Posted April 21, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Twice Round the Clock, Billie Houston
Twice Round the Clock was pretty much what I expected of this series, which means it was pretty comforting. I knew nothing about the author, though she was somewhat famous in her time (for reasons other than being an author); I wonder how much that impacted the initial reception of the book.
As it goes, it’s a country house mystery with a somewhat closed circle of suspects (not a locked room mystery, and events make it clear that people can make it to the house, but most of the suspects are cooped up in the house due to an impressive thunderstorm). The victim is a rather awful man, and the author does well at making clear that he’s awful without ever doing anything that you can point to as being so very bad.
There’s quite a bit of melodrama, fainting ladies and spurious engagements and the like — not to mention poisons that can be smeared on a person or animal and kill them spontaneously at a pre-determined time later — but that’s pretty par for the course for a crime novel of the period, and enjoyable in its way.
One thing Houston did really well is the pacing: starting off with the discovery of the body, then winding the clock back to show us the preceding hours, and then ratcheting up the tension to the climax. With each chapter having a clock time, that does help to create the tension of the story.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: Billie Houston, book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery
Posted March 31, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Green for Danger, Christianna Brand
Green for Danger is one of those classic crime novels that definitely doesn’t feel cosy. That’s not just because it’s set during the Second World War — writers were perfectly capable of writing normality-restoring, comforting crime fiction then; in fact, it was a great time for it. The war setting doesn’t help, though, because the unease creeps around the story: consider the fact that all the doctors have morphine to take in case they should get buried alive during a bombing.
Mostly, though, it’s the mystery itself that’s unsettling. The potential culprits are all an inner circle, a limited group, and you watch their insecurities and their foibles playing out as you suspect each in turn. Could it be this one, or that one? Could it be because of a dark past, a horrible secret? Why is one’s voice recognised by various patients? Was there something suspicious about that previous event? And there’s the detective, putting pressure on them all to make them confess…
It all ends up being very uncomfortable, because it’s a group of friends, and nobody wants to believe anyone else has done it. There’s a web of jealousies and friendships between them that doesn’t stop them wanting the best for each other — but someone is a killer.
Brand’s a good writer, but it isn’t what I typically look for when I pick up a British Library Crime Classic.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, Christianna Brand, crime, mystery
Posted March 4, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Crook O’ Lune, E.C.R. Lorac
Crook O’ Lune is very typical of E.C.R. Lorac’s books: maybe slower than some, but using a strong sense of place to give the story atmosphere, and to create a mystery that fits into the setting, the lie of the land, the kind of people. It’s perhaps even better at that because Lorac based it on a real place, and even on her own house: you can feel the love for the house, the land, the way of life, in all the characters.
Of course, it’s a little idealised, and rather anti-urban in sentiment — even people who come from outside are by and large calmed by the land, connected to it all of a sudden, in a way that doesn’t ring so true to me (or maybe it’s just the changing times, and everybody was closer to the land then, and more able to be absorbed back into a rural community).
The mystery in this one takes a long time to get going, but it’s all necessary set-dressing, and it’s all relevant. I didn’t ‘catch’ the killer ahead of time, this time: I suspected someone else, based on details that… I’m not sure whether they were intended as red herrings or just part of the set-dressing. But it all makes sense in execution, and despite some of the sordid deeds and the sense of increasing hurry about figuring out what happened, it was a very relaxing read — you can rely on Lorac for that!
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, E.C.R. Lorac, mystery
Posted February 19, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet
His Bloody Project was an interesting read right after Murder: The Biography, since it touches on the same themes of what is right and just when someone might not be in their right mind — and how you would tell. I could easily imagine this fictional case of Roddy Mcrae being one of the cases discussed in Murder: A Biography, in how Roddy is treated by the law and whether that’s just. (On the other hand, His Bloody Project leaves open the possibility that Roddy knew full well what he was doing, and that he murdered Flora and covered it up via his murder of Lachlan, hoping for more mercy for a “justified” killing.)
The format gets a little repetitive, since things are repeated between the various witness statements, Roddy’s own writing, and the court case itself. Each has subtle variations that cast light on Roddy’s character from different points of view, of course, but even with that cleverness, it’s still repetitive.
After reading it all, I’m still left that little bit uncertain about what to conclude. Was Roddy sane, did he plan this out? Was his written confession an elaborate lie? Does he remember exactly what he did to his victims? I think the hints are telling us that he committed the murder in a very planned way, and then wrote his narrative to cover it up — but there are spaces in between and subtleties that make it hard to be very sure. It’s very cleverly done, even though it isn’t comfortable reading.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Graeme Macrae Burnet
Posted February 16, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Mysterious Mr. Badman, W.F. Harvey
The Mysterious Mr. Badman is a bit unusual, featuring an amateur detective who is usually a carpet manufacturer (as the introduction from the series’ editor says, surely the only amateur detective to have that profession), and who is a kind older man, though backed up by a young nephew and a young woman who is involved in the case. Though it’s billed as a “bibliomystery”, honestly the book doesn’t play a huge part. It might as well be a second-hand suitcase or jacket, for all the book itself matters.
All the same, I found it fun: it was a quick read, and Athelstan Digby and Jim are rather sweet and careful in trying to sort things out and avoid scandal. Private justice, of course, but Digby in particular does his best not to cause lasting harm (padding a poker, for example, so as to knock someone out rather than crack their head open, even when he’s being imprisoned).
I wouldn’t say it particularly stands out among all the British Library Crime Classics, but it was exactly what I want from this series: a classic mystery, where all is resolved at the end, and the world goes back to normal.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery, W.F. Harvey
Posted February 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Death of an Author, E.C.R. Lorac
Death of an Author is another really enjoyable mystery from E.C.R. Lorac — one slyly self-referential, given the stuff about it being impossible for a female author to write such a mystery, and an outlier as well, because it doesn’t feature her usual series detective. There’s also rather less of an “atmosphere”, though she does describe a couple of the locations very vividly.
The reason I’m losing my head and giving it five stars is that I found the mystery so genuinely intriguing to turn over in my mind. Often when I read mystery novels, I just wait for the author to lead me to the clues, pretty much ever since Sayers and that cheat of withholding the flake white clue (yes, I know, I do bang on about that). I don’t trust authors to give the clues, and also I cynically know how the twists and turns of a mystery novel go. But I didn’t anticipate every step of this one, and I didn’t spoiler myself for the end either: I wanted the full experience, and to give the puzzle a try myself.
In the end, I got there with the solution, though some things happened that I didn’t quite believe (and there was a bit that relied extremely heavily on luck), and I really enjoyed the process of getting there. Lorac was a good writer, and her wry wit in playing with the questions of authorship here offered some extra piquancy. (I wonder how people took it when they thought she was a guy, thanks to her pen-name?)
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, E.C.R. Lorac, mystery
Posted February 9, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Death on the Down Beat, Sebastian Farr
Death on the Down Beat was a bit of a surprise to me, to be honest. I hadn’t fully clocked the format: it’s an epistolary novel, based on the detective writing letters (and sending dossiers) home to his wife. (Amusingly, it’s very careful to make this feel a little more plausible, by the husband noting multiple times that he shouldn’t be doing this, but commenting on how helpful it is and asking his wife to file things for him in the usual way.) I knew that some extracts of a musical score were included — and an important clue — but not about the letters, and I think it helped this book feel a little different, even if the detective could barely be told apart from a host of other classic mystery detectives.
The letter format does mean that the reader is held at a bit of a distance from any action, and doesn’t get to know the characters directly. The suspects thus rather blur into each other, which makes it difficult to have any real suspicions — I went off on a completely wrong track, though I wasn’t really wrong about the motive. So that’s my main critique here: there’s a lot of superfluous stuff and a lot of suspects, and the information we need is rather camouflaged by all of that.
Which makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy it, when I definitely did: I think this format is a neat idea, and I enjoyed the fact that the detection process was complemented by an understanding of the music. Not that I did understand the music, but it was explained well enough to get the point, and like Sayers’ tube of flake white in Five Red Herrings, I bet a little prior knowledge really illuminates things, and that’s kinda neat too. (Maybe it’s not quite as… obscuring as the flake white that Sayers wouldn’t name, though.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, mystery, Sebastian Farr
Posted February 5, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Murder: The Biography, Kate Morgan
Murder: The Biography is an interesting look at the history of murder, from the perspective of how different murder cases have changed the law (and how the law existing at the time impacted various murder cases). It’s written by a lawyer, but it’s accessible for the layperson, and Morgan remains keenly aware of how fascinating the topic of murder is to many. The details aren’t at all dry, but the back of the book contains details of how to find the relevant judgements, etc, for those who want to dig right into it.
For a reader of crime/mystery fiction, it has little to say about the fictional world (beyond a few comments that the bulk of murders are not like in books), just in case you were wondering — it focuses entirely on real-world cases, mostly things which helped to shape the law and other prosecutions. So we see things like the development of defences of diminished responsibility, and corporate manslaughter, through the lens of the events that prompted them. The latter law is still not really tested: the case of Grenfell, Morgan says, is a make-or-break moment for it, as you’d imagine.
I found it a really interesting read, and surprisingly quick. I wasn’t already aware of all of the murders, either. Just as a warning, there are a few really awful cases, such as the case of Dr Bateman’s negligence — skim that one if you’re a bit squeamish, and avoid the details.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, history, Kate Morgan, non-fiction
Posted January 7, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Murder at the Theatre Royale, Ada Moncrieff
Murder at the Theatre Royale was just as much fun as I’d hoped after reading Murder Most Festive. It’s not related to the first book at all, except in that it’s set at Christmas, and the narrative positively flies by — even more so than Murder Most Festive, I’d say. I’m a little disappointed there’s nothing else by Ada Moncrieff for me to inhale, because I had a lot of fun.
The main character of this one is more appealing than Murder Most Festive, through her determined industry at an actual paying job (rather than living off an estate) and her enthusiasm for her work. Daphne King is an agony aunt for a newspaper, but she wants to branch out and do more, her appetite whetted by a little mystery she solved involving a kidnapped person writing in to her column in code. Given the opportunity to do a little work for the culture section, she jumps at it, and finds herself embroiled in the mystery of the murder of an aging actor.
Veronica, who over time becomes Daphne’s Watson, is pretty cool too — not as sharp as Daphne, but a working woman trying hard to make her way, and a good companion for a little mystery-solving adventure…
I didn’t, in this case, figure out the culprit or the true motive for a while; I had my eye on a different character, because they seemed so unlikely at first (and the unlikely answer is often true). I should’ve thought more about the information I was being given about another character!
All in all, really enjoyable.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: Ada Moncrieff, book reviews, books, crime, mystery
Posted January 4, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Headed for a Hearse, Jonathan Latimer
A solid not-for-me, here. It shows its age in the attitudes to women and people of colour, and in the open portrayal of the police as being unashamedly violent, arbitrary, and prone to going around the law to get a conviction.
I feel weird about the one-star rating, given I finished it and found it absorbing enough… but would I have picked it up at all if I hadn’t already owned it, from an “advent calendar” of Golden Age crime fiction books? No, probably not. As usual, I’m rating based on my enjoyment, not the literary merit I think the book has — though that’s small enough in this case, too.
One thing that was portrayed well was the attitudes of the men on Death Row. Their reactions and interactions were interesting, their fear well-drawn, even as they themselves were still unpleasant. The horror of their situation is clear, even if their actions were reprehensible.
Rating: 1/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Jonathan Latimer, mystery
