I promised you more podcast, and wouldn’t have blamed you for not believing me; but more podcast there is today for your listening pleasure.
Continue reading
“[H]ow stressful can this game really be? A few nights in a peaceful hamlet at Christmas, trying to make sense of a puzzle? What could possibly go wrong?”. Well, an unseasonally heavy snowfall could maroon everyone, and then a murderer could start picking off the isolated denizens of the peaceful hamlet of Midwinter. But, if they can survive the slaughter, the six people who have been invited by the Midwinter Trust to take part in the competition, called Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, are unlikely to want to leave because the prize they can win is…well it’s fabulous, isn’t it? It must be. Although, now you come to mention it, what is the prize?
“My New Year’s resolution is to murder a man I’ve never met” — thus does Basil Palmer lay out his intentions at the very start of his journal in Hemlock Bay (2024) by Martin Edwards, bringing to mind the openings of classic-era touchstones Malice Aforethought (1931) by Francis Iles and The Beast Must Die (1938) by Nicholas Blake. Louis Carson, the man Palmer seeks to avenge himself on, appears to have entered into a business partnership in the Northern resort of Hemlock Bay, and so, assuming a false identity, it is there that Palmer heads. Little does he know, various other parties are also descending upon Hemlock Bay, and some of them also have murder in their hearts.
In these classic reprint-rich days, the work of Tom Mead — not just recycling the past, but building upon it by paying informed homage — feels like a breath of fresh air. His debut Death and the Conjuror (2022) was a genuine puzzle plot filled with the playfulness of this most spirited of genres, and if sophomore effort The Murder Wheel (2023) isn’t quite as successful, Mead deserves huge credit for the love he brings to his writing — and how superbly readable that writing is, never feeling weighed down by an excess of referencing or the weight of the history he is so lovingly revisiting. This is still bags of fun, and bodes well for what I hope is going to be a long and storied career.
Tom Mead is that rare thing these days: an author writing detective fiction in the classic tradition with some actual interest in the classic tradition of detective fiction. When he peppers the text of Death and the Conjuror (2022), his very entertaining and easy-to-read debut novel, with references to the work of R. Austin Freeman, G.K. Chesterton, Melville Davisson Post and others, you know it’s the result of time spent reading the genre rather than a few quick Google searches to give him credibility. And when he plays the games of identity and location as well as he does here, you also know he’s having a joyous time playing in his favourite sandbox…and wonderful it is to see.
The Invisible Event 