Look, it took me a long time to appreciate the intelligence of the inverted mystery, in which we know who committed the crime and have to watch both them struggle over it and their eventual discoverer working out the threads of the case. But the important thing is that I got there in the end.
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Having now read — and in some cases, reread — all eight of Leo Bruce’s novels to feature sometime Sergeant William Beef, my ordered mind inevitably moves to ranking them.
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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.
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.
On 18th August 2025, The Invisible Event will have been running for ten years. And while I’m not a big one for introspection — I read books, I write about those books, some people read what I’ve written, rinse, repeat — a decade feels like a notable achievement and so some introspection is going to be had, for today at least.
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An earlier British Library Crime Classics short story collection today, with The Long Arm of the Law [ss] (2017) featuring 15 stories of professional police selected by the hugely knowledgeable Martin Edwards.
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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.
Continue readingLast year my book club picked our favourite 1930s mysteries, and earlier this year we moved on a decade and each selected a top 10 for the 1940s. So, well, here’s mine.
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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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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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