An aristocratic family, a big house in which an aged relative resides, everyone converging for a party, said elderly relative being the victim of a crime, a precocious young girl keen to investigate, rumours of a family treasure hidden in the grounds…lordy, I hope I’m not reading The Swifts (2023) again.
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Having recently enjoyed the very witty Murder at the Castle (2021) by David Safier, which turned former German Chancellor Angela Merkel into an amateur sleuth, I went searching for more droll German crime fiction and, just as it’s turned into a series by Netflix, stumbled over the recently-translated Murder Mindfully (2019) by Karsten Dusse.
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People will tell you that I lack critical faculties when it comes to the work of Freeman Wills Crofts, and, well, they might have a point: I find his flavour of rigorous investigation and patient construction exactly to my liking, and will start anything by him in the most positive frame of mind. But, well, even my optimism was dented by A Losing Game, a.k.a. The Losing Game (1941), which feels, for perhaps the first time, like a man trying to fulfil a deadline — not least because it’s poorly-constructed and, and in a late attempt to swing suspicion elsewhere, requires the reader to ignore one of the key tenets of the crime under investigation. This is not the Freeman Wills Crofts I have come to know and love.
While I slowly, slowly work my way towards another episode of my own podcast, here’s news that I was invited onto someone else’s, the results of which are now available for you to listen to.
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Given the voracity with which Hollywood will seize upon almost any existing intellectual property — video game! card game! product placement! sequel to product placement! spin-off from sequel to product placement! — and make it into a probably disappointing movie, it’s amazing that Clue (1985), based on one of the dullest board games in existence, turned out as well as it did.
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Death Turns Traitor (1935) is the eleventh book by Walter S. Masterman that I’ve read, and I still don’t know what to make of him. The context of the idea herein — that in 1935 the powers of Europe have agreed a secret treaty to preclude war, yet an influential German secret society called the DUA is doing its best to foment discontent and push the continent over the edge — is fascinating, and Masterman writes some affectingly moody prose, but somehow the two just don’t quite come together. The shortfall is, perhaps, an absence of incident to fill out these 60,000 words, rendering much of what passes somewhat telescoped and thus veering into tediousness.
People will tell you that I don’t like the Brooks U. Banner stories of Joseph Commings. And, well, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
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At a rough estimate, I reckon I’ve read 40 to 50 of Erle Stanley Gardner’s books featuring Perry Mason. Precisely which ones? Yeah, I’m vague on that. But The Case of the Rolling Bones (1939) — which I make the fifteenth time Mason sallied forth to lock legal horns on behalf of some wronged party — I definitely remembered…until I was about halfway through it recently and realised that, no, I probably hadn’t read this before. In a way, then, it’s lovely to be able to find more classic-era Mason titles which I can treat as completely ‘new to me’ reads, and this is a strong entry in Gardner’s output that has a very clever idea at its core, warranting its recent reprinting in the American Mystery Classics range.
I should have loved Neck and Neck (1951), chronologically the seventh of eight Sergeant Beef novel by Leo Bruce: after all, Kate at Cross-Examining Crime placed it as the sixth-best overall, and we’re nothing if not contrary in our opinions: she has the excellent Case for Sergeant Beef (1947) in seventh place, worse than this — a sure sign this is in fact a superb and under-appreciated gem. Alas, apart from the occasionally adept turn of phrase and a few ideas, this is pretty torpid stuff, in no way justifying the four-year gap between titles in this series…unless it took Bruce that long to write because he kept getting so bored with it himself.
The Invisible Event 