Posted December 19, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Mirror Lake
Genres: Crime,
Fantasy,
Mystery Pages: 240
Series: Shady Hollow #3 Rating: 
Synopsis: A murder to solve. A reporter on the trail. Is this a case of mistaken identity?
Welcome dear reader! You have happened upon the delightful village of Shady Hollow, a place where rabbits and raptors, squirrels and snakes live together in civilised accord...with only the occasional murder to mar the peace of daily life.
Keen journalist Vera Vixen is recovering from the Harvest Festival (and its bounty of local cheeses, cider and pies) when the calm is shattered by a scream from one of the small town's grandes houses. Dorothy Springfield, a rat with a reputation for eccentricity, claims her husband - who is standing right next to her - has been murdered. Has Dorothy finally lost her grip on reality? Or is the rat who claims to be Edward an imposter? Vera's fox nose scents a story. And it's not long before the discovery of a body, minus the read, complicates things further...
Juneau Black’s Shady Hollow books seem to invariably end up being swallowed whole — by me at least. As with the others, I steamed right through it, enjoying myself all the way. As with the others, if you find the situation (the town of woodland creatures living in vegetarian harmony) inherently ridiculous and you’re unable to suspend your disbelief, then it won’t be so much your thing… and, once again, I found the mystery a little obvious. (I blame the fact that I’ve been training my brain on John Dickson Carr and other mystery greats.)
But that’s quibbling, because I personally still enjoyed it a lot. I’m still a little mad that the animals apparently don’t have a sense of smell, not even the creatures who would normally be trackers — it’d add a great extra dimension — but I’m trying not to argue with it, because I’m just having fun.
It helps that it’s a town of basically nice people. There are petty jealousies, of course, and here and there a murder or other crime (though it’s usually an outsider), but it just sounds like a nice place to be, and that makes it a nice place to read about. Vera and Orville’s romance is mostly sweet (without ever being saccharine), and Lenore is the best raven friend you could ever ask for.
Lovely escapism, and I refuse to overthink it any further!
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Juneau Black, mystery, SF/F
Posted December 13, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Who Killed Father Christmas? And Other Seasonal Mysteries
Genres: Mystery,
Short Stories Pages: 264
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: 
Synopsis: 'The red robe concealed the blood until it made my hand sticky. Father Christmas had been stabbed in the back, and he was certainly dead.'
The murder of Father Christmas at one of London’s great toy shops is just one of many yuletide disasters in this new collection of stories from the Golden Age of crime writing and beyond. Masters of the genre such as Patricia Moyes and John Dickson Carr present perfectly packaged short pieces, and Martin Edwards delivers a sackful of rarities from authors such as Ellis Peters, Gwyn Evans and Michael Innes.
The answer to any classic crime fiction fan’s Christmas wish – and the only way for you to answer Who Killed Father Christmas? – this new anthology is set to muddle, befuddle, surprise and delight.
I think this is the first of the British Library Crime Classics anthologies I’ve read that’s themed around Christmas, though there are three or four others. As usual, it’s edited by Martin Edwards, and features a spread of different authors (within the volume, there are no repeat authors, though many of them have been seen in the other anthologies). This is a rare one without a Sherlock Holmes story, and unlike the usual habit, it’s not arranged in order of when it was written/published, but instead with an eye to increasing the sense of variety between the stories.
I have to say that I probably prefer the chronological order, because part of my interest is in the development of the genre (I studied it during my undergrad, and can’t quite turn off that part of my brain — it adds to the interest for me, so I don’t see why I should). I can’t say that it felt particularly more varied than the other volumes, either.
I was a little shocked by the inclusion of a modern story (from the 90s): it seems a bit early to call that a classic. I was a kid in the 90s, and I’m only in my 30s now: it’s not that long ago. I know some stories are “instant classics”, but with this series I’m really expecting a certain period and a certain fit with the themes of that period — not that style etc through the eyes of a more modern author. So, hmm.
Anyway, it’s a fun seasonal volume. Crime is crime, no matter the time of year, so it’s not exactly about the joy and bounty of the time of year, mind you — but if that’s your cup of tea, you’ll have fun.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Martin Edwards, mystery, short stories
Posted December 2, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
The Black Spectacles
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 222
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: A sinister case of deadly poisoned chocolates from Sodbury Cross’s high street shop haunts the group of friends and relatives assembled at Bellegarde, among the orchards of ‘peach-fancier’ Marcus Chesney. To prove a point about how the sweets could have been poisoned under the nose of the shopkeeper, Chesney stages an elaborate memory game to test whether any of his guests can see beyond their ‘black spectacles’; that is, to see the truth without any assumptions as witnesses.
During the test – which is also being filmed – Chesney is murdered by his supposed accomplice. The keen wits of Dr. Gideon Fell are called for to crack this brazen and bizarre murder committed in full view of an audience.
It’s still funny how I thought I really disliked John Dickson Carr’s writing, and now here I am inhaling his books in a day. The Black Spectacles has quite a bit going on, with the police detective getting deeply emotionally involved with the whole thing and Gideon Fell coming in all sympathy and understanding. He’s rather human for one of the Great Detective types, albeit you never learn much about his personal life or opinions outside of crime.
The crime isn’t the locked-room mystery that Carr specialised in, but it is an “impossible crime” — though I realised quickly what was up with that (a similar device used in a couple of other crime novels that I happen to like). It’s fun to work out what’s going on and why.
There is something rather dark about the motivations and the way a particular character is treated, that left me wanting a little more at the end of the novel — something to set the world properly to rights for her. Maybe an epilogue or something. But the mystery is resolved well.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, John Dickson Carr, mystery
Posted November 28, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Cold Clay
Genres: Crime,
Fantasy,
Mystery Pages: 208
Series: Shady Hollow #2 Rating: Synopsis: It's autumn in Shady Hollow, and residents are looking forward to harvest feasts. But then a rabbit discovers a grisly crop: the bones of a moose.
Soon, the owner of Joe's Mug is dragged out of the coffeeshop and questioned by the police about the night his wife walked out of his life—and Shady Hollow—forever. It seems like an open-and-shut case, but dogged reporter Vera Vixen doesn't believe gentle Joe is a killer. She'll do anything to prove his innocence ... even if it means digging into secrets her neighbors would rather leave buried.
Juneau Black’s Cold Clay is another reasonably cosy mystery in the same vein as the first book: if you didn’t enjoy that, then you won’t find yourself charmed by this one, and if you did enjoy the first one, it’s likely your thing unless the conceit is wearing thin for you already. For me, it wasn’t: I was ready to suspend my disbelief once more, readily engage with the world in which a raven runs a bookshop and a moose a café, and get mildly outraged that the police bear would arrest a hard-working honest moose.
If that all sounds ridiculous, it may not be for you, but the book treats it as obvious (aside from a brief introductory page in which it advises not to get caught up on the how of it all), and it doesn’t get played as ridiculous. Really it’s just about people, except they happen to have some animal traits. Here and there I was annoyed that they didn’t use their animal traits a bit more (flying’s all very well, but some of you have noses, why did nobody ever hunt down a quarry by scent?), but mostly I just suspended my disbelief and settled in to enjoy.
I say it’s a “reasonably” cosy mystery because… I’m never entirely sure where the boundaries are on this one. Murder seems, by definition, pretty uncosy — but a lot of mystery fiction is really about that closure at the end, and saying “everything is going to be okay now”, which is profoundly cosy. Your mileage may vary, but I think this one qualifies.
As far as the actual plot goes, once again I was a bit ahead of the game and identified the culprit quickly, but watching Vera get there was entertaining as far as it goes. I could’ve done without the relationship drama between Orville and Vera — really, kids, just communicate! But all in all, I enjoyed myself once more, and quickly grabbed the next book in the series, the short stories, and the fourth book as well for good measure. I’m having fun.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Juneau Black, mystery, SF/F
Posted November 28, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 28 Comments
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is “Top Ten Books Set in X”. I was having trouble thinking of a place or a type of location or anything that I was confident of thinking up ten items for — but I do know a lot about the Golden Age of crime. The Golden Age for crime fiction was basically in the 1920s and 1930s, and it featured a lot of books written in the same kind of framework, often set in the interwar period. Usually an unlikeable character is set up and then murdered, and a detective (amateur, private or police) comes along and solves the mystery, closing things out with a comfortable solution that sees order restored. Often the solution is very clever — locked room mysteries and such, very contrived, setting a puzzle for the reader.
These books tend to have a certain sort of feel to them, and I love them dearly. So without further ado, here’s a top ten of books with that kind of feel. I’m not just going to include classic books or books that are strictly from the Golden Age, but also a couple of books that I think try to tap into the feel of that era.
- Strong Poison, by Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers was a giant of this genre, along with others like Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, and Strong Poison features not only her series detective (Lord Peter Wimsey), but his love interest and eventual wife, Harriet Vane. In writing the two of them together, Sayers was often at her wittiest, and they have a slow-burn, will-they-won’t-they for the ages.
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie. I couldn’t leave out the queen here, so I’ll give you the book I read first and which got me hooked on books of the period. She breaks the “rules” in a couple of ways, but most readers won’t mind, because it’s a fun puzzle. (It’s also worth noting that Christie often wrote about poisons with intimate knowledge, though not in this book — if you’re curious, I recommend Kathryn Harkup’s A is for Arsenic, which discusses that at some length.)
- Fire in the Thatch, by E.C.R. Lorac. I think E.C.R. Lorac was genuinely among the greats of the era, even though she was mostly forgotten (at least until the British Library Crime Classics series started republishing her work). This one is characteristic of the care she takes to evoke people and a landscape and a way of living. It’s a little later than the peak Golden Age of crime, but nonetheless, it has that feel to it.
- Death in the Tunnel, by Miles Burton. This mystery is one I absolutely loved — and one which would’ve fit into my other potential category, which was “books set on trains”. It’s less focused on people and place than Lorac, and more about the puzzle — and it was a fun one!
- The Sussex Downs Murder, by John Bude. As an example of this genre/setting, this is a good one; it’s a solid puzzle, with the sort of methodical detecting characteristic of the period. This sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, but I’d rather say I’m setting expectations. I enjoyed it a lot, but you have to enjoy it as what it is, and not as a modern psychological crime novel.
- Death on the Down Beat, by Sebastian Farr. This one came as a bit of a surprise to me when I read it: it’s an epistolary novel, and also includes a piece of music as a vital clue. It also managed to fool me, which isn’t always easy.
- Twice Around the Clock, by Billie Houston. This is a book that was celebrated a bit more when it came out, owing to the author’s minor celebrity. It’s a country house novel with a closed circle of suspects, which is such a classic situation that (combined with the fact that I found it a lot of fun) I had to include it.
- Cocaine Blues, by Kerry Greenwood. This one is, of course, a modern novel — and it’s preoccupied with a few things that the classics usually aren’t (sex, fashion, etc). But it has a little of the same feel, to me — and you can believe that the Honorable Phryne Fisher has met Lord Peter Wimsey.
- Death at Wentwater Court, by Carola Dunn. Again, this is a modern novel, but it feels very Golden Age. Daisy Dalrymple is an enjoyable protagonist, and certain aspects of the situation in this book are deeply classic for mysteries of the Golden Age.
- Shady Hollow, by Juneau Black. Bear with me here, because this isn’t only a modern novel, but also all the protagonists are animals, living peacefully together (herbivores beside carnivores) in a little village. It also feels much less British than all the others I’ve listed. But this is my list, and I get to include something a little aside from the track if I want to: it’s the little village setting and the old-timey feel that makes this one fit into my list.
Alright, that was a bit of work! Did anything there interest you? I’d be curious to hear!
Tags: books, crime, mystery, Top Ten Tuesday
Posted November 23, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Shady Hollow
Genres: Crime,
Fantasy,
Mystery Pages: 208
Series: Shady Hollow #1 Rating: Synopsis: The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony — until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case.
Reporter Vera Vixen is a relative newcomer to Shady Hollow. The fox has a nose for news, so when she catches wind that the death might be a murder, she resolves to get to the bottom of the case, no matter where it leads. As she stirs up still waters, the fox exposes more than one mystery, and discovers that additional lives are in jeopardy.
Vera finds more to this town than she ever suspected. It seems someone in the Hollow will do anything to keep her from solving the murder, and soon it will take all of Vera’s cunning and quickness to crack the case.
Juneau Black’s Shady Hollow fell into my hands right when I needed something to restore my faith that I actually enjoy reading and don’t just do it because I always have. In theory I was still fascinated by books, but in practice everything seemed a bit tedious — and then I came across Shady Hollow from someone’s Top Ten Tuesday blog post, and decided… I’ll just give it a chance.
In the end, it’s basically a mystery story like so many others… except that the characters are all animals. Our heroine is a fox, the police detective is a bear, the medical examiner is a snake, and the guy who sells everyone coffee is a moose. If you stop too long to wonder about it, you’ll get jolted out of the story — how does a raven turn the pages of a book, or a moose serve coffee? But you can just settle in and enjoy what there is, and the way the animals’ abilities occasionally give things a bit of flavour (like Lenore’s ability to fly), and the way the various different animals interact.
(And of course, of course, a beaver runs the sawmill. Of course.)
In the end, the mystery didn’t surprise me much, and I was a bit disappointed that while abilities like flight are used, it doesn’t mention scent at all. Vera’s a fox! There’s surely some degree of ability to track there — and Orville too!
But mostly I just had fun, and breezed straight through the book, and felt immensely grateful it fell into my paws — sorry, hands — right now.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Juneau Black, mystery, SF/F
Posted November 21, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Theft of the Iron Dogs
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 284
Series: British Library Crime Classics Rating: Synopsis: While hot on the heels of serial coupon-racketeer Gordon Ginner, Chief Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard receives word of an intriguing incident up in Lancashire – the summer cottage of local farmer Giles Hoggett has been broken into, with an assortment of seemingly random items missing which include a complete reel of salmon line, a large sack, and two iron dogs from his fireplace.
What first appears to Insp. MacDonald as a simple break-in quickly spirals into a mystery of contested land grabs for fishing between farmers, made all the more enticing to MacDonald when a body is then found in the river – the body of Gordon Ginner. It’s up to Insp. MacDonald, aided by the locals of Lunesdale, to determine who broke into Hoggett’s cottage, where his irons dogs have gone, and how Ginner met his watery end.
For my money, E.C.R. Lorac is one of the finest classic crime writers. She writes compelling mysteries with an amazing sense of place and setting, and characters who are enjoyable, if sometimes idealised. There’s a sense with her books that the mysteries arise out of place and personality, rather than coming up with a mystery and then inventing a setting to fit around it, which is probably true if Martin Edwards’ introductions about Lorac and her love for Lunesdale are true.
The Theft of the Iron Dogs returns to Lunesdale, in fact, and the mystery is only unravelled because the people of the area have habits, patterns and expectations which aren’t obvious to people from outside the area, meaning the cover-up of the crime isn’t as perfect as the perpetrator thinks. The story features Macdonald, of course, Lorac’s series detective, with his usual conscientiousness and care, and his sense of compassion for the people affected by his investigations.
It’s a slow one, country-paced, in a way that feels right for the place and the story. I really enjoyed this one, and though the crime itself is not terribly “cosy” (is any crime?), the overall feel is a pretty cosy, lower-stakes kind of story.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, E.C.R. Lorac, mystery
Posted November 17, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
The Seat of the Scornful
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 240
Series: Dr Gideon Fell #14 Rating: Synopsis: Judge Horace Ireton didn't care about the letter of the law. He was interested in administering absolute, impartial justice as he saw it. To some, his methods of meting out justice made him seem hardly human, for they were coldly calculated - the same type of "cat and mouse" technique that he used in his chess games with Dr. Gideon Fell, the elephantine detective. The system, as he explained it, consisted in "letting your opponent think he's perfectly safe, winning hands down: and then catch him in a corner." But the system was not infallible. One day Judge Ireton was found with a pistol in his hand, beside the body of his daughter's fiancé, a man he had every reason to dislike, as many people knew; and he found that when one was on the inside looking out, the game had to be played differently.
I really thought I disliked John Dickson Carr’s writing, and didn’t pick up most of his books republished in the British Library Crime Classics series. It seems I was wrong: after I enjoyed He Who Whispers, I decided to give a couple more a shot, and this is the first one I got to. It concerns a judge who is particularly merciless in court, dealing out justice according to his own sense of it, who becomes entangled in a murder case — the murder of his daughter’s undesirable fiancé.
It’s not the usual locked-room puzzle, but more of a puzzle of how people work, and how appearances can be made to serve one narrative or another. It has a bit more humanity to it than some of Carr’s other books (perhaps ones written earlier), and the characters feel a little more real, a little less like archetypes acting out their stories.
It made for a fun puzzle, at least, and I’m convinced enough to try reading John Dickson Carr’s other novels — clearly they can be either hit or miss for me, and must each be judged on their own merits, despite my run of bad luck with his other work that I’d read before.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, John Dickson Carr, mystery
Posted November 13, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Heads You Lose
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 159
Series: Inspector Cockrill #1 Rating: Synopsis: Pigeonsford Estate is playing host to a group of close friends when one of their number, Grace Morland, is found dead in a ditch. The murder is made even more unusual by the fact that Grace was wearing her friend Francesca's hat, the same hat that only the day before she'd claimed she wouldn't be caught dead wearing. Inspector Cockrill has known most of the friends since they were children. They are all from good families and very close to one another; how, then, could one of them be a cold-blooded killer? And if one of them had murdered Grace which one was it and why had they done it?
Heads You Lose did some very interesting things, from my point of view: the sympathy with a particular character was genuinely affecting, to me at least, and I’m noting some patterns with her work that intrigue me. As a story, though, there were a few things that bothered me. It’s a bit spoilery to go into them in depth, so I’ll just start by saying that I think in the end I’d say it was worth reading, at least for me as a fan of this period of mystery/crime fiction, but I do have caveats and content warnings to go with that.
The main caveat is the fact that the plot hinges on the oft-derived trope of a mentally ill killer, one who has blackouts and commits crimes unbeknownst to himself. That means the third-person narration is sometimes a bit unreliable, as it sticks close to particular characters’ POV, and thus misleads the reader. You have to read very closely to catch the clue, and of course you’re not looking there for it.
I did think that the ending was rather better than the “psycho killer with blackouts” trope portended. There’s a lot of pathos in the ending for that particular character and how it comes about.
I would also note that there’s a Jewish character who is treated somewhat sympathetically, and yet at the same time with some anti-Semitic tropes. Of course this was common in the crime fiction in and around the Golden Age (Dorothy L. Sayers did similar in Whose Body?), but it’s worth knowing going in.
I am noticing that Brand doesn’t do much bringing her villains to justice. They usually die in some kind of appropriate way — not in the way that some other detective novels do, with a “you should write a confession and shoot yourself, or I’ll put the police in possession of what I know”, but still, they each die. It has less of a “detective as judge and jury” ring, and more like… “the universe will put things right, somehow”. Either way, an interesting thing to note, as I read more of Brand’s work.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Christianna Brand, crime, mystery
Posted November 10, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Accident by Design
Genres: Crime,
Mystery Pages: 199
Rating: Synopsis: Templedean Place in the Cotswold Hills of England was among the last of the truly aristocratic estates, where old family traditions still flourished. When Gerald Vanstead arrived from Australia with his family, to attend his father in his last illness, other, more deadly things flourished.
Gerald's wife was the bickering kind; he drank too much, was given to feuding with the chauffeur, and seemed excessively tightlipped and disagreeable—and so no one was particularly sorry when one day the brakes on Gerald's car failed to hold, and he and his wife were killed.
A family picnic ended in the accidental death of another Vanstead, a fire destroyed what might have been a clue, and there was a night of horrible suspense before Inspector Macdonald could say who hated Gerald Vanstead the most and who, in a house of cultured, well-bred men and women, was most capable of murder.
I’ve said for a while that E.C.R. Lorac is one of my favourite authors from this period, and that’s in part because she can sketch in a place and a cast that one can care about, often full of decent people trying to do their best, and driven by her humane and careful detective, Macdonald.
Accident by Design is another case of that, but it subverted my expectations somewhat in the way the characters were set up, proving that Lorac was careful not to get too formulaic. It would be easy to slip into looking for a certain character type, and to feel sure that they are guilty, but Lorac doesn’t make it so easy.
In the end, it isn’t one of my favourite stories by Lorac (I think that still goes to Death of an Author, which isn’t even a Macdonald book, and is rather clever instead of being atmospheric), but it’s a solid example of her work. Perhaps best enjoyed once you’re used to her tendencies, so you get the surprise I did…
I continue to think Lorac’s one of the best of her generation of mystery writers — and that’s despite a fairly prolific output.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, E.C.R. Lorac, mystery
