One final go around for US TV’s modern take on Sherlock Holmes, with Jonny Lee Miller filling the detective’s shoes and Lucy Liu giving us a Watson who’s on something approaching an equal footing with our resident genius.
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The Decagon House Murders (1987, tr. 2015), the excellent first book in Yukito Ayatsuji’s series featuring the bizarre architecture of Nakamura Seiji, was translated into English so long ago that I hadn’t even started blogging at the time. Follow-up The Mill House Murders (1988, tr. 2023) was, then, much anticipated, and, for this reader at least, doesn’t quite merit the wait. While relatively swift, and enjoyably inventive as we’ve come to expect from shin honkaku, there’s a cleverness lacking in a story whose telling is marred by some unusual writing to the extent that I ripped through this without ever really relaxing into it. Like Soji Shimada, Ayatsuji has written a brilliantly clever debut and then suffered from Difficult Second Novel Syndrome.
I’ve been in denial about this moment for a long time. M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman have been clear for a while now that their excellent Adventures on Trains series had an endgame in mind and…this is it. With The Arctic Railway Assassin (2022) we reach the (ahem) end of the line.
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I looked at my ten favourite fictional sleuths a little while ago, and so, in honour of today’s Bodies from the Library conference at the British Library, here are my ten favourite novels that the excellent British Library Crime Classics range introduced me to.
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“Follow him! Don’t let him escape! He has just committed a dreadful murder!” — thus is Robert Anstey exhorted into chasing after a man he interrupts assaulting a woman on Hampstead Heath. Failing to catch his quarry, Anstey retraces his steps and discovers that Andrew Drayton, collector of knick-knacks, has indeed been shot dead in his home where Winifred Blake, the assaulted woman, had an appointment to meet him that evening. Even more curious, all Drayton’s acquisitions were well-known to be essentially valueless, so why have his gewgaws been ransacked, and what could he possibly have had amongst them that was worth killing for? Enter Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke.
A final outing for James Ponti’s very entertaining trilogy in which two junior sleuths help the FBI solve baffling cases, it is perhaps unsurprising that Trapped! (2018) follows the age-old tradition of having this case cut Very Close To Home.
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Subtitled Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime [ss] (2009) collects twelve stories originally published between 1896 and 1919 — an era which I find myself increasingly interested in, giving birth as it did to the Golden Age of the 1920s-40s.
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In the latter stages of World War 2, artist Bruce Manaton is painting the portrait of a friend dressed in the robes of a cardinal, and his sister Rosanne fretting about the efficacy of the blackout curtains on the studio where they live, when there is a knock at the door. It seems that a special constable has discovered the body of murdered Old Mr. Folliner, the Manatons’ miserly landlord, and apprehended the killer as he was fleeing. Leaving the suspect in the care of the five people in the studio — two chess-playing friends have also dropped by for the evening — the constable summons the police, and before long Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald finds himself with another complex tangle to unfurl.
Lion Down (2019) is the fifth book in Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle series and, with previous entry Panda-Monium (2017) being one of the best juvenile mysteries I’ve yet read in this Minor Felonies undertaking, expectations were high.
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Another Nero Wolfe novella, this time from the February 1956 British edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.
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