Inverted Mystery

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

/ JJ / 15 Comments


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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#1244: To Take a Backward Look – My Ten Favourite Mysteries of the 1930s

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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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#1224: The Shadow of the Wolf (1925) by R. Austin Freeman

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Shadow of the Wolf

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Far from the short story collection my House of Stratus edition pictured here promises on the back cover, The Shadow of the Wolf (1925) is the eighth novel to feature R. Austin Freeman’s “medico-legal hermaphrodite” Dr. John Thorndyke and an inverted mystery to boot — a particular delight to discover, because I’ve been giving this form of detective story a lot of thought lately. And so when Varney — I don’t think we ever learn his first name — murders Dan Purcell on a boat in the opening chapter and begins to put in place that which makes it seem the dead man has fled of his own accord, I was even more delighted than I usually am at the start of a Thorndyke tale.

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#1212: “Can you imagine anyone believing a story like that?” – Three’s a Crowd in Dial M for Murder (1954) [Scr. Frederick Knott; Dir. Alfred Hitchcock]

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The inverted mystery has been tickling my brain recently, and I got to thinking that I’d very much like to rewatch Alfred Hitchock’s Rope (1948). But the closest thing I could find on the various platforms available to me — without shelling out any money, you understand, which must be saved for essentials like books and coffee — was the similarly-inverted Dial M for Murder (1954), which I last watched before the need to shave had descended upon me. So, well, why not?

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#1206: “You haven’t got any evidence and can’t get it…” – The Department of Dead Ends [ss] (1949) by Roy Vickers

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It is my understanding that more than one collection of Roy Vickers’ inverted mystery stories have been put out under the title The Department of Dead Ends, but also that this The Department of Dead Ends (1949) is the first time it was done, with ten stories telling of ingenious murderers and the miniscule oversights that eventually caught them, thanks to the elephantine memory of that eponymous division.

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#1107: “You really are a sly one, Lieutenant.” – Sour Grapes Aplenty in Columbo: Any Old Port in a Storm (1973) [Scr. Stanley Ralph Ross; Dir. Leo Penn]

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I’ve not watched Columbo — in which Peter Falk’s eponymous, crumpled Lieutenant outwits murderers the viewer has watched commit and then cover up their crimes — in years, and would probably have gone years more but for stumbling over two references in a week to ‘Any Old Port in a Storm’ (1973) apparently being the very pinnacle of the long-running series. So, let’s take a look.

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