Posted January 5, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Still Waters
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 237
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: 
Synopsis: Trouble is brewing once more for the Hoggetts and their friend Chief Inspector Macdonald in Lunesdale, deep in the Lancashire fell country. The treacherous slopes and still waters of a quarry pool have become the backdrop for strange happenings by night, and after an architect surveying the area is nearly hoisted into the cold waters by an unseen assailant, the suspicions of local farmers become a matter for the CID. Loracās authentic writing of the Lunesdale countryside is paired with a twisting plot in this classic of Lake District crime fiction, first published in 1949.
E.C.R. Lorac’sĀ Still Waters is another return to Lunesdale for Macdonald. It’s a bit surprising that there are several books sharing the same setting and characters, because a lot of the other books are pretty disconnected, with just Macdonald and Reeves recurring. In this one, the Hoggetts are almost the stars, particularly Giles.
It’s pretty suspenseful actually; there are a couple of tense chapters at the end where Macdonald, Reeves and several others are staking out an area to figure out what’s going on and (hopefully) catch the criminals. I’d figured out what was going on already (it’s a fair-play mystery, pretty much) but it was still really tense because it wasn’t clear whether something would go wrong, whether they’d get their guy, etc. I don’t mind having figured things out anyway, but that definitely didn’t defuse any of the tension here.
It makes fun use of the setting, which Lorac knows well because she eventually settled in the area she based the story on, and apparently it was checked by a police officer as well, which shows she did her research.
One note: one of the characters is deeply anti-Welsh. He’s corrected/ignored by other characters, but the Welshman is still very much viewed as a “foreigner” and with automatic suspicion, which is a bit uncomfortable, if not surprising.
Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery
Posted December 29, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Death in Ambush
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 288
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: 
Synopsis: In a tranquil Kentish village, Dr Sandys and his wife are preparing for Christmas with their guest, Liane āLeeā Crauford. Festivities start badly when their party is spoiled by an enigmatic widow new to the village, and the atmosphere hits rock bottom when the pompous local nobleman and ceramic-collector Sir Henry Metcalfe unexpectedly dies. Sensing potential villains among Metcalfeās circle, Lee teams up with Detective-Inspector Hugh Gordon to discover the killer playing merry hell with her holiday in this lost vintage mystery, republished for the first time since 1952.
Susan Gilruth is a new-to-me author not previously published in the British Library Crime Classics series, andĀ Death in Ambush is their Christmas-themed entry for the year. It’s set at Christmas, and there’s some Christmas presents and such at the end, but it doesn’t feel that festive, really; it’s mostly a mystery that happens to be set at Christmas.
Overall, I didn’t fall in love with it, especially because I found it kind of obvious after a certain point, but it was fun enough. The introduction notes a rather weird aspect of it: a fair bit of flirting and romantic tension between the police detective and the POV character, who is married (and whose husband does not appear). Not an element I’ve seen a lot!
It was fun enough, but reminded me more of modern stuff like the Daisy Dalrymple books somehow. I’d read more of Gilruth’s books if they get reissued in this series, but probably not seek them out otherwise.
Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery, Susan Gilruth
Posted December 2, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
As If By Magic
Genres: Crime,
Mystery,
Short Stories Pages: 349
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: Impossible crime stories have delighted readers since the invention of detective fiction as puzzle-lovers sought more cerebral entertainment. Following on from Miraculous Mysteries, CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards brings together a whole new casebook of mystifying locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. Featuring more great stories by John Dickson Carr, Julian Symons and Margery Allingham alongside newly rediscovered writers, this selection of stories will bring you more insight into one of the most celebrated and dazzling sub-genres of detective fiction.
I’m not always one for locked room mysteries, I must admit, but the latest British Library Crime Classics collection,Ā As If By Magic, was actually pretty fun. It’s edited by Martin Edwards and has the usual format of short introductions before each story, though this one is opened and closed by a John Dickson Carr story. That feels only appropriate given his influence on the genre!
There is a repeat story that’s used in another collection (“The Coulman Handicap” is in a different British Library collection, not sure which), but otherwise they were all new to me, and there were some ingenious ones. Also far-fetched, of course, but that’s part of the territory with locked room mysteries. It was especially bad with (spoilers for one story ahead) the one where a pistol was shot into a tree and then the bullet fired itself at a man two hundred years later when he burned wood from that tree — though I did kinda enjoy that that one, of course, wasn’t a crime at all.
Overall, pretty fun, though that final Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr) story does strike quite the macabre note, sheesh!
Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Martin Edwards, mystery, short stories
Posted November 29, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Death in High Heels
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 253
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: 
Synopsis: The pursuit of fashion is a matter of life and death in the debut novel from Christianna Brand, one of the Queens of Golden Age crime fiction. Life in the West End dress shop Christophe et Cie is hard enough with all the pressures of delivering Frank Bevanās business vision ā and then comes murder, delivered by oxalic acid, transforming the boutique into a crime scene. Featuring a colourful cast of designers, models, shop floor assistants and the fresh-faced Inspector Charlesworth, this 1941 mystery brims with Brandās signature wit and ruthless twists.
I did end up finishing Christianna Brand’sĀ Death in High Heels, but goodness, there’s just something soĀ mean about her work that I can’t enjoy. She does usually have a couple of gooey-sweet female characters who are absolute angels (which doesn’t 100% preclude them being the killer), but she can be so vicious about characters she wouldn’t have liked in person: gay men, unattractive women, lower class women, etc. It doesn’t help that she wroteĀ Death in High Heels as a way of getting back at a woman she worked with. Boy, it shows.
The mystery itself was obviously going to work out a particular way, the “how” just remained, and it spent a frankly annoying amount of time trying to get there. I don’t particularly enjoy Charlesworth as an investigator in general, but boy, he was annoying. Strange times when I long for Inspector Cockrill…
I know the editor of this series rates Brand highly, but I really don’t agree.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, Christianna Brand, crime, mystery
Posted November 26, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Jumping Jenny
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 240
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: At a costume party with the dubious theme of "famous murderers and their victims," the know-it-all amateur criminologist Roger Sheringham is settled in for an evening of beer, small talk, and analyzing his companions. One guest in particular has caught his attention for her theatrics, and his theory that she might have several enemies among the partygoers proves true when she is found hanging from the "decorative" gallows on the roof terrace.
Noticing a key detail that could implicate a friend in the crime, Sheringham decides to meddle with the scene and unwittingly casts himself into jeopardy as the uncommonly thorough police investigation circles closer and closer to the truth.
Anthony Berkeley’sĀ Jumping Jenny shows both his playfulness with the expectations of the genre and his tendency toward misogyny, making it an interesting read that’s also pretty darn frustrating. The man had a problem with women, and a fetish about spanking them to “fix” them, and this wasn’tĀ quiteĀ as obtrusive as in some of his books, but did flit in and out of the story.
It doesn’t help that I don’t like Berkeley’s “detective”, Roger Sheringham, at the best of times — and here he’s suspecting everyone of murder except the right person, and trying to shield everyone from looking like murderers, while getting everything absolutely wrong and making everything worse. The structure amuses for a while, but it starts to really get frustrating.
In the end, “interesting but not enjoyableĀ as a whole” would be my verdict, even without Berkeley’s misogyny.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: Anthony Berkeley, book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery
Posted November 4, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Continental Crimes
Genres: Crime,
Mystery,
Short Stories Pages: 352
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: A man is forbidden to uncover the secret of the tower in a fairy-tale castle by the Rhine. A headless corpse is found in a secret garden in Paris--belonging to the city's chief of police. And a drowned man is fished from the sea off the Italian Riviera, leaving the carabinieri to wonder why his socialite friends at the Villa Almirante are so unconcerned by his death.
These are three of the scenarios in this new collection of vintage crime stories. Detective stories from the golden age and beyond have used European settings--cosmopolitan cities, rural idylls and crumbling chateaux--to explore timeless themes of revenge, deception, murder and haunting.
Including lesser-known stories by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, J. Jefferson Farjeon and other classic writers, this collection reveals many hidden gems of British crime.
Continental Crimes is a collection of classic/Golden/Silver Age crime stories from British writers but set in Europe, and is edited as usual by Martin Edwards. It actually contains a Christie story, which is rare for the series (though Parker Pyne is a fairly meh detective), along with a non-Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle… but. I’m afraid it got a bit boring, and e.g. the Reggie Fortune story chosen was almost incoherent and had an absolutely infuriating number of random exclamations from Reggie (“my aunt!” etc etc).
It’s a fun idea for a collection, and they weren’t all duds, but the overall effect is fairly uninspiring. Despite the convincing line-up of authors, the stories just don’t sparkle, so it feels pretty stodgy.
Might be better reading one at a time/spacing them out, or just dipping in for the ones that sound interesting.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Martin Edwards, mystery
Posted October 20, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Blood on the Tracks
Genres: Crime,
Mystery,
Short Stories Pages: 288
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: āNever had I been given a tougher problem to solve, and never had I been so utterly at my witsā end for a solution.ā
A signalman is found dead by a railway tunnel. A man identifies his wife as a victim of murder on the underground. Two passengers mysteriously disappear between stations, leaving behind a dead body.
Trains have been a favourite setting of many crime writers, providing the mobile equivalent of the ālocked-roomā scenario. Their enclosed carriages with a limited number of suspects lend themselves to seemingly impossible crimes. In an era of cancellations and delays, alibis reliant upon a timely train service no longer ring true, yet the railway detective has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the twenty-first century.
Both train buffs and crime fans will delight in this selection of fifteen railway-themed mysteries, featuring some of the most popular authors of their day alongside less familiar names. This is a collection to beguile even the most wearisome commuter.
Blood on the Tracks — edited by Martin Edwards, as usual for the British Library Crime Classics series — is a collection of stories on an apparently very specific theme: railway mysteries. And yet there’s plenty, and several novels as well that one can point to (more than one by Agatha Christie alone, as I recall!), so it’s definitely a worthy theme.
As ever, there were some stories that spoke more to me than others, but overall it’s a collection I enjoyed, including the Holmes pastiche by Knox (despite being often wary of Holmes pastiches). Reading E. Bramah’s story featuring Max Carrados made me almost resolve to write to the lecturer back at university who refused to include more diverse characters like disabled detectives/characters in the course material (“what’s next, animal detectives? This would be really scraping the barrel”) — Max Carrados being, of course, totally blind. These collections are really fun for how they dig for forgotten stories and bring them back to light.
Overall, one of the most fun collections; not just interesting because I’m interested in the genre, but with stories I enjoyed in and of themselves.
Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Martin Edwards, mystery, short stories
Posted September 18, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries
Genres: Crime,
Mystery,
Short Stories Pages: 317
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: Holidays offer us the luxury of getting away from it all. So, in a different way, do detective stories. This collection of vintage mysteries combines both those pleasures. From a golf course at the English seaside to a pension in Paris, and from a Swiss mountain resort to the cliffs of Normandy, this new selection shows the enjoyable and unexpected ways in which crime writers have used summer holidays as a theme.
These fourteen stories range widely across the golden age of British crime fiction. Stellar names from the past are well represented - Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton, for instance - with classic stories that have won acclaim over the decades. The collection also uncovers a wide range of hidden gems: Anthony Berkeley - whose brilliance with plot had even Agatha Christie in raptures - is represented by a story so (undeservedly) obscure that even the British Library does not own a copy. The stories by Phyllis Bentley and Helen Simpson are almost equally rare, despite the success which both writers achieved, while those by H. C. Bailey, Leo Bruce and the little-known Gerald Findler have seldom been reprinted.
Each story is introduced by the editor, Martin Edwards, who sheds light on the authors' lives and the background to their writing.
Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries is, like all the short story collections in the British Library Crime Classics series, edited by Martin Edwards, so it’s the usual spread of stories which includes some well-known ones (Conan Doyle), some standbys for the series (H.C. Bailey) and a couple of lesser-known ones, including one where the author is virtually unknown — or was at the time of publication.
For someone interested in crime fiction in general, then, it has the usual interest of being a survey of mystery stories around this theme, etc, etc. I must admit it was far from being a favourite for me, not helped by the fact that one of the stories (the one from Anthony Berkeley, if I recall) has been used in one of the other collections before or since (not sure which one, but I know the story, and that’s the only reason I would).
There are some fun stories in this collection, don’t get me wrong (I liked the atmosphere in “Where Is Mr Manetot?” for instance), but overall it didn’t grab me.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Martin Edwards, mystery, short stories
Posted August 23, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Odd Flamingo
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 256
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: Rose has news for Celia ā she is due to have a baby by Celiaās husband, Humphrey. Soon after, the seeds of scandal bear a criminal fruit when a body is discovered in Little Venice along with Roseās handbag. Celia drafts in an old flame, Will, to root out the truth from suspicions of murder and blackmail, as the evidence starts to converge on the patrons and strange goings-on of the seedy Chelsea club, āThe Odd Flamingoā. First published in 1954, this was one of two gritty and atmospheric crime novels written by the accomplished childrenās author Nina Bawden.
I knew of Nina Bawden because I readĀ Carrie’s WarĀ in university — I think for the children’s literature class I took? I hadn’t expected to see a book by her from the British Library Crime Classics series, that’s for sure.
The Odd Flamingo turns out to be a noir-ish and rather grubby story, in which few (if any) people are genuine or trustworthy. Bawden carefully gives us the hero worship the main character has for his friend Humphrey, and his idealisation of a young girl, Rose, who seems fresh and innocent… and then carefully spends the whole book tearing it down.
It’s pretty weird as a mystery/crime novel, because the main character doesn’t really get very far in solving anything, and the interest (depending on your tastes) is more on the character studies. I found it overall pretty unpleasant, and while I could admire the craft, it wasn’t what I usually hope for in classic crime. (Which is fair enough for the series, to be clear: even “classic crime” as a concept contains multitudes!)
It’s an interesting read, but not one I enjoyed in and of itself.
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery, Nina Bawden
Posted August 17, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Judas Window
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 269
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: Avory Hume is found stabbed to death with an arrow - in a study with bolted steel shutters and a heavy door locked from the inside. In the same room James Caplon Answell lies unconscious, his clothes disordered as though from a struggle, his fingerprints on the damning arrow.
Here is the unique Carter Dickson "impossible situation" - yet the great, explosive Sir Henry Merrivale gets down to serious sleuthing and at last startles the crowd in the Old Bailey with a reconstruction of the crime along logical, convincing lines.
H.M. in his most exciting case - an original, unconventional mystery, with a rich story background and a thrilling trial scene.
Every time the British Library Crime Classics series republish one of John Dickson Carr’s mysteries (under that name or as Carter Dickson), the intro hyperbolically refers to it as one of the greatest locked room mysteries ever, etc etc.Ā The Judas Window was a genuinely fun one though, with one of the least goofy explanations of how the locked room wasn’t actually impenetrable, and it’s one of the books in John Dickson Carr’s oeuvre that I got on with best so far (not always having been much of a fan).
It certainly helps that much of it is courtroom drama, with the larger-than-life H.M. defending the prisoner in court, with a few sensations along the way. The character of Mary Hume is pretty amazing, and a rare one in crime fiction: having allowed a lover to take erotic photos of her and then been blackmailed about them, she comes out in court to take all the power out of it by forthrightly admitting the whole thing. I feel like this doesn’t get as much spotlight as it deserves in the story, because it’s a heck of a power play.
The puzzle works out nicely, with my only quibble being that I didn’t think the actual culprit made a lot of sense without some more clues or build-up. But that wasn’t so much the point of the story, I think, so it wasn’t a huge downside. Overall, I really liked this one.
Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)
Tags: book reviews, books, Carter Dickson, crime, John Dickson Carr, mystery
