Christmas creeps ever-closer, and every year I promise myself I’ll read and review some festive mysteries…then I forget and review them in springtime instead. But The Christmas Appeal (2023) by Janice Hallett…that’s positively screaming for a December review. So let’s look at it in November.
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Belial. Behemoth. Beelzebub. Asmodeus. Satanas. Lucifer. The Antichrist has had many names in many cultures, and taken many forms, such as 18 years ago when a young woman gave birth to the Prince of Darkness. Thankfully, she was identified by a small group of angels who had taken human form and who knew that the baby had to be killed during a particular cosmic alignment in order to stop it simply being reborn over and over. What happened to that young woman, and to the angels who saved her, has been the subject of intense speculation ever since, and now true crime writer Amanda Bailey is going to dig into the case of the Alperton Angels and get to the bottom of all the nonsense. Because it was all nonsense. Right?
Both versions of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934/1956) contain excellent scenes in which a killer takes aim at their target in the Royal Albert Hall while the music builds ominously. Sebastian Farr’s Death on the Down Beat (1941) utilises the same idea, but transfers it to an orchestral performance of Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben in the fictional northern city of Maningpool and picks up after the killing, asking what would happen if the murder of an unpopular conductor in such circumstances was investigated a weary detective who just wants to get home to his wife and young children and finds himself frustrated at almost every turn by the intrusion by self-important local types.
So, after delighting me and then slightly underwhelming me, how did I do in solving the mystery of The Malinsay Massacre (1938) as laid out by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links?
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Depending on who you ask, the wartime children’s books of Edith Twyford are either “an unchallenging read on every level [with n]o subtext [and n]o depth” or they’re “nasty, sadistic, moral little tales full of pompous superiority at best and blatant racism at worst.” Her series based around The Super Six in which “[t]hree girls and three boys…solve mysteries that have been puzzling the local community” has been gradually updated with each successive generation and translation, so that their outdated attitudes can be put aside once and for all. But might something else have been lost along the way? Something people would kill for?
I may have called this week of The Malinsay Massacre (1938) “the investigation” but, in reality, I’m just working through the second half of the case in a manner uncannily reminiscent of how what like I did last week.
Continue readingSo, how best to explore The Malinsay Massacre (1938) by Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links?
Continue readingWhether or not you agree with the concept of detective fiction being a game, there can be little doubt that much has been done to play up to the game-esque elements of murder mysteries for well-nigh the last century.
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If you’ve met me, firstly I apologise, and secondly it’ll come as no surprise that I have a tendency to ruminate on that which many others pass over without so much as a backward glance. Previously this resulted in me writing something in the region of 25,000 words on the Knox Decalogue, and today I’m going to turn my eye upon the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list. Prepare thyself…
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Do not adjust your sets, The Appeal (2021) by Janice Hallett is a modern crime novel that does not contain an apparent impossibility…and yet here I am reading and reviewing it. I was struck by the idea behind this: essentially an update of The Documents in the Case (1930) by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, The Maze, a.k.a. Persons Unknown (1932) by Philip MacDonald, and the Dennis Wheatley “murder dossier” books that began with Murder Off Miami (1936), in which the story of a murder is told through emails, text messages, interview transcripts, and more. And as updates go, this is a very good one indeed — very cleverly written, very easy to read.
The Invisible Event 