Another Tuesday, another triumvirate of stories from the Exeunt Murderers [ss] (1983) anthology of short crime fiction by Anthony Boucher.
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#925: “Everyone has to die sometime.” – Nightwebs [ss] (1971) by Cornell Woolrich
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 reading#922: This Deadly Isle: A Golden Age Mystery Map (2022) by Martin Edwards [ill. Ryan Bosse]
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.
Continue reading#920: Little Fictions – ‘Threnody’ (1936), ‘Design for Dying’ (1941), and ‘Mystery for Christmas’ (1943) by Anthony Boucher
Having previously written about the Nick Noble stories and Sister Ursula stories by Anthony Boucher collected in Exeunt Murderers [ss] (1983), I turn my attention for Tuesdays this month to the remaining, non-series works in that volume.
Continue reading#919: “Tonight, in this house, is there going to be another killing?” – Bodies from the Library 5 [ss] (2022) ed. Tony Medawar
Another year, another collection of forgotten or unknown tales from the luminaries of detective fiction’s Golden Age brought to us by the tireless efforts of Tony Medawar. So how does Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) stack up?
Continue reading#913: “You people have the most cheerful imaginations…” – It Walks by Night (1930) by John Dickson Carr
With the superb British Library Crime Classics range having recently published its one hundredth title, and with doubtless many more books still in its future, the time seems ripe to revisit one of its most exciting reprints, It Walks by Night (1930) the novel-length debut of John Dickson Carr and his first sleuth, Henri Bencolin.
Continue reading#901: “Killing? Who said anything about killing?” – Future Crimes: Mysteries and Detection Through Time and Space [ss] (2021) ed. Mike Ashley
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?
Continue reading#892: “He happens to be around when so many murders crop up…” – Bodies from the Library 2 [ss] (2019) ed. Tony Medawar
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.
Continue readingIn GAD We Trust – Episode 29: Writing The Red Death Murders (2022)
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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