Carter Dickson
#579: Cover Stars – Abigail Salvesen on Hag’s Nook (1930) and She Died a Lady (1943) by John Dickson Carr [Polygon Books 2019 editions]
Book cover art is, for me, a source of huge excitement. Be it for reasons of apt evocation of a bygone era — the British Library Crime Classics, say, or the reams of Dean Street Press reissues — or the beautiful, almost utilitarian simplicity of the much-coveted Green Penguin, there’s an ineffable element of skill in striking the right balance.
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#578: She Died a Lady (1943) by Carter Dickson
Firstly, good heavens the excitement of posting a John Dickson Carr review without then tagging it OOP — Polygon Books have Hag’s Nook (1933), The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), and She Died a Lady (1943) in their stable, and the British Library and Otto Penzler have added more, with more to come. And after last week’s brilliant and baffling no-footprints murder in a lonely corner of England, and with my broadly chronological reading of Carr’s work bringing She Died a Lady back into my orbit, the stars seemed to be aligning on a reassessment of this, probably the most consistent contender for Best Carr Novel of All Time.
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#557: The Gilded Man, a.k.a. Death and the Gilded Man (1942) by Carter Dickson
It had been my intention to review a book by a new-to-me author this week, but thankfully I was able to get to it a little ahead of time and watch disconsolately as, after a bright start, it fizzled out to nothing (man, some Silver Age stuff has a lot to answer for…). Instead, here’s another from John Dickson Carr’s era of tight, house-set puzzles which range from masterpieces (The Reader is Warned (1939), The Seat of the Scornful (1941)) to very good (The Crooked Hinge (1938), The Emperor’s Snuff-Box (1942)) to, er, Seeing is Believing (1941). And with The Gilded Man (1942) being somewhat overlooked, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to get…
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#546: The 10 Types of Impossible Crime – Categories and Titles from Our Talk at Bodies from the Library 2019
After being on something of an enforced hiatus for a little while, The Men Who Explain Miracles, the occasional podcast run by Dan from The Reader is Warned and myself, returned yesterday for a live show at the Bodies from the Library Conference 2019 at the British Library.
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#533: “Magicians have an advantage; they never have to reveal the trick” – An Interview with James Scott Byrnside
Back in December 2015 I read and reviewed Matt Ingwalson’s first two self-published Owl and Raccoon novellas and, impressed with their quality, undertook what has since become my Adventures in Self-Publishing in which I work through impossible crime fiction following a non-trad route to its audience.
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#527: Plotting the Perfect Crime – Potential and Pay-Off via The House of Haunts, a.k.a. The Lamp of God (1935) by Ellery Queen
