Reviews

#1326: Bedrooms Have Windows (1949) by A.A. Fair

/ JJ / 3 Comments


The twelfth published novel from Erle Stanley Gardner under his A.A. Fair nom de plume, Bedrooms Have Windows (1949) finds L.A. P.I.s Bertha Cool and Donald Lam once more skirting the law in pursuit of a case whose precise shape is obscured by the sheer number of actions dragged across its trail. And while this should be getting pretty tiresome by now, the truth is that since series nadir Crows Can’t Count (1946) Fair has delivered some blisteringly fast and fun little crime thrillers that go a long way to show how to write entertainingly: let everything fly at the page, and have someone as unshakeable as Donald on hand to unpick whatever madness you throw him into.

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#1324: A Little Help for My Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #28: With a Vengeance (2025) by Riley Sager

/ JJ / 6 Comments

Fun fact: I did not pick up With a Vengeance (2025), the ninth novel by Riley Sager, because I knew it featured an impossible crime. In fact, I’m not even sure it does feature an impossible crime. But it might, and I had a lot of fun with this book, and those two points alone are enough to justify me writing about it.

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#1323: The Deadly Percheron (1946) by John Franklin Bardin

/ JJ / 15 Comments


I first heard of The Deadly Percheron (1946), John Franklin Bardin’s debut novel of identity and madness, when Anthony Horowitz called it his favourite crime novel in an interview (which I’ve been unable to find, so [citation needed] that for now). And then Kate loved it and Brad loved it and so, with this Penguin reprint newly available, I had to check it out. And, honestly, I don’t see it. It opens well — a man visits a psychiatrist, telling stories of leprechauns who have hired him to perform bafflingly inane tasks — and entertains for the first three chapters, but once the key thrust of the plot is reached it grinds to a halt, and only really comes alive again in a closing monologue that brushes most of the things that don’t make sense under the carpet.

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#1320: A Minor Operation (1937) by J.J. Connington

/ JJ / 5 Comments


If the year 2020 will be remembered for anything, it will be that I bought a set of 18 J.J. Connington novels on eBay and started my way through them. Of those 18, only A Minor Operation (1937) — Connington’s sixteenth novel and the eleventh to feature Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield — showed any signs of being read, implying that this one book alone was bad enough for the seller to completely eradicate Connington from their shelves. Well, having finally reached this accurséd title, I really enjoyed it — finding it one of the strongest of Alfred Stewart’s books yet, only lacking in the final stretch with a too-casual reveal of our killer and a motive that’s perhaps a little too complex to really hit home.

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#1317: Murder for Cash, a.k.a. The Fatal .45 (1938) by James Ronald

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Crazy to think that even a couple of years ago the works of James Ronald were so wildly unavailable that it seemed we’d never know exactly what, of the fair amount he wrote, was crime fiction and what came from other, equally profitable, genres. Then Chris Verner and Moonstone Press entered the arena, and Ronald’s criminous oeuvre has become readily available for sensible money. And so Murder for Cash, a.k.a The Fatal .45 (1938), a pulpy tale that comes nowhere near the level of Ronald’s best work — Murder in the Family (1936), They Can’t Hang Me (1938) — but nevertheless warrants examination by anyone curious about what this all-but-forgotten author has done to garner such attention in the modern day.

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#1314: Cold Blood (1952) by Leo Bruce

/ JJ / 4 Comments


Leo Bruce’s eighth and final novel in which Sergeant William Beef sallies forth into polite company to batter them with blunt questions hiding a brilliant mind, Cold Blood (1952) is a strong effort that marks a distinct improvement from preceding title, the over-long and frankly tedious Neck and Neck (1951). It’s the battering to death of a wealthy landowner which concerns us here, with Beef brought in by Cosmo Ducrow’s surviving family to counter the evidence piling up against the dead man’s nephew, Rudolf. But, the more Beef looks, the blacker the case against Rudolf becomes…so is this the final convention-busting solution Bruce has for us at the cap of this series, or is something more subtle going on?

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#1311: Fear Comes to Chalfont (1942) by Freeman Wills Crofts

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Your typical Freeman Wills Crofts protagonist — fallen on hard times, usually following the death of a loved one — young widow Julia Langley enters into a marriage of convenience with solicitor Richard Elton. He will provide for her daughter Mollie, and she will run his house, Chalfont, as hostess for social events that singularly fail to win his unprepossessing personality the acceptance he so craves. And so, Julia falls in love with wealthy novelist Frank Cox, throwing a wrench into the works of her agreeable if not desirable arrangement, and before long someone in the Elton ménage is found murdered and the various secrets in the household start to creep out.

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