#MurderEveryMonday title hints to something not visible
Today’s #MurderEveryMonday is a “crime fiction title which hints that something has disappeared or is not visible”.
I went through my shelves and the majority of books I could find were about someone disappearing, instead of something, but I decided to go with it.
My first thought went to The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristol and Bruce Manning, published in 1930, with a close setting where people start dying. Later, Agatha Christie worked the same idea for And Then There Were None. Loved both books, and I thank Dean Street Press (check the link to see their crime fiction titles) to republished the Host so we could read it today. Do you know other books with a similar idea? Let me know in the comments, I would love to read them.
My second thought was The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin because while maybe “moving” doesn’t hint to a disappearance, the blurb at the back is very clear: this toyshop vanishes during the night. How and why would a toyshop vanish? Read the book, it’s a good one and the Oxford Professor Gervase Fen is on the case. It’s also the only book that hints at something instead of someone.
Then, I thought of “Poirot loses a Client” (the book in the middle, same title both in Portuguese and American English). Mainly because this Christie Portuguese publisher used already made translations from Brazil, back in the 1950/60s, probably cheaper than to get a translation from scratch, and I also have this idea that Brazil would use the American editions to translate, maybe because they were closer and was easier to negotiate with the American publishers than with the UK ones. But this one is the UK’s Dumb’s Witness. And it reminded me that John Curran published in his Secret Notebooks, for the first time, a similar short story that was later found in Agatha Christie papers, called The Incident of the Dog’s Ball (albeit the culprit is different).
You know I love Poirot, but it does seem he’s a little bit careless sometimes with this thing of loosing clients. And while the titles don’t hint at it, it also happens in the short stories A Cornish Mystery and How does Your Garden Grow?, both from the Poirot’s Early Cases (first book in the photo) and also in the novel Murder on the Links.
Someone engages Poirot to look into or do something and then, they’re gone. Where did his clients go or why? I’m not spilling it. Read the books :-)
Finally, I found The Phantom Lady by William Irish that starts with a man talking to a woman in a bar, without catching her name. When he returns home something happens and then he needs to find the woman of the bar to do something, but she vanished.
The Raymond Chandler one is translated as A Woman was Lost, and is in fact Farewell, My Lovely. With Chandler, I’m never sure if I know Philip Marlowe (the detective) from the movies, the old time radio shows, or the books. This is the melancholic, cynic, private eye, whiskey, guns, and the femme fatale. If you like the sub-genre hardboiled, Chandler is always a good option.
#BookLook #books #ColecçãoVampiro #CrimeFiction #livros #MurderEveryMonday #Policiais
