The Encluesiast

When I first started this blog, I had hoped that I would be able to start posting a lot straight out of the gate. Unfortunately, other obligations overwhelmed me. But now, I am ready to commit to a schedule for the rest of the year. I will publish two analyses a month. They will be of the following books:

August 2025:

Encyclopedia Brown mysteries Volumes 1–5 (1963–68)

Fen Country by Edmund Crispin (1979)

September 2025:

False Scent by Ngaio Marsh (1959)

Green for Danger by Christianna Brand (1944)

October 2025:

The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye by Brian Flynn (1928)

The Three Coffins / The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr (1935)

November 2025:

Death from a Top Hat by Clayton Rawson (1938)

The House of Snow and the Six Tricks by Danro Kamosaki (2022)

December 2025:

Early-period Ellery Queen novel TBD

Rupert Penny novel TBD

This selection was not put together arbitrarily. These books fall into four groups:

(1) The Encyclopedia Brown mysteries have been paired with Crispin’s short stories because, although they differ greatly in style and intended audience, their clue mechanics are very similar. (Indeed, the clue mechanics in the Encyclopedia Brown books are common throughout much Golden Age fiction.) And they allow me to cover a lot of tropes that I will refer to again and again in the coming months (and, hopefully, years).

(2) The next three are Golden Age classics. I’ve given pride of place to False Scent in order to mount a defense of Ngaio Marsh, who is unjustly maligned in contemporary mystery blogging. I hope to show how brilliant her construction can be at her best. Green for Danger is quite simply my favorite mystery novel written by someone not named Agatha Christie. And The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye is a great example of the mystery community’s capacity to unearth new classics—in this case through Puzzle Doctor’s heroic efforts to resurrect Brian Flynn, one of the best discoveries of the current revival.

(3) The next three are novels that feature “locked room lectures” of sorts. That is, the detectives in these novels present taxonomies of mystery stories. These provide opportunities for me to offer alternative taxonomies, which can be used to re-categorize the problems/solutions presented in those books.

(4) The last two will be a contrasting pair of “Challenge to the Reader” novels. My perhaps heretical opinion is that Penny has generally improved on the Queen model in terms of construction (and, of course, general writing)!