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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Review: Cocktail Time

Cocktail Time by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think Uncle Fred (the Earl of Ickenham) is my favourite Wodehouse character now.

He has the aristocratic amiability of the Earl of Emsworth, but the intelligence of Jeeves, the easy way with all comers of Psmith, the complete lack of shame and scheming nature of Bobbie Wickham or Ukridge (but always in the service of "spreading sweetness and light"), and an ability that's all his own to improvise a role at a moment's notice, with a confidence and commitment that enables him to carry the impersonation off, however unlikely.

In this book, he first knocks his half-brother-in-law Sir Raymond "Beefy" Bastable's top hat off with a Brazil nut using a borrowed catapult from the window of the Drones Club, and then, when his dignified relative later complains about the youth of today as a result of this incident, suggests he write a novel about it to relieve his feelings, and (knowing his man) says that of course he wouldn't be able to, which spurs Sir Raymond on to do exactly that. He writes under a pseudonym, since he wants to stand for Parliament as a Conservative and being known to write novels, at least of this nature, would not go down well with his prospective constituents.

The resulting novel, Cocktail Time, is doomed to the obscurity of so many first novels until a bishop catches his daughter reading some rather racy stuff in Chapter 13, and condemns it from the pulpit. The novel is thus rescued from obscurity, and becomes a bestseller, making it even more important for Sir Raymond to hide his authorship.

Cue shenanigans involving Sir Raymond's useless nephew Cosmo, multiple couples who have various impediments to their marriage, an already-married couple of con artists who try to get in on the money that's now floating around, and, of course, the cheerful manipulations and easy, convincing falsehoods of Uncle Fred. All in the trademark breezy, sparkling Wodehouse prose, combining slang with quotations from a wide range of English literature and giving us a constant scintillation of clever imagery.

Incidentally, this is the book that convinced me that Wodehouse time does actually work the way that Wikipedia says it does, and not the way I had previously theorized. I believed that all of the Wodehouse stories were implicitly set in the inter-war years, in a reasonably self-consistent continuity, even the ones written after World War II, but that the author occasionally dropped an anachronistic contemporary reference to make it easier for his then-present-day readers to relate. But this one reveals - by unambiguous references to World War II - that it's more like Batman or Superman comics, in that the continuity is continually rebooted so that the characters are always about the same age as in previous stories, even though we are now in a different decade. Uncle Fred, for example, is perpetually about 65, even though by this point he should be well into his 90s (having been about 65 at his first appearance in 1935; this book came out in 1958). Also, everything in England, more or less, is as it was when Wodehouse last lived there, before moving overseas permanently for tax reasons in the 1930s. There's reference to change, of course, but it's still the same landscape of country houses and the hereditary aristocracy that we're familiar with from his classic period. So in a way it's, at one and the same time, the 1930s and the year in which the book came out. Better not to think about it too hard.

Above all, these books are lighthearted fun; everyone gets what's coming to them, based on their various characters, as the intricate interlocking of the plot threads works itself out, and the journey to that resolution is always amusing.

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Review: Poirot Investigates

Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like most collections, this has stronger and weaker stories.

Poirot is, throughout, impressed with his own cleverness. Hastings is, throughout, unaware of his own ineptitude.

I read the Gutenberg version, which is the British version with 11 stories (there were a couple more in the American edition, published later).

The Adventure of “The Western Star”: A jewel theft with a twist, that invokes the good old "stolen jeweled eyes of an idol" trope so beloved of pulp writers (and also used by Conan Doyle), only to subvert it.
The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor: A suicide, or is it? Poirot is commissioned by the insurance company to check.
The Adventure of the Cheap Flat: I found this one a bit unlikely. (view spoiler)[A criminal couple have rented a flat under the name of Robinson. When they discover that rival criminals are after them with assassination in mind, they rather coldly advertise the flat at a cheap rent until they attract a couple whose name actually is Robinson, with the idea that the assassins will kill them and think they've dealt with the issue. Fortunately for the Robinsons, they are friends of Hastings, and he mentions the oddity of the cheap flat to Poirot, who, characteristically, leaps to a correct conclusion. (hide spoiler)]
The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge: A man is shot by a mysterious home invader - or is he?
The Million Dollar Bond Robbery: I suspected the solution to this one, though not how it was worked.
The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb: Even prior to her marriage to an archaeologist (in 1930, whereas this collection came out in 1924), Christie was apparently interested in the subject, as I'm sure many people were, following the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamen. Here, she plays with superstition around curses on tombs, another pulp trope that she debunks through Poirot.
Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan: This was rather clever, as was Poirot's approach to working it out.
The Kidnapped Prime Minister: Probably inspired by the Conan Doyle stories like "A Scandal in Bohemia" or "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," where the Great Detective is involved in secret high-level shenanigans that don't come out to the public (at least, not until the faithful chronicler reveals them). Another clever twist, where Poirot sees through a carefully crafted illusion.
The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim: Again reminds me of a Conan Doyle story: (view spoiler)[The one where a respectable man has a second identity as a ragged beggar, and "disappears" because his beggar identity has been arrested. (hide spoiler)]
The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman: A lesson always to suspect evidence from only one source.
The Case of the Missing Will: there's a story very like this in one of the Dorothy L. Sayers short story collections, where a deceased relative has hidden a will as a test of the legatee's intelligence and they call in detectives to solve it for them. That's called out as a cheat here (by Hastings, of course), and I have to say I agree, though Poirot maintains that intelligence includes knowing when to consult an expert.

There's a common thread of "things are not as they have been carefully arranged to appear, and only Poirot suspects the truth" running through these stories. Some of the twists are very clever, though at least one I considered a bit far-fetched. Overall, an amusing set of puzzles.

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Review: The Murder on the Links

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't remember reading this book before, though I also don't remember watching the adaptation with David Suchet, and I must have done, because I've seen all of those. Maybe it's not that memorable.

Hastings is very irritating in this one. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles , he was a Watson-style idiot foil for the brilliant detective, but here he is actually an impediment, both accidentally and deliberately, albeit not as much of one as he thinks he is being. Worse, he's "in love" with a woman who's much too young for him, whose name he doesn't know, who he's hardly spent any time with, who he doesn't even really like as a person, and yet he will (view spoiler)[lay hands on his friend Poirot to let her get away in the belief that she's a murderer (hide spoiler)]. And he meets her initially by chance on a train, and then she happens to be involved in the very next case he and Poirot are on.

Hastings also has what I call a "superhero job" in this one; he is private secretary to an MP, but it doesn't prevent him in any way from being involved in the plot as much as he likes and travelling wherever he feels like, whenever he feels like it. Like his job in the War Office in the previous book, it seems to exist just because the author thinks he ought to have a job, but there's nothing that suggests it's in any way real or impacts on his schedule whatsoever. Mind you, if I was Hastings' employer, I'd want him out of the office as much as possible too. It would create less work for everyone else to do, fixing up his mistakes.

The mystery itself is full of twists, perhaps too many of them, and at least one big plot hole. (view spoiler)[There's a second body that turns up a couple of days after the initial murder. It's either been lying undiscovered all that time in a shed which, inexplicably, the keen Surete man hasn't previously searched, or someone - and it's hard to imagine who - has hidden it somewhere else, nobody ever asks or answers where, and moved it, nobody asks or answers how or why. It's been stabbed with one of what turn out to be three identical daggers, but that wasn't the cause of death. (hide spoiler)] The final solution is clever, but I felt like it was based on inadequate evidence for even Poirot to deduce it.

The author has a bad habit of leaving question marks out of sentences which are questions. I didn't note that in the first book; maybe they had different editors, and that one didn't catch comma splices, while this one didn't catch missing question marks.

Overall, for me this fell short of expectations, and it's not going on my annual recommendation list. Too many inexperienced-writer errors (thin romance, superhero job, plot hole, coincidental meetings, correct conclusions from inadequate evidence).

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Review: Mulliner Nights

Mulliner Nights by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mr Mulliner is always fun, with his unlikely stories of distant relatives (told in the bar-parlour of a fishermen's pub, so we know upfront that they're likely tall tales). Like the Oldest Member of the golf club, Wodehouse's other famous raconteur, he cannot be prevented from telling a story once he starts, though I would imagine that the regulars looked forward to these absurd, hilarious tales as much as I do. Those regulars, and any visitors to the pub, are always referred to by the drinks they have ordered, rather than by name. Only Mr Mulliner himself and the barmaid, Miss Postlethwaite, get names.

If there's a theme to this volume, it's subtle moral influence, whether that's the detective with a smile that gives aristocrats with a bad conscience the sense that he knows all and will, unless conciliated, tell all; the cat, raised in ecclesiastical surroundings, who projects such an aura of upright disapproval that the artist whose clerical uncle asked him to look after the beastie changes his whole way of life; the feeble youth who gets the wrong correspondence course in the mail and accidentally develops an iron will; or the female novelists who gush such nonsense in interviews that their interviewers have mental breakdowns. Only in a society like that of Britain before World War II (or parts of East Asia to this day) could social and interpersonal expectations be so powerful in people's lives. Along the way, we see a man in quest of strawberries in December for his lady-love, and another man and his prospective mother-in-law at odds over a copy of a detective novel.

The thing Wodehouse does so incredibly well is that he takes someone who is pursuing something that really, in the great scheme of things, matters very little or not at all, and somehow gets us to care about it as intensely as the character does, and want them to succeed. Not that the assorted Mulliner relatives in these stories always succeed; sometimes they end up not getting what they want, but getting something else that is probably, in the broad view, better, though they might not think so at the time. Not every love affair works out, and sometimes that's a good thing, if the person the young fool is in love with is patently unsuitable.

And when things go wrong, they go hilariously and catastrophically wrong, and the hero is left attempting to babble implausible explanations to which nobody is listening. Sometimes, all he can do is exercise the better part of valour and escape through a window.

Compared with some of Wodehouse's other classic series (Jeeves and Blandings Castle, specifically), these are more stories of the middle class. "The Smile that Wins" specifically roasts the aristocracy. Part of how that manifests is that most of the protagonists have jobs of some sort, and they're a lot less given to quoting English (and Latin) literature. In place of all the aristocratic foolishness, there's more slapstick. This makes them, to me at least, more relatable - not that I don't thoroughly enjoy the Jeeves and Blandings stories, but they're about a very different place and time and stratum of society that has little to do with my daily life, whereas the Mulliner stories are a bit more grounded.

If you enjoy Wodehouse at all, you will probably enjoy these.

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Review: Modern Magic.: A Practical Treatise or The Art of Conjuring.

Modern Magic.: A Practical Treatise or The Art of Conjuring. by Angelo John Lewis Hoffmann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A thorough presentation of the state of the conjurer's art at the time of its publication (1876), detailing a number of tricks and variations on them. This includes tricks with cards, coins, handkerchiefs, watches, rings, dominoes, dice and the like, and the still widely popular cups and balls. The instructions are comprehensive and clear, and accompanied with diagrams of special apparatus and of the methods of manipulation. Many of the tricks don't require any special apparatus or preparation, but rely purely on manipulation of everyday objects.

I'm sure the magician's art has come a long way in the subsequent century and a half, but the foundation is still sleight of hand and cleverly constructed apparatus. I'm sure a modern aspiring magician could probably still find inspiration here, and many of the tricks have likely remained unchanged in their essentials.

This would also be a great book to read if you were thinking of writing a magician character in the late 19th century, or even some other-world equivalent. I'm not currently thinking of doing that, at least not seriously, but if I ever do, I'll return to this book for material.

One of the key points I took from it, which applies to clever mystery stories too: if a magician ever wants you to believe that an object is somewhere, it is inevitably somewhere else, and if they want you to believe that it's a particular object (say, the one they borrowed from an audience member), you can rely upon the fact that it is not that object but a substitute. If they want you to believe that something is happening at a particular time - like an object moving from one place to another - that thing has definitely already happened. Anything the magician says or does openly is intended to mislead or distract, and nothing is as it seems.

All of this reminds me very much of the kind of mysteries you get in, say, the TV show Death in Paradise, which my wife and I are currently watching in sequence from the beginning. If anyone has a rock-solid alibi for the time of the crime, you should suspect that the crime did not, in fact, take place at that time, or if it did, that the alibi has been faked. If someone claims that the victim was dead when they found them, suspect them of killing the victim after their apparent discovery (probably having previously rendered them unconscious or duped them into pretending to be dead). If a room appears to have been locked with just the victim inside, either it wasn't really locked, or it was locked in some clever way that only made it look as if it had been locked from the inside, or the victim died after locking it themselves, or... You get the point.

Another interesting point he makes is that you should never do the same trick twice in the same way, but if you create the same effect twice in two different ways, you can use the opportunity to show something with each method that would make the other method impossible. The audience will assume that both tricks were done the same way, since the effect is the same, and so won't guess either method.

The author has one verbal peculiarity: he sometimes says "either" when he means "any," for example referring to "either of the four categories". It's pretty clear from context what he means, though.

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Review: Five Phantom Discount

Five Phantom Discount by Marcus Fell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First of all, if bad language offends you, this is not the book for you. There's a lot of it.

Secondly, if you enjoyed Ocean's Eleven, this has a lot of the same elements. It starts out with a con man just out of prison who wants to do a job on a guy who is now sleeping with his ex-wife, for one thing. But it isn't just Ocean's Eleven retold.

It's set in a version of our world where some people can use magic, and this appears to be publicly known, since there are US federal laws about it; the main character, Frank Phantom, fell foul of these laws as part of a job six years previously, and has spent the interim in a prison for magic users. Now that he's out, he and his partner Clay Bishop, who were betrayed by Deacon, their third partner on that previous job, want to steal from him. Deacon's used two of the three wishes that the genie he gained through that heist granted him, in order to screw them over and reinvent himself, and is about to be elected as the Mayor of New York, as a prelude to running for president.

The book follows the usual beginning for a heist story; the team is gathered and told how impossible the job is. (I would note that not all of the impossibilities are really dealt with in the actual heist. In particular, (view spoiler)[the impossibility of getting into the vault - that turns out to be super easy, barely an inconvenience - and the inconvenient fact that even if you get in you'll be hit with a death curse, which is part of the "this is impossible" discussion but never comes up again. (hide spoiler)] There's a creepy Ukrainian necromancer who can gather information from dead ex-employees of the security team; a technomancer hacker (a young woman whose grandfather was the first choice for the position, but he's dead); Bishop, who's a glamourist and can make things look like what they're not; Phantom, who's the mastermind, and can't work magic because he's on parole and has tattoos that prevent him from doing so or at least will report if he does; and Lemonade, a retired criminal who they convince to come back for one last job. (view spoiler)[Another inconsistency: Phantom's "shadow walk" after the job takes more than 20 minutes, but the part of the heist that prevents the tattoos from functioning only lasts 8 minutes - which includes getting into the vault and doing the actual job itself - and yet the alarm doesn't go off when he comes out. (hide spoiler)]

There are two main ways of telling a heist story. One is for the reader to know the plan in advance, see it all go wrong, and then see how the crew improvise their way to success anyway (or actually have another secret plan which involved things going wrong in exactly that way). The other is for us not to know the plan in advance, but watch it unfold in narrative time, which is what this book does. Both can be enjoyable, and this plan is clever (and involves the main character going through some rough times). As already noted, not everything in the "this is impossible" scene gets addressed when the heist unfolds, though.

There's a lot of banter - sometimes, for me, too much; it bogs down the pace of some of the scenes, without being quite good enough banter to make up for it. A lot of it consists of people insulting each other and being mutually hostile, with, as I've noted, copious swearing. Sometimes it's creative and funny; other times, less so.

Not badly edited; there are a few of the usual issues, including dialog punctuation, the odd vocabulary error, unclosed quotation marks and missing or added words in sentences, but they're thinly scattered. As always, I include the disclaimer that books I get from Netgalley may (but also may not) receive more editing after I see them, but before publication.

Overall, it's a good heist novel, if you don't mind sweary and not very likeable characters who banter a bit too much, and can ignore or don't notice the fact that not all of the threads are tied up neatly. Those factors together dragged it down to the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: The Garden Of Resurrection: Being The Love Story Of An Ugly Man

The Garden Of Resurrection: Being The Love Story Of An Ugly Man by E. Temple Thurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author is a poet, and it shows, though he's not so lyrical and fanciful as to exceed my (relatively low) tolerance. What I did find irritating was the characteristic early-20th-century assumption that women are a monolith, and men a completely different monolith; that they think and feel and act entirely unlike each other, in ways that can be generalized across the whole of each gender. From a 21st-century perspective, this is nonsense, and since there's so much of it, annoying nonsense. It's not, by the way, misogynist; the opposite, if anything.

The ugly man of the title, Bellairs, is disfigured from a childhood illness, presumably smallpox, which causes women to distrust him, but he is a deeply kind person when you get to know him. He narrates in the first person and as if keeping a diary, though it's not stated to be a diary (there are a lot of things that are implied clearly enough that we understand them, even though they're not said outright). He has no occupation, receiving 1500 pounds a year from his father, which is enough for him to live quietly in central London with a manservant to look after him and eat out at a nearby restaurant regularly. While at this restaurant, he overhears another patron talking about his fiancée, a woman for whom he has little feeling other than contempt and whom he has convinced to leave her home in the Caribbean to come and, eventually, marry him on account of the money she would bring with her. He has her lodged with his two maiden aunts in a village in Ireland, and they are, it is clear, busy repressing her and twisting her into something that will be more socially acceptable. She has some black ancestry, so they make her wear a veil on the rare occasions that they allow her out at all (both the man and the female friend he is talking to are out-and-out racists, in a way not unusual for the time; the narrator gives no indication of sharing in this prejudice except that he does remark, when he finally sees the woman in question, that she has no "racial coarseness" in her features).

Bellairs, overhearing this conversation, is incensed on behalf of the woman, and takes advantage of the fortunate coincidence that an old university friend lives in the same Irish village to take up his friend's long-offered hospitality and get on the spot, with the aim of cluing the woman in to what a loser her fiancé is and convincing her to go back to her home country and be happy as herself, instead of unhappy as an unsuccessful version of a British woman.

He takes his dog Dandy, of whom he's very fond, in part because dogs don't mind what you look like and won't ever judge you. He doesn't take his faithful manservant. His hosts, the old university friend and his wife, call each other by nicknames, which Bellairs adopts too; the man is Cruikshank and his wife Bellwattle. Cruikshank is a gardener, and Bellairs immerses himself in the beauty and joy of nature while attempting to fulfil his quest of speaking to the woman and warning her.

Things develop in both expected and unexpected ways, and there are some passages that I found moving and gripping as Bellairs deals with them. The ending, in particular, moved me, and it's this emotional power that lands it in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. It falls short of Platinum only because of the annoying gender stereotyping.

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Review: In The Night: A Detective Novel

In The Night: A Detective Novel by Ronald Gorell Barnes
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Dorothy L. Sayers apparently said, quite accurately, “Lord Gorell has a nice ear for dialogue, and a light and pleasant touch with description.” Considering he was a poet, his prose is solid, workmanlike and never attempts to be lyrical or fanciful, though personally I would relocate a few of his commas. I wonder if Sayers drew inspiration from the general tone of this book for her Lord Peter Wimsey books? They do have some resemblances, not least that the amateur detective discovers that "to investigate was interesting, to discover horrible," which is a neat summing up of how Wimsey feels about the consequences of his detecting hobby for the criminals he detects.

This is a textbook example of an early-20th-century mystery novel: country house, unpopular rich man dead in the night, everyone a suspect, apparent locked-room (or rather locked-house) aspect, inspector who has tenacity but lacks brilliance, amateur detective who is better at detecting than the professional. Interestingly, the amateur detective here is a young woman, the close friend of the daughter of the victim, and she shows considerable intelligence and ability while not being some kind of prodigy. She also has a more developed personality - as do all the characters - than I'm used to encountering in these early-20th-century mysteries. They're not just archetype plus plot role, but have believable motivations and emotions and, in general, an interior life. A lot of early detective novels, particularly those by men, had lifeless characters who were only ever seen from the outside, and went through a kind of puppet-play acting out the author's plot. This is not one of those.

(view spoiler)[I said above that everyone is a suspect. That's not completely true, but almost. The amateur detective herself is never a suspect, for the reader because we're in her head and know she wasn't involved in the crime, and for the policeman because... contrary to his declared practice, he just doesn't think she's the type and rules her out immediately, thus avoiding some complications that would otherwise have ensured. This is pretty much the only forced part of the plot, though.

The other way in which it's not true to say that everyone is a suspect is that neither detective - amateur or professional - ever suspects the actual killer, which is largely why I suspected that person intensely. Their exclusion from the list of suspects was itself suspicious, though fully understandable in the context of the story.

There's a one-sided attraction, rather than a romance - the dead man's secretary for the young woman who functions as amateur detective - but it's briefly covered near the beginning and never develops into anything; the secretary himself hardly appears after it's clear he's not the murderer. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, it's a good piece of work, better than a lot of superficially similar books from the time, and I'll be looking out for other books by the same author in the hope that they are just as good. Unfortunately, this is the only one so far on Project Gutenberg,

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Review: The Fractal Prince

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If the first book of this trilogy has a fault, it's the worldbuilding firehose. You just get doused with high-pressure names and words with no explanation, and have to struggle through until it gradually clarifies. This book, if anything, pushes the same fault even harder. For a long time, even having read the first book, I didn't have much idea what was going on in at least one and sometimes both of the two slowly converging storylines, mainly because there was an entirely new jargon vocabulary with absolutely no explanation, and not even much in the way of contextual clues. And by the end, I was once again confused about what exactly had happened in the plot.

The author lists Roger Zelazny among his influences, and I can definitely see it. Not just starting with an amnesiac character in the first book, whose amnesia frees him to be more sympathetic than would otherwise be the case (like Corwin of Amber), and the siblings at each other's throats, but Jack of Shadows , Lord of Light , Isle of the Dead .... There's a general Zelaznian feel to a lot of the ideas and characters, especially the thief and trickster at the centre of the story.

The thing is, though, no matter how weird Zelazny's highly imaginative settings got, he had the gift of orienting you to them with a few well-chosen words (not an extended infodump, just a sentence that made it clear from context what the thing was), so that instead of struggling to figure out what was going on, you could enjoy the wild ride through weirdness. Rajaniemi seems to lack that gift, or not care about using it. Now and again, he does throw in a few words that tell us what one of his neologisms means, but that usually happens after he's already been using it for many chapters, during which time we have had no idea what image to attach to it. The most obvious example is when he says "Masrurs, they are called, jinn insurgents" - this is the seventh (and last) time that the term "masrurs" is used. Why couldn't the author have thrown those five clarifying words in at the first mention instead? Is it actually his intention to leave the reader floundering, not knowing what he's talking about most of the time?

What I did piece together was that the second story here involved an echo of Sheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights, but in a place where fictional stories were forbidden, because, through a vaguely handwaved mechanism, they could be a vector for infection leading to possession by hostile entities. (The author, I think, slips up at one or two points and forgets that fiction is forbidden.) It's also, notably, an Arabian Nights setting without Islam, which is a bit like a medieval European setting without Catholicism: possible, but you have to work hard to leave it out. We have jinni, flying carpets, ghuls, rhuks (rocs), all of which behave at least in some ways like their mythical counterparts, but are given a technological explanation that fits into the world established in Book 1. You have to be very good to make fantasy with an SF excuse work, and I think this author mostly pulls it off, though it does feel a bit like everyone has agreed to live in an Arabian Nights theme park. Also, the SF side eventually breaks down, and we get something that feels very much more like fantasy, or even mysticism, despite all the smartmatter and quantum physics. I was reminded of what Neal Stephenson did with ancient Sumerian in Snow Crash ; the magical power of language is similar in both books.

We also get someone with another Arsene Lupin alias (Don Luis Perenna), though oddly it didn't seem to be the thief who adopted it. It's just a random character in a flashback. This makes it a fourth-wall-breaking Easter egg for Lupin fans, rather than an organic part of the fiction, unless we're meant to conclude that it was, in fact, the thief and he's forgotten that fact and somehow not himself noticed the Lupin tie-in when he gets a third-person version of the memory. There's also a reference to the Lupin novel The Crystal Stopper .

The strengths of the first book were in its characters and its plot; it was emotionally coherent, even when the worldbuilding was confusing. This book, for me, didn't manage to achieve that, and the worldbuilding was even more confusing, to the point where I wondered if that was deliberate. I wasn't particularly moved, just mildly surprised, at the several twists, and honestly I couldn't follow the plot particularly well, or work out all the layers of false identity around the nominal main character (the thief). There are more stumbles over English idioms, too, which, while it's not blameworthy in the author, whose first language is Finnish, is blameworthy in the publisher, who didn't make sure they were edited properly.

Overall, my experience of the book was that the faults of the first book were magnified, while its strengths were reduced or overwhelmed by the faults. It's still very clever, probably too clever, but I found it incoherent, and a disappointing follow-up to a promising first novel. I bought and read it immediately after finishing Book 1, but I'll not be rushing out to get the third book any time soon.

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