While it’s only the second book I’ve read in the Screech Owl series, Death Down Under (2001) by Roy MacGregor is in fact the fifteenth entry, and continues the tonal dissonance from my first encounter.
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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’m not entirely sure what I expected from The Murderer’s Ape (2014) by Jakob Wegelius, but it wasn’t a Gulliver’s Travels (1726)-esque multinational adventure written by an intelligent gorilla. And while the book that results is in no way a bad thing, it’s also not really a murder mystery in the vein of what I’m typically after in these Minor Felonies posts.
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Having recently read the twentieth novel in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, and the tenth to be written by someone other than series creator Robert Arthur, my mind turns to how Jupe, Pete, and Bob have fared with multiple hands now directing their fates.
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Lying in the Deep (2023) by Diana Urban was brought to my attention by a piece the author wrote on CrimeReads in which she said that she had taken the setup and some “iconic plot beats” from Death on the Nile (1938) by Agatha Christie in order to inform the structure of her own book. Holy lawsuit, Batman, colour me intrigued.
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Nicholas Blake is hardly a dusty and forgotten member of detective fiction’s past, but my experiences with him to date have been so lacking in high spots that the only way I’m going to read The Widow’s Cruise (1959) is by screwing my courage to the sticking place as part of this Mining Mount TBR endeavour. And so here we are.
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Fatal Venture (1939) represents, by my count, the ninth time in twenty-three books that Freeman Wills Crofts has devised a criminal scheme which contains a significant strain of maritime malfeasance. Compared to the mere brace involving railway timetables, you have to wonder why he’s seen as the Timbletable King rather than the Wizard of the Waterways — hell, even these excellent Harper Collins reissues make a point of highlighting his use of railway timetables, so you have to wonder if that myth will ever die. Never mind, this is still superb; highlighting why Crofts has fallen by the wayside compared to some of his peers, perhaps, but enjoyable, clever, and surprising along with it.
Of the multitudinous ways that Vultures in the Sky (1935) by Todd Downing is boring, perhaps the most irritating is the incessant padding between plot points that drags out discoveries or turn the Lantern of Suspicion upon someone so palpably innocent of any blame that you have to wonder if the author thought anyone would be paying attention. Eight people on the last train through Mexico before a workers’ strike hits should be a real cauldron of a setting, full of slow-building tension and — if clever misdirection among the tiny cast cannot be achieved — at least some doubt as to who the killer might be. It’s almost impressive how Downing fails on both counts.
Following my recent podcast chat with M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, and the nomination of this very title for an Edgar award, let’s catch up with the Adventures on Trains series. “It’s unlikely we’ll encounter another adventure quite like the last one,” Nathaniel Bradshaw tells his nephew Harrison ‘Hal’ Beck as they take their seats on the California Comet. But we readers, aware that the title of this book is Kidnap on the California Comet (2020), know better…
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There is a Golden Age of detective fiction going on at the very moment, but because most of what’s being written is aimed at 8-to-12 year-olds, it gets overlooked by, like, grown-ups. I’m trying to raise awareness of this with my frequent Minor Felonies posts, and it’s partly in pursuit of this aim that I’m delighted to welcome M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman — authors of the excellent Adventures on Trains series — to my nerdy detective fiction podcast, In GAD We Trust.
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The Invisible Event 