Reviews

#1371: The Sealed Room Murder (1934) by James Ronald [a.p.a. by Michael Crombie]

/ JJ / 2 Comments


It’s fairly incredible to me that I have a copy of The Sealed Room Murder (1934), originally published by James Ronald under his Michael Crombie nom de plume, at all. Only the recent efforts of Chris Verner and Moonstone Press to bring Ronald’s criminous oeuvre back into print for sensible money have made this and others available to fans like me without endless connections and deep pockets, and I remain extremely grateful for their undertaking. The book, then, delivers largely what one has been able to come to expect from Ronald’s earlier, pulp-adjacent writing, with much thrill and little substance: fun, but not worth the sorts of money previously requested online.

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#1369: “It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms.” – Family in the Way in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) [Scr. Robert Hamer & John Dighton; Dir. Robert Hamer]

/ JJ / 11 Comments

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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#1368: The Bishop Murder Case (1929) by S.S. van Dine

/ JJ / 12 Comments


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.

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#1366: “If six people were to die…!” – Kind Hearts and Coronets, a.k.a. Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) by Roy Horniman

/ JJ / 8 Comments

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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#1365: The Killer Question (2025) by Janice Hallett

/ JJ / 6 Comments


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.

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#1362: The Jealous One (1965) by Celia Fremlin

/ JJ / 3 Comments


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.

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#1360: “Didn’t we have enough excitement four years ago?” – The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) by Agatha Christie

/ JJ / 15 Comments

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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#1359: Top of the Heap (1952) by A.A. Fair

/ JJ / 2 Comments


Official Case #13 for the Cool & Lam Detective Agency, Top of the Heap (1952) finds A.A. Fair, nom de plume of Erle Stanley Gardner, on slick-but-unmemorable form — mixing ingredients in a way that is at once comfortably familiar for this series yet tries to ring a few changes at the same time. And while it’s certainly not a bad book, for this reader — an avowed fan of Gardner and Fair both — it all sort of fell apart in the closing stages in which so much surmise is piled up that it’s to be wondered whether some sort of meta-textual commentary on the concept of ‘solving’ a case is being offered. It’s not, but, wow, is Donald Lam ever out on a limb or five here, and it shows.

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#1356: Case without a Corpse (1937) by Leo Bruce

/ JJ / 4 Comments


I’ll level with you: I’d been kind of dreading having to reread Case without a Corpse (1937), Leo Bruce’s second novel to feature the blunt-but-far-from-dense Sergeant William Beef. Memory told me that the novel was over-long, with a large proportion of it spent on an almost entirely pointless amount of investigation that any sensible reader would know is wasted effort because (rot13 for spoilers, if you’ve never read a book before) boivbhfyl Orrs unf gb or gur bar gb cebivqr gur pbeerpg fbyhgvba ng gur raq. And in rereading it for the first time in about 15 years I’ve discovered that, once again, my memory has been a little unkind, and the book holds up far better than anticipated.

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