"At the Scene of the Crime" celebrates two years online!

Wow.

Honestly, that's all I can say. I opened up a Blogger account and created At the Scene of the Crime two years ago today. Long-time readers might recall that my debut post was a video review, to date the only one I've done. It's also one of my very worst reviews, and I'm surprised that after a video like that I wasn't chased off the Internet by a group of irate readers armed with knives and pitchforks.

But no, the mystery blogging community is a very forgiving one, and I soon found myself doing reviews on a regular basis. I've re-discovered some old favourites, and I've found new ones. I became an avid e-book reader thanks to The Mysterious Press. I've gained an appreciation for subgenres that I may have marginalized before starting this blog. I got to virtually meet some authors that I've admired tremendously, such as Paul Halter, Peter Lovesey, and René Reouven. I finally met my match in Harry Stephen Keeler. I re-read the entire James Bond series. I've finally discovered a story about the giant rat of Sumatra that has left me satisfied! (Tune in for that within the next week.) I grew a beard and shaved it off. The blog went through two major redesigns. I even started getting enough spam comments to be forced to remove Anonymous commenting! (I apologize to all users who do not wish to sign up for a Google account, but the spam was rapidly getting out of control one week, and it was all coming from anonymous spammers. I think I removed all traces of their visits, but if you spot one of their comments lying around feel free to let me know.) In general, the last two years have been a bit of a crazy ride.

Thank you for everyone who stops in to read this blog! Your encouragement, as well as the discussions we've had (both agreements and disagreements), have helped to fuel my enthusiasm for the last two years.

Last year, to commemorate my one-year anniversary, I held a month-long celebration full of crossover reviews and articles. However, I realized that I had no way to top such a performance this year. So I decided early on that I had no intention to try. Instead, I decided to commemorate this anniversary in a smaller way. I began earlier today by posting my review of Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, the very first James Bond continuation that I've read.

The second part of the celebration has been a long time coming: it's the second episode of Fair and Foul Play. This was delayed by exams and by the blog redesign, and I hope readers will forgive me. I didn't intend to have such a delay between the two parts of an episode, and it won't happen with the next episode. There might, however, be a longer delay between episodes, i.e. the end of episode 1 and the start of episode 2.

But to return to the subject at hand, I hope you will enjoy listening to the conclusion of the "mysteries in audio" segment of Fair and Foul Play. In this conclusion, I rejoin Sergio for a discussion that picks up where we left off discussing audiobooks, radio plays, and other mysteries set in the world of audio. Due to some tech issues, the images I used to illustrate the video all disappeared and I cannot explain why, but the audio itself is intact. I therefore suggest listening to this video as though it were a radio broadcast, which is only appropriate considering the subject matter. (And hopefully YouTube will be more co-operative next time!) I made some minor tweaks to the opening credits, but the show's format remains unchanged.

Fair and Foul Play

Hello everybody; welcome back to the blog. You’re just in time for me to reveal a brand-new feature, something that (I hope) will begin to make a regular appearance on this blog: a brand-new podcast entitled Fair and Foul Play.

What is Fair and Foul Play? The way I envision it, it’ll be a series of one-on-one conversations with other bloggers, mystery fans, and anyone else I can lure to the programme. These conversations will revolve around a specific topic within the mystery genre. For example, today I’m joined by Sergio, the blogger at the excellent site Tipping My Fedora. As it happens, both Sergio and I are big fans of audio productions, although we tend to specialize in different types of productions. The idea suddenly came: why not get together and talk about mysteries in audio? Audiobooks, radio plays, adaptations, dramatizations, original stuff: the complete package.

And so you’re looking at the result below, with Part 1 of our conversation forming episode 1a of Fair and Foul Play. Part 2 won’t be uploaded for a while, for the excellent reason that (a) I haven’t edited it yet and (b) the result would be over an hour long and that would be overwhelming all at once.

Please let us know what you think of the podcast, and if you’ve any interest in appearing in the future, feel free to let me know!

A Most Mysterious Suicide-- Maybe...

Hello everybody and welcome to this brand-new, special edition of At the Scene of the Crime! Today, I’m very pleased to participate in the first cross-blog review of the one-year anniversary celebrations. And what better co-blogger than Les Blatt of the prolific Classic Mysteries podcast?

But what to review? Les usually tackles classic mysteries that are either in print or easily obtained, so that ruled out books like the ever-so-obscure (I wonder if that’s because it’s fictional) novel by George Van Hooligan, The Case of the Murderous Monk.

But wait! Thanks to Faber & Faber, several novels by Cyril Hare have been brought back into print! This seemed like a perfect choice. Cyril Hare is such a respected mystery author and was a member of the prestigious Detection Club— plus he had experience as a judge, which lends a touch of authenticity to his work. And after some thinking, we settled on Suicide Excepted as a good book to read together!

Thanks a lot for joining me today, Les!

…

Les?

Oh, that’s right. I nearly forgot. As I’ve said before, Les’ reviews are in podcast form. That means there’s only one way to do this review properly, and that’s to go invade the Classic Mysteries podcast!

You can listen to the podcast review here.

Les’ post on this review can be found here.

Brand-New Podcast!

It’s rather fitting that, after my recent batch of Sherlock reviews, I participated in a podcast where the topic was Sherlock Holmes. Bill Lengeman over at Traditional Mysteries had a great idea, gathering up mystery bloggers from far and wide to participate in a round-table discussion. The participants in this podcast are:

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Bill Lengeman – The head honcho at his blog, Traditional Mysteries, Bill specializes in brief reviews of mystery novels of a more “traditional” flavour, ranging from the heavy weights like Rex Stout to little-heard of books such as the recently-reviewed Murder in Pastiche.

John Norris – If you like your crime fiction with plenty of “weirdness” to it, look no further than John’s blog, Pretty Sinister Books! John’s blog is very informative and makes for great reading. As a fan of John Dickson Carr, I particularly enjoy reading John’s reviews of crime fiction with supernatural tinges to it.

Les Blatt – Les has had some experience in the realm of podcasts, regularly producing one at Classic Mysteries. Every week Les takes a look at a different classic mystery “worth reading and re-reading”, and he usually manages to find books that are either currently in print or easily found.

Patrick Ohl – I have no idea why they invited this derivative hack, currently blogging At the Scene of the Crime. When he isn’t reviewing books, he finds clever ways of being lazy, such as reviewing the three newest Sherlock episodes back-to-back and digging out old, half-finished, unpublished reviews. He didn’t even bother to mention his affiliation with the site!

Sergio Angelini – One of the most literate bloggers around, Sergio manages to write fascinating, enticing reviews at Tipping My Fedora, where he looks not only at books, but also at movies and audio productions. He’s also the current record-holder for most frequent guest blogger on my blog, appearing a grand total of two times and each time getting me to expand my mystery horizons.

Steve Barge – Steve, a.k.a. Puzzledoctor, is In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel and his blog is one I frequently visit. He’s the fellow responsible for starting a craze over Paul Doherty novels, and he’s come to convert half the mystery blogosphere to believing the Gospel According to Doherty.

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These brave souls gathered together to answer the age-old question: have we seen too much of Sherlock Holmes? Will we ever reach a saturation point?

You can listen to/download the podcast by visiting this page of Bill’s blog. I hope you will enjoy this discussion! I had plenty of fun and will definitely join into the fun on future episodes.

A few points I wanted to make:

•  Yes, I am the mysterious “Patrick”, despite failing to mention my blog’s name.
• The quality of the recording gets better at around the nine minute mark—we had some technical issues.
• My point on the Guy Ritchie films may be seen as contradictory. But what I meant to say in my muddle-headed way was that although the films themselves may not convert many to Holmes, they proved that he can still be a profitable name and that’s what’s led to this recent resurgence in Holmes, which has brought several converts over to the stories.