at the centre of a Venn diagram of two things I heartily dislike — the everyman espionage fiction of John le Carre, and novels whose protagonists cluelessly accidentally their way along — and so I shouldn’t exactly be surprised that these two wrongs have failed to combine to produce something I would enjoy. This story of languages teacher Josef Vadassy strong-armed into helping identify a spy while on holiday at an exclusive French pension is, in fact, riddled with just about every trope and facet of genre fiction that I dislike, and it’s difficult to imagine Eric Ambler’s intent in writing such a book. But, I get ahead of myself…
We started back in August, with readers of this blog nominating sleuths of their choosing to be put into a series of gladiatorial head-to-heads that would result in an overall favourite from detective fiction’s Golden Age, and finally, in January, we have our winner.
Continue readingWe approach the sharp end of things now, with 64 names reduced now to a mere eight, and only three rounds of voting before the legally-binding World’s Favourite Golden Age Sleuth is crowned.
Continue readingAnd then there were 32 — the first round of this vote to find the most popular sleuth of detective fiction’s Golden Age having whittled the original 64 names down to half that number, and the votes available for one week from today due to halve it again. So, who survived and who is out of the running?
Continue readingRight, you probably know the drill by now: 100+ sleuths nominated, top 64 chosen, the top half of 32 already voted on…today you’re voting on the bottom half of the first round.
Continue readingOver one hundred names were nominated. The top 64 have been sifted. Today we begin the process of finding the favourite sleuth of detective fiction’s Golden Age (precise dates pending, but we’re saying 1920-45).
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The Invisible Event 