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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Review: The Sleuth of St. James's Square

The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A difficult collection to rate, because it has a combination of flaws (for me, predominating) and strengths.

The biggest flaw for a 21st-century audience is the author's evident disgust at the existence of Asian people. Though he's not a big fan of anyone who's not a well-off WASP, actually; anyone who's poor or foreign (or a villain, but that's often a subset of the other two categories) gets called a "creature" or, sometimes, a "human creature," and the implication is not a positive one.

This is the case even when the narrator is theoretically a diarist from the American colonial period; the voice is always the same, even though we have multiple (theoretical) narrators in the various stories, often first-person but sometimes third-person. The sleuth of the title provides a common thread, but often quite a slender one, and rarely does any sleuthing. A good many of the stories are recounted to him, or by him, about crimes that were committed somewhere else or even in a different time, and in the investigation of which he had no involvement. In one story, the only connection to him is that he's briefly mentioned as having given directions to the person who's informing the central character of the circumstances of her father's death. This doesn't help to develop him as a character, and I didn't feel like I knew him at all by the end, because I'd hardly seen him do anything, and most of what he said was reading out the writings of other people.

Not all of the stories are mystery stories as such, either, though most have a twist at the end which changes the reader's perspective on the preceding events. The twists are often quite clever, though of course some are weaker than others.

The Gutenberg edition has quite a few uncorrected scan errors. I'll send them in at some stage as errata.

Overall, a miss for me, and I don't see quite where the enthusiasm for the author from his contemporaries came from. It doesn't quite make it to my 2025 recommendation list, even in the lowest tier.

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Review: Make Mine Homogenized

Make Mine Homogenized by Rick Raphael
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Farm animals near a nuclear test site in Nevada start producing milk and eggs with ridiculously impossible properties.

It's as silly as it sounds, and poorly edited; there are missing commas around terms of address, commas between adjectives that don't require them, commas before the main verb, and a number of misspellings, including "yoke" for "yolk".

I found it very mildly amusing.

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Review: The Black Star A Detective Story

The Black Star A Detective Story by Johnston McCulley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rip-roaring pulp adventure. A wealthy young man with a penchant for action goes up against a brilliant criminal mastermind, the Black Star of the title, who keeps his organization so compartmentalized that nobody can betray him or each other, and plans so meticulously that he always gets away with his crimes.

There are, of course, some pulp cliches. The button that opens a trapdoor in the floor and drops the person standing in front of the desk through it into a pit. The accidental discovery of a secret compartment/door/drawer (as seen in Princess Bride, among many other places). The loyal lower-class sidekick, in this case a reformed criminal who the wealthy young man rescued from self-destruction. The love interest who plays very little role and has very little character development; she's just there because a young man like this would be expected to have one. The fat, ineffectual chief of police, of an American city that's never named; it might well be New York, since it has a river and wealthy socialites, some of whom have Dutch names, but then again, it might not.

But there are also plenty of chases, escapes, captures, pitched battles (in which surprisingly few people are even badly injured, despite the habit of the police of firing their revolvers wildly, in part because the criminals use knockout gas guns and have a code against murder), bragging letters from the criminal announcing his triumph over the police and his nemesis and celebrating his own cleverness, and the inevitable downfall of this hubristic character when his opponent proves too clever for him at last. For a while, there's a police detective character, but he drops out of sight towards the end, having acted mostly as a sounding board for the hero.

Zestful and suspenseful, it's everything you would expect from a classic pulp adventure by the creator of Zorro, and I'll certainly read the sequel at some point.

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Review: Castle of the Winds: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 3

Castle of the Winds: The Secrets of Ormdale, Book 3 by Christina Baehr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I found this by turns amusing and moving, and also very soundly crafted. Most books by 21st-century authors set in England in an earlier era feel like the characters are 21st-century people in costumes, standing in front of scenery flats. These books give me the feeling of actual inhabitants of a real England in 1899, probably helped by listening to the audiobook, which is beautifully read by an English woman.

I was thoroughly amused by the anti-romance (a genre perfected by P.G. Wodehouse), where narrator Edith is trying not to be attractive to the Welsh prince, especially since, by basically being Edith, she is significantly failing to be unattractive and uninteresting. Her rival Meredith is a waspish, conventional, pretty young woman, and Edith's distant cousin/escort/possible love interest Simon sees through Meredith immediately and is not attracted, any more than Edith is to the beautiful Welsh prince. I do love a romance plot where people behave sensibly, and Edith is (nearly) always sensible. And I particularly like the subversion of the toxic romance trope of falling in love with one's captor.

It's interesting how Edith is simultaneously put off by the prince's tendency to order people around and assume that she'll fall in with his wishes without consulting her, and frustrated by Simon not being more self-assertive. But when he does assert himself, she disastrously refuses to follow his plan. She wants something in the middle: a man who is complete in himself and doesn't need to be managed, but doesn't try to manage her either, and who will consult her as an equal - yet she doesn't treat Simon as an equal in that circumstance either, but patronizes him, rationalizing that she has more experience of the world than he does. She has room to grow, in other words, which is a good thing for a character - and she realizes it, too.

In contrast to the previous book in particular, this one has more intrepid action, though a lot of it is Edith (mostly) sensibly figuring out her next move in a situation of threat - something that I still found just as engaging as the action parts, to be clear.

Edith's moral and philosophical position is always strong and clear, without any preaching happening, and she backs it up with principled action. Nor does she think she has all the answers, or that her milieu is perfect, or that her opponents' setup is without merit, all of which is refreshing in itself.

In short, it has everything I miss in all too many fantasy works coming out today: good craft, authentic historical feel, attention to detail, a character who has the humility to acknowledge her imperfections and weaknesses and the strength to work on them, sensible decisions made out of clearly articulated principle that's believable for the time period without being jarring for today, and a depth of knowledge and understanding of how humans are, conveyed without soapboxing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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Review: Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat

Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat by Victor Appleton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I didn't expect this to be good, but I probably expected it to be better than it was.

A plot driven largely by accident, luck, coincidence, poor planning, the malicious acts of dastardly rivals, and artificial urgency that somehow vanished when there was actually a reason to hurry. Add Brazilians who speak Spanish (unlike real Brazilians, who speak Portuguese), and it's just a whole mass of nonsense.

Here's how it goes down (there are spoilers, if you care). Tom Swift, boy inventor, is helping his father, the "aged" inventor Barton Swift (everyone who's much older than Tom is "aged"), to build a submarine. They intend to enter it for a Government prize of $50,000, but then Tom reads in a newspaper about the wreck of a ship carrying $150,000 worth of gold off the coast of South America. Nobody else can reach this gold, and it's not going anywhere, but for some non-obvious reason it immediately becomes urgent that they rush the sub's development and go and get the gold, abandoning the idea of trying out for the Government prize. Por que no los dos?

Through a Convenient Eavesdrop, Tom learns that another submarine developer who wants to compete for the prize is a bad lot (he's talking to himself aloud while changing a tyre, and Tom overhears by complete coincidence). Through what I suppose I must call an Inconvenient Eavesdrop - inconvenient for Tom, that is - this character learns of the shipwreck, again by complete coincidence, because Tom is blabbing about it to a friend of his, and of course he will also be able to go after it in his submarine.

There now actually is urgency, and they rush the sub into its first trial without preparing any of the emergency mechanisms that they end up needing when a quite predictable fault occurs in this previously untested machine. Tom ("our hero") does one of the few straightforwardly effectual, protagonistic things he does in the entire book and saves everyone.

They get the sub working properly and all the emergency mechanisms installed at last, and head off for South America. The urgency doesn't stop them from deciding to spend a day relaxing on a tropical island they happen to encounter, where their rival also turns up, having unaccountably followed them (sonar doesn't seem to be a thing, and they were underwater most of the time).

They manage to shake off the pursuers, do an emergency surfacing after another system goes wrong (health and safety is not much of a thing either), and find themselves next to a Brazilian warship. The uncivilized Spanish-speaking Brazilians arrest them as saboteurs and are going to shoot them, but by fortunate coincidence a storm blows up and distracts the slipshod Brazilian navy crew enough that the brave Americans can escape. There's a completely uncalled-for dig at the fact that the Brazilians are brown-skinned.

They cruise to the location of the wreck and, after a bit of searching, find it and carry off the gold without a hitch, exiting just as their rivals come on the scene.

I've left out the subplot about Tom's bully, the spoiled son of a wealthy banker, getting his comeuppance (again) in a rather immature prank-for-prank exchange.

The other notable feature for me was that two of the characters had verbal tics, but Tom wasn't one of them - he didn't say or do things adverbially, which disappointed me, because I love a Tom Swifty. Perhaps this only developed later in the series. One of the tics I found amusing: a character who, in practically every sentence, blesses some part of his body or one of his possessions ("bless my boots!"), often in a way that connects to whatever is going on. The other I found annoying: the captain they recruit to help them with the submarine, again almost every time he says something, tacks on a phrase like "if you'll forgive the observation" or "if my saying so doesn't offend you," even when he has expressed the blandest and most obvious opinion. The tics are at least 50% of the characterization of these two men.

Probably OK if you're 12, not very knowledgeable, and have no problem with American exceptionalism. But for me, disappointing.

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Review: The Clue of the New Pin

The Clue of the New Pin by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A clever locked-room mystery, though not so clever that I didn't guess something close to it. I completely did not guess the murderer, though. And for Edgar Wallace, the romance is fairly well developed, in the sense that the couple spend a good amount of time together both before and after getting engaged, and the woman isn't completely wet and passive.

In fact, it's a strong mystery thriller, with lots of action, but not so much that the protagonists (an unusually intelligent policeman and a newspaper reporter) don't get to reflect on events and on life in general. There's a Chinese man in it, and though an offensive epithet is used by a number of characters including the reporter, he has some depth to him and is not just a stereotype or a bunch of Orientalist tropes. (view spoiler)[Also, Wallace doesn't take the easy path that a lot of his contemporaries would have more or less automatically taken and make the Chinese man the villain. (hide spoiler)]

It's solid work, enjoyable both as a mystery and as a novel.

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