Inverted Mystery

#1374: The Affair at Little Wokeham, a.k.a. Double Tragedy (1943) by Freeman Wills Crofts

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The Affair at Little Wokeham, a.k.a. Double Tragedy (1943), was the last of Freeman Wills Crofts’s books to be recently reprinted by Harper Collins in these lovely paperback editions. Fear not, I have acquired the rest of Crofts’s oeuvre — though if you have an unread House of Stratus edition of Death of a Train (1946), do get in touch — and shall indeed complete the Full Crofts here on The Invisible Event, but let’s spare a thought for what might have been: when the Inspector French TV show seemed a likely prospect, we could have had all of Crofts’s novels for grown-ups in bookshops in the 21st century. Alas, Utopia must remain a dream.

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#1353: When Rogues Fall Out, a.k.a. Dr. Thorndyke’s Discovery (1932) by R. Austin Freeman

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Once again, now for a third time, I have been misled by these House of Stratus editions about the nature of a book by R. Austin Freeman. The cover of When Rogue’s Fall Out, a.k.a. Dr. Thorndyke’s Discovery (1932) promises “Three Books in One, starring Dr. Thorndyke”, leading me to surmise that these were three novellas. Not so. As it happens, Book 1 – The Three Rogues, Book 2 – Inspector Badger Deceased, and Book 3 – The Missing Collector are simply parts of one novel-length story, and I approached the end of The Three Rogues very confused about the apparent lack of impending conclusion and the distinct absence of Thorndyke from its pages.

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#1309: Murderers Make Mistakes – Sudden Death Aplenty in Six Against the Yard [ss] (1936)

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Today is the tenth Bodies from the Library Conference, at which, until other considerations intervened, I was due to present on the topic of inverted mysteries. And you can bet I would at some point have talked about Six Against the Yard (1936), in which six crime writers put their ‘perfect murder’ on paper and ex-CID man Superintendent Cornish picked holes in their plans.

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#1279: “You ought to be able to make like Sherlock Holmes or Ellery Queen…” – The Man Who Read Mysteries [ss] (2018) by William Brittain [ed. Josh Pachter]

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The first of (so far…) two volumes of William Brittain’s short fiction from Crippen & Landru, The Man Who Read Mysteries (2018) contains the eleven stories written under the non-series ‘The X Who Read [Author Name]’ titles and seven selections from editor Josh Pachter of the tales featuring crime-solving high school science teacher Leonard Strang.

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#1267: “Simple, isn’t it? Simple enough to hang a man.” – Fen Country [ss] (1979) by Edmund Crispin

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A posthumous collection occasionally wrong billed as “Twenty-six stories featuring Gervase Fen” (there should really be, at least, a comma after ‘stories’, since series detective Fen isn’t in all of them), Fen Country (1979) was, I believe, the first collection of Edmund Crispin’s short fiction I read. And now I’m back, to get some thoughts on record.

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#1263: The Norwich Victims (1932) by Francis Beeding

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I’ve somehow managed to get this far into the Golden Age without reading any Francis Beeding, the nom de plume jointly adopted by John Palmer and Hilary St. George Saunders, but then it’s only a recent spate of Merlin Classic Crime ebook publications which has made them accessible. So let’s start our acquaintanceship off with The Norwich Victims (1932), one of Beeding’s 30-some novels — an inverted mystery that has been highly praised in many other quarters in the GAD fandom. And I can see why: it’s a genuine inverted tale, for one, and contains some clever ideas that wring much from the apparently uninspiring setup…a staunch lesson to anyone who thinks that knowing the murderer early on in some way hamstrings a mystery plot.

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#1261: “Well, to be honest, the situation got a little out of hand.” – Murder Mindfully (2019) by Karsten Dusse [trans. Florian Duijsens 2024]

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Having recently enjoyed the very witty Murder at the Castle (2021) by David Safier, which turned former German Chancellor Angela Merkel into an amateur sleuth, I went searching for more droll German crime fiction and, just as it’s turned into a series by Netflix, stumbled over the recently-translated Murder Mindfully (2019) by Karsten Dusse.

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