Self-Publishing

#708: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Ill Wind (2020) by Jean Heller

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Recently, while recording an episode of the rightly-popular Shedunnit podcast, I was moved to lament the decline in quality represented by most modern attempts at the impossible crime in fiction (and, for all I know, in reality, too). Today’s self-published crime novel, Ill Wind (2020) by Jean Heller, perhaps demonstrates the reasons for that decline better than I’ve previously managed myself.

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#672: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder by Magic (2017) by Paul Tomlinson

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Murder by Magic

Typical, eh?  You wait years for a blog to talk about magic, and then suddenly three posts come along at once: the most recent In GAD We Trust episode with John Norris, and two self-published impossible crime stories — one this week, and one next.  Sure, that’s stretching the definition of “at once” to an Orwellian degree, but that’s how I apparently roll.

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#669: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder in a Watched Room (2019) by A.G. Barnett

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Murder in a Watched Room

My previous encounter with A.G. Barnett’s self-published impossible crime fiction was An Invitation to Murder (2019), which saw an interesting-if-cozy impossible battering in a locked room lose points for drawing attention to the one detail it then failed to explain.  But, everyone gets two books, and so we’re back, this time with a different series and a stabbing in a locked and watched room.

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#666: Adventures in Self-Publishing – The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) + ‘The Episode of the Nine Monets’ (2020) by Jamie Probin

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Thirteenth Apostle, The

There’s a quote attributed to Michaelangelo essentially stating that a statue already exists inside a block of stone and it’s merely the sculptor’s job to chip away the stone that isn’t part of the resulting artwork.  This came to mind a lot whilst reading The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) by Jamie Probin, because if you remove the excess of nervous repetition and tedious tone setting there’s probably a great book in here somewhere.

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