OOP
#348: Golden Age Detection 101 – The Setting
Following on from last week’s unveiling of the previously-unknown ‘Everythyne I Know About Detectyve Fiction’ (1925) by Captain Sir Hugh J. Lee Boryng-Payne Q.C. A.B.V. and his perspectives on the writing of an amateur sleuth, I thought I’d share the second section of this pamphlet on the perks and perils of the setting of a typical GAD novel of detection.
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#346: The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner
The third Doug Selby book from Erle Stanley Gardner sees an escalation in the puzzle aspects that make this series such a joy. You may come in expecting small town shenanigans and lazy Evil Big Business villains shown up by scrappy, dogged, local hero Selby, but you get a man killed in baffling circumstances with a semi-impossible twist, or a bindle-stiff gassed in equally nonsensical conditions with an elaborate scheme behind it, or — as here — a naked corpse shot twice in the same wound and spiralling accusations of complicity in murder plots that parallel and snake around each other in a particularly lethal dance. Dammit, Gardner is my go-to when I need a lift, I can’t deny it.
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#343: He Wouldn’t Kill Patience (1944) by Carter Dickson
The result of a challenge between John Dickson Carr and magician-turned-author Clayton Rawson to write a murder in a room whose inaccessibility is assured by paper taped across the inner door jamb, He Wouldn’t Kill Patience (1944) also has GAD brethren in Freeman Wills Crofts’ zoo-set, poisonous-snake-centric Antidote to Venom (1938). Carr and Rawson take more puzzle-oriented routes, of course, and both happen to feature magicians, but the Reptile House subgenre is off to a good start with these two novels in it. And since you’re going to ask, in the head-to-head of this and Rawson’s ‘From Another World’ (1948), Carr wins. Boy, does Carr ever win.
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#334: The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) by Ellery Queen
Sure, laugh it up. Just a few short months ago I stated my intention to read the entirety of the output of Manny Lee and/or Frederic Dannay under the Ellery Queen nom de plume, and here I am — some struggles later — jumping ahead to a more warmly-perceived title. I’m not happy about it myself, I much prefer to do these things chronologically, but equally I want to want to read their books again. I’ve loved some, been unaffected by others, and abominated a handful, and as such Queen remains a problem child for me. So here I am, back on the horse in a different town, mixing metaphors with the best of ’em. And the result…?
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#318: The Sinister Six – Murder Begins at Home in ‘Behind the Screen’ (1930)
After the 
In the orchestra of John Dickson Carr’s detective fiction, his early years from It Walks by Night (1930) up to arguably The Arabian Nights Murder (1936) are very much the accordion section. Events occur in concentrated bursts, with clues and characters squeezed together to make the notes of the plot emerge, only to then be drawn apart before inexorably squeezing together again for another dense exposit you must pore over in order to follow the necessary developments. From The Punch and Judy Murders (1936) until the 1940s he wrote in the fine, clean, overlapping lines of the harp, and then the violins took over… but enough of this analogy, back to this book and the wheeze of a bellows working overtime.
The Invisible Event 