OOP

#1132: The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943) by Erle Stanley Gardner

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Case of the Smoking Chimney

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While you’ve hopefully been enjoying the regular reviews on The Invisible Event, I’ve been sweating bullets over the fact that I hit a seeming unpassable patch of reader’s block and haven’t read anything for nearly a month. Then Brad suggested that some Erle Stanley Gardner might help me out as it has done recently for him and, well, here we are. Mistakenly believing The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943) to be the first of Gardner’s two novels featuring the disreputable Gramps Wiggins I picked it up and spent a very happy day in its pages, and while it reaffirmed much of what I like about Gardner’s writing the book also bears many of the man’s flaws.

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#1124: Bats Fly at Dusk (1942) by A.A. Fair

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Bats Fly at Dusk

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With considerations of the era taking Donald Lam out of the Cool and Lam Detective Agency, Bertha Cool is left to fend for herself when a blind man wishes to hire her services in tracking down a young woman who, he claims, has disappeared. It’s an unusual jumping-off point in itself, but the real delight here is how intelligently Erle Stanley Gardner, writing under his A.A. Fair nom de plume, explores and explains the way the blind man is able to identify so many different people — and how intelligently he is able to come to conclusions about the woman whose wellbeing is his concern. And then others start to express an interest in the same woman; and then someone is murdered…

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#1121: Follow As the Night, a.k.a. Your Loving Victim (1950) by Pat McGerr [a.p.a. by Patricia McGerr]

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Follow as the Night

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Having finally achieved all he has so long dreamed of, Larry Rock has just one lingering problem: one of the women from his chequered past must die in order to not stand in the way of his continued success. Realising that the balcony of his swank new apartment represents the perfect opportunity to kill someone and make it look like an accident, Larry throws a dinner party and invites his ex-wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife, his mistress, and his fiancée…and the whole city sits back and waits for the fur to fly while we, the reader, wait to find out whose body it was that dropped out of the sky in the prologue. As set-ups go, Follow As the Night (1950) by Pat McGerr takes some beating.

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#1117: Mining Mount TBR – Death Knocks Three Times (1949) by Anthony Gilbert

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I’ve heard great things about the novels Lucy Beatrice Malleson wrote under the name Anthony Gilbert but, apart from one title in the British Library Crime Classics range, they seem pretty hard to come by. Fortuitously stumbling over an old, musty, collapsing copy of Death Knocks Three Times (1949), I’ve been reluctant to pick it up precisely because of its musty, dilapidated condition…but here goes nothing.

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#1108: Little Fictions – The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith: ‘The Hand is Quicker than the Eye’, a.k.a. ‘Lester Leith, Magician’ (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner

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A big game hunter, an explorer, and a master sharpshooter attend a magic show while on a cruise…not the setup of a disappointing joke, but rather the core idea at the centre of ‘The Hand is Quicker than the Eye’, a.k.a. ‘Lester Leith, Magician’ (1939), the fifth and final story collected in The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith (1980).

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#1106: Captain Cut-Throat (1955) by John Dickson Carr

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Captain Cut-Throat

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Just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, don’t judge Captain Cut-Throat (1955) — John Dickson Carr’s breathless tale of Napoleonic-era espionage and swagger — by its first chapter. The opening to this otherwise very enjoyable story took me three attempts to conquer, as Carr really wants you to know he’s done his research and so crams in too much detail with insufficient focus, leaving me floundering and fearful…a feeling no doubt amplified by my having given up on the two books he published prior to this because they seemed too diffuse to be worth persevering with. Push on, and this soon becomes a propulsive and delightfully plotted romp for the majority of its length.

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