For this week’s pick I’m reporting back in with some good news: the new Vinyl Detective is pretty good.
The set up is this: the granddaughter of an Italian film music composer is trying to reissue his music. But because he was suspected of carrying out a murder, some of his masters were destroyed and records themselves are somewhat hard to find. So she enlists the Vinyl Detective to try and track down the rarest of them all for her – the one for the movie where the murder happened. Oh and if he can clear her grandfathers name that would be great. But trying to stop her are the grandchildren of the murder victim…
You may remember that I was a little trepidatious about this one, because I didn’t love the last book in the series. But this was a really good read. It’s got a good mystery, a real sense of the musical genre it’s tackling and lots of food. Plus the extended gang is very much in evidence if you have read the other books in the series. Plus as a bonus for me, there’s lots of action in and around Barnes and Richmond, which are both places that I have stayed in a fair bit in my efforts to avoid the long commute back and forth to London at various points.
I’m going to say this will work best if you’ve read at least some of the others in the series, but it’s also an excuse to post the shot of them all here and to comment on the fact that this book’s cover animal is a dog. You’re welcome. I’ve already seen this in the shops so in should be relatively easy to get hold of in paperback as well as in all the usual digital formats.
Happy Tuesday everyone. I’m deeply confused about what day of the week it is and messing with my brain as I keep panicking that I’m forgetting to do things/should be somewhere that I’m not. Why is my brain like this? Anyway – to this week’s pick which sees me back with a British Library Crime Classic.
In Tea on Sunday, Alberta Mansbridge has invited an assortment of guests over for tea – among them her nephew, a friend she had fallen out with, her accountant, her doctor, an ex-prisoner she has been trying to rehabilitate and an Italian architect she has been sponsoring. But when they arrive they find that she has been murdered. The house is locked, and so her murderer must have been someone who she would have let into the flat. Our detective charged with working out who is responsible is Inspector Corby who discovers that there are plenty of options for who might have wanted the wealthy, elderly lady out of the way.
This written in 1973 but feels like it’s from an earlier period – except for the fact that some of the guests are of decidedly more modern occupations than you would have found in some of those books, or at least more explicit about what it is they do than you would have found in many of those mysteries. There have been a few patchy novels among my recent BLCC reading – but this is definitely a good one. Lettice Cooper was a prolific author, but not normally of mystery novels but I really liked her writing style so I shall look out for more from her. One of her other novels has been published by Persephone so that may be the easiest one for me to lay my hands on, should I ever get the current state of the pile under control.
Anyway, this is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and I’ve seen it in paperback in the shops too as it’s a recent release.
So I said yesterday that I had plans for some of the other books that I read last week – and one of them inspired this post. So here I am delivering on my promise that you’d hear more about some of last week’s reading and not just the BotW! This post is about mystery books that feature real people as the detectives.
So lets start with the book that inspired this: The Mystery at Rake Hall by Maureen Paton. This new mystery novel came out earlier this month (I got my copy via NetGalley) and is set in post-war Oxford and features C S Lewis – known as Jack – getting drawn into a mystery after one of his brightest pupils stops coming to her tutorials. Susan it turns out is at Rake Hall, a seemingly respectable hostel for unmarried mothers. But there’s more to it than meets the eye and along with Lucy, one of Susan’s friends and the daughter of a college servant, Jack starts to investigate. I don’t know a lot about the real C S Lewis, but this is a good mystery in a great setting. I love Gaudy Night, and that world of scouts and bulldogs is very much still in evidence here a decade or more after Sayers’ novel – and Sayers herself makes an appearance here too.
From one golden age author to another – and Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey series. I’ve written about these before, but they’re probably the most well known of the fictionalised real person solves crimes books. Because of the circles that Tey moved in, this also features people like Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne Du Maurier in the stories as Upson weaves the mysteries around the real events of Tey’s life. There are eleven books in the series, and I don’t remember feeling like it was all wrapped up when I finished Shot With Crimson – but that came out in 2023 and there hasn’t been another yet. And although Upson has a new book listed on Amazon, it seems to be a standalone Christmas mystery set in 1943 (which I will definitely be looking out for) rather than another Tey novel but details are sketchy so we will see. Margery Allingham makes an appearance in one of the Upson novels – and I’m pretty sure there’s a mystery series featuring Agatha Christie doing the detecting as well, so only Ngaio Marsh to go to complete the set of Queens of Crime!
It’s been a few years since I read them, but there is also Gyles Brandreth’s series of Oscar Wilde murder mysteries which also feature Arthur Conan Doyle and Wordsworth’s great grandson Robert Sherard. There are seven in this series, and I’ve read the first three and book five (I used to get them from the library, but my local library closed down for: reasons and I’ve not been a library regular since) but they’re clever mysteries with a dash of wit – although obviously you are heading towards Wilde’s eventual imprisonment (which is part of book six) and some of the foreshadowing of that can be a bit… clunky. But if you see them around, they’re worth a look.
And finally a slightly tangential one – and one where I’ve only read two of them. Jessica Fellowes’s Mitford Murder mysteries. I say they’re tangential because they’re set in the Mitford household, but its one of the staff who is doing the actual mystery solving. Louisa is nursery maid to the younger children and chaperone to the older ones (at least to start with), and this means that she has a ringside seat to the events of the Mitford sisters’ eventful lives. I will say that I thought the first one didn’t quite live up to the promise that it had in the blurb, and the second one had more of the stuff that I didn’t like about them and so I haven’t read any more of them – but the fact that they got to six in the series and I see various of them in paperback in the crime sections of the big bookshops fairly regularly suggests that other people liked them more than me!
That’s your lot for this week – hopefully there’s something here for you – but also, don’t forget I’ve got a whole post about Novelised Real People (in books that aren’t mysteries) from back in 2021.
I’m breaking a couple of rules this week because somewhere along the line I had managed to miss that Catriona McPherson had started a new series – and that we were on to the second book in it. But as The Edinburgh Murders came out last week I am at least timely!
It’s 1948 and Helen Crowther is a welfare almoner for the newly formed NHS in Edinburgh. It’s not an easy or a popular job, and her home life isn’t simple either but she keeps on going. While she’s at the bath house with one of her clients, the body of a man is found boiled to death in one of the cubicles. And then another couple of bodies turn up and Helen finds herself investigating because she’s noticed a few things that are worryingly close to home.
This has a great setting and a cleverly put together mystery to solve. I found Helen a really interesting character, and her job gives her an excellent excuse to be sticking her nose into other people’s lives. There aren’t as many historical mystery series set in the immediate post war period as there are set in the 1930s so that make a really nice change as well as the Edinburgh setting. I’m pretty sure this will work best for you if you’ve already read the first book, but I haven’t and I still enjoyed it! Like with McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series, the mystery is darker than you often find in historical mysteries, but it’s not too graphic although there are a couple of gruesome moments its more implied than right there on the page.
My copy came via NetGalley, but it’s out now in the UK on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback. I couldn’t find the first one of these in the shops last week when I was looking, so I don’t know how easy the hardcover version of this is going to be to find though.
I finished the last book in this eight book series a week or two back, which makes this the perfect time to talk about them!
This is a series of eight murder mystery books set on different ocean liners starting in 1907. Our detectives are George Porter Dillman and Genevieve Mansfield who are employed by the shipping line as detectives on the ships but travel incognito and mingle with the first class passengers looking to try to prevent trouble before it even starts. Except that bodies keep turning up. In the first book it’s only George who is the detective but Genevieve soon joins him on the payroll. Most of the books are set on transatlantic crossings but there are a few on other routes too.
This is all Edwardian and pre-war set, which makes a change in historical mysteries in general and for me to – because there are a lot of interwar series and a lot of Victorian series but not so much set in between. I also really like the cruise ship settings – it’s got some glamour but it’s also a closed group for the murder so you feel like you have a chance at figuring out who did it before the reveal. They’re also pretty easy reading – not scary, not too many bodies or on page violence but enough twists to keep you turning the pages.
These are pretty easy to get hold of – they’re often in the mystery sections of the bookshops still, and they had a spell where they were in The Works all the time so they turn up relatively regularly in the second hand shops. And of course they’re on Kindle and occasionally go into Kindle Unlimited too.
Happy Friday everyone, I’m back with a cozy crime series that I blitzed my way through over a couple of months, and although I’m still annoyed that the final book is a different size to all the others, I enjoyed them enough that I’m trying to work past the issues it gives me for shelving them and writing about them anyway!
At the start of the series Nell Pratt is the chief fundraiser at the Society for the Preservation of Pennsylvania Antiques, when an archivist is found dead on the same day that it’s discovered that a collection of letters from George Washington is missing. Of course she starts to investigate – this is a cozy crime series after all – and thus a series of museum/antique related mysteries is underway. Like most similar series, Nell develops a group of friends and colleagues who help out with the investigation and there’s a running romantic subplot through the series too.
I bought the second in the series at Bristol this summer – and once I’d read it, I went off and started buying up the others and then read them in order. I really liked the set up of the museum and philanthropic community around Philadelphia – it felt like something a bit different after a lot of small business related cozies. I don’t know a lot about the way the museum sector works behind the scenes in the UK, let alone in the US so I have no criticisms to make on that front – I just enjoyed the mysteries and the characters and let it all unroll!
I haven’t read any other Sheila Connolly – and I was sad to see when I was digging around into her writing to find that she died in 2020. But she has other series that I will happily work my way through should the opportunity present itself.
This is another of those times where most of a cozy crime series isn’t available on Kindle – only the last one is in ebook format, and I didn’t realise when I ordered the paperback it that it was going to be a non-matching size – if I had I might have gone with the ebook.
It’s been a while, but here I am, back with another post of some of the really good British Library Crime Classics I’ve read recently. And recently is a fairly elastic thing, because I started putting this together ages ago, and then some of the books that I was expecting to use in this ended up being Books of the Week instead!
Impact of Evidence by Carol Carnac
This is set in the Welsh borders where an elderly doctor known for his erratic driving has gone off the road and into the river – but when the police pull out the vehicle a second body is discovered in the back. Who is the mystery corpse, how did he get there and was the doctor responsible? This is another mystery centering on a tight knit community where everyone knows everyone else’s business and so clues can be picked up that way. Really good and atmospheric.
Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull
This is a murder mystery about the murder of a deeply unpopular man, who drops dead on a train to London. There are four suspects, and the story is told by intercutting the investigation by Inspector Fenby and judge sitting watching the prosecution at the trial – which he intends to be his last case before retirement – without telling you who the accused is until very late on. I really enjoyed reading it – I wasn’t sure who I thought the accused was going to turn out to be, and then I very much enjoyed how it all revealed itself and what the solution turned out to be.
The Measure of Malice Edited by Martin Edwards
A collection of murder mystery short stories all with some sort of scientific twist to them. There are some authors here I haven’t come across before along with some familiar names if you’ve read other BLCC titles and then two really big names in Conan Doyle and Dorothy L Sayers. Not being a Sherlock Holmes expert I can’t tell you if the story here is one of the better known ones, but I can say that the Sayers is a Wimsey that I have read before in one of the Wimsey short story collections, which probably isn’t a surprise, although it is a good one (even if I think bits of it clash with part of the first Paton Walsh continuation, but that’s a really nerdy point). All in all a good and varied selection.
And that’s it – and I can’t see that I’ll have read enough of these for another round of of BLCC before the end of the year, although who knows whether one will end up as a Book of the Week before then in the six weeks we have to go…
It’s been a while since I picked a British Library Crime classic, but I’m back with another one this week because it’s really good.
So, four men are due to fly on a plane to Dublin, but only three board. When it goes down in the Irish Sea, there are no bodies and the police have no idea who the man was who didn’t board the plane. And so they turn to the Wade family, who knew the four men due to fly, and question them to find out. Over the course of the book we find out about the dynamics of the household and try to work out who on earth was the man who didn’t fly.
According to the introduction it was the first novel to be nominated for the both the Golden Dagger and its American equivalent – and I can see why. For perspective also nominated for the Golden Dagger (then called the crossed red herring) that year was Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice. The following year it was won by previous BotW pick The Colour of Murder. It is not a conventional murder mystery and I’m going to warn you now: there are a lot of unlikeable characters in this one. But it’s so good. I read it in basically an evening and I didn’t care if it ended up making me go to sleep late. It’s that sort of book.
My copy came from a friend – who left a stack of secondhand BLCC’s with me because her bags were too full – but as with the others in the series it’s also on Kindle and I’m sure sooner or later it will turn up in their KU selection.
I’ve written about Nicola Upson’s series about Josephine Tey, and this week it’s the turn of Tey’s actual mystery series to feature on the blog, because I’ve finally read all of them after picking up the last one at Book Con the other week. Yes I know. Book Con is doing me quite well on the reading front.
Our detective is Alan Grant, a police inspector at Scotland Yard although his cases take him all over England and Scotland. I’ve read these severely out of order and over a period of about 20 years because I’m fairly sure I read Daughter of Time when I was studying my History A Level and doing Henry VII, because when I read it the other week it seemed very familiar. They’re also very varied in the sort of stories they tell – which aren’t always murders, or at least not recent murders. The aforementioned Daughter of Time is an examination of whether Richard III was really guilty of the murder of the princes in the tower and also of how history is put together and how historical myths come into being. It’s regularly voted as one of the best detective stories of all time. Alan Grant is only slightly in The Franchise Affair, but that is a kidnapping and abduction type plot – which is cleverly put together although it displays some somewhat dated social attitudes.
As you know, I love a good Golden Age mystery and these can be pretty good. Josephine Tey is actually one of a number of pen names used by Elizabeth McKintosh – in fact the first in this series was originally published under the name of Gordon Daviot, under which name she was a successful playwright. My favourite of Tey’s books are the ones where she’s using her knowledge of the theatre scene that she was a part of (and which Upson also uses in her books). A Shilling For Candles, about the murder of a film star was turned into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock – albeit with a fair few changes, including the removal of Grant himself!
These are fairly easy to get hold of – Arrow did paperback editions a few years back, and second hand copies of various ages are fairly easy to come buy too. And they’re all on Kindle too, some times in multiple editions at different price points because that’s the sort of age they are. So good luck with that and hard copies may be your most reliable source!
Happy Friday everyone, I’m back with another series post and this is one that may not be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention to the lists the last few weeks.
These are a series of six books set in the 1930s following a clergyman who, in book one, is on a train where someone is murdered and finds himself drawn into the investigation. And then across the course of the next few books he finds himself again drawn into mysteries and murders of various kinds.
I read the first one of these a few years back and in my BotW review I said that it was really trying to make you think it was a British Library Crime Classic. They’ve updated the cover style since then although when you get A Third Class Murder it still has the original one – as you can see from the photo. It was a standalone title at the point that I read it and there are now another five – some of which are more towards the thriller, some are more straight up murder mysteries. If you have read a lot of Golden Age crime you can spot where some of the inspiration is coming from, but they’re basically very easy to read, enjoyable 1930s set mysteries that are perhaps a little derivative but that are also missing some of the problematic attitudes and language you find in the genuine article.
All six are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and I suspect a seventh will appear at some point – there is certainly the set up for it at the end of book six.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 