#detective fiction

[mysharona1987]

#Books #creativity #detective fiction #english literature #literature

[crazy-queen-winx]

#ace attorney #the great ace attorney #the great mouse detective #poirot #acd sherlock holmes #detective columbo #detective fiction #miss marple #detective pikachu #polls

[shehriyana]

Oh to be a little gay detective who speaks in a preposterous accent and occasionally slips out of it to hint at how ridiculously funny he is as a character within the literary imagination.

Oh to be able to stand up for women who have been belittled by the unkind and the privileged, to be a cerebral force that unfailingly outwits the malevolent and the ignorant.

Oh to have Hugh Grant as my dreamboat partner, who stress bakes every now and then, who I had proposed to with some exceedingly goofy pun (like “only you can fill the Blanc in my life”), who answers the door all messy and covered in flour as I am attending a zoom call in my bathtub in my eccentric little Moroccan hat.

Oh to be Benoit Blanc.

#benoit blanc #hugh grant #daniel craig #knives out #glass onion #cinema #cinephile #cinephotography #aesthetic #literary #detective fiction #gay detective #lgbtq #lgbt representation #lgbtlove #lgbt pride #rian johnson

[citizenscreen]

“The Maltese Falcon” by Dashiell Hammett was published on or about February 14, 1930.

#dashiell hammett #the maltese falcon #detective fiction

[cineresis]

Angels in America

It's amazing how fast an evening at your favorite club can be ruined by someone keeling over and frothing at the mouth. The band never quite gets back into the swing of things afterwards.

"Angel," sighed one of the men, or nearest approximants, at the table next to mine, "why is it that I can never go anywhere with you without stumbling across a body?"

"Oh, come now," said his partner, a soft, fluffy confection in caramel and cream, rising hastily to make his way toward the source of the commotion. The first gentleman, dark, lanky, and excruciatingly chic, got up to follow him. "It's hardly every time."

I stayed where I was for now, casting my gaze around the room as I went over my memory of the past twenty or thirty minutes. Too many people passing close enough to slip something into the victim's drink, too many others to watch at the same time, too many more opportunities to poison him outside my field of view. I was a detective, not God.

"Stumbling upon, once. Literally. Do you know what it's like to have to clean up after that sort of thing? It takes a personal toll."

"Hush, Crowley," chided "Angel". "People can hear you, and you know how queer they get about these things. Ooh, yes, that's strychnine, all right," he added cheerfully, pulling a small vial from his vest pocket and tipping it into his handkerchief. "Nasty stuff."

I got up. As I approached, I caught the faint, unmistakable chemical sweetness of ether fumes and gave them a wide berth, choosing instead to inspect the victim's plate and glass before turning to scan the room from this perspective.

"Now, just what might you be doing?" drawled Crowley.

I looked him over, too, while I was at it. In Crowley's case, this involved a lot of looking and not much over; he was easily more than six feet tall, even while slouching rakishly. The snake tattoo on his right temple suggested certain things about him. The dark glasses that he hadn't removed since he'd entered just suggested questions, since I highly doubted he was blind. "I'm a detective," I said, leaving the obviously at the end of that sentence to implication. "What are you doing?"

This response seemed to delight him. "So are we," Crowley answered, and grinned. "But if you want to get specific about it, I'm keeping you distracted while my friend saves this man's life. Let's see your license, then."

As I took it out, keeping at least one eye on him and his partner, Angel called out to the rubbernecking crowd around us, "I need someone here to run and call the nearest hospital, and a couple of strong men to help get this poor fellow someplace dark and quiet to rest. Best use one of the tablecloths for a stretcher," he added to the first volunteer who stepped forward.

Crowley leaned in closer to study my license. "Drake Silas Donovan," he read off. "'Silas', really?"

"What about it?"

"I've just always wondered what kind of parent would name their kid Silas."

"The kind who had a grandfather named Silas," I replied coolly, snagging my license back. "Your turn."

He obliged. Anthony J. Crowley, it read, licensed in London since 1905, the year before mine. I wondered how long he'd been at this; he looked too young for his apparent age, but then I looked too old for mine. "A. J. Crowley," I read his signature aloud. "Get asked if you're any relation every time, or just most?"

There's a certain motion a person's head makes when they roll their eyes. Crowley's was making it. "The man's an embarrassment to the side," he griped. "I made my name legitimately."

"And your friend?" It wasn't as if I couldn't put two and two together. There's a certain type of person who's got both a nose for trouble and the brains to prepare for it; if it walks, talks, and thinks like a dick, it probably is one. It was just that I wasn't in the habit of trusting people, and I'd be a real schmuck to neglect basic due diligence on the guy purportedly surrounded by bodies. 

Detectives are no better or worse than any other person. They just think it's usually more interesting to solve crimes than commit them.

"Oh, he's as legitimate as it gets." Crowley turned to his companion, who was getting to his feet, brushing his clothes off fussily. Beside him, the two volunteers hoisted the unconscious victim onto a tablecloth spread across the floor, momentarily dislodging the ether-soaked cloth before Angel caught it and laid it carefully back in place over the victim's nose and mouth. "Aren't you, Aziraphale?"

Angel — "Aziraphale"? — looked up, startled. "Pardon?"

"Mr. Donovan here wants to see your detective's license," Crowley explained, enunciating his words with malice aforethought.

"Oh! Yes. Of course I always have that with me. Now just where did I..." He started patting down his pockets, stopped suddenly, and took a lovely calfskin card holder out of his coat. "Ah. Here it is."

Beaming, he passed it to Crowley, who passed it to me with the comment, "You'll find everything in order, I'm sure."

I glanced down at the card, then back up at Angel. "Am I supposed to call you A. Z. Fell or Aziraphale?" I asked, pronouncing the Z correctly as zed.

"A. Z. Fell is how 'Aziraphale' is pronounced in the King's English," said Crowley blandly, affecting a cut-glass Oxford accent on the last phrase. His partner seemed pleased by this comment, rather than annoyed.

"I'm afraid my progenitor bestowed me with a rather unwieldy given name," Fell admitted, raising fascinating questions about just how many syllables the British peerage could fit on a birth certificate when they really tried. "Aziraphale just sounds so much more euphonious, don't you think?" Crowley was right; I couldn't tell whether Fell had meant to say A. Z. Fell or the de-accented gloss. He'd lengthened the half-syllable between zed and Fell to a full vowel, but some people said zetta.

"I wouldn't know," I replied, handing the license back to Crowley, who was nearest. When Fell didn't take my bait, I added, "Lucky that you happened to have ether handy. I wouldn't like to imagine what might've happened if you'd decided to stay in tonight." I also lied when I said sorry, and when I swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Little white lies are the oil in the gears of civilization.

"Oh, I always carry that, too," Fell explained earnestly. "One gets into the habit after one's first run-in with strychnine, and of course ether has so many useful applica—"

"I wouldn't, angel," Crowley interrupted, sounding very amused. "Mr. Donovan thinks you're the one behind this."

"Oh," said Fell, nonplussed. "Gosh. Well, I — I suppose I can't blame him. He doesn't know me from Adam, after all, and has no reason to trust me — I did warn you about giving people funny ideas, Crowley, honestly. Of course," Fell turned to me, laying an elegant hand across his chest, "if you were to search me, you would find only a small collection of antidotes — oh, but a habitual poisoner would probably carry those, too, especially if he were the sort of voyeur with a penchant for playing the hero. I certainly wouldn't be convinced of my innocence. Yes, I can certainly understand whatever suspicion you might feel towards me, however misplaced it may be."

Crowley watched this thought process with an expression somewhere between fascination and agony. "Well, at least now he probably thinks that if you'd done it, you'd have been caught by now," he remarked, presumably because he was thinking the same thing. "You'll have to excuse my friend," Crowley added to me. "He still believes that the innocent have nothing to fear. Somehow."

"First time visiting?" I guessed.

Fell's bemusement answered my question before he did. "Pardon?"

"Never mind."

#good omens #1920s #noir #detective fiction #lgbt fiction #original fiction #(as it were; i should probably go back and tag the posts in this series more identifiably) #is this a human AU or are Crowley and Aziraphale just huge nerds? i don't know and neither does the outsider-POV narrator #i will finish this if there is public demand but otherwise This Is What You Get #(other stuff is still in the pipeline. this has just been a fuck of a year.) #i did this #my writing #a good man is hard to find (no not that one)

[m1t0ch0ndr]

need people to understand that when I wear blazers or ties casually it’s not in a pretentious-dark-academia-Yale-old-money-faux-intellectual-Raskolnikov-wannabe way it’s actually in an eccentric-Jeevesian-self-parodying-noir-detective-written-by-ACD-directed-by-Buster-Keaton sort of way

#this post will not help my case for a vast majority of people #dark academia #literature #jeeves and wooster #film noir #1920s #silent film #buster keaton #sir arthur conan doyle #detective fiction

[jabbage]

I need to tell Tumblr about my hero Ronald Knox, Absolute Troll.

Here he is sitting on a fireguard like the absolute dreamy goblin that he is:

(Caveat that I don't actually know much about his personal life or politics. He seems ok. )

Facts About Ronald Knox

He invented the use of the term 'Canon' in a fandom context. Yes, that's right, this man is responsible for everyone arguing about canon ever. It's all his fault.

Absolute troll. Wound up fellow Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts with such theories as "Sherlock Holmes died at the Reichenbach Falls and Watson made up all the later stories for the money" and "Mycroft was working for Moriarty all along". He wrote very very deadpan monographs putting forward these theories. They're hilarious.

He wrote his own detective stories and invented the Ten Rules of Detective Fiction, and kind of helped to codify the whodunnit as a genre:

You know that famous War of the Worlds radio play by Orson Welles which portrayed the alien invasion through a series of "We interrupt this broadcast!" messages? He was inspired by a similar satirical radio drama Knox did for the BBC In Knox' piece, there is a revolution in London and Big Ben gets destroyed. Believe it or not, it's very funny.

Translated the whole of the Latin Vulgate Bible by himself.

He's just so photogenic. I'm an aroace, he's a Catholic priest who gives me big aroace vibes the more I find out about him, and yet, and yet...

KNOX STOP IT STOP LOOKING INTO MY SOUL I swear every photograph of him is like this.

Anyway that's Ronald Knox, Father of Canon and Being An Absolute Madlad.

#ronald knox #sherlock holmes #detective fiction #he's my fav

[jstor]

Oh dang, we missed Poe's birthday last week! Still, this is pretty interesting year-round: the whole story annotated with scholarship in JSTOR—free to read and download.

#edgar allan poe #poe #detective fiction #american fiction #research #academic research #jstor #jstor daily

[hoshi-kawaii]

Arthur Conan Doyle: what if there was a detective and he was super mysterious and badass and like the smartest man alive but of course was misunderstood and an outcast but in a cool way.

Agatha Christie: what if there was a detective but he was a tiny little fancy man and no one ever took him seriously no matter what he does because of white on white racism. and he's got a silly mustache.

#here we have the true root of what boys think is fun verses what girls think is fun #i think poirot is way more accessible to women and sexual/gender minorities in a way sherlock isnt #except that is for the gays #they are equally accessible to the gays #i just think the casual dismissal of poirot's abilities simply because he's “a foreigner” is very much the story of womanhood #casual and systemic dismissal of your abilities based on a small technicallity such as not having been born a certain way? #that should speak to anyone who isnt a cis white man these days #and it should speak to the cis white men who care enough to listen #anyway #sociological rant in a literary meme post! #hercule poirot #sherlock holmes #agatha christie #arthur conan doyle #detective fiction

[haly-reads]

Bon, bon, bon! I just realized how brilliant David Suchet's Poirot is. It had kept me sane for the last many weeks and I am already about to finish it, so don't know what I am gonna watch next 😭

#hercule poirot #david suchet #agatha christie #agatha christie's poirot #poirot series #detective fiction #perioddrama

[mysharona1987]

By Tom Gauld

#Writers #creative writing #art #Detective fiction #artistic #biography #books

[crazy-queen-winx]

#polls #detective fiction #detective columbo #hercule poirot #acd sherlock holmes #benoit blanc #phoenix wright

[leer-reading-lire]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge || November || 17 || Blankets

Nemesis by Agatha Christie

#jompbpc #justonemorepage #book photo challenge #agatha christie #miss marple #detective fiction #books and reading #book community #booklr #leerreadinglire

[weirdlookindog]

Rafael DeSoto - Chartered for Death, c. 1940s

#rafael desoto #chartered for death #detective fiction #pulp art #cover art #death #grim reaper #painting #horror art

[k-wame]

Luke Kirby as Bell Prescott 2022 · Panhandle (TV Series) · S1·E04 · Comedy · Mystery

#luke kirby #panhandle #panhandleedit #tvedit #bell prescott #detective fiction #agoraphobia #florida #beautiful men

[bodhranwriting]

Dmitry Donne and the Great Lawyer Caper by Bodhrán M.

(I’m clearing out old drafts on my computer so I thought I’d share. This was an opening to a fantasy detective series written in February, 2022) 

Dmitry Donne was twenty-six years of age, a fact he did his best to obfuscate in either direction. With the right coat, right hat, and – above all – the right walk, Dmitry could be the youthful-looking twin of his oldest brother, some six years his senior – or pass for barely older than his notoriously indebted merchant of a youngest sister, five years in the other direction.

And while his abilities could have borne him for many years upon the boards – as they had another of his sisters – Dmitry didn’t fancy the life which came with it. Greasepaint also made him break into hives which had killed any lingering aspirations in that direction.

Instead, Dmitry Donne thought of himself as a fixer of problems and a seeker of secrets. He was less occupied with the pursuit of justice or truth, than he was scratching the itch of someone knowing something he didn’t.

In short, he was nosy and loved to pry.

At the precise moment our story begins, Dmitry was wondering if making snooping into a career had been a good move. Mostly because he was waist-deep in filthy seawater, numb fingers gripping the underside of the dock and hoping that lanterns glinting through the slats of wood weren’t enchanted to burn brighter when they sensed body heat. Although, to be fair, at this point, his body heat was probably sinking into unrecognisable levels.

And all this was because his landlady had complained that her wine seemed more watery than usual. Dmitry hadn’t had any other plans that week so now he was waiting to find out if the rest of his life was suddenly going to be as devoid of events.

A very respected wine-merchant in the Arts District was a secret gambler and had played his cards very wrong at a new underground gaming house. The gaming house apparently made a business of luring merchants to its premises, cheating at every game, and then extracting debts in the form of forcing them to sell their products. These products, of course, were being illegally distilled somewhere in the mountains, smuggled into the city, and had killed two people already.

Possibly three if he stuck around too long.

Dmitry looked down at the water, the surface spitting white foam around his body. He’d already been hiding here for precisely six minutes and thirty-four seconds. A few more minutes and even his caucho suit wasn’t going to protect him from hypothermia.

He hesitated. In the dark mirror of the ocean, he could see his face quite clearly. It had taken him ages to get his makeup right this morning. The eyeliner was impressive, even for him.

A shout echoed through the night. “He’s down there!”

“Great,” Dmitry muttered.

Footsteps thundered above his head shaking the dock like an earthquake.

Dmitry took and breath and sank into the water.

Luckily for him, apparently none of his pursuers had the Idiosyncrasy of aiming.

#dmitry donne #writing #writeblr #wip #detective fiction #fantasy #writer #novels