It's odd. I of course know who Raymond Chandler was, and his famous hard-boiled detective character Philip Marlowe... I like mystery stories, but never once have I read one of his books, until this week.
But when I saw Marlowe's praise for Fleming's Diamonds Are Forever, I thought, why not check out one of his books?
It's funny--this book collects fourteen Poirot short stories that were published between 1923 and 1924, which was years after the first Poirot novel came out in 1920. Yet it feels like Christie was still developing Poirot as I read through these.
I wonder if a bunch of Poirot shorts spent a few years in Christie's desk before the success of the novels gave the magazines a better reason to publish them?
Another thing I learned while working on this review was that a lot of these early Poirot stories are actually in the public domain!
My first time trying to review a true crime book, let's see how this goes...
Zodiac is a 1986 book by Robert Graysmith, an artist and cartoonist who was a youngster working with the San Francisco Chronicle back in the 1960s when the whole Zodiac murder thing happened. He wasn't part of the Chronicle's investigative team. He got obsessed with the case, and this is the partial story of his investigation into what we know and what he thinks he knows.
Graysmith wasn't just reading reports, either; he got personally involved with interviewing suspects, victims, and law enforcement. He has a number of his own theories.
I found my way to this book through Nero Wolfe. In the paperback Bantam Crime Line edition of one of my favorite Wolfe books, The Doorbell Rang, the introduction was written by Stuart Kaminsky, who said that the end of The Doorbell Rang was his favorite ending to any novel until he read Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block, published in 1982.
That was pretty high praise to me, so I picked up a copy and read it several years ago. Yesterday, I read it again and here are my refreshed thoughts.
"Playful" isn't a word you usually connect to murder mysteries, except maybe in a sadistic, Jigsaw-kinda way, but for this book, I really mean it. Soji Shimada pops in twice to tell you to sit down and solve the mystery before you go on, and the solution is so clever and out there that you might never get it!
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is a classic Japanese murder mystery from 1981. I read it in grad school maybe 15 years ago, and it's been hard to get a copy affordably until recently, since the book had such limited printings in English. Fortunately, a recent printing makes this book accessible at a relatively low price, which was just the opportunity I was waiting for.
This one gives me some serious mixed feelings. I've read a decent number of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels, and they are invariably excellent. Until today.
I was wandering around a physical, public library one day last month and the most interesting thing I found on their shelves was a copy of The Clocks, supposedly a Hercule Poirot mystery, by Agatha Christie of course. I managed to read a good chunk of it before my friends arrived, and I decided to come back and finish it this weekend.
This book cover lies! Some guy at the Los Angeles Times called this book "A superb thriller... tantalizing," but I don't think he read the book.
Because Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates, a.k.a. Suna no Utsuwa, a.k.a. Vessel of Sand as the book was called in Japan, is not a thriller. It's a police procedural and a very good mystery, but its pace is far too slow and it spends far too much time on cold leads and dead ends to be a thriller.
This week I've got a strong recommendation for a short story. Filling about nine pages of the (admittedly dense) Weird Tales, "The Two Men Who Murdered Each Other" is not a creepy story, but a strange tragedy!
Written by Valma Clark and published in the July/August 1923 issue of WT, it's excellently written, with a gentle but consistent flow and a timeless style. The prose is detailed without being overly flowery or wordy, and the three characters are developed quite well considering the limited space.
Flipping through Weird Tales, I found this story with a disarmingly simple style and a very solid pace. There are a lot of stories in WT that really don't seem to belong there, but this one surprised me with a neat little twist that I thought was handled subtly enough that I didn't see it coming on my first read.
You'll probably catch it because I warned you, but it was a good story nonetheless.
So, I decided to do a reading of it, since it was pretty short. Enjoy!
Oh, by the way, I didn't try to do "voices" for this one but I probably should have. Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. Maybe next time.
If you'd rather read it at your own pace, you can do so on Internet Archive or Wikisource.
