The Golden Age of Detective Fiction is generally narrowed to the interwar period, roughly covering the 1920s and '30s, because the World Wars make convenient bookends for the detective story's post-WWI boom period and post-WWII decline – not everyone agrees. Some have argued it started with E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913) or even earlier with G.K. Chesterton's short story collection The…
Back in 2024, I posted " Locked and Loaded, Part 5: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories , " a series of reviews of randomly selected short stories, which included the misidentified, non-impossible crime story, " Cardula and the Locked Rooms " (1982), penned by Jack Ritchie – another long-gone giant of short stories. So even though " Cardula and the Locked Rooms "…
Back in May, Pushkin Vertigo released their eighth Kosuke Kindaichi novel, Yoru aruku ( She Walks at Night , 1948), written by the patriarch of the Japanese honkaku mystery novel, Seishi Yokomizo – translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood. No doubt, the book title will make Western readers immediately think of John Dickson Carr 's It Walks by Night (1930) and not wholly without reason. But, as…
Last month, A. Carver published the fifth title in the Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow series, entitled Death in 13 Rooms (2026), which is a collection of previously unpublished short stories that has, sort of, been foreshadowed in previous novels – teasing comments about cases like "The Knife in the Devil's Throat." Fans of the series will be glad to see Alex Corby and her great-aunt Cornelia front…
So, back in May, I added " The Locked Library ," a companion page to " The Muniment Room ," which is a permanent, easy to edit update of " The Updated Mammoth List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Murders & Impossible Crimes " – essentially doubles as my version of " 99 Novels for a Locked Room Library ." I kind of forgot to post a short blog update to draw everyone's attention to the new page and…
Later this year, Viz is going to publish the English edition of Gosho Aoyama 's Case Closed , vol. 100, but, considering the original Japanese releases currently count 108 volumes , it will be another two, three years before the English releases have fully catch up with the Japanese – presumably around the time vol. 110 or 111 gets published. Gosho Aoyama is older now and not able to produce…
Frits de Winter was a Dutch journalist, translator and a second generation detective novelist whose father, Jan de Winter, wrote juvenile mysteries and more than twenty novels about the Limburg police inspector, Paul Nijst – which apparently enjoyed some popularity during the 1960s. Frits followed in his father's footsteps and debuted as a 19-year-old with De dood kwam door de sneeuw ( Death Came…
Some years ago, while reviewing Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), I claimed the biggest difference between the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series is that the latter never produced a genre classic or even a great detective novel – like Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). Even some of Christie's standalones, like And Then…
Some months ago, I reviewed a short story from Edward D. Hoch's Captain Leopold series, " The Rainy-Day Bandit " (1970), which Alessandro favorably compared in the comments to the subject of today's review, "The Jersey Devil" – originally published in the October, 1971, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine . Famously collected in Leopold's Way (1985). "The Jersey Devil" begins when Captain…
The Case of the Running Man (1958), the 52nd entry in the Ludovic Travers series, rang in the last phase of Christopher Bush 's decades-long run as one of Britain's premier mystery novelists as two more would appear in the late 1950s and counting down the final ten over the following decade – published between 1960 and '68. Bush was also one of the then rapidly shrinking group of Golden Age…
Back in 2022, I concluded my run of reviews of the lamentably short-lived, surprisingly classically-styled Inspector Floris Jansen series written by the Dutch editor, translator and chess player Peter Verstegen – who published his detective novels under the name " Ton Vervoort ." A run of reviews starting in 2021 with the sometimes Ellery Queen -ish Moord onder astrologen ( Murder Among…
Last year, I tried the first of Benjamin Stevenson's Ernest Cunningham novels after some initial skepticism, but Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone (2022) sold me on Benjamin's hilarious, classically-styled meta whodunits and quickly followed it up with Everyone on This Train is a Suspect (2023) and eventually Everyone This Christmas has a Secret (2024) – bridging the gap with the non-series…
In 2013, the Breakthrough Bandwagon Books translated and published over half a dozen short stories by MORI Hiroshi, associate professor, engineer and somewhat of an experimental mystery writer, which included two short stories in his popular S&M series, " Sekit ō no yane kazan " ("The Rooftop Ornaments of Stone Ratha," 1999) and "Dochiraka ga majo" ("Which is the Witch?," 2001) – collected under…
The first, of two, stories making up Motohiro Katou 's Q.E.D. iff vol. 3, "Three Killers," concern three women, Kurotsu Yui, Okada Miki and Fujishima Akiko, who have all fallen victim to Yamaguchi Senji – president of a predatory investment company (" let them try and sue me "). They all three lost much more than just money giving them a pretty strong motive to murder him. Only for an opportunity…
Percy Montgomery " Monte " Barrett was an American author, newspaperman and cartoon writer from Mitchell, Indiana, who co-created with artist Frank Ellis the original "spunky girl reporter" character, Jane Arden – cited as the prototype for similar characters like Lois Lane. More importantly than having co-created an internationally syndicated daily comic strip, Barrett had a brief stint as a…
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the permanent shuttering of our beloved, dearly departed Rue Morgue Press following a string of disasters from flood damage, health issues and financial problems to the death of Enid Schantz – severely reducing their output. Rue Morgue Press limped on until around 2015 and permanently closed down when their website went offline a year later. Tom Schantz…
Last year, James Scott Byrnside published It's About Impossible Crime (2025), a collection of original short stories, in which he paid homage to MacKinlay Kantor's It's About Crime (1960) and radio director William Spier – who worked on The Adventures of Sam Spade and Suspense . Shortly after it's publication, Byrnside started working on a second collection of stories and posted updates on his…
P.J. Fitzsimmons ' Foreboding Foretelling at Ficklehouse Felling (2023) is the seventh historical locked room comedy in the Anthony "Anty" Boisjoly series, sporting a title that could have been used for an episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You! , but " longer and more involved " than previous entries – which " took appreciably longer to complete ." Fitzsimmons noted in the afterword it took long…
Last year, I looked at two pictorial novels, Henna ie ( Strange Houses , 2021) and Henna e ( Strange Pictures , 2022), written and crafted by the masked horror/mystery Youtuber "Uketsu" – which received mixed reception in these parts of the fandom. I enjoyed both as something straying off the beaten path without getting lost or stuck. Strange Pictures and Strange Houses aren't without…
Phoebe Atwood Taylor was an American mystery writer and creator of Asey Mayo, the Codfish Sherlock, who appeared in over twenty mysteries rich in New England atmosphere, authentic Cape Code characters and screwball-y comedy – kin to Craig Rice 's boozy mystery farces. Taylor also penned eight novels featuring Leonidas Witherall under the name "Alice Tilton" and a special, once somewhat rare,…
Theodore Roscoe was an American biographer, historian and one of the finest pulp writers of the day, known for his gripping tales of exotic adventure and thrilling horror that appeared in magazines like Argosy , Adventure and Short Stories , but detective fans know him for his novels Murder on the Way! (1935), I'll Grind Their Bones (1936) and Z is for Zombie (1937) – all reprinted during the past…
Val Gielgud , an actor, director and broadcaster, was a pioneer of radio-and television drama at the BBC and served as head for both their drama departments – even directing the first ever drama for British television. Gielgud had a side hustle, writing detective and thriller novels, producing a respectable body of work from 1931 to 1975. I suppose his best known work today are his two…
I recently reviewed Fear of Fear (1931) and Blind Man's Buff (1933) by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements, a husband-and-wife writing team, which I liked enough to bump the other two Jimmy Lane novels, Seven Suspects (1930) and Shadows (1934), up a few places on my wishlist – except that both remain obscurely out-of-print as of this writing. So turned my attention to their short stories to see if…
Back in March, I reviewed Fear of Fear (1931) by Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements, a husband-and-wife writing team, who collaborated on novels, short stories, plays and movie scripts – notably several movie adaptations of S.S. van Dine 's Philo Vance mysteries. Ryerson and Clements wrote a handful of detective and thrillers themselves, published between 1930 and 1937, starring playwright and…
Darwin L. Teilhet was an American journalist, advertising executive, screenwriter and novelist who started out as a mystery writer, authoring seven detective novels from 1931 to 1940, four of which forming a short-lived series – featuring the irrepressible, slightly unhinged Baron von Kaz. Hildegarde Teilhet co-wrote three of the brave Von Kaz novels, but her husband began his literary career with…