Seven stories featuring Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, medical jurist extraordinaire and one of my very, very favourite detectives from the genre’s Golden Age.
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A big game hunter, an explorer, and a master sharpshooter attend a magic show while on a cruise…not the setup of a disappointing joke, but rather the core idea at the centre of ‘The Hand is Quicker than the Eye’, a.k.a. ‘Lester Leith, Magician’ (1939), the fifth and final story collected in The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith (1980).
Continue readingAnother tale of professional thief Lester Leith (hey, that rhymes…!), and another impossible crime. Who knew that Erle Stanley Gardner dabbled in the best subgenre in the world so frequently?
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Seven cases from the extended adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as Sherlockian superfan Nick Cardillo indulges in adding to the reminiscences of Dr. John Watson.
Continue readingI’m very much enjoying the company of Lester Leith, Erle Stanley Gardner’s gentleman scoundrel who, having extracted from criminals their ill-gotten gains, takes a small cut and passes the balance onto worthy causes.
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I’m slowly working my way up to the newly-translated Paul Halter novel The Siren’s Call (1998, tr. 2023), but there’s the small matter of these two short stories to deal with first, translated by John Pugmire and drawn here from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
Continue readingSend a thief to catch a thief, eh? And then try to catch that second thief and frame him for the theft done by the original thief? Sir, you’re not playing very fairly with Lester Leith.
Continue readingFive Tuesdays in August, five stories about gentleman scoundrel Lester Leith from the pen of Erle Stanley Gardner — synergy.
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Another themed collection of crime and mystery stories from the British Library, Crimes of Cymru (2023) sees Martin Edwards’ exemplary genre knowledge tasked with selecting tales with Welsh settings or origin.
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Subtitled Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime [ss] (2009) collects twelve stories originally published between 1896 and 1919 — an era which I find myself increasingly interested in, giving birth as it did to the Golden Age of the 1920s-40s.
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The Invisible Event 