Three weeks ago I finally caught up with ‘The Dashing Joker’ (2001) by Ashibe Taku in an old Ellery Queen Mystery magazine. This week, I finally run ‘Sacrifice in White’ (2012) by Qinwen Sun to earth in another, more recent EQMM, the January/February 2024 issue.
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I first read The Kennel Murder Case (1933), the sixth book by S.S. van Dine to feature the love-him-or-hate-him amateur sleuth Philo Vance, when in the initial thralls of having discovered the impossible crime. I tore through it, remember little of the impression it left on me, and doubtless threw it aside for the next adventure. So returning to it 20 years later, in sequence with the other Philo Vance novels, is not so much a homecoming as finally a chance to do the book justice. And I really did remember very little, just the broad strokes of the mechanism for the locked room which opens the book and the fact that it contained a dog…so this second read might as well be a first one.
The idea of a collection of Golden Age short stories based around a theme of animals seemed like an unusual one, until I remembered that one of the genre’s foundational short stories and one of its most famous novels both have animals in fairly central roles. So that’s all right, then.
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Certain so-called friends of mine have made a point of telling me that back issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine are available at their local library. My library, while cool, is not quite that cool, and so it’s taken me a while to track down some stories published therein, including this one from the September/October 2020 edition.
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Upon first encounter, some 15 years ago, I left four of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories unread for reasons which now elude me; and those reasons seem even more elusive when you realise that the last one I did read was possibly the strongest of the lot.
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2026 is becoming the year in which I finally capture some white whales, having read the astonishingly elusive Into Thin Air (1928) by Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk and now the equally scarce The Tube (1958) by French maestros Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
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One final visit for this month to the reading of my past, as I revisit the crime and thriller novels which paved the way into the Golden Age obsession that fills my every waking moment.
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Another modern novel which sounds like it might have an impossible crime at its core, sufficient reason for me to grab a copy — from the library, dear boy, I’m not made of money — and see if it’s worthy of TomCat‘s attention. I get no enjoyment from this whatsoever, you understand. And I do it for free!
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Between 2016 and 2020, Robert Innes published 10 impossible crime novellas and one novel and then just…disappeared. And his sudden — thought not seemingly impossible — vanishment from the scene made me overlook his final published work, Dollhouse (2020), which I intend to correct today.
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I’ve written before about my experience with the DI John Rebus books by Ian Rankin, a series my changing tastes saw me vacate somewhere in the early 2000s, having read about fifteen of them. Well, I recently discovered that twenty-fifth entry Midnight and Blue (2024) contains an impossible crime, so let’s saddle up one more time and see how things play out. Purely for TomCat‘s benefit, you understand.
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