I thought that the novel Holmes on the Range (2006) by Steve Hockensmith was the first time he wrote about crime-solving cowboy Gustav ‘Old Red’ Amlingmeyer, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that some earlier short stories had featured the character first.
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A third entry in the delightfully silly Montgomery Bonbon series, from the mind of the equally delightfully silly Alasdair Beckett-King, Mystery at the Manor (2024) is…delightfully silly.
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Let’s take a moment to reflect on what Tony Medawar has done in recent years for GAD fans, with Wicked Spirits (2024) being the eighth collection of lost, forgotten, and so-rare-they-doubt-their-own-existence stories by GAD luminaries Medawar has edited under the …from the Library label. Whether we get any more after this or not, and I sincerely hope we do, it’s a wonderful body of work, and only the tip of an iceberg of effort he has been putting in for decades now.
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Having thoroughly enjoyed the hard-edged cynicism of P.I. Peter Chambers in Death on the Double (1957), which had an impossible crime in it just to add to the fun, I sought out Too French and Too Deadly, a.k.a. The Narrowing Lust (1955) due to Adey promising me similarly impossible happenings.
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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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The Invisible Event 