Review: The Crime at Black Dudley

The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This first book of the more-than-20-book-long Campion series is unusual in a few ways, some of them good, some bad, and some just... unusual.

Firstly, it's more a thriller than it is a mystery story. There's very little time spent on investigating the crime, which is the fatal stabbing of an elderly man at a country-house party during a game played with the lights off. This is partly because there aren't many clues; the protagonist eventually works it out based on the logic of who might have had a motive - though even then he doesn't know what the motive might be, exactly - and by doing some library research, the results of which we don't learn until the big reveal scene. Mainly, though, nobody is too focused on the mystery because they are busy for most of the book being held captive by a ruthless international criminal, who has come to the house to pick up plans for a huge bank robbery that have now gone missing. This provides plenty of tension and action, as the guests strive unsuccessfully to escape.

Unfortunately, the resolution involves a massive deus ex machina right at the last moment, and all of the plans and courage and actions of the party go for nothing. That's the "bad" I referred to.

The other somewhat unusual thing is that Campion, who would go on to be the series hero, is a secondary character here. The protagonist is a pathologist, a consultant to Scotland Yard, who is a friend of the house party's host. Campion has inserted himself into the party for his own purposes, and reveals in the course of the book that he is some kind of shadowy freelance operative with a casual attitude to law and order, under the guise, which never slips, of an upper-class twit. He's like Lord Peter Wimsey (who first appeared six years earlier, in 1923), if Lord Peter never dropped the pose and wasn't always ethical. There may be a bit of Arsene Lupin in there too, and (given Campion's hinted-at origins), some Cleek of the Forty Faces, though without the disguise schtick.

It's not the only example of a famous detective who wasn't the main character in his first book; Charlie Chan in The House Without a Key (1925) is also a secondary character. I suspect that the author decided after writing the book that Campion was more interesting than the rather staid pathologist, and decided to write more about him.

Because Campion is interesting, though annoying, and even though the great clanging deus ex machina drags the book down to the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list, it does make it to the list because it's fluently written, suspenseful, and shows a lot of potential. There isn't the complexity of a mystery by, say, Freeman Wills Crofts or R. Austin Freeman, or the sophistication and humane empathy of a Dorothy L. Sayers, but it's good enough that I'd definitely read another by the same author.

View all my reviews

Review: Bachelors Anonymous

Bachelors Anonymous by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another one of those Wodehouse books where the same few people keep coincidentally bumping into each other, because London (or, in other books, New York) is apparently a village with about 20 total inhabitants. I tend to blame the fact that a lot of his early work was in musical comedy, where you have to keep the cast tight, and sometimes this is how you do it. Most of the books where he pulls this kind of rannygazoo are early ones, but he wrote this one in 1975, seven decades into his career. So that's a strike against it, for me at least; I don't like seeing the author's hand too obviously adjusting things.

The story itself, though, is as sparkling and full of comedic ups and downs as I could wish, so I partially forgive the coincidences that drive it. The central couple are appealing, hapless and deserving of a happy ending, the interfering lawyer Mr Trout is hilarious, and if the film magnate and the actress are stock characters, and the nurse and the hero's friend, the woman detective and the indigent baronet get little development, they're still adequate for the roles they play. I didn't fully believe the efficient and matter-of-fact detective's motivation in wanting to marry the baronet (purely to get the title of Lady Warner, even though the baronet was, as she was well aware, a complete no-hoper), but everything else was at least at the usual Wodehouse level of plausible.

Trout, a member of Bachelors Anonymous (a support group along the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous, which helps its members - and non-members, not necessarily at their request - resist matrimony), is also the lawyer of Ivor Llewellyn, the much-married motion picture magnate, and after Llewellyn's fifth divorce promises to help him avoid getting married again. The hero is hired as a kind of bodyguard to help him, but is himself newly in love; Trout looks on this development with disapproval, and interferes disastrously, though not all of the main romance's vicissitudes come from his actions.

I was amused to see that one of the other bachelors was named Fred Bassett, and wondered whether Wodehouse was familiar with the comic strip about the dog of that name, which had been running for 12 years at the time; quite possibly not, since it ran in the Daily Mail, and even if Wodehouse had been living in the UK he probably wouldn't have read that paper.

The Everyman editions are good ones, well edited and cleanly typeset (though in a typeface a few points smaller than I would prefer), but I find the cover illustration style unattractive. I did spot one small typo, a full stop that should have been a comma, but otherwise it was impeccable.

View all my reviews

Review: Sasha vs the Whole Wide World (and Dragons) (Set in the

Sasha vs the Whole Wide World (and Dragons) (Set in the by Rachel Taylor Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is (apart from the copy editing, which I'll mention later) a sound piece of work. The characters have plenty of backstory, which makes them feel like they didn't start existing in Chapter 1, and also makes sense of their actions and feelings during the book. Relationships matter, a lot, especially family for the protagonist, and most of the relationships are not straightforwardly like or dislike, trust or distrust; they're messy and complicated, like real relationships. This is a level I don't see often in first books.

I definitely called what would happen with the money side of things well in advance. Money is an obsession of the protagonist, since her family is struggling with debt; she's working four jobs to try to save for college, but has to keep paying off overdue mortgage payments with the money instead. I predicted both that (view spoiler)[she would have to give up the McGuffin without being paid for it, because it was the right thing to do (hide spoiler)] and that (view spoiler)[she would still make money out of the publicity surrounding it, just not the obscene amounts selling the McGuffin would have brought (hide spoiler)]. The end point of the romance plot was also predictable, because after all, romance plots all come out the same way, though it did have a rocky road to get there, and was well thought out and believable in its evolutions. Having said that, it wasn't a made-from-box-mix, totally predictable plot at all, and it kept me thoroughly engaged, even gripped, throughout. Most of the book consists of a road trip, taken while being hunted, not knowing who to trust or how to escape pursuit, which keeps the tension high. There's constant comic relief, not only from the snark of the protagonist (which isn't cruel), but from the antics of the three little dogs she has stolen from one of her jobs for reasons that are a bit glossed over. I think it's to make it more believable that she's been kidnapped, but... it doesn't, really. (view spoiler)[Perhaps the McGuffin got involved in manipulating events earlier than it seemed to? (hide spoiler)]

The author, like an increasing number of authors these days, is under the mistaken impression that it's correct to put a hyphen between an adjective and the noun it's modifying. This is most noticeable with "magical-creatures," because that's the pair that occurs most frequently, but it's a more widespread problem, and she also hyphenates numerous phrases that shouldn't be hyphenated either. At least once, in a compound adjective (which is almost the only place you should hyphenate), she doesn't hyphenate all the words in the phrase. It's good that authors want to use more punctuation, but not that they don't know where to put it. Otherwise, there are a couple of the usual errors, but most of them don't occur frequently, and some, but by no means all, of the apostrophes are in the right place. An editor is credited, but that may or may not be a copy editor. I've seen way worse, but the excess hyphens were a distraction.

Usual disclaimers: I received a pre-publication review copy, and more editing may happen before publication. Also, many people don't know or care how punctuation works, but for those readers who do, I give specifics in my reviews so they can decide how much it will reduce their enjoyment.

It's to the credit of the author that, even though the punctuation annoyed me, I was still strongly gripped by the plot and was cheering for the protagonist all the way along. Recommended.

View all my reviews

Review: Barmy in Wonderland

Barmy in Wonderland by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If there was one thing Wodehouse knew well, it was the New York theatre scene, since his first great success, before he became a popular novelist, was writing lyrics for New York musicals. He once had five running on Broadway at once, and claimed that his royalties from the song he contributed to Showboat would keep him in whisky and cigarettes for life.

This isn't the musical theatre, though, but the "legitimate" theatre. Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps, known to his friends in the Drones Club as "Barmy" because, even in that dim-witted environment, he stood out as particularly slow, loses his job as a hotel clerk thanks to the drunken shenanigans of a Hollywood actor who is in New York to perform in a play. Through a series of events involving a supposed fortune teller and a young woman who Barmy thinks is his destiny, Barmy ends up investing a legacy he recently got from his grandfather into the play that his friend is performing in.

There follow confusion, conflict, drama (more offstage than on), the looming threat of failure and some actually rather cunning work by Barmy, who isn't always quite as green as he is cabbage-looking, ably assisted by friends and well-wishers. It's as bright and sparkling as a good musical, like all of Wodehouse's stuff, and if the Hollywood actor sounds a bit like every English-literature-and-the-Bible-quoting smart young fellow in these books, well, it's an amusing way to sound.

Even though this was published in 1952 and refers to the contemporary actor Gregory Peck, whose career began in 1939, it's still, somehow, implicitly set in the pre-war world of Wodehouse. Barmy is still a young man, for one thing, as he was in the pre-war Drones stories, and a young woman refers to the Volstead Act (the Prohibition law), which might have been on her mother's mind a generation earlier but would hardly have been brought up by someone who was young in 1952. In fact, the book is based on a play by Wodehouse's friend George S. Kaufman, written in 1925. (Wodehouse split the royalties with Kaufman 50/50, in contrast to the plot point late in the novel where a novella writer has to sue for a share in the proceeds of the play, which was apparently based on his work without permission.) And yet it feels entirely Wodehousian from start to finish, even if nobody pretends to be someone else.

It's a cheerful short novel, and I solidly recommend it.

View all my reviews

Review: The Shadow of the Wolf

The Shadow of the Wolf by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is in the "reverse mystery" subgenre pioneered by Freeman and most famously encountered in the TV series Columbo, where we start out by seeing the crime committed and know who did it, and the tension and interest is generated by seeing the detective and the criminal play cat and mouse respectively.

From the first scene in which Freeman's detective, Dr Thorndyke, appeared, I had some idea of the kind of clues that might turn up and help him solve the case, and by fortunate coincidence exactly that thing occurred. In fact, coincidence plays a significant role, along with Thorndyke's considerable acumen as a forensic investigator, in solving the mystery. Once again, as in at least two previous books (I haven't read the series in order), the author uses the plot device of Thorndyke getting involved in what seem initially like two separate investigations but turn out to be one, so what he discovers from one end helps him solve the mystery from the other. An author can get away with doing this kind of thing once, but three (or more) times? That takes it from an aberration to a bad habit. Sure, Thorndyke does tend to get consulted on strange cases, which makes it slightly less of a coincidence, but only slightly.

There's a second coincidence when just the piece of evidence turns up that I was expecting, and it happens to unequivocally point to the location of the body, which is just what the plot requires at that point. And there's a third coincidence at the end, which allows a neat conclusion.

I prefer not to see the hand of the author so obviously on the scales, so even though this is otherwise sound, both in the dynamics of the interpersonal relationships and the practicalities of the forensic science, I can't give it better than a Bronze-tier rating in my annual recommendation list.

View all my reviews

Review: Full Moon

Full Moon by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Written in 1947, after Wodehouse's experience of being interned by the Nazis (he was living in France when it was taken over). And yet, it sparkles with all the joy of the interwar period in which it is implicitly set, like all classic Wodehouse. The only difference I can see is that the pre-war Wodehouse probably wouldn't have mentioned a character's brassiere.

Like every Blandings Castle novel, it features imposture, but in this case takes it to an extreme; Bill, the disapproved suitor of one of Lord Emsworth's nieces, comes to the castle three times under three different identities, only one of which has any form of disguise (an enormous false beard that makes him look like an Assyrian king), and all three identities talk to Lord Emsworth, but that woolen-headed peer has so poor a memory for faces that he doesn't twig that both of the artists he employs to paint his pig's portrait are actually the same person. His far more intelligent (and less moral) brother Galahad assures the young man that he can rely on Lord Emsworth's vagueness, and so it proves.

It looks for a while there as if Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth's younger son, who is now a go-getting salesman for his American father-in-law's dog biscuit empire, is going to end up as the person who inevitably but reluctantly funds the deserving young couple of the moment, but this departure from the classic formula (in which the older generation, or the undeserving, do this kind of funding) is averted at the last minute through Gally's complicated manipulation of everyone in sight.

We get to meet some new members of the Threepwood clan, including the Wedges: Lady Hermione (Lord Emsworth's sister, who unfortunately looks like a cook), Colonel Egbert, and their daughter Veronica, whose outstanding qualities are a lack of intelligence and extraordinary beauty, plus a love of jewellery. It looks like Freddie's friend Tipton, a wealthy American, will be able to ignore the lack of intelligence for the sake of the beauty and supply the jewellery in bulk, but the course of true love runs very rough indeed for a while, not only for them but also for Freddie's other cousin Prue and her artist fiancé Bill.

The ups and downs and complications and farcical impostures, misunderstandings and assorted maneuverings, and the witty prose, scattered with a mixture of quotations from classic English literature and slang, are all well up to the classic Wodehouse standard. A strong entry in a delightful series.

View all my reviews

Review: The Eames-Erskine Case: A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery

The Eames-Erskine Case: A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery by A.E. Fielding
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A twisty tale of hidden identities and complicated schemes.

Even though the chief inspector isn't described all that much and doesn't have much in the way of personal traits, he still feels significantly more individual than the interchangeable inspectors of Freeman Wills Crofts, showing that it doesn't take very much work to turn a cardboard cutout into something a bit more like a character. He has a flatmate, who he uses as a sounding board, and this alone - the fact that he has a domestic life and talks to someone who isn't a suspect or a witness - goes a long way to humanize him, even though the flatmate isn't anything like a Watson, playing no role in the actual plot.

The unfortunate thing is that we don't get to follow the detective all the way through the case. Partway through, the viewpoint switches to a young woman who is asked to act as an amateur detective/undercover spy to help clear her potential fiancé of the crime, and while we get some exciting action as a result, a lot of the detective's work is done off-screen and then sprung on us (via the woman) as an infodump of sorts. This makes for a less satisfactory ending than if we'd been able to follow along and have some chance of figuring out the solution for ourselves, since, as they say in court, it relies on facts not in evidence.

Still, it's a sound piece of work in other respects, and I'll try to get hold of others in the series. Unfortunately, at time of review this is the only one that's on Project Gutenberg.

View all my reviews

Review: The Phone Booth Mystery: A Traditional British Mystery

The Phone Booth Mystery: A Traditional British Mystery by John Ironside
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reminded me very much of The Terriford Mystery , in that rather than being a standard detective story where the focus is on the detective solving the mystery, it focuses on an innocent man accused of murder and his faithful fiancée (Terriford)/wife (this book), who always believes in his innocence. In both cases, the resolution is not brought about by anyone cleverly figuring out who the real killer is, but by the killer confessing. This leaves the main characters without a lot of agency, and the detectives, who aren't the main characters, cease to be relevant well before the end. If you're looking for the experience of a standard detective story, you'll be disappointed (don't believe the "A traditional British mystery" tagline on some editions), though considered on its own terms it's reasonably successful and written fluently and competently.

The author uses a couple of coincidences to tighten up the connections between the cast members. The victim is a friend of the accused's wife's bridesmaid's music teacher, as well as being the accused's boss's wife. The couple, newly married, decide on a whim to stay with a maiden lady who runs basically a B&B, who the wife had stayed with years before, and this lady turns out to be an old flame of the husband's boss's manservant. Neither of these coincidences have much impact on the plot, not least because the resolution of the plot is by no effort of any of the characters (apart from the murderer who confesses), but this kind of coincidence, to me, shows the hand of the author too prominently. I don't like it when it happens in Dracula, and I don't like it when it happens in early Wodehouse; I don't like it here either, though it's relatively harmless.

The other thing I didn't like was that there's a bit of mysticism - a woman with "the gift" who makes an accurate prophecy that everything will turn out all right - dropped in partway through. To me, that makes the wife's simple faith look rather naive, in that she readily believes it and rests her faith on that rather than on her Anglican beliefs, and it again shows the hand of the author too obviously. It doesn't make any difference to the plot either, but it does act as a bit of an internal spoiler.

It's well enough written, and the B&B owner is amusing, though none of the characters have a ton of depth. On consideration, I'm not going to put it on my recommendation list for this year, because although I enjoyed it most of the time I was reading it, I was left discontented at the end.

View all my reviews

Review: Blandings Castle and Elsewhere:

Blandings Castle and Elsewhere: by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prime Wodehouse from his classic period (1920s and 1930s). All of his books are implicitly set in what at least feels like the 20s and 30s, but these short stories were actually written and published in that period, so they don't ever feel (as the later ones occasionally do) that he was imitating himself.

I felt like I'd read at least some if not all of the stories in this book, but I don't seem to have it recorded on Goodreads, so perhaps it was a long time ago, or in a different format. I enjoyed the read in any case.

There are three sections to the book. The first is a set of Blandings Castle stories, with all of the things there are to love about that setting - the dithery, harmless Lord Emsworth, who does manage to stand up to his domineering sister, Lady Constance Keeble, once or twice; his beloved pig, Empress of Blandings; his extremely Scots gardener, with whom he has several battles of wills; and, of course, people pretending to be other people for purposes of romance resolution. It's a lovely place to spend time, and the hijinks are hilarious.

Then there's a story in which that red-haired menace to society Bobbie Wickham plots to free herself from her mother's plan for her to marry a stuffy politician through bare-faced lies and manipulation, in the process setting the politician and an American publisher at each other's throats, each believing that the other is mentally unbalanced. Even though I'm sure I'd read that one before, it had me chuckling.

Finally, there's a set of Mr Mulliner stories about Hollywood, in which Wodehouse genially sends up that very silly place. He had spent some time there himself, trying to get film versions of his musicals made, but the craziness of the studio system had defeated that plan; this is his revenge, if something so basically good-natured can be called revenge. Mr Mulliner, of course, is an elderly raconteur in the bar-parlour of a pub called the Angler's Rest, and usually makes some distant relative the protagonist of his stories, which immediately alerts you that these are probably tall tales. They evoke an exaggerated version of Hollywood in the period of Prohibition (the existence of which contributes to the plot of a couple of the stories).

There's a running theme, as there often is in Wodehouse, of formidable women (probably modelled on his aunts) and diffident men who sometimes grow a spine, or at least manage to give that impression, and either stand up to or stand up for the women. Sometimes, though, it's the intelligent, ruthless women who triumph over foolish men. I don't want to give the idea that it's a constant battle of the sexes, though; men and women are allies as well as adversaries, often against their stiff and unsympathetic elders. There's generally conflict in a Wodehouse story, and if it's not always resolved by the determined actions of the protagonist - if there are sometimes fortunate events that bring an unlooked-for resolution - it's still always a fun ride, because he somehow manages to engage the reader's sympathies for even the most trivial dilemmas of his most foolish characters.

View all my reviews

Review: Whisky Galore

Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My late father was a fan, though the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that he was a fan of the film (which I haven't seen) rather than the book. If he'd liked the book, we probably would have had a copy, and I would have read it years ago.

I was not a fan of the book particularly. I listened to the abridged BBC version read by Stanley Baxter, who does an excellent job; other reviewers suggest that it needed abridgement, and I probably got a better version than the wordier original. I certainly didn't feel like it needed to be longer.

It's very slice-of-life. The first part consists of various people on a Scottish island during World War II moaning about how all of their problems would be solved if only there wasn't a shortage of whisky. Then a ship carrying whisky wrecks nearby (with no loss of life), the islanders "salvage" the cargo, and all their problems are, in fact, solved. The rabbity school principal, with a few drams on board, finally stands up to his mother, the English sergeant-major gets to have an engagement party and to fix his wedding date, and everyone else is, by Scottish standards at least, in a good and hopeful mood, apart from the man whose daughters tipped out all his whisky to hide it from the excise inspector.

I found it mildly amusing at best.

View all my reviews

Review: The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye

The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye by Brian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This author appears to have loaded a shotgun with punctuation and discharged it at close range into his manuscript. He should have included fewer dashes, fewer hyphens, fewer exclamation marks and a lot more commas (some of them in places that he uses dashes, some in places where he puts no punctuation at all). Proof, if it were needed, that some publishers a century ago sometimes put out badly edited work, just like many publishers today.

Neither the amateur detective nor the police inspector has a lot of personality, and I kept confusing them, because they both have names starting with B.

A bookie is introduced at one point as a minor character. Before we even meet him, the author alludes to his maid's appearance as indicating that she's Jewish. Then he similarly indicates that the bookie himself is Jewish. After that, he points out his Jewishness, and then after stereotyping him two or three times, concludes by making the point (in case you had missed it) that he's Jewish. If this isn't quite antisemitism, it's a close cousin to it, especially since his ethnic origin has nothing to do with anything.

The plot doesn't make a ton of sense. It's sometimes unclear which parts were coincidence and which parts were planning, especially since (view spoiler)[the murderer steals a suitcase from a luggage trolley at a hotel, possibly at random, so that the victim won't be identified immediately to give him time to do something I've forgotten, and registers the victim at a different hotel under the name of the suitcase's owner, who, as it happens, is acquainted with the victim, even though neither of them are anywhere near their hometown. The victim then apparently signs in under that name, which can't be accounted for by anything other than some prearrangement with her that the resolution of the plot never mentions and that isn't especially plausible (hide spoiler)]. The twist is unusual, but I don't think the author played very fair with the reader in leading up to it. And one of the two motives for the crime is muddied by a backstory that comes almost straight out of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

For me, it was a bit of a miss, and I won't be reading more from this author.

View all my reviews

Review: The Ponson Case

The Ponson Case by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remarked to my wife about this one that it doesn't matter if the inspector in a Freeman Wills Crofts novel isn't Inspector French, because he'll be functionally indistinguishable from him anyway. The author reserves personality for his suspects and victims, supplying none to his detectives. They're all efficient, dogged men who work patiently through the tedious investigative work that lets them unravel complicated and imaginative crimes.

The suspects are generally interesting, though, at least in spots. The deceased and his wife and daughter are lightly sketched, and have little role except as backstory, but his son, his nephew, the son's fiancée (a determined, intelligent woman who gets respect and approval from the police inspector), and another character who it would be a spoiler to describe have had more time spent on them, and come through as individuals.

There are elaborate and clever alibis, a tense chase leading eventually to Portugal, and a couple of unexpected twists, one of which I saw coming from a little distance off, but the other of which I definitely did not. While the resolution stretched my suspension of disbelief a little ((view spoiler)[the police decide not to prosecute anyone, even though a man has died and a lot of money has been spent on investigating events which several people conspired to cover up (hide spoiler)]), it was emotionally satisfying.

These are enjoyable mystery stories in which the cleverness of the crime, and its gradual revelation through careful police work, are the biggest draws, but there's an awareness too of how the events affect the characters emotionally, and how their relationships impact events. There's also always admiration of the landscape through which the inspector travels, both in England and often, as here, on the Continent, and I have to wonder whether this was Freeman Wills Crofts' way of making his holidays tax deductible, as well as a reflection of his genuine enjoyment of travel and scenery. And we usually get a tense chase, fight, or other action sequence thrown in as well. The character work may be patchy, and the detectives interchangeable, but these are still well written stories in other respects.

View all my reviews

Review: Uncle Fred in the Springtime:

Uncle Fred in the Springtime: by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Uncle Fred (Lord Ickenham) is equipped by nature with the skills, personality and moral outlook of a successful con man, but by heredity with the rank of an earl in the peerage of England. Firmly instructed by his countess that he is not to leave his country estate while she's away, he of course nips up to London almost immediately, and becomes involved in the money troubles of his nephew and the romantic troubles of his niece. The obvious solution to these problems is for him to impersonate Sir Roderick Glossop, the prominent loony doctor, at the Earl of Emsworth's Blandings Castle. Blandings (as one of the characters makes note of in the course of the story) seems to attract imposters like other houses attract mice.

Published in 1939, and unusual in that it has a couple of references to the existence of World War I, which Wodehouse usually ignored; with the Second World War looming, perhaps he couldn't quite manage that. But it's still set in his classic idealized inter-war world of country estates, harmless deceptions and farcical events. The pig Empress of Blandings gets stolen (of course), the Efficient Baxter literally gets egg on his face, young love goes through vicissitudes and finally prospers, people who need money end up with it by complicated means, and the whole thing sparkles with genial language play covering Shakespeare, the Bible, Keats, Tennyson and Dickens, among other literary references, mingled with both British and American slang of the period.

It's a Wodehouse novel, in short, and a good one, though not, for me, one of the very greatest. I lost track of some of the convolutions of the plot through not being sufficiently rested when I read it, but since a Wodehouse plot always works out more or less the same way, I was confident that I'd end up all right, along with the deserving characters, and that no real harm would come to anyone.

The edition I read could have done with a couple of additional commas (perhaps it was set from the edition which notoriously removed too many of them), and has "soups-willing" where it should be "soup-swilling," but is otherwise generally well edited.

View all my reviews

Review: Second Sight Secrets and Mechanical Magic

Second Sight Secrets and Mechanical Magic by Herman Pinetti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A short book by a magician, well known in his own time, about how some of the more common medium tricks and mind-reading acts worked. Debunking fake mediums was a popular hobby among magicians during the days when spiritualism was popular.

While, in these days of electronics, mentalism acts are easier than ever before, the basic technique is no doubt still the same: an assistant, usually a woman, is placed into a situation which seems to make it impossible that she could see whatever is being examined by the performer. Using a prearranged code worked into the performer's patter, or a second assistant who can see the object and communicate in some way with the receiver, the receiver correctly gives the number, or the details of the written note, or the identity of the object being held up where she can't see it, or whatever it may be. It's still clever even when you know how it's done. I saw a particularly spectacular example on a Britain's Got Talent magician special, where the assistant was enclosed in a glass tank of water and yet was able to write the serial number of a random banknote (which she couldn't see) on the glass.

Less common today are acts where a person is apparently restrained and yet is able to manipulate objects when hidden inside a "cabinet" defined by curtains. This was a favourite of mediums, who claimed that the spirits were doing it, but used an assistant reaching up through a hollow leg of the cabinet, or freed themselves somehow or gave themselves enough slack in the ropes that they could do it.

The old, but still popular, levitating lady illusion is also explained. I'd already seen it explained in another book ( The Old and the New Magic , which put me on to Pinetti), but I think Pinetti does a better job of his explanation. His explanations, in fact, are all very clear and easy to understand, and my only complaint about the book is that I wish it was longer and covered a larger variety of tricks.

View all my reviews

Review: The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris

The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris by Evie Gaughan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Told in almost aggressively plain and unornamented prose, which may be part of the reason that it has comparatively few errors in it. Going along with that, the observations on life and the characters' self-insights are bland and obvious most of the time, and the plot is fairly predictable and low-stakes. I don't mind low stakes or a slow-moving plot if something else is going on to engage me, but, while I certainly never wanted to give up on it, this one didn't grip me very hard. It does have an appealing setting in a town in France, which is well evoked.

The love interest is an extreme wish-fulfilment fantasy. He's rich, but he doesn't care about money - easy to do when you have plenty of it - and would rather be an art photographer than a ruthless property developer like his father. (Photographing picturesque buildings, by the way, not anything controversial.) He's infeasibly handsome and also sensitive and kind, yet unaccountably single. He thinks the rather bland heroine is the best thing ever. I'm assuming this is a convention of a genre I don't often read, so it gets a pass on that basis, but it did stick out to me. There's a predictable misunderstanding between the hero and heroine that is resolved in exactly the way I thought it would be.

I have a personal preference for strong, capable heroines who make good decisions. Edie is... not quite that. Yet she's not such a klutz as to be interesting for that reason, either. She makes decisions which might put her in situations that aren't ideal, but are definitely survivable and may have their upsides, and copes in them in ways that don't really put anything she values at much risk most of the time. She is good-hearted, though, and her well-intentioned meddling always works out and doesn't get resented more than briefly by the other characters. She does persevere with things, even when frightened; she says a couple of times "there's no going back now" when, in fact, she could quite easily go back.

It's not a good book to be a mother in. One character has a mother who is alive and in good health; everyone else's mother is either tragically dead (there are three of these, with different causes of death: Nazi concentration camp, chronic illness, and road accident) or, in one case, suffering from dementia. Fathers get a slightly more varied set of fates: dead in a road accident, dead in a Nazi concentration camp, dead of old age, alive and money-grubbingly villainous, or alive and supportive but elsewhere. The echoes of WW II do give it some emotional heft that was badly needed.

There is a supernatural element, or rather two: a ghost, and a magical substance that brings back happy memories. (There's some attempt at intertextuality with Proust with that second one; the hero, who speaks fluent French, for some reason carries what appears to be an English translation of Proust around with him, and lends it to the heroine.) Either or both of the supernatural elements could be removed and it would barely affect the plot, except that there would need to be some easily imaginable rewrites of a couple of motivations.

There are a few continuity glitches. For instance, the heroine wears kitten heels at one point, and then later says that the only heels she has with her are boots. She also says that she applied "all those months ago" for a job that was advertised for immediate start, which she has just started.

Overall, it's inoffensive, warmhearted, but bland and expected. If you like this kind of thing, this is certainly one. For me, while it was mildly enjoyable, it lacked any factor that I could really enthuse about, so even though there was nothing major wrong with it, I'm calling this one a three-star read that doesn't quite make it to my annual recommendation list. It was just OK. I'm probably not the target audience, though.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review.

View all my reviews

Review: Diary of a Pilgrimage

Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jerome's follow-up to Three Men in a Boat , the book that made his name and fortune, was another travel story, this fictionalized account of a trip to see the Oberammergau passion play - presumably in 1890, since it's performed in years ending in 0 and the book was published in 1891. It offers an Englishman's view of Germany, nearly a decade and a half before the First World War (which event, I would imagine, reduced the demand for this book and Three Men on the Bummel , the story of a cycling trip to Germany with his former companions from the boating trip). As well as the travelogue itself, it's scattered with obviously exaggerated comic incidents in which everyone, certainly including Jerome himself, looks like idiots. It's the same "dealing with frustrating but not really dangerous obstacles" comic genre that the later American writer Patrick F. McManus does so well.

For my taste, most of the comic and landscape-related set-pieces would have been improved if they were cut by ten to fifteen percent, and the occasional philosophical ones if they were cut by fifty to a hundred percent. But that's me. I did like the description of the play itself, even if it ran a little long; in an era when British law still prevented any member of the Trinity from being represented on the stage, Jerome's musings on how seeing the life of Jesus portrayed by actors touched him in ways that a book or a sermon could not were subversive as well as devout.

The narrator of this audiobook edition is excellent, and really adds to the experience. It's not just a reading of the book; it's a performance, with asides delivered in an undertone, and strong accent work for the various characters encountered on the journey.

View all my reviews

Review: Mr. Petre

Mr. Petre by Hilaire Belloc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an odd one from Hilaire Belloc. It's arguably science fiction, set about 20 years in the future from when it was published (in the year of Belloc's death, coincidentally, 1953), but that doesn't make a huge amount of difference. It's mainly so that he can introduce a vaguely described technology named the "rotor" which powers things (ships, cars, civic infrastructure), as far as I can tell because he needed a character to have made a lot of money from something and that's what he picked. He also, without fanfare or anyone discussing it at all, has women holding several high offices such as Prime Minister and Chancellor, which makes absolutely no difference to how anything operates, and this is probably the point.

Nothing else has really changed in the world; the closest there is to a reference to anything relating to World War II is a mention that a newspaper has printed a story about how the Poles are oppressing the German-speaking minority in Poland. Let's not forget that in 1932, when this book was published, Adolf Hitler was a new figure on the German political landscape, and the Nazis weren't yet in power.

So any claim to be science fiction is fairly thin. It's mostly a satire, mostly on the financial system and those who run it, but the legal system, politicians and civil servants, doctors, and newspapers come in for their share of mockery too.

A man - a man, we're told, who isn't doing very well financially, though he's from a landowning background - gets off a boat from the US and, in the train on the way to London, falls asleep and wakes up with no memory of who he is. He vaguely thinks his name might be Petre (pronounced Peter), and when a cabbie takes him to the Hotel Splendide based on how he's dressed, he registers under that name. The clerk assumes he's the eccentric American millionaire of that name, John K. Petre, who would, in today's terms, be a billionaire (his quoted fortune of 50 million pounds translates to 250 million USD at the 1932 exchange rate, which today would be getting on for six billion, assuming we are talking 1932 values). This man's eccentricities include bullying newspapers who dare to print his whereabouts, and he also doesn't allow pictures of him to be published, so nobody knows what he looks like unless they've met him, and it's not surprising that nobody knows he's in London.

A rising young stockbroker gets hold of the amnesiac, and uses the power of the Petre name to pull off several large financial transactions, netting the presumed Petre about two million pounds - close to 180 million in 2025 pounds - without him having to put up any actual money (of which he has almost none) or prove his identity (which he cannot do). It's all done on bluff and assumptions and people's fear and greed, manipulated through rumour both by word-of-mouth and through a Press that is for sale and easily fooled, and the money... just appears somehow through financial wizardry, though ultimately, as Belloc reflects, it probably comes from the collective pockets of the British taxpayer.

There's a farcical series of appointments with different doctors in Harley Street who are no use whatsoever with helping the amnesiac regain his memory; they mostly make him angry by not listening to him and then chiding him for not telling them things.

(view spoiler)[Eventually, the man is recognized by an old friend and regains his memory, whereupon it is clear - if it wasn't already - that he isn't Petre; his first name is Peter. The real Petre gets to know of the whole business and sues him, but is defeated in court because of complicated legal principles going back to Edward III, which Belloc makes up and gives convincing names. Peter is left with the difficult problem of how to dispose of the money that he doesn't want and thinks is probably going to be harmful to whoever possesses it, but he doesn't manage to come up with an answer. (hide spoiler)]

It's amusing more than laugh-out-loud funny, and was probably funnier in 1932 than it is today, but I did enjoy the read.

View all my reviews

Review: Hull and Fire

Hull and Fire by James W. Cutter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm always keen on some original worldbuilding, especially if it's essential to the plot and not just there for decoration, and this book offers some. It takes the approach of not always explaining the world immediately, so for a while you have to just let the unexplained cultural references wash over you. For myself, I prefer a little bit of infodumping to being left wondering what the heck the thing that was just mentioned is and why it matters, but tastes in this regard differ.

We have a world where a group of islands has mysteriously appeared, changing the weather, and also there's a new continent which is in the process of being colonized and which generates a mysterious call for at least some people who go there. The world is filled with lines of magical force or connection which some people can perceive and manipulate, using them both for communication and to pull ships along. All of which is cool and has a lot of potential, though in this book it's more potential than actual; the worldbuilding is relevant a couple of times, but it's not like it powerfully drives the whole book, apart from the new continent being a destination for the characters for various reasons - and that would have worked just about as well without the continent having recently come into existence, as far as this book is concerned.

The blurb did make me nervous that the book would turn out to be dystopian or depict a lot of cruelty and tragedy, and there was some, but not more than I could stand. The main characters are mostly of an ethnic group known as Woads, who are distinguished by having blue hands; they are currently being persecuted by a post-revolutionary government who overthrew a Woad emperor, and two of the viewpoint characters are a Woad brother and sister from an ancient landowning and merchant house, recently in decline, living in a free city near the former empire. They find that their fellow citizens, who they grew up with and dealt with on what they thought were terms of mutual respect, have turned against them under the influence of the post-revolutionaries. I had a moment of disbelief that a family who had been part of the city for a thousand years would suddenly be persecuted like that, but then I thought about the Jews. Though I did have some difficulty with the idea that a genetic difference could have been around for a thousand years (or more) and not spread to the whole population through intermarriage, which appears not to be a taboo.

The author can mostly punctuate, except that he puts commas between adjectives that do not require them (very common - but I haven't seen many people put a comma after the adjective "single," which he does), and sometimes uses a hyphen when he shouldn't, such as between an adjective and its noun; in fact, practically every hyphen he includes is in a place where no hyphen should be. He's also bad with homonyms, committing a lot of the common homonym errors and even one I hadn't seen before (hew for hue). I'll pass on the full list to the publisher in the hope they can be fixed in the ebook before publication, or maybe shortly after. There are a few examples of most of the other common errors that many people make: missing past perfect tense, "may" where it should be "might," and so forth, and some comma splices.

These issues aren't constant, so I was able (mostly) to focus on the story. Unfortunately, this is very much a setup book, introducing the characters and their issues and getting them ready to go to the new continent, where presumably more will happen. They do have obstacles to overcome in getting away from the city, but the book doesn't feel like it tells a complete story or is particularly strong in plot at all, though I wouldn't call the ending a cliffhanger.

I find I'm not sufficiently engaged to quite want to carry on with the series, though I was certainly engaged enough to finish the book. Part of that, as so often happens, is the editing issues wearing away at my enjoyment, and some readers will not notice those, and will be able to focus better on the other aspects. It's an original world with some interesting worldbuilding, though that's not so far strongly incorporated, and the characters are reasonably appealing, but it just doesn't quite grab me hard enough to make me want to continue.

View all my reviews

Review: The old and the new magic

The old and the new magic by Henry Ridgely Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Written in the wordy style of the time, and maybe telling stories that are a little too neat and include more of the writer's rather jolly and self-satisfied voice than I personally would prefer. Inclined to list the effects that the magician under discussion produced (sometimes just by name, as if every reader would know what the cigarette-paper trick is, for example), more than telling us how they were done, which is what I was mainly hoping for, and also to devote a lot of the space to biographical details of the magicians. But it does have some "how the trick is done" content, with diagrams - you need to make sure, if you're getting an ebook edition, that it has the illustrations, because they're essential.

The "old" magic of the title is the magic used by priests and shamans to fool credulous primitives into believing in divine miracles. There are some illustrations and examples, all from pagan temples, of apparatuses that cause doors to open, trumpets to sound, and water or even milk to flow out of statues, usually when a fire is lit on the altar or lamps are lighted to provide heat which drives some hydraulic/pneumatic mechanism. Unlike more modern skeptics, the author doesn't go up against current religions, apart from spiritualism, which was already notorious for fakery and deception. He's clearly a Freemason, based on multiple references, as were many of the magicians he discusses - including Cagliostro, who he denounces as an obvious fraud. He also recounts visiting a supposed Tibetan mystic with a friend in order to debunk him, though the man seems to have had very little success and hardly needed debunking.

The "new" magic is that which is practiced overtly for entertainment, with acknowledgement that it's based on the practiced manipulation of scientific principles to fool the onlookers, who have consented to be fooled. In other words, the "old" magic is deceptive and the "new" magic is honest.

The content tends to ramble a bit, without an obvious plan. The best nonfiction books have a clear theme and stick to it; this one is partly about the difference between frauds using conjuring tricks and illusions to claim real supernatural powers and avowed entertainers using the same tricks, but it's also about the lives of magicians, and also about how they did some of their tricks (while others are described but not explained, sometimes because the author doesn't know how they were done).

It could have been better if it had had more focus, but I did enjoy it, and it pointed me to other authors in the same general space who I intend to read at some point.

View all my reviews

Review: Lady of Magick

Lady of Magick by Sylvia Izzo Hunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A strong second book in the trilogy, the more so because it has a self-contained story and isn't just a transitional book in a three-book story arc.

The first book was well done apart from the use of coincidence, fate, and prophecy to help the plot along and make the protagonist more Special. This book doesn't repeat those mistakes, making it even stronger. Sophie is still overpowered, but she does have fit opposition, and her overpowered abilities give her chances to make good moral choices and reveal her character in so doing.

I like books which extend a relationship beyond the wedding day and show us the couple navigating marriage, and this is one. And I like to see a marriage in which there's mutual respect and support, too.

The setup is that Sophie is studying, and Gray teaching, in the neighbouring country of Alba (= Scotland), where they have to learn Gaelic because, since it's separate from the Kingdom of Britain, the people there have not adopted English. They make a number of friends there, some of whom turn out to have agendas. Meanwhile, Sophie's sister Joanna, now in her mid-teens, is assisting with Gray's brother-in-law's important government work, and eventually she visits her sister in Alba and becomes involved in those events. There's also a quiet romance bubbling below the surface.

But it's not all university study and government work; there's a sinister plot, and the characters get involved in attempting to foil it because the plotters make the mistake of involving them. (view spoiler)[I was never completely clear on whether the agricultural issues in Alba were the result of magic or not, but the solution to them did involve magic. (hide spoiler)] In both books, and also in the third book which I'm now reading, the rulers are just and wise, though human, and the traitors against them are clearly villainous and self-interested.

The worldbuilding has a couple of small cheats in it. This is a kind of alternate-history fantasy world, in which the influence of the Roman Empire and its gods persisted and Christianity never took off, and in which, of course, there is magic. There was still an Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain and a Norman conquest, but the Normans retained holdings in France (which isn't united as a single kingdom, as far as I can tell), and the people of Cornwall (Kernow) and Bretagne retained their language and culture into what's roughly equivalent to the Regency period (early 19th century) in our world. There was still a Tudor dynasty, and Henry Tudor "the Great" still had multiple wives, but better luck in ensuring his succession; it seems Edward VI lived to have sons, after growing up under the regency of his sisters, and there is still a Tudor - Henry XII - on the throne of Britain. The author throws in a couple of real 18th-century Scottish songs, and cheekily repurposes a verse of a very Christian hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus, as a pagan hymn at one point. So, while the departure from our history is very early and has a lot of impact, if she wants a piece of actual history for whatever reason she just drops it in there. This is what I mean by "cheats". It wasn't fatal to my suspension of disbelief, but it did take me out of the narrative a bit when it occurred.

What didn't disrupt my enjoyment of the story was the editing, which was close to impeccable; definitely once, and possibly twice, there are a couple of words in the wrong order, but that's it. And the Regency-era language is beautifully and, as far as I can tell, flawlessly done, as is the use of names. I rarely see a book in which these things are done so well.

Combine that with a more than solid story and good-hearted characters, and this first read of 2025 makes it into the Gold tier of my annual Best of the Year list.

View all my reviews