Six Against the Yard (1936) – The Detection Club

This collection has an intiguing premise. Five writers from the Detection Club (plus Russell Thorndike) wrote six stories of the "perfect murder", and then Superintendent George Cornish, who had recently retired from the C.I.D., was tasked with explaining how the police would have caught all these clever criminals and outwitted the best detective writers in Britain. I enjoyed his commentaries - they surprised me with how speculative they were. He doesn't stop at the facts given in the stories; he re-imagines them, and sometimes…

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The Short Career of Montague Egg (1933-1939) – Dorothy L. Sayers

In addition to Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers also had a much less well-known regular detective. Unlike Lord Peter, Montague Egg is a working man; a "commercial traveller" for Messrs. Plummet and Rose, Wine Merchants. Though still mingling with the well-off due to his job, Egg exists in a very different mileu to Wimsey. Less butlers, spying, and dressing up as a wizard, and more suspicious travellers, awful pub dinners, and money-saving train dodges. The down-to-earth nature of the stories leads to them…

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Lord Peter Views the Body (1928) – Dorothy L. Sayers

This first collection of Dorothy L. Sayers' short stories was published in 1928, after a few Lord Peter Wimsey novels had already been published. The stories range from tales of detection, through tales of puzzle-solving, and into tales of adventure. Aside from all sharing the trait of ridiculously long titles, quite a few of them are what I'll call "hobby-themed"; they turn on a particular interest. Generally this is a high-culture or high-class interest. Lord Peter resolves the plot through his specialist knowledge of…

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