Review: Red Aces: Being Three Cases of Mr. Reeder

Red Aces: Being Three Cases of Mr. Reeder by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

J.G. Reeder is one of Wallace's few characters that he reused across different books, at least early in his career - though in the first book he's a young man (with an older man as a decoy), and subsequently the older man is Reeder and the young man is never mentioned again, so the continuity is not that strong.

He's a private detective who's also consulted by the police and has some kind of ill-defined connection with the Public Prosecutor's Office, which allows Wallace to have his cake and eat it too. Reeder is independent in terms of what cases he takes on, but he has some semblance of official authority when he needs it.

These three mid-length stories are varied. "Red Aces" is a story of a murder that Reeder happens to come upon on a snowy night, with some theatrical elements and a backstory of organized crime and revenge. His task is to extricate a young man from the elements that make him look guilty and identify the actual culprits. I found the whole thing rather confusing, and for most of it had no idea what had actually happened.

"Kennedy the Con Man" I thought was clever; I was fooled almost to the end. A number of people who had been victims of a scam several years before have disappeared mysteriously, and Reeder is asked to find them.

"The Case of Joe Attymar" had its clever elements too, but I was suspicious of one particular character throughout, though I was never sure. Since we don't get to see all of the evidence that Reeder sees, it isn't a "fair play" mystery.

The construction and unwinding of the cases shows ingenuity and originality, but these are otherwise not top-drawer Wallace. Entertaining, though, certainly.

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Review: Laughing Gas

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm reasonably sure I've read this one before, but long enough ago that it was a fresh experience.

It's another standalone Wodehouse, technically in the Drones Club series, though that is a very loose series linked only by the fact that the stories' main characters are members of that frivolous club. This one, Reggie, has recently inherited an earldom that he wasn't expecting (a number of relatives had died in the necessary order), and he's been sent off by the family lawyer as the new "head of the family" to lay down the law to his alcoholic Cousin Egbert, who has got engaged to someone in Hollywood, of all ghastly places.

On the way to Los Angeles by train, he meets (by what seems to him like a coincidence, but clearly is planned on her part) a popular film actress who's as fake as a rubber chicken, but takes him in completely. Drones Club members are not noted for their intelligence. He refuses to hear a word against her from anyone, including Ann, his former fiancée, who turns out to be his cousin's current fiancée.

People swapping bodies was a staple of pulp fiction at the time, no doubt inspired by F. Anstey's Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers (1882). The book Freaky Friday, now the best-known example thanks to the movie (which recently got a sequel), drew on Anstey, and here, so does Wodehouse, introducing a rare supernatural element that never gets explained - because it's a plot device, and not at all the point of the story. While under the laughing gas of the title for dental surgery, Reggie accidentally swaps bodies with Joey Cooley, the child star, who is having a similar procedure next door, and shenanigans ensue.

The weedy Joey, now in an adult body with the build and experience of an amateur boxer and a face like a gorilla, goes around punching people in the snoot who he has long felt deserved it. Reggie, on the other hand, has to cope with Joey's unenviable situation: he lives with the head of the studio and the studio head's sister, who can't stand Joey at any price and makes no secret of it, and he also inherits Joey's youthful enemies.

But what he does discover is that Ann, who looks after Joey, is genuinely fond of the child and a good person, and that April June, the film star he had fallen in love with, is the viper that everyone has warned him about. Meanwhile, Cousin Egbert believes Joey is some kind of hallucination brought on by alcohol, and is drawn as a result to the temperance preaching of the Temple of the New Dawn. (There's a bit of tongue-in-cheek Wodehouse playfulness in that the Temple's services are described as if it's an Anglican church, with matins, evensong, and prayer books, though he certainly would have known that a nondenominational church in Los Angeles would have none of those things.)

Because this is Wodehouse, everything is sorted out in the end, and people get their comeuppance or their reward according to what they deserve. But it's the journey that matters, and it's full of reversals and comedic moments ranging from slapstick to sophisticated wordplay.

I will note that I've given it my "casual-racism" tag, though I hesitated whether to do so or not. By the standards of the 1930s, it's not virulently racist, not like some other popular books such as John Buchan's or I Pose, but it's more racist than Wodehouse usually gets. The racial stereotypes are undermined in a couple of cases, and yet the attitudes and language are there, and if this is something you're extra sensitive to, it would be best to avoid this particular Wodehouse.

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Review: The Melody of Death

The Melody of Death by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An odd one, and not my favourite of the Wallaces I've read.

There's a significant amount of relationship drama, which is a bit unusual for Wallace. A controlling mother pushes her daughter to marry a man who she believes is wealthy, or at least the heir to wealth, and neither of these things is true (his eccentric uncle having disinherited him on a whim). In turn, he believes that his bride-to-be has money of her own and that money has nothing to do with her wanting to marry him, and neither of these things is true either. He doesn't pick up on the clear signs that she doesn't love him whatsoever and is probably (reading between the lines) mainly marrying him to escape from her awful mother. They do talk honestly, after rather than before the wedding, and set up a household in which they live as, basically, flatmates with a growing non-romantic friendship, but it's still awkward, because they each feel they've let the other down.

Also, on the evening of their wedding, a violinist plays a tune outside, and he turns pale and won't say why.

Meanwhile, he's going out a lot at night and, again, not explaining why. And there's a rash of safecracking burglaries going on. And he's given up his job, but now has money. Coincidence? We think not!

But also not what it looks like. There's a gang of safecrackers who are cleverly avoiding the police, but we know he's not one of them.

The explanation turns out to be far-fetched. (view spoiler)[He suspected he had cancer, and went to a doctor in another city, and, because he couldn't face hearing the diagnosis directly and didn't want the doctor to know who he was, devised an elaborate system where the doctor would send one of two cards to a violinist the young man knows, asking him to play one of two melodies outside the man's house, depending on whether he had cancer or not. But the doctor unaccountably messes up and sends the wrong card (saying that he has cancer when he doesn't), and then, not having any way of contacting him, can't correct the error.

Having, he thinks, nothing to lose, and loving his wife even if she doesn't love him, and having always had a fascination with the idea of being a thief but being too law-abiding to actually do it, he sets out to steal from the thieves, and in a highly unlikely turn of events, manages to turn the money into more than twice its value by clever stock speculation, so that he can pay back the victims and the thieves and still have some for himself and his wife. He's captured by the robbers; locked up to prevent him interfering in their next hit - on his uncle; fortunately rescued when a fire happens to break out next door, and foils the robbery, winning his uncle's approval and his wife's love. (hide spoiler)]

There's a diamond necklace McGuffin, there are armed confrontations and a shoot-out, all of the machinery is there, but because the explanation for the odd events is just so unlikely I felt let down by the reveals. Still enjoyable, but not up to the usual standard for Wallace.

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Review: The Black Company

The Black Company by W. B. M. Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A young man who has inherited unexpected wealth from his uncle and then succumbed to his family's tendency to alcoholism happens across a mysterious criminal gang calling itself the Black Company, and themed on chess. He manages to become sober, encouraged by his also-chance-met love interest, and insists on investigating, despite the danger.

There are lots of unexpected twists, in some of which a situation I was expecting to continue for a while is resolved and replaced with another situation. On the other hand, there are also a few tropes - the chance encounter, the Convenient Eavesdrop, falling into the obvious trap.

Still, it's action-packed, suspenseful, and if not quite as good as, say, Edgar Wallace or Johnston McCulley, it's very much in the same mould. I have to say, the love interest didn't interest me - she was high-handed and moody and had almost no other characteristics - but each to their own.

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Review: Nonesuch: A Novel

Nonesuch: A Novel by Francis Spufford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a fine piece of fiction.

It reminds me of Connie Willis, in that it's set in World War II, in the Blitz, and involves time travel, though the time travel doesn't come until the end. It also reminds me of Charles Williams, in that it's set in the period when he was writing and involves the occult (a secret society along the lines of the Golden Dawn, working from the writings of a 17th-century researcher who discovered how to bind lesser angels into statues around London). But it feels very different from both authors. It has more psychological and spiritual depth than Willis, and is more down to earth and much less self-consciously lyrical than Williams, and the main character is one that neither of them would write. It's like the best parts of both writers, plus something neither of them achieves.

The author started out as a nonfiction writer, which is probably why it feels so well researched, and yet the research isn't ground into the reader's face like some authors (including Connie Willis) sometimes do. It's used to give us a moment of observation that makes us feel like we're actually there and then, a passing detail that someone in that place and time might well have observed. It's literary in feel, but not in the trying-too-hard, overly lyrical way that some writers approach being literary. It feels literary because of the aptness of the observations, the way the characters come to understand themselves and each other, and the theme that runs throughout.

I'd summarize that theme as a confrontation and a contrast between people who believe that having power gives them the right to do whatever they want because they can, and people who believe that human freedom and dignity is a higher value. The most obvious level at which this operates is World War II itself, between the Nazis and the beleaguered British. Part of the plot hinges on the moment where Churchill almost didn't become Prime Minister and lead Britain to fight, instead of taking the easier route of folding in the face of the Nazi threat. But it's also operating at the level of the occultists and British fascists (there's considerable overlap between the two groups); real-life occultists often were seekers of power for its own sake, and if they had got it would have used it to exploit others for their own benefit, so this rings true. And at a personal level, it comes down to two women: Lall, an aristocratic British fascist who has got hold of some of the occult research and is determined to use it to impose her vision of how the world should be ordered, regardless of what anyone else thinks or what it costs them, and the protagonist, Iris, who is determined to stop her, who considers the losses Britain is suffering (and that she herself and her beloved are suffering) are a worthwhile price for freedom.

Iris is a complex character. She starts out, for me, at least, unsympathetic; she sleeps with a number of well-off idiots who she has no respect and not much liking for, mostly because she enjoys the sex, though also (very secondarily) because they take her to nice places beforehand. She picks up Geoff, a nerdy young radio engineer, at a bohemian club they both happen to be at, partly to spite Lall, who Geoff is obviously smitten by, though it's equally obvious Lall doesn't want him. But then events both supernatural and otherwise start to occur, and Iris starts to discover new dimensions in the world and in herself. Eventually, we get the story that's been hinted at throughout about the fire that changed her life, and it forms a key part of a devastating conclusion that pulls off the "surprising but inevitable" trick perfectly.

In fact, the whole thing is pulled off very nearly perfectly, with the odd exception (for such a careful researcher) of a family whose individual titles make no sense when taken together. I had a pre-publication version for review from Netgalley, and will mention this issue to the publisher, and it may well be corrected before publication. I did also wonder (view spoiler)[why, given that the characters knew how to free angels from their captivity, they didn't even discuss doing that to the statues in order to deny access to them for time-travel purposes(view spoiler)[, but that was a minor point.

This is by far one of the best books I have read this year, and given that I've read, so far, 150 books in 2025, that's an achievement. Highly recommended. (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

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Review: The Element of Fire

The Element of Fire by Martha Wells
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I've tried to read this twice now. The first time, I bounced off the complex setup and wordy descriptions early on, and set it aside for several years. The second time, I made it about halfway through before deciding that I just didn't care about the characters enough to trudge through the kind of tragic war story that I don't enjoy in order to find what happened to them. There are clear hints of two of the characters ending up together, but I didn't much like either of them or think they would be a good couple, so that didn't motivate me either.

My issues were mainly with the setting: a decadent court with a weak king, where the Queen Mother makes most of the effective decisions, and the king's older cousin is clearly the villain. Practically everyone, including one of the two main characters (the captain of the queen's guard), sleeps around constantly as if relationships don't matter even a little bit, and that alone made it not the book for me, even before the violence and gore and meaningless death of innocents really started to kick in. (To be fair, at least in the first half, we're only told, not shown, that the captain is promiscuous; we don't see him with anyone, even the widowed queen, his main lover.)

The two main characters, the captain and the king's older-but-illegitimate half-sister, do seem to be trying to do the right thing in a dark world, but... it wasn't enough for me.

It's well written for the kind of book it is; it just happens that I don't care for that kind of book. It's from the 1990s, meaning it's been scanned and run through OCR, meaning that there are quite a few small typos and misreadings, because publishers seldom do a thorough enough job of cleaning up the books they publish that way. (It's difficult work - I used to do it, and OCR doesn't seem to have improved much in the intervening 30 years, oddly.)

Not for me, might be for you.

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Review: Way of the Wolf

Way of the Wolf by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had this in my TBR folder for a while before starting it, because I assumed it would be very similar to every other Buroker, and I'm not always in that mood.

The characters do feel very familiar. As I've said before, it's like the author has a small number of actors who play all her characters, and while they bring something new to each role, you can recognize the similarities. The (tentative) love interest this time is played by the wacky, self-regarding guy, and the narrator and protagonist is the competent, snarky but slightly insecure woman.

Considered on its own merits, it's a solid piece of work. There's a strong setup: the middle-aged protagonist, Luna, was born a werewolf, left her pack after killing her lover while shifted, and has been taking potions to suppress her change for more than half her life, but now various events are pushing her towards returning to the pack. Her mother is ill, her cousins appear to want to kill her, and there's a mysterious box with a wolf carved on it that she wants to know more about. Her potion supplier has suddenly disappeared, and a lone werewolf (the wacky self-regarding one) has turned up and is poking around for who-knows-what. Machinating somewhere in the background is her creep of an ex-husband. Their two sons, who have left home, are mentioned but play no direct role in the plot. Luna just wants to work quietly at her job managing an apartment complex and save some money for her retirement, but the dynamic situation won't let her do that.

As usual for Lindsay Buroker, there are very few editing errors, just the odd hyphen where it shouldn't be and "palette" for "palate". The characters, while very reminiscent of all her other characters, are engaging, the banter (though, again, familiar) is good as always, the setup is original, and the pacing worked well for me. I'd probably read the whole series if I could get it as a bundle and was in the right mood.

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Review: Six Against the Yard

Six Against the Yard by The Detection Club
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something unusual: a themed anthology contributed to by some of the best-known detective writers of the early 20th century: Margery Allingham, Ronald Knox, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Russell Thorndyke. There's also an article by Agatha Christie, not part of the original volume but published around the same time, about a real-life unsolved murder.

The theme is "the perfect murder," and in between the stories, George W. Cornish, a retired Scotland Yard detective, analyzes the crimes and talks about how they aren't perfect murders at all, and how detectives would go about solving them if they happened in real life. The one that he does concede is probably not soluble is the Sayers, but he manages to pull off a move of "even when I lose, I win" by claiming that it isn't actually a murder.

While Cornish's commentary is interesting, it does go a bit against the grain of the detective genre, which we all secretly know doesn't reflect real life. It's as if a relationship counsellor commented on a book of romance stories, or a Western historian on a book of cowboy stories, or an actual undercover agent on a book of spy stories. It takes the air out of them a bit.

The stories are mostly enjoyable, though. I'd read the Sayers before, in one of her collections, but the others were new to me, and they're varied and interesting - some told in first person, some in third. As with any anthology, some are better than others, but all of them, I thought, were at least competent. The Sayers was the best written, to my mind, though in terms of the actual crime story I most enjoyed Anthony Berkeley's venture into American-style hard-boiled meeting British matter-of-fact domestic crime.

The proofreading of what I assume is a scanned and OCR-interpreted text is, as usual, rough in spots.

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Review: Brigands & Breadknives

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Travis Baldree is one of the best writers of cozy fantasy out there, and here he has produced a book that is pushing the boundaries of how much action you can put into a cozy, while absolutely writing a cozy book. It's not about the fighting. It's about the character growth.

Fern, the rattkin bookseller we met in Bookshops & Bonedust , comes to join Viv, the orc who has, until now, been the protagonist of the series, in the town where she's founded her successful coffee shop (see Legends & Lattes ). The idea is that she will set up her bookshop opposite the coffee shop and there will be retail synergy.

But if anyone has earned the right to be a cozy fantasy heretic, it's Baldree, and, as he says in his acknowledgements, “I don't want to pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life's woes.” Despite a successful launch and the fact that everything's going fine, Fern discovers that her mid-life crisis has not been averted by her move to a different town and reconnecting with her old friend Viv. She gets very drunk, and, happening to spot Astryx, a famous thousand-year-old elf warrior, on the street, on a whim hides in the back of her cart, thus involving herself in adventure. Astryx is on her way to collect a bounty on a chaos-agent goblin she has in custody, and other people want the goblin too - some for the bounty, others for revenge.

Neither Fern nor the ancient elf comes out of the experience unchanged. Along the way, they encounter a sentient ancient blade reforged (as a punishment) into a breadknife. His name is Bradlee, but, given his form, he gets the nickname Breadlee, which he objects to strenuously.

Fern continuing to use a nickname he hates is kind of bullying, or at least rude, but then, Fern is rude. Not just because she swears a lot, though she does, but because she's often blunt and tactless in her interactions with others. It's a wonder she survived in retail for so long, honestly.

Her imperfection, though, is part of what makes this book so good. She isn't brave, in any way; she can't talk to her old friend Viv about the fact that the bookshop isn't working out as she'd hoped, for example. But over the course of the story, she comes to care enough about the people she's with to develop a degree of courage, though, realistically, she's still incapable of fighting effectively. Both she and Astryx find new meaning through their journey together, and new honesty with themselves, and that, to me, is the real story (and the real strength) of the book. It's also part of what makes it cozy, even though it has more fighting than a cozy normally would.

There's not a lot to criticise for me here. It's all minor stuff: Fern gets drunk on whisky at the start of the book, but by the end of the book it's become brandy. There are some commas after adjectives that shouldn't have them, including a couple that come between the adjective and its noun. There's one misplaced apostrophe ("Warden's barracks" when there's more than one warden). The distances shown on the map and the distances described in the narrative don't seem to match up well, in that places that seem the same distance apart on the map can require very different lengths of time to travel between them, not obviously connected to the difficulty of the terrain. Astryx has an elder blade named Nigel, which she makes no attempt to conceal, but which somehow is not part of her legend.

The flaws are so minor, and the strengths so well handled, that I had to give it the full five stars, which I don't hand out particularly often. Not only is it sound in its craft, it has a deeper layer of meaning that is what I look for in a five-star book, and relationships and personal growth are at the heart of that depth. It's cozy in that it doesn't have epic scope - the things that matter in it matter mostly to the people directly involved - but they matter deeply to those people, and that makes for a compelling story.

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Review: A Knack for Metal and Bone

A Knack for Metal and Bone by Kim McDougall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't see nearly as much steampunk fiction these days as I used to a decade ago; the tide seems to have ebbed on it. I enjoy it when it's done well, though - which it rarely is, though this one, I'm glad to say, is largely an exception.

We're on a future post-apocalyptic Earth, it turns out through bits and pieces of backstory doled out in relevant moments rather than in infodumps (good). The eruption of magic six centuries ago filled the world with dangerous monsters. This apparently happened in the 21st century, based on how long ago Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is said to have been written. Much technology was lost, but some of it is now being reconstructed in a new way, using magical power sources. I love a good alternative tech tree based on magic, and this was a big plus for me. I'll note that I wouldn't have picked the book up if I'd known it was post-apocalyptic, since I don't usually enjoy that genre. However, it was far enough post-apocalyptic that it was effectively a secondary world in most respects.

The characters are a bunch of military misfits on a suspicious mission to investigate why a science station out in the Meadows (where the monsters are) has suddenly stopped communicating. There's a princess, which almost put me off - I can't stand princesses as a rule - but she's not at all princessy; she's a mechanic with a magical-technology arm and a mech familiar that turns from a bird into a mouse, all of which is cool. She's not a kid, either. She's 28. And there's a werewolf, also not one of my favourite tropes, but he also has an interesting backstory: he killed his incompetent general to keep his whole unit from being killed. Shifters are discriminated against, so he's in more trouble for being one than for killing the general.

Even though there's a large group of characters in the troop and most of them are introduced at once, I quickly got to be able to distinguish them, which is well done by the author. Most of the minor characters don't have much more than a couple of quirks and a role, but that's fine. The two main characters, who have a relatively slow-burn romantic attraction, have some depth to them, some of which is given in backstory references and flashbacks.

It's relatively well edited for a steampunk book, which are usually awful and full of vocabulary issues. There are a few notable glitches, though. The most common is the good old "let's eat Grandma" error (missing commas around terms of address), but there are a couple of misplaced apostrophes for plural nouns, missing question marks, and a few instances of sloppy typing around the end of a sentence (double period, no period, missing closing quotation mark). Numbers that are not between twenty-one and ninety-nine get hyphens they shouldn't have. There are a couple of vocab errors, but they're not frequent. I marked about 70 issues, which is two or three times the average for most books, but for a steampunk book is not terrible.

The most obvious worldbuilding mistake, which doesn't actually affect anything, is that the author seems unclear on how midnight works. Even in the far north (this appears to be former Canada, based on the wildlife, but a globally warmed version), even in the middle of summer, no matter how short the day is, the sun will never set after midnight. Midnight is the midpoint of the night - you know, the dark bit. It comes after sunset and before sunrise, roughly halfway between the two.

I did also wonder, though, how the city fed itself, given that the river and the plains were both full of monsters, and so not conducive to farming or fishing. Also, how an artificial limb fitted the princess both when she was a child and when she was an adult. And why so many contemporary references (like "didn't get the memo" or "harlequin" or the way people were named) had survived six hundred years of disruption and change. And why, now they had a magical power source which would be capable of driving it, nobody had brought back flight technology.

It's hovering on the border of the Bronze (lowest) and Silver (solid) tier of my annual recommendation list, but I think on balance it falls into high Bronze. Definite issues, both with the editing and the worldbuilding, but some good bones, strong character work and a compelling story.

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