Genius detective
#649: The Curse of the Bronze Lamp, a.k.a. Lord of the Sorcerers (1945) by Carter Dickson
You may view the above rating of this book as too harsh, and you may be right. Honestly, I’ve struggled with how good The Curse of the Bronze Lamp, a.k.a. Lord of the Sorcerers (1945) may or may not be, and it certainly has its fans — at one point John Dickson Carr apparently considered it among the four of his own books that he enjoyed the most. But the key thing I keep coming back to is how this novel, rooted as it is in Egyptian curses and an apparent vanishing in a ghostly old family pile, written by a man who could stir up sulfur and brimstone with a well-place adjective and could summon the most wonderful patterns from the most perplexing of mysteries, is so very forgettable.
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#639: “Nothing is so sad as the devastation wrought by age” – Going Out in Style(s) with Curtain (1975) by Agatha Christie
Given the inevitable decline in Agatha Christie’s powers as her career drew to a close, there’s a moderate irony in that fact that she had come off probably the most successful decade in the history of detective fiction writing when she opted to portray Hercule Poirot at his apparent worst.
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#623: Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930) by R. Austin Freeman
When digging his garden to lay a foundation for a new sundial, quiet, unostentatious bachelor Marcus Pottermack uncovers a previously-unknown well. That same day, he receives yet another demand for money from the man who is blackmailing him, and it’s only a matter of time before one problem is used to solve the other. And when curiosities about the man’s disappearance are raised in passing with Dr. John Thorndyke, it’s only a matter of time before that pillar of truth is on the trail of quiet, unostentatious Marcus Pottermack. And yet, for all its conventional-sounding setup, Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930) is a delightfully unconventional inverted mystery.
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#615: And the Knights are No More and the Dragons are Dead – Viewing the Detective Through a Glass, Darkly via The Hero (2019) by Lee Child
You’ve doubtless heard of Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher books in which the gargantuan ex-serviceman does plenty of fightin’ and figurin’, and if there’s a bigger name in publishing today it’s only because James Patterson has, like, 86 co-authors.
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#600: Murderers Make Mistakes – Poirot’s Early Cases [ss] (1974) by Agatha Christie
The majority of Agatha Christie referred to on this blog has been from her later, less popular phase while I work through her canon chronologically. So it’s lovely to be able to refer to some of her early work with this collection of 18 stories originally published between 1923 and 1936.
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#561: Thinking Too Precisely on th’ Event – Clued and Unclued Detective Fiction, or: The Active and the Passive Detective-Reader
August is my summer holiday, and I’m contributing to the slow death of the planet by taking a few breaks here and there, so might not be as hot in the comments as usual. But the nature of what we mean when we say “GAD” has been on my mind for a while, so here goes nothing.
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#546: The 10 Types of Impossible Crime – Categories and Titles from Our Talk at Bodies from the Library 2019
After being on something of an enforced hiatus for a little while, The Men Who Explain Miracles, the occasional podcast run by Dan from The Reader is Warned and myself, returned yesterday for a live show at the Bodies from the Library Conference 2019 at the British Library.
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#520: Seeing is Believing, a.k.a. Cross of Murder (1941) by Carter Dickson
Socialising is difficult, isn’t it? One minute you’re making polite dinner party conversation about jobs with someone you’ve only just met, the next a hypnotist performs a few mesmeric passes and goads a wife into stabbing her husband with a knife everyone knows is fake but which — awks — actually turns out to be real and, oh my god, she’s killed him. We’ve all been there, and we all know how tricky it can be to factor this sort of thing into one’s TripAdvisor rating. An unexpected, impossible murder can dampen the mood somewhat — especially when so many people seem to be operating at cross-purposes — but remember you did say the canapés were lovely…
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#504: Little Fictions – ‘The Helm of Hades’ (2019) by Paul Halter [trans. John Pugmire 2019] + Ranking the Translated Short Stories
The Invisible Event 