Review: In the Fog

In the Fog by Richard Harding Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is clever, and unfortunately the reason that it's clever is a total spoiler.

In a club so exclusive that members don't even mention they belong to it because that would sound boastful, several members are sitting late at night. One is an opponent of a bill in parliament which one of the others, if he speaks to it, will probably get passed. This particular MP has a vice: he loves detective stories, and can't bear to put them down.

One of the other members then starts telling a detective story. Lost in a recent London fog, he stumbled into a house - he's not sure where - and found two people murdered.

It turns out that others of the members also have stories to contribute relating to this murder or the people involved, and the story-telling goes on long into the night...

It's well written, the journey is enjoyable, and the conclusion includes multiple twists, one after another.

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Review: City of Serpents: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 4

City of Serpents: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 4 by Christina Baehr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These books make me feel things - amusement, mostly, but also sadness and tension in sympathy with the plight of various characters - and that boosts their rating in my personal system. The main character and narrator, Edith, is a delight - principled without being pompous about it, brave, clever, and showing a delightful humility, and a willingness to work with others rather than go it alone, that I wish more protagonists had.

It does have a few minor flaws. Because I listened to the audiobook, I can't comment on the copy editing, except for a couple of language issues that came through even in audio format. Firstly, Edith (or rather the author) sometimes says "lay" where an actual speaker of Edith's dialect would use "lie," and secondly there's an instance of the "she glimpsed at me" error I've seen a few times. It should be either "glimpsed" or "glanced at," depending on whether the subject is doing it deliberately or not. Both imply momentary seeing, but "glimpsed" means something like "happened to see momentarily because of already looking in a particular direction"; it implies passive observation, whereas "glanced at" implies that the subject was directing their gaze, which is why it gets the "at" preposition and "glimpsed" doesn't. There are occasional minor Americanisms, too.

The plot doesn't completely rely on coincidence, but coincidence does help it along now and again and keep the cast tight and densely connected.

The various dragon-keeping families have several times now mentioned lighting beacons to signal each other for aid, but it's unclear how that would work, given that beacons are a line-of-sight signal and someone in between would have to pick up the signal and pass it on (the distances are great enough that line-of-sight doesn't apply).

My other question was, did young women routinely carry walking sticks in 1899? Young men certainly did, but I don't think healthy young women did, so arming themselves in this way would have been rather obvious.

None of this was even close to being fatal for my enjoyment of Edith's voice and her actions, and this largely real-feeling version of England (mainly London) at the end of the 19th century. The author reads extensively in literature of the period, and it shows. A lot of people who set their books in earlier time periods fail to give them any sense of authenticity, and I think it's partly because they've either never read or at least never really thought about anything written at the time. Edith is of her time while being fully relatable to a present-day reader, and it's an admirable feat of craft that makes her that way.

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Review: The Big Four

The Big Four by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A departure for the Poirot series, in that it's more in the vein of Edgar Wallace or Fu Manchu (complete with mysterious, sinister Chinese mastermind) than the classic Poirot setting of a country-house murder mystery. It's what's sometimes called a "fix-up," a number of short stories reworked into a novel, and that gives it an episodic feel, connected by an overarching set of adversaries; this means that the plot doesn't follow the usual rising action, climax, falling action shape as much as something planned as a novel from the start.

Hastings has been ranching in the Argentine with his wife "Cinderella" for a year and a half, and has come back to England for a planned couple of months on what is implied to be urgent business, but this is instantly dropped and not mentioned again when he connects back up with Poirot. He then spends nearly a year helping his old friend battle against the sinister conspiracy of the Big Four: the aforementioned Chinese mastermind, an American multi-millionaire, a French mad scientist, and a master of disguise and ruthless assassin. These four are attempting to destabilize the world in such a way that they can end up as dictators of it; they are behind various current revolutionary movements and labour troubles (because, of course, the idea that people who have genuine grievances with bad government and predatory management would organize themselves to oppose them is patently absurd).

I suspect that Hastings' ranch probably had its best year ever while he wasn't there mismanaging it, but that's just my prejudice. He continues to be remarkably dense, and resentful of this being pointed out, while Poirot continues to be intensely self-admiring and to come to correct conclusions on inadequate evidence. Poirot is forced to deceive not just his enemies, but his chief ally, because Hastings is too honest and would give the game away otherwise. Fortunately, he's trivially easy to deceive.

Part of Poirot's characterization here, which hasn't been as prominent previously, is that he never gets an English idiom or proverb quite correct, making him more of a "funny foreigner". The Chinese characters are mysterious and sinister. At times, the book approaches parody - of the suspense genre, of Sherlock Holmes (with the disguises and the (view spoiler)[faked death and the brother, who turns out to be a ploy in this case (hide spoiler)]), and of Poirot and Hastings themselves. The conclusion is a classic over-the-top trope.

Hastings makes a couple of classic sexist and racist remarks (of the French scientist, who is a woman, that he would have thought that a male brain was required to do what she does; later, that he has never been able to tell "Chinamen" apart), but I view these as the author's characterization of Hastings as a particular kind of English idiot, not as her own prejudices. The idea that a sinister conspiracy was behind various current political problems... I'm unsure whether she believed that, as many people of her background did at the time, or just used the trope fictionally.

Where the author does definitely fall down is in a few mechanical issues. She dangles a modifier, comma-splices two sentences, and frequently - her abiding fault - doesn't end a question with a question mark, also in a couple of places ending sentences which aren't questions with question marks.

But does the book work as what it is, despite what it is not being in the usual vein? I think it does, even though its author called it "that rotten book". There were plenty of worse thriller/suspense novels written in the period. Part of the book's sales success was down to the publicity around Christie's still-unexplained disappearance and reappearance shortly before its publication, but I think it stands up against its contemporaries in the genre. It's not a great Poirot book - it's not a great book of any kind - but I found it enjoyable in its own terms.

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Review: The Glass Slide World

The Glass Slide World by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Competent, rather than thrilling. That's even true of the interpolated excerpts from the pulp fictionalization of the main character's two fathers; it's both more competent and less thrilling than real pulp fiction of the era. I think the lack of thrillingness, despite pirates and conspiracies and spies and disease outbreaks and the threat of a selfish person causing World War I to break out early because of an obsession with wealth, is down largely to three things.

Firstly, the main character, Ava, is not obviously emotional about any of it. Now, I yield to nobody in my liking for a level-headed, sensible, pragmatic female character rather than an emotional mess, but they should still obviously feel something, and I never got much of an emotional sense off Ava. I'm not sure if that's the character or the narration style, which is matter-of-fact throughout.

Secondly, there's no real driving plot question. (Some spoilers in this paragraph for a not-very-exciting plot; you really won't lose much tension by reading them.) (view spoiler)[Ava goes off on a self-assigned scientific expedition to Nassau, pirates randomly occur for reasons not connected with her, she and her fellow passengers and some of the crew deal with that, she ends up in what is now South Africa (then the Cape Colony) and there's a need for someone with medical training, which she has, at a concentration camp left over from the Boer War, so she deals with that, meanwhile noping out of the whole spies-and-international-intrigue plot which lay behind the pirates. Then she goes home and passes her medical exams (implausibly learning the results on the same day). The end. (hide spoiler)]

Thirdly, the magic system is super loose and non-Sandersonian. The premise is that naturalists, by understanding nature, gain the ability to access powers that the creatures they study have, but a lot of it seems to be dependent on imagination, and while Ava insists that it's science (though not an exact science) and that it's not magic, it's totally magic. Her particular area of study is small and microscopic organisms, so her family think it's lacking in power, but it's really not.

Some of it is pretty dubious, too. At one point, needing a way to sterilize things in a field hospital, Ava turns water into alcohol using the power of yeast. Except yeast can't turn plain water into alcohol; alcohol has carbon atoms in it, and you need a source for those. Ava also learns to scry using bacteria, which are everywhere, and even has a vision of the future, feebly justified by the chain of life stretching through time as well as space.

The magic can do pretty much anything, and we don't know in advance what its limitations are, so it can be used to overcome any plot difficulty. Which is why Sanderson's First Law ("An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic") is so important. The stakes never feel very high, because we're never convinced that Ava is going to fail; she'll just pull a solution almost literally out of the air - plus she's not setting out to solve an overarching problem, she's just dealing with what's in front of her. Perhaps the next book, where she tries to prevent World War I, will solve the second problem if not the first.

But the book is, at least mechanically, very competent, like its heroine. I only noticed three sentences where there were missing or misplaced words in the pre-publication version I got from Netgalley for review, and the punctuation is impeccable.

The setting in 1902 feels authentic; it's not just scenery flats with some 21st-century people in cosplay performing in front of them. Sure, Ava's parents are what's now called a throuple, but it isn't like such arrangements didn't exist in the period. The poet Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938), author of 'Drake's Drum,' had a well-documented and long-standing polyamorous relationship with his wife and her cousin, for example, though as at time of writing his Wikipedia article doesn't mention it. The comparative openness of Ava's parents' arrangement - which seems to have been reached in the first book, which I haven't read - is perhaps slightly anachronistic, but given that one of her fathers is of African descent, anyone who's going to be shocked already is, so why obsess about hiding it?

Still, if this book was a contestant on American Idol around the mid-20-teens, Randy Jackson would describe it as "just OK for me, dogg," while Harry Connick Jr would say it was "all chops and no gravy". It's... fine. The competence would normally get it a Silver rating in my annual Best of the Year list, but I just didn't find it that exciting, mainly for reasons of craft that I've outlined above. An experienced author like Carrie Vaughn, who has written thrilling urban fantasy and supers books, can definitely do better than this.

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Review: The Crimson Cryptogram

The Crimson Cryptogram by Fergus W. Hume
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While there's plenty of detective work going on from the amateur detectives here (the police are hardly involved and dismissed out of hand as incompetent), it doesn't ultimately lead to the solution to the mystery. That comes through a combination of fortunate coincidence (discovering a key piece of evidence by total chance) and the confession of the criminal, which weakens the ending and makes it a disappointment to me.

Where it is stronger is in everything leading up to the end. The protagonist is a doctor, just trying to establish himself in his first practice, and he's assisted by his flatmate, a reporter. The doctor falls in love with the widow ((view spoiler)[actually her twin sister, who's far more level-headed and competent and is impersonating her flighty sister in order to protect her - I figured this out before the protagonist did (hide spoiler)]) of the murdered man and wants to help her. Because he doesn't have many patients yet, he's able to take the time to do so, which is an improvement on the usual "superhero job" phenomenon, where an amateur detective theoretically has a job, but in practice spends all their time solving the mystery.

The relationship between the doctor and the woman is developed over time, rather than being the usual instant thin romance, so points for that. The doctor is brave, determined, clever, and works hard on the solution, not being afraid to confront the various ne'er-do-wells associated with the victim, who was a dissolute gambler and all-round no-goodnik. His cousin the weaselly lawyer is also well characterized. As a novel, it's pretty good. As a mystery, ultimately disappointing.

The cryptogram of the title is something the victim writes on his arm in his own blood; it's solved relatively easily, and ends up being a herring of unusually literal redness. Also, it would have been much easier to understand how the cryptogram worked if we had been given a diagram of the solution grid. It's unimportant, though, just a bit of colour (again, literally).

Taking the rough with the smooth, it's just barely a recommendation, in the lowest tier of my annual list. But it is a recommendation.

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Review: The Sleuth of St. James's Square

The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A difficult collection to rate, because it has a combination of flaws (for me, predominating) and strengths.

The biggest flaw for a 21st-century audience is the author's evident disgust at the existence of Asian people. Though he's not a big fan of anyone who's not a well-off WASP, actually; anyone who's poor or foreign (or a villain, but that's often a subset of the other two categories) gets called a "creature" or, sometimes, a "human creature," and the implication is not a positive one.

This is the case even when the narrator is theoretically a diarist from the American colonial period; the voice is always the same, even though we have multiple (theoretical) narrators in the various stories, often first-person but sometimes third-person. The sleuth of the title provides a common thread, but often quite a slender one, and rarely does any sleuthing. A good many of the stories are recounted to him, or by him, about crimes that were committed somewhere else or even in a different time, and in the investigation of which he had no involvement. In one story, the only connection to him is that he's briefly mentioned as having given directions to the person who's informing the central character of the circumstances of her father's death. This doesn't help to develop him as a character, and I didn't feel like I knew him at all by the end, because I'd hardly seen him do anything, and most of what he said was reading out the writings of other people.

Not all of the stories are mystery stories as such, either, though most have a twist at the end which changes the reader's perspective on the preceding events. The twists are often quite clever, though of course some are weaker than others.

The Gutenberg edition has quite a few uncorrected scan errors. I'll send them in at some stage as errata.

Overall, a miss for me, and I don't see quite where the enthusiasm for the author from his contemporaries came from. It doesn't quite make it to my 2025 recommendation list, even in the lowest tier.

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Review: Make Mine Homogenized

Make Mine Homogenized by Rick Raphael
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Farm animals near a nuclear test site in Nevada start producing milk and eggs with ridiculously impossible properties.

It's as silly as it sounds, and poorly edited; there are missing commas around terms of address, commas between adjectives that don't require them, commas before the main verb, and a number of misspellings, including "yoke" for "yolk".

I found it very mildly amusing.

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