MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

“The detective is a true son of the murderer Oedipus, not only because he solves a riddle, but also because he kills the man to whom he owes his title, without whom he would not exist in that capacity (without crimes, without mysterious crimes, what would he be?) because this murder was foretold for him [...]

Queneau, Raymond. Pierrot Mon Ami (1942). Translated from the French by Barbara Wright. Dalkey Archive, 1989. Calling an author sui generis is a cliché, but in the case of Raymond Queneau it is nothing but the truth. Pierrot Mon Ami, his eighth novel, is a fine introduction to the particular style of this French polymath. [...]

My most recent read is Tom Harris by Stefan Themerson (1967), one of Dalkey Archive’s most recent reissues. I was attracted by an ad in the last Review of Contemporary Fiction which describes it as “an outlandish, highly unconventional detective story.” That is a fairly good way of summing up the novel. It is a [...]

I read E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (Project Gutenberg’s edition of the novel) in about a day. It’s a short early detective novel from 1913. I can’t recall now where I heard of it, but something about the description struck me as relevant to my detective story interest (that is, in unusual ones). Bentley dedicates [...]