Hake Talbot
#355: Change a Letter, Alter the Plot
If you’ve been paying attention, especially to my comments left both here and elsewhere, you’ll be aware that my typing is rather famously variable. 90% of the time I’m good, but that other 10% — man, some errors there are. Writing something recently, I made reference to the novel Five Little Pugs by Agatha Christie and then — catching myself in time to correct it — I had a thought…
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#353: The Men Who Explain Miracles – Episode 4.3: The Edward D. Hoch ‘Best Impossible Crime Novels’ List of 1981 (Books 5 to 1)
Here we are, the third and final week of Dan and I using our podcast The Men Who Explain Miracles to look at the list of the 15 best impossible crime novels as curated by Ed Hoch in 1981.
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#268: Spoiler Warning 3 – Rim of the Pit (1944) by Hake Talbot
Okay, here we go: Spoiler Warning Number 3 in which Dan from The Reader is Warned and I discuss Hake Talbot’s cavalcade of impossibilities, voted the second best impossible crime novel of all time back in 1981.
Except, well, this time we’ve done things a little differently…
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#232: Spoiler Warning – Coming in July: Rim of the Pit (1944) by Hake Talbot
Following on from the spoiler-filled deconstruction of He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr and Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, I’m going ahead with another spoiler-filled deconstruction in the next couple of months, this time of Hake Talbot’s impossibility-laden masterpiece Rim of the Pit (1944).
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#207: Five GAD Collaborations That Would Have Been Awesome
I’ve read a lot of comics in my time, I spend many hours online enthusiastically contributing to discussions about a moderately obscure area of popular culture — hell, I even wear glasses. I must, therefore, be a nerd. I mean, sure, I don’t own a single t-shirt emblazoned with some hilarious-but-obscure quote or image, but that’s mainly because the kinds of things I’d put on a t-shirt — “Hairy Aaron!” or, say, a decal of Gideon Fell above the legend Don’t irritate a man who knows 142 ways to kill you without being the same room — no-one else wants on a t-shirt and so they’re not available to buy.
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#195: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – My First Five Impossible Crimes…
Much like being stuck with that one relative who wishes to recount every event of note from their life regardless of how interested you appear, my reminiscing about the beginnings of my detective fiction reading continues. This week, with my oft-mentioned fondness for an impossible crime, I’m going to attempt to recall the first few, faltering steps I made into the subgenre. So, let’s see now…
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#188: Five to Try – Debunked Séances in Detective Fiction
Flying lute? Check. Ghostly disembodied hand? Check. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, let’s call this meeting to order…
Following a recent post on John Dickson Carr’s The Lost Gallows over at The Green Capsule, I was reminded of just how much I love a séance in fiction. Now, to be clear, I’m with Charlie Brooker on psychics and other such manipulative awfulness, but have a real love of sleight of hand and up-close magic (as perhaps evinced in my enthusiasm for fair play detective fiction and impossible crimes therein) and a debunked séance is often a great way to explore the little ways a set of circumstances can be misrepresented, and often some fascinating insights come out of it.
So, here are five great séances from detective fiction, alpabetically by author.
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#149: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – A Plague of Flaming Phantoms…
The Invisible Event 