Reviews

#701: Death on the Way, a.k.a. Double Death (1932) by Freeman Wills Crofts

/ JJ / 36 Comments

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No, I’m not back from hiatus.  But if you think I’m going to let today’s reissue of three more Freeman Wills Crofts novels — Sudden Death (1932), Mystery on Southampton Water (1934), and Crime at Guildford (1935) — pass without comment, you’re mad.  Plus, in my absence WordPress has foisted a new post-writing setup upon us all, and I need some practice because I hate change.  But the world’s a negative enough place right now, so let’s dwell on the exemplary work done by HarperCollins in bringing Crofts back for us to enjoy; some people have been waiting years to be able to afford some of these titles, and it’s a wonderful thing to have them in general circulation.

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#699: Jack-in-the-Box (1944) by J.J. Connington

/ JJ / 36 Comments

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The devastation wrought by the First World War in the sheer quantity of life lost saw an upsurge in the popularity of spirit mediums, to the extent that no less an authority on the rational than Arthur Conan Doyle fell under their spell.  Given that this rise in open chicanery coincided with the birth of the detective novel, it surprises me that The Psychic Killer took such a long time to appear in GAD, perhaps owing to its intersection with the impossible crime and the associated difficulties of explaining away the tricks on the page — The Reader is Warned (1939) by Carter Dickson being easily the best example of a very, very small subset.

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#697: This Way Out (1939) by James Ronald

/ JJ / 18 Comments

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Malice Aforethought (1931) by Francis Iles, possibly the most famous novel of uxoricide ever written, begins with a line so classic it distracts you from the opening being, well, a bit dull. This Way Out (1939) by James Ronald, similarly concerned with a dissatisfied husband wishing to dispose of his wife, is happy for you to be immersed in the commonplace before hitting you with brilliant lines of its own, but would surely be more more famous if it began with the following from approximately a third of the way through: “While dawn on slippered feet crept through the silent streets Philip lay in bed examining schemes for killing his wife”.

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#695: The Perfect Alibi (1934) by Christopher St. John Sprigg

/ JJ / 3 Comments

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The discovery of a bullet in a body in a fire in “one of the most peaceful and law-abiding parts of Thameshire” ushers in a game of Murder or Suicide? that will be familiar to the seasoned GAD reader.  And since the Chief Constable would “rather have a few murders than [Scotland Yard] nosing round in his area” it falls to his nephew, constable Laurence Sadler, and Sadler’s superior Inspector Trenton to get to the bottom of Antony Mullins’ death.  But even Sadler and Trenton, as the local men, are unprepared for the characters who seek to inveigle their way into proceedings, and the complexity that will unfold as a result.

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#694: “It was a small matter but very conclusive” – The Singing Bone, a.k.a. The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke [ss] (1912) by R. Austin Freeman

/ JJ / 18 Comments

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It was my understanding that William Shakespeare invented the word “eyeball”.  The noun eye was extant at the time, as was the concept of a ball being something round, but that Shakespeare was the one to take the two principles and conflate them.  It turns out he didn’t [see the comments below this post], but presumably someone did, and that’s all I really need to be the case for this opening paragraph.

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#693: My Late Wives (1946) by Carter Dickson

/ JJ / 49 Comments

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As a reader, there’s a tension to be found at the heart of every writer’s work once it’s a closed set, especially when they’ve scaled the heights that John Dickson Carr did: with nothing else to be added, at what point does The Decline set in?  From Till Death Do Us Part (1944), arguably the pinnacle of his glittering career, it’s a sawtooth diagram of quality all the way to Papa La-Bas (1968), arguably the nadir, but at what point does a downward trajectory become the prevailing trend rather than the occasional, forgivable oversight?  It’s obviously impossible to pick the precise moment — helloooo, subjectivity — which inevitably makes such a moment impossible not to look for.

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#691: Off the Record (2010) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

/ JJ / 5 Comments

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You know the drill: two men in a meeting, a shot rings out, one of them is found with a bullet in him, the other holding the gun that fired it.  Stir in a “But he was already dead when I got here!” and simmer until an associate of an-amateur-sleuth-with-a-friend-in-the-police asks them to get involved (usually for personal reasons).  That Off the Record (2010) follows this recipe so perfectly is a credit to how perceptively Dolores Gordon-Smith has assimilated the Golden Age detective novel, because never does it feel just like we’re jumping through hoops for the sake of it.  The setup is familiar, but never less than engagingly handled.

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#688: Sudden Death (1932) by Freeman Wills Crofts

/ JJ / 22 Comments

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Today, three previously very hard to find novels by Freeman Wills Crofts are republished by HarperCollins: Death on the Way (1932), The Loss of the ‘Jane Vosper’ (1936), and Man Overboard! (1936).  September will add Mystery on Southampton Water (1934), Crime at Guildford (1935), and Sudden Death (1932) to that, bringing the total of Crofts’ works in ready circulation up to twenty.  I have no idea why they’re being published out of order, and frankly I don’t really care — it’s mainly just delightful to see him getting some traction — and I wanted to celebrate by continuing my broadly chronological reading of Crofts with this, the first of his which ever came to my attention.

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#685: The Murders in Praed Street (1928) by John Rhode

/ JJ / 8 Comments

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One evening, responding to a phone call from the local hospital requesting that he identify a man involved in an accident, Mr. James Tovey, Fruit and Vegetable Merchant on London’s Praed Street, discovers he’s the victim of a prank and that no such call was made by anyone at the hospital.  On the short walk home, he encounters a group of men outside the local pub and…there endeth his story, for he is stabbed and dies shortly thereafter.  With the group all claiming innocence, and talk of a scar-faced sailor seen in the vicinity, the event is put down to a senseless tragedy until circumstances link it to another death on the same stretch of road.  And another.  And another.

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