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As an avid reader of Golden Age murder mysteries, I have certainly seen my share of red herrings in print. These are the clues – the references, the hints, even the omissions – that an author might provide to send the reader up the proverbial garden path and well away from the true solution. Red herrings often rely on the reader to draw a false connection from cleverly inferred but…
Cecil John Charles Street is far better known to classic detective fiction readers for his many enjoyable mysteries published under his pseudonyms John Rhode and Miles Burton than for his four early titles credited to Cecil Waye. These rare Waye-ward books from the early 1930s have been resurrected and are now available in print and eBook form from Dean Street Press, which is cause for…
With the focus on an intriguing new character and a new and competitive drug dealing locale, Eton Crop becomes both a great standalone novel and one of the best stories to date in Bill James’s Harpur and Iles series. The character is young undercover agent-in-training Naomi Anstruther, and the location is an amusingly kitschy floating restaurant named The Eton Boating Song. The setup is…
Furious Old Women. What a wonderful crime story title, both evocative and a great antonymic turn on the phrase “angry young men”. Indeed, an infuriated 71-year-old named Mrs. Bobbin accuses an unknown group of male hooligans of waylaying, robbing, and clubbing her sister Millicent to death on her way to church. But as schoolmaster and amateur detective Carolus Deene listens to the…