Agatha Christie’s 1929 Partners in Crime is a series of short stories in which Tommy & Tuppence Beresford imitate the detecting styles of the popular detectives of the day. Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner has his place in their playacting.

Published in 1909, this collection of short stories, initially serialized, feature the nameless man in the corner who reveals to intrepid reporter Polly Burton his solution to several unsolved crimes in London and other cities such as Dublin, Liverpool etc. Many of the crimes are elementary but still clever, and given that this genre was still cutting its teeth, Orczy shines. In addition to thinking of unsolved crimes, she must always have ones in which the fact that they are unsolved , or wrongly solved, didn’t mean the false conviction of an innocent person.

Thanks to Jane at Fleur Fisher for her review that prompted me to get the library to dig this out of storage for me.

Read this if: you’re fairly new to mystery stories and want an introduction to the genre; you’re a young teen keen to solve conundrums; or you’re a keen admirer of mysteries and want to explore a classic of the genre. 4½ stars ( )

A volume of delightful, fun, and intriguing stories by the author of The Scarlett Pimpernel. My only complaint about these is that there are so very few of them.

I enjoyed this book. It iswas not the typical mystery book that I read. I generally love blood and gore, but this was an okay book. I enjoyed guessing the end of each of the stories, and I was right on about half of them. I did not however have a piece of string like the old man in the corner. ( )