It’s actually harder to come across a body in the library than you might expect. Agatha Christie described this trope as one of the ‘cliches’ of ‘the detective story’. Over the course of her career, only 5 people are killed in this room in her mystery novels, although she does have some further library victims […]| crossexaminingcrime
Back in 2019 I read Dorothy Cameron Disney’s Crimson Friday (1943), and it has taken me this long to try another by her. She is perhaps not the most accessible of authors, which has certainly fed i…| crossexaminingcrime
In Death in the Clouds (1935), Norman Gale says to Jane Grey: “Murder […] doesn’t concern the victim and the guilty only. It affects the innocent too. You and I are innocent, but the shadow of murder has touched us. We don’t know how that shadow is going to affect our lives.” Hercule Poirot also […]| crossexaminingcrime
Today’s a read is a recent edition to the A Very Short Introduction series. I have read various ones over the years, including one on Crime Fiction (2015). This was a particularly bad reading exper…| crossexaminingcrime
There are a few vintage mystery novels which focus on a jury. The first two that sprang to mind were Verdict of Twelve (1940) by Raymond Postgate and The Jury (1932) by Gerald Bullett. Curtis Evans…| crossexaminingcrime
