Reviews

#1506: The Penrose Mystery (1936) by R. Austin Freeman

/ JJ / 2 Comments


I have to be honest: I don’t think I gave The Penrose Mystery (1936) by R. Austin Freeman quite a fair go. I’ve been struggling to find much enthusiasm for reading of late, and I think even the most sprightly and event-packed of novels would have felt like so much boggy ground. So Freeman’s slightly pedantic tone and recapitulatory telling was absolutely not going to work for me, and I should have realised this and not bothered. But the blog needs three posts a week, and so I persisted and had a lousy time; alas, I want to write about Freeman (broadly) chronologically, so I either wait five years to read this again, or I write it up now and admit the slight unfairness of my perspective.

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#1503: Tread Softly (1937) by Brian Flynn

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If you follow the Golden Age blogosphere with any moderate interest, you’ll be aware of the love Puzzle Doctor has for Brian Flynn and the efforts he has gone to, via the wonderfully accommodating people at Dean Street Press, to get as much of Flynn’s work as possible republished. I’ve been slow in my adoption of Flynn it must be said — I couldn’t get on with The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye (1928), Murder en Route (1930), and one other title which escapes me now — but I’m back to give him another go in the form of the well-regarded twentieth novel to feature his amateur sleuth Anthony Bathurst, Tread Softly (1937). It…did not go well.

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#1501: “It looks like we’ve got our locked room mystery.” – Ten Little Wizards (1988) by Michael Kurland

/ JJ / 2 Comments

Having recently been unimpressed by both the sole novel in Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy corpus, Too Many Magicians (1967), and a pastiche novel by Michael Kurland, The Infernal Device (1978), the obvious next step is to read a pastiche novel in the Lord Darcy universe by the author of The Infernal Device, right?

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#1500: Murder in the House of Omari (2021) by Taku Ashibe [trans. Bryan Karetnyk 2025]

/ JJ / 16 Comments


It’s fair to say that, in my reading of crime and detective fiction, I generally like my plots fast-moving, my clues brilliantly baffling, and my detection rigorous. It has been known, though, for something a little more calculated in its pacing or with an absence of well-drawn detection to scratch an itch that only manifests once every blue moon. It was absolutely the case with The Devil’s Flute Murders (1953) by Seishi Yokomizo and, returning to the Land of the Rising Sun and the fiction brought therefrom by Pushkin Vertigo, it’s proved to be the case with Murder in the House of Omari (2021) by Taku Ashibe. Another time, in a different mood, this would not have worked for me at all, but, honestly, I delighted in practically every page of this.

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#1498: “You have a reputation for poking your nose into this sort of thing…” – Deep Waters: Mysteries on the Waves [ss] (2019) ed. Martin Edwards

/ JJ / 9 Comments

Sixteen salty seadogs sallying seaward in search of scurrilous…stuff, that’s what you’ll more or less find in Deep Waters [ss] (2019), another anthology of short fiction in the British Library Crime Classic series edited by the some-might-say-too-knowledgeable Martin Edwards.

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#1497: You Can Die Laughing (1957) by A.A. Fair

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Hired by Texan businessman Lawson C. Corning to find the whereabouts of Mrs. Yvonne Wells, the Cool and Lam Detective Agency has reason to believe that there might be more in back of the request than they’re told. Finding the woman’s house doesn’t prove too difficult, but her surly, uncommunicative husband is unwilling to help Donald Lam in his enquiries, and so Lam has to cast his net a little wider. Which is how he ends up at the next door neighbour’s house where Mrs. Raleigh tells him that she heard an argument in the Wells house a couple of nights before, and that Drury Wells then exited the house carrying a body.

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#1495: “It’s going to be a long, hard haul, you know…” – When the Old Man Died (1991) by Roger Ormerod

/ JJ / 8 Comments

It’s been a while since I read anything by Roger Ormerod, and that’s in part because I can’t quite decide how I feel about his work. Yes, he puts forwards some intriguing ideas and has resolved a few impossibilities very neatly, but at the same time there’s no real detection and the books always seem to sag heavily in the middle…so can the much-recommended When the Old Man Died (1991) reverse those impressions?

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#1494: The Five Matchboxes (1948) by John Russell Fearn

/ JJ / 11 Comments


I may not yet share TomCat’s love of John Russell Fearn, but I also won’t deny that in the little I’ve read by the man he’s shown enough spirit to warrant further investigation. Blame, then, my never-ending TBR for the multiple years it’s taken me to get back to him, with The Five Matchboxes (1948) patiently waiting on my Kindle with nary a word of complaint. Much to my surprise and delight, it was an impossible crime, too, with stockbroker Granville Collins shot in his office when there was no-one around and no way to shoot him from outside. Can Chief Superintendent Mortimer Garth get to the bottom of this without his dyspepsia distracting him too greatly?

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#1492: “You got trouble, haven’t you, honey?” – Do You Know Me? & Other Aberrations [ss] (2025) by Bruce Elliott

/ JJ / 4 Comments

As a fan of the impossible crime novel You’ll Die Laughing (1945) by Bruce Elliott, I was delighted when I accidentally discovered that Stark House Press had put out a collection of Elliott’s short fiction, Do You Know Me? & Other Aberrations (2025). I was aware that You’ll Die Laughing is atypical of his output, but curiosity reigned nonetheless and here we are.

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#1491: To Catch a Thief (1943) by Craig Rice [a.p.a. by Daphne Sanders]

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All I really knew about To Catch a Thief (1943), published by Craig Rice under the nom de plume Daphne Sanders, was that it represented something of a change from the work she’d done to that point in her career. And having read most of the work she’d done to that point in her career I can reaffirm that position. Not only is the focus of this rather more stern than we’ve seen elsewhere, it’s also less-tightly constructed and decidedly more in the Pulp-y vein than anything I’ve seen from this wonderfully talented writer, and in that regard it came as something as a disappointment. It scores some good points along the way, but overall the Rice non-completist can dodge this one.

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