We’re all prone to speculate at times about how wonderful it would be to discover a previously-unpublished work by a beloved Golden Age author, and for today’s podcast episode Tony Medawar rejoins me to tempt you with two forthcoming collections of hard-to-find material from two of the genre’s titans — John Dickson Carr and Freeman Wills Crofts.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 13: Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World (2020) by Mark Aldridge [w’ Mark Aldridge]
This year’s celebrations of the centenary of Hercule Poirot’s debut and, arguably, the dawn of the Golden Age of Detection have obviously been overshadowed by wider events, but there’s still much to celebrate — not least of which is a new book about Poirot from Mark Aldridge.
Continue reading#710: “And what would you call the right surroundings for reading a ghost story?” – The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983) by John Dickson Carr [ed. Douglas G. Greene] Part 2 of 2

Two weeks ago I looked at the first four plays in this collection, so let’s get on the with final five.
Continue reading#704: “That’s an interesting choice of phrase, young man…” – The Dead Sleep Lightly (1983) by John Dickson Carr [ed. Douglas G. Greene] Part 1 of 2

It’s fair to say that no-one has done more for the curation of John Dickson Carr’s work than Douglas G. Greene: collecting various obscure short pieces in the likes of The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980), Merrivale, March, and Murder (1991), and Fell and Foul Play (1991), writing the staggeringly comprehensive (and recently reprinted) biography The Man Who Explained Miracles (1995), and enabling, through Crippen & Landru, publication of two — soon to be three — collections of Carr’s radio scripts edited by Tony Medawar.
Continue reading#702: Shedunnit x The Invisible Event – Locked Room Mysteries

You’re doubtless aware of the superbly wide-ranging Golden Age-focussed Shedunnit podcast run by Caroline Crampton, and I was delighted to be asked to contribute to an episode about locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. The results are now online for your listening pleasure.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 10: Genre and Detective Fiction [w’ Ryan O’Neill]

A final (for now) podcast episode before I head off on hiatus, this time discussing the idea of genre with author Ryan O’Neill.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 9: Japanese-English Translation + The Honjin Murders (1946) by Seishi Yokomizo [w’ Louise Heal Kawai]

A seam of superb Japanese detective novels and short stories have crossed the language barrier in recent years, teaching even the most culturally ignorant of us to tell our honkaku from our shin honkaku. And here to give us a sense of the work involved in making that happen is literary translator Louise Heal Kawai.
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#694: “It was a small matter but very conclusive.” – The Singing Bone, a.k.a. The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke [ss] (1912) by R. Austin Freeman

It was my understanding that William Shakespeare invented the word “eyeball”. The noun eye was extant at the time, as was the concept of a ball being something round, but that Shakespeare was the one to take the two principles and conflate them. It turns out he didn’t [see the comments below this post], but presumably someone did, and that’s all I really need to be the case for this opening paragraph.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 8: Uncovering Long-Forgotten Short Stories + Bodies from the Library 3 (2020) ed. Tony Medawar [w’ Tony Medawar]

Today was due to have been the sixth (sixth!) Bodies from the Library conference at the British Library but, for obvious reasons, it’s not. I can’t, alas, give you a whole day of GAD-based discussion, but I can at least fill an hour with someone from that line-up of exceptionally knowledgable people, Tony Medawar.
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#690: Minor Felonies – Alfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries [ss] (1963): ‘The Mystery of the Four Quarters’ by Robert Arthur


