The original antepenultimate case for the world’s first consulting detective; the perfect time to introduce some new lore, what?
Continue reading#1280: Little Fictions – ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Short stories
#1279: “You ought to be able to make like Sherlock Holmes or Ellery Queen…” – The Man Who Read Mysteries [ss] (2018) by William Brittain [ed. Josh Pachter]
The first of (so far…) two volumes of William Brittain’s short fiction from Crippen & Landru, The Man Who Read Mysteries (2018) contains the eleven stories written under the non-series ‘The X Who Read [Author Name]’ titles and seven selections from editor Josh Pachter of the tales featuring crime-solving high school science teacher Leonard Strang.
Continue reading#1277: Little Fictions – ‘The Resident Patient’ (1893) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#1274: Little Fictions – ‘The Crooked Man’ (1893) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Five Tuesdays in April should allow me to finish off the last five stories in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Right?
Continue reading#1267: “Simple, isn’t it? Simple enough to hang a man.” – Fen Country [ss] (1979) by Edmund Crispin
A posthumous collection occasionally wrong billed as “Twenty-six stories featuring Gervase Fen” (there should really be, at least, a comma after ‘stories’, since series detective Fen isn’t in all of them), Fen Country (1979) was, I believe, the first collection of Edmund Crispin’s short fiction I read. And now I’m back, to get some thoughts on record.
Continue reading#1256: “There’s more here than meets the eye.” – Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner [ss] (2004) by Joseph Commings [ed. Robert Adey]
People will tell you that I don’t like the Brooks U. Banner stories of Joseph Commings. And, well, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Continue reading#1250: “The mere facts are obvious enough; it is their interpretation that yields the knowledge.” – The Puzzle Lock [ss] (1925) by R. Austin Freeman
The last time I read a book by Richard Austin Freeman, my House of Stratus edition told me it was a collection of short stories only for it to turn out to be a novel. So it’s fitting that my next encounter with Dr. John Thorndyke should reverse the situation and what is pitched on the back cover as a novel turn out to be a collection of short stories.
Continue reading#1242: “Nothing appals me more than the criminal mind.” – Four Square Jane (1929) by Edgar Wallace
First brought to my attention when one of its escapades was included in the Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime [ss] (2009), Four Square Jane (1929) by Edgar Wallace is a novel in reality comprising a series of separate adventures of our eponymous thief as she seeks to relieve the wealthy of their property in the interests of charitable endeavours.
Continue reading#1240: “Our investigation is foxed and bewildered because everybody is thinking of Christmas.” – Crimson Snow [ss] (2016) ed. Martin Edwards
Having looked at Silent Nights [ss] (2015), the first collection of Christmas-themed short stories in the British Library Crime Classic collection a fortnight ago, I move on to Crimson Snow [ss] (2016), the second such collection, edited once again by Martin Edwards.
Continue reading#1237: Death Croons the Blues (1934) by James Ronald
The recent publication of the tenth and eleventh volumes of James Ronald’s stories of crime and detection by Moonstone Press turned my mind back to the opportunity to read one of his novels that would have been out of my means due to financial or acquisitional circumstances prior to 2024. And so Death Croons the Blues (1934), a second outing for newspaperman Julian Mendoza, into whose boarding house an inept sneak thief stumbles having just discovered a dead woman in the flat they were burgling nearby. When the victim turns out to be nightclub chanteuse Adele Valée, Mendoza’s journalistic tendencies kick into overdrive as he attempts to find the killer.
The Invisible Event 