The Old Paperback Carousel

Given the 2021 centenary of Christie's first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I decided I'd start a read of all the Poirot books she wrote. Styles was Poirot's debut, an unfortunate one as it happened since Christie made him an elderly retiree. She didn't expect to still be writing about the character 50 years later, by which time he'd be around 120 if you estimate his age in Styles to be 70 or so. (She'd go on to make the same mistake ten years later with the debut of Miss Marple, an elderly spinster.)                                                                                    This makes Styles a slight anomaly among her works in one way, as unlike later novels it's attached to a specific era: post-World War I. The t...

I wanted to read one of the giants of the "cosy" subgenre of mystery fiction and happened across Charlotte MacLeod, a Canadian-American author active from the '60s through to the '90s. Honestly, I wasn't expecting much other than a half-decent detective plot and some light humour that your gran would appreciate. (The cosy is a trope-driven subgenre that mixes puzzle-based plots with comedy-of-manners, downplaying sex and violence in favour of escapism.) To my pleasant surprise, MacLeod is a much more cockeyed and self-aware writer than I'd anticipated. The first in her series for which the amateur sleuth is an agricultural professor, Peter Shandy, Rest You Merry takes place during the festive season and begins with a rather mean-spirited prank. Bullied each year by the local harridans to join in with the Grand Illumination, a moneymaking exercise whereby Balaclava College's academic neighbourhood is festooned with fairy lights, Shandy pays to have his hom...