Reviews

#904: “If you knew the man, you would realize that he is mad enough for anything.” – Cross Marks the Spot, a.k.a. The Frightened Girl (1933) by James Ronald [a.p.a. by Michael Crombie]

/ JJ / 5 Comments

Actress Cicely Foster, calling at the home of movie mogul Jacob Singerman to discuss a role in a ‘talkie’, is innocent enough to be shocked by his advances and fights him off, striking him on the head in the struggle before fleeing. When reporter Julian Mendoza, “the bloodhound of Fleet Street”, tracks her down and tells her that Singerman was found dead shortly after her departure, it looks bleak…but for the small matter of the corpse having been found with a bullet between his eyes.

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#903: The Loss of the Jane Vosper (1936) by Freeman Wills Crofts

/ JJ / 8 Comments
Loss of the Jane Vosper

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Hector Macdonald’s excellent thriller The Storm Prophet (2007) was the first book to ever make me consider the terror of being trapped aboard a sinking boat in the open sea.  15 years later, the opening chapters of The Loss of the Jane Vosper (1936) by Freeman Wills Crofts, in which the eponymous freighter is shaken by mysterious explosions and must be abandoned, brought those anxieties back, despite the calm competence of her crew and some surprisingly elegiac imagery (“[the lifeboats] turned with one consent and began rowing with her, determined to see the end…Not a man but was heartily thankful to be out of her, and yet she was their home.”).

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#901: “Killing? Who said anything about killing?” – Future Crimes: Mysteries and Detection Through Time and Space [ss] (2021) ed. Mike Ashley

/ JJ / 10 Comments

Mike Ashley, surely the world’s hardest-working editor of short story collections, has combined two of my loves with Future Crimes (2021): detective fiction and SF. As a fan of crossover mysteries, this seems tailor-made for me, and I have Countdown John to thank for bringing it to my attention. So, how does it stack up?

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#900: The Twyford Code (2022) by Janice Hallett

/ JJ / 12 Comments
Twyford Code

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Depending on who you ask, the wartime children’s books of Edith Twyford are either “an unchallenging read on every level [with n]o subtext [and n]o depth” or they’re “nasty, sadistic, moral little tales full of pompous superiority at best and blatant racism at worst.” Her series based around The Super Six in which “[t]hree girls and three boys…solve mysteries that have been puzzling the local community” has been gradually updated with each successive generation and translation, so that their outdated attitudes can be put aside once and for all. But might something else have been lost along the way? Something people would kill for?

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#897: Jumping Jenny, a.k.a. Dead Mrs. Stratton (1933) by Anthony Berkeley

/ JJ / 15 Comments

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Soren Kierkegaard said that life is to be lived forwards but only understood backwards, and the same is true of my reading Anthony Berkeley Cox. I’m reasonably sure that I’ve read the majority of Cox’s novels, but only in revisiting them — with, admittedly, a firmer grounding in the detective genre’s Golden Age which he explored so rigorously in a staggeringly small number of books — do I appreciate what he was trying to do. Jumping Jenny, a.k.a. Dead Mrs. Stratton (1933), for example, is the inversion of every novel of detection written to that point and a vast majority of those written since, and only in seeing this did I finally understand just how damn good it is.

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#895: “There are some jokes, young man, that are not permitted here.” – Speak of the Devil [rp] (1994) by John Dickson Carr [ed. Tony Medawar]

/ JJ / 9 Comments

The recently-published The Island of Coffins (2020) brought several of John Dickson Carr’s previously-unavailable radio plays to public attainability, and gave many of us the chance to appreciate the Master in a slightly different milieu. Shortly after reading that wonderful volume, I was lucky enough to acquire Speak of the Devil (1994), the script for the eight-part radio serial Carr wrote for broadcast in 1941, and it is to that which we turn today.

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#894: A Silent Witness (1914) by R. Austin Freeman

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A Silent Witness

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Sheltering from the rain while out for a walk in north London one September evening, trainee doctor Humphrey Jardine happens upon the body of a dead man, only for the corpse to have vanished by the time he is able to bring the police to the location. Before long, a discovery at the scene of this vanishing, a chance encounter with the comely Miss Sylvia Vyne, a suspicious clergyman, and the death of an elderly patient just as Jardine is about to act as locum tenens for another doctor’s practice will combine with this mobile corpse to make quite the most “astounding sequence” in young Jardine’s life, changing it forever.

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#892: “He happens to be around when so many murders crop up…” – Bodies from the Library 2 [ss] (2019) ed. Tony Medawar

/ JJ / 10 Comments

With the Bodies from the Library 5 (2022) collection due in a couple of months, and spin-off Ghosts from the Library (2022) coming later in the year, the time seems ripe to revisit one of the earlier collections which — given the timespan over which I first read them — I failed to review on publication. And since, for reasons too complicated to bore you with here, the second volume was the first one I encountered, it’s there I’ll head today.

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#891: A Fête Worse than Death (2007) by Dolores Gordon-Smith

/ JJ / 4 Comments
Fete Worse than Death

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Attending a village fete in support of family connections, Jack Haldean is vexed to be confronted by the boorish Jeremy Boscombe — an acquaintance from his war days he’d rather avoid. Several whiskeys later, Boscombe is deposited in the fortune-teller’s tent and, when Mrs Griffin returns victorious from the cake competition to resume her palm readings, it’s discovered that Boscombe’s presumed drunken slumber is in fact a rather more permanent state of affairs: someone has crept up to the tent and shot him dead. And Jack Haldean, who had made his displeasure at Boscombe’s presence known, had been standing right outside the tent when it happened…

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