Genius Amateur
#396: Little Fictions – The Impossibilities of Ellery Queen: ‘The Adventure of the Dead Cat’, a.k.a. ‘The Halloween Mystery’ (1946)
Sometimes you go through every story in a collection and review them all. Sometimes you just want to talk about one of them. To engage in the second of these on a more thematic basis, I shall use my Tuesday posts this month to launch an occasional series of Little Fictions posts, and spend June with some of the impossible crime short stories written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee under their Ellery Queen nom de plume.
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#395: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #6: Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out (2010) by Lee Goldberg
I can’t claim to’ve watched swathes of the TV series Monk — starring the wonderfully talented Tony Shalhoub as the eponymous consultant to the San Francisco Police Department — but I always enjoyed its creativity when I did catch it (an episode in which a musical birthday card contributes to the solving of a crime stands out in my memory).
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#382: The Night of the Wolf [ss] (2006) by Paul Halter [trans. Robert Adey & John Pugmire 2004]
With Christian recently starting his blog looking at impossible crimes in short fiction, and with a new Paul Halter translation in the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the time seemed ripe to go back and reread this collection of Halter’s short fiction and get my thoughts on record. Originally published in English by Wildside Press in 2006 (in slightly modified form from its original 2000 publication in French) and then taken in by Halter’s subsequent English publisher Locked Room International, the ten stories here serve as a great primer for the breadth of Halter’s ingenuity, and rediscovering them has been a huge amount of fun.
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#378: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 4
Good heavens, it’s practically the end of the month already, and so this is the final week of the reforming Tuesday Night Bloggers (we’ll be back, I’m sure) in their exploration of the great detectives of fiction.
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#375: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 3
Another week– where does the time go, eh? — another serving of reflections on the Great Detectives of Fiction from the blogosphere…
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#372: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 2
Another week, another set of posts from our GAD blogging collective, running down their own personal favourites of the great detectives of fiction.
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#369: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – The Great Detectives – Week 1
The Invisible Event 