Last week, I wasn’t expecting a Christmas mystery and arguably didn’t get one; but for the week of Christmas itself I wanted to be on firmer ground.
Continue reading#739: Minor Felonies – Mistletoe and Murder (2016) by Robin Stevens
Crime-solving couples
#736: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Iron Box (1952) by Bruce Campbell
At the risk of appearing to stoke the thoroughly-raked embers of the “Is Die Hard (1988) a Christmas movie?” conversation — it’s not, by the way — how much Christmas should appear in your mystery in order for it to be considered a Christmas Mystery?
Continue reading#716: Nosferat-whodunnit? – The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) by James Scott Byrnside
Nearly five years ago, in the innocent, heady days of December 2015, I read two self-published impossible crime novellas by Matt Ingwalson and was motivated into what has become my Adventures in Self-Publishing.
Continue reading#714: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Death at the Diogenes Club (2017) by Anna Elliott and Charles Veley
Reading this Sherlock Holmes pastiche has perhaps inevitably made me reflect on my history with Sherlock Holmes pastiches.
Continue reading#684: Minor Felonies – Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries [ss] (1963): ‘The Mystery of the Three Blind Mice’ by Robert Arthur
Last week we had the shortest mystery in this collection, this week it’s the longest.
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#683: “A terrible orgy of murder and crime, and it seems that we are not at the end of it yet” – The Crimson Circle (1922) by Edgar Wallace
My TBR pile, like Norm Lindsay’s Magic Pudding, is an apparently self-aware, endlessly self-replicating source of nourishment that I will never, ever finish. I daren’t even let it out of my sight sometimes, because who knows what sort of nonsense it gets up to when I’m not looking?
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#672: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder by Magic (2017) by Paul Tomlinson
Typical, eh? You wait years for a blog to talk about magic, and then suddenly three posts come along at once: the most recent In GAD We Trust episode with John Norris, and two self-published impossible crime stories — one this week, and one next. Sure, that’s stretching the definition of “at once” to an Orwellian degree, but that’s how I apparently roll.
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#670: Sleeping Murder (1976) by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie famously wrote the final novels to feature her two biggest sleuths well ahead of their publication, and where Hercule Poirot’s swansong Curtain (1975) was a joyous return to the heights for a character she had grown weary of, Sleeping Murder (1976) — the last hurrah for Miss Jane Marple, a character you can’t help but feel Christie had a growing respect for as she aged — is…fine. Yes, it had a cogency and precision that At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) and Nemesis (1971) sorely needed, but in all honesty the sound and fury on display here signifies something that doesn’t even add up to a hill o’ beans, if you’ll forgive my mixing of classics.
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#660: Minor Felonies – Mic Drop (2020) by Sharna Jackson
Aaah, the difficult second novel. Sharna Jackson’s High-Rise Mystery (2019) was a great debut, with a superb setting, wonderful mix of characters, and a neat little mystery at its core. How does this follow-up compare?
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#657: Minor Felonies – Death Knell (1990) by Nicholas Wilde
