Man, I’ve missed Anthony Boucher. First I was in love, and then I fell out of love, and now I’m asking myself why it ever went sour. Well, the answer to that is easy – The Case of the Seven Sneezes. After an absolutely storming introduction to Boucher by way of Nine Times Nine and The Case of the Solid Key, I had found my next big thing. This was a mystery author whose work simply sang – deft impossibilities rendered in the fat of some of the best prose that the GAD era had to offer. Scarcely a page went by without encountering a passage that I yearned to stamp permanently in my mind.
And then came the incongruous mix of the obnoxious and the forgettable – The Case of the Seven Sneezes. How it was even written by the same author is beyond me. No, it’s not some legendarily bad book by any means, but it just lacks the wit and panache of its brethren. My excitement for Boucher was gone.
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