Impossible Crimes
#340: The Owner Lies Dead (1930) by Tyline Perry
Fellow GAD blogger Noah Stewart has in the past talked about intertextuality in detective fiction, part of which is how each mystery’s solution feeds into a general awareness of all other mysteries and their solutions. Essentially, reading detective fiction is then a game: has the author been able to mislead you about the solution? And the more you read, the harder this game becomes for these authors, especially as many of them wrote their books close to a century ago and so don’t really get the right of response where later developments in the field are concerned. The best GAD plots stand up to all subsequent attempts to innovate, and remain surprising.
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#339: Highs & Lows – Tall Tales and Subterranean Shenanigans
Okay, after three weeks of opinion, and with Tyline Perry’s murder-in-a-coalmine-centred The Owner Lies Dead (1930) up for review this Thursday, let’s have some much-needed objectivity: here is a selection of crimes where altitude plays a part.
Disclaimer: All heights are approximate. And fictional.
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#338: Spoiler Warning 5 – The Problem of the Wire Cage (1939) by John Dickson Carr
Okay, here we go — do not read any further unless you are happy to be spoiled on the details of John Dickson Carr’s 1939 novel featuring the impossible “no footprints” problem of a man strangled in the middle of a clay tennis court.
#337: Foreign Bodies [ss] (2017) ed. Martin Edwards
Had you asserted back in 2014 that the republication of two forgotten crime novels would lay the foundation for one of the most celebrated series of GAD reissues in modern times, well, people would have laughed. And yet the British Library Crime Classics collection, under the stewardship of Martin Edwards and Rob Davies, is now over 50 books deep and gathering momentum for another exciting year. And it’s a sure sign of the hale condition of the series that, far from simply reissuing books, they’re now branching out into original translations with this collection of overseas tales. In the words of Ira Gershwin, who’s got the last laugh now?
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#333: Highs & Lows – Five Reading Lowlights of 2017
Last week, the good; this week, the ugly: five of the low points from my reading in 2017. No further introduction necessary.
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#330: Highs & Lows – Five Reading Highlights of 2017
January, month of rebirth and self-recrimination. For every resolution to improve there must be some frank assessment of what debilitated you in the first place, and so the month can take on a curiously Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect for some. So my Tuesday posts for this month will be a mixture of what is good and bad in my reading, and where better to start than a celebration of the previous 12 months?
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#327: The Men Who Explain Miracles Have Returned, with Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe
Apologies, I’m a bit late in bringing to your attention — term only finished yesterday, and I’m still in shock — that the third episode of the occasional podcast Dan of The Reader is Warned and I record is now up and ready to fly straight to your ears at the click of a mouse.
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#322: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #5: The Real-Town Murders (2017) by Adam Roberts
My previous attempt at finding a modern locked room mystery for TomCat ended in frank disaster when it turned out TomCat had, of course, already read the book chosen. Well I’m back, baby, and this time I’ve done my homework. Hours of research went into choosing this title, including an algorithmic analysis of TomCat’s reading habits over the past five years. I in no way just happened to see it at my local library, no sir. Why would you even suggest that?
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#319: A Call to Arms – ‘The Running Dead’ (1985) by Soji Shimada [trans. Ho-Ling Wong & John Pugmire 2017]
