Beneath the Stains of Time

Last time, I reviewed the splendid novella "Death is a Trouper" (1946) by "Kelley Roos," a shared penname of William and Audrey Roos, which finds their normally bantering, wisecracking mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila Troy during a messy breakup –…

Writing under the shared pseudonym "Kelley Roos," William and Audrey Roos formed one of the best, cleverest and funniest writing duos of genuinely funny, cleverly-plotted detective novels starring their bantering, mystery solving couple of Jeff and Haila…

Dorothy Cameron Disney was an American journalist, writer and columnist whose column, "Can This Marriage Be Saved," ran for three decades in Ladies' Home Journal, but she also authored nine detective novels – published between 1936 and 1949.

Back in 2020, I posted the first "Locked and Loaded" blog-post reviewing five, or six, randomly picked, usually uncollected short stories of the impossible variety and covered a 118 year period of short locked room mystery stories in the previous seven re…

Last year, I came across the work of fan-lator Mitsuda Konno, formerly known as Mitsuda Madoy, who's translating first-rate Japanese detective fiction with "cosmmiicnana" such as Kie Houjou's superb "The Ryuuzen Clan" series and Danro Kamosaki's insane "M…

When patching together one of these lists, I always try to avoid the usual topic and opt for something slightly less obvious and original, "Top 10 Works of Detective Fiction Lost to History," "Top 10 Beneficiaries of the Reprint Renaissance" and "Top 10 N…

Milward Kennedy was an English civil servant, journalist, literary critic, reviewer and mystery writer, who was a founding member of the Detection Club, but the bulk of his novels and short stories have been out-of-print and largely forgotten about for de…

Motohiro Katou's C.M.B. vol. 13 comprises of four, one-chapter stories starting with one of those human, heart-shaped puzzles, "The Grass in Summer," which begins when soaring temperatures end the school day early for the students of Meiyuu Private High S…

Rev.

I previously reviewed Ross Montgomery's The Murder at World's End (2025), a classically-styled, retro-Golden Age mystery, which is set against the backdrop of the Great Comet Scare of 1910 when Halley's Comet was making its pass by the Earth – believing t…

Last year, Ross Montgomery, a British author of more than twenty children's books, debuted with his first novel for adults, The Murder at World's End (2025), which is the first in a new series of historical, retro-Golden Age style detective novels – starr…

A.B.

Samuel Spewack was a Ukrainian-born American journalist, Hollywood screenwriter and novelist who penned two detective novels, The Skyscraper Murder (1928) and Murder in the Gilded Cage (1929), before abandoning the genre – leaving behind two obscure, long…

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction is generally narrowed to the interwar period, roughly covering the 1920s and '30s, because the World Wars make convenient bookends for the detective story's post-WWI boom period and post-WWII decline – not everyone agre…

Back in 2024, I posted "Locked and Loaded, Part 5: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories," a series of reviews of randomly selected short stories, which included the misidentified, non-impossible crime story, "Cardula and t…

Back in May, Pushkin Vertigo released their eighth Kosuke Kindaichi novel, Yoru aruku (She Walks at Night, 1948), written by the patriarch of the Japanese honkaku mystery novel, Seishi Yokomizo – translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood.

Last month, A.

So, back in May, I added "The Locked Library," a companion page to "The Muniment Room," which is a permanent, easy to edit update of "The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Murders & Impossible Crimes" – essentially doubles as my version…

Later this year, Viz is going to publish the English edition of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 100, but, considering the original Japanese releases currently count 108 volumes, it will be another two, three years before the English releases have fully c…

Frits de Winter was a Dutch journalist, translator and a second generation detective novelist whose father, Jan de Winter, wrote juvenile mysteries and more than twenty novels about the Limburg police inspector, Paul Nijst – which apparently enjoyed some…

Some years ago, while reviewing Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), I claimed the biggest difference between the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series is that the latter never produced a genre classic or even a great detective novel – like

Some months ago, I reviewed a short story from Edward D.

The Case of the Running Man (1958), the 52nd entry in the Ludovic Travers series, rang in the last phase of Christopher Bush's decades-long run as one of Britain's premier mystery novelists as two more would appear in the late 1950s and counting down the…

Back in 2022, I concluded my run of reviews of the lamentably short-lived, surprisingly classically-styled Inspector Floris Jansen series written by the Dutch editor, translator and chess player Peter Verstegen – who published his detective novels under t…

Last year, I tried the first of Benjamin Stevenson's Ernest Cunningham novels after some initial skepticism, but Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone (2022) sold me on Benjamin's hilarious, classically-styled meta whodunits and quickly followed it up…

In 2013, the Breakthrough Bandwagon Books translated and published over half a dozen short stories by MORI Hiroshi, associate professor, engineer and somewhat of an experimental mystery writer, which included two short stories in his popular S&M series, "…

The first, of two, stories making up Motohiro Katou's Q.E.D. iff vol. 3, "Three Killers," concern three women, Kurotsu Yui, Okada Miki and Fujishima Akiko, who have all fallen victim to Yamaguchi Senji – president of a predatory investment company ("let t…

Percy Montgomery "Monte" Barrett was an American author, newspaperman and cartoon writer from Mitchell, Indiana, who co-created with artist Frank Ellis the original "spunky girl reporter" character, Jane Arden – cited as the prototype for similar characte…

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the permanent shuttering of our beloved, dearly departed Rue Morgue Press following a string of disasters from flood damage, health issues and financial problems to the death of Enid Schantz – severely reducing the…

Last year, James Scott Byrnside published It's About Impossible Crime (2025), a collection of original short stories, in which he paid homage to MacKinlay Kantor's It's About Crime (1960) and radio director William Spier – who worked on The Adventures of…

P.J.

Last year, I looked at two pictorial novels, Henna ie (Strange Houses, 2021) and Henna e (Strange Pictures, 2022), written and crafted by the masked horror/mystery Youtuber "Uketsu" – which received mixed reception in these parts of the fandom.