There May Be Danger (Jerrold)

Is there?

The House of Godwinsson (Punshon)

Gangsters and the rightful heir to the throne in a fast-paced case for Bobby Owen.

The Case of the Fighting Soldier (Bush)

By Christopher Bush First published: Cassell, 1942 The third of Bush’s wartime detective stories, following TCOT Murdered Major (1941) and Kidnapped Colonel (1942). This one is set in a Home Guard training school. The ‘Fighting Soldier’ is Captain Mortar, a swaggering Pistol of a man, broad shouldered and bull necked. Although Travers likes him, the …

Murder in the Maze (J.J. Connington)

A double murder and the début of Sir Clinton Driffield.

Death in the Tunnel (Miles Burton)

By Miles Burton First published: UK, Collins, 1947 Published in the US as Dark is the Tunnel, Doubleday 1936 Miles Burton, New Statesman critic Ralph Partridge observed, was a gentleman who knew all about mass production technique. Death in the Tunnel was the first of three books Major Street published under the Burton byline in 1936, …

Largely February

I made one of my occasional assaults on The Lord of the Rings, a book that both impresses and baffles me. Tolkien’s imagination was vast and deep; few can match his achievement of creating a world for a language. But reading it can be as much of a trudge as Frodo’s epic journey to Mount …

Wot I reeded in Janissary

Death in a Deck Chair and Peril Under the Palms (K.K. Beck, 1984 and 1989): Bright Young Thing Iris Cooper solves murders on a Transatlantic liner and on Hawaii. Light, frothy, fun. Deck Chair is the better of the two, although as Tomcat points out, it’s really The Secret of Chimneys at sea: deposed kings, …

H.R.F. Keating: The crime novel as fable

Based on Masters thesis, University of Sydney, 2010 The Puzzle Doctor was unamused by Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker. "Is there a great Inspector Ghote book that I must read?" he wondered. Probably, but not if he expects a detective story... Keating, a gentle, whimsical writer, was less concerned with plot and detection than with …

Greetings, puny humans, from the space year 2020

Happy New Year, Terrans and other sentient lifeforms! And welcome to the future! I’m tired; I’ve just flown by jetpack from Mars Colony Five to my parents’ habidome halfway down the Mariana Trench. I’m telepathically dictating this with my cerebral augs while enjoying a revitalizing course of electro-stimulation. In the next room, I can hear …

Merry Dies Natalis Solis Invicti!