Season 4 of Monk is upon us — well, upon the blog, because it aired 18 years ago and I’m only just catching up — and, since I’ve approached the three previous seasons in slightly different ways, let’s mix things up again and rank the sixteen episodes here from worst to best, eh?
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Good heavens, after this second reading of Christianna Brand’s Suddenly at His Residence, a.k.a. The Crooked Wreath (1946) do I have plenty of Thoughts. Indeed, I have so many Thoughts that I’m deliberately writing about it on a Thursday so that my self-imposed 1,000 word limit stops me going on for about four times that length, to the enjoyment of no-one. So: Sir Richard March, tiring of the attitudes of his grandchildren, threatens to rewrite his will, retires to the lodge in the grounds of Swanswater Manor for this express purpose…and is discovered dead the following morning. Having been visited by various people throughout the previous evening, who actually poisoned him?
The return of my In GAD We Trust podcast, and a welcome return for Alasdair Beckett-King, comedian and now children’s author.
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Everyone enjoys a break from work, but when your job is to turn up somewhere and have a baffling crime occur, how can you guarantee you’re taking time off until after you’ve left? Hercule Poirot, Inspector Cockrill, Sir Henry Merrivale, Nigel Strangeways, and swathes of other classic era detectives have had their holidays interrupted by murder, and to this pantheon we can now add Montgomery Bonbon, he of the indefinable foreign accent and curious physical similarity to a ten year-old girl.
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It looks like I might be making these ‘Ten Favourite…’ lists a thing, having previously done fictional detectives and British Library reissues; today, we turn our attention to the great work done by Ramble House, publishers of an unusual mix of crime and weird fiction.
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Full disclosure, this is the second time I’ve read Through the Walls (1937, tr. 2021) by Noel Vindry, but I was on blog hiatus at first encounter, so here’s a chance to get my thoughts on record. Similar to The Howling Beast (1934, tr. 2016), this sees Vindry’s series examining magistrate M. Allou consulted by someone who has lived through baffling events, only for Allou to give some meaning to the apparent impossibilities at the end. The setup here is slightly less enticing — someone in apparently breaking into Pierre Sertat’s house at night and searching it carelessly enough to leave things just out of place enough for Sertat to notice — but the patterns that Vindry spins are wonderful, even if not all the answers are as convincing as we’d like.
I’ve heard great things about the novels Lucy Beatrice Malleson wrote under the name Anthony Gilbert but, apart from one title in the British Library Crime Classics range, they seem pretty hard to come by. Fortuitously stumbling over an old, musty, collapsing copy of Death Knocks Three Times (1949), I’ve been reluctant to pick it up precisely because of its musty, dilapidated condition…but here goes nothing.
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Excepting a couple of books by James Scott Byrnside, who graduated magna cum laude from the University of Self-Publishing, the last time I pursued these Adventures was October 2020. So, grizzled and too old for this shit, I am summoned out of retirement by The Author is Dead (2022) by A. Carver.
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I often find myself in possession books with no idea why I bought them — there was a good reason at the time, or a recommendation from a reliable source, but damned if I can remember it now. And thus, with my motivation to read them forgotten, they linger on my TBR making me feel guilty…so for Tuesdays this month I’m again plucking four from obscurity and hoping for the best.
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