Yes. More Short Crime Fiction Reviews

Amongst Our Weapons - Ben Aaronovitch

It's probably not an indication of how good or bad this book is that I've forgotten most of it in the month or so since I've read it. The problem with this series is I have favourites - Broken Homes, False Value - and the rest suffer in consequence. 

It starts with a death in the silver vaults in London, a missing item - but of course it's not as simple as murder and theft. Electronics are fried. There's a ring that people act weird around and don't want to talk about (cue LotR joke), and it soon becomes obvious there's a few of these things knocking around, and something that's looking for them. 

Then there's another part where Peter goes up North with Seawoll and his solution to the problem they're there for really did strike me as a sign of him maturing and coming into his power, and that their professional relationship has also moved on as a consequence - but I kind of felt too many plotlines were running at the same time - not helped by the fact that the whole theft business involved Lesley May, and I can't help sympathising with Lesley. Not just because 

(spoilers for the previous books)

of her injuries but because she starts out in Rivers of London as an old-fashioned cop, a thief-taker, and ends up working with the demi-monde, which is more like a complex web of arrangements and favours, an interlocking series of cogs that the folly adds a pennyweight of pressure or a little oil to every so often to keep them working together nicely. 

Work that suits Peter – he’s a community policeman, there to serve the people and keep the peace, but it becomes obvious in Broken Homes, when a juvenile river goddess takes revenge by killing two men, that the fact there's nothing she or Peter can do, really does not sit well with Lesley.  

 

The Body in the Dumb River - George Bellairs

This is a police procedural and another of the British Library Classics, which I mostly pick up in libraries, which adds a nice serendipity to my reading. The more I pick up the more the lie is given to the idea that detective fiction pre 1970s was all country houses and whatnot. Bellairs does a wonderful tatty townscape, failed enterprise and failed marriage and families who don’t really like each other but don’t have anyone else. I don't think you could work out what happened from the clues, but it's not that sort of book. 

The Lost Gallows - John Dickson Carr

Another Bencolin, and I again it didn't quite work for me (and yet I do keep reading these, so there must be some reason). I suspect the problem I have isn't Bencolin himself, it’s Jeff Marle. There is of course a long and honourable tradition of detective sidekicks who are idiots, but it doesn’t help when Carr is trying to create atmosphere and I’m left wondering if these places are really that scary or if Jeff is just easily scared (Gee Jeff, if a bit of fog scares you why’d’ya ever come to yurrup).

Maybe he likes being scared – and maybe that should be further explored. In the meantime The Lost Gallows is Bencolin in London. Fog, dead chauffeurs, shadows of gallows cast on walls, a mummy case, late nights and gentlemen's clubs and dark secrets. You know the drill. 

But the short story at the end was a little masterpiece, and made me wonder if the problem is that I'm not invested in the characters as readers at the time would be from reading all the short stories - because if I had been one aspect of the main story would have much more impact. 

The Two-Way Murder - E C R Lorac

Lorac also wrote Fire in the Thatch, Murder by Matchlight and Bats in the Belfry. I've enjoyed all of them although Murder by Matchlight with it's London setting in the blackout remains my favourite. 

The Two Way Murder was unpublished in Lorac's lifetime and the introduction (as always with the British Library Classics written by that staunch advocate of Golden Age crime Martin Edwards) speculates on why. 

Well, to begin with I felt it could have done with a bit more editing to make it perfect, and a bit more fleshing out of some of the male characters to make them more distinct - but these are quibbles. More seriously I felt the character of the heavy-handed Dad was a smidge inconsistent - and the way others react to him strangely different at the start and end of the book as well. 

Most strikingly there's a servant looking to leave his employment, and then at another point much further on thinking about marrying him, without any evidence anywhere in the book of attachment or attraction, which raises the obvious question of why. So she can go on doing unpaid what she's currently paid for and it's even harder to leave if he bullies her? 

I couldn't help thinking these points might have been more developed, some bits rewritten, if the author had meant it for publication. 

Purely as a mystery though, and for the wonderfully practical minded female character who is friend of the delicate and slightly drippy daughter of the bully, it worked fine, and the solution is so obvious you'll kick yourself. I worked it out the same time or possibly slightly after the police did, and it was quite nice to see them show the amateur sleuth type character where he'd gone wrong for a change. 

Rules for Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson

Do not read this book if you don’t want to be spoilered for a number of others. Amongst them The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie, Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Some are skilfully done and the spoilers may not stick – but there are some real giveaways in here. On the other hand if you don’t mind, or you’ve read the books already, this is a bit of a gem for a fan of crime fiction, because the references add to the game.

It’s first person - Malcolm Kershaw is the part owner and manager of a bookshop in Boston which specialises in crime fiction. They have the cat, the blog, the signing events, the regulars, the other owner who’s a hands-off thriller writer, they have the snow and of course they have the books. It’s a cosy existence.

But ten years ago, just when they were starting up, Malcolm wrote a blog post about perfect murders in fiction. And now an FBI agent arrives in the shop with a theory. There have been a number of deaths that seem to fit too well with that checklist. She thinks they have a serial killer on their hands. 

Malcolm is sceptical at first, the evidence seems thin - but then it turns out he knows one of the victims and is keeping things back himself and the whole thing starts to seem more plausible. 

There’s something very midwinter about this book. It’s not just the descriptions of the weather, although that's a big part of it - sometimes the shop doesn't open or there's only one customer, sometimes it's safer to walk than to drive - but it's also the images of being on the outside looking in, the feeling of starting a snowball rolling and ending up with an avalanche.