Something a little different today: knowing that I’m a fan of the Australian dramatist and novelist Malcolm ‘Max’ Afford, Tony Medawar — the closest thing the GAD firmament has to Indiana Jones — sent me a selection of Afford’s thus-far-uncollected short fiction, as found in a variety of Australian publications from the Golden Age, and I’ve read them and am going to write a little about each one.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 31: Bodies from the Library 6 (2023) ed. Tony Medawar [w’ Tony Medawar]
Another year, another Bodies from the Library collection — incredibly, the sixth — and another opportunity to sit down with Tony Medawar and talk about the wonderful work he’s doing on all our behalfs.
Continue reading#1141: “He must have known he was playing a dangerous game.” – Bodies from the Library 6 [ss] (2023) ed. Tony Medawar
Bodies from the Library 6 (2023) represents another delightful foray into the neglected and forgotten stories from many of the luminaries of the Golden Age, as editor Tony Medawar puts his enviable genre awareness to wonderful use bringing yet more gems to public attention.
Continue reading#1023: “The act of homicide always throws a man off balance.” – Bodies from the Library [ss] (2018) ed. Tony Medawar
The annual Bodies from the Library (2018-present) collections, in which Tony Medawar expertly selects long-forgotten and previously-unpublished stories and plays, have become essential purchases for anyone with even a passing interest in the great and the good of detective fiction’s Golden Age.
Continue reading#971: (Spooky) Little Fictions – Ghosts from the Library [ss] (2022) ed. Tony Medawar
With the annual Bodies from the Library collections, which have brought long out-of-print stories of crime and detection back to public awareness, proving rightly popular, editor Tony Medawar turns his attention to another facet of genre fiction with the Ghosts from the Library (2022) collection, in which authors (mostly) better known for their stories of crime and detection have a go at generating some supernatural chills instead.
Continue reading#919: “Tonight, in this house, is there going to be another killing?” – Bodies from the Library 5 [ss] (2022) ed. Tony Medawar
Another year, another collection of forgotten or unknown tales from the luminaries of detective fiction’s Golden Age brought to us by the tireless efforts of Tony Medawar. So how does Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) stack up?
Continue reading#895: “There are some jokes, young man, that are not permitted here.” – Speak of the Devil [rp] (1994) by John Dickson Carr [ed. Tony Medawar]
The recently-published The Island of Coffins (2020) brought several of John Dickson Carr’s previously-unavailable radio plays to public attainability, and gave many of us the chance to appreciate the Master in a slightly different milieu. Shortly after reading that wonderful volume, I was lucky enough to acquire Speak of the Devil (1994), the script for the eight-part radio serial Carr wrote for broadcast in 1941, and it is to that which we turn today.
Continue reading#892: “He happens to be around when so many murders crop up…” – Bodies from the Library 2 [ss] (2019) ed. Tony Medawar
With the Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) collection due in a couple of months, and spin-off Ghosts from the Library (2022) coming later in the year, the time seems ripe to revisit one of the earlier collections which — given the timespan over which I first read them — I failed to review on publication. And since, for reasons too complicated to bore you with here, the second volume was the first one I encountered, it’s there I’ll head today.
Continue reading#847: “Vital and immediate. Vital and immediate.” – ‘Secret Radio’ [rp] (1944) by John Dickson Carr
If you were fortunate enough to get one of the 150 hardcover editions of The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2020) by John Dickson Carr — and I was — you also got an additional pamphlet containing the play ‘Secret Radio’ (1944). And so, having completed my reviews of the collection proper, I turn my attention to this delightful appendix.
Continue reading#845: The Island of Coffins and Other Mysteries from the Casebook of Cabin B-13 (2020) by John Dickson Carr [ed. Tony Medawar and Douglas G. Greene] – Series 2, Episodes 7-12
The final six trips aboard the Maurevania during the Golden Age of radio, with Dr. John Fabian leading us through the apparently impossible.
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The Invisible Event