A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Some Afterthoughts!

And here is my last A to Z post for the year, on some afterthoughts. 

I’ve been doing this since 2017 and I never know till just beforehand what my theme is going to be. Every year I have wondered if I even will come up with a theme and then… I come up with something. I always learn something too.

In this case I realised suddenly just how much mystery fiction I have read over the years, even if I’ve only read one book or even one story by each author. I probably even left out a fair few. I confess I looked up lists of mystery writers each day to see if I could find someone with that letter, whom I have read at some stage. 

The lists were long, but most of those authors I hadn’t heard of, let alone read. And sometimes it was someone I was familiar with, but hadn’t read in years, or had read, but hadn’t realised wrote mysteries. Yes, I’ve learned again. 

It has been nice to rediscover some authors I hadn’t read in a long time, such as Nury Vittachi. I don’t regret choosing this topic.

I really appreciate your comments and enjoyed wandering over to your blogs to see what you’d been writing about. Thank you! You will be  having visits from me over the next few days. 

I’m glad, too, that some of you had the chance to remember books you’ve read yourselves, or found the ones I mentioned interesting enough to add to your TBR piles. 

Thanks again, and happy reading. I’m now heading for bed, to catch up with my own reading.

Cheers and see you soon. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: Z Is For Israel Zangwill

 

Today is my final post for 2025, apart from the afterthoughts I’ll be writing tomorrow.

I seem to have discovered a number of familiar writers who aren’t best known for writing mysteries, but have done it anyway. Today’s is Victorian/Edwardian era British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, who wrote as a journalist and playwright and, among other things, popularised the term “melting pot” with his play of the same name, which was about America’s absorption of immigrants, and was performed there in 1910. Former US President Theodore Roosevelt loved it and wrote to him to say so after he had seen it.

Zangwill was born in London in 1864, the son of Jewish immigrants from Latvia(his father) and Poland(his mother). He attended the Jews’ Free School(it’s still around and one of its houses is named for him). He taught there for a while and got a degree from the University of London. It was a family thing, as his brother, Louis Zangwill, was also a writer.

Eventually he became involved in various Jewish movements and women’s suffrage.

He was known as “the Dickens of the Ghetto”.

However, the reason he has made it into this post is his novel The Big Bow Mystery, first published in The Star newspaper before being published as a novel in 1892. It is one of the first locked room mysteries. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, it refers to a mystery in which the victim is killed in a locked room, with no immediate way of working out how it could have happened. Of course, it is eventually worked out. The novel was filmed three times in 1928, 1934 and 1946. 

There is an introduction to the novel in which he says that readers who had read it in The Star kept writing to him to give him their idea of who was the murderer, including one who must be seven feet high, judging by the illustration! In the end, he had to choose a character who was the last one left after he had decided the others were not guilty. And then he admitted he’d been joking. 

He complained that you weren’t supposed to write humour in a mystery novel, and he did. Like Agatha Christie and her movement, he made rules for whodunnit, as in it had to be a character you had already met, and readers had to have a chance to work it out. 

If this is of interest to you, it’s available free on Project Gutenberg, along with a lot of his other works.

And here we go! I hope you have enjoyed my A to Z this year. I’ve enjoyed yours, where you wrote them. 

Tomorrow I’ll post some thoughts on what I’ve done this year.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: Y Is For Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is a very prolific American author of about 70 books and many short stories. She is best known for her horror fiction, especially the novels about vampire Saint Germain. So I was surprised to find that she has also written some mystery fiction, even if it is basically Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. I only have her novella length ebook The Case Of The American Twins, but she wrote a series of books featuring Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft, with Bill Fawcett, under the pen name Quinn Fawcett, so it’s a universe with which she is familiar.

This novella is based on a play of the same name(see above for a poster). It’s not written in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle. It is set early in Holmes’ career, and Holmes asks Watson not to write about it, because the client wants confidentiality, so it is in third person, unlike the original stories, which are told in first person as if written for publication.

The story starts with an American woman, one of the twins of the title, coming to Holmes for help in finding her brother, whom she hasn’t seen in four years, but their father has died, leaving them a huge estate.

 Holmes doesn’t do the usual observations that let him work out who he is dealing with; when the client is impressed with what he knows about her, he explains that he got the information from the American Ambassador. Then he visits Mycroft to ask for help in getting information. 

Still, an interesting story and not her only one. It’s available in print as part of the two stories in the Sherlock Holmes Collection. It’s on Amazon, but rather expensive for paperback, at about A $50.00, with free overseas shipping. It’s not available in Kindle, but American Twins is in Apple Books.

See you tomorrow for my Z post!

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: X is For EXtras

 This is the post where I slip in a couple of items I had no room for, elsewhere. I have only managed to find a word starting with X once, when I was doing an A to Z about Greek mythology, which does have X words in it. 

This time, I will start with Faye Kellerman, who I was going to write about in K, but Kerry Greenwood died, so I gave her that post instead. If you haven’t been following, feel free to go back and read. 

Faye Kellerman is an American mystery writer. It seems to be all in the family, because her husband Jonathan and their son Jesse are also mystery writers, though Jesse also writes plays. I saw Faye and Jonathan at the Melbourne Writers Festival some years ago. I haven’t read anything by Jonathan, because his books are psychological thrillers, not my favourite genre. 

Faye’s books are basically police procedurals, with Jewish themes; the author is herself an Orthodox Jew. Her main characters are police detective Peter Decker and Orthodox widow Rina Lazarus, whom he eventually marries. They meet in the first novel of the series, Ritual Bath, when there has been a crime in her local community. Peter was brought up as a Baptist by his adoptive parents, but his biological parents were Jewish teenagers. He decides to study and become Orthodox himself. None of this stops him from investigating crime. There are twenty-seven Decker/Lazarus mysteries, though Faye Kellerman has written more books, including a novel about Shakespeare and a Jewish woman. I haven’t read all of them, but have, so far, enjoyed the ones I have read. 

Second Extra: Enid Blyton. I don’t know about you, but she was my introduction to mystery fiction. She wrote several series in which a group of children solve mysteries. The best known is the Famous Five series, of course. Three siblings, Julian Anne and Dick, have adventures and solve mysteries with their cousin George(Georgina), usually during the school holidays. The fifth member of the group is George’s dog, Timmy. A friend of mine calculated that, by the end of the series the kids should be in their twenties! 

Kerry Greenwood wrote a Famous Five short story in which they solve the mystery of some missing ginger ale. She had fun with the sexism of the original stories, with Anne finally objecting to being expected to do all the cooking. 

There was another series, the Five Findouters, which was set in a village rather than the holiday travels of the Famous Five. It’s a lot funnier. The group is made up of Fatty(Frederick), Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets and Fatty’s dog Buster. Fatty is the leader and Sherlock Holmes of the group. He is able to get into disguise and work out whodunnit. The local policeman, Mr Goon, hates them because they always solve the crimes before him. Buster snaps at his heels quite a lot. Notice that he is named “Goon”, a slang word for police, and sent up? 

I read these books in my childhood and loved them. The Famous Five alone are still selling around two million copies every year.

See you tomorrow! 

A To Z Blogging Chsllenge 2025: Mysteries: W is for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Poster. Fair Usage

 You have probably, at one time or another, heard the sentence, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” It’s become a classic line, even if you haven’t seen the film. 

It comes from a 1980s film called Who Framed Roger Rabbit? starring Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant, a private eye in a 1947 Hollywood in which humans and animated cartoon characters called toons live side by side. The toons live in Toontown and get work in animated features. 

Roger Rabbit is a cartoon rabbit and has stressed out because he thinks his beautiful human toon wife, Jessica Rabbit, is unfaithful. It starts with Valiant being called in by Roger’s boss to find out if this is true and take photos. He’s not keen on the job, but needs the money to repay a loan, so agrees. The joke is that “playing patty cake” is literal - the photos show Jessica playing patty cake with her hands, as in “Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man…” with the supposed lover, owner of Toontown. This still upsets Roger, who stresses out and says how he feels.

Next day, the man is found dead, killed by a falling piano, toon-style, with Roger accused of murder, and Valiant has to find out who really committed the crime before the villain can execute him.  

This isn’t by any means the first film with a combination of animation and live action, but it’s very cleverly done. There are Disney characters and Mel Blanc voices his various characters, such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. There is a warehouse for various Acme products - remember Acme from the Roadrunner cartoons, where the Coyote is constantly ordering stuff from them? At one point, Valiant makes use of a portable hole.

It’s a tribute to classic Hollywood animation.

The director is Robert Zemeckis of Back To The Future fame, and even has Christopher Lloyd as the villain. The role of Jessica Rabbit - the one who gets that famous line - is voiced by Kathleen Turner, who has a distinctive voice, but for some reason she isn’t credited. 

I hope you don’t mind my using a film, but I did need a W post and I haven’t read the novel on which it’s based. 

This is a day late, but I was unable to get it done yesterday and I wasn’t doing the weekend anyway. Next post, on Xtras, is Monday. See you then! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: V is for Nury Vittachi

 

Nury Vittachi is a Hong Kong writer whom I once heard speak at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. We exchanged emails for a while. He is a very funny man and it shows in his writing. He has done a lot more than mysteries - children’s and YA fantasy are among his other work. 

But he created a series called The Feng Shui Detective, which is set in Singapore and centred around C.F. Wong, a Feng shui master, whose day job as a geomancer involves designing offices and houses which follow the practice of feng shui. Feng shui is a Chinese practice that involves arranging objects and space to optimise the flow of positive energy. Even Wong’s tiny office is meant to face in certain directions to make sure he gets the most out of it.

But crime somehow always gets into the picture. And on top of it all, Wong is having to supervise an intern on her gap year, an Australian girl called Joyce McQuinnie, who wants to work with him and learn about feng shui to help her get into her chosen university course. He has been promised a pay rise for helping her and her own pay will be taken care of.

Here is the first description of Joyce, who has just promised to be quiet. 

Wong realised immediately that this person could not be quiet, even if she had her larynx surgically removed. Her look was not quiet. She was big. She wore bright colours. She was a Westerner. It would be as logical for a giraffe to say he is inconspicuous because he has no voice.” 

Very colourful! 

Wong is a sort of Asian Sherlock Holmes, with Joyce as his Watson. It sounds a little strange, but it works. The humour is a delight, as are the characters, who travel around Asia solving crimes. There is even one book which happens in Australia.

I admit it has been a while since I read this series, first published in 2000, but I’m rediscovering it with pleasure. 

The books - there are five of them -  are available in ebook, both in Kindle and Apple Books but also in paperback from Booktopia. If you need them in paperback, it’s probably best to look for them secondhand on ABEBooks. 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: U Is for Nicola Upson and Arthur Upfield

Yesterday’s post was about Josephine Tey, author of the Inspector Alan Grant series. There was something I left out so I could use it today. 

The author appeared as a character in a number of mystery novels by Nicola Upson! It’s not that nobody has ever written novels with historical figures before. I’ve read books with amateur sleuths from Shakespeare to Jane Austen and even one series with Elizabeth I solving mysteries. But they are usually from a long time ago, not within the last fifty or sixty years. 

The fictional Josephine Tey(referred to by her pen name) works with a detective, Inspector Archie Penrose. The series is set in the 1930s, featuring historical events such as the abdication of Edward VIII. One of them was shortlisted for a Historical Dagger award.

There are, so far, eleven books in the series, all available in ebook.

I confess I have not yet read any of Arthur Upfield’s Bony mysteries, though a late friend of mine was a passionate fan, but I do know about him and one very dramatic event in his life, because I researched and wrote about it in my children’s book on crime, Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly. 

It was described to me by Kerry Greenwood, who suggested the subject for a chapter, as a writer’s nightmare. 

What if someone gets an idea for a real murder from one you are writing about? This happened to Arthur Upfield. 

He wasn’t only a novelist. In 1929, he was working on a novel called The Sands Of Windee, while also having a job as a boundary rider on the Rabbit-proof fence in Western Australia. One night, when he was with his workmates, he asked for a suggestion about how he could have a murderer dispose of a body in such a way that it would be very hard to catch him. A man called George Ritchie came up with an idea. You could burn the body, then sift out the bits of bone from the ashes, scatter the ashes and use acid to destroy the bones. It was such a good idea that he couldn’t use it without a flaw to help the detective work it out. Upfield offered a pound for anyone who could think of one.

Unfortunately, there was a travelling stockman called Snowy Rowles who was listening in. He liked the idea so much that he used it several times to get himself a car and money. He was caught, in the end, because one of his victims had an unusual wedding ring which identified him, and that wasn’t destroyed. 

The story made it into the newspapers along with extracts from Upfield’s new novel - which sold a lot of copies after that. Not only that, but he used the wedding ring in another of his books. 

Was it a nightmare for that particular author? It would have been for Kerry, and certainly for me. I wonder how Arthur Upfield felt? 

The Bony(Napoleon Bonaparte) novels are still available. 

 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: T is for Josephine Tey

 Scottish writer Josephine Tey was born as Elizabeth MacKintosh in 1896. Her pen name was based on the name of her great great grandmother. In any case, it’s the name by which she was best known. She also used the name Gordon Daviot as a pen name for her plays, of which she wrote quite a few, though only four were produced in her lifetime, the most well known a play about Richard II, called Richard of Bordeaux. 

She spent some time as a PE teacher, which she used in some of her fiction, Miss Pym Disposes. 

However, what I want to talk about in this post is her Alan Grant series. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard first appears in The Man In The Queue, published in 1929. He is the hero of five novels, although he does have a small role in The Franchise Affair. Her last novel, The Singing Sands, in which Alan Grant appears, was found among her papers after her death and published posthumously. 

The last one published before her death was The Daughter Of Time, which had Alan Grant solving a very cold case mystery from his hospital bed. 

I first encountered this mystery when I was in Year 11 at school. I had a wonderful English teacher who told us about it when we were studying Shakespeare’s Richard III. It turned me into a Ricardian and I eventually joined the Richard III Society. 

Oddly enough, people are still arguing about whether Richard III was a good guy or a villain. This, after the king in the car park issue! But he is properly buried now in Leicester cathedral and for the most part people think of him as a good guy. I do have to wonder how many people were inspired by Josephine Tey’s novel, as I was.

When she wrote it, though, most people who had heard of Richard III thought of him as the hunchbacked villain of Shakespeare’s play. And Alan Grant spends the whole novel researching with the help of an enthusiastic young American, Brent Carradine, who is in London to support his actress  girlfriend. Between them they come to a conclusion that finds Richard not guilty.

Grant is in hospital because he fell into a hole while chasing a crook in the course of his duties. He is bored, lying there staring at the ceiling all day. His friends have brought him books, but they are not enjoyable. He is visited by his friend Marta Hallard(who first appeared in A Shilling For Candles). Grant is interested in faces as part of his job, and has a reputation for being able to “pick them at sight” and decide whether they belong on the bench or in the dock. 

Marta brings him prints of famous -or infamous - faces with mysteries connected to them. One of them is Richard III, a picture he hasn’t seen before. He places that face on the bench, till he finds out, to his surprise, that according to what is known of him at the time, he belongs in the dock. But Grant can’t leave it alone once his curiosity is roused and starts reading everything he can get hold of on the subject. When Marta sends along Brent Carradine to help him with the research, the two of them spend the rest of the book looking up and discussing it. They decide that he didn’t kill the Princes in the Tower. I’ll leave the rest in case you want to read it.

I loved the whole idea of a mystery solved as a cold case from a hospital bed. You couldn’t do it now, when we have the Internet and Google to look things up. Besides, in our time, Grant would probably be using his laptop to do work. But the novel is set in the 1940s when you  had to read books to find things out and it’s just so delightfully clever.

It’s not very long - more of a novella than a novel - and easy reading.

I have it in audiobook, read by the wonderful Derek Jacobi, who plays all the roles - beautifully!

The book is a classic and you don’t have to have read the other books in the series to enjoy it.