Miss Potts is Home Again

 Because of its lack of rules and even of a standard definition, "Suspense", whether you call it psychological or domestic, was a very peculiar genre that was home to some very peculiar writers - and Jean Potts may have been the most peculiar of them all. If Ursula Curtiss as I once said occupied the …

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

The definition of the Golden Age and how long it lasted are issues I've been pondering for years. I first outlined my thoughts in a well-received series in which I tried to distinguish between the different stratas of the period but while I still think there is merit to this approach I also think it …

The Mischaracterization of Charlotte Armstrong

Perhaps one of the weirdest stories of riches to rags in the crime fiction genre is that of Charlotte Armstrong. A towering force both critically and commercially in her lifetime and a perennial Anthony Boucher's favourite, she progressively faded into obscurity after her untimely death and is now known only to the diehard vintage mystery …

The Problematic Cop

To say that crime fiction long had, and to some extent still has, a police problem may seem rather odd at a time when police procedurals are the most frequent and popular form of the genre. The problem I'm discussing here is not the old political one of knowing whether crime fiction should lionize law …

Soyez modernes, lisez des vieilleries!

Cela ne vous aura sans doute pas échappé depuis le temps, mais je lis et je parle essentiellement de la littérature policière vintage - des trucs pas trop récents, écrits par des gens qui ont rejoint depuis longtemps le royaume de l'inconnue dimension. Ce n'est pas que je sois particulièrement passéiste, même si je ne …

Sunday Thoughts, The Ranting Edition

Warning: The following contains some strong opinion stated as fact.  I've said it before and I say it again: I am empathetically not a crime fiction purist. I don't think the rules must be followed to a T or that a really good mystery must read like it was written by Agatha Christie in her …

Puissance de la bêtise

Un type ramasse sur une plage un sifflet portant une inscription sibylline. Il souffle dedans. Un peu plus tard, il est agressé par un drap de lit. Racontée de cette manière, cette histoire est parfaitement stupide. Et pourtant je viens de vous résumer l'une des nouvelles fantastiques les plus terrifiantes jamais écrites, un classique dans …

The Puzzle of the Book Without a Puzzle

It doesn't often happen that a book keeps me awake until 3:00am and it happens even less often that I'm unable to explain why even to myself - and yet this happened last night, and Bill S. Ballinger is the one to blame. Ballinger is one of the few noir/hardboiled writers I really like, mostly …

The Impossible Originality

"Never write the same book twice" was the motto of the late Mark McShane, and he mostly lived by it for all his writing career. Sure not everything he wrote was the stuff of immortal masterpieces (though a lot of it is) but he always or nearly always kept his promise to not repeating himself …

I Know What You Did… and I Don’t Care

One of the minor inconveniences of reading mysteries almost exclusively over a long stretch of time (thirty years in this blogger's case) is that you're becoming harder and harder to fool (also to please, but that's another matter) While a few masters of the form elevate plotting to fine art and remain mostly unpredictable, most …