The Acquisitive Chuckle

Regular readers of mine are probably aware, by now, of this semi-regular “showing off acquisitions” series, which due to a lack of originality from my part is undergoing a reboot today. I don’t have much to share this time but what I do have to share is fairly major. And so without further ado, let’s get down to business. Well, pictures speak louder than words, so let this image speak for itself:

That’s right, the complete set of Columbo arrived for me just this morning, after I began worrying it may have been lost in the mail. This is a terrific series starring the late, great Peter Falk in the titular role. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes, watching the series sporadically, but I liked every episode very much, and now I’ll have the ability to catch up with the entire series. I look forward to it.

Enter Dr. Thorndyke

The inanimate things around us have each of them a song to sing to us if we are but ready with attentive ears.

— Dr. John Thorndyke, “The Echo of a Mutiny” (collected in The Signing Bone)

And thus we have returned to R. Austin Freeman. I launched this series of reviews last week with Freeman’s own The Eye of Osiris, devoted to various Crime Kings: male authors who wrote in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and towards whom time has been extremely unkind. Freeman is an excellent case in point. At one point in time, he was a highly respected author, even earning praise from Raymond Chandler (no mean feat, that). Flash forward to the publication of Bloody Murder in 1972, and what does Julian Symons write about Freeman? “Reading a Freeman story is very much like chewing on dry straw.” And he hasn’t fared much better today, which just puzzles me. My confusion increased after reading The Singing Bone, a collection of short stories originally published in 1911, in which Freeman invented what is known as the “inverted detective story”—a technique that the television show Columbo excelled at. I was expecting an interesting experiment but not much more. But once again, Freeman surprised me and smashed the ball out of the park.

Oh, there's just one more thing...

In the past, I frequently complained about the state of the modern mystery, but in recent months, I’ve discovered wonderful authors like William L. DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini. Still, mysteries in the classic, GAD-style mould often seem unfairly ignored— how else to explain the lack of interest in publishing translations of Paul Halter's work in English? (You can say what you like, but Le Tigre borgne (The One- Eyed Tiger) is an absolute masterpiece.)

And yet, the opposite seems to be true in Japan, where authors like Soji Shimada (author of the brilliant The Tokyo Zodiac Murders) sell well! I’m not Japanese, nor do I understand the language, so I really cannot comment in depth here. However, on the blog Detection by Moonlight, there recently was a guest blog written by Ho-Ling, who pointed out some Japanese detective novels (translated into English) worth checking out. After searching my library catalogue, I managed to find one of the books Ho-Ling mentions in his final list (which includes a disclaimer, “not a complete list”): Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X.