Tangled Yarns

Tangled Yarns

Mystery and crime fiction, unraveled.

  • “Surfeit of Lampreys” by Ngaio Marsh

    While this may be the first appearance of Ngaio Marsh on the blog, she and I have a long history. After my infamous “Year of Agatha Christie” where between 4th and 5th grade I only read, you guessed it, Agatha Christie, I didn’t know where to go next. There were brief dalliances with other authors…

    Read more…

  • “King’s Ransom” by Ed McBain

    Have you ever watched a really good movie, in awe at the originality of the screenwriting, and then once the credits roll you’re hit with the one-two punch that it was an adaptation of something you never would have expected? Something similar happened to me, except before I watched the movie. Learning that Akira Kurosawa’s…

    Read more…

  • “Patners in Crime” by Agatha Christie

    I have a bit of an aversion to short stories. I don’t want to, really, yet there it is. Growing up as a reader I at some point became of the opinion that the novel was the superior artistic format for literature, and despite several encounters with short-form masterpieces (“The Dead”! “Bartleby”! “A Good Man…

    Read more…

  • “In a Lonely Place” by Dorothy B. Hughes

    I find it a bit ironic that, in the world of literary criticism, hardboiled crime fiction is held on a much higher pedestal than our beloved GAD. Yes, it’s hard to disagree that the prose style of Chandler and Hammett is more artistically refined than Christie or Carr, but the latter authors knew how to…

    Read more…

  • “The Scarab Murder Case” by S. S. Van Dine

    When I first read The Benson Murder Case in 2022, my goal was to read all 12 Philo Vance novels, one a month. That did not come to fruition. Three years on and I’m only on the fifth installment of the series. So much for being a voracious reader, eh? With The Scarab Murder Case,…

    Read more…

  • “Night of the Jabberwock” by Fredric Brown

    Followers of the blog may remember my uproarious praise for Joel Townsley Rogers’ The Red Right Hand, a wondrous hybrid of fair-play impossible crime, hard-boiled atmosphere, and unreliable-narrator fueled preternatural vibes. At the end of that review I said that “no other GAD mystery” was quite like The Red Right Hand in those regards. When…

    Read more…

  • “(Death and) The Gilded Man” by Carter Dickson

    Oh, John Dickson Carr. How far my obsession with your works has fallen. I read, like, 20 of his books in 2021 once I realized how awesome his mystery-writing skills were. Conversely, The Gilded Man is only my 5th in the past two years. To be fair, that is mostly indicative of my efforts to…

    Read more…

  • “The Murder Wheel” by Tom Mead

    To me, Death and the Conjuror was like lightning in a bottle. How lucky could we be that we were getting a detective novel with three impossible crimes, from an established short story writer, published (at least here in the US) by no less a mystery publisher than Penzler? It wasn’t perfect – some of…

    Read more…

  • “Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier

    Well, after only twice as long as it was actually supposed to take, I have finally reached 25 books written by 25 different authors I have not read before. Say what you will about it taking two years, at least I stuck through and finished it. I wanted my final selection in this series to…

    Read more…

  • “The Case of the Late Pig” by Margery Allingham

    When you start out on your GAD journey, one of the myths that you stumble onto early only to be later dispelled is that of the “Four Queens of Crime”, this idea that among women mystery authors of the period the quartet of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham tower above…

    Read more…

Next on the Blog:

  • The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
  • Wake Up Dead Man (I need to rewatch first lol)

Agatha Christie American Mystery Classics Anthony Boucher British Library Crime Classics Christianna Brand Clayton Rawson Cool and Lam Cornell Woolrich Dr. Fell Edward D. Hoch Ellery Queen Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine Erle Stanley Gardner Fergus O'Breen Films Freeman Wills Crofts Hardboiled Henri Bencolin Humdrum Impossible Crime Inspector Cockrill Inspector French Inspector Morse Inspector Wexford Inverted James Scott Byrnside John Dickson Carr Joseph Spector Locked Room International Musical Mysteries New Horizons Challenge Nick Velvet Noir Philip Marlowe Police Procedural Raymond Chandler Reviews Ruth Rendell S. S. Van Dine Shin Honkaku Short Stories Sir Henry Merrivale Superintendent Battle Tom Mead Uncategorized

“The past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.”

– Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Waiting in the Wings:

  • The Mill House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji
  • Murder in the Basement by Anthony Berkeley
  • L. A. Confidential by James Ellroy
  • Death at the Opera by Gladys Mitchell
  • Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

Be on the lookout for: “The Many Hats of John Dickson Carr,” my first long-form essay!

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started