The Locked Room Reader

"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

-  Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet," from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891)

This isn't going to be a third review in as many days, I'm not that fast, but an update with some vague, weekend musings thrown in.

First of all, I finally put the finishing touch to the update of the largest post on this blog, "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries, Part I: The Novels," which is an 8-page counting list of what I consider to be some of the finest impossible crime novels in existence. This post will undoubtedly continue to expand further, but this thorough rewrite of the list will buy me a year or two of neglect – before another rigorous update is in order. Now it looks neat, tidy and ordered again.

I'll be redrafting, rewriting and updating the sequel to that list, "My Favorite Locked Room Mysteries, Part II: Short Stories and Novellas," when I have reached the ending of The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014). The first two reviews from that monster anthology can be found here and here. I'll probably squeeze in a review of Case Closed, before returning to the Black Lizard book. There will also be reviews of regular mystery novels interspersed with the ones tackling Otto Penzler's anthology.

The blog for crime-fiction reviews and news, Past Offenses, fills us in on the third series of the BBC's Father Brown and a rundown of the upcoming episodes reminded me why I passed on the previous seasons. Well, the post warns to expect "the occasional squeal of anguish from the G.K. Chesterton purists," but the original stories were set in the early decades of the previous century and their author died in 1936 – yet the series is (apparently) steeped in 1950s nostalgia!

I hear you say, "Oh, that’s just a change in setting," but a glance at the episode description proves the snooty purist correct. "The Invisible Man," from The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), is one of those over anthologized, but landmark, stories in the impossible crime genre and this is what they made of it,"the circus brings death to Kembleford when a clown is murdered." What? This is going to be The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries adaptation of The Rising of the Moon (1945) all over again, isn't it? Oh, well, there's at least one detective fanboy who'll be glad to see another clown dead, if only a fictional one.

On the death bed of 2014, I posted "The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction," which was a response to crime writer and fellow mystery enthusiast, Martin Edwards, asking an important question on his blog – why are contemporary readers taking note of Golden Age detective stories again? I compiled a rather long, rambling answer, but something occurred to me later that should have been part of the post. Surely, I haven't been the only one who left a bookstore, within a minute of entering, because of the usual stock of contemporary crime novels – which gave since the early 2000s an expanding group of customers to independent publishers, secondhand book dealers and a growing interest for public domain work. We're now as far removed from the year 2000 as from 2030 and the clock is ticking on the expiration date of a lot of copyrighted works from the Golden Age. So why not, from a publishers point of view, make some bucks out of the best works and writers from the Golden Age, before Gutenberg starts making them available in the decades ahead.

Finally, I deleted the badly written, overlong introduction to the updated list of favorite locked room mysteries and will probably rewrite it as a filler post entitled, "Why I Love Impossible Crime Stories." Hey, I promised activity would (eventually) resume, which, by the way, has been going on since September, 2014, showing an ascending line in blog activity – one post at a time. Well, hopefully, I'll have a quick review up tomorrow.

To be continued...

The Renaissance Era of Detective Fiction

"One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."

 - Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton's "The Hammer of God," from The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

Martin Edwards is a British crime writer and author of an upcoming book, The Golden Age of Murder (2015), discussing the London Detection Club and examining "the mystery of the writers who invented the modern detective story."

Do You Write Under Your Own Name is Edwards' personal blog, represented here on the blog-roll of Insightful Informants, and two interesting posts appeared on there recently – concerning a resurgent interest in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

The first post, "And the latest runaway bestseller is," considers the unexpected success harvest by the British Library Crime Classics with the republication of Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (1937) by J.J. Farjeon. We'll leave it to the scholars to debate who was more obscure, the book or its author, but the reprint of this long-forgotten mystery novel sold over 60.000 copies! The second post, "Golden Age reflections," asks the opinion of the blog-readers of why a rival of the classic crime novel is happening now.

Well, I believe it's been happening, slowly but surely, for a while now and began when the internet offered a free and open market place to small, independent publishing houses. Rue Morgue Press, House of Stratus and Crippen & Landru began in the early 2000s with reintroducing then forgotten mystery writers such as Glyn Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Torrey Chanslor, Craig Rice, Joseph Commings, Kelley Roos and Freeman Wills Crofts. It steadily expanded the available material to readers of Golden Age fiction beyond the shelves of secondhand bookshops and rummage stores.

A notable success story of these reprints is Gladys Mitchell, whose output was largely forgotten and next to impossible to find. That was until the Rue Morgue Press began reprinting some of her work, such as Death at the Opera (1934) and When Last I Died (1941), while Crippen & Landru collected all of Mitchell's short stories under the title Sleuth's Alchemy: Cases of Mrs. Bradley and Others (2005). Minnow Press reproduced a handful of expensive, hardcover edition of some of the harder to find titles in the Mrs. Bradley series. That was a decade ago and since then multiple publishers, big and small, republished nearly every mystery novel the prolific Mitchell wrote in her lifetime – and most of them were expensive collector items only a decade ago!

60.000 copies sold! The ride never ends.

The secondhand book hawkers of the internet market place also did their part in putting little known, long out-of-print detective stories back in the hands of readers, which made collecting vintage mysteries look really easy. However, I'll grudgingly admit that the growing popularity of e-readers and a growing catalogue of public-domain titles may've drawn a serious crowd of new readers to our genre. The names in the public domain are monuments of the transitional period between Sherlock Holmes with his Rivals and the Golden Age: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), G.K. Chesterton (Father Brown), Maurice Leblanc (Arsène Lupin), Jacques Futrelle (The Thinking Machine) and R. Austin Freeman (Dr. John Thorndyke). To name just a few. And their books are free or offered in bundles for pennies on the dollars.

Now juxtapose all of that to the stale, rigidly state of the contemporary crime novels topping the "Crime Bestseller Lists" for the past 20-30 years. The crime novel with cover art besieging you to consider it proper literature, exploring the criminal nature of mankind in a series of mini-biographies of the characters, guaranteeing a book bound with more substance than its plot. What about the character-driven series of police procedurals with a troubled cop or the literary thrillers in the hardboiled vein with a jaded protagonist. It's the same old, same old, come-and go realism critics have been raving about for decades and chugging awards at for "Transcending the Genre," character exploration and prose that's probably "stone-cold" or "ultra-modern."

A personal favorite reprinted by RMP

I believe the entrenchment of the contemporary crime novel, together with its tropes and clichés, while pretending to be the only game in town, is what kept drawing a bigger audience of readers to the detective stories of yore – offering even a wider variety of crime stories than its modern counterpart. Whodunits, howdunits, locked room and impossible crime stories, thrillers of all stripes, rogue stories, forensic mysteries, suspense, gothic romances, socially aware detectives, comedy of manners, spy intrigues, "Had-I-But-Known," historical mysteries, parodies and pastiches, hardboiled, softboiled, adventure-hybrids, SciFi-hybrids, early police procedurals, juvenile mysteries, etc. I think the abundance of short stories produced during the Golden years are being appreciated all over again by modern readers, because you can easily read one or two stories on the train or bus to kill the time.

From a consumer's perspective, it's completely understandable why these stories have become interesting again. They offer the reader a genuine choice and a majority can be downloaded with a swipe of a finger on your e-reader, of which a significant portion is in the public domain – completely free-of-charge. How can those stale, dime-a-dozen "Literary Thrillers" and "Crime Novels" compete with that?

Personally, I hope this expanding interest in the classics is a response to the postmodern deconstructivism, which is at the root of the contemporary crime movement, because I believe we're leaving that period behind us. What's left to deconstruct? Even the major prizes are given out to writers only marginally associated with the genre. So why would readers put up with the same themes being crammed down theirs throats how the world can be a dark, violent and unfair place swamped in corruption and deceit. That message has been duly noted over the past 15 years.

Maybe that's really why readers are turning to books enthusiastically shouting, "c'mon, what are you waiting for? The game's afoot!," instead of the ones depressingly asking "what's the point." Times and attitudes have changed. The meme "born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe" won’t be an epitaph for the 21st century, but a challenge that was met. We'll colonize the hell out of the Moon and Mars like the descend of Imperial Europe on the New World! 

Bits and Pieces

"So, with that display of general incompetence, we reach the end of recorded history. All that remains to see is who has learned its lessons, and who's condemned to repeat their mistakes endlessly…" 

- Stephen Fry (QI)

It has become a pattern of expectation for this blog to promise a resurgence in activity, during a rambling post or stuck at the end of a review, only to be followed up by another prolonged radio silence. And, this being December, I would be foolish to renew that promise for this month, but I do foresee a hike in blog activity for the holiday season.

Cameo appearance by John Dickson Carr

Firstly, I'll be composing the annual list of best-and worst mystery novels read in 2014, however, they probably won't be as comprehensive as in previous years – 'cause it was a slow year. You know the excuses by now.

Secondly, Dutch crime-and detective writer extraordinaire, M.P.O. Books, published his latest entry in the District Heuvelrug series, Cruise Control (2014), which I want to have read and reviewed before Christmas rolls around. It's not an impossible crime story such as the previous one, Een afgesloten huis (A Sealed House, 2013), but a hunt for a possible serial killer and I have spotted a map of the crime scene! Books has consistently written splendid crime fiction since his return, after a four year hiatus, with De blikvanger (The Eye-Catcher, 2010) and De laatste kans (The Last Chance, 2011) remains a high note in the series – deserving of a wider audience nationally and internationally. So you can expect a review of Cruise Control before 2015.

I'm afraid reviews of newer works and recent publication will be dominating the blog for the next month or two. There are five or six volumes of Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan) on the itinerary and want to knock at least two of the list before the New Year.

Meanwhile, translator and publisher John Pugmire, from Locked Room International, never took a break from ferrying impossible crime stories from across the globe to a very appreciative, English-speaking reading audience – like a true purveyor of spirits! And, yes, I have some serious catching up to do in 2015 with the Locked Room Int. publications. Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller's The Body Snatchers Affair (2015) will be published in January and still have a few mysteries by Keigo Higashino and Louise Penny to go through.

And, no, I have not forgotten about Otto Penzler's 900-page juggernaut, The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014), which I don't find intimidating at all. It's what I have trained and prepared for all my life under the mentorship of John Dickson Carr's ghost. Hey, I got halfway through the unabridged, four-volumes of five hundred and odd pages each epic known as Journey to the West (c. 1592) by Wu Cheng'en. I use the boxed set now as a book end.

So, yeah, 2015 is basically going to be more of the same: enthusiastically babbling about locked room mysteries, reviewing the classics, traversing the trail of obscurity and looking down contemptuously at the contemporary school of crime novels and their champions. 

The reader has been warned.