Should you ever run up against The Riddler, a sphynx, or any other puzzle-obsessed villains, it might be good to have this Wheel of Fortune contestant, Rufus, at your side to help you piece together the clues. With only one letter, and in less than 10 seconds, Rufus solves it! Could you beat his time?
NYPD Puzzle by Parnell Hall is the 15th humorous mystery about Cora Felton, the grandmotherly-appearing and fraudulent Puzzle Lady, whose wise-cracking and sleuthing will put her under suspicion of murder by New York's Finest (available January 21, 2014). Cora Felton would probably bite your head off if you asked her for help doing the Sunday…
Or are elves secretly applying for new gigs as imps? If so, one of the 7 unbreakable codes this isn't, but then again, centuries of whittling alphabet blocks may dull the mental edge somewhat. Hat tip: Cheezburger's Fail blog.
Call me fickle: just as I was mourning the loss of Inspector Lewis and Sergeant Hathaway, along comes another man to steal my heart. His name is Shaun Evans, and if there are photos of him frolicking on the beaches of the French Riviera or cavorting in Las Vegas, I don’t want to see them. …
I’m going to lay my dirty little secret right out there; I love video games. Since I am a woman of a certain age, and a librarian, most people react with shock and astonishment. I can hear the words, “what’s wrong with you?” trembling on their lips. At ComicCon a few years I obtained the…
Languages can be fun, but they usually take a lot of time and effort to learn. Even if you put in the hours, some seem impossible to master. I for one can’t even make it past basic-level Korean, it seems, and my efforts to try to teach foreign friends to pronounce the Dutch ‘G’ have…
I am not making a habit of discussing books that aren’t available outside of Japan. Really. I myself am very aware that it is frustrating to read articles on oh-so-interesting books that aren’t available in a language you can read. But some books need the promotion. Some books must be made known to the outside…
Peter Falk, the actor who played the inimitable Lt. Columbo, passed away at the age of 83, according to KTLA. During Columbo’s 13 seasons, Falk’s homicide detective was rumpled and bumbling, very soliticitous and ingratiating with the suspects who he always treated as his betters. He was the northeastern version of the slow-talking southern gentleman,…
We all have to start somewhere. My first encounter with Japanese detective fiction was through the Japanese animated movie Detective Conan: The Fourteenth Target. It changed my life. I started to read through all of the Detective Conan comics. Through the comics, I started to learn about other Japanese writers and series. I changed my…
Crime novel critic Kiyoshi Kasai focuses in his books on “orthodox” detective novels, which refer to the Golden Age detective novels in the Christie-Queen-Carr tradition. He identifies three distinct “waves” in the development of the orthodox detective novels in Japan , the first (1920-1940s) being the one represented by Edogawa Rampo, while the second is…
