Reviews

#1464: The Black Path of Fear (1944) by Cornell Woolrich

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Clearly on the run, Bill ‘Scotty’ Scott and Eve Roman find themselves in Havana, and are set about living as full a life as they can when the past catches up with them and Scotty finds himself accused of murder. With the police apparently willing to believe his protestations of innocence — at first, at least — Scotty soon finds himself in a nightmarescape where his memory of events and the evidence he has to back it up diverge, and so only one course becomes available to him: go on the run again. And so, in an unfamiliar city and with no knowledge of the language, just how does this hunted protagonist go about proving his innocence? And what of the threat that surrounds him, the ‘someone’ he’s fleeing, who is keen that Scotty get some just deserts?

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#1461: For the Defence: Dr. Thorndyke (1934) by R. Austin Freeman

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Prior to reading For the Defence: Dr. Thorndyke (1934), the sixteenth novel featuring R. Austin Freeman’s eponymous esteemed medical jurist, the honour of Most Ridiculous Opening to a Book I’ve Read belonged to thriller The Day After Tomorrow (1994) by Allan Folsom. To Folsom’s credit, that book is pretty insane the whole way through, and he drops the opening few lines on you quickly and then moves on at a superb pace. Freeman’s novel, by comparison, takes Folsom’s cake and bakes it several times over, using its first five chapters to patiently build in classic Freeman style towards the pitch of its true insanity, and doing it all with a straight face.

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#1459: “What we’ve got is mighty interesting.” – Death at Sea: A Murder Mystery in 3-D (1994) by Len Oszustowicz [ill. Brian Small]

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Either one of the greatest innovations in the genre’s history or one of it’s most misguided attempts at latching onto a passing phase, you can bet that I snapped up a copy of this murder mystery containing what my youthful 1990s self knew as magic eye pictures — more formally called stereograms or autostereograms — the second I learned of its existence.

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#1458: Beware the Curves (1956) by A.A. Fair

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Given that A.A. Fair was a nom de plume adopted by Erle Stanley Gardner, a trained lawyer who would write over 80 legal thrillers featuring Perry Mason, it was inevitable that the Cool and lam books Fair wrote would veer into legalistic territory at times. The first in the series, The Bigger They Come (1939), relied on an obscure state law loophole, after all, and got things off to an ingenious start. What’s perhaps surprising is that it wasn’t until fifteenth title Beware the Curves (1956) that Gardner would venture once more into the courtroom with his L.A. P.I.s…though, I suppose he had written 36 Masons and nine novels featuring D.A. Doug Selby in the meantime…so I guess he was getting his fix elsewhere.

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#1455: Enemy Unseen (1945) by Freeman Wills Crofts

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The twenty-fifth long form case for Inspector Joseph French, Enemy Unseen (1945) does not cover its detective or its author Freeman Wills Crofts in glory. While, given the era in which it was written and published, there’s an understandable desire to provide a positive impression of the work of the Home Guard, and for the workings of the country as a whole to appear reassuringly competent, the book seems to have no purpose beyond this, feeling to this FWC fan as if, for only the second time in the author’s long and storied career, he was perhaps putting something out to fulfil an obligation. And yet, its inexorable, dull plodding towards the finish line would be comforting to many — E.C.R. Lorac fans would lap this up, I feel.

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#1452: Furious Old Women (1960) by Leo Bruce

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“Milly may have been mean and sanctimonious but she was my sister. To club her to death on her way to church was quite damnable.” So speaks Mrs. Bobbin, the elderly widow who has approached History master Carolus Deene to investigate the murder of her elder sister, Millicent Griggs having been found beaten over the head and hidden in an open grave in the churchyard in the small village of Gladhurst. Since all the police have done in the intervening week is ask “a series of questions even more moronic than [Deene’s],” Mrs. Bobbin wants something more achieved: “I’m livid. So don’t take too long in solving the thing.”

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#1449: The Ark (2022) by Haruo Yuki [trans. Jim Rion 2026]

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Seven university friends go in search of a mysterious underground facility in the hills and, arriving late in the evening, encounter a family of three who have become lost walking in the same isolated region. The ten of them see no choice but to stay underground until morning, only for an earthquake to trap everyone inside. A means of escape exists, but requires that one person stays behind, trapping themselves underground where they might be lucky and not starve to death: instead, they may drown in the rising water filling the building from below. And so, naturally, one of the group is murdered. But why now? And, of course, whodunnit?

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