What present to get for the mystery fanatic in your life? A week ago, mysteriesahoy! published an unboxing video of crossexaminingcrime's coffee and crime box. (By the by, you should be reading their blogs instead of mine.) It looked cute, I had a birthday coming up...why not? The package came rather quickly—all the way from… Continue reading Coffee and Crime Box
Fellers were money for jam, thought Sari, compared with trying to enchant small girls. Really one felt sorry for poor exhausted paedophiles... That's just one of the many lines in Christianna Brand's 1979 novel The Rose in Darkness that sent me into a fit of cackling delirium. Brand who can nail a characterization with the… Continue reading The Rose in Darkness
On this point, the author feels he may have been unfair to the reader. However, he believes that it will not cause any lasting damage to those with a vivid imagination. So writes Soji Shimada in the solution chapter of his locked-room mystery, Murder in the Crooked House. Whether this is a cop out (perfectly-tuned… Continue reading Murder in the Crooked House
Richard Forrest's 1975 novel is a an example of the "impossible crime thrown in at the last minute" (sub)subgenre of mystery. It begins with the discovery of three skeletons (1 man, 1 woman, 1 child) on a ridge in Murphysville, Connecticut. A doll clutched in the tiny skeleton's arms and the dental work on the… Continue reading Child’s Garden of Death
I've been hard at work on The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (I'm going to get so tired of saying that title), but I wanted to post something in the meantime. When the manuscript goes out to beta readers, I'll be posting a lot and you won't get me to shut up. Enjoy… Continue reading July Update
James Scott Byrnside 