A Matter of Mood

Cosy and Noir are usually seen as the two extremes bookending the large spectrum of crime fiction. That claim is not without merit (they are indeed extremes) but also rests on the mistaken  premise that Cosy and Noir are separate, distinct genres - which they are not. This may seem a rather counter-intuitive take as …

The Ten, 2021 Edition

So 2021 is over, or will be in a few hours, and it is thus time for me to tell you about my favourite books of the year, something you've undoubtedly been feverishly waiting for all those twelve months. Who will succeed Lawrence G. Blochman? Will it be a major or reasonably well known writer …

Justice for the Victorians

Some people, myself included, have used the word "Victorian" to describe our current brand of long-winded, bloated narratives, especially as pertains to books and this is actually a slander - against Victorian fiction, that is.   There's no denying the Victorians were not models of brevity when it came to novel writing; what's more, they …

Cave Canem

This article is a bilingual one. Please scroll down for the English-language version. Le Chien des Baskerville occupe une place paradoxale dans l'oeuvre de Conan Doyle et en fait à l'intérieur du genre policier dans son ensemble. C'est sans doute la plus connue, la plus abondamment rééditée et commentée de toutes les aventures de Sherlock …

A Little More Straw to Chew

R. Austin Freeman was the subject of one of this blog's first entries, one that pulled no punches in defending him from what I thought and still think to be an unfair characterization as a dull writer with nothing to offer to the modern reader. That post, which remains one of my most popular to …

Méditations freemaniennes

J'ai commencé L'Empreinte de sang de Freeman et je livre mes premières impressions. La traduction de Gabin Perry me paraît excellente: elle restitue très bien la "petite musique" de Freeman que je connais bien désormais pour l'avoir si souvent pratiquée dans le texte. J'espère que Perry sera reconduit dans ses fonctions si le succès est …

Renouons avec les « bonnes » vieilles habitudes…

... et poussons un petit coup de gueule.   Il y a un problème Agatha Christie dans notre pays. Celle-ci est pour l'immense majorité de nos compatriotes l'incarnation du roman d'énigme, et souvent le seul auteur du genre qu'ils soient en mesure de citer. En soi ce n'est pas grave mais les conséquences, elles, le …

Sunday Thoughts – The Whodunit Edition

Warning: The following contains some opinion stated as fact, which doesn’t mean it isn’t open to reasonable discussion.  While frequently thought of as being one and the same, the Detective Story and the Whodunit actually are two different items whose histories admittedly overlap frequently but are nevertheless separate. A Detective Story can do without the …

Some Thoughts on the Least Likely Person

Our ancestors had it so much better than we do when it comes to crime fiction. Readers were much less jaded and familiar with the tropes of the genre and so they got fooled more easily, and writers in turn didn't have to rack their brains to find some new trick or a clever way …

The Clandestine Plotters

While we are repeatedly told by critics that crime fiction is about character and social comment, many of us readers keep ranking writers the old way, that is, by their plotting skills. There are a few great plotters, some good ones, many that are just average and a long, long succession of mediocrities - and …