Review: The Clue of the Twisted Candle

The Clue of the Twisted Candle by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A writer of clever mysteries is manipulated by someone he believes to be a friend into shooting another man dead accidentally. His wealthy, influential "friend" has done this because he once wanted the woman who is now the writer's wife, and she turned him down.

The writer's actual friend, a Scotland Yard assistant commissioner, tries to prove his innocence. But later, the false friend is murdered in what appears to be a locked room...

A strong classic mystery from Edgar Wallace. Sure, I guessed a couple of the twists, though not how the locked-room murder was achieved. The villain isn't a cheap, cartoonish stock villain; he's well characterized, and believably and thoroughly villainous. (Though to make him so thoroughly awful, Wallace has to make him not English.)

The romance is a bit thin, as they often are in Edgar Wallace, and the love interest is far too young for the detective, but she is resourceful and brave and intelligent, so there's that.

It's been eccentrically edited by someone who thinks that an exclamation mark is a good thing to end a question with, rather than a question mark, and does this constantly. They were also weak on commas after subordinate clauses. I'm blaming an unknown editor, because Wallace himself reputedly rarely did any editing on his books, and I've not seen these quirks in other books of his I've read either.

Wallace's books are all thriller, no filler, and there's plenty to keep you glued to the page.

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Review: The Fire Within

The Fire Within by Patricia Wentworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this up under the impression that it was a classic mystery. And at first, it seemed like it would be.

Old Edward is rather a nasty old man who is dying of (probably - it's never said outright) cancer. He has little other than contempt for his brother's son, also named Edward; he much prefers Edward's childhood companion David, now Old Edward's doctor. His wards are sisters Mary and Elizabeth. Mary is recently married to Edward, but David has never got over being in love with her. Elizabeth is in love with David, but it's unrequited; her friend Agneta's brother Louis nurses a similarly unrequited love for Elizabeth. There's also another woman, the widow of the doctor whose practice David took over, who has her eye on David as well.

David, out of principle, refuses to let Old Edward leave him any legacy, so it's mostly willed to the younger Edward, with some provision for Elizabeth.

And then David is called because Old Edward has taken a turn, and is close to death. The old man tells him, "I was fine until I drank from that cup. Edward brought it to me." David tests the dregs in Old Edward's home chemistry lab; there's a huge dose of arsenic.

And then Mary asks him, for her sake, because he once said he'd do anything for her, to just sign the death certificate so there won't be an inquest. Against everything he believes in, and believing that he's becoming an accessory to murder in so doing, he does so, unable to resist his appeal - and it breaks him.

Spoiler tags from here on. (view spoiler)[Shortly after this, both David and Edward receive letters from Old Edward, which he'd arranged to have sent to them with some delay, revealing that it was one of his nasty jokes - he put the arsenic in the cup himself, as a way of ending his suffering that would also cause problems for Edward, but he doesn't want Edward actually convicted of his murder.

This doesn't help David at all. He did what he did, believing what he believed, and he despises himself, and, increasingly, Mary. He's unable to sleep, and starts drinking heavily.

Eventually, Elizabeth is able to grant him sleep, using a mystical connection that she has to the Divine. Desperate, he marries her so that they can be together and she can help him sleep. He sees her only as his old childhood friend, but hopes that eventually they can come to be truly married.

He's had a recurring dream for many years of a mysterious woman in the moonlight by the sea. He used to sleepwalk during this dream. Not long after his marriage, he starts doing so again, and comes to Elizabeth at night, unconscious of what he's doing.

She becomes pregnant, shortly after Mary has also conceived. (Elizabeth and Mary - the choice of names is surely intentional.) But how can she tell David? (hide spoiler)]

The passages dealing with Elizabeth's mystical consciousness reminded me very much of Charles Williams. And after setting everything up for potential tragedy, even an actual murder, the author pulls off what I call the Glorious Ending, where someone acts so much out of love that it completely transforms the outcome.

The author's prose, without being showy or complicated, is expressive and intelligent. There are a lot of (unattributed) poetry quotations at the heads of chapters; I think many of them may be Tennyson, who was the favourite poet of the author's later detective character Miss Silver, but I don't know Tennyson well enough to be certain.

The human relationships are a good deal deeper than you get in a standard classic mystery, because they're the focus of the story. It's definitely a novel, properly so called, and in its way it's a romance, though it's an unusual one. It's not my usual reading, but I enjoyed it considerably, and was gripped by it to the extent that, reading it on the train, I had some difficulty staying aware of which stations we were passing through so I could get off at the right time.

I'll definitely be looking for more from this author. Happily, she's remained popular enough that I can get a lot of her books, mainly the Miss Silver series, from the library.

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Review: The Case with Nine Solutions

The Case with Nine Solutions by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A twisty piece of writing, in which once again Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield keeps proving that he's smarter than his slightly Watsonesque inspector, and, eventually, that he's smarter than the criminal.

There are no fewer than four deaths, three of them on the same night. The "nine solutions" refers to Driffield's table of possibilities for two of the deaths: all possible combinations of accident, suicide, and murder, which gets the inspector thinking.

The setup involves a complex set of relationships among workers at a scientific research institute, centering around a married couple whose marriage is not in good shape. There are three men and three women involved in a complicated relationship diagram; to say more would be a spoiler.

I didn't spot the criminal until very late, when even the inspector had worked it out. The reconstruction of the crime is typically clever. And yet, the ending - though involving a literally explosive climax - ended up being a letdown for me, as we're led to think something and then it turns out differently.

It's an odd mixture, in that the plot is obviously driven by powerful emotions, but the investigation is very matter-of-fact, and so is the attitude of the criminal when eventually confronted. Perhaps this is why I felt something was a bit off about it, and I enjoyed it less than I might have.

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Review: The Dark Eyes of London

The Dark Eyes of London by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another classic mystery from Edgar Wallace, and like all of the others I've read, not written to an obvious formula, even though he wrote so quickly.

This one involves a gang of blind men (the "Dark Eyes" of the title). There is a lot of imposture, identity concealment, suspense, and even romance, which is more fully developed than a lot of Wallace's romances, in that the couple at least spend a significant amount of time together.

However, it was the romance that gave me the element that I disliked about the book. It's between the Scotland Yard inspector and his secretary, who he admires not only because she's good-looking (though she is) but because she's intelligent and capable and, he thinks, a better detective than he is. But when he finally proposes, he doesn't like the idea of her working; he wants her to stay home and look after his flat, which is already perfectly well looked after by his manservant and cook. (Yes, a Scotland Yard inspector in the 1920s apparently made enough to have two servants.) I know, attitudes were different then, but usually Wallace doesn't just buy into the zeitgeist in this way. And it's not as if men of that generation never thought women should work or develop their natural gifts. World War I had accelerated a trend of opening up new options for women that had been around since before Victoria, and World War II was soon to accelerate it again.

Apart from that, it's a clever and thrilling mystery with hairsbreadth escapes (sometimes through intelligent preparation), kidnapping, conspiracy and fraud as well as murder, and plenty of period setting to enjoy. Sure, the same few cast members keep on coincidentally meeting, but I should probably give up complaining about that, because it seems everyone managed their plots that way a hundred years ago.

Even with the woman's-place-is-in-the-home foolishness, it's still a solid piece of work.

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Review: The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith

The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A terrific thriller from a century ago.

Jane Smith is exactly the kind of determined, brave, sensible, intelligent young woman I particularly like to see as a protagonist. Several of her more foolish fellow characters dislike her, because she isn't attempting to conceal that she's not suffering them gladly, but I thought she was wonderful.

She's not a stoic, though, and in fact she's a very believable young woman not long out of school. She gets frightened, a lot, and cries on multiple occasions. But she has good reason for both reactions, and, crucially, she doesn't let how she feels stop her from doing what she thinks is right.

The biggest flaw of the book is that Jane keeps being coincidentally in the exact right place at the exact right time for the plot to progress. She overhears conversations, sees people enter secret passages, finds a letter that, if she hadn't found it, would have caused a lot of trouble, not least for her, and of course stumbles and accidentally finds the hidden switch that opens one of those secret passages, with which this novel's setting abounds.

But she is at least looking for the switch when that happens, and, despite all of this helpful-to-the-plot coincidence, she does protagonize, and nothing falls into her lap; she has to be very brave and clever to thwart the evil conspiracy.

That conspiracy is a vaguely defined anarchist/socialist/communist/bolshevist thing, something to do with organized labour, but super radical, in that everyone who's not part of it is to be eliminated all around the world, using some mysterious (presumably chemical-warfare-related) formula which has been stolen from a government lab. My grandfather and great-grandfather were Red Federationalists at around this same time, but I'm reasonably confident that they didn't plot the overthrow of civilization and the deaths of millions. This seems to have been a middle-class bogeyman at the time, along with the "Yellow Peril," and about as real.

Still, I can set that aside for the sake of the story, which is gripping, and delivered in excellent but prose that, however, doesn't draw attention to itself. Unusually, the point of view is omniscient - sometimes switching between different characters' perceptions in the same scene - and the narrator even says "I suppose that..." at one point. It isn't obtrusive, as omniscient narration can easily be, and is mostly indistinguishable from the more usual third-person limited.

There are scenes in which the characters struggle, and look as if they'll succeed, but are thwarted, and then have to try something else, and this goes back and forth a few times, which is great for sustained tension. Jane rescues the Scotland Yard man who's in love with her at one point. We get a long thread in which someone seems one way and we eventually discover otherwise. The main villain is creepy and obsessive and believable. All the main characters have depth and dimension; they're not just their archetype and their plot role and one or two minor tags to distinguish them, they have a complex inner life, things they're striving for and that they fear, a push and pull of wanting something and also not wanting it, abilities that aren't just there for the plot.

It's a fine piece of work, apart from the coincidences and the bogeyman, and sits comfortably in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. I'll be looking for more from this author.

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Review: The Mystery of the Blue Train

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Apart from the fact that multiple characters cross paths multiple times by complete coincidence, which is a device used by better writers than Christie to keep their casts tight, there's not much to carp at in the execution of this one. (Though she does use that device constantly, until they're acquainted and she doesn't need to.)

This is a clever Poirot mystery. I thought, about halfway through, that I had figured out who the murderer was (I thought it was (view spoiler)[the exotic dancer (hide spoiler)]), but I was completely wrong and didn't suspect the actual culprits even for a moment. And yet, I think it would qualify as a "fair-play" mystery; the clues were all there, nothing was known only to the detective.

The journey was enjoyable, Poirot was his classic self, Hastings was mercifully absent, and all in all Christie is hitting her stride with this one.

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Review: The Brand Of Silence: A Detective Story

The Brand Of Silence: A Detective Story by Johnston Mcculley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another rip-roaring pulp adventure from McCulley.

He's re-using his material a bit. The wealthy man gains his valet the same way the wealthy man in The Black Star gets his valet: he finds him about to commit suicide by jumping into a river, talks him out of it, and gains his gratitude and loyalty for life. This seems a slightly unconventional way of getting a valet (I believe it was more common to go to an agency), and it's weird that it happened twice. Anyway, "Murk," as he names the valet (who, implausibly, has used so many false names he's forgotten his real one), is "solid" for his boss from then on. So is his boss's old friend, a detective, who values friendship and loyalty more than money. Both of them refuse to be intimidated or bribed into working against, or ceasing to work for, the hero.

And he needs loyal friends, because he's come back to New York from ten years in Honduras, where he turned $10,000 into a million, to find that he's mysteriously shunned by society; a bank manager doesn't want his business, he's asked to leave the first hotel he books into, young women he hardly knows cut him dead, and, when forced to talk to him, say "You know what you did!" But he doesn't.

And then he gets arrested for murder, and the people who can prove his alibi swear they never saw him at the time.

It's a fine mystery, and it took me until 70% of the way through to figure out what was going on and who was behind it. (view spoiler)[I did suspect the villain of also murdering his wife, but apparently not. And there's no real explanation for how he came to know who could prove the hero's alibi and got to them before they were called into the police station, but that's the only loose end I noticed. Apart from why the hero had never written to anyone in New York for 10 years, including his mentor/virtual foster-father; maybe he wasn't a letter-writer. (hide spoiler)] Meanwhile, there's lots of detective work and plenty of being ambushed and hit on the head and abducted. It's hard-boiled on the outside and noblebright on the inside; both Murk and the detective maintain their loyalty, and the hero is a good man wrongly accused.

If you're going to write pulp fiction, this is how to do it.

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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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Review: The Black Star A Detective Story

The Black Star A Detective Story by Johnston McCulley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rip-roaring pulp adventure. A wealthy young man with a penchant for action goes up against a brilliant criminal mastermind, the Black Star of the title, who keeps his organization so compartmentalized that nobody can betray him or each other, and plans so meticulously that he always gets away with his crimes.

There are, of course, some pulp cliches. The button that opens a trapdoor in the floor and drops the person standing in front of the desk through it into a pit. The accidental discovery of a secret compartment/door/drawer (as seen in Princess Bride, among many other places). The loyal lower-class sidekick, in this case a reformed criminal who the wealthy young man rescued from self-destruction. The love interest who plays very little role and has very little character development; she's just there because a young man like this would be expected to have one. The fat, ineffectual chief of police, of an American city that's never named; it might well be New York, since it has a river and wealthy socialites, some of whom have Dutch names, but then again, it might not.

But there are also plenty of chases, escapes, captures, pitched battles (in which surprisingly few people are even badly injured, despite the habit of the police of firing their revolvers wildly, in part because the criminals use knockout gas guns and have a code against murder), bragging letters from the criminal announcing his triumph over the police and his nemesis and celebrating his own cleverness, and the inevitable downfall of this hubristic character when his opponent proves too clever for him at last. For a while, there's a police detective character, but he drops out of sight towards the end, having acted mostly as a sounding board for the hero.

Zestful and suspenseful, it's everything you would expect from a classic pulp adventure by the creator of Zorro, and I'll certainly read the sequel at some point.

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Review: Castle of the Winds: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 3

Castle of the Winds: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 3 by Christina Baehr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this by turns amusing and moving, and also very soundly crafted. Most books by 21st-century authors set in England in an earlier era feel like the characters are 21st-century people in costumes, standing in front of scenery flats. These books give me the feeling of actual inhabitants of a real England in 1899, probably helped by listening to the audiobook, which is beautifully read by an English woman.

I was thoroughly amused by the anti-romance (a genre perfected by P.G. Wodehouse), where narrator Edith is trying not to be attractive to the Welsh prince, especially since, by basically being Edith, she is significantly failing to be unattractive and uninteresting. Her rival Meredith is a waspish, conventional, pretty young woman, and Edith's distant cousin/escort/possible love interest Simon sees through Meredith immediately and is not attracted, any more than Edith is to the beautiful Welsh prince. I do love a romance plot where people behave sensibly, and Edith is (nearly) always sensible. And I particularly like the subversion of the toxic romance trope of falling in love with one's captor.

It's interesting how Edith is simultaneously put off by the prince's tendency to order people around and assume that she'll fall in with his wishes without consulting her, and frustrated by Simon not being more self-assertive. But when he does assert himself, she disastrously refuses to follow his plan. She wants something in the middle: a man who is complete in himself and doesn't need to be managed, but doesn't try to manage her either, and who will consult her as an equal - yet she doesn't treat Simon as an equal in that circumstance either, but patronizes him, rationalizing that she has more experience of the world than he does. She has room to grow, in other words, which is a good thing for a character - and she realizes it, too.

In contrast to the previous book in particular, this one has more intrepid action, though a lot of it is Edith (mostly) sensibly figuring out her next move in a situation of threat - something that I still found just as engaging as the action parts, to be clear.

Edith's moral and philosophical position is always strong and clear, without any preaching happening, and she backs it up with principled action. Nor does she think she has all the answers, or that her milieu is perfect, or that her opponents' setup is without merit, all of which is refreshing in itself.

In short, it has everything I miss in all too many fantasy works coming out today: good craft, authentic historical feel, attention to detail, a character who has the humility to acknowledge her imperfections and weaknesses and the strength to work on them, sensible decisions made out of clearly articulated principle that's believable for the time period without being jarring for today, and a depth of knowledge and understanding of how humans are, conveyed without soapboxing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Review: Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat

Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat by Victor Appleton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I didn't expect this to be good, but I probably expected it to be better than it was.

A plot driven largely by accident, luck, coincidence, poor planning, the malicious acts of dastardly rivals, and artificial urgency that somehow vanished when there was actually a reason to hurry. Add Brazilians who speak Spanish (unlike real Brazilians, who speak Portuguese), and it's just a whole mass of nonsense.

Here's how it goes down (there are spoilers, if you care). Tom Swift, boy inventor, is helping his father, the "aged" inventor Barton Swift (everyone who's much older than Tom is "aged"), to build a submarine. They intend to enter it for a Government prize of $50,000, but then Tom reads in a newspaper about the wreck of a ship carrying $150,000 worth of gold off the coast of South America. Nobody else can reach this gold, and it's not going anywhere, but for some non-obvious reason it immediately becomes urgent that they rush the sub's development and go and get the gold, abandoning the idea of trying out for the Government prize. Por que no los dos?

Through a Convenient Eavesdrop, Tom learns that another submarine developer who wants to compete for the prize is a bad lot (he's talking to himself aloud while changing a tyre, and Tom overhears by complete coincidence). Through what I suppose I must call an Inconvenient Eavesdrop - inconvenient for Tom, that is - this character learns of the shipwreck, again by complete coincidence, because Tom is blabbing about it to a friend of his, and of course he will also be able to go after it in his submarine.

There now actually is urgency, and they rush the sub into its first trial without preparing any of the emergency mechanisms that they end up needing when a quite predictable fault occurs in this previously untested machine. Tom ("our hero") does one of the few straightforwardly effectual, protagonistic things he does in the entire book and saves everyone.

They get the sub working properly and all the emergency mechanisms installed at last, and head off for South America. The urgency doesn't stop them from deciding to spend a day relaxing on a tropical island they happen to encounter, where their rival also turns up, having unaccountably followed them (sonar doesn't seem to be a thing, and they were underwater most of the time).

They manage to shake off the pursuers, do an emergency surfacing after another system goes wrong (health and safety is not much of a thing either), and find themselves next to a Brazilian warship. The uncivilized Spanish-speaking Brazilians arrest them as saboteurs and are going to shoot them, but by fortunate coincidence a storm blows up and distracts the slipshod Brazilian navy crew enough that the brave Americans can escape. There's a completely uncalled-for dig at the fact that the Brazilians are brown-skinned.

They cruise to the location of the wreck and, after a bit of searching, find it and carry off the gold without a hitch, exiting just as their rivals come on the scene.

I've left out the subplot about Tom's bully, the spoiled son of a wealthy banker, getting his comeuppance (again) in a rather immature prank-for-prank exchange.

The other notable feature for me was that two of the characters had verbal tics, but Tom wasn't one of them - he didn't say or do things adverbially, which disappointed me, because I love a Tom Swifty. Perhaps this only developed later in the series. One of the tics I found amusing: a character who, in practically every sentence, blesses some part of his body or one of his possessions ("bless my boots!"), often in a way that connects to whatever is going on. The other I found annoying: the captain they recruit to help them with the submarine, again almost every time he says something, tacks on a phrase like "if you'll forgive the observation" or "if my saying so doesn't offend you," even when he has expressed the blandest and most obvious opinion. The tics are at least 50% of the characterization of these two men.

Probably OK if you're 12, not very knowledgeable, and have no problem with American exceptionalism. But for me, disappointing.

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Review: The Clue of the New Pin

The Clue of the New Pin by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A clever locked-room mystery, though not so clever that I didn't guess something close to it. I completely did not guess the murderer, though. And for Edgar Wallace, the romance is fairly well developed, in the sense that the couple spend a good amount of time together both before and after getting engaged, and the woman isn't completely wet and passive.

In fact, it's a strong mystery thriller, with lots of action, but not so much that the protagonists (an unusually intelligent policeman and a newspaper reporter) don't get to reflect on events and on life in general. There's a Chinese man in it, and though an offensive epithet is used by a number of characters including the reporter, he has some depth to him and is not just a stereotype or a bunch of Orientalist tropes. (view spoiler)[Also, Wallace doesn't take the easy path that a lot of his contemporaries would have more or less automatically taken and make the Chinese man the villain. (hide spoiler)]

It's solid work, enjoyable both as a mystery and as a novel.

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Review: The Daffodil Mystery

The Daffodil Mystery by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Starts out strongly, establishing a thoroughly despicable man who will turn out to be the victim. But I found the ending a bit of a let-down; a lot of the mysterious features of the case turned out just to be coincidences that didn't mean anything.

Romance was not a Wallace strength, despite or perhaps because of the fact that he had an adventurous life in this regard, and this book includes what I call a "thin romance". A man who, based on his position in the police, is probably in about his mid-thirties and has never before even considered a romantic attachment, meets a woman who is probably no more than mid-twenties, based on the stated age of her mother (who is likely closer to the detective's age), and instantly falls in love with her; they spend very little time together, and she hides significant knowledge from him, and he knows that she's doing it. And this is what passes for a romance.

Still, the journey was twisty and enjoyable, even if where we ended up was a bit weak.

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Review: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Significantly better than the previous novel in the series ( The Murder on the Links ), and I'm not sure whether that's because of Hastings' absence or despite it.

What I mean is that Hastings was an actual impediment in Links, but here I felt Poirot was different without him, as if the Poirot-and-Hastings collaboration was itself almost a character. But Poirot finds a kind of substitute in the doctor who narrates this book, taking him with him while he investigates (like Hastings, and like the young doctors in Austin Freeman, he seems to have a lot of leisure time despite theoretically having a job), and bouncing ideas off him. Poirot remains, as always, inscrutable about his conclusions from the various clues, until the traditional gathering of the suspects for the dramatic reveal.

And it is dramatic. The twist in this particular book is famous, and I did know about it in advance, but even so, I found it hard to spot the clues. It all comes down to timing, like so many mystery stories.

The process, the incidental human stories that get revealed (as usual in this sort of cosy mystery, everyone has some sort of secret; Poirot explicitly says to a group of the suspects that he knows each of them is hiding something), and the clever solution are all at a high standard by classic mystery measures. The doctor's sister alone is worth the price of admission: the centre of the village gossip network, she's better than a newspaper at gathering, generating and disseminating rumour and speculation, which varies from highly accurate to highly inaccurate, but which she always delivers with the same level of confidence. The romance subplots are a little weak, particularly without Hastings and his susceptibility to redheads, and the police's main suspect is offstage for almost the entire novel and a near-nonentity once he does appear, but it still lands right at the top of the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: The Crimson Circle

The Crimson Circle by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rip-roaring suspense thriller in which a blackmailer, extortionist and murderer is pursued by a stolid Scotland Yard detective and a private investigator who is more the policeman's colleague than his rival.

Wealthy men are receiving notes marked with a crimson circle, telling them to pay large amounts of money or be killed. Several are killed - to encourage the others - and much blame falls on the Scotland Yard man for not preventing the deaths, or making much progress on identifying the criminal. Because it is, mainly, a single criminal, who finds out people's guilty secrets and uses a carrot-and-stick approach to get them to do key elements of the crimes, without being able to recognize each other or him thanks to strict compartmentalization. It reminds me of a classic science fiction story about what's basically a prediction of Taskrabbit, which is used to get people to do acts, innocent in themselves, that add up to criminality or resistance to authority - though here the stooges are usually fully aware that their actions are criminal or contributing to a crime. (If anyone knows the story I'm thinking of - which could be by Simak or Heinlein or someone of that era, though it might be one of the cyberpunks, maybe even Cory Doctorow - please let me know in the comments.)

Weaving through the narrative is a young woman, who seems at various times to be a thief, one of the stooges, perhaps a murderer, maybe even the Crimson Circle. A young man is in love with her despite himself, which was the aspect of the story I found weakest. Wallace's romances are generally not well motivated or well developed, and this is no exception. The young man's father is one of the early victims, and seemingly the only one whose death is really regrettable, extremely wealthy or powerful men being what they are.

The stakes are raised when the Crimson Circle threatens a dozen cabinet ministers, and the policeman, who has just been basically fired for incompetence, is kept on in order to work alongside the private detective at the latter's insistence. The final reveal is a big twist, and makes sense of something that seemed a departure from the usual Wallace approach when it first appeared. All throughout, it seemed like people knew things they shouldn't, but the twist explains a lot (not all) of this.

There's plenty of tension and drama and action along the way, and all in all, it's a strong book of its type, namely highly-coloured pulp thriller. No wonder so many of Wallace's books were filmed.

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Review: The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar

The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar by Dave Dobson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

A fairly typical "funny" fantasy, in that it's trying much too hard to be funny and not succeeding nearly as well as it thinks it is (IMO). It alternates chapters between a warrior woman who has one of those egos so large that it bends reality around itself - at least for the owner of the ego - and her squire or, really, minder, whose job appears to be to prevent her causing bloody disasters through getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and refusing to be corrected, and also to keep her alive. This is fairly amusing, but it's just laid on much too thick (especially in the Isovar chapters), and the setting is the usual off-the-shelf sword-and-sorcery world. I stopped reading at 18%.

On the upside, it is much better edited than the other books I've read by the same author, though there are still a few issues.

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Review: Angel Esquire

Angel Esquire by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this at the recommendation of my wife, who had just listened to it on Librevox. She was right - it was amusing as well as action-packed. There are no shortage of villains; even the romantic male lead is a bit of a villain, though he despises himself for it.

The premise is one of those "wills with puzzles" that seem to have been such a popular trope for detective novelists. The former owner of a casino in Egypt has died, and left his giant fortune - or rather, the opportunity to access his giant fortune by solving a puzzle - to three people: two of his former confederates, and the daughter of a man whose ruin came about through gambling at the casino in question.

Christopher Angel, known as Angel Esquire, an odd sort of special inspector at Scotland Yard, takes an interest on behalf of the female heir, who is frankly a bit weaksauce, especially when compared with some of Wallace's intrepid heroines; she does almost nothing to influence the course of events, and is mostly there to be rescued and explained to, and to be fallen in love with by one of the former confederates of the casino owner. She is also, by a convenient coincidence that keeps the cast tight and puts her and her protectors in danger, the former secretary of a publisher who published a book that may hold the clue to the puzzle, and who gave a copy to her for no particular reason. By another convenient coincidence of the same kind, the author of the book is a close associate of the gang of ruffians who are after the puzzle solution, though that doesn't help them much, since he's suffering from dementia. The puzzle solution, in the end, is not that difficult and a bit of a let-down.

Apart from those two convenient coincidences and the weak female lead, though, it's enjoyable, funny, quirky, and full of well-described action.

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Review: The Duke of York's Steps

The Duke of York's Steps by Henry Wade
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A twisty piece of classic detective fiction.

An elderly banker with a known health condition (an aneurism that could easily burst under stress) dies of exactly this cause after being jostled by someone hurrying down the steps of the title. It's treated as something between an accident and natural causes, until his daughter raises suspicions. Why has the person who jostled him not come forward, even in response to her advertisements, to apologize for any part he might have had in the death?

With this slim suspicion to go on, Inspector Poole begins to investigate. The dead man's son looks a likely suspect: he has motive (he badly needed money, and his father was about to cut him out of his will for his latest escapade with an unsuitable young woman), and his alibi is thin and implausible. But before the mystery is wrapped up, Poole will spread his net wide and encounter more than one shocking twist.

I did guess about halfway through both the motive for the murder and who was behind it, though there were a couple more twists I didn't see coming at all. One of them I wasn't a big fan of; serious spoiler in the tags. (view spoiler)[The dead man's friend and subordinate at the bank is a German Jew, and the more senior banker stood up for him during World War I, when anyone German was suspect, and won't hear any ill said of him or tolerate any prejudice on account of his Jewishness. And yet he plays a key role in the murder of his friend. The son also says something horribly antisemitic about him. (hide spoiler)]

It's cleverly done, though, and I would definitely read another by the same author, though at the moment this is the only one on Project Gutenberg.

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Review: Room 13

Room 13 by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm starting to have more respect for Edgar Wallace. In his own time, he was seen as a prolific hack, producing highly-coloured sensational literature to thrill the undiscerning public, but they aren't just written to a formula or full of easy pulp tropes. Each one I've read so far is distinctly different, and the plots are clever and gripping. The characters, while not having a great deal of depth, are also distinct, and behave in understandable human ways.

This is particularly true here. John Gray has just got out of prison, where he was serving time for swapping out a racehorse for a "ringer". While he's been away, his beloved, Marney, has got engaged to someone else, who she and her father (a retired criminal who has raised Marney "straight" and not told her where his money came from) think is an honest man, in contrast to Gray.

This is, unfortunately, not true. Gray arrives to find her married to someone he recognizes as a notorious forger and the son of Marney's father's former partner, who went to prison for shooting a policeman on their last job together, while Marney's father got away clean. He's resentful and wants vengeance (and money; he believes his old partner hasn't given him his fair share). So he's set up this marriage as part of his vengeance plot and to give himself more leverage.

In the course of the story, it looks pretty bad for Gray a few times; his rival gets shot while he is suspiciously nearby, and more violence, kidnapping, and murder ensue. Meanwhile, the name of J.G. Reeder keeps coming up, attached to a fussy older man who is thought to be some kind of bank detective.

It's suspenseful, fast-moving and full of period criminal slang - I suspect Wallace did some research, perhaps just in the form of talking to a criminal or ex-criminal and asking them about the slang, and wanted to make full use of it. But the slang is never confusing or obscure.

Overall, a solid suspense novel, and I'll be reading more from this author.

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Review: Room 13

Room 13 by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm starting to have more respect for Edgar Wallace. In his own time, he was seen as a prolific hack, producing highly-coloured sensational literature to thrill the undiscerning public, but they aren't just written to a formula or full of easy pulp tropes. Each one I've read so far is distinctly different, and the plots are clever and gripping. The characters, while not having a great deal of depth, are also distinct, and behave in understandable human ways.

This is particularly true here. John Gray has just got out of prison, where he was serving time for swapping out a racehorse for a "ringer". While he's been away, his beloved, Marney, has got engaged to someone else, who she and her father (a retired criminal who has raised Marney "straight" and not told her where his money came from) think is an honest man, in contrast to Gray.

This is, unfortunately, not true. Gray arrives to find her married to someone he recognizes as a notorious forger and the son of Marney's father's former partner, who went to prison for shooting a policeman on their last job together, while Marney's father got away clean. He's resentful and wants vengeance (and money; he believes his old partner hasn't given him his fair share). So he's set up this marriage as part of his vengeance plot and to give himself more leverage.

In the course of the story, it looks pretty bad for Gray a few times; his rival gets shot while he is suspiciously nearby, and more violence, kidnapping, and murder ensue. Meanwhile, the name of J.G. Reeder keeps coming up, attached to a fussy older man who is thought to be some kind of bank detective.

It's suspenseful, fast-moving and full of period criminal slang - I suspect Wallace did some research, perhaps just in the form of talking to a criminal or ex-criminal and asking them about the slang, and wanted to make full use of it. But the slang is never confusing or obscure.

Overall, a solid suspense novel, and I'll be reading more from this author.

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Review: The Summer War

The Summer War by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Naomi Novik is what Neil Gaiman calls an "otter" author; unlike a dolphin, an otter won't do the same trick each time. So her stuff is sometimes very much to my taste ( Spinning Silver ), sometimes very much not (the Scholomance books), and sometimes somewhere in between (Temeraire).

Happily, this one worked very well for me, even though it's about the Fae (the word is never used, but that's clearly what the Summerlings are), and I'm wary of Fae books because... well, because there are too many of them, and some are not good.

This version of the Fae is very much like the legends. They're bound by their word, they have a completely different set of values from humans, they have a completely different sense of time and will hold a grudge for human generations and seek to wipe out an insult in all human blood, they're beautiful and mysterious and closely linked with nature. These particular ones are linked, in particular, with summer, and it's only in summer - very generously defined - that the Green Bridge from their country to the human lands exists. Which is fine when they're trading, not so great when they are invading every year that they remember that a human king insulted the sister of the Summerling prince when he married her, causing her to commit suicide. (They don't always remember. Their memory is different from that of humans too.)

This war went on for a hundred years, and was ended by the protagonist's father before she was born (to an illegitimate daughter of the king, whose hand he obtained as a reward for winning the war through the same cunning that got him a fox as his emblem).

The protagonist, Celia, is, therefore, a descendant of a Sorceress Queen from long before, and manifests sorcery herself for the first time in many generations - accidentally cursing her brother in the process. She then sets about trying to fix her mistake, with the help of their disregarded middle brother, and ends up caught in the continuing aftermath of the original grievance of the summerling prince and also the complications ensuing from the way the war was ended.

Celia makes an excellent protagonist. She's intelligent, level-headed and creative, like her father. She's also good-hearted, and wants the best outcome for everyone, if she can just figure out how to get it.

Along the way she discovers, by allying with the middle brother, that you can choose to love someone, and that doing so is generally the best move. There's some wonderful family-dynamics stuff in general: father/son misunderstandings, and siblings not understanding each other either, admiring or being jealous of or ignoring each other, and eventually communicating.

It's beautifully written, with evocative descriptions of a well-imagined summer court, but not to the point of being overwritten or showing off. The plot is well conceived; it drew me along because I wanted to know, and couldn't imagine, how Celia (and her brothers) could possibly manage to bring about a good outcome for all concerned.

I've marked it as YA, mainly because Celia is 12 at the start of the book and 15 by the end, but it's like T. Kingfisher's young protagonists in that it's fully enjoyable by an adult reader. In fact, it's very like T. Kingfisher in general.

Good stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was nominated for a few awards. It has enough depth and originality, too, that I'm putting it in the Gold tier of my annual best books list.

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Review: Kate Plus Ten

Kate Plus Ten by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kate is a young woman (in her late teens) who has been raised by her uncle, a career criminal, and absorbed his attitude to law and order. She doesn't commit crimes herself, but she's brilliant at planning them in exhaustive detail for other people to commit.

Mike is a mass of contradictions. He's heir to a title of nobility (early on, we're told the current holder is his sickly cousin, but later it changes to his brother without notice), but he also holds radical economic views - not just fashionable Socialism but something more complicated. Yet this doesn't prevent him from living, in part, off inherited wealth and keeping a manservant and a cook. It also doesn't prevent him from becoming a police inspector, first through the Special Branch (more or less the UK equivalent of the US Secret Service; they protect politicians and investigate threats to the state), and then transferring to the CID for reasons that are brushed past quickly.

Together, Kate and Mike fight about crime. He knows she's planning something. She knows he knows. He tries to convince her to give up crime; she counters that her only alternative is to be severely underpaid in some soul-deadening job and regularly hit on by her male employers. No thanks!

Kate isn't the only young woman in the book (though I don't remember the two of them having a full conversation about anything). There's also Lady Moya, daughter of one of the marks for Kate's latest heist. Mike once asked her to marry him, but their views on life were incompatible. She gets engaged to one of her father's business associates, but then she meets a young artist... This subplot isn't at all closely related to the main plot, but Moya serves as a thematic counterpart or foil to Kate. Both of them are "New Women," starting to make their own decisions in life about money and romance and the relative value of the two.

It's quite a short book to have two plots, even though the Moya subplot isn't that complicated, and yet the author does manage to raise some philosophical questions and give his characters inner as well as outer conflicts. In his lifetime, Wallace was seen as a prolific hack, but this is decent work which stands up well against a lot of today's authors. The heist is clever, the inspector's investigation intelligent and courageous, and we get crime, romance, philosophy worked out to some degree in practice, action and suspense in the package.

A weakness for me was that the resolution involved a bit of fortunate coincidence (fortunate, at least, from the point of view of the protagonists, whose decisions don't bring it about and who are, therefore, not to blame for the negative aspects of it, and who are put in a much better situation as a result). But it's not too implausible, at least. The text could do with more commas in places, but it isn't too bad. Overall, a solid effort.

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Review: The Elysium Heist

The Elysium Heist by Y.M. Resnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disaster lesbians* attempt a casino heist in space; it gets distinctly M-rated between a couple of them, and all the problems with the fairly simple heist are because the characters have personal issues. Also, the heist ends up not making a lick of sense. But the journey is reasonably entertaining.

*Technically, one lesbian, two bisexuals, one pansexual and an asexual, all women within a couple of years either way of 20 years old. They are:

- Kiyo, a brittle heiress to a jewellery fortune, who's being extorted by Shaul, the villain and mark, over a sex tape (think Paris Hilton, but if the boyfriend who secretly recorded the tape died on screen through an interaction between a drug he was on and her body paint). She is the client and funder.
- Finley, a recovering alcoholic (recovering thanks to Kiyo) and professional gambler. In mutual thought-to-be-unrequited longing with Kiyo, who is understandably gun-shy when it comes to sex since her previous experience.
- Psalome, a Dazzler (casino employee). She's theoretically available for clients to have sex with, as well as to have her deal for them and provide various other forms of entertainment, but in practice she doesn't have sex with them because she wants to reserve that for someone she cares about, and the Casino is very strict about consent (and yet it's often implied or stated that she's very skilled at sex, even though she's had, it emerges, only one previous partner and isn't that old). She's working in the casino to pay off a huge debt left by her father. It's never made clear why she feels she has to do this.
- Psylina, Psalome's sister. A hacker, asexual but not aromantic, and in a relationship with the casino's AI, who she refers to as her "joyfriend". She's been trying, unsuccessfully, to get around the AI's programming to allow it to forgive her sister's debt. The AI has multiple bodies which are often referred to as clones, but are actually androids, to fulfil the role of casino security.
- Ilaria, Shaul's wants-to-be-ex-wife. They come from a strict Jewish planet where only men can grant divorces, and he won't, even though he doesn't care about her at all; it's part of his controlling personality. (Shaul, the only significant male character, is not only an unmixedly vile human being but also not very smart.) Kiyo has helped her fake her death, both so that she can escape and also so that she can help them get Kiyo's heirloom earrings back from Shaul, since they would validate the sex tape as not a deepfake; this is the heist. Ilaria is in mutual thought-to-be-unrequited longing with Psalome, whose exact type she coincidentally is - which is fortunate for getting Psalome to sign on to be part of the heist, though she might well have done it just for the promise of Kiyo paying off her remaining debt.

A lot of the book is more about the romantic angst and the characters working through their considerable damage than it is about the heist, so if you're not up for that, this isn't your book. The heist itself is relatively straightforward: manipulate a poker tournament in which the stakes put up are jewellery, and in which Shaul will put up the McGuffin earrings. The dealer wears all the stakes during the game, and Psalome is the dealer in the final. Then they just have to swap the earrings out somehow. (The actual heist turns out to be more complicated than this, of course.)

Their plan for doing this earring swap is far from clear for most of the book, and then when it comes to it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. (view spoiler)[Instead of the stake jewellery going into a secure safe as would be the case in any normal casino, Psalome is simply allowed to take the pieces with her when she returns to her room. She doesn't do the switch in her room, which is explicitly not surveilled by the Casino, because "the Casino would find out" (how?). What she does instead is to swap them in the corridor instead, in the presence of multiple Casino androids, in a set of circumstances which are specifically being recorded - it's a key plot point that a recording is being made. Shaul doesn't notice, because he's distracted by her being naked at the time, though it seems unlikely that even someone as stupid and lustful as him wouldn't notice her switching earrings. But the Casino isn't a man, and wouldn't be distracted - yet apparently doesn't notice either. I found it completely implausible. (hide spoiler)]

Most, though certainly not all, of the commas are in the right place, but the vast majority of the apostrophes are not, and if I had a bingo card with every error you can commit with an apostrophe, it would have been mostly full by the end of the book. Some idioms are fumbled, some words are confused with other similar words, and there's at least one typo that should have been caught by spellcheck. I've seen far worse; the issues aren't constant, and, as always, I give the disclaimer that I saw a pre-publication version which may not represent the final text.

More significant for me were the issues of plausibility. I've already mentioned the biggest one in spoiler tags above, but it's also implausibly easy to avoid security cameras in the space casino. The casino AI doesn't twig to things it really should have twigged to. Fire in a space station is said at one point to be unthinkable, but there's plenty of smoking going on, and the Dazzlers sometimes set cocktails on fire, and in general fire seems to be a lot more thinkable than it in fact should be. And (view spoiler)[as part of the conclusion where the supposed plan was not the actual plan, Finley is arrested, in order (by a hack swapping the identity of two spaceships, I think) to get her into Shaul's ship to take his stuff, even though it's been established that he's moved it out of his ship into a secure area that couldn't be broken into and in which you definitely would not confine a prisoner unsupervised(view spoiler)[.

It's lacking in polish, in short; needs a more knowledgeable development editor, a continuity editor, and a more careful copy editor who's good with apostrophes and idioms. But it shows potential, and even though the heist of the title was overshadowed by the characters' personal and interpersonal issues and ended up full of plot holes, I found it an enjoyable read on the whole. It's good enough, just barely, to make my 2025 recommendation list, though it's right at the bottom. (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

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Review: The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For a book described as one of the 100 best thriller novels and "brimming with heartstopping action" (blurb on the version I read), this has a very slow burn for a very long time, about two-thirds of its total word count.

Not that it isn't good. In place of that long-delayed heartstopping action we get a good deal of character development, rare in the thriller/suspense genre, of our two central characters: the narrator, Carruthers, a junior Foreign Office clerk, and his old university acquaintance Davies. Davies invites Carruthers via letter to join him on his (very small and uncomfortable, as it turns out) yacht in the Baltic just when Carruthers is fed up with having to work - at something quite unimportant - while everyone else he knows is off at country-house parties. He finishes his work and, on a whim, joins Davies, who eventually confides in him that he thinks a man he's met is English, not German as he presents himself, and tried to kill Davies by leading him into a dangerous area in a storm. Davies also believes that there's something going on in terms of preparations for war (this is in 1903) in the shallow harbours and channels between the East Frisian islands and the German coast, and that as patriotic Englishmen they should try to find out more. He wanted Carruthers with him in part because Carruthers speaks good German.

It's interesting to me that, before World War I, a good many English people seem to have liked and admired the Germans and even the German empire. Read, for example, Three Men on the Bummel or Diary of a Pilgrimage , both by Jerome K. Jerome. Of course, thinking that Germany was good didn't stop them thinking that Britain was better, and that's the case for Davies, who admires the Kaiser but is also keen to spy on Germany if that protects his own country.

For a long time, there's no real sense of danger. Yes, they're in a small boat in October in a region where running aground and bad weather are basically daily occurrences, but the boat is very sound (it's a converted lifeboat), Davies is an extremely competent sailor, and he keeps downplaying any danger as part of his characterization. What there mainly is is a sense of discomfort. The boat is small, cramped, damp, impossible to keep clean, and full of fumes from its petroleum-fueled stove, on which the pair cook bad rations. The whole trip is based on one the author had made about five years before the book came out with his brother and another man, which gives a deeply authentic feel to the incidental details of both the experience of sailing and also of the location.

The relationship between the two men also feels real. They weren't close friends before the trip, though they liked each other well enough, but as the story progresses they get to understand each other better and appreciate each other's strengths, with occasional brief arguments. Carruthers lets go of his annoyance at the discomforts of the trip a lot more easily than I would have, even at his age, but it's believable as a dawning of self-insight and not taking himself so seriously. The two become comrades by working towards a common goal, facing challenges together. It's a classic early-20th-century-Englishmen's friendship, though in many ways it's just a classic men's friendship, where you respect each other and get on with a common task with a minimum of drama (especially since they are very English, and drama, or even direct acknowledgement of emotions, would be not quite the thing).

At length, we do get some genuinely suspenseful narrative. First, taking advantage of Davies' uncanny ability to navigate the shoals using soundings, they sneak through a heavy fog in a rowing boat for a distance of about 12 miles so that Carruthers can spy on a meeting between their suspects in the hope of discovering what's going on. They get some more information, but a lot of it is overheard words without clear context, and they have to put in more work - and Carruthers has to do a daring solo mission, in disguise - to figure out what the Germans' plan actually is.

At this point, the book winds up in a hurry. It could, I felt, have lingered a little more over the fate of the characters, rather than just concluding with a summary by the "editor" (Childers, claiming to be working from Carruthers' and Davies' accounts) of the political and military upshot. After all, the first two-thirds of the book is us coming to care about the characters.

Still, it's a strong piece of work, with lots of layers of character and setting carefully built up to give a richer picture than the usual superficial suspense novel, and I recommend it.

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Review: The Blue Scarab

The Blue Scarab by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thorndyke short cases narrated by his original sidekick, Jervis, apparently during the period when they roomed together before Jervis's marriage.

They are very much what you would expect if you've read any of the author's previous works. Thorndyke is erudite and full of obscure but somehow useful knowledge (like the exact habitat of a rare snail). Thanks to his great learning and intelligence, he's able to work out non-obvious conclusions from the scientific evidence that he and Jervis collect so professionally, using what were, at the beginning of the 20th century, advanced techniques (all real, apparently, and all tested by the author), occasionally assisted by fortunate coincidence, as in the case of the snail. Jervis is his foil, his Watson, whose main function is to stand in for the audience, who probably can't figure out the clues either, so that they (we) don't feel so stupid.

The author's contemporary Freeman Wills Crofts wrote stories of clever criminals who were no match for the dogged persistence of generic Scotland Yard detectives. R. Austin Freeman is the reverse: a brilliant detective who solves what are often quite ordinary crimes that would remain undetected or unsolved without his involvement. We have here not just murders, but robberies (including a jewel robbery), and the title story is about a mysterious family secret of hidden treasure that uses Egyptian hieroglyphics to conceal the solution.

He's definitely a literary descendant of Sherlock Holmes, and an ancestor of every scientific detective since. The stories are interesting puzzles, though there's not a great deal of character development to be seen anywhere - difficult in the short form, admittedly, though there's not much in the novels either.

There's a black character in one story, and his former landlady expresses her dislike of the fact that another person used a racial slur about him; there's also a Jewish character in another story, and he doesn't come in for any specific or overt racism either in the brief mention of him, though he is clearly a villain. If you read Freeman's Wikipedia article, you'll see that he had a complex mix of mostly stereotypical views about Jews, and was also a eugenicist, though his views seemed to change after the advent of the Nazi Party. Although I'm noting these factors in my review, I'm not giving it my "casual_racism" tag because the viewpoint character doesn't express specific racist views or use racial slurs, which is what that tag is for.

It's solid and well executed, without major flaws, so I put it in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list for 2025. Recommended if you like watching a clever man solve puzzles.

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