Capital Crimes: London Mysteries

Capital Crimes: London Mysteries
by Martin Edwards
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780712357494
Publication Date: March 12, 2015
Pages: 319
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: The British Library

Capital Crimes is an eclectic collection of London-based crime stories, blending the familiar with the unexpected in a way that reflects the personality of the city. Alongside classics by Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley and Thomas Burke are excellent and unusual stories by authors who are far less well known.

The stories give a flavour of how writers have tackled crime in London over the span of more than half a century. Their contributions range from an early serial-killer thriller set on the London Underground and horrific vignettes to cerebral whodunits. What they have in common is an atmospheric London setting, and enduring value as entertainment. Each story is introduced by the editor, Martin Edwards, who sheds light on the authors' lives and the background to their writing.

I’ve had this anthology on my shelves for a few years, always waiting. Well, this year I needed to read a mystery set in London for 2020 Halloween Bingo and I finally remembered I had this wonderful stash of stories all in one spot.

For this year’s bingo, I chose – of course – Conan Doyle’s The Case of Lady Sannox. This is not a Sherlock Holmes story, in spite of the title, and it’s closer to horror than mystery. It’s also classic Conan Doyle style. As such, I guessed the twist at one point, when I read a specific sentence that reminded me of Holmes:

View Spoiler »

Don’t ask me why, but with that sentence I knew how the story would end. And I was right, and it was horrifying. Darkest London, indeed.

2 more short stories from The Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

The Locked-Room Mysteries
by Otto Penzler
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9780307743961
Publication Date: October 28, 2014
Pages: 941
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Vintage Crime / Black Lizard

In this definitive collection, Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler selects a multifarious mix from across the entire history of the locked room story, which should form the cornerstone of any crime reader's library.

Virtually all of the great writers of detective fiction have produced masterpieces in this genre, including Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, G.K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr, Dashiell Hammett, Ngaio Marsh and Stephen King.

The purest kind of detective story involves a crime solved by observation and deduction, rather than luck, coincidence or confession. The supreme form of detection involves the explanation of an impossible crime, whether the sort of vanishing act that would make Houdini proud, a murder that leaves no visible trace, or the most unlikely villain imaginable.

The Black Lizard Big book of Locked-Room Mysteries claims, on its cover, to be “The most complete collection of impossible-crime stories ever assembled.” Whether this is true or not, clocking in at 939 pages of small, two-column print, it’s definitely a monster and one I’ve been chipping away at slowly for years. For this year’s Halloween Bingo, I needed Locked Room mysteries, so I turned to my Big Book and chose two from the same author: The Wrong Problem by John Dickson Carr, and Blind Man’s Hood by the same author writing as Carter Dickson. I’ve read two of this author’s full length novels so far, one as Dickson Carr (The Mad Hatter Mystery) and one as Carter Dickson (The Skeleton in the Clock), both of which I enjoyed. The short stories though, were a mixed bag:

The first, The Wrong Problem, was frankly, weird. I gave it 4 stars for the sheer ingeniousness of the murder method but the rest seemed pointless. To mention anything about the story, I think, would be to spoil it. It honestly doesn’t deserve 4 stars but that murder method was diabolical.

The second, Blind Man’s Hood, made up for the first in spades. This one turned out to be a perfect – absolutely perfect – short story for Halloween. Yes, it takes place at Christmas, but ignore that, it’s irrelevant. So. damn. creepy. I read it before I went to bed last night and when I realised what I was reading, I knew two things: no way I was going to stop, and that I’d have to stay away long enough to read something else before going to sleep. The locked room solution isn’t particularly clever or even surprising, but the rest of the story, for me, was. 5 stars.

As I mentioned at the start, I read these for the Locked Room Mystery square on my 2020 Halloween Bingo card.

Sympathy for the Devil (Mad Bean Mystery, #1)

Sympathy for the Devil
by Jerrilyn Farmer
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 9780380795963
Series: Madeline Bean #1
Publication Date: May 31, 1998
Pages: 248
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: Avon Books

In the years before I started tracking my reading in the mid 2000’s I’d read this book several times, but it’s obviously been sitting on the shelf, neglected ever since, because I have no record of a review for it.

This came out in the heyday of the cozy mystery, before big publishing corrupted the sub-genre into a cash-cow, cookie-cutter formula. Madeline Bean and her partner Wesley own a catering company that’s hip with the Hollywood crowd, throwing parties for the rich and infamous. When their latest client is killed, Wesley’s old grudge with the man makes him look like the best suspect.

Farmer write a hell of a mystery. It’s fun, it’s cozy, it’s fast-paced and the dialog is witty, intelligent and engaging. These are characters one would choose to be friends with. And the Huntley family is diabolically dysfunctional in ways that are hard to imagine unless you watch a lot of entertainment news.

The plotting was fascinating. So many promising, legitimate possibilities and so many red herrings. The climax is dramatic but well done – not overplayed – and the murderer was a surprise.

I enjoyed every book in this series, until it was cut short for reasons never explained; I’ve always been disappointed that it ended long before its time, but thankful that I have them all on my shelves to revisit.

I read this for the Halloween Square on my 2020 Halloween Bingo card.

The Falcon Always Wings Twice (Meg Langslow, #27)

The Falcon Always Wings Twice
by Donna Andrews
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781250193001
Series: Meg Langslow #27
Publication Date: October 16, 2020
Pages: 312
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

27 books and I don’t think Andrews has written a bad one yet. The only books in this series that I enjoy less than the others are the ones with settings that aren’t typically my jam.

This is one of those books. The story takes place at a Renaissance Fair being hosted by Meg’s grandmother during summer weekends at the Craft School she owns and runs. Ren Fairs aren’t my thing; I had a brief fling with them as a teen-ager, but you have to be seriously invested to get into a Ren Fair in Florida’s heat and humidity, and I enjoyed the arts and crafts more than the food and the role-playing.

Still, the Red Fair as envisaged by Andrews sounds like a pretty good time: actors that do a daily improve around a loose plot involving the heir to the throne of their fictitious kingdom of Albion. Unfortunately, their nefarious villain takes his job a little too much to heart, and is on the verge of termination for harassment when he’s found dead in the woods outside the fairgrounds, murdered.

What follows is a well-plotted mystery, as Meg and her family assist the police with their investigations while continuing to run the fair. The mystery of who murdered Terrance wasn’t obvious, but it wasn’t a shock either, though Andrews does a pretty good job with clues and misdirection.

Meg is an inspiration to me, not only as the most realistically organised character I’ve ever read, but also the most unflappable. She is so capable that just reading about her makes me feel more capable by osmosis. And her family never, ever fails to delight; the more of them that are present in a story, the more delighted I am.

I keep expecting a flop, to be honest; statistically speaking, it’s a reasonable expectation, but so far Donna Andrews’ well of imaginative stories has not drawn low, and I sincerely hope it never does. I need to be reminded – at least once a year, if not more often in these horrific times – that strong, capable, unflappable, rational men and women (especially women in Meg’s world) exist, even if only on the page.

I read this for my Cozy Mystery square for Halloween Bingo 2020.

The Turquoise Mask

The Turquoise Mask
by Phyllis A. Whitney
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9780385085144
Publication Date: January 1, 1974
Pages: 250
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday

Wow, can Whitney be verbose. Her earlier work has always been better, in my opinion, but this one was an in-between – first published in 1974. Which makes the plotting excellent, and the abuse of the expository extreme. Unfortunately the expository gauntlet must be run for many chapters before a hint of the rewarding plot can be found.

I’m undecided on whether it’s worth the effort. The plotting was very well done. I was absolutely certain I knew who the villain was right up until almost the end, when she convinced me I was wrong, that it was really …. and then she blindsided me with the solution that was just unexpected. Whitney got huge bonus points for stunning me, but I’m not sure how I actually feel about it as a legitimate ending. It works, but it feels like it shouldn’t.

The characters, and the romance, were, as is typical with both Whitney’s writing and the time she wrote in, dramatic and overly simplified. Insta-love has nothing on romantic suspense from the 70’s; and characters’ personalities are never subtle or nuanced. If you accept this as the style of its time, it’s not an insurmountable problem.

The one thing Whitney never lost, no matter how many books she wrote, was her sense of place. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anybody better at putting the reader in whatever setting she wants them, and making them feel like they were there. Here the deserts of New Mexico are the backdrop, and though I’ve never in my life seen an adobe house, I feel like I’ve lived in one the last couple of days.

I’d neither recommend it nor deter anyone from this one; the exposition is a challenge, but if that slow build isn’t a deterrent, the story is one of her more complicated and compelling ones.

I read this for the Romantic Suspense square (which is on my card is the Psych square that’s been flipped), for Halloween Bingo 2020.

Mini Book Haul

My resolve broke a few weeks ago and I went on a small ordering spree, which has been slowly trickling in here and there. Today though I got 3 books at all once, and one of them a special edition I’m excited about.

Oops. I meant to crop that. Anyway, that Pride and Prejudice is the new Chronicle Books edition, which includes the 19 letters as actually letters, hand written and folded, each inserted into a glycine envelope bound in with the text block where the letter is relevant.

The folding freaked me out a bit as they’re definitely hand folded in a complicated tucked-into-itself fashion that had me a little stressed about unfolding them without damaging anything. Once you get the hand of it, it’s easy, and they’re so well done with postmarks and scratch outs.

Now, I want to read Pride and Prejudice again. After Halloween Bingo.

Staked

Staked
by Kevin Hearne
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9780345548511
Series: Iron Druid Chronicles #8
Publication Date: January 26, 2016
Pages: 224
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Random House

When a Druid has lived for two thousand years like Atticus, he’s bound to run afoul of a few vampires. Make that legions of them. Even his former friend and legal counsel turned out to be a bloodsucking backstabber. Now the toothy troublemakers—led by power-mad pain-in-the-neck Theophilus—have become a huge problem requiring a solution. It’s time to make a stand.

As always, Atticus wouldn’t mind a little backup. But his allies have problems of their own. Ornery archdruid Owen Kennedy is having a wee bit of troll trouble: Turns out when you stiff a troll, it’s not water under the bridge. Meanwhile, Granuaile is desperate to free herself of the Norse god Loki’s mark and elude his powers of divination—a quest that will bring her face-to-face with several Slavic nightmares.

As Atticus globetrots to stop his nemesis Theophilus, the journey leads to Rome. What better place to end an immortal than the Eternal City? But poetic justice won’t come without a price: In order to defeat Theophilus, Atticus may have to lose an old friend.

A couple of things occurred to me while reading Staked: it feels like Herne doesn’t really like his main character, Atticus; at least, not judging by the amount of existential pain he dumps on him. The other is that I can see the inspiration, right down the the scatalogical humor, of the character in his new series that starts with Ink & Sigil – clearly in Owen, the arch-druid and Atticus’ mentor. Owen is quite feral and off-putting, no matter how gold and good his heart may be.

Staked is told through the rotating viewpoints of all three druids: Atticus, Granuaile and Owen, and the meandering is epic. We begin and end with the titular war with the vampires, but in between there’s a battle-seer-horse needing rescue, ecological retribution being wrought, treaties being hammered out in Asgard, greek gods getting vaporised, and all matter of other trivia. It wasn’t boring but I disliked being passed off between characters, especially when I had little use for Granuaile’s daddy issues and Owen’s feral lack of expletives that didn’t include his bollocks and backside, and those of everyone else’s.

I do enjoy Atticus’s adventures and character, and I like Oberon even more when I read him, as opposed to listening to a narrator scooby-doo his voice. I enjoy his interactions with the various deities and villains, and especially enjoy the verbal sparring between himself and Leif. It’s a detriment to the books, if not the overall story arc, that Hearne felt it necessary to take all of Atticus’ interesting friends away from him; he suffers from the lack of intellectually challenging interactions. Overall, though, it was a good enough story to keep me reading, and I enjoyed the ending well enough. If one chooses, one could end the series right here and everything save Ragnarok would be tied up neatly. At this moment, I’m content to leave the series here, but I can’t say I won’t change my mind.

I read this book for Halloween Bingo 2020, for the Dead Lands square. In spite of all the wandering about the plot did in the middle the beginning and end were chock full of vampires.

Finding Australian Birds

Finding Australian Birds: A Field Guide to Birding Locations
by Rohan Clarke, Tim Dolby
Rating: ★★★★★
Publication Date: May 15, 2014
Pages: 602
Genre: Natural Science, Reference
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing

In the category of “books likely to only appeal to the .01%”, I give you this solid gold publication. As I live in Australia for now, and I enjoy stalking its amazing birds with my camera (purely amateur hour and likely even more entertaining for the birds than it is for me), and I’m rapidly running out of ‘new-to-me’ birds in my area, I grabbed this on a whim when I saw it at my local bookstore.

It exceeded my expectations, to say the least. Broken down by state, then by region, complete with common birds, not-so-common birds, descriptions, maps and suggested road trips to bird hotspots! I fell in love with this feature, as it includes day trips, weekend trips and dedicated bird-stalking 10 day trips. It then capped itself with a cherry on top by highlighting areas that also included interesting non-birding things to do, for those unfortunate spouses such as mine, who like birds well enough, but don’t find the need to stalk them, yet still find themselves dragged along for the ride.

I wish I could say this was part of a larger, international publication series, so I could urge my other bird loving friends to find their locals edition, but it’s published by CSIRO, which stands for The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; it’s an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research, so unlikely to part of a greater publishing series. But if anyone reading this is ever in Australia and intends to add some birds to their lists, you can’t go wrong picking this book up beforehand.

Half-off Ragnarok (InCryptid, #3)

Half-Off Ragnarok
by Seanan McGuire
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9780756408114
Series: InCryptid #3
Publication Date: March 1, 2014
Pages: 356
Genre: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: DAW Books

These books always start off so slow for me, and this one felt especially so. I suppose the author might have felt as though she needed to do a bit of world building with the change of character. Whatever the case, Alex’s story dragged in spite of some cryptid action early on in the first half.

Fortunately, I liked Alex, and I was interested enough in Sarah’s recovery after book 2 to keep on. Which became more important as I failed to find anything interesting or authentic about Shelby, Alex’s romantic interest. Partly because, living in Australia, I was looking for the “Aussie-ness” of her personality, and it never appeared. In the acknowledgements, the author thanked someone for keeping her from making Shelby a cliché, which I can wholly appreciate wanting to avoid, as well as how easily it might be to fall into that trap. But I think her advisor might have over-compensated (and failed to catch that it’s the Great Ocean Road, not highway). Most Aussies aren’t Crocodile Dundee, or Steve Irwin, but they do have a unique character, and Shelby didn’t have it. Though my favorite quote of the book was:

“Pretty sure that ship has sailed,” said Shelby, who was eyeing the nearby foliage with trepidation, as if she expected it to attack at any moment. Then again, she came from Australia: she probably did expect some sort of vegetable ambush.

(Australia. The only continent designed with a difficulty rating of “ha ha fuck you no.”)

After about the first half, the story started to stand on its own legs. Shelby never really got off the ground for me, but the rest of the story coalesced into something moderately interesting. The plot was well crafted, but it just didn’t have any oomph, for me. As always though, the presence of the Aeslin mice, and in this case, Angela Baker, made up for a lot.

I have the second of Alex’s books, and I’ll read it – it takes place in Australia, and it will be interesting to see of the author writes the characters any more authentically on the second try.

I’m using this book for the Monsters square in Halloween Bingo 2020. It not only had basilisks, gorgons, and cockatrice, oh my, but one of the main secondary characters, Alex’s grandfather, is a revenant.

Down the reading hole, or what I did my first week of holidays

Remember that re-read streak I went on? The one that had nothing to do with my Halloween Bingo progress? I’ve just now come out of Patricia Briggs’ world of the Marrok; I’ve run out of books to re-read. I’ve decided, though, that I’m going to make Patricia Briggs my Author wild card in Halloween Bingo; at this point, it would be stupid not to. That means at leat one square can be filled with a book: A Grimm Tale.

Rather than do a re-read review of the 4 books I’ve re-read, I’m just going to summarise by saying they’re all good and they all stand up nicely to my original ratings and reviews. If anyone is curious about reading those original reviews, the covers below link to them.