Reading in May - Short Crime Fiction Reviews Part 2

The House of Green Turf – Ellis Peters

I’m surprised I hadn’t read this one. I thought I’d read all the George Felse mysteries back in the early 90s.  Cadfael was on the TV and I'm fairly sure Peters' other books were republished on the resurgence of popularity that created, and I enjoyed Felse and Bunty and even their son Dominic and his girlfriend with the unfortunate nickname of Tossa.

I’m also not sure why this didn’t make my ‘books I enjoyed this year’ list. It was quite fun and the set up was certainly interesting. A famous singer is in a car crash and wakes up convinced she’s killed someone – if not in the crash then somewhere in the past.

But Peters has an undercurrent of something I can't always quite believe in. I wouldn’t call it magical thinking but it's in that realm. An semi-telepathy or sympathetic communication between strangers and events that sometimes works for me and sometimes doesn’t, snapping my suspension of belief so violently I’m thrown right out. 

Also, if I was with someone bleeding to death and a collapsing enemy were trying to shoot me I definitely, definitely wouldn’t stand and face them down. Try and tackle them possibly, keep pressure on the injured party's wound and hope the enemy collapses before they have a chance to kill us both, also possibly. Freeze with terror and be useless perhaps. Stand and face them down, no. 

Service of All the Dead  – Colin Dexter

This was far more prosaic, always assuming that the people involved are absolute idiots. By the end you can almost hear Morse wondering What the Bloody Hell These Clowns Were Thinking. I never watched much Morse but he's definitely more active in this 70s book than he was the few times I caught the programme. Morse, like Wexford, can be a bit of an berk (it's 79, and the gender politics are fairly standard for the time), but his main strength here is his determination to ferret about until he has an answer. Not a brilliant flash of insight detective, but not a plodder either. Also he gets a love interest, in a low-key 'blink and you'd miss that they were attracted' sort of way. Very 70s. 

The Sailors' Rendezvous - Georges Simenon

Maigret is always understated, even when he gets cross. Even when he decides to stay up all night on a moored board reaching for some kind of flash of intuition or atmospheric revelation. I’ve read three Maigrets and feel I could do with more padding in all of them. That’s a personal preference rather than a fault with the books, though.

Thrones, Dominions – Dorothy L Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh

I was surprisingly impressed with this. usually books finished by other authors leave me a bit cold and certainly the one written entirely by Jill Paton Walsh (set after the Second World War) didn't convince me (review here).

This though, which was apparently a continuation of a book Sayers began and never finished, seemed seamless.