Philip MacDonald first came to my attention for having written a handful of impossible crime novels but this is not one of them, and nor does it feature his series sleuth Anthony Gethryn.  I stumbled across my copy of X v. Rex in a second-hand bookshop a good while ago and, as he was out of print at the time (one Gethryn novel, The Rasp, has since been republished by Collins) I picked it up for future perusal. And so, with the Crimes of the Century at Past Offences dipping into 1933, here we are – with policemen in and around London being targeted by a killer, and a government sliding into disarray as the previously unimpeachable bastion of order is attacked seemingly at will.

This is decidedly more of a thriller than a crime novel – no small cast of suspects, no scattered clues, no sudden moment of retrospective reanalysis, no clever misdirection – you just sit and wait for the suspect to be apprehended three pages from the end and then that’s over and done with.  There is one piece of sort-of misdirection, but it’s revealed fairly quickly and by that point I wasn’t really all that bothered.  It certainly wasn’t clever enough to warrant a closer reading.  Honestly, where’s the appeal?

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