Another tales of small town Americana from Theodore Roscoe, his time focussing on the effects of a crime on one man’s standing in the tiny community of Four Corners, the fictional town in upstate New York
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The Detection Club — a membership-by-election dining club for detective fiction writers, whose origins and early days were traced so entertainingly by Martin Edwards in The Golden Age of Murder (2015) — has produced several collaborative efforts down the years, and it’s to one of those that we turn today.
Continue readingGiven how much classic (and modern!) crime and detective fiction relies on the concept of Othering — identifying the person who doesn’t ‘fit’ in a situation, and hoping guilt can be pinned on them — it’s interesting to see Theodore Roscoe employ the concept in the story of ‘Frivolous’ Clariselle Allders.
Continue readingI had intended to read and review the stories in Four Corners, Volume 1 (2015) — written for pulp story magazine Argosy between 1937 and 1941 — on Tuesdays last month, but was operating under a fatal misapprehension: that eponymous “Four” refers to the town, not the number of stories in the volume, of which there are five. Thankfully, August 2022 came to the rescue, and here we go,
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The short story collection The Great Portrait Mystery (1918) occupies an odd position in the oeuvre of R. Austin Freeman. Five of the seven stories herein have almost nothing to do with each other — tonally, thematically, genre-wise — and the other two are inverted tales of detection featuring his famous medical jurist character Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke. So were Freeman’s publishers simply fancying up some of his B-material by including a couple of Thorndyke tales to draw otherwise-uninterested readers to this collection? Let’s find out.
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A slight cheat this week — the final two stories by Anthony Boucher from the collection Exeunt Murderers [ss] (1983), and then, so that we have three stories again this week, the Holmes pastiche ‘The Anomaly of the Empty Man’ (1952) as listed in Adey.
Continue readingAnother Tuesday, another triumvirate of stories from the Exeunt Murderers [ss] (1983) anthology of short crime fiction by Anthony Boucher.
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Roughly twenty years ago, the British publisher Orion released a series of reprints under the banner of Crime Masterworks which had something of a transformative effect on the books Younger Me started to look out for. Included in that selection was the short story collection Nightwebs (1971) by Cornell Woolrich.
Continue readingThree more non-series tales from Exeunt Murderers: The Best Mystery Stories of Anthony Boucher [ss] (1983).
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After the very enjoyable work done by Herb Lester and Caroline Crampton in mapping the key locations of Agatha Christie’s English mysteries, it was surely only a matter of time before a similar project was attempted. And This Deadly Isle, which maps the locations of a raft of Golden Age mysteries across the country, is the delightful inevitable follow-up.
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The Invisible Event 