Review: That Affair Next Door

That Affair Next Door by Anna Katharine Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Before Miss Marple, there was Miss Butterworth.

Miss Butterworth is a very decided middle-aged spinster (middle-aged by today's standards; perhaps elderly by the standards of her time), living in the fancy New York neighbourhood of Gramercy Park. When a murder is committed in the next-door house, she - in the most dignified possible manner and with full consciousness of her social position - pokes her nose in and starts figuring things out, in tandem with the police detective, Grice, who had appeared in seven previous books by the same author, and is at this point quite old even by today's reckoning, at 77.

My big objection to the first Grice book, which is the only other one I've read by this author, was that people kept declaiming set-piece speeches about their emotions. The style seems to have settled down somewhere in the interim, and the whole book is a delight, with the notable exception of a nasty piece of anti-Chinese prejudice dropped right in the middle, apropos of nothing whatsoever. It may only be part of the characterization of Miss Butterworth's type of person and her likely prejudices, rather than the prejudice of the author, but it's a jarring note in any case. She's a slightly unreliable narrator, at least when it comes to herself, so I'm choosing to believe this was at least mostly the character's unexamined prejudice.

Miss Butterworth conveys more personality in a paragraph than, say, Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French does in probably his entire series (I have only read a couple of those books, but I'd risk a small bet). Take this example:

I don't like young men in general. They are either over-suave and polite, as if they condescended to remember that you are elderly and that it is their duty to make you forget it, or else they are pert and shallow and disgust you with their egotism. But this young man looked sensible and business-like, and I took to him at once, though what connection he could have with this affair I could not imagine.

Grice retains his quirk of not looking directly at people, but always picking some object in the room and apparently addressing his remarks to it, while remaining fully conscious of everything that's going on. He's smart enough to treat Miss Butterworth and her deductions and discoveries with respect, while not being so unprofessional as to open up all of his own investigation to her. She has knowledge he lacks; he's a man (who, if I remember rightly from his first appearance, is of the working class, though that's not mentioned here), and she's a woman who has spent her life in the level of society that the Van Burnams, the family who own the house where the murder was committed, also inhabit.

The mystery involves obscured identities, deceptive young gentlemen, and an odd murder which appears to have taken place in two stages. There are plenty of twisty twists and startling revelations. I've not given it my "plot-relies-on-coincidence" tag, because although the murder happens as it does because of a reasonably unlikely coincidence, and there's another coincidence later that raises the irony level, neither of them assist the plot to stay on track, which is the sense in which I mean that tag.

The only significant issue I noticed with the copy editing is that quite often something phrased as a question has no question mark.

I am demoting it a tier ranking (from Silver to Bronze) in my annual Best of the Year list, because of those couple of moments of really horrible racism, but other than that I thought it was better than most other classic mysteries I've read lately.

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Review: Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons: The Fallbacks: Dealing with Dragons by Jaleigh Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll be honest: I didn't expect this to be good.

A lot of people who write "licensed" fiction are, let's face it, hacks - and hacks who, all too often, don't have much of a grasp of the basic mechanics of prose.

This author is better than that, and better than the average writer in general.

Because the characters are a D&D adventuring party, it's an ensemble cast. Those can be difficult to do. Giving multiple characters distinctive viewpoints, voices, motivations and backgrounds, and then meshing them together in such a way that they both clash and support each other and all contribute to the overall plot, is not a trivial task, and here it's handled well. The characters have some dimension to them, and they all have believable arcs which are complementary.

The plot trots along at a good pace without sacrificing characterization, though you are expected to be familiar with the world of the Forgotten Realms; its places and creatures and organizations get minimal description. It even took me a while to realize Tess, the group's leader, was an elf, partly because I was left to assume that the people whose species wasn't specified were human, and (unless I missed something) Tess's elven ancestry wasn't mentioned immediately. There's also a good deal of reference back to the previous book, which I haven't read, but I didn't feel lost because of it; everything said about the events of that book is said in a context where it's relevant to whatever's going on in this book.

Overall, it felt like a good, solid pulpy adventure with well-intentioned, capable but flawed characters who bounced off each other in interesting ways.

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Review: The Lerouge Case

The Lerouge Case by Émile Gaboriau
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This 1863 mystery is so very, very French. There are two mistresses central to the plot, one of them particularly awful, and the other one has an illegitimate son, upon whose identity the plot hinges. Everyone is very excitable. Someone literally dies of shame; someone else, rejected by his love interest, runs out to murder the man she prefers to him, can't do it, and falls into a delirium for six weeks. (Said love interest, incidentally, is about 19 at the time of the main events, since it's roughly two years since events, including the rejected suitor's offer, that took place when she was stated to be 17. However, her successful suitor, who is 33, has been trying to convince his father to let him marry her for the past five years, meaning when he started she was 14 and he was 28. Those aren't good numbers by modern standards, though in 1863 France nobody would have turned a hair; that was the year that the age of consent was raised from 11 to 13.)

The inciting incident is that an elderly woman is murdered in a village near Paris. The amateur detective thinks over the scenario, and concludes that obviously she was a former servant who was blackmailing her former employer over an illegitimate child, which turns out to be correct. The detective, by the way, is not Lecoq, even though this is considered the first Lecoq novel; Lecoq appears only briefly at the beginning, with another brief mention late in the book, and his sole role is to bring the amateur detective, Tabaret, into the story. In later books, apparently, Tabaret is his mentor, and Lecoq takes a more active role.

Tabaret then goes to see his neighbour, who by complete coincidence is closely connected with the crime, thus short-circuiting a great deal of tedious investigation and getting straight to the drama and sensation, which was presumably what the original audience was there for. Plus! The investigating magistrate also has a coincidental connection to the prime suspect, one that will give that punctilious official a good deal of angst, because he's not sure he can be fair and impartial. This development, at least, uses coincidence to create difficulties rather than remove them, but I still don't love it. (Though it will later turn out that, in a way, the first coincidence also caused difficulties...) The author lampshades the convenience of the coincidences, and also the ridiculousness of the hackneyed baby-swap backstory, which, of course, doesn't justify either one.

It soon appears that the prime suspect has been expertly and comprehensively framed, with a lot of physical evidence clearly pointing to him. The physical evidence is subtle enough that a bungling police officer, such as the one who's investigating, would miss it, but Tabaret picks up on it because he's very smart (if eccentric). Tabaret is then convinced of the suspect's innocence by the fact that he has (or at least proffers) no alibi, and someone who was as careful as the criminal they're looking for would definitely have one, but also we, the readers, are privy to the suspect's thoughts, and he is not thinking "I done it, it's a fair cop" (or the aristocratic French equivalent).

And then the supposedly bungling officer tracks down his completely different suspect, and there's a twist that gets us re-evaluating the significance for this case of the old forensic maxim "Who benefits?," and makes it pretty clear who the criminal must be (and we've already seen their motive). Cue manic pursuit and dénouement, including another coincidence to help the detective along, and it turns out the murderer wasn't actually as clever or as careful as Tabaret had thought.

This isn't a "procedural" in the English style at all. It's full of Gallic high drama, and the whole book is driven by character interaction, by people desiring things intensely and taking often ill-advised steps to obtain or keep them. It's a roller-coaster ride of emotional beats that, if they were music, would be speed metal. The forensic aspects of the investigation are misleading more than they are helpful ((view spoiler)[and, in fact, the original cleverly detected details which pointed to a particular suspect turn out to be another complete coincidence, not a clever frame-up at all (hide spoiler)]), and the investigators, far from being the problem-solving plot mechanisms that most English detective novelists would produce starting half a century or more later, are flawed human beings with their own quirks and foibles that impact the plot as well as themselves. The narrator retains a stance of the inevitability of Justice, but the characters come to doubt it, and themselves, deeply.

I'm not sure who translated this particular version, or if they were English or French; the Project Gutenberg text doesn't credit a translator. The phraseology often reflects the original French more closely than a truly idiomatic English translation would, and there are some misplaced or missing commas (for example, comma before the main verb or before "that," or no comma before a term of address). The quotation marks need another going-over as well, since a number of them are missing, while others are where they shouldn't be. Some sentences phrased as questions are missing question marks, while a couple of sentences not phrased as questions do have question marks. There's even an its/it's error. Not a great edition, in other words, and Project Gutenberg is likely not to blame for most of it; they follow the original texts pretty accurately, on the whole.

Although I'm not a fan of the massive role of coincidence in the plot and the over-the-top melodrama, it was a thrilling ride for sure. I'm going to be a bit generous and include it in my annual recommendation list, though right at the bottom of the lowest tier. And I may venture on another Lecoq book, though if it's just like this it will be the last.

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Review: The Bittermeads Mystery

The Bittermeads Mystery by E.R. Punshon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The story opens with a man who's amazingly strong, stealthy (despite being large and apparently ungainly), alert, and an excellent tracker. He feels more like a larger-than-life pulp hero than the protagonist of a detective novel, and indeed this is less a detective novel than it is a thriller. The difference between the two often comes down to time orientation: the detective novel is about solving a crime in the past, and the thriller is frequently about preventing a crime in the future. Not that the main character does a particularly wonderful job of that, at least for the first half of the book. He's busy gaining the trust of one of the criminals, falling for the love interest while trying to work out if she was complicit in the murder of his old friend, and maintaining his undercover identity. There has been more than one murder, but it's not really a mystery who committed them; the trick is getting to a point where he can prove it and foil the villain's plans.

It's only around the middle of the book that we discover exactly who he is and get at least some idea of what he's trying to do and why (I guessed it before the reveal, but not a long time before). About two-thirds of the way in, I, but not he, figured out who the mysterious figure behind the crimes was; the main character is notable for his physical rather than his mental aptitude. I was never in any danger of being bored, though; the tension is well maintained, in part by keeping information unrevealed as long as possible. And then there's a race against time to save multiple people in different places, where seconds could count.

The style, particularly at the start, is excitable and overdramatic, again more like a pulp adventure novel than the urbane narration I'm used to in classic detective stories.

The author isn't good with commas, using them to splice sentences together, placing them incorrectly in sentences or leaving them out where they're needed, and not using them when he splits a sentence of dialog in two parts with a tag; he punctuates the second part, incorrectly, as if it was a stand-alone sentence. Today's authors do this kind of thing all the time, but a century ago it was less common, and publishers generally had better editors, who knew the rules even if the authors didn't.

Between the not-too-bright protagonist, the pulpy prose and the mediocre copy editing, I can't give it better than a Bronze-tier rating in my annual recommendation list, but if you ignore those things, it's exciting and full of tension and, at times, action-packed.

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Review: The Wrong Letter

The Wrong Letter by Walter S. Masterman
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The introduction by G.K. Chesterton mentions unspecified faults with the book, which he however commends for fooling him about who the murderer was.

These faults, from my perspective, include simplistic prose mainly consisting of declarative sentences, some of which are comma-spliced, others of which are missing their question marks despite being phrased as questions. The paragraph breaks sometimes make it slightly confusing to work out who is speaking, since the author uses a break after a beat, even if the dialog that follows is from the person who was taking action in the beat.

It's a locked-room mystery, made less mysterious by the fact that in the discovery-of-the-body scene the amateur detective of the (unrealistic) amateur-and-professional pair opens the door of the murder room by manipulating the key, which is in the lock on the other side, with a pair of pliers, thus demonstrating how the murderer could have left and locked it behind them. However, nobody seems to pick up on this, and the police strip the entire room looking for secret passages.

I was finding it tedious, mainly because of the prose style, so I glanced at the ending to see what Chesterton was talking about, only to find that it breaks two of Ronald Knox's rules of detective fiction (rules 1 and 7, if you want to look them up and don't mind a big spoiler). So I didn't bother to finish it.

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Review: Flecker’s Magic

Flecker’s Magic by Norman H. Matson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Short, and yet it seems much longer than it needs to be at times. This is because the main character, a 21-year-old struggling American artist living in Paris, spends so much time introspecting and philosophizing. He is dithering about what to wish for, having been given a ring by a young woman who says she's a witch (and can back it up by performing remarkable feats), and told that it will grant him one wish.

He has a vivid imagination, and can see the downsides of each wish he thinks of, which at least puts him ahead of most fictional people who are granted wishes - but it also means that he just wanders along through his life, procrastinating the decision while the deadline he's been given looms closer. He eats (very well; he's not a starving artist), he philosophizes, he paints, he sleeps, he havers, he dithers, he blathers. An old witch turns up a few times and advises him to wish for happiness, but, disgusted by her, he's also repelled by the idea (and worried that she might be the same person as the young witch, who he's fallen for, in the way of young men).

He fails to make a decision, and then the book goes into a series of long conversations which get increasingly nonsensical and self-indulgently pointless, and at that point I gave up on it. I can see it being interesting if you were around the main character's age and still looking for a philosophy of life, though even then, the philosophies of life it presents are diffuse, out-of-date and sometimes surreal. But for me, it wasn't interesting.

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Review: The Problem Club

The Problem Club by Barry Pain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amusing and different. Club stories were almost as much a staple of English literature as clubs were of London life at one time, though this isn't a club in the Drones Club sense (with its own premises), but more like a supper club that meets each month in the private rooms of a restaurant. The members compete in quirky challenges like "who can steal the most handkerchiefs from other club members?" or "try to get someone to say to you, 'You ought to have been a giraffe'." It bears some similarities to G.K. Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades .

The format of each story is the same. The month's challenge is announced (as a formal reminder) by the chairman, a rotating office among the twelve members, so each member is chairman once a year. The chairman doesn't compete, but adjudicates who among the other members has won. Most of the club subscription goes into a pool, which is taken by the winner or winners.

The chairman then goes around asking the members whether they have completed the challenge. It's all done on the honour system; these are pukka Englishmen, and while they might not blink at manipulating people (harmlessly) or bending the law a bit to complete the challenges, they would naturally never lie about whether they had won. Most of the entertainment value comes from the oddness of the challenges, the discomfiture of the non-winners and their unsuccessful attempts, and the ingenuity of the winners (though at least one winner is a winner by pure luck). Some people attempt to argue that they have won by a technicality involving the precise wording of the rules, and the chairman adjudicates. Once the prize is awarded (or not, if nobody has won; the prize is then added to the next month's pool), the next month's challenge is announced. The meeting then breaks up, and some members play bridge or otherwise socialise amongst themselves. Within this format, the stories are varied; different people, with different specialty knowledge or skills, stand out in each competition, the challenges are diverse, and the solutions even more so.

If you enjoy heist stories for the ingenuity of the plans and the ability of the characters to manipulate, this may be something you'd enjoy too. It's all good fun, nobody is harmed, and some of the club members set out to be clever and end up looking ridiculous.

Even though I found it amusing rather than hilarious, it was entertaining, and original and different enough that I've placed it in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list. A lot of what I read is, inevitably, changes rung on old concepts, and this, despite being more than a century old, struck me as fresh and with further potential for development.

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Review: The Middle Temple Murder

The Middle Temple Murder by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fletcher was a journalist, which is probably why the journalist who is the hero of this story, and solves the case, is so exemplary. He's empathetic to people who could be hurt if he reveals everything he knows, and keeps some things out of his paper in consequence, though admittedly they are friends and a potential love interest.

The pacing worked well for me, and never bogged down in a lack of progress; the journalist and (less frequently) the police detective were constantly discovering new clues and facts that progressed towards a solution, and those facts revealed a complex and engaging story, involving fraud, false identities, theft, blackmail and murder.

I was engaged enough that I'm not even demoting it by one tier in my annual recommendation list for relying on coincidence for the plot to happen. The core cast of nine people turn out to have multiple connections to one another, a good many of them completely coincidental, and the murder itself is the result of at least three coincidences. But given that those coincidences happened, it does all make sense, and the process of unravelling it all was enjoyable.

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Review: The Achievements of Luther Trant

The Achievements of Luther Trant by William MacHarg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something different: An early (1910) presentation of a detective using psychological science to solve cases.

Unfortunately, much of the psychological science of 1910 is bunk, and those parts of it that are valid are badly oversold. For example, the authors take it for granted that anyone who's lying will be stressed, and therefore detectable using early predecessors of the polygraph. There's a reason that polygraph evidence isn't accepted in courts: it's not that simple, not that clearcut, and not that reliable.

It reminds me, in fact, of every overhyped technology ever (such as AI today), which, when you actually start trying to apply it, comes up against the fact that the real world - and particularly the human part of it - is a lot more complicated than the technology evangelists have allowed for.

It's not all polygraph; in fact, there's quite a lot of variation, and no two stories use exactly the same method. There's some stuff about "hysteria" that, I think, takes a few laboratory experiments that were probably exaggerated in their writeup and interpretation, and turns them into "known facts" that apply generally. In one chapter, the detective solves a case based on giving a brief word-association test to a group of bank employees. In another, he measures the speed of response in a word-association test using an elaborate apparatus (all the scientific instruments are mechanical or electro-mechanical, in this time before electronics) in order to discover the guilty party. The response speeds quoted seem extremely slow for what is supposed to be a "word you first think of" test, and could easily be distinguished without using a clock accurate to a tenth of a second. We also don't ever get a discussion of how this young man, who's implied to be off a Midwestern farm, can afford to set himself up with all this presumably expensive precision equipment (once he leaves the university and goes out on his own, that is).

The whole thing takes psychological effects which, if real at all, are probably only visible in a large-scale statistical analysis, and makes them act like universal laws that apply to every subject every time, and can be easily and quickly measured outside a lab setting.

So, treat it as science fiction. But the mysteries are clever, and it's not just the same thing over and over; each story in the book presents a different type of puzzle and a different type of solution, so points to the authors for that.

There is generally a young woman in each story, but she's always engaged or married to someone already, and Trant - young, handsome and athletic as well as highly intelligent - never has a romantic interest. He is, like most early detectives, more of a crime-solving plot device than a character with his own life and interests outside detection. But if you enjoy a clever puzzle, and can suspend disbelief about the "psychological science," it's an enjoyable collection.

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Review: If I Were You

If I Were You by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The British obsession with class - and the fact that some of the brighter Brits suspected quite early on that nurture was more important than nature in creating any detectable differences between people of different classes - has produced a few comedies with a baby-swap at the centre of the plot. Gilbert and Sullivan have two (HMS Pinafore and The Gondoliers). In the US, Mark Twain did something similar, only with race, in Pudd'nhead Wilson .

Here we have a story where - according to his old nurse - the Earl of Droitwich is not the son of the previous earl, as everyone has always believed, but the son of the nurse, and the man who's grown up as the son of the nurse is not a Cockney barber but the rightful holder of the title. The Family, of course, are outraged; so is the butler, especially since the nurse in question is his sister, and he doesn't fancy calling his young nephew Sid "m'lord". The mercenary Modern Girl who has just got engaged to the man who she thought, at the time, was the earl isn't happy either.

Fortunately, the barber's manicurist, Polly Brown (a name like that in Wodehouse always signals a worthy, sensible girl), suggests that the Claimant should be shown just how much he wouldn't like earling, and the Family begin a campaign along those lines, making him ride, attend highbrow concerts and lectures, and so forth. Meanwhile, Tony, who was previously believed to be the earl, takes over the barbershop, spends time with Polly, and falls in love with her. Hijinks ensue.

The novel was based on a play, written by Wodehouse and his frequent collaborator Guy Bolton, which was never produced; they later adapted the novel into another play titled Who's Who?, which ran for 19 performances. Bolton adapted the play into a musical, Who's Who, Baby?, which was even less successful, running for 16 performances. I'm not sure why audiences didn't take to it; it's a typical Wodehouse bit of fun, with amusing dialog and situations. The novel shows its origins as a play, with limited locations and, occasionally, the feeling that the characters are saying lines to each other rather than conversing, but overall it's a solid piece in the Wodehouse manner, and I enjoyed it.

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Review: At the Villa Rose

At the Villa Rose by A.E.W. Mason
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An unusual structure for a mystery story: the criminals are identified and captured just over half-way through the book, after which we get a (rather horrific) sequential account of how their crime unfolded. They're cruel and brutal, and honestly it's more than I bargained for. Then a chapter or two of how the detective figured it out.

It's a clever crime cleverly detected, but too dark for me.

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Review: The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been reading a lot of classic mysteries lately (more than 50, not sure how that happened), and you can only do that for so long without turning to Christie. My grandmother had a collection of Christie books, which I used to read when I stayed with her, but that was many years ago, and I don't remember whether or not I read this one specifically. I've certainly seen the wonderful TV adaptation, and when I read Poirot's dialog, I hear it in my head in the voice of David Suchet. He is Poirot.

Compared with most of her contemporaries, Christie's prose feels smoother, less stiff and more modern, closer to the way people write today than to the Victorian or Edwardian style. She's not the literary stylist that Dorothy L. Sayers is, but her writing is fit for its purpose. She does occasionally commit a comma splice.

She also makes a mystery story feel like a story and not just a puzzle. The characters have more life than a lot of authors of the time manage, and in particular, her detective, Poirot, has an individuality that's missing from a lot of detectives of the era, despite its presence in the great model, Sherlock Holmes. I sometimes say that one of the things I enjoy most about a great mystery story is the parts that aren't the mystery, and Christie provides that: the interpersonal dynamics and the thoughts and feelings of the narrator all seem more developed, more in colour and less in black-and-white, than in a lot of classic mysteries.

Part of it, I suspect, is that Christie, as a woman, was permitted, even expected, to be more comfortable and familiar with emotion and relationships than the male English authors of her time, whose stories often feel like you're watching them through a window of thick glass rather than being in the same room with the characters. I've noticed a similar phenomenon with C.L. Moore in the fantasy and science fiction genre. She, like some other female authors writing at the time, introduces another layer of emotional realism and significance that's missing from most of her male contemporaries, and that we've come to expect in modern fiction.

At the same time, Christie doesn't let us down on the detective-story part. The mystery is intricately constructed and carefully unfolded, just as much as it would be in a book by one of the Freemans (Freeman Wills Crofts or R. Austin Freeman).

Hastings, the Watson character, makes a delightfully dim narrator. Take this passage, for example, where Poirot is speaking to him:

"We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all.”
I acquiesced.
“There, mon ami, you will be of great assistance to me.”
I was pleased with the compliment. There had been times when I hardly thought that Poirot appreciated me at my true worth.
“Yes,” he continued, staring at me thoughtfully, “you will be invaluable.”

The excuse for Hastings' presence in the story is that he's convalescing from an unspecified war wound at the house of an old friend from his childhood, but the wound doesn't seem to trouble him much; he plays tennis, for example, which requires quite a sound body. He's there for a long time, too, and is eventually given a job in the War Office, suggesting that his wound is serious enough not to send him back to the Front (though clearly not so serious that he can't play tennis), or that he brings some kind of ability to the job that is not visible in his assistance of Poirot, or has some sort of influence in high places that he never mentions. It smells strongly of authorial fiat to me, used to ensure that Hastings remains present throughout the whole series of events, but nothing else in the story smells similarly, so I'll let it pass.

He's not referred to as Captain Hastings in this book, even though he's a currently serving officer. It's odd that he gets that title in future books, since he says in this one that he wasn't a professional soldier before the war, and hence technically shouldn't retain his military rank into civilian life, particularly since it's a comparatively low one; it's usually only majors and above who get to keep their rank. According to the Wodehouse annotation site madameulalie.org on their page for Lord Emsworth and Others, "In English literature, former army officers who use the rank of Captain are almost always bounders". Hastings is a strong counter-example; he’s certainly not a bounder, being, in fact, brave, loyal, and scrupulous to a fault (except that in this book he's rather too admiring of his friend's wife).

It's very solid for a first novel, and comparing it to other detective fiction of the time makes it clear to me why Christie is still the most read of all the authors working in this period (though, of course, she did continue writing for many more decades too).

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Review: Max Carrados

Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

We aren't privy to the detective's knowledge until he explains everything at the end of each of these stories, so the enjoyment here consists of watching a clever man solve odd problems. There's an extra wrinkle in that Carrados is blind, so he relies on his other senses (and his author-given ability to reason accurately from limited information, and his extremely observant manservant) to work on the strange cases that he encounters, usually by having them brought to him by his friend the private inquiry agent. He doesn't do it professionally, having inherited a lot of money, so he can choose cases that he finds interesting - thus increasing the chances that we will also find them interesting.

The author is clever in setting up the situations and having the detective figure them out, so the stories are enjoyable, though they're not "fair play" detective stories by any measure. The author also makes sure that, usually, virtue is rewarded and vice punished, even if this sometimes requires coincidences outside the control of any of the characters, including Carrados.

The last story includes some tense moments and a bit of action, driven by Carrados being more of a protagonist than usual.

They're entertaining, but I'm not about to rush off and read others.

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Review: Mystery At Lynden Sands

Mystery At Lynden Sands by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the third Sir Clinton Driffield novel, Sir Clinton is accompanied both by his Watson from the first book (his friend Wendover, a JP who represents the sound British county chap who's a stickler for the done thing), and his inspector from the second book, who tends to play Scotland Yard bungler to Sir Clinton's Sherlock Holmes, though he's sound enough at basic police work. He can collect evidence and notice evidence, he's just not that good at stringing it together into a narrative, which is where Sir Clinton shines.

The motive for the first murder seemed pretty obvious to me, and gave a clear suspect from the start, though Sir Clinton tries to make out late in the book that it could have pointed two different ways. The main mystery, though, involved gunshots, multiple sets of footprints later washed away by the tide, several different people believing that something had taken place which had not, tyre tracks, eavesdropping, and bigamous marriages, and had me completely confused until Sir Clinton cleared it all up neatly. He's still a bit of a know-it-all; it would be nice to see him confounded, or making a mistake, from time to time just to humanize him (or having a non-professional relationship with anyone besides Wendover, who, because he's drafted as the Watson, ends up still being a professional relationship). But the crimes and solutions are clever, and if you enjoy Freeman Wills Crofts and/or R. Austin Freeman, with their puzzle-solving detectives who don't have much personality, this is another author for you.

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Review: Lord Emsworth and Others

Lord Emsworth and Others by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Short stories, in which, mostly, people win who don't always win. This is a bit of a theme for Wodehouse; he was always one for the underdog.

In the opening story, "The Crime Wave at Blandings," Lord Emsworth's despised former secretary, the Efficient Baxter, is shot with an airgun multiple times by multiple people, and another of Lord Emsworth's many nieces gets to marry the man of her choice because Lord Emsworth, emboldened by circumstances, uncharacteristically stands up to his sisters. It's prime Blandings Castle material.

We then get stories from those tireless raconteurs Mr. Mulliner and the Oldest Member (of a golf club; these are golf stories, but you don't have to be a golfer to enjoy them, since they're really about the struggles of young people in love). I'd say these stories are about average for Mulliner and Oldest Member stories: good, but not great.

Finally, we get three stories in which Ukridge uncharacteristically makes money out of his perpetual schemes, though not without the usual vicissitudes. The boxer he intermittently manages, Battling Billson, even wins a fight for once. His reluctant friend, "Corky" Corcoran, who narrates the Ukridge stories, in this case is mostly narrated to, as Ukridge recounts his triumphs and disasters. I enjoy Ukridge's inexpert con games and his eccentric costume and personality, and these three stories are well up to standard.

The cover illustration to the Everyman edition presumably is meant to be the Efficient Baxter, but with none of the features of his stated appearance (for example, his spectacles). Everyman have done an excellent job of copy editing, but I question their art direction.

The book cheered me up when I needed that, and what more can you ask from a collection of comic short stories?

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Review: Tragedy at Ravensthorpe

Tragedy at Ravensthorpe by J.J. Connington
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The most unusual thing about this classic mystery series is that the investigator is the Chief Constable, the head of all the police in a county (the county is not named). His inspector, who would normally be the detective, is instead the Watson. Sir Clinton Driffield is the detective's name.

This one is a country-house mystery of sorts, in that it does take place at a country house, and the first crime is committed during a masked ball in honour of the daughter of the house's 21st birthday.

You always have to make allowances, in period mysteries, for something, and here it's Driffield's rather patronising way of protecting the women from distress (they seem perfectly capable to me), and the fact that he smokes no fewer than three cigarettes during his summing-up of the case.

Driffield is a bit of a self-satisfied clever dick, and figures everything out nicely, connecting a number of odd elements into a complete story. He does acknowledge that he doesn't have enough to take to a jury, so he has to try to trap one of the criminals. This, at least, doesn't go quite as planned, though it still leaves him in a good position.

The mystery turns out to be two entangled mysteries, one of which is not that satisfying. (view spoiler)[A man disappears and is found dead. Driffield judges that his brother, who hates him and has just been thrown out of the family home without an income for no great transgression, "isn't the fratricidal type" and that therefore it's suicide. He does have more to his theory, in that the man has agoraphobia, like a number of members of his family - rather to my surprise, there is a genetic component to that particular form of mental illness. But there's no really decisive evidence for suicide versus murder, and the brother had a motive, no alibi, and freely admits to moving the body. In the end, there's no trial for anyone, because the other criminals in the more or less unrelated mystery have all killed each other, the last accidentally killing himself - though he lives long enough to confess and confirm Driffield's cleverness in working out the crime. (hide spoiler)]

While it's a cleverly plotted puzzle, it's not much more than that, so I'm giving it a position in the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list. If you read a mystery novel in part for the stuff that isn't the mystery, which I do, there isn't a lot of that here; the family dynamics are sketched in enough to provide context and a couple of red herrings, but no more, and the personalities of the characters are similarly adequate. The detective is not particularly colourful or individual, either, more like the crime-solving machines of Freeman Wills Crofts or R. Austin Freeman than a Poirot or a Wimsey. Enjoy this one for the cleverness rather than the human interest.

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Review: The Crime at Black Dudley

The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This first book of the more-than-20-book-long Campion series is unusual in a few ways, some of them good, some bad, and some just... unusual.

Firstly, it's more a thriller than it is a mystery story. There's very little time spent on investigating the crime, which is the fatal stabbing of an elderly man at a country-house party during a game played with the lights off. This is partly because there aren't many clues; the protagonist eventually works it out based on the logic of who might have had a motive - though even then he doesn't know what the motive might be, exactly - and by doing some library research, the results of which we don't learn until the big reveal scene. Mainly, though, nobody is too focused on the mystery because they are busy for most of the book being held captive by a ruthless international criminal, who has come to the house to pick up plans for a huge bank robbery that have now gone missing. This provides plenty of tension and action, as the guests strive unsuccessfully to escape.

Unfortunately, the resolution involves a massive deus ex machina right at the last moment, and all of the plans and courage and actions of the party go for nothing. That's the "bad" I referred to.

The other somewhat unusual thing is that Campion, who would go on to be the series hero, is a secondary character here. The protagonist is a pathologist, a consultant to Scotland Yard, who is a friend of the house party's host. Campion has inserted himself into the party for his own purposes, and reveals in the course of the book that he is some kind of shadowy freelance operative with a casual attitude to law and order, under the guise, which never slips, of an upper-class twit. He's like Lord Peter Wimsey (who first appeared six years earlier, in 1923), if Lord Peter never dropped the pose and wasn't always ethical. There may be a bit of Arsene Lupin in there too, and (given Campion's hinted-at origins), some Cleek of the Forty Faces, though without the disguise schtick.

It's not the only example of a famous detective who wasn't the main character in his first book; Charlie Chan in The House Without a Key (1925) is also a secondary character. I suspect that the author decided after writing the book that Campion was more interesting than the rather staid pathologist, and decided to write more about him.

Because Campion is interesting, though annoying, and even though the great clanging deus ex machina drags the book down to the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list, it does make it to the list because it's fluently written, suspenseful, and shows a lot of potential. There isn't the complexity of a mystery by, say, Freeman Wills Crofts or R. Austin Freeman, or the sophistication and humane empathy of a Dorothy L. Sayers, but it's good enough that I'd definitely read another by the same author.

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Review: Bachelors Anonymous

Bachelors Anonymous by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another one of those Wodehouse books where the same few people keep coincidentally bumping into each other, because London (or, in other books, New York) is apparently a village with about 20 total inhabitants. I tend to blame the fact that a lot of his early work was in musical comedy, where you have to keep the cast tight, and sometimes this is how you do it. Most of the books where he pulls this kind of rannygazoo are early ones, but he wrote this one in 1975, seven decades into his career. So that's a strike against it, for me at least; I don't like seeing the author's hand too obviously adjusting things.

The story itself, though, is as sparkling and full of comedic ups and downs as I could wish, so I partially forgive the coincidences that drive it. The central couple are appealing, hapless and deserving of a happy ending, the interfering lawyer Mr Trout is hilarious, and if the film magnate and the actress are stock characters, and the nurse and the hero's friend, the woman detective and the indigent baronet get little development, they're still adequate for the roles they play. I didn't fully believe the efficient and matter-of-fact detective's motivation in wanting to marry the baronet (purely to get the title of Lady Warner, even though the baronet was, as she was well aware, a complete no-hoper), but everything else was at least at the usual Wodehouse level of plausible.

Trout, a member of Bachelors Anonymous (a support group along the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous, which helps its members - and non-members, not necessarily at their request - resist matrimony), is also the lawyer of Ivor Llewellyn, the much-married motion picture magnate, and after Llewellyn's fifth divorce promises to help him avoid getting married again. The hero is hired as a kind of bodyguard to help him, but is himself newly in love; Trout looks on this development with disapproval, and interferes disastrously, though not all of the main romance's vicissitudes come from his actions.

I was amused to see that one of the other bachelors was named Fred Bassett, and wondered whether Wodehouse was familiar with the comic strip about the dog of that name, which had been running for 12 years at the time; quite possibly not, since it ran in the Daily Mail, and even if Wodehouse had been living in the UK he probably wouldn't have read that paper.

The Everyman editions are good ones, well edited and cleanly typeset (though in a typeface a few points smaller than I would prefer), but I find the cover illustration style unattractive. I did spot one small typo, a full stop that should have been a comma, but otherwise it was impeccable.

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Review: Sasha vs the Whole Wide World (and Dragons) (Set in the

Sasha vs the Whole Wide World (and Dragons) (Set in the by Rachel Taylor Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is (apart from the copy editing, which I'll mention later) a sound piece of work. The characters have plenty of backstory, which makes them feel like they didn't start existing in Chapter 1, and also makes sense of their actions and feelings during the book. Relationships matter, a lot, especially family for the protagonist, and most of the relationships are not straightforwardly like or dislike, trust or distrust; they're messy and complicated, like real relationships. This is a level I don't see often in first books.

I definitely called what would happen with the money side of things well in advance. Money is an obsession of the protagonist, since her family is struggling with debt; she's working four jobs to try to save for college, but has to keep paying off overdue mortgage payments with the money instead. I predicted both that (view spoiler)[she would have to give up the McGuffin without being paid for it, because it was the right thing to do (hide spoiler)] and that (view spoiler)[she would still make money out of the publicity surrounding it, just not the obscene amounts selling the McGuffin would have brought (hide spoiler)]. The end point of the romance plot was also predictable, because after all, romance plots all come out the same way, though it did have a rocky road to get there, and was well thought out and believable in its evolutions. Having said that, it wasn't a made-from-box-mix, totally predictable plot at all, and it kept me thoroughly engaged, even gripped, throughout. Most of the book consists of a road trip, taken while being hunted, not knowing who to trust or how to escape pursuit, which keeps the tension high. There's constant comic relief, not only from the snark of the protagonist (which isn't cruel), but from the antics of the three little dogs she has stolen from one of her jobs for reasons that are a bit glossed over. I think it's to make it more believable that she's been kidnapped, but... it doesn't, really. (view spoiler)[Perhaps the McGuffin got involved in manipulating events earlier than it seemed to? (hide spoiler)]

The author, like an increasing number of authors these days, is under the mistaken impression that it's correct to put a hyphen between an adjective and the noun it's modifying. This is most noticeable with "magical-creatures," because that's the pair that occurs most frequently, but it's a more widespread problem, and she also hyphenates numerous phrases that shouldn't be hyphenated either. At least once, in a compound adjective (which is almost the only place you should hyphenate), she doesn't hyphenate all the words in the phrase. It's good that authors want to use more punctuation, but not that they don't know where to put it. Otherwise, there are a couple of the usual errors, but most of them don't occur frequently, and some, but by no means all, of the apostrophes are in the right place. An editor is credited, but that may or may not be a copy editor. I've seen way worse, but the excess hyphens were a distraction.

Usual disclaimers: I received a pre-publication review copy, and more editing may happen before publication. Also, many people don't know or care how punctuation works, but for those readers who do, I give specifics in my reviews so they can decide how much it will reduce their enjoyment.

It's to the credit of the author that, even though the punctuation annoyed me, I was still strongly gripped by the plot and was cheering for the protagonist all the way along. Recommended.

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Review: Barmy in Wonderland

Barmy in Wonderland by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If there was one thing Wodehouse knew well, it was the New York theatre scene, since his first great success, before he became a popular novelist, was writing lyrics for New York musicals. He once had five running on Broadway at once, and claimed that his royalties from the song he contributed to Showboat would keep him in whisky and cigarettes for life.

This isn't the musical theatre, though, but the "legitimate" theatre. Cyril Fotheringay-Phipps, known to his friends in the Drones Club as "Barmy" because, even in that dim-witted environment, he stood out as particularly slow, loses his job as a hotel clerk thanks to the drunken shenanigans of a Hollywood actor who is in New York to perform in a play. Through a series of events involving a supposed fortune teller and a young woman who Barmy thinks is his destiny, Barmy ends up investing a legacy he recently got from his grandfather into the play that his friend is performing in.

There follow confusion, conflict, drama (more offstage than on), the looming threat of failure and some actually rather cunning work by Barmy, who isn't always quite as green as he is cabbage-looking, ably assisted by friends and well-wishers. It's as bright and sparkling as a good musical, like all of Wodehouse's stuff, and if the Hollywood actor sounds a bit like every English-literature-and-the-Bible-quoting smart young fellow in these books, well, it's an amusing way to sound.

Even though this was published in 1952 and refers to the contemporary actor Gregory Peck, whose career began in 1939, it's still, somehow, implicitly set in the pre-war world of Wodehouse. Barmy is still a young man, for one thing, as he was in the pre-war Drones stories, and a young woman refers to the Volstead Act (the Prohibition law), which might have been on her mother's mind a generation earlier but would hardly have been brought up by someone who was young in 1952. In fact, the book is based on a play by Wodehouse's friend George S. Kaufman, written in 1925. (Wodehouse split the royalties with Kaufman 50/50, in contrast to the plot point late in the novel where a novella writer has to sue for a share in the proceeds of the play, which was apparently based on his work without permission.) And yet it feels entirely Wodehousian from start to finish, even if nobody pretends to be someone else.

It's a cheerful short novel, and I solidly recommend it.

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Review: The Shadow of the Wolf

The Shadow of the Wolf by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is in the "reverse mystery" subgenre pioneered by Freeman and most famously encountered in the TV series Columbo, where we start out by seeing the crime committed and know who did it, and the tension and interest is generated by seeing the detective and the criminal play cat and mouse respectively.

From the first scene in which Freeman's detective, Dr Thorndyke, appeared, I had some idea of the kind of clues that might turn up and help him solve the case, and by fortunate coincidence exactly that thing occurred. In fact, coincidence plays a significant role, along with Thorndyke's considerable acumen as a forensic investigator, in solving the mystery. Once again, as in at least two previous books (I haven't read the series in order), the author uses the plot device of Thorndyke getting involved in what seem initially like two separate investigations but turn out to be one, so what he discovers from one end helps him solve the mystery from the other. An author can get away with doing this kind of thing once, but three (or more) times? That takes it from an aberration to a bad habit. Sure, Thorndyke does tend to get consulted on strange cases, which makes it slightly less of a coincidence, but only slightly.

There's a second coincidence when just the piece of evidence turns up that I was expecting, and it happens to unequivocally point to the location of the body, which is just what the plot requires at that point. And there's a third coincidence at the end, which allows a neat conclusion.

I prefer not to see the hand of the author so obviously on the scales, so even though this is otherwise sound, both in the dynamics of the interpersonal relationships and the practicalities of the forensic science, I can't give it better than a Bronze-tier rating in my annual recommendation list.

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Review: Full Moon

Full Moon by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Written in 1947, after Wodehouse's experience of being interned by the Nazis (he was living in France when it was taken over). And yet, it sparkles with all the joy of the interwar period in which it is implicitly set, like all classic Wodehouse. The only difference I can see is that the pre-war Wodehouse probably wouldn't have mentioned a character's brassiere.

Like every Blandings Castle novel, it features imposture, but in this case takes it to an extreme; Bill, the disapproved suitor of one of Lord Emsworth's nieces, comes to the castle three times under three different identities, only one of which has any form of disguise (an enormous false beard that makes him look like an Assyrian king), and all three identities talk to Lord Emsworth, but that woolen-headed peer has so poor a memory for faces that he doesn't twig that both of the artists he employs to paint his pig's portrait are actually the same person. His far more intelligent (and less moral) brother Galahad assures the young man that he can rely on Lord Emsworth's vagueness, and so it proves.

It looks for a while there as if Freddie Threepwood, Lord Emsworth's younger son, who is now a go-getting salesman for his American father-in-law's dog biscuit empire, is going to end up as the person who inevitably but reluctantly funds the deserving young couple of the moment, but this departure from the classic formula (in which the older generation, or the undeserving, do this kind of funding) is averted at the last minute through Gally's complicated manipulation of everyone in sight.

We get to meet some new members of the Threepwood clan, including the Wedges: Lady Hermione (Lord Emsworth's sister, who unfortunately looks like a cook), Colonel Egbert, and their daughter Veronica, whose outstanding qualities are a lack of intelligence and extraordinary beauty, plus a love of jewellery. It looks like Freddie's friend Tipton, a wealthy American, will be able to ignore the lack of intelligence for the sake of the beauty and supply the jewellery in bulk, but the course of true love runs very rough indeed for a while, not only for them but also for Freddie's other cousin Prue and her artist fiancé Bill.

The ups and downs and complications and farcical impostures, misunderstandings and assorted maneuverings, and the witty prose, scattered with a mixture of quotations from classic English literature and slang, are all well up to the classic Wodehouse standard. A strong entry in a delightful series.

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Review: The Eames-Erskine Case: A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery

The Eames-Erskine Case: A Chief Inspector Pointer Mystery by A.E. Fielding
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A twisty tale of hidden identities and complicated schemes.

Even though the chief inspector isn't described all that much and doesn't have much in the way of personal traits, he still feels significantly more individual than the interchangeable inspectors of Freeman Wills Crofts, showing that it doesn't take very much work to turn a cardboard cutout into something a bit more like a character. He has a flatmate, who he uses as a sounding board, and this alone - the fact that he has a domestic life and talks to someone who isn't a suspect or a witness - goes a long way to humanize him, even though the flatmate isn't anything like a Watson, playing no role in the actual plot.

The unfortunate thing is that we don't get to follow the detective all the way through the case. Partway through, the viewpoint switches to a young woman who is asked to act as an amateur detective/undercover spy to help clear her potential fiancé of the crime, and while we get some exciting action as a result, a lot of the detective's work is done off-screen and then sprung on us (via the woman) as an infodump of sorts. This makes for a less satisfactory ending than if we'd been able to follow along and have some chance of figuring out the solution for ourselves, since, as they say in court, it relies on facts not in evidence.

Still, it's a sound piece of work in other respects, and I'll try to get hold of others in the series. Unfortunately, at time of review this is the only one that's on Project Gutenberg.

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Review: The Phone Booth Mystery: A Traditional British Mystery

The Phone Booth Mystery: A Traditional British Mystery by John Ironside
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reminded me very much of The Terriford Mystery , in that rather than being a standard detective story where the focus is on the detective solving the mystery, it focuses on an innocent man accused of murder and his faithful fiancée (Terriford)/wife (this book), who always believes in his innocence. In both cases, the resolution is not brought about by anyone cleverly figuring out who the real killer is, but by the killer confessing. This leaves the main characters without a lot of agency, and the detectives, who aren't the main characters, cease to be relevant well before the end. If you're looking for the experience of a standard detective story, you'll be disappointed (don't believe the "A traditional British mystery" tagline on some editions), though considered on its own terms it's reasonably successful and written fluently and competently.

The author uses a couple of coincidences to tighten up the connections between the cast members. The victim is a friend of the accused's wife's bridesmaid's music teacher, as well as being the accused's boss's wife. The couple, newly married, decide on a whim to stay with a maiden lady who runs basically a B&B, who the wife had stayed with years before, and this lady turns out to be an old flame of the husband's boss's manservant. Neither of these coincidences have much impact on the plot, not least because the resolution of the plot is by no effort of any of the characters (apart from the murderer who confesses), but this kind of coincidence, to me, shows the hand of the author too prominently. I don't like it when it happens in Dracula, and I don't like it when it happens in early Wodehouse; I don't like it here either, though it's relatively harmless.

The other thing I didn't like was that there's a bit of mysticism - a woman with "the gift" who makes an accurate prophecy that everything will turn out all right - dropped in partway through. To me, that makes the wife's simple faith look rather naive, in that she readily believes it and rests her faith on that rather than on her Anglican beliefs, and it again shows the hand of the author too obviously. It doesn't make any difference to the plot either, but it does act as a bit of an internal spoiler.

It's well enough written, and the B&B owner is amusing, though none of the characters have a ton of depth. On consideration, I'm not going to put it on my recommendation list for this year, because although I enjoyed it most of the time I was reading it, I was left discontented at the end.

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Review: Blandings Castle and Elsewhere:

Blandings Castle and Elsewhere: by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prime Wodehouse from his classic period (1920s and 1930s). All of his books are implicitly set in what at least feels like the 20s and 30s, but these short stories were actually written and published in that period, so they don't ever feel (as the later ones occasionally do) that he was imitating himself.

I felt like I'd read at least some if not all of the stories in this book, but I don't seem to have it recorded on Goodreads, so perhaps it was a long time ago, or in a different format. I enjoyed the read in any case.

There are three sections to the book. The first is a set of Blandings Castle stories, with all of the things there are to love about that setting - the dithery, harmless Lord Emsworth, who does manage to stand up to his domineering sister, Lady Constance Keeble, once or twice; his beloved pig, Empress of Blandings; his extremely Scots gardener, with whom he has several battles of wills; and, of course, people pretending to be other people for purposes of romance resolution. It's a lovely place to spend time, and the hijinks are hilarious.

Then there's a story in which that red-haired menace to society Bobbie Wickham plots to free herself from her mother's plan for her to marry a stuffy politician through bare-faced lies and manipulation, in the process setting the politician and an American publisher at each other's throats, each believing that the other is mentally unbalanced. Even though I'm sure I'd read that one before, it had me chuckling.

Finally, there's a set of Mr Mulliner stories about Hollywood, in which Wodehouse genially sends up that very silly place. He had spent some time there himself, trying to get film versions of his musicals made, but the craziness of the studio system had defeated that plan; this is his revenge, if something so basically good-natured can be called revenge. Mr Mulliner, of course, is an elderly raconteur in the bar-parlour of a pub called the Angler's Rest, and usually makes some distant relative the protagonist of his stories, which immediately alerts you that these are probably tall tales. They evoke an exaggerated version of Hollywood in the period of Prohibition (the existence of which contributes to the plot of a couple of the stories).

There's a running theme, as there often is in Wodehouse, of formidable women (probably modelled on his aunts) and diffident men who sometimes grow a spine, or at least manage to give that impression, and either stand up to or stand up for the women. Sometimes, though, it's the intelligent, ruthless women who triumph over foolish men. I don't want to give the idea that it's a constant battle of the sexes, though; men and women are allies as well as adversaries, often against their stiff and unsympathetic elders. There's generally conflict in a Wodehouse story, and if it's not always resolved by the determined actions of the protagonist - if there are sometimes fortunate events that bring an unlooked-for resolution - it's still always a fun ride, because he somehow manages to engage the reader's sympathies for even the most trivial dilemmas of his most foolish characters.

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Review: Whisky Galore

Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My late father was a fan, though the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that he was a fan of the film (which I haven't seen) rather than the book. If he'd liked the book, we probably would have had a copy, and I would have read it years ago.

I was not a fan of the book particularly. I listened to the abridged BBC version read by Stanley Baxter, who does an excellent job; other reviewers suggest that it needed abridgement, and I probably got a better version than the wordier original. I certainly didn't feel like it needed to be longer.

It's very slice-of-life. The first part consists of various people on a Scottish island during World War II moaning about how all of their problems would be solved if only there wasn't a shortage of whisky. Then a ship carrying whisky wrecks nearby (with no loss of life), the islanders "salvage" the cargo, and all their problems are, in fact, solved. The rabbity school principal, with a few drams on board, finally stands up to his mother, the English sergeant-major gets to have an engagement party and to fix his wedding date, and everyone else is, by Scottish standards at least, in a good and hopeful mood, apart from the man whose daughters tipped out all his whisky to hide it from the excise inspector.

I found it mildly amusing at best.

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Review: The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye

The Mystery of the Peacock’s Eye by Brian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This author appears to have loaded a shotgun with punctuation and discharged it at close range into his manuscript. He should have included fewer dashes, fewer hyphens, fewer exclamation marks and a lot more commas (some of them in places that he uses dashes, some in places where he puts no punctuation at all). Proof, if it were needed, that some publishers a century ago sometimes put out badly edited work, just like many publishers today.

Neither the amateur detective nor the police inspector has a lot of personality, and I kept confusing them, because they both have names starting with B.

A bookie is introduced at one point as a minor character. Before we even meet him, the author alludes to his maid's appearance as indicating that she's Jewish. Then he similarly indicates that the bookie himself is Jewish. After that, he points out his Jewishness, and then after stereotyping him two or three times, concludes by making the point (in case you had missed it) that he's Jewish. If this isn't quite antisemitism, it's a close cousin to it, especially since his ethnic origin has nothing to do with anything.

The plot doesn't make a ton of sense. It's sometimes unclear which parts were coincidence and which parts were planning, especially since (view spoiler)[the murderer steals a suitcase from a luggage trolley at a hotel, possibly at random, so that the victim won't be identified immediately to give him time to do something I've forgotten, and registers the victim at a different hotel under the name of the suitcase's owner, who, as it happens, is acquainted with the victim, even though neither of them are anywhere near their hometown. The victim then apparently signs in under that name, which can't be accounted for by anything other than some prearrangement with her that the resolution of the plot never mentions and that isn't especially plausible (hide spoiler)]. The twist is unusual, but I don't think the author played very fair with the reader in leading up to it. And one of the two motives for the crime is muddied by a backstory that comes almost straight out of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

For me, it was a bit of a miss, and I won't be reading more from this author.

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Review: The Ponson Case

The Ponson Case by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remarked to my wife about this one that it doesn't matter if the inspector in a Freeman Wills Crofts novel isn't Inspector French, because he'll be functionally indistinguishable from him anyway. The author reserves personality for his suspects and victims, supplying none to his detectives. They're all efficient, dogged men who work patiently through the tedious investigative work that lets them unravel complicated and imaginative crimes.

The suspects are generally interesting, though, at least in spots. The deceased and his wife and daughter are lightly sketched, and have little role except as backstory, but his son, his nephew, the son's fiancée (a determined, intelligent woman who gets respect and approval from the police inspector), and another character who it would be a spoiler to describe have had more time spent on them, and come through as individuals.

There are elaborate and clever alibis, a tense chase leading eventually to Portugal, and a couple of unexpected twists, one of which I saw coming from a little distance off, but the other of which I definitely did not. While the resolution stretched my suspension of disbelief a little ((view spoiler)[the police decide not to prosecute anyone, even though a man has died and a lot of money has been spent on investigating events which several people conspired to cover up (hide spoiler)]), it was emotionally satisfying.

These are enjoyable mystery stories in which the cleverness of the crime, and its gradual revelation through careful police work, are the biggest draws, but there's an awareness too of how the events affect the characters emotionally, and how their relationships impact events. There's also always admiration of the landscape through which the inspector travels, both in England and often, as here, on the Continent, and I have to wonder whether this was Freeman Wills Crofts' way of making his holidays tax deductible, as well as a reflection of his genuine enjoyment of travel and scenery. And we usually get a tense chase, fight, or other action sequence thrown in as well. The character work may be patchy, and the detectives interchangeable, but these are still well written stories in other respects.

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Review: Uncle Fred in the Springtime:

Uncle Fred in the Springtime: by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Uncle Fred (Lord Ickenham) is equipped by nature with the skills, personality and moral outlook of a successful con man, but by heredity with the rank of an earl in the peerage of England. Firmly instructed by his countess that he is not to leave his country estate while she's away, he of course nips up to London almost immediately, and becomes involved in the money troubles of his nephew and the romantic troubles of his niece. The obvious solution to these problems is for him to impersonate Sir Roderick Glossop, the prominent loony doctor, at the Earl of Emsworth's Blandings Castle. Blandings (as one of the characters makes note of in the course of the story) seems to attract imposters like other houses attract mice.

Published in 1939, and unusual in that it has a couple of references to the existence of World War I, which Wodehouse usually ignored; with the Second World War looming, perhaps he couldn't quite manage that. But it's still set in his classic idealized inter-war world of country estates, harmless deceptions and farcical events. The pig Empress of Blandings gets stolen (of course), the Efficient Baxter literally gets egg on his face, young love goes through vicissitudes and finally prospers, people who need money end up with it by complicated means, and the whole thing sparkles with genial language play covering Shakespeare, the Bible, Keats, Tennyson and Dickens, among other literary references, mingled with both British and American slang of the period.

It's a Wodehouse novel, in short, and a good one, though not, for me, one of the very greatest. I lost track of some of the convolutions of the plot through not being sufficiently rested when I read it, but since a Wodehouse plot always works out more or less the same way, I was confident that I'd end up all right, along with the deserving characters, and that no real harm would come to anyone.

The edition I read could have done with a couple of additional commas (perhaps it was set from the edition which notoriously removed too many of them), and has "soups-willing" where it should be "soup-swilling," but is otherwise generally well edited.

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Review: Second Sight Secrets and Mechanical Magic

Second Sight Secrets and Mechanical Magic by Herman Pinetti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A short book by a magician, well known in his own time, about how some of the more common medium tricks and mind-reading acts worked. Debunking fake mediums was a popular hobby among magicians during the days when spiritualism was popular.

While, in these days of electronics, mentalism acts are easier than ever before, the basic technique is no doubt still the same: an assistant, usually a woman, is placed into a situation which seems to make it impossible that she could see whatever is being examined by the performer. Using a prearranged code worked into the performer's patter, or a second assistant who can see the object and communicate in some way with the receiver, the receiver correctly gives the number, or the details of the written note, or the identity of the object being held up where she can't see it, or whatever it may be. It's still clever even when you know how it's done. I saw a particularly spectacular example on a Britain's Got Talent magician special, where the assistant was enclosed in a glass tank of water and yet was able to write the serial number of a random banknote (which she couldn't see) on the glass.

Less common today are acts where a person is apparently restrained and yet is able to manipulate objects when hidden inside a "cabinet" defined by curtains. This was a favourite of mediums, who claimed that the spirits were doing it, but used an assistant reaching up through a hollow leg of the cabinet, or freed themselves somehow or gave themselves enough slack in the ropes that they could do it.

The old, but still popular, levitating lady illusion is also explained. I'd already seen it explained in another book ( The Old and the New Magic , which put me on to Pinetti), but I think Pinetti does a better job of his explanation. His explanations, in fact, are all very clear and easy to understand, and my only complaint about the book is that I wish it was longer and covered a larger variety of tricks.

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Review: The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris

The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris by Evie Gaughan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Told in almost aggressively plain and unornamented prose, which may be part of the reason that it has comparatively few errors in it. Going along with that, the observations on life and the characters' self-insights are bland and obvious most of the time, and the plot is fairly predictable and low-stakes. I don't mind low stakes or a slow-moving plot if something else is going on to engage me, but, while I certainly never wanted to give up on it, this one didn't grip me very hard. It does have an appealing setting in a town in France, which is well evoked.

The love interest is an extreme wish-fulfilment fantasy. He's rich, but he doesn't care about money - easy to do when you have plenty of it - and would rather be an art photographer than a ruthless property developer like his father. (Photographing picturesque buildings, by the way, not anything controversial.) He's infeasibly handsome and also sensitive and kind, yet unaccountably single. He thinks the rather bland heroine is the best thing ever. I'm assuming this is a convention of a genre I don't often read, so it gets a pass on that basis, but it did stick out to me. There's a predictable misunderstanding between the hero and heroine that is resolved in exactly the way I thought it would be.

I have a personal preference for strong, capable heroines who make good decisions. Edie is... not quite that. Yet she's not such a klutz as to be interesting for that reason, either. She makes decisions which might put her in situations that aren't ideal, but are definitely survivable and may have their upsides, and copes in them in ways that don't really put anything she values at much risk most of the time. She is good-hearted, though, and her well-intentioned meddling always works out and doesn't get resented more than briefly by the other characters. She does persevere with things, even when frightened; she says a couple of times "there's no going back now" when, in fact, she could quite easily go back.

It's not a good book to be a mother in. One character has a mother who is alive and in good health; everyone else's mother is either tragically dead (there are three of these, with different causes of death: Nazi concentration camp, chronic illness, and road accident) or, in one case, suffering from dementia. Fathers get a slightly more varied set of fates: dead in a road accident, dead in a Nazi concentration camp, dead of old age, alive and money-grubbingly villainous, or alive and supportive but elsewhere. The echoes of WW II do give it some emotional heft that was badly needed.

There is a supernatural element, or rather two: a ghost, and a magical substance that brings back happy memories. (There's some attempt at intertextuality with Proust with that second one; the hero, who speaks fluent French, for some reason carries what appears to be an English translation of Proust around with him, and lends it to the heroine.) Either or both of the supernatural elements could be removed and it would barely affect the plot, except that there would need to be some easily imaginable rewrites of a couple of motivations.

There are a few continuity glitches. For instance, the heroine wears kitten heels at one point, and then later says that the only heels she has with her are boots. She also says that she applied "all those months ago" for a job that was advertised for immediate start, which she has just started.

Overall, it's inoffensive, warmhearted, but bland and expected. If you like this kind of thing, this is certainly one. For me, while it was mildly enjoyable, it lacked any factor that I could really enthuse about, so even though there was nothing major wrong with it, I'm calling this one a three-star read that doesn't quite make it to my annual recommendation list. It was just OK. I'm probably not the target audience, though.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review.

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Review: Diary of a Pilgrimage

Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jerome's follow-up to Three Men in a Boat , the book that made his name and fortune, was another travel story, this fictionalized account of a trip to see the Oberammergau passion play - presumably in 1890, since it's performed in years ending in 0 and the book was published in 1891. It offers an Englishman's view of Germany, nearly a decade and a half before the First World War (which event, I would imagine, reduced the demand for this book and Three Men on the Bummel , the story of a cycling trip to Germany with his former companions from the boating trip). As well as the travelogue itself, it's scattered with obviously exaggerated comic incidents in which everyone, certainly including Jerome himself, looks like idiots. It's the same "dealing with frustrating but not really dangerous obstacles" comic genre that the later American writer Patrick F. McManus does so well.

For my taste, most of the comic and landscape-related set-pieces would have been improved if they were cut by ten to fifteen percent, and the occasional philosophical ones if they were cut by fifty to a hundred percent. But that's me. I did like the description of the play itself, even if it ran a little long; in an era when British law still prevented any member of the Trinity from being represented on the stage, Jerome's musings on how seeing the life of Jesus portrayed by actors touched him in ways that a book or a sermon could not were subversive as well as devout.

The narrator of this audiobook edition is excellent, and really adds to the experience. It's not just a reading of the book; it's a performance, with asides delivered in an undertone, and strong accent work for the various characters encountered on the journey.

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