The Invisible Event

If you follow the Golden Age blogosphere with any moderate interest, you’ll be aware of the love Puzzle Doctor has for Brian Flynn and the efforts he has gone to, via the wonderfully accommodating people at Dean Street Press, to get as much of Flynn’s work

It is an oft-repeated lament in the halls of Golden Age fandom that, with the authors from that era all being, y’know, dead, we’re always reading a closed set of books.

Having recently been unimpressed by both the sole novel in Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy corpus, Too Many Magicians (1967), and a pastiche novel by Michael Kurland, The Infernal Device (1978), the obvious next step is to read a pastiche novel in the Lord D…

It’s fair to say that, in my reading of crime and detective fiction, I generally like my plots fast-moving, my clues brilliantly baffling, and my detection rigorous.

It was over three years ago that I read The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006), the first of Nancy Springer’s books featuring Sherlock Holmes’s younger sister Enola, and while I didn’t hate it I also clearly didn’t feel the need to rush back to the serie…

Sixteen salty seadogs sallying seaward in search of scurrilous…stuff, that’s what you’ll more or less find in Deep Waters [ss] (2019), another anthology of short fiction in the British Library Crime Classic series edited by the some-might-say-too-knowledg…

Hired by Texan businessman Lawson C.

Neither of the two novels I’ve read by Anthony Abbot have exactly thrilled me, but the guy clearly has some good ideas — ideas that, I can’t help but feel, get a little diluted in the need to expand them up to novel length.

It’s been a while since I read anything by Roger Ormerod, and that’s in part because I can’t quite decide how I feel about his work.

I may not yet share TomCat’s love of John Russell Fearn, but I also won’t deny that in the little I’ve read by the man he’s shown enough spirit to warrant further investigation.

It’s true that, with a self-imposed target of three posts a week all year long, I can sometimes lose a little perspective on the playfulness of this genre I love so dearly.

As a fan of the impossible crime novel You’ll Die Laughing (1945) by Bruce Elliott, I was delighted when I accidentally discovered that Stark House Press had put out a collection of Elliott’s short fiction, Do You Know Me?

All I really knew about To Catch a Thief (1943), published by Craig Rice under the nom de plume Daphne Sanders, was that it represented something of a change from the work she’d done to that point in her career.

Having thoroughly enjoyed some of the entries Dennis Lynds wrote as William Arden in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, I was surprised and curious when I discovered that he had written an impossible crime story listed in Adey, ‘The…

Back in 2020, as part of my occasional Adventures in Self-Publishing undertaking, I read two stories by Jamie Probin — the novel The Thirteenth Apostle (2020) and the much shorter ‘The Adventure of the Nine Monets’ (2020) — and followed this up a few years

When Adelaide Barnett is found strangled to death in her fourth-floor flat in Monmouth Mansions, Platt Street — that’s a clue to the sort of time you’re in for here — author and amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham, trying to take Inspector Moresby out to lunc…

Twenty-Twenty-Six has been a big year for me finally tracking down long-sought stories of murder.

Never Trust a Partner [ss] (2021), another collection from Crippen & Landru, is composed of two complete series by Robert Edward Eckels: 12 stories revolving around art forgery with Lang and Lovell, and five tales of “the world’s greatest adjutant”, Major…

Newly-married and living in England, young American Sally Bowen receives a letter from a friend in the U.S. expressing concern for surprising recent developments: “It must be dreadful to be so far away from home and have your aunt confess that she poisoned

Fourteen alternative takes on the Great Detective — editor Sebastian Wolfe is unable to distinguish “parodies, pastiches and burlesques” from each other — fill out The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1989).

As Northern Hemisphere summers get increasingly sweltering — I wrote this post during the heatwave that the U.K. underwent in late June 2026 — let’s enjoy 18 tales of people murdering, cheating, lying to, and generally mistreating each other, selected for…

When the mayor of Oldhaven apparently leaves the local pier one evening without gathering in his fishing paraphernalia, initially it seems like he may have just been forgetful: his daughter was due to give birth, after all, so he had other things on his m…

I thoroughly enjoyed the very readable set of stories collected in Baker Street Irregulars: The Game is Afoot [ss] (2018), which gave a variety of almost crossover mystery interpretations to the Sherlock Holmes/Dr.

The private eye of fiction is positively assailed on all sides by the classic Simple Case That Turns Out to Lead to Something Much Bigger.

One of the especially lovely things about having a blog is when someone discovers an old post and restarts a conversation from, like, eight years ago.

Hand on heart, I honestly believed I had read The Infernal Device (1978), the first of five books about Professor James Moriarty written by Michael Kurland, before now.

I’ve read, in my general perusal of the crime and mystery genre, some of the Union Club mysteries by Isaac Asimov, but this collection of 30 of them was a chance to diver deeper into the canon, and so I snapped it up.

J.J.

A collection of 11 non-canonical takes on Sherlock Holmes by eleven different authors, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [ss] (1985) has lingered long on my shelf, and its day in the sun is finally here.

Three weeks ago I finally caught up with ‘The Dashing Joker’ (2001) by Ashibe Taku in an old Ellery Queen Mystery magazine.

I first read The Kennel Murder Case (1933), the sixth book by S.S. van Dine to feature the love-him-or-hate-him amateur sleuth Philo Vance, when in the initial thralls of having discovered the impossible crime.

Well, the penultimate Lord Darcy story was fucking awful, so the final one has to end things on a more positive note, right?

Firstly, no: I have no idea what the cover of this 1973 pocket edition of The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1934) by Erle Stanley Gardner is about.

The metafictional world inhabited by Anthony Horowitz in this series, where he plays Watson to the mysterious, ingenious ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne, kicks up a notch in sixth title A Deadly Episode (2026).

With an uptick in quality in the previous two Lord Darcy short stories, I was very much looking forward to the penultimate one — also the longest, by a significant amount — continuing this trend.

The idea of a collection of Golden Age short stories based around a theme of animals seemed like an unusual one, until I remembered that one of the genre’s foundational short stories and one of its most famous novels both have animals in fairly central ro…

“There were moments when the police felt like giving up their attempt to find among the scores who hated or feared Emily Purvice the one who had killed her”.

And so, a new-to-me story from Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy oeuvre, since I definitely didn’t read these last three in this collection at first encounter (no, I’m not sure why).

Certain so-called friends of mine have made a point of telling me that back issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine are available at their local library.

Clearly on the run, Bill ‘Scotty’ Scott and Eve Roman find themselves in Havana, and are set about living as full a life as they can when the past catches up with them and Scotty finds himself accused of murder.

Upon first encounter, some 15 years ago, I left four of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories unread for reasons which now elude me; and those reasons seem even more elusive when you realise that the last one I did read was possibly the strongest of the lo…

2026 is becoming the year in which I finally capture some white whales, having read the astonishingly elusive Into Thin Air (1928) by Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk and now the equally scarce The Tube (1958) by French maestros Pierre Boileau and Thomas…

Prior to reading For the Defence: Dr.

Five Tuesdays in June means that I have sufficient time and space to read and write about the five remaining Lord Darcy short stories by Randall Garrett which, given that I reviewed the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) back in January, means the full canon…

Either one of the greatest innovations in the genre’s history or one of it’s most misguided attempts at latching onto a passing phase, you can bet that I snapped up a copy of this murder mystery containing what my youthful 1990s self knew as magic eye pic…

Given that A.A.

I find my books by various means, but this might be the first time I’ve taken advice from YouTube: this video recommending 15 Criminally Underrated Mystery Books was shared in the Facebook GAD group, and mentioned The World’s Greatest Detective (2017) by…

I thought I would have done a few more episodes of my increasingly-occasional podcast In GAD We Trust by now, but a couple fell through and I didn’t want to rush out something to replace them that didn’t have my heart in it.

The twenty-fifth long form case for Inspector Joseph French, Enemy Unseen (1945) does not cover its detective or its author Freeman Wills Crofts in glory.

Post-2001, doesn’t a title like Attack on the Tower of London (2004), with the associated implications of terrorism, sound a little beyond the calling of a juvenile ice hockey team?