TomCat has been singing the praises of Roger Ormerod for a while now, and, sure, TomCat has questionable taste some of the time, but let’s see if Ormerod warrants the praise, eh? And so, Time to Kill (1974), the first novel to feature Birmingham-based Detective Sergeant David Mallin.
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When Derek Fordingbridge, long-supposed-dead heir to the family fortune, apparently resurfaces, his face mutilated in the war and all other identifying characteristics similarly compromised, his uncle Paul is naturally sceptical. When this re-emergence is followed hard upon by the murder of the old family retainer who cared deeply for Derek and the theft of Derek’s diaries from family pile Foxhills…well, it’s almost like we’re in a classically-styled piece of detective fiction, eh? Thankfully Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield is in the area and ready to help out Inspector Armadale with his investigations into which of two possible interpretations this should be taken as.
Five Tuesdays in August, five stories about gentleman scoundrel Lester Leith from the pen of Erle Stanley Gardner — synergy.
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I’ve heard much about the quality of the 1957 screen version of Witness for the Prosecution, based on the play which was spun from the story of the same name by Agatha Christie. Well, consider this me bowing to peer pressure as I finally check it out to see what all the fuss is about.
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“This is the sort of thing we came to the country to get away from,” Jake Justus laments when, being given a tour of the Jackson County Courthouse in Wisconsin, the dead body of ex-Senator Gerald L. Peveley rolls down an emergency stairwell and lands at his feet. And with the D.A. insisting that “nobody here could have murdered him [because] we all know each other” it’s only a matter of time before Jake finds himself arrested and his wife Helene must enlist the services of Chicago-based lawyer John J. Malone, who has joined the Justuses on four previous murder investigations, to dig them out of trouble…a task that will only get harder as the murders in the town multiply.
We’ve all wanted to solve a ‘footprints in the sand/snow/dust’ mystery, right? Well, here’s your chance…
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With a new Paul Halter short story recently appearing in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, not to mention novel The Siren’s Call (1998, tr. 2023) being newly translated, the time seemed ripe to jump into the sole remaining Paul Halter novel that I first read pre-blog. The Crimson Fog (1988, tr. 2013) represents something of a tricky proposition to review, so let’s see how we do.
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Jack Reid, posing for the last few weeks as a holidaying artist, breaks into Severinge Abbey one night with the intent of relieving its chapel of its more valuable contents, only to half-witness in the darkness the murder of Lord Henry Severinge by an unknown hand. Feigning ignorance, Reid returns to the Abbey the next day to find that the body has disappeared, and suggests that they use the bloodhounds of the Severinge’s neighbour Colonel Graham to track down the missing man. When the body is discovered in an Ellery Queenian hiding place, the small matter of who could plan such a diabolical crime, and to what end, comes into question.
A shorter mystery from The Book of Clues (1984) from the excellent John Sladek, and pay attention to the picture this week…
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Another themed collection of crime and mystery stories from the British Library, Crimes of Cymru (2023) sees Martin Edwards’ exemplary genre knowledge tasked with selecting tales with Welsh settings or origin.
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