Tag: E.C.R. Lorac

Review – Rope’s End, Rogue’s End

Posted November 14, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Rope’s End, Rogue’s End

Rope's End, Rogue's End

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 249
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Wulfstane Manor, a rambling old country house with many unused rooms, winding staircases, and a maze of cellars, had been bequeathed to Veronica Mallowood and her brother Martin. The last time the large family of Mallowoods had all foregathered under the ancestral roof was on the occasion of their father's funeral, and there had been one of those unholy rows which not infrequently follow the reading of a will. That was some years ago, and as Veronica found it increasingly difficult to go on paying for the upkeep of Wulfstane, she summoned another family conference -- a conference in which Death took a hand.

Rope's End, Rogue's End is, of course, an Inspector MacDonald case, in which that popular detective plays a brilliant part.

Rope’s End, Rogue’s End isn’t one of my favourite E.C.R. Lorac books so far, though when I say that you always need to take into account that I think she was a really great writer. A three-star rating for an E.C.R. Lorac book is always relative (for me) to what I know her best books can be. In this case, she didn’t really exercise her talent for likeable characters, with everyone in the Mallowood family being difficult and argumentative, their relationships always rocky.

What I did think about a lot is that E.C.R. Lorac was careful not to pigeon-hole herself. She doesn’t have a particular character “type” that always turns out to be the villain. There are similarities between the situation in this book and that in Accident by Design — but the similarities are fairly superficial, and not a guide as to whodunnit in this particular story.

As usual, Lorac’s ability to evoke a sense of place does shine through in the portrayal of Wulfstane Manor, though again, it’s not a copy/paste by any means: while several of the characters adore the house, and Macdonald is certainly impressed by it, it doesn’t feel like a happy house, and the sense of wear and dilapidation is what comes through most strongly.

The mystery itself, I worked out the basics of fairly quickly, but figuring out exactly how everything was done was something else.

The main thing marring the experience here is that the Kindle edition is very badly edited. My guess is that OCR was used, but the system didn’t recognise various bits of punctuation (colons and dashes), meaning that sentences don’t always make a whole lot of sense.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Death Came Softly

Posted June 24, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Death Came Softly

Death Came Softly

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 251
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

This crime puzzle features Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald, who is a “London Scot” and an avowed bachelor with a love for walking in the English countryside. But what will he make of the body found dead in a cave?

Death Comes Softly has a lot to recommend it; if it weren’t an E.C.R. Lorac book, it’d unquestionably be four stars, whereas as it is I’m weighing in the balance with her other books and wondering if four stars is quite fair. Sometimes when I’m reading classic crime, I’m just looking for a mystery with all the traditional bells and whistles, and that’ll be satisfying in and of itself. It feels like with E.C.R. Lorac’s work, I look for a little more.

Still, with her usual skill she summons up a landscape that feels beautiful, peaceful and real — and a group of characters who also feel like humans. Macdonald is, as ever, a fundamentally decent person, and Lorac’s usual ability to make her characters feel memorable and worth knowing is present too.

I tumbled to the why of the mystery quicker than the how, and feel like maybe it could’ve used a little more hinting. Mind you, maybe when it was written this kind of thing would’ve been more obvious. I’ve never handled a charcoal brazier at all, after all.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Murder in Vienna

Posted May 14, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Murder in Vienna

Murder in Vienna

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 194
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Superintendent Macdonald, C.I.D., studied his fellow-passengers on the Vienna plane simply because he couldn’t help it, because he hadn’t conditioned himself to being on holiday. The distinguished industrialist he recognised: the stout man he put down (quite mistakenly) as a traveller in whisky. The fair girl was going to a job (he was right there) and the aggressive young man in the camel coat might be something bookish. Macdonald turned away from his fellow-passengers deliberately; they weren’t his business, he was on holiday - or so he thought.

Against the background of beautiful Vienna, with its enchanting palaces and gardens, its disenchanted back-streets and derelicts of war, E. C. R. Lorac constructs another great detective story with all its complexities, an exciting and puzzling crime story.

I really love E.C.R. Lorac’s work, for a lot of reasons I’ve written about before, and it boils down to two gifts that she had. One, she was good at characters, and especially at creating likeable characters. Two, she has a great sense for place, and for showing how a place is lived in — I thought at one point she was mostly good at describing rural locations and small towns, but this book (and others set in London) show she just had a gift in general of making anywhere sound lovely in its way. In this case, post-WWII Vienna.

The other thing to bear in mind is that even a character you like a lot might turn out to be a murderer, and that someone who’s a bit of a slimeball needn’t be the one who killed someone. If you read only one or two of her books, it’s easy to think that she’ll always point the finger at a certain type of character, but it isn’t the case.

Murder in Vienna captures the unsettled feeling of a city uneasy with what some of its inhabitants have done. The collaborators walk free, and it’s unclear who collaborated because they felt that they had to and who collaborated willingly. That isn’t completely germane to this story, it’s just part of the feeling of everything. But Vienna itself is beautiful in Lorac’s words, and through the eyes of Macdonald, one of the most human of the detectives of classic fiction (in my view). I found it all really enjoyable, not so much the mystery itself, but how the mystery inhabited Vienna and the anxious minds of those trying to believe that the ordeal is over and normality has returned.

Poor Macdonald really should be allowed a proper holiday at some point, though. If he could please be returning from holiday at the start of a book or something, that’d be nice. No more busman’s holidays for him, please.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Impact of Evidence

Posted February 21, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Impact of Evidence

Impact of Evidence

by E.C.R. Lorac, Carol Carnac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 221
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Near St Brynneys in the Welsh border country, isolated by heavy snow and flooding from the thaw, a calamity has occurred. Old Dr Robinson, a known 'menace o the roads', has met his end in a collision with a jeep at a hazardous junction. But when police arrive at the scene, a burning question hints at something murkier than mere accident: why was there a second body - a man not recognised any locals - in the back of Robinson's car?

As the local inspectors dive into the muddy waters of this strange crime, Chief Inspector Julian Rivers and Inspector Lancing are summoned from Scotland Yard to the windswept wilds, where danger and deceit lie in wait.

Puzzling and atmospheric, this exceedingly rare mystery from one of the masters of crime fiction's Golden Age returns to print for the first time since its publication in 1954.

It’s always exciting when the British Library Crime Classics series bring out another of E.C.R. Lorac’s books, especially the rare and out of print ones. I’m slightly less fond of Lorac’s work under the Carol Carnac pseudonym, perhaps because I’m not as fond of the detective — though Lorac’s McDonald doesn’t show us a lot of his personal life, he does show a constant decency and patience, and that impression has been cumulative through the books in which he’s featured. Lancing and Rivers don’t really compare (and don’t really stand out to me, either, though nor did McDonald at first).

In any case, Impact of Evidence is the latest, a book which is out of print and almost unattainable until now. The setup is intriguing: details are drawn from Lorac’s own experience of Lunesdale, but transplanted to the Welsh borders, and she depicts farm life with her usual care for what’s needed and how those communities worked. As usual, she’s idealised the working farmer a little here, with her usual “salt of the earth” rock-solid decent characters — but having read more of her work, one’s always aware of the tension there, and when those people might do wrong.

I admit I was onto what happened fairly early on just because of certain details that were drawn to the reader’s attention multiple times, but it was still interesting to see how it worked out, and how some things were subverted (like the Derings matter-of-fact behaviour about the accusations of them).

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Theft of the Iron Dogs

Posted November 21, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Theft of the Iron Dogs

The Theft of the Iron Dogs

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 284
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: four-stars
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

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Review – Accident by Design

Posted November 10, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Accident by Design

Accident by Design

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 199
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Templedean Place in the Cotswold Hills of England was among the last of the truly aristocratic estates, where old family traditions still ïŹ‚ourished. 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

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Review – Post After Post-Mortem

Posted October 30, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Post After Post-Mortem

Post After Post-Mortem

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 300
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

The Surrays and their five children form a prolific writing machine, with scores of treatises, reviews and crime thrillers published under their family name. Following a rare convergence of the whole household at their Oxfordshire home, Ruth – middle sister who writes ‘books which are just books’ – decides to spend some weeks there recovering from the pressures of the writing life while the rest of the brood scatter to the winds again. Their next return is heralded by the tragic news that Ruth has taken her life after an evening at the Surrays’ hosting a set of publishers and writers, one of whom is named as Ruth’s literary executor in the will she left behind.

Despite some suspicions from the family, the verdict at the inquest is suicide – but when Ruth’s brother Richard receives a letter from the deceased which was delayed in the post, he enlists the help of CID Robert Macdonald to investigate what could only be an ingeniously planned murder.

I normally love E.C.R. Lorac’s books, and I think this was a very fine example of her work… without being one that I, strictly speaking, enjoyed. She has a way of describing characters and places that can make you love them and feel their goodness — and in this book, the nastiness of murder feels particularly prominent. It’s less “good people overcome” and more “good people are overcome”, and it just hit wrong for my current mood, despite being well handled.

Those who read it should be warned that the setup has the murder being taken to be suicide at first, and that the family react accordingly, with shock and horror and the sense that the world is upended. And that isn’t the end to their sorrows.

It’s a good thing that Lorac writes such a sensitive, humane detective in MacDonald, because his sympathy also helped to make this book as powerful as it is.

In the end, the solution was also a sad one, and the whole thing just left me with a sense of melancholy. Beautifully written, perhaps among Lorac’s best — but perhaps not one that I’ll visit again.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Crook O’ Lune

Posted March 4, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Crook o Lune by E.C.R. LoracCrook 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

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Review – Death of an Author

Posted February 12, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Death of an Author by E.C.R. LoracDeath 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

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Review – Crossed Skis

Posted February 12, 2022 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Crossed Skis by Carol CarnacCrossed Skis, Carol Carnac

Carol Carnac is perhaps better known (at least since the British Library Crime Classics started coming out) as E.C.R. Lorac — one of my preferred writers from that series of reissues. It’s not that her plots are particularly original or different, and in fact they’re usually easy to work out, but it’s the way she writes about people and places, bringing out the atmosphere of place and writing well about ordinary, decent people (for the most part — aside from the criminal).

All in all, her books epitomise the sense of things being set to rights that’s common to a lot of Golden Age crime fiction, and that can be rather comforting if that’s your thing. They’re a reasonable puzzle, and the detectives are generally likeable (unlike, say, John Dickson Carr’s); more Agatha Christie than Dorothy Sayers on the scale of literary pretension. This book is exactly what you’d expect, as a consequence: a decent sense of place, a series of thumbnail portraits about decent, pretty ordinary people in a pretty ordinary situation, and a couple of red herrings.

I found this one a tad obvious, because I very quickly narrowed the field down to two possibles, from all the descriptions and actions of the characters. The setting, though, is lovely — you get the sense of the crowded trains, the cold air, the bubbly enthusiasm of the group of Brits getting away on a skiing holiday together, slightly lacking in inhibitions because it’s not Britain and they don’t all know each other well. The characters are mostly sketched in because the group is so large (16 characters in the traveling party), so I didn’t find it quite as good at bringing characters to life, here.

It all sounds a bit like I’m damning Lorac’s books with faint praise, but I genuinely pounce upon each one that gets reissued, and enjoyed this one too — but it’s like enjoying food from the fish and chip shop rather than a fancy restaurant. Solid and satisfying, but usually not surprising.

Rating: 3/5

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