OOP

#709: The African Poison Murders, a.k.a. Death of an Aryan (1939) by Elspeth Huxley

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African Poison Murders

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Elspeth Huxley’s Murder on Safari (1938) used its uncommon milieu and the author’s own experiences of life in Kenya as a young girl to enrich what might have otherwise been a ham-handed attempt to introduce some ‘variety’ into the annals of detective fiction. Its reliance on the trappings of safari life, and on the general ignorance of her policeman Superintendent Vachell to introduce the unfamiliar aspects to the reader, worked well with some unusual clues to mark it out as a very accomplished piece of detective fiction…right up until the reveal of the killer, when it all sort of fell apart. And lightning, it seems, has struck twice…

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#693: My Late Wives (1946) by Carter Dickson

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As a reader, there’s a tension to be found at the heart of every writer’s work once it’s a closed set, especially when they’ve scaled the heights that John Dickson Carr did: with nothing else to be added, at what point does The Decline set in?  From Till Death Do Us Part (1944), arguably the pinnacle of his glittering career, it’s a sawtooth diagram of quality all the way to Papa La-Bas (1968), arguably the nadir, but at what point does a downward trajectory become the prevailing trend rather than the occasional, forgivable oversight?  It’s obviously impossible to pick the precise moment — helloooo, subjectivity — which inevitably makes such a moment impossible not to look for.

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#685: The Murders in Praed Street (1928) by John Rhode

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One evening, responding to a phone call from the local hospital requesting that he identify a man involved in an accident, Mr. James Tovey, Fruit and Vegetable Merchant on London’s Praed Street, discovers he’s the victim of a prank and that no such call was made by anyone at the hospital.  On the short walk home, he encounters a group of men outside the local pub and…there endeth his story, for he is stabbed and dies shortly thereafter.  With the group all claiming innocence, and talk of a scar-faced sailor seen in the vicinity, the event is put down to a senseless tragedy until circumstances link it to another death on the same stretch of road.  And another.  And another.

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#681: Minor Felonies – Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries [ss] (1963): ‘The Mystery of the Seven Wrong Clocks’ by Robert Arthur

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Hitchcock STYM

Another short conundrum from Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries (1963), which contains the following being covered this month:

1. ‘The Mystery of the Five Sinister Thefts’
2. ‘The Mystery of the Seven Wrong Clocks’
3. ‘The Mystery of the Three Blind Mice’
4. ‘The Mystery of the Man Who Evaporated’
5. ‘The Mystery of the Four Quarters’

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#664: The D.A. Breaks an Egg (1949) by Erle Stanley Gardner

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Well, it’s taken me about twice as long as I thought it would, but we’re finally at the end of Doug Selby.  This is the ninth and final novel to feature Erle Stanley Gardner’s District Attorney of Madison County — a place where “they roll up the sidewalks and put them in mothballs at nine or ten o’clock at night” and that in the words of P.L. Paden, new owner of the Blade newspaper, “has been small time [and is] about to grow up”.  Certainly one change is in evidence here: events of the preceding novel carry over in a way that spoils one of the best surprises of that book, so make sure you’ve read The D.A. Takes a Chance (1948) before picking this up.

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