BEATING PUZZLE DOCTOR AND KATE TO THE PUNCH: The 2021 Mystery of the Year

It’s February 28, and I know exactly what you’re doing: you’re waiting with bated breath for 306 more days to go by, the amount of time it will for the Puzzle Doctor and Kate at Cross Examining Crime to finish sifting through the respective books they’ve read all year (about 2000 for PD, and 6953 …

COFFEE TABLE BOOK TALES: Everson’s Trio of Crime Film Classics

William K. Everson (1929 – 1996) was a film historian, educator and archivist who was one of the guiding lights in preserving films from the silent period through the 1940’s. Born in England, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1950 where he put his experience in film publicity to use for Monogram Pictures, a small, …

TOO MUCH META IN MY DIET: Lending the Key to the Locked Room

Here we are at the start of 2021, and the Western world is facing an existential crisis of enormous proportions while the Eastern world seems to have things pretty much under control. I’m speaking, of course, of the efforts of thirty or so bloggers to transform public opinion in America and Europe as to the …

FANGS FOR THE MANORYS: The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire

It has been forty-five years since we could all savor the prospect of a “Christie for Christmas.” Alas, that time is passed, so I propose a new tradition: a “Byrnside for Boo-time!” The classic-style impossible crime mysteries penned by modern-day scribe James Scott Byrnside are, by turns, mystifying, sometimes fear-inducing, and most of the time …

DAY-OLD BLANCMANGE: Paul Halter’s The White Lady

It turns out that if you Google “white lady,” it’s an actual thing. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the legend of a woman in white pervades the folklore of multiple countries. She tends to be the ghost of a woman who died by violence, committed suicide or, in the scarier versions, killed her husband and/or …

MAY I SUGGEST YOU READ A MURDER MYSTERY?

I have to admit I’ve been stressed for about . . . three and a half years. Bernie Sanders said recently that the current health crisis is “on the scale of major war,” but I’ve felt battle-scarred, mostly by tweet, for some time now. And now, thanks to COVID-19, I’m in exile: our schools have …

MURDER GETS GRAPHIC: The Detection Club, by Jean Harambat

  Far be it from me not to cave into peer pressure. When Kate Jackson reviewed the English translation of a French graphic novel placing seven members of the famed Detection Club into an actual mystery, I snapped like a long bean. Despite the fact that the English translation of this comic book mystery is …

THE REPRINT THAT JJ WILL LOVE: The Honjin Murders

Right now, we are in the throes of Kate’s Second Annual Best Reprint of the Year poll, and Kate has roped some of her fellow bloggers to post one or two selections from which all readers can select a winner. If, for some uncanny reason, you have decided not to vote for my first selection, …

IT’S BAAAAAAACK! My First Nominee for “Reprint of the Year”

In this perilous age of political craziness, where most of us are shaking our heads and muttering that invaluable Latin phrase, “What the fuuuuuu - ?” (translation: “I am stymied, Marcus Aurelius”), it behooves us to be grateful for small matters. For instance, it’s turning out to be a great time to be alive if …

THE REIGN OF PAIN STAYS MAINLY IN THE PLANE: Franco Vailati’s The Flying Boat Mystery

Trains and boats and planes are passing by They mean a trip to Paris or Rome For someone else but not for me The trains and the boats and planes Took you away, away from me                                             I’m sure when Burt Bacharach wrote this melancholy song, he never imagined that the thing that “took you away …