#1521: Ten Minute Alibi (1934) by Anthony Armstrong and Herbert Shaw


I very much enjoyed Anthony Armstrong’s contribution to the collaborative novel Double Death (1939), and so a friend kindly lent me the novel Ten Minute Alibi (1934), adapted — with help from Herbert Shaw — from Armstrong’s stage play of the same name, which was published the year before. I’ve not yet read the play, so have no idea how closely the two coincide, but I suspect that it was Shaw who did most of the writing of this novel if only because the rather functional prose lacks so much of the character that made me curious to check out more of Armstrong’s writing. I am, however, getting ahead of myself, so let’s (appropriately) back up a bit…

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#1516: “It was a pretty obvious case of murder.” – Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries [ss] (2018) ed. Martin Edwards

Comprising fifteen stories of murder and malfeasance linked to that most Golden Age of associations — the romance of travel as provided by the early 20th century train — Blood on the Tracks [ss] (2018) is an early example of the British library Crime Classics anthology, brought together for your delectation by President of the Detection Club Martin Edwards.

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#1513: Don’t Tell Me There’s No Hope At All – Occasional Comforting Discernment in Monk Season 6 (2007-08)

‘Hey,’ readers this blog aren’t saying ‘it’s been a while since Jim wrote about Monk, in which Tony Shalhoub plays an OCD-afflicted ex-police detective in San Francisco.’ Yeah, well I have them all on DVD — look, I scanned in the cover above and everything — but what I don’t have is a DVD player.

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#1498: “You have a reputation for poking your nose into this sort of thing…” – Deep Waters: Mysteries on the Waves [ss] (2019) ed. Martin Edwards

Sixteen salty seadogs sallying seaward in search of scurrilous…stuff, that’s what you’ll more or less find in Deep Waters [ss] (2019), another anthology of short fiction in the British Library Crime Classic series edited by the some-might-say-too-knowledgeable Martin Edwards.

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#1491: To Catch a Thief (1943) by Craig Rice [a.p.a. by Daphne Sanders]


All I really knew about To Catch a Thief (1943), published by Craig Rice under the nom de plume Daphne Sanders, was that it represented something of a change from the work she’d done to that point in her career. And having read most of the work she’d done to that point in her career I can reaffirm that position. Not only is the focus of this rather more stern than we’ve seen elsewhere, it’s also less-tightly constructed and decidedly more in the Pulp-y vein than anything I’ve seen from this wonderfully talented writer, and in that regard it came as something as a disappointment. It scores some good points along the way, but overall the Rice non-completist can dodge this one.

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#1489: Following in the Footsteps of Giants – ‘Chapter 17: Perroquet Explains’ (2026) by Jamie Probin

Back in 2020, as part of my occasional Adventures in Self-Publishing undertaking, I read two stories by Jamie Probin — the novel The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) and the much shorter ‘The Adventure of the Nine Monets’ (2020) — and followed this up a few years later with two of Probin’s further short stories, ‘The Heir Affair’ (2022) and ‘Body of Matter’ (2022).

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