I’m not entirely sure what I expected from The Murderer’s Ape (2014) by Jakob Wegelius, but it wasn’t a Gulliver’s Travels (1726)-esque multinational adventure written by an intelligent gorilla. And while the book that results is in no way a bad thing, it’s also not really a murder mystery in the vein of what I’m typically after in these Minor Felonies posts.
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An earlier British Library Crime Classics short story collection today, with The Long Arm of the Law [ss] (2017) featuring 15 stories of professional police selected by the hugely knowledgeable Martin Edwards.
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Crazy to think that even a couple of years ago the works of James Ronald were so wildly unavailable that it seemed we’d never know exactly what, of the fair amount he wrote, was crime fiction and what came from other, equally profitable, genres. Then Chris Verner and Moonstone Press entered the arena, and Ronald’s criminous oeuvre has become readily available for sensible money. And so Murder for Cash, a.k.a The Fatal .45 (1938), a pulpy tale that comes nowhere near the level of Ronald’s best work — Murder in the Family (1936), They Can’t Hang Me (1938) — but nevertheless warrants examination by anyone curious about what this all-but-forgotten author has done to garner such attention in the modern day.
A third mystery for Roger, Diana, Snubby, Loony, Barney, and Miranda, and, well, one that frankly makes me wonder if I’ll bother reading the remaining three books in this series.
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Having sold squillions of copies in its native Japan, Strange Pictures (2022), the debut novel of mysterious YouTuber Uketsu, vaults over the language barrier into English thanks to Pushkin Vertigo and the excellent work of translator Jim Rion, and…honestly, it underwhelmed me.
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Leo Bruce’s eighth and final novel in which Sergeant William Beef sallies forth into polite company to batter them with blunt questions hiding a brilliant mind, Cold Blood (1952) is a strong effort that marks a distinct improvement from preceding title, the over-long and frankly tedious Neck and Neck (1951). It’s the battering to death of a wealthy landowner which concerns us here, with Beef brought in by Cosmo Ducrow’s surviving family to counter the evidence piling up against the dead man’s nephew, Rudolf. But, the more Beef looks, the blacker the case against Rudolf becomes…so is this the final convention-busting solution Bruce has for us at the cap of this series, or is something more subtle going on?
Current crime and detective fiction fans needn’t look too hard to find a successful children’s author who transitioned well into writing books for grown-ups, and now Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal (2021) and four subsequent books, is heading in the other direction, with A Box Full of Murders (2025) being her debut for the 9-to-12 year-old market.
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Mary Virginia Carey was not, it seems, scared of a little velitation in her stewardship of The Three Investigators.
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Your typical Freeman Wills Crofts protagonist — fallen on hard times, usually following the death of a loved one — young widow Julia Langley enters into a marriage of convenience with solicitor Richard Elton. He will provide for her daughter Mollie, and she will run his house, Chalfont, as hostess for social events that singularly fail to win his unprepossessing personality the acceptance he so craves. And so, Julia falls in love with wealthy novelist Frank Cox, throwing a wrench into the works of her agreeable if not desirable arrangement, and before long someone in the Elton ménage is found murdered and the various secrets in the household start to creep out.
I’m doing Roger Ormerod a slight disservice here, by lumping him into this tranche of Mining Mount TBR. See, this series is an initiative by which I get to finally scrape books off my TBR that have been clinging there for arguably too long, and Ormerod has been so entertaining thus far that I was always going to read more by him. So wherefore his involvement here?
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The Invisible Event 