This first volume of The Complete tales of Jules de Grandin, French detective of the occult, contains 23 stories published between 1925 and 1928. Seabury Quinn was brought to my attention on the GAD Facebook group as an author who, like William Hope Hodgson, would mix in rational solutions to apparently supernatural problems so that you’re never sure what you’re getting. Sounds like fun? Let’s see how these stories stand up to scrutiny.
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This week, nine tales of criminous and/or eerie happenings written by Hirai Tarō who, under the name Edogawa Rampo, is widely acknowledged as the godfather of Japanese mystery writing.
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Another author exploring the spOooOOoOky side, with rational solutions just as likely as ghosts and spectres. WooOOoOooOoo, etc.
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With the annual Bodies from the Library collections, which have brought long out-of-print stories of crime and detection back to public awareness, proving rightly popular, editor Tony Medawar turns his attention to another facet of genre fiction with the Ghosts from the Library (2022) collection, in which authors (mostly) better known for their stories of crime and detection have a go at generating some supernatural chills instead.
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One final, for now, trip to Four Corners, “the kind of one-horse burg where they leave the doors open at night”, and the story of ‘Daisy Boy’ Dumont and the Curlew fortune.
Continue readingWhere next for Theodore Roscoe’s tales of small own life in upstate New York? Well, how about some Suspense?
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Another collaborative effort in the style of Behind the Screen (1930) and The Scoop (1931), with six authors each taking up the challenge of continuing this story, published in instalments in the News Chronicle in 1954.
Continue readingAnother 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
Continue readingThe 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.
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The Invisible Event 