Review: The Secret House

The Secret House by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Classic Edgar Wallace: an intriguing title, a clever villain with (for the time) state-of-the-art technology, a calmly determined police detective who ends up in deadly danger, an appealing couple who have Troubles, a secondary villain who is up to no good but charming (in a foreign way; foreigners are, of course, automatically suspect and a bit strange), blackmail, murder, faked suicide, financial skullduggery, the mysterious house of the title with its secret panels and tunnels and lifts, the search for a missing heir under an unusual will, it's all here.

The ending is a bit abrupt and doesn't fully resolve everything, but I don't think it absolutely needs to. It's a strong point at which to end.

Wallace wasn't always that strong on continuity in his more quickly-written books, and the opening chapter of this one seems to be contradicted in minor ways in subsequent chapters, but if you don't think about it too hard and just imagine the well-described characters and their conflicts, it's fine.

Wallace's solidly written pulp novels consistently hit the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. They don't have the depth of reflection or emotion to take them up to Gold, but they seldom have serious enough faults to drop them into Bronze. They're reliably good for the genre, and if you're in the mood for a pulp adventure, not written to a formula or leaning too hard into the silly tropes, but definitely right in the middle of what a pulp adventure is, picking up a Wallace is a sound move.

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Review: The Corbin Necklace

The Corbin Necklace by Henry Kitchell Webster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A family of rich Midwesterners (their grandfather came in and, someone actually says aloud, chased the Indians off a bunch of land and took it) are preparing for a wedding. The grandmother, still alive at an advanced age, is rumoured to be planning to give an heirloom pearl necklace to the young bride as a wedding gift. The young woman doesn't particularly want it, and in fact doesn't particularly want the groom, either, as it turns out, but feels obligated to accept both, for reasons which unfold.

There's a big coincidence at the heart of the plot, but since it's more to set things up than to resolve them I don't mind as much as I otherwise would. The pearl necklace is a classic McGuffin, and both it and its less-valuable duplicate disappear, reappear, and are generally complication and suspicion generators throughout.

The bride's name is Judy, and her younger brother is consequently known to one and all as Punch, though he's officially John Corbin III. He's a clever, loyal and courageous 13-year-old, who takes his responsibilities seriously, and considers preventing the theft of the necklace to be one of them. He's effective, too.

The family's neighbour, never named, is the narrator, mostly an observer of the action because of a broken leg, though he does facilitate a few conversations. There's an older man who seems to have a past as some sort of law enforcement agent, who takes effective action as well, and is one of those characters that you'd like to hear more stories about. (As far as I know, though, there were not any.)

The groom is, without being malicious or villainous, still thoroughly despicable in his adherence to his background's assumptions about what he's owed and who it's right to inconvenience so that he gets it. It's a relief to everyone when he finally departs. Meanwhile, the tyrannical old lady is more flexible and fair-minded than you might expect.

It's a genial mystery in which there are no murders and no police, and all of the characters are distinct, believable, and the possessors of some depth. The author was a prolific producer of fiction, who said once that to make a living from fiction you had to churn out a lot of possibly inferior stuff, but this is decent, by the standards of the time and of today.

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Review: The Man in the Brown Suit

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This started out very promising. The two narrators have strong voices (different ones from each other), and the female narrator, Anne, seemed strong and sensible. In a setup reminiscent of Wilhelmina in London , she is the daughter of a long-deceased mother and a vague father who dies, leaving mostly debts, so she must make her own way in the world. Her way of doing so is to turn amateur detective, having come across a clue to a mystery but being unable to make the police take her seriously. This sends her off on a boat to South Africa, and on the boat she meets various people: a kind older woman, the other narrator (an MP), the MP's two secretaries, a clergyman/missionary, and Colonel Race, who's rumoured to work for the Secret Service.

We know from the prologue that there's a sinister mastermind called "the Colonel," who doesn't usually get his hands dirty, but gives criminal tasks to other people to do (fairly standard stuff, see, for example, Kate Plus Ten by Edgar Wallace). A wrinkle with this mastermind, though, is that he also always finds someone to frame for the crime. A supposedly Russian dancer who isn't actually Russian was one of his catspaws, and she has evidence of one of the frame-ups, and is planning to extort the Colonel.

Well, it's obvious what happens next. And thus kicks off the mystery, which Anne has stumbled into by happening to be in the right place at the right time - but she then takes action, which, while headstrong, isn't completely stupid.

What is completely stupid is that she gets decoyed into danger not once, but twice, with the same simple trick (like that idiot in Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery ). She does bravely go deliberately into danger again by pretending to fall for it a third time (though the text says it's the second time, it's the third), after (view spoiler)[surviving the second incident by complete lucky chance and, by complete coincidence, connecting back up with her love interest, who she's seen for about 10 minutes at this point but is totally in love with. It's only the fact that they do spend some time together getting to know each other that saves it from my "thin-romance" tag, though, like Anne herself, it doesn't really deserve its narrow escape (hide spoiler)].

The identity of "the Colonel" was a complete surprise to me, and something of a cheat. (view spoiler)[We have had him as a viewpoint character, and he has misled us deliberately in his diary. Also, nobody ever even raises the question of whether Colonel Race might possibly be "the Colonel," even though that is literally his rank. (hide spoiler)]

So it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, Anne has an appealing voice and takes action as a protagonist. On the other hand, she makes some outstandingly stupid choices, has to be rescued not just by her love interest but by the author's heavy Hand of Fate, is the kind of female protagonist that all the men want, falls in love with someone she's barely met, and gives a speech about how women want to be dominated by men. On balance, it's... not great, with a lot of wasted potential. I'm dropping it down to three stars - not a recommendation - although it was teetering on the border of slipping into the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list.

This is an early Christie, and early Christie was not that great. It's a lesson to all of us that even the most admired authors usually wrote a few stinkers, or at least books that weren't even close to their later standards, at the start of their careers.

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Review: The Clue of the Twisted Candle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Fire Within

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Case with Nine Solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Dark Eyes of London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith

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

A terrific thriller from a century ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Mystery of the Blue Train

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Brand Of Silence: A Detective Story

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

Another rip-roaring pulp adventure from McCulley.

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: In the Fog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Big Four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Glass Slide World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Crimson Cryptogram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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