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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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?
Current crime and detective fiction fans needn’t look too hard to find a successful children’s author who transitioned well into writing books for grown-ups, and now Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal (2021) and four subsequent books, is heading in the other direction, with A Box Full of Murders (2025) being her debut for the 9-to-12 year-old market.
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Mary Virginia Carey was not, it seems, scared of a little velitation in her stewardship of The Three Investigators.
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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.
I’m doing Roger Ormerod a slight disservice here, by lumping him into this tranche of Mining Mount TBR. See, this series is an initiative by which I get to finally scrape books off my TBR that have been clinging there for arguably too long, and Ormerod has been so entertaining thus far that I was always going to read more by him. So wherefore his involvement here?
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Today is the tenth Bodies from the Library Conference, at which, until other considerations intervened, I was due to present on the topic of inverted mysteries. And you can bet I would at some point have talked about Six Against the Yard (1936), in which six crime writers put their ‘perfect murder’ on paper and ex-CID man Superintendent Cornish picked holes in their plans.
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Like The Serial Killers’ Club (2006) by Jeff Povey and the Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004-15) series by Jeff Lindsay, Joanna Wallace’s debut You’d Look Better as a Ghost (2023) takes on the challenge of seeing the world through a serial killer’s eyes. Wallace, though, takes the far harder route of not trying to justify her killer’s murderous urges by having them only kill ‘bad people’, and instead invites you to spend nearly 400 pages with Claire, who is unhinged enough to murder a man who accidentally emailed her incorrect information, and who blithely admits that she “like[s] to peel the skin off queue-jumpers”. It shouldn’t work. But, thanks in no small way to some pitch-black humour, boy, does it.
Another Tuesday in June, another book which has lingered on my TBR, and, coincidentally, another impossible crime. So, does Murder Most Ingenious (1962) by Kip Chase live up to its own self-confident billing? Sort of.
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You don’t write as much as Edward D. Hoch without hitting the bull’s-eye a few times, so I’m finally doing what I should have done all along and starting the Dr. Sam Hawthorne series from the beginning, with this first collection, Diagnosis: Impossible (2000), a tranche of 12 stories initially published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine between 1974 and 1978.
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The Invisible Event 