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I read a bunch of stuff by John Dickson Carr to prepare for Wake Up Dead Man, and then more after that just because he's good! I reported on them in various newsletters, but here they all are in one place.



It Walks By Night (1930) My only previous exposure to Carr was The Blind Barber, which is a farce, so I was surprised to hear him described as a writer of atmospheric, Poe-ish mysteries. But It Walks By Night is definitely that. Carr wrote it in college (it was originally serialized in his university newspaper!) and it feels very young. The detective is Henri Bencolin, a French judge with a devilish, pointed hairdo (I unfortunately could not stop envisioning Dilbert’s boss). It’s very atmospheric as well as a locked room mystery, two things Rian mentioned specifically. I was off to the races. The 2020 British Library reissue includes the short story "The Shadow of the Goat," which I also recommend. (Youtube audiobook)

Castle Skull (1931) This was far and away my favourite, with its Scooby-Doo setting and dramatic double mystery. Really good stuff, I had a blast. Bencolin is always accompanied by an emotional support American called Jeff Marle, whom he relies on to ask blundering questions of beautiful young ladies. Carr was himself American, and I suspect that Jeff was either an attempt to relate to his peers or an outright caricature of someone. This is less a locked room mystery than it is an inaccessible castle mystery, and has Bencolin going up against a German detective in a really catty competition to solve the thing. I really loved the villain and resolution in this. (Youtube audiobook)

The Lost Gallows (1931) This one sees Bencolin and Marle in London, reunited with Bencolin’s old friend from Scotland Yard (who appears in the Bencolin short stories Carr published in his school paper, including the one reproduced in the British Library’s reissue of this book) and hunting a historical hangman. This also includes Carr’s first explicitly nonwhite character, a wealthy bachelor from Egypt, who doesn’t come off very well (but to be fair, neither do most anyone else in these books). The solution to the puzzle is satisfyingly neat and also sees Marle in genuine mortal peril, which was fun. (Youtube audiobook)

The Corpse in the Waxworks (1932) Bencolin and Marle return to Paris and discover a corpse held in the arms of a wax satyr. Although It Walks By Night was also set in Paris, this one feels really Parisian, with city politicians, blackmail, and a secret club. There’s an honest-to-god action sequence, and the first female character from Carr who I genuinely liked. Carr was definitely figuring things out as he went, writing these books. (Youtube audiobook)

The Hollow Man, or The Three Coffins (1935) Skipped forward to this one, which I saw repeatedly described as Carr’s ultimate locked room mystery. The original name of the book was The Hollow Man, but it was published in America as The Three Coffins, so you’ll see it as both. This features Dr. Gideon Fell, another of Carr’s detectives. I’m not entirely sure what he’s a doctor of, but he seems to know everyone he needs to in order to be pulled into mysteries. I enjoyed the story of this one, and the way it works is very good, but it does feel a little like Carr had become interested in the puzzle to the detriment of the story. Dr. Fell goes so far as to break the fourth wall and deliver a lecture on the best locked room mysteries, complete with citations, declaring to his companions that it’s relevant because they of course are also in a detective story. Wild stuff! (Libro.fm audiobook)

The Black Spectacles (1939) Another Gideon Fell, a poisoning case, and impossible not because of a locked room but because several people saw it happen and it was filmed. Fell doesn’t come into it until the midpoint, and his police contact is a young man who is having the worst time of his life on account of having recently fallen in love at first sight with the woman suspected of being the poisoner while visiting Pompeii (she did not notice him in Pompeii and is naturally distracted by other things). I had fun with this one! Fell lectures on the topic of “the male poisoner” which was. weird! (Youtube audiobook)

The Crooked Hinge by John Dickson Carr (1937). An imposter nobleman, a satanic cult, an antique automaton, the Titanic, and finally, of course: an impossible crime. Goes places, even by Carr’s standards.

He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr (1946). This is the first post-war Carr I’ve read, and it definitely felt different. He uses the war, however—it signifies a very definite crux for many characters—and he plays around with psychological tropes which were on the rise at the time. Additionally, there is a sequence involving a lit dental display which I found thoroughly terrifying (I hate teeth).

And, covered in a previous entry: The Blind Barber.

i'm always reading queer murder mysteries a little bit. never not reading queer murder mysteries. call it a load-bearing genre. however, right now i am only reading queer murder mysteries and doing so in a way which might be termed compulsive. i am also involved in the final days of a 4-month long renovation bleeding into the slowest house move imaginable. the two things might be related. anyway, here is an attempt to record my descent into wherever it is i'm going. have some queer mysteries.

the compulsion kicked off on february 19th, but i read one queer mystery before then, so i'm just going from feb 1st.

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i had never heard of Perfect Days, a 2023 Wim Wenders film. it made the festival circuit and then came out in the US in 2024. at the end of 2024, my friend Jody listed it as her favourite film of the year, which was the first i became aware of it. i watched it on the flight back from Portland on New Year's Day, which had such persistent streaming issues that everyone's movies kept dropping out, but i was so enraptured with the film that i patiently poked at my screen each time until it came back. absolutely worth it.


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one of the perks of getting a laptop after years with a desktop was knowing that i would likely get into playing steam games again. This Bed We Made was at the top of my list. a point-and-click mystery game, this is less up my alley and more the alley itself.


set in 1950s Montreal, it follows Sophie, a hotel maid, throughout one day at work. on this day, she stumbles across some suspicious information about a hotel guest, makes the decision to investigate it, involves a coworker (who can become a romantic connection), and ultimately encounters a body. it's a relatively short game (3-6 hours, i think), but there's a lot of variation in the choices you make, which can impact what's revealed throughout the game, as well as how it ends. the game is also extremely queer, but the degree to which the player (and sophie) engage with that queerness depends on player choices. i also really enjoyed how the game's writing incorporated the player's natural (imo) inclination to open every drawer and paw through every suitcase into sophie's character. i always get a kick out of narratives which find uses for game mechanics or aspects of genre.

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a lot has been said about the new dragon age game. i haven't seen most of it, just gotten a sense of the scale of the discourse like someone on a boat watching the shadow of a blue whale pass beneath them. i've read a few posts on tumblr, but otherwise haven't delved in--nor do i intend to. in general, my enjoyment of a game is not affected by other people's opinions of it. and i did enjoy this game! i played it all the way through once and have already embarked on a second play-through. despite this list of grievances, there is a lot in it to recommend it. the character creator is wonderfully diverse (you can be fat!) and i loved that your options for rook's voice went beyond male vs female and american vs british. the clothing and armor is wonderful. i loved just about every single companion character. that said.

is it a GOOD game? no. the combat is fun, the level up system is fine, there's no laborious crafting to be done, and visually it's a treat! but narratively, it's not great. for perhaps the first time ever, a game is bad because of woke.

( spoilers for dragon age 2 and inquisition follow, very minor spoilers for veilguard )

sci-fi mystery is one of those genres that is so up my alley (but still relatively niche) that i tend to pick them up automatically. so all i knew about Drunk on All Your Strange New Worlds by Eddie Robson was that it was a sci-fi mystery. it's also near-future sci-fi and alien sci-fi and translation sci-fi and...workplace sci-fi? is that a thing? if that combination of descriptors is making you think of julie e. czerneda, you're not alone! but crucially, also, there is a murder.

lydia is a translator for the logi cultural attaché in new york. she's in many ways an outsider: she's british, but not high class, she's never seemed to mesh with fellow translators, and she spends all her time either with her boss, an alien, or at high society cultural events becoming progressively drunk. because that's the thing about translating for the logi--only a small percentage of people can even learn to speak logisi, a telepathic language, and even if you can speak it, doing so results in a feeling of drunkenness. the drunkenness plus one very persistent theater producer lands lydia in some hot water, professionally, which is where she is when her boss is suddenly killed.

this is a fun whodunnit with an amateur sleuth (lydia) and a really good variety of elements in the mix. my favourite part of the book, however, was lydia's relationship with madison, the logi who is acting cultural attaché after the murder. lydia knows that her late boss, fitz, was at odds with madison, so she's disinclined to do madison's bidding, especially when it prevents her from the legwork required to investigate a murder. madison is very no-nonsense, and seemingly not nearly as cognizant of the toll that translation takes on the human brain as fitz was, and also maybe kind of a bitch? naturally, where the book really took off for me (and which gave me pleasant flashbacks to czerneda's survival trilogy) was when circumstances force lydia and madison onto the same side. just a fun book, start to finish.

 i picked upA Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall at my local bookshop, lured in by the twin promises of epistolary and scholars building an archive. it could have gone very, very wrong, but happily for me this book was everything it promised and more.

the book opens with a letter from E. Cidnosin, who lives in an underwater house, to classification scholar Henery Clel, about two elongated fish she saw from her bedroom window and could not find in his book on the subject. from this letter we learn that E. is the daughter of an accomplished architect who built her home--The Deep House--which is the only one of its kind. E. lives there alone, as both of her siblings have left to become scholars elsewhere. her voice is funny, self-depreciative, and curious. you can't help liking her.

the next letter is from E.'s sister Sophy to Henery's brother Vyerin about their siblings, both of whom, we learn, have died. a year has passed since they lost them, and both of them have been grief-stricken. however, sophy located a cache of letters as well as henery's day book in the ruins of The Deep House--also lost--and has come to vyerin with a proposition: what if between the two of them they reconstructed the last year of their siblings' lives through the letters they left behind? they construct an archive, sending each other their siblings' letters and sometimes other relevant correspondence or documents in the order in which they occurred. they also come to like one another quite a lot--deciding to meet at a market with both of their spouses and eventually foregoing the letter writing entirely in favor of finishing the archive in person at vyerin's house.

i liked so many things about this book--the epistolary aspect (done in such a way that the reader always knows where the letter originated from and why), the slow revelation about the universe in which these people live, the sweet and unique romance between e. and henery (two very sweet and unique people), as well as the romance between sophy and her wife, which developed during the period being reconstructed. the prose is wonderful, the world-building deft and interesting. every character stands out on the page. e. suffers from debilitating anxiety, and the way this was presented and talked about in a world which has a very different relationship to mental health than ours was interesting and i appreciated it. 

i finished this book a few weeks ago but have struggled to write about it, because it's (ironically!) hard to classify. it's the softest of sci-fi, but still inventive and gripping. it's about a character with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but also not about that at all. it's a romance between two people, and two other people, and also four people (and two children). it's a murder mystery--or is it? anyway. i loved it. 5 out of 5.

a little while ago, i added a bunch of books that i liked the sounds of to my storygraph to read list from a post that was going around on tumblr of forthcoming queer books, and then i forgot about them. but storygraph dutifully emails me whenever one of these books has come out, and i trust that past door had my best interests at heart, and check if the library has it. this is how i ended up reading Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis, and past door really knocked it out of the park with this one.

floating hotel is about a hotel in space. it's set in a far, far distant future, where mankind has left earth behind in order to mine other planets for all they're worth and then move on. there's an emperor, one who has been alive for 500 years, and massive wealth inequality. the book is aware of all of these things, but mostly comes at them from the side. the book is about the hotel.

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Amaza Lee Meredith was born in 1895 in Lynchburg, Virginia, and went on to establish the arts department at Virginia State University (an historic Black college/university in Peterburg) and build the only "international style" home in virginia. i first learned about her from the new angle voices podcast, and as a queer virginian and house architecture enthusiast was immediately desperate to know more. so i read Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class by Jacqueline Taylor.

this was taylor's first book, and it's based ( i believe) on her dissertation, although she also contributed a chapter about meredith to a book called Suffragette City about women's contributions to the built environment. i'll be interested to read that piece, because although meredith left her archives to VSU, which includes letters and plans, she left behind absolutely no writing (aside from scrapbooks and sketches) about her home or the homes she planned/built in Sag Harbor, NY. this resulted in a book that is very strong in its chapters about meredith's growing up and schooling years (of which there were many, as she went to college for a teaching certificate, then later a BA and, subsequently, an MA in arts education) and the state of education theory and opportunities available to upwardly mobile black people in the early 20th century. this was fascinating and extremely well-researched. unfortunately, i was much more in it for the houses.



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there's a fantastic used game and tech shop in my city, and a little while ago i went with the goal of finding ps5 games to play that i wouldn't have to spent $70 on (because that's what a new ps5 game costs. seventy dollars. yeah it's beautiful but at what cost?? seventy dollars i guess). i lucked out on a used copy of the director's cut of ghost of tsushima, a game i had seen images of and of which i'd heard generally positive reviews but otherwise knew nothing. as far as i could tell, the director's cut is the base game + some digital exclusives (an especially beautiful horse is one) + the DLC (which is a whole other storyline on a whole other island). i was given the option to play the game in "kurosawa mode," which is black and white and appears as if on film, which is fun. i went with the basic mode, and i'm glad. this is a beautiful game with wonderfully saturated colors.



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