Review: The Blue Scarab

The Blue Scarab by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thorndyke short cases narrated by his original sidekick, Jervis, apparently during the period when they roomed together before Jervis's marriage.

They are very much what you would expect if you've read any of the author's previous works. Thorndyke is erudite and full of obscure but somehow useful knowledge (like the exact habitat of a rare snail). Thanks to his great learning and intelligence, he's able to work out non-obvious conclusions from the scientific evidence that he and Jervis collect so professionally, using what were, at the beginning of the 20th century, advanced techniques (all real, apparently, and all tested by the author), occasionally assisted by fortunate coincidence, as in the case of the snail. Jervis is his foil, his Watson, whose main function is to stand in for the audience, who probably can't figure out the clues either, so that they (we) don't feel so stupid.

The author's contemporary Freeman Wills Crofts wrote stories of clever criminals who were no match for the dogged persistence of generic Scotland Yard detectives. R. Austin Freeman is the reverse: a brilliant detective who solves what are often quite ordinary crimes that would remain undetected or unsolved without his involvement. We have here not just murders, but robberies (including a jewel robbery), and the title story is about a mysterious family secret of hidden treasure that uses Egyptian hieroglyphics to conceal the solution.

He's definitely a literary descendant of Sherlock Holmes, and an ancestor of every scientific detective since. The stories are interesting puzzles, though there's not a great deal of character development to be seen anywhere - difficult in the short form, admittedly, though there's not much in the novels either.

There's a black character in one story, and his former landlady expresses her dislike of the fact that another person used a racial slur about him; there's also a Jewish character in another story, and he doesn't come in for any specific or overt racism either in the brief mention of him, though he is clearly a villain. If you read Freeman's Wikipedia article, you'll see that he had a complex mix of mostly stereotypical views about Jews, and was also a eugenicist, though his views seemed to change after the advent of the Nazi Party. Although I'm noting these factors in my review, I'm not giving it my "casual_racism" tag because the viewpoint character doesn't express specific racist views or use racial slurs, which is what that tag is for.

It's solid and well executed, without major flaws, so I put it in the Silver tier of my Best of the Year list for 2025. Recommended if you like watching a clever man solve puzzles.

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Review: Cocktail Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: Poirot Investigates

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

Like most collections, this has stronger and weaker stories.

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Murder on the Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: Mulliner Nights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: Five Phantom Discount

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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