This husband-wife team were reporters in New Orleans, Louisiana until they wrote The Invisible Host, about a mysterious person who summons eight people to an Art Deco penthouse apartment, prevents them from leaving and tells them via radio message that they will be killed off one by one. This was published in 1930, nine years before Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and although it’s not a perfect match by any means, there’s enough plot elements in common to make people wonder if Christie could have known about it. The Invisible Host did not get published in England at the time, and there’s no evidence for Christie seeing either the play version or the 1934 movie adaptation (entitled The Ninth Guest). That being said, I think people underestimate how much an author can pick up by osmosis, especially if they have friends who write or review in the same genre. Perhaps some more cinema-inclined member of the Detection Club had seen Ninth Guest, and made snarky comments about it, and Christie had thought, like any hardcore Star Wars fan sitting down to Episodes I, II, III, VII, VIII, or IX: “That’s an interesting notion but not what I would have done with it!”

The Invisible Host is not a masterpiece of suspense and psychology, like And Then There Were None, but in some ways it’s a more likable book: pretty good fun in its pulpy way,

Continue reading “Old School Mysteries: Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning” →

Knox came from a prominent line of Anglican clergy, and would probably have risen all the way to bishop or archbishop in that religion if he hadn’t converted to Catholicism, but he was named protonotary apostolic by Pope Pius XII, an honorary rank which allowed Knox to use the title “Monsignor/Msgr.” Knox was a biblical and classical scholar, a friend of G. K. Chesterton’s, and a member of the Detection Club alongside Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Baroness Orczy, et al. He presented “Broadcast at the Barricades,” a satire from BBC Radio depicting a Bolshevik revolution in London, which caused widespread panic when people mistook it for the real thing, and inspired Orson Welles’s famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast. Knox also originated the “Sherlockian game” of writing mock-erudite essays that treat Holmes, Watson, etc as historical rather than fictional figures.

His “Ten Commandments of Crime,” which laid out the rules of Golden Age “fair play” mysteries, are widely quoted. In the days before ebooks, I found it impossible to find any fiction he’d written by himself, as opposed to The Floating Admiral and the other tedious “chain-written” collaborations that the Detection Club put out in its heyday. Recently, I had the chance to snag his entire Miles Bredon series as a $0.99 ebook, and the standalone mystery the Viaduct Murder for I think the same amount.

The short verdict is that as a mystery writer, Knox was strictly a “puzzle” man.

Continue reading “The Mysteries of Msgr. Knox” →