Perhaps the most important scene in The Lost Gallows is paradoxically one in which nothing much happens plotwise: It contributes nothing to either the mystery or the solution and might as well not be there - and this is why Carr chose to write it nevertheless that makes it so crucial. I'm referring to the … Lire la suite The Man Who Read Detective Novels
The Great and the Famous
There is no widely agreed upon definition of the Great Detective but mine would go like this: An amazingly gifted person, either from an amateur or professional background, who solves criminal cases that leave other people baffled. While it may seem rather broad and consensual this definition is much more restrictive than appears at first … Lire la suite The Great and the Famous
The Right Length
If you're not (yet) a member of the Golden Age Detective Fiction group over at Facebook then you miss a lot of great discussions. The latest hot topic t here started with a member voicing his disappointment with Otto Penzler's Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries but quickly turned into a larger debate over whether … Lire la suite The Right Length
The Speckled Casket of Death
DEEP silence, then a long shuddering wail of terror, a stifled, strangling cry for help, the sound of a body falling, and again deep silence. A pause, and after awhile the tramp, tramp of heavy shoes through a lower hall. A door slammed and a man staggered out into a deserted street, haggard, trembling and … Lire la suite The Speckled Casket of Death
Sunday Thoughts – The Plotting Edition
Warning: The following contains some opinion stated as fact, which doesn’t mean it isn’t open to reasonable discussion. It has been three decades last year since I began my journey into crime fiction and it taught me, and is still teaching me, many things. One of them is that the genre is diverse, not only … Lire la suite Sunday Thoughts – The Plotting Edition
Doing Away With Murder
A complaint often made about Golden Age and overall traditional mysteries is that they trivialize violent death, making murder a mere pretext for a parlour game and/or cheap thrills. One might argue that modern crime fiction with its much more graphic and often gratuitous violence doesn't fare that better for all its pretence of greater … Lire la suite Doing Away With Murder
Tell It Straight
Now here's something you won't often catch me saying: The French title of Barbara Vine's A Dark-Adapted Eye is much better than the original. Vine's "debut" is known in France as Véra va mourir, which roughly translates as "Vera Is Going to Die" an admittedly less striking and "literary" title but one that fits the … Lire la suite Tell It Straight
That Problematic Barber
Carr's legacy is an odd story, an odder one that any he ever devised. He is arguably the most famous of all forgotten crime writers, maintaining a loyal and enthusiastic fanbase (of which I'm a proud member) despite most of his books never having been reprinted in decades. What's more, this quintessentially Golden Age writer's … Lire la suite That Problematic Barber
The Baronness and the Queen
I'm in the middle of a re-evaluation of P.D. James, at least as a short story writer (I'm not feeling ready yet for trying a novel of hers again, having not yet recovered from my two previous attempts) After reading the excellent The Part Time Job, I followed with The Boxdale Inheritance which I liked … Lire la suite The Baronness and the Queen
And Now for Some Controversy…
Controversial idea: A weak or bad plotter is not necessarily a bad crime writer. Let me explain before throwing tomatoes. It has been my credo for years that a writer should be judged after what they tried to do rather than what the reviewer would like them to do. If a crime writer is not … Lire la suite And Now for Some Controversy…
