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.
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When Dee Allison’s itinerant uncle Jonas Breen pulls one of his sudden appearing acts and then promptly dies, leaving the overwhelming majority of his fortune to his newly-on-the-scene 18 year-old daughter Laila, the problems sown in the family are only just beginning. When the unworldly Laila runs away from home, unaware that she has eaten poisoned food which has already killed their housekeeper, Dee and her fiancée Andy Talbot are in a race against time to find the young woman before she, too, succumbs. And with some elements of the family possibly happier if Laila were dead, since that would solve their own financial woes, well, then you have a plot on the boil.
Quite some time ago, I was made a very generous gift of a random selection of old Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines and anthologies and, aside from the odd story, they’ve sat largely unread on my shelves since. Well, no more. From today, they will (probably) make regular appearances on The Invisible Event where longer or notable entries are concerned.
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I don’t know the exact point at which an author becomes one I want to read in great depth, but I do know that the American Mystery Classics range has introduced me to novels by three authors who, in virtually no time at all, became fixtures on my Long-Range Reading List — those being Craig Rice, Cornell Woolrich, and Charlotte Armstrong. Of course, having now tantalised me with expertly-judged selections, the AMC will abandon all three, never reprint another of their works, and move on to pastures new, but at least my urgent searching out of further reading by these wonderful writers will give me something to do in my retirement. Or, y’know, if anyone wants to reprint them now, I won’t complain…
There really is no accounting for taste. When I read The New Sonia Wayward (1960) by Michael Innes following a rave review from Aidan, I found it rather wanting; now that I’ve read The Chocolate Cobweb (1948) by Charlotte Armstrong following a rave review from Aidan, I wonder if he praised it enough, because it’s very probably the best novel of pure domestic suspense that I’ve ever encountered. We can add this to the likes of The Voice of the Corpse (1948) by Max Murray on the list of Books I Should Not Like Yet Absolutely Loved, an experience so enjoyable that it stalled my reading for about a week since I had no idea what I could possibly follow it up with.
The Invisible Event 