A second anthology of impossible crimes from the British Library Crime Classics range, As If by Magic [ss] (2025) is another genre-spanning collection from editor and Detection Club President Martin Edwards that does much to highlight the depth and breadth of classic crime and detective fiction.
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A man sleeping alone in a bolted room, five storeys up in the tower attached to his grand old house, wakes in the night and hurls himself out of the window to his death. Refusing to believe in spooks, spectres, and eldritch terrors, the man’s son determines to sleep in the room as well, and similarly hurls himself from the sole window while alone and the door is again bolted. And if that setup doesn’t entice you to read The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), John Dickson Carr’s lucky thirteenth long form case for Dr. Gideon Fell, then, well, I don’t know how else to entice you in. It was this book that convinced me Carr was going to be my flavour of jam years ago, and I returned to it with great eagerness.
Mary Virginia Carey was not, it seems, scared of a little velitation in her stewardship of The Three Investigators.
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As my grandfather used to say, “Good god, it’s tough being a John Dickson Carr fan — he wrote some of the genre’s best and most enduring masterpieces, and yet the decline in his later works like Behind the Crimson Blind (1952) and The Cavalier’s Cup (1953) means that when you get to that end of his career he can prove to be frustrating and unenjoyable to read. But try The Dead Man’s Knock (1958), which at least features Dr. Gideon Fell, a character I’m sure you’ll like when you encounter him.” And, over 40 years later, his prophecy has been borne out, with The Dead Man’s Knock arresting a recent slide in quality where my Carr reading is concerned.
Last 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.
Continue readingI 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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One of many classic detection titles I read before I started this blog, The Judas Window (1938) is arguably among the most popular books John Dickson Carr ever wrote, under his nom de plume Carter Dickson or otherwise. The seventh book to feature his barrister-detective Sir Henry ‘H.M.’ Merrivale, and the only time H.M. enters the courtroom in all his cases, this was actually the first Merrivale book I read, way back when, and so a revisit seemed on the cards, especially with the British Library Crime Classics adding Dickson’s The Ten Teacups, a.k.a. The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) to their stable next month. Might this one follow suit? Lord knows it deserves to.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on what Tony Medawar has done in recent years for GAD fans, with Wicked Spirits (2024) being the eighth collection of lost, forgotten, and so-rare-they-doubt-their-own-existence stories by GAD luminaries Medawar has edited under the …from the Library label. Whether we get any more after this or not, and I sincerely hope we do, it’s a wonderful body of work, and only the tip of an iceberg of effort he has been putting in for decades now.
Continue readingI’ve written before about the impact the long-defunct Orion Crime Masterworks series had on my discovery of classic-era crime and detective fiction, and a recent pruning of my shelves brought back to me many of the happy memories from those books. So today, I’m going to run through the ten which left, perhaps, the strongest impression on Young Jim.
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I have in the past referred to The Punch and Judy Murders, a.k.a. The Magic Lantern Murders (1936) — the fifth book to feature Sir Henry ‘H.M.’ Merrivale under John Dickson Carr’s Carter Dickson nom de plume — as an underacknowledged masterpiece in the oeuvre of an author who produced more than his fair share of masterpieces in the genre. So let’s examine that, eh? That sort of claim can’t possibly backfire.
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The Invisible Event 