Cabaret Macabre (2024) by Tom Mead

At the beginning of the year, I read The Murder Wheel, Tom Mead’s second novel staring magician Joseph Spector, and, unfortunately, I didn’t really care for it. I was annoyed about disliking a modern-day writer trying to emulate the Golden Age of Detective fiction, and who liked locked rooms. However, other reviews I’d read indicated that his third novel, Cabaret Macabre, was his best. I was looking forward to trying it, but was it worth the hype?

Cabaret revolves around Judge Giles Drury. Almost ten years ago, his secretary, Gloria Crane, died of strychnine poisoning. It’s unlikely that anyone would choose to commit suicide with such a painful poison, but there was no trace of it in any of the food and drink that she shared with the Drury family. Her fiancé, Victor Silvius, believed that Giles Drury had something to do with it and went after the judge with a knife, an act that got him sentenced to a sanitarium, where he has remained ever since. Both the judge and the head doctor are both part of a gentleman’s club called the “Tragedians,” and they take care of their own.

Cut to the present, and Victor’s sister, Caroline, comes to Inspector Flint claiming that the judge is trying to kill her brother. Broken glass has been discovered in his food. Around the same time, Judge Drury’s wife Elspeth calls on Joseph Spector claiming that Victor is trying to kill her husband. The man has been getting death threats, and someone even takes a shot at him while he’s meeting with Spector. Of course, that doesn’t explain how Victor could send the threats from his asylum cell.

And so, Spector agrees to accompany the judge and his family their estate, Marchbanks. Even the unflappable Spector can’t shake the eerie atmosphere and foreboding the house gives off, and his worst fears soon come true: Not even twenty-four hours after their arrival, a man is found stabbed to death on the frozen lake outside the home…and he will not be the first to die.

And what does all of this have to do with the brutally battered body stuffed in a trunk discovered at the novel’s opening?

Yes, Tom Mead once again stuffs this book full of incident. I complained about Murder Wheel having too much going on, but it works much better here, since everything is traced back to Marchbanks, the center of a web of revenge and bloodshed. The central idea that Mead plays with here is also very appealing to me. One of my favorite mystery stories is Agatha Christie’s “Motive vs. Opportunity.” There, the central problem revolves around a will that’s replaced by a blank sheet of paper. Those who had a motive to switch it had no opportunity, those who had the opportunity had no motive. I love mysteries that hinge on that duality, where one explanation seems impossible but the other makes no sense, or where both options seem impossible: “Every single interpretation had an equally valid opposing interpretation.”

Is Drury trying to kill Victor or is Victor trying to kill him? Did the judge kill Gloria Crane as his wife thinks, or did she kill Crane as he thinks? This even extends to the murders. On the one hand, the ice on the frozen lake was too thin to carry the body out. So he must have been killed before midnight and launched out onto the lake. But everyone had a alibi for that time and the weapon only went missing past midnight, so he must have been killed after the lake froze. But that’s impossible. Or take Gloria’s death. No one would choose to kill themselves with strychnine, so it must have been murder. But everyone shared food and drink and no one else was affected. So it must be suicide. But that makes no sense…and so on and so forth. Even the third death at Marshbanks, a shooting with a shotgun inside a room bolted from the inside, has elements of this: If the killer could have slipped onto the estate, why commit the crime with such an attention-getting weapon?

The explanations are, for the most part, satisfying. Mead prefers a different type f impossible crime than I do. I suspect that most readers will have a broad idea of the lake murder, even if they can’t explain the specifics. The shotgun locked room was fine, again, not my preferred style of solution. Gloria’s death is the one I can see being…not controversial, but I can see people not liking it. Thinking about it, I believe that it works and hammers in the “tragedy” theme that the book is going for, but it hinges on a type of logic I don’t like from locked room mysteries. And if Mead wanted to emphasize the tragedy part, Spector should have told the answer to more than just Inspector Flint.

The cluing is stronger than in the previous book. There, I complained that they were too vague, here they work much better. Some of the footnoted ones still fall in that category of “Come on, how could I have noticed that?” but most of them were things that I saw, or least felt like I should have seen. There were a couple of times when it felt like Spector was making some real big leaps, but I was, for the most part, satisfied. The pacing was also good. Mead is wise enough to resolve one of the murders at the two-thirds mark, meaning the final explanation isn’t backloaded. It’s a very good book.

Which makes it very odd that I kind of bounced off it overall. It’s like the opposite of my last review, where I had nothing but complaints about a book I liked, while here I have a lot of nice things to say about a book I didn’t care for. I’m inclined to think I just didn’t click with Mead’s writing style, because is an objectively good book that’s an improvement over its predecessor. It’s a fair bit better than his first book as well. I guess that the final solution has a few too many reversals for my taste. And I felt that some of the characters got off a bit too lightly, considering what they did.

But overall, I must give Cabaret Macabre a verdict of Recommended. If you’ve liked Tom Mead’s previous books or just locked room mysteries in general, this is well worth your time. If you didn’t like his previous books, this just might make a believer out of you. I’m only disappointed that it didn’t do the same for me. 

Other Reviews: Stephen M. Pierce, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Beneath the Stains of Time, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).

A Line to Kill (2021) by Anthony Horowitz

After having such a good time with The Sentence is Death, I was really looking forward to the next installment of Danny and Tony’s Excellent Adventures. A Line to Kill opens with Anthony “Tony” Horowitz once again getting embarrassed by Daniel Hawthorne in front of his peers. Tony’s publishers want to send him to a literary festival on Alderney, a small, rocky island that was occupied by the Germans in World War II. Tony is reluctant, seeing as the other authors are a hodge-podge of random writers (*“an unhealthy chef, a blind psychic, a war historian, a children’s author, a French performance poet, Hawthorne and me”), but much to his surprise, the reluctant Hawthorne shows interest. So Hawthorne and him set off to Alderney, where there hasn’t been a murder in decades.

At first, Tony is thinking he can get one over on Hawthorne, since literary festivals and promotion are his domain, but the trip promises to be rough. The various guests don’t have much in common and a few rub Tony the wrong way. Hawthorne is charismatic enough to charm crowds and draw attention away from Tony. And casting his shadow over the gathering is the sponsor, Charles le Mesurier. Le Mesurier is a deeply unpleasant man who has history with some of the guests, cheerfully harasses them, and is the man behind an unpopular power line that’s going to be established on the island. The line will clog the island and smash through the graves of Nazi victims, so there’s plenty of bad blood directed at le Mesurier. Tony is even with him when he finds an ace of spades with a skull on it under his windshield. Not that le Mesurier is concerned. Again, there hasn’t been a murder on Alderney in decades!

After a party at his house, le Mesurier is found stabbed to death in the bunker he used for affairs. He’s been tied to a chair and then stabbed in the throat. Oddly, the killer left his right hand unbound. There’s a footprint in the blood and a coin on the floor. Alderney isn’t really equipped to handle a serious crime (and the detective in charge is lazy), so Hawthorne is asked to lend his assistance, meaning Tony will get his third book out of the trip.

There are plenty of suspects. As mentioned, quite a few members of the group wanted to stab le Mesurier before they got to the island, and he’s happy to give the stragglers a reason to do it too. As usual, Horowitz conveys all these characters with effortless ease. There’s also another man prowling around the island, the real reason Hawthorne wanted to come to Alderney. If you remember from the first book, Hawthorne was kicked off the force after he shoved a pedophile down the precinct stairs. Derek Abbott is that very man and he also has a connection to le Mesurier: He’s his financial advisor. But not for long, since one of the suspects said she heard le Mesurier planning to fire him. The confrontation between him and Hawthorne is memorable.

While I liked this book overall, I had some issues with it. This is another Horowitz where the suspects don’t get a lot of page time. This makes sense for some of them—once their big secret is revealed there’s nothing left for them to do—but some just fade out of the narrative. They feel very disconnected from each other, rarely interacting among themselves. This made sense in the previous books since the suspects really didn’t have much to do with each other already, but the island setting should have meant they were bouncing off each other more. I will give credit that their various secrets and actions on the night of the murder give the crime some texture, but that’s just on a plot level. (Which, to be fair, is what I like.) The motive didn’t hit me as hard as it could either, lacking the raw “oomph” of the previous two books. But I like how it ties into some of the oddities of the crime scene. The explanation for the unbound hand has that macabre touch that wouldn’t be out of place in Alex Rider or Horowitz Horror.

Hawthorne himself is oddly subdued. Outside of his general shadiness around Abbott, he’s not as sinister a figure, and there are less clashes between him and Tony. I don’t mind this too much—I don’t want them to argue in every book—but it stood out here. Hawthorne’s actions near the end are probably the most morally ambiguous, if not outright criminal, things he’s done all series, yet they go without much comment. Tony makes a point that he and Hawthorne traumatize multiple people and wreck lives during their investigation, and I was surprised that Horowitz didn’t do more with that idea.

All of this sounds quite negative, but I really did like the book! Horowitz is one of my favorite modern mystery writers. He does an excellent job of describing the desolate scenery of Alderney. There aren’t as many meta asides, but what is there is always interesting or amusing. (Like Tony fearing that Hawthorne won’t solve the crime before the police do because it means he doesn’t have a book, or, when Hawthorne points out he could just make it up, he protests that “Even when I’m writing fiction I try to write the truth.”) There are also plenty of clues. I admit that I felt that there weren’t as many compared to Sentence or even Moonflower Murders, but there’s enough for the armchair reader to make a good stab at the culprit. The main slip-up Hawthorne catches the killer in is a good one. It’s the kind of thing you accept at face-value and don’t question even when you get information that really should make you wonder about it. I wish there were more clues like that, but what we have is enough.

But shame on Tony for taking my intended solution and going. “Boy it sure it glad I didn’t say that in front of Hawthorne, I would have looked like an idiot.”

All in all, I enjoyed this book. While I thought that Sentence was a better book, this is still a good mystery novel. I wouldn’t start with this if you’re new to the series, but fans of Hawthorne and Horowitz will enjoy this. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: CrossExaminingCrime, The Invisible Event, Murder at the Manse (with two others), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Stephen M. Pierce, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).

Bodies from the Library 2 (2019), edited by Tony Medawar

Last year, I read Bodies from the Library, an anthology of lost or obscure mystery stories compiled by Tony Medawar. While the collection wasn’t quite what I expected, I still decided to give some of the later entries a try. Hence, Bodies from the Library 2.

We begin well with a never-before-published Christianna Brand story: “No Face.” No Face is the name of a brutal serial killer who has successfully evaded the police. Seemingly the only man who has a chance of catching the faceless killer is “psychic” Joseph Hawke…if he can get the police to listen to him. I didn’t care much for it on my first read, but when I read it again for this review, I liked it more. Hawke isn’t exactly a pleasant protagonist, but Brand gives him enough of a conscience so that we root for him to outwit No Face. The ending is a nice surprise, well-foreshadowed.

The next story is from “Peter Antony,” a penname used by Peter and Anthony Shaffer. It is the only story featuring their detective Mr. Verity. Verity is called to the scene of an old woman’s murder. Someone stabbed her in the head during the night. All of the suspects have alibis and the corridor to the dead woman’s door was being watched by a nurse. Nonetheless, Verity interrogates the suspects, picks up on subtle clues, delivers a satisfying-but-not-spectacular solution and goes home…

And then we get part two, written by “J. M. Caffyn,” where the investigating officer notices a fatal flaw in Verity’s logic and reveals his own solution, which is much more reasonable and grounded. This is a fun bit of satire that jabs at one of the common clichés of detective fiction (and I don’t mean the locked room).

Helen Simpson’s “Hotel Evidence” is next on the list. Mr. Brodribb is a mild-mannered fellow whose wife is having an affair. Refreshingly, no one wants to kill each other here, instead she has a sensible plan to just have him fake desertion by hiding out at a hotel and “ignoring” her solicitor’s letters. Mr. Brodribb’s gradual realization of his new freedom is entertaining enough, and it’s nice to see virtue rewarded for once. Charming and different, but not quite what I wanted.

Our next story comes from Q. Patrick/Patrick Quentin/Jonathan Stagge/Gormon the Manslayer: “Exit Before Midnight.” Carol Thorne is a secretary for Leland and Rowley Process Company. Well, not for long, because it’s being devoured by Pan-American Dye Combine, and the merger is finalized on New Year’s Eve. Carol rushes back into the dark, almost deserted office, but finds a bizarre letter left in a typewriter. The writer opposes the merger and reminds the assembled shareholders that the sale isn’t finalized until midnight, and if some of the shareholders happened to die before then, there’d have to be another vote…Nonetheless, the merger goes through. The bulk of the shareholders leave for the night while those mentioned in the note remain. One of them thinks he knows what’s going on, but the lights blow and…well, you know.

This is more of a thriller than a mystery, and Q. Patrick does a good job of racking up the tension. Like in the best of these types of stories, our heroes are well and truly confined (the doors are blocked, the cleaning staff has the weekend off, the office is surrounded by a roof so they can’t throw messages out), and Patrick sells their fear through the eyes of Carol. Also, the killer has snatched up some calendar days to put on the victims; a nice, macabre touch. I suspected the killer but will give Patrick credit for leaving it ambiguous up till the last moment. Not much in the way of cluing, but the motive behind the murders is clever. This story reminds me that I really need to read more by this writing partnership.

Margery Allingham is up next with a lost radio play, “Room to Let.” A retired police officer recounts a baffling case from early in his career. A strange man moves into the home of a former doctor. He seems polite enough, but before long he begins to bully and terrorize the household. He reads their mail, chases off other visitors, and forces them to stay inside at all hours. And it’s likely that he’s an escapee from a private asylum. This part is handled excellently; Allingham conveys the terror of being constrained in your own house well. One night, the tension explodes, and the guest is found dead in his room with a bullet in the head. Only there’s no gun in the room, and the door is locked and bolted on the inside. Yes, it’s a locked room mystery! The solution is good, not innovative but satisfying, with a nice final twist at the end.

“A Joke’s a Joke” is the only short story by Jonathan Latimer. It’s an account of how an obnoxious prankster’s latest joke blows up in his face. Fun but light.

Next is a Christie story, “The Man Who Knew.” I read this in John Curran’s Murder in the Making, it’s first publication. It’s about a man who returns to his apartment with a sudden premonition of danger, a premonition confirmed when he sees that someone has written on his theater program the words “Don’t go home”… Christie later expanded this into “The Red Signal,” which is a better take on this idea. This is solid, as most Christie is, but too short to really carry the premise all the way through.

I knew that S. S. Van Dine wrote short fiction but “The Almost Perfect Murder Case” was my first experience with it. The story is told by Philo Vance, recounting the death of a clerk at the German embassy in Chile. He was found dead in his burning office, struck over the head. A series of threatening letters points the finger at a Chilean office acting out an old grudge, but a cynical magistrate digs deeper. His case turns on the subtle difference between two words. I feel that the mistake that traps the killer probably should have been noticed anyway, but that’s a minor blemish. This is actually a very well-told story. Van Dine’s writing is straightforward but engaging, and this is well worth your time.

Next up is a real gem: “The Hours of Darkness” by Edmund Crispin. This was broadcast before, but this is a version of the story that includes Gervase Fen. Fen is called to the estate Rydells, where one of the guests has been strangled and brutally slashed up in the long gallery. This is another Crispin with a contrast between the viciousness of the crime and the light-heartedness of the rest of the story. It’s a testament to Crispin’s skill that he makes a story that mostly consists of various suspects trooping in and out of a room to be interrogated by the police and Fen engaging and witty. At first, I didn’t buy Fen’s logic pointing to the killer, but on thinking about it I found it more convincing (even if I don’t by that X would be thinking that clearly). It’s based on a seemingly-trivial detail that, as Fen points out, really doesn’t make a lot of sense until you realize what’s actually going on. This could have been shorter, but I’m glad it wasn’t.

“Chance is a Great Thing” is by E.C.R Lorac, who, yes, I must get to at some point. Here she quickly sets up then resolves the sudden death of an aunt by a clever murder method. Unfortunately for the killer, there’s a police officer right on the scene. This story is a bit light, and I feel that the method would have been better in a longer story, but what we have is good.

Clayton Rawson’s “The Mental Broadcast” might star The Great Merlini, but it isn’t a crime story; it’s an explanation of a magic trick. Namely how to predict which card a volunteer pulls out of a deck in a separate room while the magician is blindfolded. I had to read the solution a couple of times to understand it, but it’s a neat magic trick that pulls from the Jonathan Creek school of thought that most magic is someone going through great and unnecessary lengths to fool someone. And it’s nice to see Ross get one over on Merlini for once.

Ethel Lina White’s “White Cap” stars Tess Leigh, a secretary at a factory. She’s prone to suffering from blackouts when stressed after an injury. So, in true suspense heroine fashion, she’s suspect number 1 when her unpleasant boss is found shot to death on the side of the mountain that overlooks the factory. No mystery here, but a well-done suspense tale with a clever twist that clears her from suspicion.

“Sixpennyworth” is a stage play—likely meant for local community theater groups—from John Rhode, set at a pub. There are—besides the incompetent bartender—only a handful of customers in attendance: some local women, a stranger and his companion, and a man who all but screams, “blackmailer!” as soon as he starts talking. The pub’s lights blow out and, to the shock of no one, when they come back on, the man has been stabbed to death by one of the multiple bladed objects lining the walls. So far so cliché, but Rhode’s police officer Jimmy Waghorn—Dr. Priestley not in attendance—quickly pieces the crime together in another solid Rhode work.

The next story, "The Adventure of the Dorset Squire," is by an author I'd never heard of: C. A. Alington. The narrator is showing a friend around a castle and mentions an amusing story of a judge who found a maid wearing one of his wigs. This provokes the friend to recount his own story of how a dull house party suddenly transformed into a farce when the power went out. There's no crime here, but instead a very funny and amusing story of escalating events.

The collection ends with what I suspect will be the main draw for most readers: a never-before-published Lord Peter Whimsey story! “The Locked Room” sees Lord Peter staying over at the estate of an acquaintance and bantering with the daughter of the house. But soon, tragedy strikes. The lord of the house loses big on horseracing just as his wife arrives with a new gown, sparking an argument after which the host locks himself in the library. He is found dead by morning, a bullet in the head, door locked and windows barred. Lord Peter demurs about investigating until the daughter confronts him months later. The solution is split into two parts. The locked room itself is nothing special, but the second part of the crime is decently clever and gives the story a little oomph.

All in all, Bodies from the Library 2 is a great collection. This collection has much more in the way of mysteries than the previous one and will be of more interest in that sense. Some of the stories here are a bit light, but nothing egregiously awful, and non-plot fiends will enjoy them too. Recommended

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, FictionFan's Book Reviews, CrossExaminingCrime, The Invisible Event, My Reader's Block.

"The Short-Haired Corpse" (2014/2020) by Yuugo Aosaki

A couple of months ago, I reviewed “Knockin’ on Locked Door,” the first of the same-titled series by Yuugo Aosaki. Shortly after posting that review, Bad Player of Bad Player’s Good Reviews by Bad Player mentioned that he had translated the second story in that series, “The Short-Haired Corpse.” It was originally published in the December 2014 issue of Dokuraku magazine. After some fumbling on my part, he shared his translation with me, allowing me to share with you all another case from the Knockin’ On Locked Door Detective Agency.

To my surprise, Aosaki switched narrators. The previous story was narrated by whydunit specialist Hisame, this one is narrated by howdunit expert Tori. And like in the previous story, it looks like our narrator will be sidelined. The victim is Zenda Mika, the leader of theater troupe Wood Ear. She was found strangled in her own apartment’s bathroom, laying in a running shower in her underwear. Okay, not super interesting on its own for a pair of great detectives, but there’s one other odd bit about the crime scene: the killer cut her hair down to the shoulders.

The rest of the story takes place in Zenda’s apartment as our detectives and the police try and figure out who the killer is and why they cut her hair. Ideally solving the latter will point towards the killer. Tori mostly sits and makes comments since this is Hisame’s domain but, just like in the last story, the narrator gets the last laugh and details how the crime was accomplished, pointing directly at the reason for the killer’s actions.

Aosaki shows a lot of creativity, coming up with two reasons for the killer to cut Zenda’s hair. The first, false explanation would have been enough on its own, but Aosaki outdoes himself. Like the best mystery stories, the final explanation hinges on a misunderstanding, a reversal of the “known” facts of the case. But unlike some of those stories, it’s not just, “You realize X and instantly solve everything,” as Tori’s explanation of the killer’s actions is quite involved. And yet, the clues are all there. Seemingly irrelevant details set up not just “Why the killer did this,” but also, “Why the killer didn’t do this.”

That being said, this is another story where the suspects are literally just pictures with descriptions, no interactions with them at all. And the story isn’t quite as balanced as “Knockin’.” There, both Hisame and Tori got equal billing, with Tori explaining the locked room but Hisame getting the final say about the motive. Here, Tori gets to explain everything, and the reviews I’ve read indicate that the imbalance between “why” and “how” is a persistent issue throughout the series.

But for now, this story is great. BP and Ho-Ling both compared this series to“Popcorn”; a nice, light, treat. If I binged them, I think the charm might wear off but reading them one at a time keeps my attention on Aosaki’s creativity and skill. Recommended.

And if anyone happens to have finished translating the third story… 

Other Reviews: Bad Player's Good Reviews, The Case Files of Ho-Ling.

The Appeal (2021) by Janice Hallett

Back in 2021, Janice Hallett’s debut novel, The Appeal, released to rave reviews. Some of these were members of the blogosphere, but I admit, I was skeptical. Surely a modern mystery novel, even one that promised on the front cover that you could uncover the truth, couldn’t be that good. Probably it was just overhyped by reviewers. But then The Puzzle Doctor dropped a review of her third book, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, which sounded so intriguing that I decided to give her a shot at some point. And so, after re-reading some reviews of her first book, I decided to give The Appeal its own appeal.

The book is an epistolary novel, a story told through in-universe documents. The framing device is that two lawyers, Femi and Charlotte, have been assigned to go through a series of documents detailing the trials and tribulations of the Fairway Players, an amateur theater group. The Players, and the town they perform in, are led by the Haywards, modern-day aristocracy. They intend to put on a performance of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, when disaster strikes: Granddaughter Poppy is diagnosed with Medulloblastoma, a rare type of brain cancer, and she’ll need very expensive treatment. The community springs into action, arranging fundraisers, charity events, whatever else Poppy needs. But the course of things do not run smoothly. There are hidden tensions and frustrations among the cast. The charity is targeted by fraudsters. And a new person in town seems convinced that the Haywards are being taken for a ride by Poppy’s doctor. Or maybe she just has a grudge over something that happened in Africa. All of this is told through emails, text messages, and promotional material.

At first glance, you’d think that emails would make things easy. After all, none of the suspects wrote these emails or sent these messages anticipating that anyone else would read them, so they’re more open than they would be in a formal investigation. But that’s not the case. They bring their misunderstandings, context that the readers aren’t aware of. It’s also much easier to lie in text than it is in person, to tell someone that they were your first choice for a part in the play even though you asked two others first. Hallett does a good job at letting the characters’ personalities shine through their messages. Even though the reader never really “sees” them, we still get a firm impression of who they are based on what and how they write and occasionally based on how they write to one person verses another. The standout character is nurse Isabel "Issy" Blake. Hallett perfectly captures a nightmare of a human being, an emotional parasite who drains everyone she latches onto, who decides for herself if you’re an enemy or a friend…and yet who is so put on or flat-out ignored by everyone else that you can’t help but feel a bit sorry for her. I was rooting for her, honestly.

These documents are building up to something. Readers know there’s a murder coming, but it happens pretty late in the book. To Hallett’s credit, the drama and mysteries of the first part of the book are engaging and give the reader something to think about before the crime. Not to mention wondering how all of this will lead to the murder. As a consequence of it coming so late, the crime itself is pretty basic. There’s a good idea behind it, but the real joy comes from the first two-thirds of the book and the reveal of the motive behind the crime.

I’ve been on a “dossier” game kick recently: Games like Hunt a Killer, Unsolved Case Files, etc. These are games where you have a box full of items, from profiles to maps to witness testimonies to newspapers to brochures, and have to use them to solve a murder. This reads like it could easily have been made into one of those. This isn’t an insult, but a testament to how carefully Hallett constructed this book. There’s nothing wasted, everything either informs character or contributes to the plot, or both (with the occasional comic relief). It’s fun; this format is so fun. I enjoyed reading this and seeing how everything came together. And it’s a fair mystery. Femi and Charlotte’s boss even gives them a series of questions to ask once they’ve read most of the documents. Who’s the killer, who’s the prime suspect, who knew the victim was dead, etc. Hallett is even kind enough to clear up some of the mysteries before the big reveal. The cluing is maybe a little thin, but once the main one was pointed out, I kicked myself for not seeing it.

I only have a handful of complaints. One is that the cast list is quite large. You get a manageable one near the beginning but the second one you get in the build-up to the climax is like forty characters. Sure, a good chunk of them are obviously minor, but I had trouble keeping everyone straight until pretty late. Also, we don’t get access to a certain character’s emails, even though we know they’re responding to others. I was expecting a reason for this and…there isn’t one. We just never see them. I know the answer is, “Because it would give everything away,” but the fact that Charlotte and Femi aren’t even shown them off page is strange.

So, in the end, I liked The Appeal and regret not giving it a fair trial sooner. I’m partly over by bias against modern mysteries, but clearly, I need to get rid of it entirely. You can expect to see more of Janice Hallett on this blog. Recommended

Other Reviews: Ah, Sweet Mystery, The Invisible Event, Crossexaminingcrime, My Reader's Block, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Stephen M. Pierce.

Bertie and the Seven Bodies (1990) by Peter Lovesey

In between the end of his historical Sgt. Cribb series and the beginning of his contemporary Peter Diamond series, Peter Lovesey experimented with a variety of non-series novels, a couple of which I’ve looked at. One of those books was Bertie and the Tin Man, a book starring Bertie, Prince of Wales and the future King Edward VII. I was interested, but the reviews I read indicated that this was more of a thriller than a straight mystery. But Lovesey’s second Bertie book, Bertie and the Seven Bodies, looked more promising. I read the Soho Press omnibus edition containing all three of the Bertie books with an introduction from Lovesey. In it, he says that the book was meant for the centenary of Christie’s birth, further whetting my appetite. Lovesey might not be a patch on the Queen of Crime, but perhaps this tribute would be worthwhile.

The book opens with Bertie getting an invitation to a shooting party at Desborough, the estate of one Ameila Drummond. Bertie wants to go for the shooting and for the widow, though his wife Alexandra (“Alix”) intends to accompany him to prevent any funny business. Also at the party are the hostess’s brother, Marcus Pelham, the charitable and giving Sir George Holdfast and his wife, Moria, a shy and stuttering poet (but an excellent shot) Wilfred Osgot-Edge, Jerry Gribble, His Grace the Duke of Bournemouth, commoner Claude Bullivant, and Jerry’s latest fling, actress Queenie Chimes. There are also other assorted guests, such as the famed explorer Isabella Dundas and other members of the household. All in all, it promises to be an exciting party, with shootings and parlor games and even a ghost story.

And then Miss Chimes faceplants into her dessert. She is dead by morning. A natural, if shocking death. Bertie isn’t concerned. Then during Tuesday’s hunt, Jerry is found dead of a gunshot to the head. Clearly, Bertie thinks, a grief-stricken suicide. He and the other discoverers endeavor to cover the whole thing up. Then on Wednesday, during a game of Sardines, another guest is found stabbed and shoved into the dumbwaiter.

At this point, Bertie starts to suspect that there’s a murderer afoot.

Guiding his conclusions are the pieces of paper left by the bodies, each labeled with the day of the week. It seems inexplicable until Alix notes that the days are a reference to the poem, “Monday’s Child”:

“Monday’s child is fair of face,

“Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

“Wednesday’s child is full of woe…” And so on and so forth, only the killer is replacing “child” with “corpse.”

To grant Bertie his due credit, once the magnitude of what’s going on sinks in, he takes, if not competent, certainly decisive action, taking control of the investigation with the help of Inspector Sweeney (who’s really his bodyguard). Lovesey strikes a good balance between Bertie’s inflated ego and incompetence versus his role as a detective. His dumb decisions are usually justified in the moment, and his more boneheaded or amorous actions are quickly called out by either his own narration or other characters. But as the Crown Prince, he has the ability to throw his weight around and gain information from the other suspects, no matter how much they dislike him personally. Lovesey keeps the story moving at a good pace, and there’s plenty of wit and amusement to be found.

The mystery is pretty solid too. While there aren’t much in the way of clues per se—and the key clue is an offhanded comment that I’m sure most readers will miss—you can make a genuine guess at who the killer is if you really think about what’s going on. Lovesey provides some nice false solutions along the way, one of which I dare say will be most readers’ first guess at what’s going on. I do wish the rhyme had been better implemented. Early on, Lovesey does a good job at playing with the ambiguity with some of the lines to misdirect the reader about who will be next, but in the end some of the connections are very tenuous, and the killer’s motive for working the rhyme in gets handwaved. But I liked the motive for the murders, which casts a more somber light on some of the preceding events and gives the ending a darker hue when you realize what Bertie has done.

But I can honestly say that I liked this book. I was getting skeptical of Lovesey as a mystery writer (he’s a very good writer in general), but this revived my faith some. Not a stone-cold classic of the genre, but a fun read that tries to give the reader a legitimate mystery. I’m tempted to give Bertie and the Crime of Passion a shot based on the strength of this, but we will see. Recommended

Other Reviews: Mystery*File, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Mysteries Ahoy!

Cards on the Table (1936) by Agatha Christie

“Supposing that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening, the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four, while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?”--Poirot, The ABC Murders

Agatha Christie is known for many things. One is her ability to surprise and astonish the reader with someone they never suspected. You name a least-likely killer, they probably star in at least one of her books. What makes Cards on the Table so interesting is how Christie doesn’t do that. There are four, and only four, suspects. They all have equal motive. They all have equal opportunity. Any one of them might have done it. But which one?*

The book begins at a party attended by shady Mr. Shaitana, a collector. He sets his sights on Poirot and provokes and banters with him. Then he gets an idea: he’ll show Poirot his most prized collection…of murderers. Not just any two-bit murderers, but murderers who have gotten away with it. He invites Poirot to a dinner with these esteemed criminals. Poirot is too much of a gentleman to say that this is the stupidest idea he’s ever heard, but he implies it.

Poirot isn’t the only detective in attendance. He’s joined by Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, by Colonel Race of the Service, and by Ariadne Oliver, a famous mystery writer, making her first appearance in one of Christie’s novels. Matching them are the murderers: hearty Dr. Roberts, laconic Major Despard, classy Mrs. Lorrimer, and shy Anne Meredith. Shaitana relishes the conversation, dropping smug hints about his guests’ secret pasts, before proposing a game of bridge. Detectives at one table, murderers at another, while he sits and watches his collection of killers. All goes well until the detectives take their leave for the night. They go to tell Shaitana…and find that he’s been stabbed in the chest.

Initial interrogations don’t help much. All four suspects say that they barely know Shaitana. All of them had at least one moment when they got up from the table, and that’s just what was noticed. There are almost no clues. Christie says in her foreword that “The deduction must, therefore, be entirely psychological,” and she’s not kidding. Sure, there’s no hard evidence, but Poirot and Battle know that a killer tends to repeat themselves. Not in that they’ll use the same methods, but that they’ll commit the same type of murder. The four detectives each dig into the suspects’ past, trying to determine what murders they’ve committed to match them with Shaitana’s death. This is very promising, but in practice it’s mostly just Poirot and Battle. Race does all his work off-screen, says some racist stuff about how a white man won’t commit a murder, then skips out of the narrative to do hush-hush work. Mrs. Oliver is more successful, both practically—she manages to get one over Battle by getting information on one of the past murders—and in the meta sense. Christie is clearly having a blast whenever Mrs. Oliver speaks. Her normal laconic, to-the-point dialogue is replaced with paragraphs of her poking fun at the business of mystery writing. Sadly, she too fades out of the narrative about halfway through.

The suspects are also vivid characters. All of them seem like very nice, respectable people, but those are the people you need to watch out for in Christie. It seems impossible that any of them would have committed a crime, but Christie gives them all plausible murders, each distinct to the suspect. One character in particular is chilling in their lack of any hesitation when it comes to murder, and they’ll stick with me for a while. Again, you need to pay attention to the past murders to be able to solve the present one. This mostly works out. On the one hand, the psychological similarity between the deaths is clever. It’s not obvious, but when Poirot spelled it out, I realized that yeah, it makes sense. But I can see a more skeptical reader picking at it or being annoyed at how Christie somewhat backs off on her promise that all four suspects are equally guilty near the end of the book. I will say you do not need to know bridge to solve this; a couple of five-minute tutorials on YouTube are all you need, and I think the main point is made clear enough through context.

Christie expertly paces the book. While reading I thought to myself, “I should really be bored with this,” because Christie is all dialogue, and like I said, it’s often very to-the-point. But man could she control a narrative, expertly dolling out information at just the right pace to keep you hooked. It would have been very easy to let this spiral out of control with four detectives and four suspects, and it’s a testament to Christie’s skill that it doesn’t. But I'm not happy with how Poirot catches the killer. I didn't mind it in the moment, and I feel that you can argue it's thematically fitting, but it is a weakness in the book.

All in all, I liked this one. I’ve been looking forward to it, and there's a degree where I know I'm responding to the book that I imagined it would be and not the book it is. But I still enjoyed it. I want to read it again to see how I react to it, which I wouldn't want to do if the book was truly bad. I wouldn’t recommend it to Christie neophytes, but for someone who has a few Christie's under their belt and wants to see her try something a little different, this is Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Ah, Sweet Mystery (contains spoilers for the TV version at the end), In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, (review one and review two), The Green Capsule, Mysteries Ahoy, Countdown John's Christie Journal, Crossexaminingcrime (spoiler analysis), FictionFan's Book Reviews.

*Also, this was her third Poirot book that year!