Author: JJ
#635: A Taste for Honey (1941) by H.F. Heard
It’s difficult to know where to begin with A Taste for Honey (1941), the first of three ‘Mr. Mycroft’ novels by H.F. Heard. The core conceit is delightfully barmy — I shall avoid naming it in this review to preserve it for the curious — and played with an impressively straight face, but beyond that there’s really only a short story’s worth of content here, spread thinly over 189 generously-margined pages. With only one plot-line, only really three characters, and nothing to widen the universe or engage the mind in any meaningful way past the halfway point (when the ending will already be painfully obvious to anyone), this really is just a latter-day Holmes pastiche with verbal diarrhoea.
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#634: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Death in Unlikely Places (2014) by John Reisinger
Here’s a poser to wrap your head around: how is it possible for a novel set in the 1920s Florida land rush and containing five murders — four of them impossible — to be so dull?
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#633: Spoiler Warning – Coming in April: The Eye of Osiris, a.k.a. The Vanishing Man (1911) by R. Austin Freeman
This post serves a double purpose: firstly to reassure you that the promised spoiler-heavy discussion about The Box Office Murders, a.k.a. The Purple Sickle Murders (1929) by Freeman Wills Crofts is on the way, and secondly to let you know about the next spoiler-heavy review coming in April.
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#632: The Honjin Murders (1946) by Seishi Yokomizo [trans. Louise Heal Kawai 2019]
After years of occasional titles like The Tattoo Murder Case (1948) by Akimitsu Takagi trickling through the East-West translation gap, it seems English-speaking audiences might be getting more classic Eastern honkaku. The shin honkaku translations brought to us by Locked Room International have highlighted the ingenuity in works coming out of Japan, China, and surrounds during the 1980s and 1990s, an era when the Western crime novel was rather more focussed on character and procedure, and so the puzzle-rich seam of GAD-era honkaku titles might finally get more attention. And the first non-LRI novel to come across is one that was greeted with much excitement.
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#631: Adventures in Self-Publishing – Murder Brewed at Home (2015) by Belle Knudson
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most unpleasant character in any murder mystery typically ends up dead. The cozier the mystery, the truer this adage becomes. And the more hobby-based the mystery is, the cozier it tends to be…so welcome to Murder Brewed at Home (2015).
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#630: The Freight Should be Proportioned to the Groove – The Sliding Scale of Poetry in Detective Fiction
