Status Updates From A Puzzle for Fools (America...

I do like this one, and the John Dickson Carr novel I have lined up to compete with it is going to have to work hard to top it. This plot works kind of like a JDC plot; things that seem impossible or supernatural will no doubt be explained, and hopefully the reveals and clear-ups will be brilliant. It's also nice to get some First Person narrative, because Carr likely won't do that, in my summer reads of his stuff.

Loving it. And, considering it’s from the 1930s, the depiction of the people getting care at the sanitarium is mostly being done with respect, and not as a joke. This is kinda like watching one of my favourite movies of old - The Snake Pit - except with a hideous murder about a quarter of the way in.

Let's see if this can at least match the others by Patrick Quentin, for entertainment value. Crime stories set in sanitariums can get creepy; I did enjoy 'Homicide Sanitarium' by Fredric Brown. There's a slight element of The Sleep Police here, as well...are some poor people on the edge of a really disturbed state of mind - possibly madness - being 'helped along' by someone in the shadows? And why?

Right - so, back to another Patrick Quentin, for Pride Month, but this will also take me to my second pairing of one John Dickson Carr novel ‘versus’ one novel from a Mystery-writing rival from the same era. Only I’m gonna switch the order around this time, and read the rival’s offering first. Then go to The Skeleton in the Clock. Sanitarium murder, versus a murder on abandoned prison grounds. Yay!!