How terribly alone one was, among all one's friends... Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand is widely regarded by anglophone mystery readers as a top-notch locked room mystery with a devious solution, but it was technically left off the actual Locked Room Library list due to the French translation changing the ending. That only made me more curious to know what all the fuss was about. Some of the other entries are more properly "impossible crimes" than "sealed rooms", but this is one of the most thoroughly sealed rooms out there. The Locked Room: An actress in a medieval pageant is killed onstage: strangled by hand and her body apparently dropped over a balcony by the killer. But the set was locked on the stage side, and the only other exit is in full view of the audience.   Of course, as Inspector Charlesworth points out, "in sealed room mysteries, the solution is never really anything to do with the room being sealed. The murderer has always gone into...

Originally posted June 12, 2024. ‘No darling,’ said Tedward. ‘That was a doings, very brilliant but not brilliant enough for the Yard.’ Christianna Brand’s work is a hole in my genre knowledge. She’s often pointed to as an underrated GAD author, with some unique and devious solutions. I checked out the one book of hers the library had some years back, and bounced off it for reasons of outmoded bigotry that I don’t remember the specifics of. I try to take a measured approach that (1) people are products of their society, and any author writing >50 years ago probably had at least some values that I would not agree with, but (2) that doesn’t mean it was acceptable back then, either. It can be useful to follow the throughline of tropes to modern fiction. Ultimately, though, I’m reading on my own time, and sometimes things just throw me out of the book. In any case, Fog of Doubt is one of the free mystery eBooks offered by Early Bird Books, so I took the chance to give Inspe...