May MysteryKIT - The Golden Age

The Golden Age of mystery writing predominantly refers to books written in the interwar period, mostly in the 1920s and 1930s. However, as many of the writers who began their bodies of work in this timeframe continued writing into the 1970s or so, the definition can be elastic.

The style has been so popular that it is still being replicated now. Kindle Unlimited is chock full of 1920s and 30s style mysteries.

Entirely up to each reader whether they choose to read from the actual Golden Age or to treat it more as a particular style of mystery writing.

Happy mystery reading!
And please update the wiki if you can! https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2024_MysteryKIT

I'm sure I have lots to fit this one. Let me choose...

Planning to read Death from a Top Hat, a 1938 locked-room mystery by Clayton Rawson, the first of his four novels featuring crime-solving magician The Great Merlini.

I probably won't have much unless we can read a mystery set in the 1930s...

But I'll check, anyway.

I am planning on reading The Ginger Cat Mystery by Robin Forsythe. He wrote a series of mysteries during the 1920s and 30s and this one was published in 1935.

I am intermittently working my way through the works of two Golden Age authors, Agatha Christie and Michael Innes, although I have now reached some of their later works.

More strictly Golden Age, I have sitting on my shelves The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey (1929) and Murder At Cambridge by Q. Patrick (1933).

>4 LibraryCin: I think it is fine to read a modern mystery set in the time period - there are so many now being written in the style of that era. And I do love them myself!
I've left it to each reader's discretion as to interpretation.

I will read something by Agatha Christie, and I'm sure I'll get lots of BBs from this thread!

I have yet to read Gladys Mitchell, so I'm going with Death at the Opera. My edition has a remarkable ugly cover!

>7 JayneCM: Thank you! That being the case, I will probably aim for Spanish Fly / Will Ferguson

ETA: Hmmm, the "mystery" tag is pretty small on "Spanish Fly". Will need to be sure there is actually some kind of mystery in the book! I have an alternate picked out: Radio Girls / Sarah-Jane Stratford

Original Post: 04/21/2024:
I've just started It Walks by Night: A Parisian Locked-Room Mystery (Henri Bencolin #1; by John Dickson Carr) - Originally published in 1930 and currently included in the British Library Crimes Classics collection.

Update: 04/29/2024
It Walks by Night: A Parisian Locked-Room Mystery (Henri Bencolin #1; by John Dickson Carr) - Henri Bencolin is a French juge d'instruction (examining magistrate) in the Paris judicial system who is called upon to protect the new husband of a recent divorcée. The groom, Duc de Saligny, has been specifically threatened by the women's first husband-- a dangerous lunatic who has undergone plastic surgery-- so no one knows what he looks like now. At a casino, the Duc is seen to enter a room with two watched/guarded doors-- but though he enters alone, he is soon discovered dead. This is a solid locked-room whodunit with no cheats and some great descriptive passages conveying the time and place of 1920s, jazz-age Paris. There is a second, short story called "The Shadow of the Goat" included in the British Library Crime Classics edition; but it is not nearly as well developed as the main attraction.

I read A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake