Hags Nook - John Dickson Carr (1933)
This isn't the first John Dickson Carr (aka Carter Dickson) I've read, but I think it's the first that's really clicked for me, perhaps because instead of Bencolin, the Parisian detective I never warmed to (and also felt the narrator never did) and the waxworks museum that kept being described as scary but didn't really feel it, we have Gideon Fell: plump or indeed obese, matter of fact and merry and based on G K Chesterton, and a place with a history so grim there's no trouble thinking our young hero (Dr Fell's guest on some pretext I've forgotten) might believe in malevolent spirits.
Even finding out that there was a ludicrous ritual that the eldest son of a local family had to go through to receive his inheritance couldn't put me off, and normally I struggle with that sort of thing (surely a competent lawyer could argue that if the whole family are in agreement it is ludicrous and are willing to sign something to that effect, it would be allowed to lapse.)
I have The Case of the Constant Suicides lined up next.
The Sittaford Mystery - Agatha Christie (1931)
The small hamlet of Sittaford is cut off by six foot of deep snow, there's no phone, and no post or cars are coming through. But no-one is much troubled. Friendly newcomers the Willetts have invited everyone (well not everyone. Not, for example, the servants or the couple who take in paying guests) for drinks and a roaring fire and it looks to be a cosy evening.
Until someone suggests a seance, and the message the spirits bring sends Major Burnaby, not the sort of man you'd expect to pay much attention to spirits unless they're the sort in a bottle (I can't remember where I've pinched that joke, it may be another Christie), back out into the snow to check on his old friend Trevelyan six miles away.
But Trevelyan's house has apparently been broken into, and Trevelyan himself is found dead, while his nephew - one of those young well meaning utterly idiotic young men who seem to have been in such abundance in the 20s (at least if the literature is anything to go by) and here just creeping over the line into the 30s - has only gone and got himself implicated. Luckily two bright young people - his fiancée and an up and coming newspaper reporter - are both on hand and determined to find out the truth.
I balked at one of the coincidences in this book, but I won't spoiler by saying which it is. Read it for Emily Trefusis, the fiancée, smart and determined and somehow managing to keep it together because giving way won't help, and the cluing in plain sight, and solution irritatingly obvious once you know it.
Love Lies Bleeding - Edmund Crispin (1948)
I've had this book ages, read it with a view to possibly letting it go and decided no, it's too good and I'm keeping it. It begins with the headteachers of boys' and girls' schools respectively discussing Brenda, one of the cast in a joint play they're putting on, who came back from rehearsals at the boys' school in a state of shock - and she's a girl of quite modern parents, so not too easily shocked.
Later, when two teachers are killed and the girl goes missing, Gervase Fen, up from Oxford to present the prizes, is asked to investigate.
The mystery almost doesn't matter, the book is great fun - witty but not cruel - with the sole exception of the moments Fen pulls himself up and reminds himself that girl is probably dead, and along with reminding himself, the reader..
The Babes in the Wood - Ruth Rendell (2002)
More missing children. This time a pair of teenage siblings who disappeared along with their adult babysitter during recent floods. Their mother panics that they've drowned, their father appears more interested in getting back to work, even the Chief Constable thinks drowning so likely that he calls off the investigation, but Wexford sticks stolidly to the fact that they had no reason to go near the water and their house is well above the highest point it reached, and when the flood recedes he's proved to be right. Unfortunately by then the trail is growing colder..
A number of people in this book utterly infuriated me, and you're left, as no doubt Wexford is left, with a vague sense that not everyone who should have got their comeuppance did, while others have perhaps been over-punished.
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