#599: Heir Presumptive (1935) by Henry Wade

November 28, 2019November 28, 2019 / JJ / 29 Comments

Without wishing to overlook the great work once done by The Murder Room, someone needs to reprint Henry Wade. I enjoyed The Hanging Captain (1933) and very much enjoyed The Duke of York’s Steps (1929), but Heir Presumptive (1935) is in another class altogether and, like Craig Rice the other week, if he has any other books written with even half the fizz and joy of this one, those are books I wish to read…but, goddamn, the man’s fully OOP at present and something needs to be done. Because if you haven’t read this one yet, I urge you to find it at the earliest opportunity, and that means we’ll then be in competition for any other paperbacks out there once you love this as much as I did.

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#448: The Hanging Captain (1933) by Henry Wade

October 18, 2018November 23, 2019 / JJ / 21 Comments

When The Murder Room, the ebook-only arm of publishing house Orion, announced a couple of years ago that they’d be releasing a bunch of Henry Wade’s novels I got quite excited and then proceeded to buy none of them. Instead, I eventually acquired three hard-to-find Wade novels in paperback — The Duke of York’s Steps (1929), The Hanging Captain (1933), and the apparent classic Heir Presumptive (1935) — and proceeded to read none of them, too. So, as I v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y make my way through these, I’m pleased to report that here it certainly seems Wade has learned a lot from that earlier book and grown significantly as an author in four short years.

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#431: The D.A. Cooks a Goose (1942) by Erle Stanley Gardner

August 30, 2018January 16, 2020 / JJ / 19 Comments

It is slightly over a year since I decided to reread the Doug Selby novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, and while I sort of imagined I’d be done by now — nine books into twelve months goes fairly easily — I had not counted on how much I enjoyed the ones I’d read first time around, and so how I would draw out this revisiting so as to enjoy them equally now. And, even more fun, it turns out that I hadn’t read this one (side note: does anyone actually read the synopses of authors they love in advance of reading the book? You’re gonna read it anyway, right, so why would it matter what it’s about?) — so it felt like a new Doug Selby novel even though, yes, no, I’m aware it isn’t.

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#414: The Four Defences (1940) by J.J. Connington

July 19, 2018July 16, 2018 / JJ / 38 Comments

I had only read one previous novel by J.J. Connington — The Case with Nine Solutions (1928) — about which I remember one clever piece of misdirection and little else. I’ve had The Four Defences (1940) for ages, but his fellow-Humdrummer Mr. Freeman Wills Crofts captured my heart and swept me off my feet, so amends were here to be made. Thus, we have the remains of an unidentified body in a burned-out car, an obstreperous coroner insisting on felo de se, and a mystery on our hands. Cue an amateur detective — with the delightfully pleonastic name of Mark Brand, whose job seems to be giving relationship advice on the radio — to break the case…

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#394: The D.A. Goes to Trial (1940) by Erle Stanley Gardner

May 31, 2018January 16, 2020 / JJ / 19 Comments

I maintain that the Doug Selby novels of Erle Stanley Gardner stand as probably his best work, and only the genius of Raymond Burr, that awesome theme music, and the fact that the Perry Mason novels outnumber the Selby ones by a mind-blowing 9:1 ratio have led to the relative obscurity of this better series. “What about the Cool and Lam books?” you want to know? Well, as soon as I’m done with Selby I’m going to go and read all 30 of those in order, too, because probably two-thirds of them eluded me back when I started reading Gardner and so there are plenty of gaps to fill. So officially the jury is still out, but the Selby books remain fabulous nonetheless.

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#346: The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939) by Erle Stanley Gardner

February 8, 2018January 16, 2020 / JJ / 37 Comments

The third Doug Selby book from Erle Stanley Gardner sees an escalation in the puzzle aspects that make this series such a joy. You may come in expecting small town shenanigans and lazy Evil Big Business villains shown up by scrappy, dogged, local hero Selby, but you get a man killed in baffling circumstances with a semi-impossible twist, or a bindle-stiff gassed in equally nonsensical conditions with an elaborate scheme behind it, or — as here — a naked corpse shot twice in the same wound and spiralling accusations of complicity in murder plots that parallel and snake around each other in a particularly lethal dance. Dammit, Gardner is my go-to when I need a lift, I can’t deny it.

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#308: The D.A. Holds a Candle (1938) by Erle Stanley Gardner

November 2, 2017January 16, 2020 / JJ / 25 Comments

After the disappointment of last week, I should dive straight back in to another dense impossibility and to hell with any lingering doubts. But, well, my meretricious moods find me yearning for a little comfort reading, and so it’s back to Doug Selby and the gang. Here we find newly-elected D.A. Selby and Sheriff Rex Brandon contending with obstreperous reporters, influential businessmen, political opportunism, and a host of tangled stories and motives when trying to unpick the riddle of a dead body found bearing a note that states the intention of the possessor to have killed someone else…but no second body to back up the claim. And hold onto your hats, because that’s not the only thing that doesn’t add up.

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