A posthumous collection occasionally wrong billed as “Twenty-six stories featuring Gervase Fen” (there should really be, at least, a comma after ‘stories’, since series detective Fen isn’t in all of them), Fen Country (1979) was, I believe, the first collection of Edmund Crispin’s short fiction I read. And now I’m back, to get some thoughts on record.
Continue reading
Among the five books I have reread for Thursday reviews this January, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), the debut of the composer Bruce Montgomery under the name Edmund Crispin, is unique in that I wasn’t completely sure I could remember the guilty party. The method by which our corpse finds itself shot in a room to which there was no access and no open windows through which a bullet could be fired was dimly in my brain somewhere, but I had the very enjoyable experience of rereading something and being able to treat it as a genuine problem…trying to work out if my suspicions came from dim remembrance of the solution or were merely smelly fish. So that was fun.
I’ve been planning this for over a year, since reviewing the British Library’s fifth collection of Christmas short stories last November. Finally, then, December will see me reviewing Christmas-themed books for perhaps the first time since starting this blog in 2015, with a second BL collection coming in the weeks ahead.
Continue reading
In the back of my mind when I started The Invisible Event was the idea that exactly half of what I’d post about would feature impossible crimes, locked room mysteries, and/or miracle problems — and although this proportion started an irreversible slide after the first 500 or so posts, the impossible crime remains my first love.
Continue reading
With the annual Bodies from the Library collections, which have brought long out-of-print stories of crime and detection back to public awareness, proving rightly popular, editor Tony Medawar turns his attention to another facet of genre fiction with the Ghosts from the Library (2022) collection, in which authors (mostly) better known for their stories of crime and detection have a go at generating some supernatural chills instead.
Continue reading
Another year, another collection of forgotten or unknown tales from the luminaries of detective fiction’s Golden Age brought to us by the tireless efforts of Tony Medawar. So how does Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) stack up?
Continue reading
With the Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) collection due in a couple of months, and spin-off Ghosts from the Library (2022) coming later in the year, the time seems ripe to revisit one of the earlier collections which — given the timespan over which I first read them — I failed to review on publication. And since, for reasons too complicated to bore you with here, the second volume was the first one I encountered, it’s there I’ll head today.
Continue reading
I can’t believe that there is a GAD enthusiast who doesn’t look forward to the annual Bodies from the Library collections so expertly curated by Tony Medawar. In bringing to public awareness some of the forgotten, neglected, or simply unknown stories that the great and the good of the form produced, these collections have become a source of great excitement, and a must-read for even the most ardent student of the Golden Age.
Continue reading
Prepare yourself for what might just be the most jam-packed episode of In GAD We Trust to date — when you sit down with Tony Medawar, there’s always going to be a lot to talk about.
Continue reading
After the interruption to the schedule of two weeks ago, here’s another In GAD We Trust podcast — and given the topic of ‘Making a Good First Impression’ it’s only fitting to welcome returning guests Sergio and Brad.
Continue reading
The Invisible Event 