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.
I’m not quite the target audience for a Sherlock Holmes pastiche taking its motivation not from Arthur Conan Doyle’s original canon but instead the 20th Century Fox films and subsequent radio serial starring Basil Rathbone — being as I’ve neither seen nor heard them — but the notion intrigued me enough to give A Study in Crimson (2020) by Robert J. Harris a go.
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How do you go about discussing a book you couldn’t even be bothered to finish? The tempting thing is not to review it at all, but I’m committed to certain undertakings on this blog — the complete works of Freeman Wills Crofts, the complete John Thorndyke stories of R. Austin Freeman, more Walter S. Masterman than most people will ever consume — and the full Cool & Lam by A.A. Fair, nom de plume of Erle Stanley Gardner, is one of them. So how to write about Crows Can’t Count (1946), the tenth published Cool & Lam novel, and the first time this normally lively and entertaining series has draaaaaaagged me into the doldrums of an almost spiritual level of indifference?
I thought that the novel Holmes on the Range (2006) by Steve Hockensmith was the first time he wrote about crime-solving cowboy Gustav ‘Old Red’ Amlingmeyer, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that some earlier short stories had featured the character first.
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It usually takes me about five books to figure out where I stand with an author — to cover something good, something borrowed, something blue and eventually figure out whether I like the skull beneath the skin of their writing. Impact of Evidence (1954) is my eleventh book by Edith Caroline Rivett — here writing as Carol Carnac, though best-known as E.C.R. Lorac — and represents another example of me not quite figuring her out. Her ideas are interesting, and she demonstrates no small acuity with her characters, but her plotting seems to stall at times and so the book didn’t for me reach the same level of immersion as Crook o’ Lune (1953) from the year before.
The Invisible Event 