An aristocratic family, a big house in which an aged relative resides, everyone converging for a party, said elderly relative being the victim of a crime, a precocious young girl keen to investigate, rumours of a family treasure hidden in the grounds…lordy, I hope I’m not reading The Swifts (2023) again.
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People will tell you that I don’t like the Brooks U. Banner stories of Joseph Commings. And, well, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
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And so we start the second quarter-century of modern impossible crime novels which we’re no longer pretending I read solely for TomCat‘s benefit. Spoilers: I’m something of a fan of the impossible crime, so I actually read these because I’m hoping to find good modern examples of the form for myself — gasp!
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Among the five books I have reread for Thursday reviews this January, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), the debut of the composer Bruce Montgomery under the name Edmund Crispin, is unique in that I wasn’t completely sure I could remember the guilty party. The method by which our corpse finds itself shot in a room to which there was no access and no open windows through which a bullet could be fired was dimly in my brain somewhere, but I had the very enjoyable experience of rereading something and being able to treat it as a genuine problem…trying to work out if my suspicions came from dim remembrance of the solution or were merely smelly fish. So that was fun.
“A man is shot in a room from which, apparently, no one could have made an exit. Now what’s the first rational possibility that strikes you?”. It is the shooting of Wolfe Harrigan which Detective Lieutenant Terrence Marshall must solve: rationalist and exposure of religious chicanery Harrigan having apparently been shot by Ahasver, the yellow robe-wearing, centuries-old Wandering Jew who leads the Children of Light church in Los Angeles…and was on stage at the time of said shooting. And when the “rankly fantastic notion of a secret passageway” in Harrigan’s study is dismissed, what possible explanation can there be? Men don’t just vanish into thin air…
“I stood staring about the room, and the first disadvantage of living in a basement apartment occurred to me. Jumping from a window would bring no release”. The much-missed Rue Morgue Press reprinted only four Jeff and Haila Troy novels from husband-and-wife team Kelley Roos. The Frightened Stiff (1942), the third, opens magnificently and wastes barely a word right up to THE END, so let me say this now: someone needs to reprint this series. Not a few selected titles as we’d likely get from the (excellent) American Mystery Classics range, but the whole kit and caboodle. Sure, some will be better than others, but I refuse to believe that they don’t deserve rediscovery.
A twenty-first outing for Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, and the fourth to be written by Mary Virginia Carey, The Secret of the Haunted Mirror (1974) is another fast-paced and engaging turn for The Three Investigators, even if it doesn’t quite hit the highs that this series or this author have achieved before now.
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I picked my ten favourite crime and detective novels published in the 1930s a little while ago for my online book club, but I only do a Ten Favourite… list every four months or so and thus am only just getting round to writing it up now. I am so late to the party that it might as well never have happened, but I ironed a shirt specially so, dammit, I’m going to dance. Or something.
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One of many classic detection titles I read before I started this blog, The Judas Window (1938) is arguably among the most popular books John Dickson Carr ever wrote, under his nom de plume Carter Dickson or otherwise. The seventh book to feature his barrister-detective Sir Henry ‘H.M.’ Merrivale, and the only time H.M. enters the courtroom in all his cases, this was actually the first Merrivale book I read, way back when, and so a revisit seemed on the cards, especially with the British Library Crime Classics adding Dickson’s The Ten Teacups, a.k.a. The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) to their stable next month. Might this one follow suit? Lord knows it deserves to.
The Invisible Event 