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.
Continue readingAnthony Boucher
#1220: “About ghosts in particular he was a blatant and contemptuous sceptic.” – Wicked Spirits [ss] (2024) ed. Tony Medawar
Let’s take a moment to reflect on what Tony Medawar has done in recent years for GAD fans, with Wicked Spirits (2024) being the eighth collection of lost, forgotten, and so-rare-they-doubt-their-own-existence stories by GAD luminaries Medawar has edited under the …from the Library label. Whether we get any more after this or not, and I sincerely hope we do, it’s a wonderful body of work, and only the tip of an iceberg of effort he has been putting in for decades now.
Continue reading#1000: A Locked Room Library – One Hundred Recommended Books
In the back of my mind when I started The Invisible Event was the idea that exactly half of what I’d post about would feature impossible crimes, locked room mysteries, and/or miracle problems — and although this proportion started an irreversible slide after the first 500 or so posts, the impossible crime remains my first love.
Continue reading#929: Little Fictions – ‘A Matter of Scholarship’ (1955), ‘The Ultimate Clue’ (1960), and ‘The Anomaly of the Empty Man’ (1952) by Anthony Boucher
A slight cheat this week — the final two stories by Anthony Boucher from the collection Exeunt Murderers [ss] (1983), and then, so that we have three stories again this week, the Holmes pastiche ‘The Anomaly of the Empty Man’ (1952) as listed in Adey.
Continue reading#926: Little Fictions – ‘The Retired Hangman’ (1947), ‘The Smoke-Filled Locked Room’ (1950), and ‘The Statement of Jerry Malloy’ (1955) by Anthony Boucher
Another Tuesday, another triumvirate of stories from the Exeunt Murderers [ss] (1983) anthology of short crime fiction by Anthony Boucher.
Continue reading#920: Little Fictions – ‘Threnody’ (1936), ‘Design for Dying’ (1941), and ‘Mystery for Christmas’ (1943) by Anthony Boucher
Having previously written about the Nick Noble stories and Sister Ursula stories by Anthony Boucher collected in Exeunt Murderers [ss] (1983), I turn my attention for Tuesdays this month to the remaining, non-series works in that volume.
Continue reading#919: “Tonight, in this house, is there going to be another killing?” – Bodies from the Library 5 [ss] (2022) ed. Tony Medawar
Another year, another collection of forgotten or unknown tales from the luminaries of detective fiction’s Golden Age brought to us by the tireless efforts of Tony Medawar. So how does Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) stack up?
Continue reading#901: “Killing? Who said anything about killing?” – Future Crimes: Mysteries and Detection Through Time and Space [ss] (2021) ed. Mike Ashley
Mike Ashley, surely the world’s hardest-working editor of short story collections, has combined two of my loves with Future Crimes (2021): detective fiction and SF. As a fan of crossover mysteries, this seems tailor-made for me, and I have Countdown John to thank for bringing it to my attention. So, how does it stack up?
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