I first read Not to be Taken, a.k.a. A Puzzle in Poison (1938), my debut experience of the work of Anthony Berkeley, after happening across a Black Dagger Crime edition in about 2005. And I bloody hated it. Over the years, however, I’ve come to love Berkeley’s work, so the recent reissue of the title in the British Library Crime Classics range was a (welcome…?) chance to reappraise it.
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Having curbed the slaughter in his first two books, S.S. van Dine’s early promise that The Greene Murder Case (1928) is “the first complete and unedited history of the Greene holocaust” certainly sets you up for carnage galore. And the book offers this and more: a veritable cornucopia of almost everything the detective novel should have, as if, having learnt from his opening brace, Van Dine was keen to cram in just about every trick, revelation, and reversal1 he could possibly envisage. And yet, for all its trappings, the book does suffer from the same problem as its predecessors in that the killer is blindingly obvious, and no amount of telling me otherwise will change my mind.
While Brad adopts a thematic approach to reading the Perry Mason novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, I’m more a sort of wander in the meadow, la-la-la, isn’t everything beautiful kinda guy, and so I’m just getting it into my head I want to (re)read one and picking them up on a whim. But let’s attempt some method and stick to the approximate era of the last one I reviewed, eh?
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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.
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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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.
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.
An earlier British Library Crime Classics short story collection today, with The Long Arm of the Law [ss] (2017) featuring 15 stories of professional police selected by the hugely knowledgeable Martin Edwards.
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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.
Having sold squillions of copies in its native Japan, Strange Pictures (2022), the debut novel of mysterious YouTuber Uketsu, vaults over the language barrier into English thanks to Pushkin Vertigo and the excellent work of translator Jim Rion, and…honestly, it underwhelmed me.
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The Invisible Event 