The final Tuesday of June brings us the final two stories from Mystery and More Mystery (1966) by Robert Arthur. And with one of them comes some excitement…
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After the interruption to the schedule of two weeks ago, here’s another In GAD We Trust podcast — and given the topic of ‘Making a Good First Impression’ it’s only fitting to welcome returning guests Sergio and Brad.
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That title is doing a lot of work, isn’t it? Fair warning: this goes on a bit.
At the online Bodies from the Library conference last weekend, I gave a talk inspired in part by E.M. Wrong’s introduction to the 1926 anthology Crime and Detection. And, in addition to coining the term “Wellington of detection” that inspired the thinking I laid out last weekend, there is plenty of material in that piece of prose to get the cogs turning.
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Sometimes I plan ahead — c.f. a review of a novel by R. Austin Freeman in the same week as a podcast episode about R. Austin Freeman — and sometimes I really should. Rest assured, it will haunt me for years that I didn’t review this updating of the Holmes/Watson dynamic in the same week as Anthony Boucher’s The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940).
Continue readingIn January of last year, I read my first R. Austin Freeman novel, little suspecting that it was to be the first step along a road of sheer delight. And so, to mark the end of Series 2 of In GAD We Trust, today I’m discussing Freeman and the Thorndyke stories with author and fellow R.A.F. fan Dolores Gordon-Smith.
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God, I needed this. Not that my reading has been hard work of late — I’m keeping within fairly safe ground, the last year having taking its toll on my…everything — but this is the first book I’ve read in a while that has been so damn fun. Remember fun? We used to have it all the time. For 90% of The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940) I was swept up in the sheer joy of the ornate, ridiculous planning that goes into a puzzle mystery, in wave after wave of wildly unpredictable developments, and in the excitement of celebrating the voracious fandom the mystery genre excites. For the other 10%…well, we shall get to that in due course.
Whatever happens to the series from here, it would be difficult to deny that creator Robert Arthur set Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews off to a magnificent start with his ten Three Investigators novels.
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Reading this Sherlock Holmes pastiche has perhaps inevitably made me reflect on my history with Sherlock Holmes pastiches.
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The Invisible Event 