I try to keep a weather eye on modern crime fiction publications, mainly so that anything which sounds like it might contain an impossible crime can be tried out in this occasional undertaking where we all pretend that I’m only reading them so I can recommend one to TomCat. But Black Lake Manor (2022) by Guy Morpuss, well, I sort of went looking for this one…
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With their gloomy house in isolated woodland, overlooking a dreary bay and containing a mask from Japanese Noh theatre that is rumoured to carry a curse, it’s frankly amazing that no-one in the Chizui family — “[r]iven by mutual suspicion, hatred and a sheer failure to understand one another…” — has been found murdered in a locked room before. Thankfully, hard upon the return of Hiroyuki Ishikari to the area, ostensible head of the family Taijiro is found thus slain, and mystery fan Akimitsu Takagi is on hand to help dig to the bottom of the tangled skein that will see yet more of the clan wiped out in the days that follows. Though how much use he’ll be is up for debate.
I’ve written before about the impact the long-defunct Orion Crime Masterworks series had on my discovery of classic-era crime and detective fiction, and a recent pruning of my shelves brought back to me many of the happy memories from those books. So today, I’m going to run through the ten which left, perhaps, the strongest impression on Young Jim.
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Having, at the end of previous book The Twist of a Knife (2022), signed up to relating at least three more cases following around ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne, Anthony Horowitz faces a problem: interesting murders are not determined by publishing deadlines. So, with a contractual obligation looming and no death on the horizon, Anthony asks Hawthorne for details of a past case, and Hawthorne obliges by slowly feeding him notes on the murder of Giles Kenworthy in Richmond some five years previously. Can Anthony make this format of mystery work for him? And is there an appropriate amount of peril in an investigation already signed, sealed, and delivered well before his involvement?
Another month, another Sherlock Holmes pastiche, this time from the very enjoyable US TV series Elementary (2012-19). My belated discovery of two novelisations in that universe was a source of immediate interest, and so The Ghost Line (2015) by Adam Christopher found its way onto my TBR.
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Having recently read the twentieth novel in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, and the tenth to be written by someone other than series creator Robert Arthur, my mind turns to how Jupe, Pete, and Bob have fared with multiple hands now directing their fates.
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Serendipity brought the superb Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime [ss] (2009) edited by Michael Sims to my awareness, and highlighted Sims’ erudition and excellent coverage of Victorian crime fiction, an era of the genre which is holding an increasing fascination for me. And so the opportunity to read another Sims-edited collection was to be seized with alacrity.
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Last weekend, it was my distinct honour to present for a fourth time at the Bodies from the Library conference, in this instance on the topic of Enid Blyton’s detective fiction as represented by her Five Find-Outers series.
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After what felt like a run of fairly light reading, I found myself in the mood for something a little denser, and boy does The Devil’s Flute Murders (1953), the fifth title by Seishi Yokomizo to be published in English by Pushkin Vertigo, deliver on that front. We start with a mass poisoning in a jewellery store, then move onto the disappearance of a member of the nobility who turns up dead…only for his family to doubt his demise and pull amateur genius detective Kosuke Kindaichi into a superbly atmospheric divining ceremony that culminates in a gruesome locked room murder. Yup, the opening third of this book is, pleasingly, something of a whirligig.
And so we reach season 5 of Monk, in which Tony Shalhoub plays the eponymous OCD-afflicted former detective, brought in to consult on a range of odd and uncommon crimes.
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The Invisible Event 