First brought to my attention when one of its escapades was included in the Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime [ss] (2009), Four Square Jane (1929) by Edgar Wallace is a novel in reality comprising a series of separate adventures of our eponymous thief as she seeks to relieve the wealthy of their property in the interests of charitable endeavours.
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Having published five books about lawyer John J. Malone and his friends Jake Justus and Helene Brand between 1938 and 1941, Craig Rice evidently felt the need for change. Consequently, only one of the four books she published in 1942 featured that triumvirate. I’ve been unable to track down Telefair, a.k.a. Yesterday’s Murder (1942) or The Man Who Slept All Day (1942) — the second published under the nom de plume Michael Venning — but I do have The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942), the first of two novels Rice would complete about Robert Emmett ‘Bingo’ Riggs and Boniface ‘Handsome’ Kusak. And, as a fan of Rice’s writing, I can comfortably say that, well, I found this one a little flat.
Having looked at Silent Nights [ss] (2015), the first collection of Christmas-themed short stories in the British Library Crime Classic collection a fortnight ago, I move on to Crimson Snow [ss] (2016), the second such collection, edited once again by Martin Edwards.
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Since I don’t post about books in the order that I read them, I must start this review by informing you that, behind the scenes, I gave up on five books by five different authors before settling on The Canary Murder Case (1927), the second novel by S.S. van Dine. Try, then, to imagine my delight at picking it up with fond memories of his debut The Benson Murder Case (1926) still fairly fresh and finding it not just readable but frankly compelling. I carry over the exact same reservations from that debut, but the simple fact is that I loved practically every minute of this and am now very eager to read Van Dine further.
Perhaps there’s a charm imbued here by being slightly separated from too direct an experience of the career of former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel; the porcine indiscretions of David Cameron, for example, don’t exactly compel him as a kooky amateur sleuth.
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The recent publication of the tenth and eleventh volumes of James Ronald’s stories of crime and detection by Moonstone Press turned my mind back to the opportunity to read one of his novels that would have been out of my means due to financial or acquisitional circumstances prior to 2024. And so Death Croons the Blues (1934), a second outing for newspaperman Julian Mendoza, into whose boarding house an inept sneak thief stumbles having just discovered a dead woman in the flat they were burgling nearby. When the victim turns out to be nightclub chanteuse Adele Valée, Mendoza’s journalistic tendencies kick into overdrive as he attempts to find the killer.
I’ve been planning this for over a year, since reviewing the British Library’s fifth collection of Christmas short stories last November. Finally, then, December will see me reviewing Christmas-themed books for perhaps the first time since starting this blog in 2015, with a second BL collection coming in the weeks ahead.
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The Castleford Conundrum (1932) represented a change of pace for the detective fiction that Alfred Walter Stewart had been writing under the name J.J. Connington, being decidedly longer on character than his earlier works. Gold Brick Island, a.k.a. Tom Tiddler’s Island (1933) from the following year shows that Stewart was clearly in for some experimentation in this era, seeing as it’s a separation from detective fiction altogether, rendering itself rather more like an adventure for a grown up Famous Five. Some mysterious types and a honeymooning couple converge on a tiny Scottish island, and the result is…somewhat mixed.
It’s easy to dismiss James Patterson for not writing his own books or being too prolific or being a hack or [insert insult of choice here], but I’m a fan of giving someone a chance before condemning them, and when Holmes, Margaret and Poe (2024) — featuring three detectives with classical names “solving a series of seemingly impossible crimes” — came to my attention, well, why not check it out?
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“My New Year’s resolution is to murder a man I’ve never met” — thus does Basil Palmer lay out his intentions at the very start of his journal in Hemlock Bay (2024) by Martin Edwards, bringing to mind the openings of classic-era touchstones Malice Aforethought (1931) by Francis Iles and The Beast Must Die (1938) by Nicholas Blake. Louis Carson, the man Palmer seeks to avenge himself on, appears to have entered into a business partnership in the Northern resort of Hemlock Bay, and so, assuming a false identity, it is there that Palmer heads. Little does he know, various other parties are also descending upon Hemlock Bay, and some of them also have murder in their hearts.
The Invisible Event 