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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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