I have an undeniable fondness for the work of Edgar Allan Poe, having looked at his tales of ratiocination on this blog as well as written a novel inspired by one of his most famous stories. So Beyond Rue Morgue [ss] (2013), a collection of stories edited by Paul Kane and Charles Prepolec purporting to extend the career of Poe’s unfathomably influential detective C. Auguste Dupin, was certainly an intriguing find.
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Something a little different today: knowing that I’m a fan of the Australian dramatist and novelist Malcolm ‘Max’ Afford, Tony Medawar — the closest thing the GAD firmament has to Indiana Jones — sent me a selection of Afford’s thus-far-uncollected short fiction, as found in a variety of Australian publications from the Golden Age, and I’ve read them and am going to write a little about each one.
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In my very first post on this blog I shared the belief that G.K. Chesterton’s writing is “too verbose”, and I’ll confess that I’ve found him hard to enjoy in the past. But reading some stories with Countdown John got me thinking that maybe I could suffer to give him another go, and so here, eventually, we are.
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The key facet of most crime and detective fiction is that we, the reader, should find ourselves in sympathy with the person who is the victim — or, more rarely, the perpetrator — of, some crime. Sometimes, though, that’s simply not possible.
Continue readingThe original antepenultimate case for the world’s first consulting detective; the perfect time to introduce some new lore, what?
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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 readingFive Tuesdays in April should allow me to finish off the last five stories in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Right?
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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.
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The Invisible Event 