Crime Fiction Bingo

#627: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #14: The Darker Arts (2019) by Oscar de Muriel

/ JJ / 23 Comments

Darker Arts, The

A certain amount of debate continues to rage — “rage” might be too strong a word — over whether the impossible alibi qualifies as a true impossible crime.  I suggest that, should it eventually be inducted into future Locked Room Murders supplements, we do so on a ‘one out, one in’ policy and retire the “death by unknown means” to make space.

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#597: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #13: Impolitic Corpses (2019) by Paul Johnston

/ JJ / 13 Comments

Impolitic Corpses

Cast triskaidekaphobia aside!  Sure, these modern impossible crime novels haven’t always shown the subgenre at its best, but Paul Johnston was one of the many contemporary crime fiction authors I read back in the early 2000s, and a chance to reconnect with him and the series that made his name can only be a good thing…right?

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#576: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #12: Endgame (2019) by Daniel Cole

/ JJ / 12 Comments

Endgame

I started, but did not finish, Daniel Cole’s debut novel Ragdoll (2017), which seemed to me a gruesome hook followed by a lot of meandering prose.  Endgame (2019), his third novel, promised me a dead body in a locked room and so, since I’m reluctant to write off anyone after just one book, here we are.

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#549: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #11: Now You See Me (2019) by Chris McGeorge

/ JJ / 28 Comments

Now You See Me

The English language is a funny thing.  Take for instance Chris McGeorge’s debut novel Guess Who (2018) which, revolving as it did around a group of people solving a mystery while locked in a room, was marketed as a ‘locked room mystery’ when that is a phrase which has already had another meaning for well over a century.

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