Mike Ashley, surely the world’s hardest-working editor of short story collections, has combined two of my loves with Future Crimes (2021): detective fiction and SF. As a fan of crossover mysteries, this seems tailor-made for me, and I have Countdown John to thank for bringing it to my attention. So, how does it stack up?
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With the Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) collection due in a couple of months, and spin-off Ghosts from the Library (2022) coming later in the year, the time seems ripe to revisit one of the earlier collections which — given the timespan over which I first read them — I failed to review on publication. And since, for reasons too complicated to bore you with here, the second volume was the first one I encountered, it’s there I’ll head today.
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All good things come to an end, and so does my podcast; started in the first UK lockdown and hard to justify now that lockdowns are well and truly over, In GAD We Trust’s 30th episode (number 29, but don’t forget that bonus run through the Jonathan Creek canon) is going out in a blaze of self-promotion.
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Well, look, it was bound to go wrong, wunnit? In four weeks of reading and writing about Cornerstone titles, assessing their merits and examining whether I felt they added anything to the corpus of detective fiction, I should have foreseen coming across one absolute dud. And trust me to get confident after three (largely) enjoyable weeks and leave this too late to replace with anything else, eh? Right, let’s get this over with.
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Max Carrados (1914) was the first collection of stories to feature Ernest Bramah’s eponymous aristocrat, blinded in an accident before deciding to turn his hand to detection, and another entry on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list. Certainly the concept of a blind detective is novel enough to capture the imagination, but does Bramah do enough with the potential here to warrant consideration as one of the foundational texts of detective fiction?
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Another week, another Cornerstone; this time, it’s “the American Sherlock Holmes” Craig Kennedy, creation of Arthur B. Reeve and a wildly popular character in his day.
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As discussed previously, Tuesdays in February will feature four collections of short stories on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list, selected on account of my ever-growing interest in what the genre looked like before the advent of the Golden Age in (no arguments here…) 1920. Confusingly, my 1950 green Penguin paperback of gentleman thief Raffles stories by E.W. Hornung shown above contains 14 tales, only the first eight of which concern us today, comprising as they do the first collection to feature the character, The Amateur Cracksman (1899).
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If you’ve met me, firstly I apologise, and secondly it’ll come as no surprise that I have a tendency to ruminate on that which many others pass over without so much as a backward glance. Previously this resulted in me writing something in the region of 25,000 words on the Knox Decalogue, and today I’m going to turn my eye upon the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list. Prepare thyself…
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William Link and Richard Levinson are undoubtedly best known today for their work done in creating TV crime-fighters Lieutenant Columbo, Jessica Fletcher, Joe Mannix, and Alexander and Leonard Blacke, as well as for a host of guest writing spots on other classic crime shows from the 1950s onwards. Shooting Script and Other Mysteries (2021) collects 17 stories by the pair that were published over a period of twelve years, mostly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
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After a tough few months in which I have been very grateful for the support of good friends and the presence of good books, let’s discuss the latter, eh? Kicking off 2022 is John Thorndyke’s Cases (1909), the first collection of short stories to feature Richard Austin Freeman’s medical jurist.
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The Invisible Event 