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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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.
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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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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And so we reach season 5 of Monk, in which Tony Shalhoub plays the eponymous OCD-afflicted former detective, brought in to consult on a range of odd and uncommon crimes.
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Season 4 of Monk is upon us — well, upon the blog, because it aired 18 years ago and I’m only just catching up — and, since I’ve approached the three previous seasons in slightly different ways, let’s mix things up again and rank the sixteen episodes here from worst to best, eh?
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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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Another themed collection of crime and mystery stories from the British Library, Crimes of Cymru (2023) sees Martin Edwards’ exemplary genre knowledge tasked with selecting tales with Welsh settings or origin.
Continue readingI looked at my ten favourite fictional sleuths a little while ago, and so, in honour of today’s Bodies from the Library conference at the British Library, here are my ten favourite novels that the excellent British Library Crime Classics range introduced me to.
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Sixteen stories from Christianna Brand, who, thanks to the likes of the excellent Bodies from the Library (2018-present) series and the British Library Crime Classics range, has enjoyed something of a resurgence of late. So, how do these stack up?
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The Invisible Event 