@lurking-latinist #…*goes off to look up dizzyingly meta Golden Age mysteries*#they sound marvelous#as does this AU!
I was going to reply to this, but if I start talking books, I may as well just do it in a post, because it’s never going to fit in a tumblr reply.
I haven’t read enough of these particular authors to know if I’ve read their weirdest or have yet to plumb the depths of them. So who knows what else could be lurking out there? Or the rest of their back catalogue could be almost normal.
But it is quite fun, because while Christie, Sayers, Allingham, & Marsh were off writing the serious crime novels & leading the field, there’s also this little band of male authors who sometimes write regular crime novels and sometimes go full on comedy or meta or completely random.
The two biggest examples of this (that I’ve read) is Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop (which tbh, i found a bit much - I prefer Love Lies Bleeding in which Love’s Labours Won turns up at a school and people inevitable get murdered in the rush to get ahold of it. but that is practically normal). It’s very random indeed. The most meta I’ve yet found, as I said, is Michael Innes The Daffodil Affair, a book which I keep because otherwise I wouldn’t be sure I hadn’t just started misremembering things, but basically a horse and a house get stolen and by the end the characters are complaining about being stuck in a Michael Innes book. (But he also writes some straightforward classics like The Death at the President’s Lodgings so you just never know what you will get. Could be whimsical meta, could be classic crime.)
John Dickson Carr is fast becoming my fave of this group, though, but he’s been hard to get hold of since I discovered him (but seems to be being reprinted at last!). He’s more humorous than meta, but certainly plenty of random. I’m reliably informed that at least one (or two?) feature time travel. (I can’t remember which one, but it must be one of the three I was strongly recced by my flist when it came up, those being The Burning Court, Fire, Burn! & The Devil in Velvet.)
I have very much enjoyed his And So To Murder and The Case of the Constant Suicides, which both had great tropey premises in them (UC generator eat your heart out. I give you “omg there was only one first class sleeping compartment in the overnight train to Scotland & it turns out we’ve been conducting a war in the letters section of the newspaper” and “two authors hired by a film studio to adapt each other’s books, written in genres they can’t stand.”)
But it’s like this whole random subgenre. Look out for the tatty Penguin greenbacks, in short.
