One final, for now, trip to Four Corners, “the kind of one-horse burg where they leave the doors open at night”, and the story of ‘Daisy Boy’ Dumont and the Curlew fortune.
Continue readingWhere next for Theodore Roscoe’s tales of small own life in upstate New York? Well, how about some Suspense?
Continue readingAnother tales of small town Americana from Theodore Roscoe, his time focussing on the effects of a crime on one man’s standing in the tiny community of Four Corners, the fictional town in upstate New York
Continue readingGiven how much classic (and modern!) crime and detective fiction relies on the concept of Othering — identifying the person who doesn’t ‘fit’ in a situation, and hoping guilt can be pinned on them — it’s interesting to see Theodore Roscoe employ the concept in the story of ‘Frivolous’ Clariselle Allders.
Continue readingI had intended to read and review the stories in Four Corners, Volume 1 (2015) — written for pulp story magazine Argosy between 1937 and 1941 — on Tuesdays last month, but was operating under a fatal misapprehension: that eponymous “Four” refers to the town, not the number of stories in the volume, of which there are five. Thankfully, August 2022 came to the rescue, and here we go,
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The final week of the Death of the Reader boys picking their way through Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe, and the reckoning is upon us: how close were they with the solution they proposed in last week’s show?
Continue readingAnother Monday, another chance to listen to Felix ‘Flex’ Flexerton and Herman ‘Herds’ Herdley as they read Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe in sections and I attempt to entice them away from the confident groove they settled into last week.
Continue readingYou may remember that I recently reviewed Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe — but what you won’t know until now is that I was rereading it in part because I’d been invited onto Death of the Reader to talk about it.
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Approximately five years ago, powered by a combination of ego and ignorance, I set about trying get Murder on the Way! (1935) by Theodore Roscoe reprinted, based on its reputation as a cracker and its infuriating unavailability. To my frank surprise I succeeded, and it — and Roscoe’s Second World War-predicting I’ll Grind Their Bones (1936) — was republished by Bold Venture Press in 2017. Rereading it recently, it seemed due a reappraisal — well, an appraisal, really — since I edited the book without any notion of whether it was any good, and was too fixated on matters typographical to focus all that intently on, like, the plot and stuff.
The Invisible Event 