The Case of Colonel Marchand - E C R Lorac

Firstly - quick warning - this book is not widely available. I utilised the British Library again to get my paws on a copy. 

It's a shame because I really enjoyed it, even though (perhaps because) there was nothing incredibly innovative or original about it.

Following on directly from A Greenwell Mystery by the same author, I was relieved to get a relatively straightforward murder mystery with a reasonably straightforward cast of characters.

First of those is Colonel Marchand, merry if maturing bachelor of old London town twixt the wars. 

Irritatingly as I read this book a little while back I can't actually remember if we ever see the Colonel alive. What I do know however is that the Colonel has invited a young lady to tea, and the servants are below stairs discussing what a nice young lady she is and how often she has visited him now, and should such a nice young lady really be seeing the Colonel, who at the age of 50 has been attractive to women all his adult life and knows it. 

All this conversation over and around a game of bridge, which passes the time until the bell is rung for the butler to take away the tea things (I admit to being a little surprised by this. I have always associated bridge with little baize card tables and cocktails or sherry up in the drawing room, not servants round a kitchen table). 

At about 6.30 though the butler (Gibbs) starts to think it odd that the bell hasn't been rung, and off he goes upstairs on his own initiative, finding the lady gone and the Colonel dead.  

Then, after some tangles where the secretary and the dead man's nephew go all gentlemanly and refuse to share the name of the Colonel's tea time companion with our old friend MacDonald of the Yard, and he points out they're doing her no favours but they still don't budge, she reads about the case in the paper and very sensibly comes forward of her own accord (making them look even sillier than they already did but, well, early 1930s, lingering Victorian chivalry, you know the drill).

It struck me at this point in the book how hard it would be to get that element right if you set a book in the era. A young woman could live independently (as this one does) travel across the globe (she's Australian) have an occupation (she's a musician) and yet there this lingering sensibility about needing to protect her in this hugely unhelpful way.  

Just as complex as what women themselves understood (or didn't understand) about their relationships with men - also illustrated rather nicely in this case because Karin (her name is Karin) has to explain to MacDonald that she had an on-off friendship with the dead man, refusing and shying away whenever he tried for anything more, but responding when he contacted her again because she really did like him and enjoyed his company and they had things like music in common. 

Again this feels very much of it's time. To a modern mind it's so obvious the Colonel was never going to get over it and be friends, and a Victorian miss would of course be chaperoned, but Karin is kind of caught in the middle of those two cultures and really rather naïve.   

As she tells it to MacDonald she only properly understood Marchand was serious when, on the afternoon of his murder, he proposed to her over the tea things, presenting her with his grandmother's pearls and an engagement ring, and becoming terribly hurt and shocked when she declined him (he being about as good at listening to what the other person is actually saying as she is, apparently, but again it makes perfect sense in it's era - he's been successful with the ladies before, is a good catch financially speaking, and perhaps doesn't get that things have changed and women who say no aren't just holding out for marriage.). 

Anyway, appalled at what she had done and not knowing how to fix it, Karin simply ran out to the hall, grabbed her things and left. 

Thus we have a motive and also a mystery. Marchand was not killed in the tea or cakes, he did not take patent medicines and yet he was poisoned. And although the jewellery boxes are still there the ring and pearls are gone... 

Anyway, really enjoyed this one. Hopefully if not republished it will be available in the public domain fairly shortly as I believe copyright should expire in 2028 in the UK and a little later elsewhere. 

The Greenwell Mystery - E C R Lorac

I would normally start a review like this with the mild disclaimer that I’m not a huge fan of thrillers, so I might be missing some of the enjoyment others would find in this book.

That said, I don’t think the issues I had with this one are going to be unique to me. Mostly, frankly, it’s a question of pace. There is so, so much talking, even for a book over 90 years old. Too many cases of men sitting down over a drink or a smoke and describing their activity in far too many words when it would be better for the author to describe the action and leave the conversation as ‘X told X what had happened and the address of the house they had finally followed him to…’

It opens promisingly. A talented young scientist (Campbell) has been working on a way to make fuel more efficient. If successful it will of course be worth a fortune.

The very night Campbell makes a breakthrough he disappears. Supposedly the owner of the business, Blakely, had rung him and invited him to his country place that evening, and all excited to show his mentor his work, Campbell packed up his papers (luckily not quite all of them) and went. 

But that invitation wasn’t from Blakely. 

Blakely believes it’s kidnapping, and calls in Scotland Yard to get MacDonald on the case, but of course all through our sleuths have to consider the possibility that it's a blind, that Campbell always meant to run off to the highest bidder as soon as his work was complete. 

There are good bits – the girlfriend fails to fall into the fairly standard trap of someone pretending to be Campbell’s friend and trying to kidnap her, and turns the tables rather nicely. Campbell’s ingenious use of a cat to get a message out. 

There's no lack of action - stake outs and break ins and a pilot who flies MacDonald across the country to stage an emergency landing on someone’s country estate (as with other earlier Loracs I have read MacDonald still has a bit of gentleman sleuth about him, and has some posh friends).

But still there is so much talking, and often in such a long winded way, that the plot just stagnates. I also felt cross that a very, very significant telephone call happened off the page, which meant that the reader didn’t know what the main sleuths knew.

That call is between MacDonald and Blakely, which leads to my other whinge. Throughout the book Blakely remains one of the main sleuths, and however much he protests he believes in Campbell’s innocence and however avuncular Lorac makes him every time he appears,  I can’t help feeling he has a vested interest and shouldn’t be involved in the investigation at all.  

Finally, as well I think I had a problem with stakes. Frankly, I didn't see enough of Campbell to feel worried about the possible kidnapping. I did feel some engagement with the brother and sister who are his girlfriend and friend, but they seemed to fade out after a bit and only came in again at the end.

As far as the industrial espionage element went I just didn’t care (I mean, so what if one rich person might end up not as rich as he expected, and another rich person might be better off?), and every time it came up in the text I had to resist the urge to skip forward.

I should add that I read this in the British Library reading rooms, as copies of the book are quite rare. It’s not one that’s been republished yet (only 3 years from falling out of copyright in the UK though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was fairly shortly) and I can only see a few reviews online.

All are more positive than mine.   

The Affair on Thor's Head - E C R Lorac

 

The Affair on Thor’s Head (1932) is the second of E C R Lorac’s books featuring Scotland Yard’s Robert MacDonald. Called out this time to the coast after a hut burns down and the original  theory – that the old man that lived there came back from drinking and had an accident with his stove - won’t fly.

Instead the charred body appears to be that of a visiting sailor come out of the past to right a wrong. We know this because he got chatting to a local doctor up on Thor's Head earlier that day when both men had stopped to admire the view (incidentally Lorac waxes as lyrical on the fineness of the man as the view, and does a lovely job of both) and told him about his pursuit of a swindler from a voyage he took 25 years or so before, and about an injury that happened to his arm on that trip. 

So when the skeleton is examined the doctor naturally recognises the injury. Hence murder and MacDonald, following up what seem like dead leads from that horrendous sea trip 25 years before; involving alcoholics, con artists, a mad lady (although she may be the same as the alcoholic, I’m a little unclear) a newly married man slowly dying but determined to see St Helens, a doctor who took the post because he thought it would be a rest (hah!), and such atrocious weather that it was believed the ship might never make port.

Just as well that it was such a memorable trip though, as otherwise it seems unlikely that MacDonald would be able to jog the memories of all the various people whose memory he has to jog to get to the bottom of things. This could be very tedious but somehow manages not to be, and while the book is currently out of print (I read it in the British Library) I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was republished in the next few years – it seems a much more polished book than the first (The Murder on the Burrows) and has a great sense of place. 

I do struggle to believe anyone wouldn’t spot the murderer by the halfway point, even with the red herrings and distractions like people wandering around at night despite having rocks heaved at their heads or being shot at. Not to mention local prejudices, liaisons, lifeguard outposts and two young students who want to try their hand at amateur detection – but MacDonald is painstaking and undistracted and I was always sure he was working on the right lines. It becomes not whodunnit but how to prove it. 

Incidentally I’m resolved not to comment again on how often Lorac or one of her characters talks about MacDonald’s Scottishness and the supposed attributes of Scots, but will quote one final paragraph on the matter and for future books (and my own amusement) content myself with a rough tally.

'You forget he's a Scot, and Scotsmen are the least foolhardy race under heaven'. Said, I believe, just before MacDonald was lowered down a cliff face late at night to look for a corpse and not long after someone bunged that rock at him. Just saying. 

The Murder on the Burrows - E C R Lorac.

I should start by saying that I don't know how available this book actually is. I apologise in advance to anyone who reads this review, fancies judging for themselves (or even just seeing MacDonald's first sally)  and then finds it impossible. It's not one of the books republished by the British Library, and doesn't seem to be available at any of the usual second-hand sources. In fact there is at least one retailer online urgently seeking it. If it does turn up I suspect it will be as gold-dust and priced accordingly.

It is available at the British Library to readers, which is how I got my grubby paws on it, but I realise that's not helpful to most people. 

That said, on with the review:

The Murder on the Burrows was Lorac's first book and as debuts go it's pretty good - it starts with two mismatched holidaymakers who've decided to go for a walk, get caught by the rain, explore a car that's parked up and find a body. Some of the phrases used by the smaller of the two (described as the 'little cockney') seem to belong to wildly different social classes, but that's a minor quibble, and as always Lorac hooks you in quickly. You want to read on. 

The story itself is middling. The main thing that struck me about our sleuth, compared to the later books I've read, is that MacDonald seems posher in this one - more of the gentleman 'tec and less of the police officer, chatting up society ladies but bored by it, complete with a manservant to look after him and an Oxbridge background (the war intervened before he completed his studies, alas!). 

Other characters are, as usual, interesting and varied - the famous pianist and her long suffering neighbours, the dead man himself, a communist who has spent time in Russia and taken a Russian name but was born plain old John or Bob or Fred something, the young lady who was sent down or removed from Oxford because of her relationship with him, and then married a much older man because she was unhappy at home - MacDonald's natural sympathy for people and their circumstances is already firmly established in this book. 

That said there were bits around AA scouts and roads that made me glaze over. Possibly it's me - I'm the same when Wimsey starts playing cricket or if there's anything in a book around railway timetables. There was a mild snob element and of course the gender politics have changed, but nothing odd for the time. If anything more liberal than you'd expect. So I'm slightly surprised it hasn't been republished - it may not be the best, but it's perfectly good, and I think there would be a market. 

A Pall for a Painter - E C R Lorac

 A Pall for a Painter (published 1936) begins with Richard Carling returning to his old art college 12 years after his father died and he had to drop out and go back to Australia to look after the ranch and support his mother and sister.

Nostalgic for the life he could have had – the smell of turpentine and modelling classes, the quiet of the quad and welcome of old friends – and sensitive to the atmosphere, it doesn’t take him long to detect an uncomfortable undercurrent to the old place.

Is it because it’s an anachronism, no longer relevant in the modern age, and its Masters frustrated by the fact? Is it the squabbling over the young and lovely Antoinette (who is being stalked by the model, amongst other things) or is it that Manette, that stately and impressive old man in charge, son of the founder, has gone distinctly odd?

Before he can figure all this out - or even sort his own feelings for Antoinette out - a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo topples over on someone’s head and the police are not satisfied that it is the accident it first appears…

 

Favourite line: “We shall find ourselves up against the dense stupidity of men who are besotted with the ‘Keep her name out of it’ complex.”

Favourite passing character: the carpenter chap who arrives to rebuild the plinth, is one of the people to find the body, and tells them the police won’t thank them for interfering with it.

 

Despite a slight disappointment over part of the solution (more me than Lorac, I suspect), this one really worked for me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see A Pall for a Painter in print again in the near future.

The Devil and the C I D - E C R Lorac

 Another E C R Lorac – and this is the point at which it occurs to me that I’m very likely going to end up reading all her books and it would have been neater, for the purpose of this blog, to begin at book one.

That said, a writer’s first book is rarely their best, and I might not have been tempted to carry on. 

The other problem is that I hadn’t even heard of Lorac before I picked up Fire in the Thatch, and later Murder by Matchlight and Bats in the Belfry, all republished in the British Library Crime Classics series. This of course is the point of the BLCCs, and the strand is so successful and vast by now that there must surely be something to suit everyone’s taste, provided they have any taste for crime at all. The trick is finding it.

In my case that has mostly been George Bellairs and E C R Lorac – so far.

Hence my seeking out the not yet published. I read The Devil and the C I D over two sittings in one of the British Library Reading Rooms (Humanities 2), ordered alongside Detective Stories from the Strand, which I haven’t finished yet but mean to blog about here when I do. The intro alone is fascinating. 

But I digress.   

The Devil and the C I D is one of the Macdonald books, and begins with our hero crawling along the embankment in a fog on Armistice Night in the late 30s. 

My first surprise was that unlike Remembrance Day, which I would have assumed it resembled greatly, Armistice Night – twenty years or thereabouts after the end of what was then known as the Great War – was apparently the excuse for a big party. Macdonald is not only contending with the fog and the rest of the traffic but crowds of revellers in fancy dress and a young woman who has lost her sense of direction completely and had her bag snatched. 

I really enjoy these unselfconscious bits of local colour. You get a great sense of how driving a car in those days did not mean being closed in a box away from pedestrians like it would now, and the disorientation where you can’t even see the edge of the kerb.

Eventually of course Macdonald gets to Scotland Yard and parks up with a sigh of relief.

Only to find next morning that during the few minutes he was out of the car assisting the young lady (delivered safely back to her aunt and never mentioned again) someone left a dead body in it, and he has unwittingly driven it all the way to the Yard to be locked in overnight. 

Sheer cheek on the behalf of the murderer? Or did they get the wrong car in the fog?

I’m going to get the obvious out of the way – characters and on occasion author use ‘the language of the time’ repeatedly. The book is an uneasy hodgepodge of conscious rejection of prejudice and repeated stereotyping along the lines of race. The Italian is hysterical. Our half-Chinese heroine Charley is inevitably described as inscrutable (code for not fainting about the place like the British one, I suppose) and it would take too long to enumerate all the rest. But there are also sensible and surprising discussions about the police between Charley and an ex-suffragette, and a nice awareness from Macdonald that he needs to guard against assuming Catholics are less reliable. 

But I'm meant to be talking about the mystery, and unfortunately I can’t do that without spoilers so PLEASE NOTE SPOILERS BELOW. 

Although not for the murderer. I’m not a monster.

 

 

 

 

SPOILERS 

My first and major beef with this book is that I dislike MacGuffins. I particularly dislike ones that turn up within a few chapters of the end and in the form of a diamond that our hysterical Italian ex opera singer once gave to a lady and now wants to buy back because he believes it confers immortality (instead she has given it to our corpse - pre-corpsehood, obviously - to fund Franco’s war in Spain). 

I also didn’t believe in the bit of paper stuck to another car in that fog, which was supposedly there to throw suspicion on the retired opera singer (because the corpse was meant to be left in his car and the killer realised his mistake). 

Firstly, unless the killer is incredibly stupid he would surely realise that’s not at all the same as leaving the dead body in the car, and would only make the police think someone (i.e. the real murderer) wanted to direct their attention that way. Otherwise, who is supposed to have left it? The owner of the car? The chauffeur? the dead man? 

On top of that, why is the note written in such an oblique way – a bit of Milton and a bar or two of Faust?  And lastly, given the fog, where was our killer that he managed to first put the body in the wrong car, then realise, write this note and pin it to the right car afterwards? Would he not have faded out the moment he knew his murder was successful?

So in summary – local colour good, characters an intriguing mix of four and one dimensional, quite a lot of humour - but mystery a no go.

SPOILERS END

 

I do still want to read more Lorac though, so in the spirit of still reading out of order the next one I intend to tackle is A Pall for a Painter, which comes before this one and was also published two years before Marsh’s Artists in Crime, with which I suspect there will be comparisons.

Brand and Lorac

 Death of Jezebel – Christianna Brand

I really, really enjoyed the background to this book – the ridiculous pageant that is being set up, part of a big exhibition (it sounds something like the ldeal Home Show crossed with a Country Fair) and Brand being very amusing about the daft kitchen gadgets for sale and the out of work actors who have never ridden a horse but are only too pleased to take the work anyway, all with a second, underlying aspect -  that all this pomp and nonsense is largely driven by the desire to get back to normal after the Second World War. 

Similarly there are the semi-humorous love affairs and entanglements, and behind that the memory of a young man who came from the then British Colony of Malaya to fight in the early days of the war, and committed suicide after he found his fiancée drunk and snuggled up with another man.  

Three people had a role in the disillusionment and suicide, but up until now the young man's friends and family have been stranded during the Japanese occupation, and even if they wanted revenge they couldn't have acted. Now, the war over, there are a number of people involved in the pageant from Malaya. People who have lost not only years of their lives and any sense of security, but at least a measure of their sanity too. The death threats start coming in. 

Unfortunately I started to find the behaviour of both suspects and potential victims quite hard to take - we have multiple confessions at one point, and at least one person who has received a death threat going for a walk very late at night because she can’t sleep, and a locked room mystery that.. was fine, as they go (I’m lukewarm on locked room mysteries). 

On the other hand (again) I also really enjoyed the relationship between Inspectors Cockrill and Charlesworth. Cockrill is down from Kent for a conference, Charlesworth is the London man. The antagonism was nicely pitched – present but not so that they let it get in the way of working together.  

 

Checkmate to Murder – E C R Lorac

This by contrast is written while the war is going on. The period detail is, again, really enjoyable. I often feel you get more info from these sprinklings through the fiction of the time than you do from the history books, which repeat a lot of already known information around evacuation or gasmasks or rationing but leave out the niceties around accepting a cup of rare lapsang souchong or the actual logistics of digging a trench on London clay or the attitudes there might be to someone who left London because they were scared, and then got bombed in their ‘safe’ country cottage.

The set up is also good. Five people are having a pleasant, if low key, evening – a casserole cooked in the small kitchen/bathroom attached to the run-down studio which is all the Manatons can get. 

Bruce and Rosanne are brother and sister, both artists - and with a war on artists are not exactly in clover.   Still there is beer, and food, and they’ve got the place reasonably warm and blacked out well enough that they won’t be fined £5. They’ve got friends - Rosanne is in the kitchen when the woman who cleans next door pops in with some herring she managed to get for them, and the guests brought the beer as well as some rations for the pot. Her brother is taking a sketch for a painting, one of those guests is posing for him, and the two others playing chess.

The evening is interrupted by a special constable who has just found the old man next door murdered, and a Canadian soldier, supposedly his nephew or great nephew, standing over the body. The special doesn’t exactly get off on the right foot with the group in the studio – even the respectable middle aged chess playing civil servant – but they undertake to watch the young man while the special goes off to call for back up.

Enter MacDonald, Lorac’s series sleuth, who, like the group in the studio, starts to smell a rat...  

Death at Dyke's Corner - E C R Lorac (for the 1940 club)

E C R Lorac has been having a moment in the sun. Quite a few of her books have been republished recently as part of the British Library Crime Classics, and one published by them for the first time (Two-Way Murder). 

Death at Dyke's Corner isn't one of those,  I read the library's copy in Humanities 2 Reading Room in St Pancras in one sitting this morning (with a break for coffee and cake), and enjoyed it. It's an excellent book for a binge read - the set up for the murder was quite ingenious, the scene setting with the pouring rain and dangerous road very well done, and I've met Lorac's series detective MacDonald in previous books and found him unflashy but agreeable. The cast of supporting characters were also mostly good, even though the occasional aside of this sort (about Braid, the chauffeur): 'Like most Irishmen he thrived on controversy' or (about MacDonald himself): 'His rather comminatory - and extremely Scottish - train of thought.' felt not only very much of it's time but also completely superfluous, because Lorac successfully builds these characters by their dialogue and the things they notice, and doesn't need to reinforce them by telling us what we should think.  

Plot-wise the murder victim, Conyers, is a successful builder of department stores, moving into towns and buying up or undercutting the small local traders until he comes out on top, and there's a rather interesting discussion between one young lady and her father (the local squire type person) where 'Daddy' is all for the old ways, and she is pointing out the lack of hygiene in the old shops, and how some of them mercilessly bully and underpay their staff, or refuse to heat the place even in miserable weather, or sell you what they think you ought to want, and not what you do. It seems Mr Conyers' business practices were not solely a force for evil.

But his business practices were not the only possible reason for someone to kill Conyers. He was an adulterer with an eye for girls more his son's age than his own, and a bully at home. Anyone's murder, MacDonald says, and he's right. Much of the book is him clearing away the dead wood, talking to people, being his sensible and almost too considerate self. 

Until, that is, the last few chapters. 

Firstly, because of the treatment of some gypsies who are clearing out because they found something. MacDonald allows White, the gamekeeper, to explicitly threaten the man with a shotgun and enter their caravan uninvited and without sufficient reason and frighten his wife. The language used makes it clear what the gamekeeper thinks of gypsies, but it's MacDonald's complacency about it that grated. It felt out of character, especially contrasted to how reasonable and gentle he is with everyone else (including actual suspects). 

He then, a bit later, does another out of character thing by breaking into a dark house by himself rather than getting help or waiting the murderer out, which I can only think was put in to up the excitement, because even with the explanation that his colleagues are busy it's madly reckless, the kind of thing a completely different detective would do. It reminded me of those Poirot episodes that end in a chase around an airport or someone waving a gun about even though that was never in the original book. 

That said, the solution is clever, and when all was explained in the last chapter there were definite moments where I realised I should have spotted what he spotted. 

Incidentally gas masks and ARPs are mentioned on page 121 and there's a similar reference towards the end, but there's otherwise little or no reference to wider contemporary events in the book. 

As always thanks to Simon and Karen for running the club. You can find lots more reviews of other 1940 books, and previous years they've done, on their blogs. 

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.

Some Short Crime Fiction Reviews

Money from Holme – Michael Innes (1964)

The premise of this book is excellent – an art critic and sometime painter turns up at the posthumous exhibition of the work of Sebastian Holme, a talented young artist killed in a revolution in Africa, and is startled to find Holme amongst those present. He is certain it is Holme – despite his having grown a beard and the fact even his estranged wife believes him dead – because of an injury to Holme’s hand inflicted by Cheel years earlier.

An injury inflicted when Sebastian Holme came to the aid of a young woman Cheel still kids himself wanted the thrill of a ‘faux rape’ despite the fact that the 'silly little girl' (Cheel's thoughts again) screamed. 

Because Cheel is, unmistakably, a nasty piece of work, and although his self-justifications are amusing up to a point, they do drift past that point more than once. For example his internal dialogue about Sebastian Holme, once he persuades Holme to tell him why he is in hiding, quickly shifts from cavalier and advantage-taking to actually sinister. 

Which wouldn't trouble me – I don't have to like the main protagonist to enjoy a book - except on top of Cheel we have the casual racism of almost everyone else who describes the events of the revolution, a more general atmosphere of sexism (which was not present in other books I've read by the same author) and the fact that the foreign proprietor of the gallery can’t open his mouth without a couple of malapropisms per sentence. 

It’s a shame because the story itself, and Cheel’s unpleasant but amusing internal dialogue, are so well done, and there's a farcical element that is genuinely funny. I didn't hate the book, but it did make me wince.

 

Dead Lion – John and Emery Bonett (1949)

Another predatory male (and critic) is the corpse in this book – Cyprian Duse, who is initially thought to be the victim of an accident when a broken sash window crashes down on him while he’s leaning out. However his nephew, who has just arrived from America to stay with him, first picks up a suspicious phone call and then discovers someone has tried to get into Cyprian’s desk. Not just that, but he knows his uncle's reputation as a critic, and finds himself considering all the reasons he might be unpopular.

Then when he does get into the desk there are six records Duse has had made of women who loved him, and which at least two of the women are desperate to get back..

I’m afraid I didn’t quite believe in those records – one or two women might be daft and besotted enough to do such a thing, but six, I felt, was pushing it. That and the nephew falling in love with one of the recordings was the weakest part of the whole book.  Also what made him so sure the records were anything to do with anything?

It picked up again though, despite a few unlikely coincidences, and there’s an unexpected and rather satisfying end.

 

Murder by Matchlight – E C R Lorac – (1945)

Still in the world of rationing (our young hero above comments at one point that being from the States he hadn’t realised that being given some chocolate biscuits for an evening party practically amounted to a declaration of love). This time earlier on (half a pint of milk between two, as one woman says, and lucky if you get that. At another point the inspector and someone he was putting out incendiaries with drink cold leftover tea before leaving a building that might be about to collapse).

The story begins with a young man, sitting in Regents Park in the dark (the railings having been removed and the park therefore open at night) where he witnesses a murder on the bridge just as the victim has struck a match to light a cigarette. 

But no footsteps were heard by him or by a man hiding beneath the bridge, and while Inspector Macdonald is poking around he finds out the dead man isn’t who he was pretending to be.

Again, he’s not a character you can grieve over much. I should note some mild anti-Irish prejudice here, not because the dead man was involved in trouble in Ireland (Macdonald finds out that he also tried very hard to join up, despite not being fit, and ties the two things together as ‘wanting a scrap’ and therefore, from the point of view of a country at war, admirable) but the Irish waster who has charm and almost no morals is a cliché – there is another, living off his wife and worse in Dead Lion in fact.

Under the circumstances, with bombs dropping and sons in the armed forces, people might be excused for politely asking why the police care about the death of this one, fairly useless, individual, and in fact the question is asked even by the police themselves. All the time they investigate there are flattened streets and people with horrible injuries and a sense that although they want to get to the bottom of it, even Macdonald knows that there are bigger things than their investigation, and the living are more important than the dead. 

I was certainly more concerned that my favourite people would all survive than who actually dunnit, but that’s a tribute to the author’s ability to take a snapshot of the time, not a criticism of the mystery. (Also E C R Lorac wrote Fire in the Thatch and she killed off my favourite character early on, so I had reason to be suspicious).