More magic, mummery, and misdirection from Randall Garrett’s alternate history Europe, and this time a bit of an impossible crime thrown in to boot. Not that he makes much of that element.
Continue readingAnother Tuesday, another Lord Darcy story, in which Randall Garrett mixes magic and detection in an alternate-history Europe.
Continue readingPerhaps two decades a go, I read some, but not all, of the Lord Darcy series of stories by Randall Garrett, in which detection is augmented with magic. And I’ve been telling people they’re good ever since. So for Tuesdays this, and another as-yet-undetermined future, month let’s take this Fantasy Masterworks volume of the complete stories — 10 shorts, and the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) — and see how they stand up.
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I’m not entirely sure what I expected from The Murderer’s Ape (2014) by Jakob Wegelius, but it wasn’t a Gulliver’s Travels (1726)-esque multinational adventure written by an intelligent gorilla. And while the book that results is in no way a bad thing, it’s also not really a murder mystery in the vein of what I’m typically after in these Minor Felonies posts.
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Current crime and detective fiction fans needn’t look too hard to find a successful children’s author who transitioned well into writing books for grown-ups, and now Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal (2021) and four subsequent books, is heading in the other direction, with A Box Full of Murders (2025) being her debut for the 9-to-12 year-old market.
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You don’t write as much as Edward D. Hoch without hitting the bull’s-eye a few times, so I’m finally doing what I should have done all along and starting the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series from the beginning, with this first collection, Diagnosis: Impossible (2000), a tranche of 12 stories initially published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine between 1974 and 1978.
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I have an undeniable fondness for the work of Edgar Allan Poe, having looked at his tales of ratiocination on this blog as well as written a novel inspired by one of his most famous stories. So Beyond Rue Morgue [ss] (2013), a collection of stories edited by Paul Kane and Charles Prepolec purporting to extend the career of Poe’s unfathomably influential detective C. Auguste Dupin, was certainly an intriguing find.
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A second Sherlock Holmes pastiche from the pen of Robert J. Harris, The Devil’s Blaze (2022) sees him once again take his cue from the Second World War setting of the Basil Rathbone films rather than Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Victorian milieu.
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I’ll level with you: I have never understood the obsession Sherlockians have with the Giant Rat of Sumatra.
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It is no doubt fitting that the last Sherlock Holmes pastiche I read saw our Great Detective tackling a copycat of the Jack the Ripper killings in 1942, given that the next one I would go on to read would see him tackle the actual Ripper killings in 1888.
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The Invisible Event 