#1035: “Our guest has a problem and I direct him to favour us with it.” – Tales of the Black Widowers [ss] (1974) by Isaac Asimov

“Twelve mystery masterpieces by the maestro” promises the back cover of Tales of the Black Widowers (1974), the first collection featuring Isaac Asimov’s puzzle-solving dining club, and given that Asimov says in the introduction that his “detective ideal is Hercule Poirot and his little gray cells” it seems like it might not be an empty promise…

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#865: There Is Nothing Either Good or Bad, But Thinking Makes It So – Examining the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones List

If you’ve met me, firstly I apologise, and secondly it’ll come as no surprise that I have a tendency to ruminate on that which many others pass over without so much as a backward glance. Previously this resulted in me writing something in the region of 25,000 words on the Knox Decalogue, and today I’m going to turn my eye upon the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list. Prepare thyself…

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#763: Little Fictions – Death and the Professor [ss] (1961) by E. & M.A. Radford

A surgeon, a policeman, a psychiatrist, a mathematician, and a pathologist walk into a club — the foundation not of some esoteric wit but instead the Dilettante’s Club, a dinner-and-discussion group who meet fortnightly for their own entertainment. And when Professor Marcus Stubbs joins their number, those discussions take a frequent turn into the realm of the impossible crime.

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#757: Little Fictions – The Nine Mile Walk and Other Stories [ss] (1968) by Harry Kemelman

A little while back, I decided that short story collections don’t really merit an overall star rating since the stories should be considered individually. Thus, I stopped reviewing them on Thursdays and moved them to weekends. The upshot of this is that I now have a lot of unreviewed short story collections, so I’m going to pick out four single-author bundles to look at on Tuesdays in February. And first up is this collection recommended to me by Christian of Mysteries, Short and Sweet.

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#747: “A murder which at first seems absolutely purposeless always reveals an interesting trait in human nature…” – The Case of Miss Elliott [ss] (1905) by Baroness Orczy

There’s so much depth in Golden Age detective fiction — it was a golden age, after all, irrespective of how narrow you make the window of admissible dates — that one could never read everything. Instead, we must find 60 or so authors who interest us, and hope to get a good coverage elsewhere. Well, if you’ve yet to read Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner stories, I urge you to start as soon as possible.

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#677: “You must forgive me if I repeat that which you know already…” – The Old Man in the Corner [ss] (1908) by Baroness Orczy

Old Man in the Corner

You are three weeks away from, but I have just recorded, an episode of In GAD We Trust with a focus on short stories, part of the preparation for which got me reflecting on the works by Baroness Emmuska Orczy about the old man found in the corner of the A.B.C Teashop holding forth on unsolved crimes.  And the more I thought about them, the more I wanted to write about them.  So here we are.

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