Norman Berrow

#490: It Howls at Night (1937) by Norman Berrow

/ JJ / 9 Comments

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The detective novel often requests that you, the reader, swallow some fairly difficult concepts in order to fully engage with it — that someone can organically devise the methods of murder and misdirection depicted within, for instance, or that the mechanical solutions sometimes put froward do actually work in the manner described.  However, the delightfully creative Norman Berrow, in his werewolf-on-the-prowl novel It Howls at Night (1937), demands of you the greatest degree of forbearance I’ve yet encountered, a hurdle some may struggle to overcome, in requiring you to believe that a man would actually go by the name of ‘Pongo Slazenger’.

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#451: The Smokers of Hashish (1934) by Norman Berrow

/ JJ / 11 Comments

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Aaaah, Norman Berrow.  Such highs, such lows, so much middle ground.  I can’t think of anyone else who leaves me on such a knife-edge: with a few adjustments here and there Berrow could well have written some genre classics, and it’s often an agonising fascination waiting to see which way the book falls.  So now we’re back at the very beginning with his first novel The Smokers of Hashish (1934), decidedly more adventure than detection, where he applies his chameleonic tendencies to some (ahem) intrigue in Tangier.  As you may expect from a book of this era with this title, the result is pulpy fun, though with two neat moments to distinguish it.

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#376: Fingers for Ransom (1939) by Norman Berrow

/ JJ / 9 Comments

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You can tell it’s been a tough couple of weeks, because I’ve reverted to my reading Happy Place — Carter Dickson, Max Afford, and now Norman Berrow (there was a traumatic Ngaio Marsh experience in there, too, but the less said about that the better).  My entirely non-chronological sampling of this delightful Kiwi — probably the most purely joyous GAD author I read — continues apace, since this is the preceding title to Murder in the Melody (1940), the last Berrow I read…no, I have no idea why I’m doing it like this.  I’ll make sure his debut The Smokers of Hashish (1934) is the next Berrow I pick up.  Just bear with me, eh?  It’s been a tough couple of weeks.

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#355: Change a Letter, Alter the Plot

/ JJ / 44 Comments

Paws

If you’ve been paying attention, especially to my comments left both here and elsewhere, you’ll be aware that my typing is rather famously variable.  90% of the time I’m good, but that other 10% — man, some errors there are.  Writing something recently, I made reference to the novel Five Little Pugs by Agatha Christie and then — catching myself in time to correct it — I had a thought…

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#324: Murder in the Melody (1940) by Norman Berrow

/ JJ / 16 Comments

murder-in-the-melody.jpgAs I wend my merry way through the works of Norman Berrow — this is the seventh book of his I’ve read, thanks to the wonderful efforts of Ramble House in republishing his entire catalogue — I’m forced into a certain awareness: I really like his style of mystery, even though they fall slightly below the standard I’d typically expect.  His characters are fun, his situations inventive, he doesn’t bog you down in mucilaginous prose, and the fact that he jumped between five different (albeit short) series plus standalones in his career invited a certain variation in his approaches that stops things getting samey.  If the plots occasionally fall short of full brilliance…I can live with that.  But it makes things a little tricky from a reviewing perspective.

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