We started this month of Minor Felonies Tuesdays with one Sherlock Holmes pastiche, so let’s wrap it up with another before next month takes us back into Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. Thus, Black Ice (2011), the third entry in Andrew Lane’s series charting the development of a teenage Holmes into the resident of 221B Baker Street we all know and love.
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I’ve been searching around for a juvenile mystery series not from the 21st century to take the place of the Five Find-Outers on the blog (I still have several Ken Holt books to read, it’s true, but I grew a little weary of those) and stumbled upon a reference to an impossible crime in the shape of The Locked Safe Mystery (1954), the second of fifteen juvenile mysteries by Norvin Pallas published between 1951 and 1967. And it’s in Skupin, so, well, why not?
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I like crossover mysteries, I like stories about time travel — these two being combined in the short-lived Anthony Horowitz series Crime Traveller (1997) — and I like juvenile mysteries. So a juvenile crossover mystery in which twins can affect the flow of time should be right up my street. Should be.
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It is an oft-repeated lament in the halls of Golden Age fandom that, with the authors from that era all being, y’know, dead, we’re always reading a closed set of books. And the wish is to come across some new corpus of work that we can throw ourselves into in the years ahead. Well, it’s not GAD, but with Friday Barnes: Girl Detective (2014) by R.A. Spratt I’ve definitely found a long-running series I can get very excited about.
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It was over three years ago that I read The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006), the first of Nancy Springer’s books featuring Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister Enola, and while I didn’t hate it I also clearly didn’t feel the need to rush back to the series. So here with are with a belated look at second title The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (2007).
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The private eye of fiction is positively assailed on all sides by the classic Simple Case That Turns Out to Lead to Something Much Bigger. So I guess it’s not surprising that the Three Investigators aren’t immune.
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I find my books by various means, but this might be the first time I’ve taken advice from YouTube: this video recommending 15 Criminally Underrated Mystery Books was shared in the Facebook GAD group, and mentioned The World’s Greatest Detective (2017) by Caroline Carlson, with the promise of some impossible crimes amidst the youthful crime-solving…how could I resist?
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Post-2001, doesn’t a title like Attack on the Tower of London (2004), with the associated implications of terrorism, sound a little beyond the calling of a juvenile ice hockey team?
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In a pure coincidence of timing, I read the first of Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes novels, Death Cloud (2010), at about the time a series based on the books was announced by Amazon. The trailer, however, seemed to share ‘teenage Sherlock Holmes’ with the books — “teenage” in Hollywood meaning “played by someone who’s nearly 30 years old” — and nothing more, so let’s get onto the second volume today instead.
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Earlier this year, I stumbled over The Beanstalk Murder (2024) by P.G Bell, a superb crossover mystery which imports the tenets of a well-clued mystery into the world of Jack and the Beanstalk. Bell’s second novel along this line, The Big Bad Wolf Murder (2025), followed in due course, and a few weeks ago he was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about the writing of these two excellent books.
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