Having adored the Ealing black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) as a teenager, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the novel from whence it sprang, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) by Roy Horniman. Thus, to the film do I return for the first time in easily 30 years to see if it holds up in the many ways I remembered it improving on its source material.
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Few people are as surprised as me at how much I’ve enjoyed the opening novels of S.S. van Dine’s career. They’re not fair play detection of the sort I’d like, but as an example of rigorous police work alongside an amateur dilettante they’re swiftly-plotted, lightly-written, and a very pleasing way to pass a few hours. And the fourth in the series, The Bishop Murder Case (1929), improves on the previous three in the matter of the killer not being frankly bloody obvious well before the halfway stage. Sure, you have to swallow a few coincidences, but, meh, where would classic detection be without that? Did anyone ever complain that Hercule Poirot or Perry Mason always happened to be on the scene of a murder? Think of what we’d have missed! Kick back and enjoy, that’s what I say.
After five novels of seemingly impossible crimes explained away with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, James Scott Byrnside tackles the far harder shorter form in his latest book, It’s About Impossible Crime (2025), which gives us five stories featuring his most frequent protagonists, Chicago P.I.s Rowan Manory and Walter Williams.
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I was probably 12 or 13 years old when I discovered the seam of (sometimes blackly-) comic movies that came out of London’s Ealing Studios, with Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955) being among the most notable as far as Young Jim was concerned. I can’t remember when I found out that Kind Hearts was based on a novel, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) by Roy Horniman, but it’s to that book we turn our attentions today.
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You must, at the very least, admire Janice Hallett’s industry, The Killer Question (2025) being her seventh book since she burst onto the crime fiction scene with her debut, The Appeal (2021). It’s difficult not to feel that some of those books could have used a bit of extra time in the writing, but Hallett deserves to be lauded for the way her sort-of-epistolary approach to storytelling and — especially — character-building has shown such great variety in such a short time. And this latest novel, her fifth for older readers, continues to evince much of what makes her successful…and some of the habits she’s picking up which, for this reader at least, stymie her somewhat.
A nice bit of crossover here, with a juvenile mystery that’s also a self-published impossible crime novel easing the transition from Minor Felonies this month to another batch of Adventures in Self-Publishing in November.
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Seventeen scenarios of skulduggery, stealing, and slaughter in the British Library Crime Classics range, all centred on London, the finest city on god’s green Earth, and selected by the ne plus ultra of classic crime appreciation, Martin Edwards.
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Waking from a dream in which she was strangling her attractive new neighbour Lindy, Rosamund Fielding is suddenly confronted by her husband Geoffrey bearing the breathless news that Lindy has disappeared. Is there, then, anything in the all-too-vivid nightmare Rosamund was just having? And exactly how, given their long devotion and many shared perspectives, could someone like Lindy come between the Fieldings in so short a time and thus inspire such jealousy and hatred in the normally placid Rosamund? It is to the book’s credit that Celia Fremlin chooses to devote the first half of The Jealous One (1965) to that second question.
While it’s only the second book I’ve read in the Screech Owl series, Death Down Under (2001) by Roy MacGregor is in fact the fifteenth entry, and continues the tonal dissonance from my first encounter.
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In my online book club, discussion turns from time to time to our favourite GAD novels of a particular decade. Having done the 1930s and the 1940s, we turned to the 1920s. And, since there’s an expectation of Agatha Christie being in the mix when discussing favourite GAD titles, I thought I’d return to what I remember to be my favourite from her first decade, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929).
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The Invisible Event 