It’s been ten months since I last caught up with Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, so how does new author Nick West — a nom de plume of Kin Platt — apply himself here, in the first of his two entries in The Three Investigators series?
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With magicians being renowned as practitioners of misdirection and Vanishing canonically one of the ten types of impossible crime, you’re damn right I picked up twelfth Ken Holt book The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician (1958) by husband-and-wife team Sam and Beryl Epstein expecting some impossible shenanigans.
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Expanding on a book by writing a sequel is a tricky proposition; you need to retain what made the first one (hopefully!) good and yet also give something new to make such an expansion worthwhile. Poached (2014), the second entry in Stuart Gibbs’ Funjungle series, thankfully does some very good work in building on the world of first book Belly Up (2010)…and throws in an impossibly-vanished koala for good measure to spice up the intrigue.
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I don’t know if I’d rather the writers and series I love took risks and missed some of the time, or if it’s worse for them to settle into a sort of congenial predictability that’s less and less exciting though safely fine from book to book.
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Following my recent podcast chat with M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, and the nomination of this very title for an Edgar award, let’s catch up with the Adventures on Trains series. “It’s unlikely we’ll encounter another adventure quite like the last one,” Nathaniel Bradshaw tells his nephew Harrison ‘Hal’ Beck as they take their seats on the California Comet. But we readers, aware that the title of this book is Kidnap on the California Comet (2020), know better…
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There is a Golden Age of detective fiction going on at the very moment, but because most of what’s being written is aimed at 8-to-12 year-olds, it gets overlooked by, like, grown-ups. I’m trying to raise awareness of this with my frequent Minor Felonies posts, and it’s partly in pursuit of this aim that I’m delighted to welcome M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman — authors of the excellent Adventures on Trains series — to my nerdy detective fiction podcast, In GAD We Trust.
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On page 110 of 355 of Elizabeth C. Bunce’s Premeditated Myrtle (2020) we learn that 12 year-old Myrtle Hardcastle starts reading novels in the middle because “beginnings were often boring”. Thankfully the unproved murder on which the entire book to that point has hung is finally suspected a few pages later and the book comes to life at last, but there’s an uncomfortably meta air to the criticism at the time.
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“Can you call it homicide if the victim is a hippo?” asks the back cover of this first entry in Stuart Gibbs’ Funjungle series and, from a purely Latin perspective, no you can’t. However, the brilliance of Gibbs’ endeavour here is how much he adheres to the fundamental form of the murder mystery despite this core difference.
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While far from his best work, The Blind Barber (1934) by John Dickson Carr does contain the brilliant problem of a corpse appearing on a passenger liner mid-voyage with no passenger or crew member apparently having died to provide it. Ella Risbridger’s juvenile mystery debut The Secret Detectives (2021) works from the same principle, with 11 year-old Isobel Petty seeing someone thrown overboard one stormy night…and yet the next morning no-one is missing.
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The Invisible Event 