The first half of John Dickson Carr's It Walks By Night deals with the murder and its immediate aftermath. What a grand murder it is! A former athlete (who has only recently become a recluse) is found beheaded in the card room at Fenelli's restaurant. The room had two entrances, both of which were under… Continue reading It Walks By Night
When I bought the The Locked Room Reader , I thought I had only read one of the stories. As it turned out, I had read a few of them. (Damn you, early onset of Alzheimer's!) Nevertheless, I thought I'd write some impressions. Collections of shorts (be they stories or films) tend to vary in… Continue reading The Locked Room Reader
Paul Halter's The Phantom Passage has an audacious hook. It's London (1902), and people are reporting strange occurrences. The details are similar. A madman comes out of the fog to guide the victim down Kraken Street. This, in itself, is incredible--the street doesn't exist anymore. Along Kraken, they encounter a man selling grapes, a woman… Continue reading The Phantom Passage
Ianthe (God, we don't get many Ianthes nowadays, do we?) Jerrold's The Studio Crime is the sort of competent mystery I could learn a lesson or three from. Not that it's terribly inspired, but what it does, it does very well indeed. The familiar repartee between the fact-worshiping cop and the gut-feel-worshiping sleuth is especially… Continue reading The Studio Crime
The heart and soul of Juanita Sheridan's The Chinese Chop lies in the relationship of the two main characters, Janice Cameron and Lily Wu. Janice has moved from her beloved Honolulu to the loneliness (and frigid winters) of New York City. Desperate to find a room, she meets Lily Wu. The two move into a… Continue reading The Chinese Chop
I'm trying to imagine what a normie would think of Carr. (Where is the theme, the character development, the story?) His novels have little in the sense of narrative momentum. The penultimate chapter starts with a character we've never met, throwing us off the problem we're so invested in and grinding things to an unbearable… Continue reading The Reader is Warned
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
