This first English translation of The Secret of the Pointed Tower (1937) by Pierre Véry was a cause of great excitement when announced, and I regret only that the complexity of the multi-limbed TBR has delayed me this long in getting to it.
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More magic, mummery, and misdirection from Randall Garrett’s alternate history Europe, and this time a bit of an impossible crime thrown in to boot. Not that he makes much of that element.
Continue readingAnother Tuesday, another Lord Darcy story, in which Randall Garrett mixes magic and detection in an alternate-history Europe.
Continue readingPerhaps two decades a go, I read some, but not all, of the Lord Darcy series of stories by Randall Garrett, in which detection is augmented with magic. And I’ve been telling people they’re good ever since. So for Tuesdays this, and another as-yet-undetermined future, month let’s take this Fantasy Masterworks volume of the complete stories — 10 shorts, and the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) — and see how they stand up.
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Eleven cases from the early career of the World’s Favourite Golden Age Sleuth, Poirot Investigates (1923) offers a chance to revisit a collection I’ve not read in, oh, twenty years. Lovely stuff.
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I first encountered James Yaffe via his story ‘The Problem of the Emperor’s Mushrooms’ (1945), but have heard much about his ‘Mom’ stories, in which a police officer’s mother “is usually able to solve over the dinner table crimes that keep the police running around in circles for weeks”. So I was delighted to acquire the complete collection of those tales.
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On 18th August 2025, The Invisible Event will have been running for ten years. And while I’m not a big one for introspection — I read books, I write about those books, some people read what I’ve written, rinse, repeat — a decade feels like a notable achievement and so some introspection is going to be had, for today at least.
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An earlier British Library Crime Classics short story collection today, with The Long Arm of the Law [ss] (2017) featuring 15 stories of professional police selected by the hugely knowledgeable Martin Edwards.
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Today is the tenth Bodies from the Library Conference, at which, until other considerations intervened, I was due to present on the topic of inverted mysteries. And you can bet I would at some point have talked about Six Against the Yard (1936), in which six crime writers put their ‘perfect murder’ on paper and ex-CID man Superintendent Cornish picked holes in their plans.
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You don’t write as much as Edward D. Hoch without hitting the bull’s-eye a few times, so I’m finally doing what I should have done all along and starting the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series from the beginning, with this first collection, Diagnosis: Impossible (2000), a tranche of 12 stories initially published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine between 1974 and 1978.
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The Invisible Event 