Review: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Significantly better than the previous novel in the series ( The Murder on the Links ), and I'm not sure whether that's because of Hastings' absence or despite it.

What I mean is that Hastings was an actual impediment in Links, but here I felt Poirot was different without him, as if the Poirot-and-Hastings collaboration was itself almost a character. But Poirot finds a kind of substitute in the doctor who narrates this book, taking him with him while he investigates (like Hastings, and like the young doctors in Austin Freeman, he seems to have a lot of leisure time despite theoretically having a job), and bouncing ideas off him. Poirot remains, as always, inscrutable about his conclusions from the various clues, until the traditional gathering of the suspects for the dramatic reveal.

And it is dramatic. The twist in this particular book is famous, and I did know about it in advance, but even so, I found it hard to spot the clues. It all comes down to timing, like so many mystery stories.

The process, the incidental human stories that get revealed (as usual in this sort of cosy mystery, everyone has some sort of secret; Poirot explicitly says to a group of the suspects that he knows each of them is hiding something), and the clever solution are all at a high standard by classic mystery measures. The doctor's sister alone is worth the price of admission: the centre of the village gossip network, she's better than a newspaper at gathering, generating and disseminating rumour and speculation, which varies from highly accurate to highly inaccurate, but which she always delivers with the same level of confidence. The romance subplots are a little weak, particularly without Hastings and his susceptibility to redheads, and the police's main suspect is offstage for almost the entire novel and a near-nonentity once he does appear, but it still lands right at the top of the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: The Crimson Circle

The Crimson Circle by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rip-roaring suspense thriller in which a blackmailer, extortionist and murderer is pursued by a stolid Scotland Yard detective and a private investigator who is more the policeman's colleague than his rival.

Wealthy men are receiving notes marked with a crimson circle, telling them to pay large amounts of money or be killed. Several are killed - to encourage the others - and much blame falls on the Scotland Yard man for not preventing the deaths, or making much progress on identifying the criminal. Because it is, mainly, a single criminal, who finds out people's guilty secrets and uses a carrot-and-stick approach to get them to do key elements of the crimes, without being able to recognize each other or him thanks to strict compartmentalization. It reminds me of a classic science fiction story about what's basically a prediction of Taskrabbit, which is used to get people to do acts, innocent in themselves, that add up to criminality or resistance to authority - though here the stooges are usually fully aware that their actions are criminal or contributing to a crime. (If anyone knows the story I'm thinking of - which could be by Simak or Heinlein or someone of that era, though it might be one of the cyberpunks, maybe even Cory Doctorow - please let me know in the comments.)

Weaving through the narrative is a young woman, who seems at various times to be a thief, one of the stooges, perhaps a murderer, maybe even the Crimson Circle. A young man is in love with her despite himself, which was the aspect of the story I found weakest. Wallace's romances are generally not well motivated or well developed, and this is no exception. The young man's father is one of the early victims, and seemingly the only one whose death is really regrettable, extremely wealthy or powerful men being what they are.

The stakes are raised when the Crimson Circle threatens a dozen cabinet ministers, and the policeman, who has just been basically fired for incompetence, is kept on in order to work alongside the private detective at the latter's insistence. The final reveal is a big twist, and makes sense of something that seemed a departure from the usual Wallace approach when it first appeared. All throughout, it seemed like people knew things they shouldn't, but the twist explains a lot (not all) of this.

There's plenty of tension and drama and action along the way, and all in all, it's a strong book of its type, namely highly-coloured pulp thriller. No wonder so many of Wallace's books were filmed.

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Review: The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar

The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar by Dave Dobson
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

A fairly typical "funny" fantasy, in that it's trying much too hard to be funny and not succeeding nearly as well as it thinks it is (IMO). It alternates chapters between a warrior woman who has one of those egos so large that it bends reality around itself - at least for the owner of the ego - and her squire or, really, minder, whose job appears to be to prevent her causing bloody disasters through getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and refusing to be corrected, and also to keep her alive. This is fairly amusing, but it's just laid on much too thick (especially in the Isovar chapters), and the setting is the usual off-the-shelf sword-and-sorcery world. I stopped reading at 18%.

On the upside, it is much better edited than the other books I've read by the same author, though there are still a few issues.

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Review: Angel Esquire

Angel Esquire by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this at the recommendation of my wife, who had just listened to it on Librevox. She was right - it was amusing as well as action-packed. There are no shortage of villains; even the romantic male lead is a bit of a villain, though he despises himself for it.

The premise is one of those "wills with puzzles" that seem to have been such a popular trope for detective novelists. The former owner of a casino in Egypt has died, and left his giant fortune - or rather, the opportunity to access his giant fortune by solving a puzzle - to three people: two of his former confederates, and the daughter of a man whose ruin came about through gambling at the casino in question.

Christopher Angel, known as Angel Esquire, an odd sort of special inspector at Scotland Yard, takes an interest on behalf of the female heir, who is frankly a bit weaksauce, especially when compared with some of Wallace's intrepid heroines; she does almost nothing to influence the course of events, and is mostly there to be rescued and explained to, and to be fallen in love with by one of the former confederates of the casino owner. She is also, by a convenient coincidence that keeps the cast tight and puts her and her protectors in danger, the former secretary of a publisher who published a book that may hold the clue to the puzzle, and who gave a copy to her for no particular reason. By another convenient coincidence of the same kind, the author of the book is a close associate of the gang of ruffians who are after the puzzle solution, though that doesn't help them much, since he's suffering from dementia. The puzzle solution, in the end, is not that difficult and a bit of a let-down.

Apart from those two convenient coincidences and the weak female lead, though, it's enjoyable, funny, quirky, and full of well-described action.

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Review: The Duke of York's Steps

The Duke of York's Steps by Henry Wade
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A twisty piece of classic detective fiction.

An elderly banker with a known health condition (an aneurism that could easily burst under stress) dies of exactly this cause after being jostled by someone hurrying down the steps of the title. It's treated as something between an accident and natural causes, until his daughter raises suspicions. Why has the person who jostled him not come forward, even in response to her advertisements, to apologize for any part he might have had in the death?

With this slim suspicion to go on, Inspector Poole begins to investigate. The dead man's son looks a likely suspect: he has motive (he badly needed money, and his father was about to cut him out of his will for his latest escapade with an unsuitable young woman), and his alibi is thin and implausible. But before the mystery is wrapped up, Poole will spread his net wide and encounter more than one shocking twist.

I did guess about halfway through both the motive for the murder and who was behind it, though there were a couple more twists I didn't see coming at all. One of them I wasn't a big fan of; serious spoiler in the tags. (view spoiler)[The dead man's friend and subordinate at the bank is a German Jew, and the more senior banker stood up for him during World War I, when anyone German was suspect, and won't hear any ill said of him or tolerate any prejudice on account of his Jewishness. And yet he plays a key role in the murder of his friend. The son also says something horribly antisemitic about him. (hide spoiler)]

It's cleverly done, though, and I would definitely read another by the same author, though at the moment this is the only one on Project Gutenberg.

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Review: Room 13

Room 13 by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm starting to have more respect for Edgar Wallace. In his own time, he was seen as a prolific hack, producing highly-coloured sensational literature to thrill the undiscerning public, but they aren't just written to a formula or full of easy pulp tropes. Each one I've read so far is distinctly different, and the plots are clever and gripping. The characters, while not having a great deal of depth, are also distinct, and behave in understandable human ways.

This is particularly true here. John Gray has just got out of prison, where he was serving time for swapping out a racehorse for a "ringer". While he's been away, his beloved, Marney, has got engaged to someone else, who she and her father (a retired criminal who has raised Marney "straight" and not told her where his money came from) think is an honest man, in contrast to Gray.

This is, unfortunately, not true. Gray arrives to find her married to someone he recognizes as a notorious forger and the son of Marney's father's former partner, who went to prison for shooting a policeman on their last job together, while Marney's father got away clean. He's resentful and wants vengeance (and money; he believes his old partner hasn't given him his fair share). So he's set up this marriage as part of his vengeance plot and to give himself more leverage.

In the course of the story, it looks pretty bad for Gray a few times; his rival gets shot while he is suspiciously nearby, and more violence, kidnapping, and murder ensue. Meanwhile, the name of J.G. Reeder keeps coming up, attached to a fussy older man who is thought to be some kind of bank detective.

It's suspenseful, fast-moving and full of period criminal slang - I suspect Wallace did some research, perhaps just in the form of talking to a criminal or ex-criminal and asking them about the slang, and wanted to make full use of it. But the slang is never confusing or obscure.

Overall, a solid suspense novel, and I'll be reading more from this author.

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Review: Room 13

Room 13 by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm starting to have more respect for Edgar Wallace. In his own time, he was seen as a prolific hack, producing highly-coloured sensational literature to thrill the undiscerning public, but they aren't just written to a formula or full of easy pulp tropes. Each one I've read so far is distinctly different, and the plots are clever and gripping. The characters, while not having a great deal of depth, are also distinct, and behave in understandable human ways.

This is particularly true here. John Gray has just got out of prison, where he was serving time for swapping out a racehorse for a "ringer". While he's been away, his beloved, Marney, has got engaged to someone else, who she and her father (a retired criminal who has raised Marney "straight" and not told her where his money came from) think is an honest man, in contrast to Gray.

This is, unfortunately, not true. Gray arrives to find her married to someone he recognizes as a notorious forger and the son of Marney's father's former partner, who went to prison for shooting a policeman on their last job together, while Marney's father got away clean. He's resentful and wants vengeance (and money; he believes his old partner hasn't given him his fair share). So he's set up this marriage as part of his vengeance plot and to give himself more leverage.

In the course of the story, it looks pretty bad for Gray a few times; his rival gets shot while he is suspiciously nearby, and more violence, kidnapping, and murder ensue. Meanwhile, the name of J.G. Reeder keeps coming up, attached to a fussy older man who is thought to be some kind of bank detective.

It's suspenseful, fast-moving and full of period criminal slang - I suspect Wallace did some research, perhaps just in the form of talking to a criminal or ex-criminal and asking them about the slang, and wanted to make full use of it. But the slang is never confusing or obscure.

Overall, a solid suspense novel, and I'll be reading more from this author.

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Review: The Summer War

The Summer War by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Naomi Novik is what Neil Gaiman calls an "otter" author; unlike a dolphin, an otter won't do the same trick each time. So her stuff is sometimes very much to my taste ( Spinning Silver ), sometimes very much not (the Scholomance books), and sometimes somewhere in between (Temeraire).

Happily, this one worked very well for me, even though it's about the Fae (the word is never used, but that's clearly what the Summerlings are), and I'm wary of Fae books because... well, because there are too many of them, and some are not good.

This version of the Fae is very much like the legends. They're bound by their word, they have a completely different set of values from humans, they have a completely different sense of time and will hold a grudge for human generations and seek to wipe out an insult in all human blood, they're beautiful and mysterious and closely linked with nature. These particular ones are linked, in particular, with summer, and it's only in summer - very generously defined - that the Green Bridge from their country to the human lands exists. Which is fine when they're trading, not so great when they are invading every year that they remember that a human king insulted the sister of the Summerling prince when he married her, causing her to commit suicide. (They don't always remember. Their memory is different from that of humans too.)

This war went on for a hundred years, and was ended by the protagonist's father before she was born (to an illegitimate daughter of the king, whose hand he obtained as a reward for winning the war through the same cunning that got him a fox as his emblem).

The protagonist, Celia, is, therefore, a descendant of a Sorceress Queen from long before, and manifests sorcery herself for the first time in many generations - accidentally cursing her brother in the process. She then sets about trying to fix her mistake, with the help of their disregarded middle brother, and ends up caught in the continuing aftermath of the original grievance of the summerling prince and also the complications ensuing from the way the war was ended.

Celia makes an excellent protagonist. She's intelligent, level-headed and creative, like her father. She's also good-hearted, and wants the best outcome for everyone, if she can just figure out how to get it.

Along the way she discovers, by allying with the middle brother, that you can choose to love someone, and that doing so is generally the best move. There's some wonderful family-dynamics stuff in general: father/son misunderstandings, and siblings not understanding each other either, admiring or being jealous of or ignoring each other, and eventually communicating.

It's beautifully written, with evocative descriptions of a well-imagined summer court, but not to the point of being overwritten or showing off. The plot is well conceived; it drew me along because I wanted to know, and couldn't imagine, how Celia (and her brothers) could possibly manage to bring about a good outcome for all concerned.

I've marked it as YA, mainly because Celia is 12 at the start of the book and 15 by the end, but it's like T. Kingfisher's young protagonists in that it's fully enjoyable by an adult reader. In fact, it's very like T. Kingfisher in general.

Good stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was nominated for a few awards. It has enough depth and originality, too, that I'm putting it in the Gold tier of my annual best books list.

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Review: Kate Plus Ten

Kate Plus Ten by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kate is a young woman (in her late teens) who has been raised by her uncle, a career criminal, and absorbed his attitude to law and order. She doesn't commit crimes herself, but she's brilliant at planning them in exhaustive detail for other people to commit.

Mike is a mass of contradictions. He's heir to a title of nobility (early on, we're told the current holder is his sickly cousin, but later it changes to his brother without notice), but he also holds radical economic views - not just fashionable Socialism but something more complicated. Yet this doesn't prevent him from living, in part, off inherited wealth and keeping a manservant and a cook. It also doesn't prevent him from becoming a police inspector, first through the Special Branch (more or less the UK equivalent of the US Secret Service; they protect politicians and investigate threats to the state), and then transferring to the CID for reasons that are brushed past quickly.

Together, Kate and Mike fight about crime. He knows she's planning something. She knows he knows. He tries to convince her to give up crime; she counters that her only alternative is to be severely underpaid in some soul-deadening job and regularly hit on by her male employers. No thanks!

Kate isn't the only young woman in the book (though I don't remember the two of them having a full conversation about anything). There's also Lady Moya, daughter of one of the marks for Kate's latest heist. Mike once asked her to marry him, but their views on life were incompatible. She gets engaged to one of her father's business associates, but then she meets a young artist... This subplot isn't at all closely related to the main plot, but Moya serves as a thematic counterpart or foil to Kate. Both of them are "New Women," starting to make their own decisions in life about money and romance and the relative value of the two.

It's quite a short book to have two plots, even though the Moya subplot isn't that complicated, and yet the author does manage to raise some philosophical questions and give his characters inner as well as outer conflicts. In his lifetime, Wallace was seen as a prolific hack, but this is decent work which stands up well against a lot of today's authors. The heist is clever, the inspector's investigation intelligent and courageous, and we get crime, romance, philosophy worked out to some degree in practice, action and suspense in the package.

A weakness for me was that the resolution involved a bit of fortunate coincidence (fortunate, at least, from the point of view of the protagonists, whose decisions don't bring it about and who are, therefore, not to blame for the negative aspects of it, and who are put in a much better situation as a result). But it's not too implausible, at least. The text could do with more commas in places, but it isn't too bad. Overall, a solid effort.

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Review: The Elysium Heist

The Elysium Heist by Y.M. Resnik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disaster lesbians* attempt a casino heist in space; it gets distinctly M-rated between a couple of them, and all the problems with the fairly simple heist are because the characters have personal issues. Also, the heist ends up not making a lick of sense. But the journey is reasonably entertaining.

*Technically, one lesbian, two bisexuals, one pansexual and an asexual, all women within a couple of years either way of 20 years old. They are:

- Kiyo, a brittle heiress to a jewellery fortune, who's being extorted by Shaul, the villain and mark, over a sex tape (think Paris Hilton, but if the boyfriend who secretly recorded the tape died on screen through an interaction between a drug he was on and her body paint). She is the client and funder.
- Finley, a recovering alcoholic (recovering thanks to Kiyo) and professional gambler. In mutual thought-to-be-unrequited longing with Kiyo, who is understandably gun-shy when it comes to sex since her previous experience.
- Psalome, a Dazzler (casino employee). She's theoretically available for clients to have sex with, as well as to have her deal for them and provide various other forms of entertainment, but in practice she doesn't have sex with them because she wants to reserve that for someone she cares about, and the Casino is very strict about consent (and yet it's often implied or stated that she's very skilled at sex, even though she's had, it emerges, only one previous partner and isn't that old). She's working in the casino to pay off a huge debt left by her father. It's never made clear why she feels she has to do this.
- Psylina, Psalome's sister. A hacker, asexual but not aromantic, and in a relationship with the casino's AI, who she refers to as her "joyfriend". She's been trying, unsuccessfully, to get around the AI's programming to allow it to forgive her sister's debt. The AI has multiple bodies which are often referred to as clones, but are actually androids, to fulfil the role of casino security.
- Ilaria, Shaul's wants-to-be-ex-wife. They come from a strict Jewish planet where only men can grant divorces, and he won't, even though he doesn't care about her at all; it's part of his controlling personality. (Shaul, the only significant male character, is not only an unmixedly vile human being but also not very smart.) Kiyo has helped her fake her death, both so that she can escape and also so that she can help them get Kiyo's heirloom earrings back from Shaul, since they would validate the sex tape as not a deepfake; this is the heist. Ilaria is in mutual thought-to-be-unrequited longing with Psalome, whose exact type she coincidentally is - which is fortunate for getting Psalome to sign on to be part of the heist, though she might well have done it just for the promise of Kiyo paying off her remaining debt.

A lot of the book is more about the romantic angst and the characters working through their considerable damage than it is about the heist, so if you're not up for that, this isn't your book. The heist itself is relatively straightforward: manipulate a poker tournament in which the stakes put up are jewellery, and in which Shaul will put up the McGuffin earrings. The dealer wears all the stakes during the game, and Psalome is the dealer in the final. Then they just have to swap the earrings out somehow. (The actual heist turns out to be more complicated than this, of course.)

Their plan for doing this earring swap is far from clear for most of the book, and then when it comes to it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. (view spoiler)[Instead of the stake jewellery going into a secure safe as would be the case in any normal casino, Psalome is simply allowed to take the pieces with her when she returns to her room. She doesn't do the switch in her room, which is explicitly not surveilled by the Casino, because "the Casino would find out" (how?). What she does instead is to swap them in the corridor instead, in the presence of multiple Casino androids, in a set of circumstances which are specifically being recorded - it's a key plot point that a recording is being made. Shaul doesn't notice, because he's distracted by her being naked at the time, though it seems unlikely that even someone as stupid and lustful as him wouldn't notice her switching earrings. But the Casino isn't a man, and wouldn't be distracted - yet apparently doesn't notice either. I found it completely implausible. (hide spoiler)]

Most, though certainly not all, of the commas are in the right place, but the vast majority of the apostrophes are not, and if I had a bingo card with every error you can commit with an apostrophe, it would have been mostly full by the end of the book. Some idioms are fumbled, some words are confused with other similar words, and there's at least one typo that should have been caught by spellcheck. I've seen far worse; the issues aren't constant, and, as always, I give the disclaimer that I saw a pre-publication version which may not represent the final text.

More significant for me were the issues of plausibility. I've already mentioned the biggest one in spoiler tags above, but it's also implausibly easy to avoid security cameras in the space casino. The casino AI doesn't twig to things it really should have twigged to. Fire in a space station is said at one point to be unthinkable, but there's plenty of smoking going on, and the Dazzlers sometimes set cocktails on fire, and in general fire seems to be a lot more thinkable than it in fact should be. And (view spoiler)[as part of the conclusion where the supposed plan was not the actual plan, Finley is arrested, in order (by a hack swapping the identity of two spaceships, I think) to get her into Shaul's ship to take his stuff, even though it's been established that he's moved it out of his ship into a secure area that couldn't be broken into and in which you definitely would not confine a prisoner unsupervised(view spoiler)[.

It's lacking in polish, in short; needs a more knowledgeable development editor, a continuity editor, and a more careful copy editor who's good with apostrophes and idioms. But it shows potential, and even though the heist of the title was overshadowed by the characters' personal and interpersonal issues and ended up full of plot holes, I found it an enjoyable read on the whole. It's good enough, just barely, to make my 2025 recommendation list, though it's right at the bottom. (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

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Review: The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For a book described as one of the 100 best thriller novels and "brimming with heartstopping action" (blurb on the version I read), this has a very slow burn for a very long time, about two-thirds of its total word count.

Not that it isn't good. In place of that long-delayed heartstopping action we get a good deal of character development, rare in the thriller/suspense genre, of our two central characters: the narrator, Carruthers, a junior Foreign Office clerk, and his old university acquaintance Davies. Davies invites Carruthers via letter to join him on his (very small and uncomfortable, as it turns out) yacht in the Baltic just when Carruthers is fed up with having to work - at something quite unimportant - while everyone else he knows is off at country-house parties. He finishes his work and, on a whim, joins Davies, who eventually confides in him that he thinks a man he's met is English, not German as he presents himself, and tried to kill Davies by leading him into a dangerous area in a storm. Davies also believes that there's something going on in terms of preparations for war (this is in 1903) in the shallow harbours and channels between the East Frisian islands and the German coast, and that as patriotic Englishmen they should try to find out more. He wanted Carruthers with him in part because Carruthers speaks good German.

It's interesting to me that, before World War I, a good many English people seem to have liked and admired the Germans and even the German empire. Read, for example, Three Men on the Bummel or Diary of a Pilgrimage , both by Jerome K. Jerome. Of course, thinking that Germany was good didn't stop them thinking that Britain was better, and that's the case for Davies, who admires the Kaiser but is also keen to spy on Germany if that protects his own country.

For a long time, there's no real sense of danger. Yes, they're in a small boat in October in a region where running aground and bad weather are basically daily occurrences, but the boat is very sound (it's a converted lifeboat), Davies is an extremely competent sailor, and he keeps downplaying any danger as part of his characterization. What there mainly is is a sense of discomfort. The boat is small, cramped, damp, impossible to keep clean, and full of fumes from its petroleum-fueled stove, on which the pair cook bad rations. The whole trip is based on one the author had made about five years before the book came out with his brother and another man, which gives a deeply authentic feel to the incidental details of both the experience of sailing and also of the location.

The relationship between the two men also feels real. They weren't close friends before the trip, though they liked each other well enough, but as the story progresses they get to understand each other better and appreciate each other's strengths, with occasional brief arguments. Carruthers lets go of his annoyance at the discomforts of the trip a lot more easily than I would have, even at his age, but it's believable as a dawning of self-insight and not taking himself so seriously. The two become comrades by working towards a common goal, facing challenges together. It's a classic early-20th-century-Englishmen's friendship, though in many ways it's just a classic men's friendship, where you respect each other and get on with a common task with a minimum of drama (especially since they are very English, and drama, or even direct acknowledgement of emotions, would be not quite the thing).

At length, we do get some genuinely suspenseful narrative. First, taking advantage of Davies' uncanny ability to navigate the shoals using soundings, they sneak through a heavy fog in a rowing boat for a distance of about 12 miles so that Carruthers can spy on a meeting between their suspects in the hope of discovering what's going on. They get some more information, but a lot of it is overheard words without clear context, and they have to put in more work - and Carruthers has to do a daring solo mission, in disguise - to figure out what the Germans' plan actually is.

At this point, the book winds up in a hurry. It could, I felt, have lingered a little more over the fate of the characters, rather than just concluding with a summary by the "editor" (Childers, claiming to be working from Carruthers' and Davies' accounts) of the political and military upshot. After all, the first two-thirds of the book is us coming to care about the characters.

Still, it's a strong piece of work, with lots of layers of character and setting carefully built up to give a richer picture than the usual superficial suspense novel, and I recommend it.

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