Oh Lordy.  Let me count the ways -- or probably, better not.

Short version: Lillelara, I'm positive this one isn't for you.  (Nor for BT, for that matter.)

Let's just pocket the $3 this equals to in BL-opoly money and move on, shall we?

First roll: 3 + 4 = 7

... which puts me on square 7:

Stay-Cation: "Read a book that has a house on the cover, or that is related to something unique about your community (for example, if your community has a strawberry festival, read a book with strawberries on the cover)."

Miles Burton's Secret of High Eldersham neatly fits the "house on the cover" requirement.

Length: 256 pages

= + $3 upon completion.

A classic mystery from days gone by. The body of Sir Wilfred Saxonby is discovered on a train, but the carriage was locked, so he must have killed himself, mustn't he? The days when legwork really was legwork, when every little detail had to be worked out with no help from computers or smartphones! I love these old fashioned stories, but perhaps this one was a bit too long winded and complicated. It was a fascinating step back in time but I was quite glad to step forward again to today!

Remember - you don't necessarily need to read an entire book to fill each square. The two collections are both chock full of "locked room" mysteries and other impossible crimes. The Black Lizard edition, edited by Otto Penzler, is a long book (900+ pages), and the Martin Edwards offering is part of the British Library Crime Classics series. One or two stories would fill this square nicely!

In addition, Murder on the Orient Express is such a wonderful book that everyone should read it! There is also a new adaptation coming soon to a theater near you, so if you plan to see the movie, always read the book first!

Finally, Death in the Tunnel has received a mixed reception here on BL. Both Tigus & I really liked it, but BrokenTune (I think) was decidedly lukewarm. 

Read on!

Sir Wilfred Saxonby sits alone in his locked compartment as the train he  is travelling on enters a tunnel. When the train emerges from the other side of the tunnel, Sir Wilfred is dead. All evidence indicates suicide but Inspector Arnold and his friend Desmond Merrion believe that murder is more likely. Can they outwit the seemingly perfect perpetrators?

A traditional ‘locked room’ mystery, Death in the Tunnel was the first of the British Library crime series I have read. The series features re-issues of various Golden Age crime novels, popular at the time but forgotten by the reading public until recently.

There were parts of the story where I was silently shouting at Arnold, telling him to stop being an idiot and see what was blatantly obvious to the reader and to Merrion. Of course he did get to the same conclusion, just several pages later. I had figured out the main motives and spotted the red herrings before the reveals but this didn’t alter my enjoyment of the story.

There is something comforting about Golden Age crime novels. The murders are clean, no gore or unnecessary violence. Usually the victim was disagreeable, no justification for murder of course, but lends to lots of suspects (from a small cast of characters) and perhaps a little understanding of their actions. There is the clever detective, amateur or otherwise, and their not so on the ball sidekick. The scenery is idyllic, the stories threaded with a sort of romanticism for a bygone age where glamour and understated opulence were the mainstays.  The stories are clear cut, easy to read and the guilty parties revealed and dealt with accordingly, order therefore being restored. They gentle tax the ‘little grey cells’ to borrow from one of the era’s finest detectives. Death in the Tunnel was reminiscent of this, even the cover suggests a long lost glamour.

This was a pleasant, gently paced novel with an old world charm, reminiscent of Sunday evenings watch Poirot or Marple adaptations. Happily I have all of the other British Library crime series novels to work my way through.