#1249: Nine Times Nine (1940) by Anthony Boucher [a.p.a. by H.H. Holmes]

Nine Times Nine

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“A man is shot in a room from which, apparently, no one could have made an exit. Now what’s the first rational possibility that strikes you?”.  It is the shooting of Wolfe Harrigan which Detective Lieutenant Terrence Marshall must solve: rationalist and exposure of religious chicanery Harrigan having apparently been shot by Ahasver, the yellow robe-wearing, centuries-old Wandering Jew who leads the Children of Light church in Los Angeles…and was on stage at the time of said shooting. And when the “rankly fantastic notion of a secret passageway” in Harrigan’s study is dismissed, what possible explanation can there be? Men don’t just vanish into thin air…

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#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.

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#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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