Review: The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery

The Man in the Dark: An Ealing Mystery by John Ferguson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I get a lot of books off the Project Gutenberg RSS feed, and often I don't know much about them or their authors. The reason I keep doing that is that every so often I hit one as good as this.

Told in compelling and capable prose, this isn't your standard Golden Age mystery with the locked room, the closed pool of suspects, and the detective sorting through motives and alibis. It's completely different from that, in fact. The murderer remains an unseen and unnamed figure for most of the book; how and (roughly) why he committed the crime is clear from early on, but the main focus of the book isn't even on who he is, but the experiences and fate of the man of the title.

This man, Kinloch, has been blinded in World War I, and is down and out as a result. In desperation, he visits an old friend, a fellow Scot who was at university with him, one night in the London suburb of Ealing. They quarrel, and he storms out into the pea-souper fog that has the whole city locked down, in which he's at no more disadvantage than anyone else.

A man finds him lost, looking for the railway station, and offers him a deal: five pounds to come to his house and be a hidden witness to a meeting he is having, only revealing his presence if prompted. He's delighted to discover that Kinloch doesn't recognise him, which a sighted man would, since he's a public figure.

The meeting degenerates into murder, Kinloch is knocked out in the subsequent chaos, and the murderer has a female accomplice take him away into the country because, initially unaware of his blindness, the murderer thinks Kinloch will be able to identify him. Kinloch keeps his ears out for clues that would identify the place he's being held, but over his captivity forges a mutual bond with his captor, who appears to be the murderer's wife.

Then the point of view switches, and we get an account by a journalist who, with a private detective (Francis McNab, the series hero), is attempting to track down the murderer ahead of the police. This would sell a lot of papers, so the journalist's editor is keen, at least until they seem to stop making progress. There's some well-handled dramatic irony as both the private and official detectives draw conclusions from the crime scene that we, the readers, already know are incorrect. Later, we get the account of Kinloch's friend the doctor, who is trying to track him down simply out of concern, and then the last section of the book is back with the journalist as the detective gets on the trail of Kinloch, whose name they have finally discovered. The book ends with a tense and dramatic climax and a satisfying resolution.

The whole thing is excellently done, with a high standard of craft all the way around: in constructing the story, in pacing, in managing the emotional arc, in the puzzle and the investigation, and just in the writing mechanics.

There's a complete one-volume ebook of the six McNab mysteries available for cheap, so I picked it up (first checking the sample quickly for quality, and it looked OK). I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the novels.

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Review: Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life

Judith Lee: Some Pages from her Life by Richard Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Judith Lee is sometimes described as a "lady detective," but she's really not a detective. She's a superhero, a couple of decades before that consciously became a thing. (This collection of stories was published in 1911, and several more were published five years later, after the author's death.)

Her superpower is that she can read lips with slightly implausible accuracy from some distance away, since she - like her father and grandfather before her - is a teacher of the deaf and dumb, using the "oral method," which involves teaching deaf people to lipread. This doesn't seem to be her only source of income; she moves in moderately well-off circles, a policeman at one point notes that she's wearing an expensive frock, and most of the stories in the volume take place while she's on holiday at some resort or other, or at least eating at a nice restaurant. She's a bit of a snob, and is prejudiced against foreigners (of course), the lower classes, people who look unusual, and... gingers. Any character who has red hair is definitely going to be up to no good. So it's a surprise when she disguises herself at one point with a red wig.

It's also surprising that she has dark skin (a Sicilian refers to her "black face" at one point, and even allowing for exaggeration that suggests she's quite dark for an English person), very dark hair, and gets referred to by one of the less grateful people she helps as "that half-bred gipsy-looking creature." The surname Lee is sometimes held by Roma in Britain, so perhaps she's supposed to be of Roma descent.

As well as foreigners, common people and gingers, she's not a big fan of men either, saying at one point, "Why are some men so silly—so many men—nearly all of them?" Having said that, women are sometimes the perpetrators and men occasionally the victims of the crimes and crime-adjacent schemes that she keeps stumbling upon through her unacknowledged second superpower, incredible luck. And by "incredible" I mean I didn't believe in it; it's authorial interference, is what it is. In one of the longer stories, she hangs a lampshade on the coincidence of bumping into the same people over and over, sometimes years apart, at random places, just at the moments that are essential for the plot to progress. Some higher power, she says, must be involved. Indeed it is, and that power is an author who can't make his plot work without this level of coincidence. Although when she is confronting wrongdoers, she sometimes claims to be the instrument of God, and if that isn't just part of the bluff, the "higher power" bit may be intended to be taken seriously. In one story, it's "borne in upon her" that she should go to a particular place because something is happening there, so maybe she is supposed to be acting under the direct guidance of God. Outside these contexts, she doesn't express religious sentiments or ideas, so it's hard to say.

I say she's not a detective because she never really solves mysteries in any conventional sense. She just eavesdrops visually on chance conversations plotting harm to people, and then involves herself in obtaining justice, either by attempting to warn the victims or, in several cases, using her knowledge of what the people having them were convinced were private conversations, in order to frighten them into abandoning their plots. She does sometimes involve the police, but she pretends they're involved at other times when they're actually not, in order to put the frighteners on the villains. She has plenty of self-assurance, and bluffs like a poker world champion; it's almost a third superpower. She says at one point that she makes it a rule never to do anything important while angry, but this is patently untrue. When she's enraged at injustice, her typical first move is to go and confront the villain, without much thought for her own safety.

Her bluffs often work, but as the stories go on, they're less and less effective, and in the last story she has a physical fight for her life that leaves her permanently scarred. She also, in one of the later stories, uses Jiu Jitsu, which she's been practicing, but I'm not going to count that as a superpower because it only gets mentioned that once.

Her fourth superpower is that she can gain near-native fluency in languages in a short amount of time, which is useful a couple of times when she's lip-reading people who speak a particular German or Italian dialect from somewhere she happens to have been.

Overall, the various superpowers make for a setup that's pretty implausible, unless you consider these as pulp stories in the vein of, say, Doc Savage. Judith is an interesting character, though: independent, intelligent, capable, with a powerful sense of justice that sometimes overrides her better judgement. She will go to considerable trouble and even risk her own life to help people who she has, in most cases, never met before, even ones she doesn't like or who don't like her, and if that's not a superhero, I'd like to know what is.

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Review: Tavern Rats

Tavern Rats by Matt Youngmark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Funny" fantasy often fails for me, because it tries much too hard to be funny, and sets out to achieve that using little more than silly names, tired genre tropes with minimal effort put into parodying them, often tedious prose, and occasionally awful verse. I found this book funny because it avoided all of those traps, and gave us the humour of an ill-equipped party of would-be adventurers consistently (but never quite fatally) failing to use their minimal and unreliable spellcasting abilities to quest for treasure. They keep getting into well-described scrapes out of sheer incompetence combined with terrible luck, and barely getting out of them by exerting maximum courage and ingenuity, and as a result the book worked as a story, apart from the humour, as well.

The main narrative is first-person, from a sorcerer who has learned 29 of the 30 known cantrips (deeming the 30th one completely useless), but no spells more powerful than that. She also loses most of her spellcasting supplies and notes early on, so she's even more limited, which serves as a further impetus to creativity. There's a secondary narrative from a bard, whose involvement in the story is unexplained (he's yet to appear in the main narrative), giving a more omniscient view of things, explaining lore and issues of which the main narrator was unaware. This is done in brief notes between the chapters, and I didn't find it intrusive.

The world is a fairly standard sword-and-sorcery world, heavily inspired by but not just copied from D&D. The setting is the Conquered Lands, so called because over a number of centuries they have been conquered by 22 consecutive factions: dragons, turtle mages, lich kings, elves (several times), humans (several times, from different places), a goblin/hobgoblin alliance, harpies... The most recent conquest, a couple of decades back, was by humans, and the main narrator is human, but was raised by orcs, so she can converse with the orc summoner in the party in his own language. This is convenient for them, since his Common isn't great, but inconvenient for the rest of the party, a scary dark elf witch with minimal spells and a probable druid, who's concerningly vague about what he can actually do. The sorcerer narrator has come across what she believes is the location of an ancient, valuable scroll, which she needs to get in order to pay her back tuition at the sorcery school. She attempts to hire a competent party, but they just take the quest and exclude her, so she has to race them to the location with the above party of incompetent misfits.

This doesn't go well.

It's fairly well edited, with few of the common errors I see almost every contemporary author making, though it has a few words missed out of sentences and the like.

Unlike the party it follows, it's much more competent than average, and I look forward to getting hold of the sequel.

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Review: The Lavender Dragon

The Lavender Dragon by Eden Phillpotts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Starts out as a pseudo-medieval tale of a knightly quest, told in formal English occasionally spiced with archaic and sometimes anachronistic terms (rather than William Morris's style of quasi-medieval language). It's supposedly set in the "Dark Ages," but refers to a lot of people and ideas that are post-medieval. It then quickly becomes a socialist utopian tract, more News from Nowhere than The Well at the World's End . The dragon is both a socialist (teaching that the greatest happiness is found by working for the good of others) and a rationalist, though he generously allows a good priest to minister to the people he has gathered in his utopian community. Assorting ill with the socialism is the inherent nobility of a young woman swapped at birth with a peasant (and the inherent commonness of her replacement), nature winning out over nurture.

Utopias usually involve big expository lumps; the author is self-aware enough that he has one of the characters, the dragon's strongest supporter, fall asleep while the dragon is expounding his philosophy at length, while all his other listeners have wandered off. I'm not sure why he didn't just cut it, if he knew this would be the effect on an audience.

It more or less peters out at the end, but since there's very little plot, I suppose this is to be expected.

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Review: Golem for Broke: A Magical Midlife Urban Fantasy

Golem for Broke: A Magical Midlife Urban Fantasy by Deborah Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Midlife urban fantasy is often an ever-so-slightly reskinned version of what I always refer to as This Damn Thing Again, where a middle-aged woman with no ties (instead of a young woman with no ties) inherits property from an elderly relative, returns to her hometown, discovers her magical heritage, meets a hot werewolf and/or cop, gets a cute familiar and solves a bland and obvious mystery while not putting much work into a small business.

This book is not that.

Instead, it's set in a world similar to ours - maybe a little too similar, given that the difference is that a lot of people have magic, and this is publicly known, and apparently this has been the case for a long time, maybe forever. The protagonist is Jewish, and for some unexplored reason, even though people from every culture have magic, the apparently universally used terms for people with and without magic, and the name of the group that polices it, are Hebrew terms.

The original (as far as I know) twist to this particular setting is that magic comes to people through transitions or traumatic life events, including but not limited to puberty and menopause. The protagonist and her three friends, collectively the Mad Queens, have magic they got at menopause, which reflects menopausal changes - hot flashes giving fire magic, brain fog the ability to make other people forget things, and so on. They also have secret secondary magic, secret because (again, for reasons unexplored beyond "historically, people with two powers have been a problem"), that's drastically illegal and will get you imprisoned for life or killed. This provides stakes; Tovah, the protagonist, must protect her secret, and so hesitates to use her second power (of unravelling magic) in case it leads to detection for her and her friends, but sometimes that's her only option if she's going to survive.

They function as a kind of problem-solving agency, not exactly private detectives but similar, and have managed to find a legal loophole that means they aren't regulated by the authorities. This puts the protagonist at odds with her cousin, who's the head of Gevurah, the supernatural policing agency for the Canadian city where they all live. Not least because she inherited the Mad Queens agency from her aunt, the cousin's mother.

The book opens with a tone-setting scene, simultaneously hilarious, ridiculous, suspenseful and occasionally coarse, in which Tovah, in the middle of a mammogram, topless and clamped into the machine, must fight off a rogue golem who's threatening both her and her mammography technician. This leads into a mystery/thriller plot that kept me interested, and mostly puzzled (in a good way), throughout.

There are a few flaws. I've already mentioned some bits of worldbuilding that didn't completely convince me. There's an enemies-to-lovers romance arc that didn't convince me either. Firstly, not a lot of work has gone into the "enemies" bit; there's no backstory (as far as I remember) of any specific incidents or reasons why Tovah and the golem maker are enemies, it's just "this bastard is my brother's best friend and we don't get on." Then the handling of the actual arc reminded me of an early British motor car, in that it was so obviously "enemies to lovers" it might as well have had a man walking in front of it waving a big flag and letting off fireworks every time he reached an intersection. And then there are a few minor issues, like why a golem made of fired porcelain would leave clay under the fingernails of a woman she'd attacked.

But the golems and gargoyles are cool, the world is interesting if occasionally thin, the plot is sound, the multicultural middle-aged women are gloriously indifferent to what other people think, the threats feel genuinely threatening and the protagonist feels genuinely competent and intelligent, the writing craft is solid, and the editing is mostly very clean. I'd definitely read a sequel.

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Review: Dancers In Mourning

Dancers In Mourning by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unusually, this book includes a callback to earlier in the series: a character from Police at the Funeral reappears, and is the means of introducing Campion into the investigation into what is, at first, just a series of nasty pranks played on a prominent theatrical producer/dancer with the apparent goal of disrupting his show and/or emotional stability (inasmuch as theatre people can be said to have emotional stability).

It omits a callback to Sweet Danger, in which Campion more-or-less promised a very young woman that when she was old enough, they would try a relationship. (It's less creepy than it sounds, in context.) I would have expected some such callback, because in this book he inadvertently and rather to his dismay falls in love with his client's wife.

Campion's love interests always seem to be unavailable. A good half of them end up with (or, in this case, start out with) someone else, for a start. Having played out a similar pattern - excluding the someone-else's-wife part - in my own young adult life, I sympathise, though I got past it at a younger age than Campion; it's a form of self-sabotage, probably, or self-protection against actually having to deal with a relationship.

As always, all the characters are vivid, individual and mostly eccentric, or at least distinctive in some way. Not the least vivid of them is Lugg, Campion's ex-con manservant. Sent to fill in as butler at the country house that's the centre of the events when the existing butler resigns, Lugg declares, "I'll do anything, as long as it's not common." Which is amusing, because Lugg is always common, as his habit of addressing his employer as "cock" attests. He ends up teaching the theatrical manager's six-year-old daughter to pick locks with a hairpin and run the three-card-monte scam, much to her delight, and probably nobody else's.

To my surprise, I figured out the murderer some time before Campion did, though I didn't have his personal stake in the answer. It's not the best of the series, but mainly because of the character work I still feel it deserves five stars.

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Review: The Blotting Book

The Blotting Book by E.F. Benson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rather disappointing as a mystery, and not much to my taste as a novel either.

I bounced off Benson's Mrs Mapp, a thoroughly nasty, small-minded woman, after already having been less than delighted by his character Lucia's pretentious self-involvement. The characters here are not wonderful people either, and all in all Benson comes off as a misanthrope. Even the person for whom his omniscient narrator's viewpoint has little but praise acts completely out of character for what we're told about him, and since we don't see the key scenes it's never explicitly explored how he came to do so. (His motive is clear, but not how such a person comes to do such a thing.)

The mystery isn't particularly puzzling. A young man (22) reposes complete trust in a lawyer who has looked after his inheritance almost all his life, and been like a father, or at least an uncle, to him. What he doesn't know is that the lawyer had made some foolish investments and lost a lot of the young man's money, and is now attempting to get it back again. The lawyer's partner, who does know this, uses the knowledge to blackmail the first lawyer. The partner, knowing that the young man comes into his inheritance if he marries, also slanders him to his intended's father so that the marriage won't proceed, reducing the risk that he'll become aware of the shenanigans.

The young man becomes murderously furious about the slander, which doesn't succeed in its goal (since the intended believes in him), and when the partner is found murdered close to the intended's home, where the young man was around the presumed time of the murder, he is arrested and tried for the crime.

There's very little investigation shown; the investigating officer isn't even very bright. We're mostly shown the trial, at which evidence comes out that points to the (extremely obvious) actual murderer. It's a short book, and the whole thing wraps up quickly and linearly.

Not a success for me, and I think I'm done with Benson after this.

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