Come to Paddington Fair – Derek Smith (1997)

I’ll admit it – I’m not one for the theatre.  Don’t get me wrong, attending a play is just fine, I’m just not that mad about mysteries that revolve around one.  There’s this whole world of the stage that seems somewhat alien to me, and as varied as the writers and trappings may be, a theatrical murder plot always feels somewhat the same.  Panic in Box C, Puzzle for Players, Cue for Murder – they’re fine enough stories (although there isn’t anything verging on a classic in those ranks), but you kind of know what you’re going to get.  A cast of suspects made up by, er… the cast… of the play, plus a stage manager or two, a security guard, and maybe a stage hand.  We’ll be taken behind the curtain into a world of grease paint, and subjected to 150+ pages of interviews.  Someone will break into a dressing room at night, plus some antics are sure to occur outside of the bounds of the theatre.

I don’t know… it never really clicked for me.  It’s funny, because many similar tropes apply when it comes to country house murders, but for some reason I tend to enjoy them there.

Whistle Up the Devil – Derek Smith (1953)

It feels like ages since I’ve mentioned the top locked room lists cited by John Pugmire in A Locked Room Library.  It’s an excellent reference, providing a top 15 locked room mystery list initiated by Ed Hoch with the help of other luminaries of detective fiction, along with a list of ninety nine novels for “any respectable” locked room library compiled by another set of genre experts.  I’ve by no means read through this list exhaustively (why would I rob myself of future enjoyment?), and yet I feel compelled to drop the following declaration: Derek Smith’s Whistle Up the Devil is easily one of the top locked room mysteries ever published.

Bear in mind, Whistle Up the Devil didn’t even make the original Ed Hoch list – apparently Helen McCloy’s Through a Glass Darkly and Ellery Queen’s The King is Dead and The Chinese Orange Mystery were felt to be better entries, although I can’t imagine that many would agree.  Whistle Up the Devil did make the list of 99, but for that matter so did John Dickson Car’s The Dead Man’s Knock (crap), Night at the Mocking Widow (bad story but bizarre clever impossibility), and The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (decent enough story but tiptoeing the line on being impossible).