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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