Reviews

#1230: Crows Can’t Count (1946) by A.A. Fair

/ JJ / 9 Comments
Crows Can't Count

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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?

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#1227: Impact of Evidence (1954) by Carol Carnac

/ JJ / 12 Comments
Impact of Evidence

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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.

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#1224: The Shadow of the Wolf (1925) by R. Austin Freeman

/ JJ / 6 Comments
Shadow of the Wolf

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Far from the short story collection my House of Stratus edition pictured here promises on the back cover, The Shadow of the Wolf (1925) is the eighth novel to feature R. Austin Freeman’s “medico-legal hermaphrodite” Dr. John Thorndyke and an inverted mystery to boot — a particular delight to discover, because I’ve been giving this form of detective story a lot of thought lately. And so when Varney — I don’t think we ever learn his first name — murders Dan Purcell on a boat in the opening chapter and begins to put in place that which makes it seem the dead man has fled of his own accord, I was even more delighted than I usually am at the start of a Thorndyke tale.

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#1221: Case for Sergeant Beef (1947) by Leo Bruce

/ JJ / 1 Comment
Case for Sergeant Beef

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Ronald Shoulter has been found shot in the appropriately-named Deadman’s Wood, and his sister refuses to believe the police’s easy assumption of suicide.  While “[t]he fashion was for detectives of high social standing and large private incomes”, she “won’t have one of these pansified snobs who are supposed to be brilliant investigators hanging around” and seeks out ex-Sergeant William Beef to get to the bottom of things. And so Lionel Townsend, Beef’s Boswell for four previous cases, finds himself once again, though more unwillingly this time, drawn in to the matter of a devious murder that the earthy Sergeant must untangle.

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#1220: “About ghosts in particular he was a blatant and contemptuous sceptic.” – Wicked Spirits [ss] (2024) ed. Tony Medawar

/ JJ / 2 Comments

Let’s take a moment to reflect on what Tony Medawar has done in recent years for GAD fans, with Wicked Spirits (2024) being the eighth collection of lost, forgotten, and so-rare-they-doubt-their-own-existence stories by GAD luminaries Medawar has edited under the …from the Library label. Whether we get any more after this or not, and I sincerely hope we do, it’s a wonderful body of work, and only the tip of an iceberg of effort he has been putting in for decades now.

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#1219: The Examiner (2024) by Janice Hallett

/ JJ / 11 Comments
Examiner

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Janice Hallett fairly set the crime fiction firmament a-gaggle with her debut The Appeal (2021), a story of murder in a community theatre group told via emails and texts. Her third novel, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (2023), was, to my thinking, even more successful again, not least because of how it stirred in a speculative plot about the Antichrist and a forthcoming apocalypse so confidently, again told via various media rather than in straight prose. So when her fourth novel The Examiner (2024) was announced, I was at the head of the (library) queue, and, well, we might be in an her-odd-numbered-novels-are-the-good-ones situation.

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#1218: “Ever hear of the classic locked-room theme?” – Too French and Too Deadly, a.k.a. The Narrowing Lust (1955) by Henry Kane

/ JJ / 4 Comments

Having thoroughly enjoyed the hard-edged cynicism of P.I. Peter Chambers in Death on the Double (1957), which had an impossible crime in it just to add to the fun, I sought out Too French and Too Deadly, a.k.a. The Narrowing Lust (1955) due to Adey promising me similarly impossible happenings.

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