Nicolas Freeling, Edgar Wallace this week on BBC Radio 7.

This week on BBC Radio 7, Nicolas Freeling's Inspector Van der Valk appears in Love in Amsterdam; also featured are short stories by thriller master Edgar Wallace, including "The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder." Go here for the schedule.

Freeling: Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke is "deplorable trash."

I picked up Nicolas Freeling's Criminal Convictions: Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License (1994), but found little within that I could embrace. Anthony Berkeley Cox's The Poisoned Chocolates Case? "Arid." Dashiell Hammett? "A bad writer." He likes Sayers's Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors (the latter is called "a sunny, happy work of immense charm"). He is preoccupied throughout with the question of crime and metaphysics, an argument that I found difficult to follow, and likening the writer to an artist or musician. There is a good chapter on Conan Doyle ("Why worry if Doctor Grimesby Roylott—marvellous name—has brought his snake all the way here [and kept it in a safe, poor thing] expressly to bite young girls with financial expectations?"). The estimation of Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke as "deplorable trash" was the final straw.

I shall have to stick with the grace and thoughtfulness of Michael Gilbert and Vincent Starrett, methinks.

Nicolas Freeling this week on BBC Radio 7.

Nicolas Freeling's Dutch detective Piet van der Valk investigates in Love in Amsterdam this week on BBC Radio 7. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

Happy birthday, Arthur Machen, Nicolas Freeling, and Max Allan Collins.

H.P. Lovecraft inspiration Arthur Machen was born today in 1863; the late Nicolas Freeling, the creator of Inspector Piet Van der Valk, would have marked his 80th birthday today; and the ever-energetic Max Allan Collins turns 59 today. Collins, the author of Road to Perdition and many other works, will release Black Hats under the pseudonym Patrick Culhane in April 2007, which features the intriguing combination of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Al Capone.