More from my crime-fiction treasure chest

Some of the loot I have accumulated in the past few weeks – most (not all) from Golden Age Crime Fiction, and most of these yet unread. Over periods of much personal distress/agitation in the past few months, I have found that nothing focused my mind and provided a few hours of calm as much as GA mysteries do. John Dickson Carr has of course been the cornerstone of my rediscovery of the genre, but I have been exploring other works too.

Very brief notes on some of these: 

1) I have loved a few of Fredric Brown’s short stories (notably the impossible-crime/no-footprints story “The Laughing Butcher”) but The Fabulous Clipjoint is the first of his novels I will be reading.
[UPDATE: read it, liked it very, very much – though it is more of a coming-of-age story, with elements of "soft-boiled" noir, than a complex murder mystery. Something very comforting about the relationship between the narrator, young Ed Hunter, and his uncle Ambrose, who takes him under his wing.]

2) Hake Talbot wasn’t exactly prolific or widely known as a crime writer, but Rim of the Pit has a considerable cult reputation among locked-room-mystery fans; I have heard some great things about it.
[UPDATE: read it – some clever stuff in it, many good ideas, but parts of the solution are also confusing/hard to picture without the illustration that I believe was in a earlier edition of the book. Will try to write a longer review sometime.]

3) Tour de Force will be my second Christianna Brand novel (after Green for Danger, which I wrote about here recently). But I did read a brilliant meta short story by her called “Dear Mr Editor” (originally published as “Dear Mr MacDonald” in an anthology edited by John MacDonald).

4) Big admirer of Cornell Woolrich’s short stories, and The Bride Wore Black (not quite a mystery in the sense that the other books here are, I believe) is a long-overdue read. 

5) Having greatly enjoyed Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Decagon House Murders (in particular) and The Mill House Murders, I have high expectations of The Labyrinth House Murders, which was published around the same time (late 1980s, part of the shin honkaku or “new orthodox” movement in Japanese crime writing).

6) The Carr you see here, It Walks by Night, was his first novel, from 1930. This edition includes one of his short stories from that period, “The Shadow of the Goat”, which I have read and enjoyed.
[UPDATE: I read It Walks by Night two days ago and mostly liked it very much – though I felt a bit let down by the final “locked-room” explanation, which seemed to derive from the omission of some key information. Carr’s writing though is often very vivid – as a young man he was a bold, stylish writer, and I like the Grand Guignol aspects of his first few novels.

I am sharing here a short excerpt from a bit where the narrator visits a fencing school - one of many neat descriptive passages in this book.]