Let's try this again...

-

This is a backup of my other blog of the same name, which may turn into the main blog if I like the format better. Updates Mondays, but for now I'm porting over all my previous posts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Impossible Crimes, Time After Time: THE LAPIS LAZULI CASTLE MURDERS (2002)

-
Image
"All living things in this world go to war. It doesn't matter if they're big or small. As long as life exists, we'll all keep killing each other." Two lovers reincarnate in an endless cycle across history, destined to always find one another, cursed to always kill each other with the same dagger. Not a premise you look at and think "sounds like a fair-play locked room scenario", but that's exactly what you get in The Lapis Lazuli Castle Murders , an unconventional detective novel by Takekuni Kitayama. It's the second book in his Castle series, which could be compared to Yukito Ayatsuji's Mansion series (each case is themed around a weird castle) except that as far as I'm aware, the detective doesn't carry over. Kimiyo is a young librarian suffering from terminal brain cancer. One day, the mysterious Kito comes to "the Library at the End of the World", claiming that Kimiyo was his lover in a past life, that she was once...
Read more

Locked Room Library #5: THROUGH THE WALLS (1937)

-
Image
As I mentioned in the masterpost for this blogging endeavour, French mystery authors are a bit of a lacuna in my mystery knowledge. Noël Vindry is one such author, a mystery novelist who wrote a string of meticulously fair-play "puzzle novels" in the 30s and 40s before quitting the genre, and is apparently almost as forgotten in French as he is in English. Thankfully, I don't have to lean on my shoddy French skills, as John Pugmire translated several of his best works into English through Locked Room International, including Through the Walls . The Locked Room:   A family is menaced by a mysterious intruder who leaves the house's upstairs without having entered, can kill in locked bedrooms and in broad daylight while facing the victim, and vanish in plain sight. The Story: Through the Walls leans towards the far extreme of the puzzle plot, which is to say, there's vastly more puzzle than plot. Petty bureaucrat Sertat comes to Police Commissaire Maubritaine looking...
Read more

John Dickson Carr’s 10 Best Detective Novels

-
Image
Originally posted June 3, 2024. The Wikipedia page for The Lamp of God by Ellery Queen mentions that it is “included by the mystery writer John Dickson Carr in his list of the ten best mystery stories ever written.” Naturally I wondered: what are the other nine? The thing was, though, the list didn’t seem to be transcribed. Anywhere. And when I went a-googling, the only other novel described as one of JDC’s “ten best” was The Greene Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine. To the source, then! The “list” is actually the essay ‘The Grandest Game in the World,’ originally written in 1946, and which is reprinted in the collection The Door to Doom —specifically the 1991 edition. Dickson Carr is quick to clarify that these are not the best novels, rather some of the best novels—this was originally supposed to be the introduction to an anthology that never happened. The essay itself doesn’t summarize the novels in an ordered list, rather discussing the significance of the ten author...
Read more