Two Envelopes And A Phone > Recent Status Updates

I loved the first one, but never followed up with any other Tarzan adventures written by his creator. That changes now…and I have to say, I was not aware that the plots got so gonzo so soon. I’m a little worried, but I’ll just hang on to Tarzan as he swings through the craziness…

Darn, some pencil marks were made in this old hardcover...either paragraphs with a bracket enveloping them, or words and phrases underlined. Hopefully someone didn't go back and highlight all the clues! Or is this like Rodney Dangerfield said, in Back to School, about avoiding Used books with marks made in them as supposedly a help to studying: "Get new books! You don't know if some lunatic wrote in the book!".

I love how it’s as if the police don’t exist, in this one - and certainly, they could not be working on the murder any harder than it is being mulled over by several amateur sleuths living in the Frampton. Meanwhile, this almost feels like an Inverted Mystery, because one character is doing nothing but acting highly suspicious, lying and getting other people to lie, messing with evidence…but is he/she the killer?!

Just a taste, until tomorrow. I love whodunits featuring hotels full of people - though, the killing has not occurred in the hotel. But apparently, where the poor woman resided, there are many amateur sleuths ready to roll…

Pairing this up with Death-Watch. I’m thrilled to have a few British Library Crime Classics editions handy, as I select one rival read for each John Dickson Carr book I get to - alas, I don’t have anything from BLCC that is highly rated. Let’s see if this or Murder in the Museum, later on, can somehow out-perform JDC. I would love a surprising gem hidden…

I love my old hardcover of this book…but it has no dust-jacket, which is a little sad, because - assuming things are lined up correctly at the website - that old dust-jacket artwork is a pip. All my thing. Anyway, this will be my third John Dickson Carr book in a short period of time, out of 13 I will be blazing through this summer. As it turns out, I don’t have much from the Gideon Fell series. But there’s this!

So good!

Okay, that gets me rolling, a couple chapters' worth, anyway. A great start; I've paired this off with Quentin's Puzzle for Fools, which I read first. One to do with a sanitarium, and now a whodunit to do with a prison. Not much of a link, but they both have 223 pages, by coincidence! I'll be pairing off The Gilded Man with Annulet of Gilt...after that, I think linking pairs of Carr and rivals' books will be tougher.

This and two graphic novels will be my last Westerns of the month. I’m a little dubious of this one, but we’ll see…

I do like this one, and the John Dickson Carr novel I have lined up to compete with it is going to have to work hard to top it. This plot works kind of like a JDC plot; things that seem impossible or supernatural will no doubt be explained, and hopefully the reveals and clear-ups will be brilliant. It's also nice to get some First Person narrative, because Carr likely won't do that, in my summer reads of his stuff.

Loving it. And, considering it’s from the 1930s, the depiction of the people getting care at the sanitarium is mostly being done with respect, and not as a joke. This is kinda like watching one of my favourite movies of old - The Snake Pit - except with a hideous murder about a quarter of the way in.

Let's see if this can at least match the others by Patrick Quentin, for entertainment value. Crime stories set in sanitariums can get creepy; I did enjoy 'Homicide Sanitarium' by Fredric Brown. There's a slight element of The Sleep Police here, as well...are some poor people on the edge of a really disturbed state of mind - possibly madness - being 'helped along' by someone in the shadows? And why?