CADS 54

The arrival of a new issue of CADS, the fanzine edited by Geoff Bradley, is always a cause for rejoicing as far as I’m concerned. I first met Geoff at the 1990 Bouchercon in London, and soon after that I came across CADS. I’ve been hooked on it ever since.

In this issue, I’ve contributed a few reviews of older books (by Boileau and Narcejac, Durbridge, Rupert Penny and Milward Kennedy) but the real meat is in the articles, and as usual, they are a varied assortment. As usual, the emphasis is not on contemporary crime, and this is a good thing: there are plenty of sources of information about current novels, and much less about the hidden gems of the past. CADS fills the gap admirably.

There are two articles extolling the work of H.C. Bailey. Bailey was a major writer of the Golden Age, ranking, in some estimations, alongside Christie and Sayers, but time has not treated his reputation well. I’ve read a few Bailey short stories, featuring his sleuth Reggie Fortune, and I have a couple of his novels (one features his other series character, a rascally solicitor – shock, horror! – with the improbable name of Joshua Clunk) which I haven’t got round to reading. The recommendations of Nick Fuller and Barry Pike, both of whom are reliable commentators on Golden Age detective fiction, made me resolve to push Bailey up the to-be-read pile.

Among other things, this issue includes an interesting article about Ronald Knox, who laid down ten famous commandments for detective novelists, and a piece by Philip Scowcroft about one of my all-time favourites, Anthony Berkeley. Philip is an immensely knowledgeable crime reader, and he and I collaborated a while back on an article for CADS about the late Cyril Hare. His memory for books read long ago is astonishing and he it was who once pointed me in the direction of Dorothy Bowers, a talented novelist of whom I’d never before heard. This is the merit of fanzines like CADS – they highlight fresh possibilities, reminding readers that just because a writer is forgotten, it doesn’t mean that he or she was not worth reading.