You’re doing it wrong

#745: Mining Mount TBR – Menace for Doctor Morelle (1947) by Ernest Dudley

/ JJ / 14 Comments

The joy of running this blog comes not from the screaming fans that hound my every step, nor the piles of untaxable cash that seemed to just appear from day one, but from the discussions it and others allow me to have with like-, and sometimes unlike-, minded enthusiasts of Golden Age detective fiction. What to do, then, when I have a book that probably no-one is going to want to talk about?

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#630: The Freight Should be Proportioned to the Groove – The Sliding Scale of Poetry in Detective Fiction

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Snark Was a Boojum

When Xavier brought to my attention that Lee Child is sharing the writing of his best-selling Jack Reacher series to his brother before handing it over in due course, I saw it as the universe nudging me towards a filial co-authoring job residing in my own TBR, The Snark Was a Boojum (1957/2015) by Gerald and Chris Verner.

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#568: Adventures in Self-Publishing – An Invitation to Murder (2019) by A.G. Barnett

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An Invitation to Murder

Confidence and competence are, I think, the two qualities I’d like an author to exhibit if they’re going to ask for money for their work.  The confidence to know they’ve written something well, and the competence to be at least moderately schooled in things like continuity, how to use the language they’re writing in, and how to place and build ideas around their core structure.

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#549: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #11: Now You See Me (2019) by Chris McGeorge

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Now You See Me

The English language is a funny thing.  Take for instance Chris McGeorge’s debut novel Guess Who (2018) which, revolving as it did around a group of people solving a mystery while locked in a room, was marketed as a ‘locked room mystery’ when that is a phrase which has already had another meaning for well over a century.

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#527: Plotting the Perfect Crime – Potential and Pay-Off via The House of Haunts, a.k.a. The Lamp of God (1935) by Ellery Queen

/ JJ / 54 Comments

Black Lizard Locked Room

Slowly, slowly I work my way through the Otto Penzler-edited Woo Whatta Lotta Locked Room Mysteries (2014) — it’s not really a convenient size to dip into — and, since my chronological reading of Ellery Queen is going so well, it seemed time to take on this impossible disappearance story.  Or so I thought…

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#515: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #10: Angel Killer (2014) by Andrew Mayne

/ JJ / 40 Comments

Angel Killer

The appeal of detective fiction and impossible crime novels for me is their potential for elegance, for taking something that seems utterly baffling and rendering it clear through intelligent deployment of a few key ideas.  This achieved peak density during the Golden Age, which is why that era earned that sobriquet, and it feels like it’s been downhill ever since.

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