Flying lute? Check. Ghostly disembodied hand? Check. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, let’s call this meeting to order…
#188: Five to Try – Debunked Séances in Detective Fiction
John Dickson Carr
#177: Spoiler Warning – Coming in January: The Ten Teacups, a.k.a. The Peacock Feather Murders (1937) by Carter Dickson
Given that so much time spent discussing mystery fiction is devoted to edging carefully around the precise plot points on which such enterprises are founded, I thought I’d give you fair warning that Puzzle Doctor and I are going to be abandoning this approach next month in looking at the 1937 impossible crime novel The Ten Teacups/The Peacock Feather Murders by John Dickson Carr, published under his Carter Dickson secret identity.
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#173: Murder Gone Mad (1931) by Philip MacDonald
Well, this seems an odd choice of book to review the day after John Dickson Carr’s 110th birthday, right? The sensible thing would be to pick one of his novels, in keeping with the occasional Carr-related theme of my posts of late, right? Aha! Well, good job, then, because this is Carr-related: in 1946 Carr selected what he felt to be the 10 best detective novels published to date (writing an essay entitled ‘The Grandest Game in the World’ that, I believe, was intended to be published as an introduction to a run of reprints of the books…which never materialised due to copyright issues) and this was one of them. I really did not like the first MacDonald book I read (X v. Rex) and was warned in advance by both TomCat and Noah that this isn’t a particularly good book…so that all boded well, hey?
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#172: The Round-Up of #Carr110
And so, with John Dickson Carr’s 110th birthday coming to an end on this side of the Atlantic, let’s have a look at what those people who got involved had to say of the man and his work…
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#171: JDC OOP – WTF?
In his lifetime, John Dickson Carr published 76 novels and short story collections, plus a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle and a ‘true crime’ novel predating Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey. Following the closure of the Rue Morgue Press, who had five Carr novels in their books, and the coming disappearance of Orion’s ebook undertaking The Murder Room, who have around 14 or so Carr novels in their ranks, we’re not too far from a point in time where only two Car novels will be available to buy: Orion’s perpetually in-print version of The Hollow Man and the Mysterious Press publication of The Devil in Velvet. So, to return to the question in the title of this post: John Dickson Carr’s out of print — where’s the fuss?
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#170: Dark of the Mood – Atmosphere in the Work of John Dickson Carr
Half a lifetime ago, I put up this post looking at the consistency of language across the Sherlock Holmes canon, and for my first post today in celebration of John Dickson Carr’s 110th birthday — a second post will be going up later today, then a round-up of the posts I’m kinda just trusting that other people are doing will go up this evening — I thought I’d utilise a similar approach to analyse an aspect of Carr’s writing that is often much-discussed: his use of atmosphere.
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#169: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Man and Superman: Refining the Protagonist in John Dickson Carr’s Historical Mysteries
With the great man’s 110th birthday looming tomorrow — I hope everyone has got their suits dry-cleaned (I’m not the only one who blogs while in full formal dress, right?) — I thought I’d look at an aspect of John Dickson Carr’s writing that came to my attention recently upon reading The Devil in Velvet, namely his use of a modern-day protagonist thrown back into the past.
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#168: Death on the Radio – John Dickson Carr and ‘Murder by Experts’
Since reading Max Afford’s radio-set mystery The Dead Are Blind, I’ve had a new-found appreciation for the art of creating radio drama, especially during the age when radio held such a huge sway in the homes of most people. My interest in detective fiction from this era inevitably lead to some passing awareness of the serials produced at this time, but Afford’s novel really brought home the level of technical expertise required to produce something so much more complex than simply four people sitting at a microphone with a script.
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#166: One Week Until #Carr110 – Some Links to Help You…
The time is nearly upon us! Banish next week’s post-Thanksgiving blues by getting involved in the celebration of John Dickson Carr’s 110th birthday on 30th November. Post an article, review, discussion piece, poem, comparison, or anything you damn well please about Carr, put the link in the comments here, and I’ll collect everything together for summing-up post at the end of the day.
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#165: The Tuesday Night Bloggers – Finding Satan in the Subtleties (if not in the book) of The Devil in Velvet (1951) by John Dickson Carr
