For 2024 I set myself a personal goal to read 12 of the short story collections that had been languishing on my TBR pile for a while. Earlier this month I completed this challenge, and you can see my ranked list here.
Buoyed up by this success I was keen to do another similar goal for 2025, so I headed off to my TBR pile (and by pile read bookcase) to see what I had a lot of. As my blog post title heralds, the conclusion I came to, after a brief perusal, was that I had a lot of mysteries which were in a Green Penguin edition. My book advent calendar this year, put together by my husband, included quite a few, which certainly increased their presence in my TBR pile (I know it’s a bookcase, but pile sounds better!) Therefore, I decided in 2025 I would read a Green Penguin by a different author each month.
Here are the titles that I chose:
January – The Ghost It Was (1936; 1950) by Richard Hull
Synopsis
‘Gregory Spring-Benson was an idle young man with no fixed desire to do anything – except possibly to drink Burgundy, for which he had a nice taste. The harsh reality of life, the necessity to do something in order to survive, he contrived to avoid by being incredibly self-centred and impervious to the criticism of his friends and the abuse of his creditors. The time had come, however, when it was really necessary for him to see what could be done in the way of regular employment, preferably of a kind that would leave him plenty of spare time – and cash. For some reason he imagined that journalism would suit his purpose, but the newspaper he applied to for a job was not of that opinion. Now it happened that at this time Gregory read in this very newspaper that his Uncle James, a wealthy and eccentric old man, had acquired an ancient country mansion, complete with ghost. He did not like his uncle – few did – but he sensed that here might be good “copy” of a kind to impress a newspaper, for that appeared to be necessary in order to get a job. So down to Uncle James’s place he went, there to encounter several other hopeful and hateful relatives, all bent on seeing that they were not forgotten in the will, and that Uncle James’s interest in ghosts should not be exploited to their detriment. It is of these events, ghostly and otherwise, that this book tells.’
February – The Blind Barber (1934; 1952) by John Dickson Carr
Synopsis
‘This adventure of the genial and omniscient Dr Fell takes place aboard the Queen Victoria, most sedate of all Atlantic liners. Before the ship has docked, it has been turned inside out by four allies intent on preventing a diplomatic scandal, and a girl with a Greek profile has been murdered in her cabin. A stolen moving picture film, a stolen emerald, and international jugglery play their parts in this swift and colourful mystery at sea.’
March – The Cambridge Murders (1945; 1952) by Dilwyn Rees
Synopsis
‘Fisher College at Cambridge lies between St John’s and Trinity Colleges, a fact which may escape those who visit Cambridge trusting only to the official guide-books and seeing no more than a gap of twenty feet between those two great houses of learning. Here one morning the bedmakers and gyps clamouring for admission on the last day of term were admitted to find, lying across their path, the body of one of the College porters. The murder of the porter begins a mystery which is deepened when it is found that the unpopular Dean of the college is missing. The search for the murderer is conducted partly by the police and partly by the Vice-President of Fisher College, Sir Richard Cherrington, an eminent but slightly eccentric archaeologist with a penchant for amateur detection.’
April – The Four of Hearts (1936; 1958) by Ellery Queen
Synopsis
‘Ellery Queen made a rather disgruntled debut in Hollywood – he wanted work, whereas he was expected to sit back and contemplate his art as a writer – or “ideas man” as they called them there. he found out that he has been “working” for the studio for six weeks before the boss realised he was there – upon which they drank too much brandy together and started on the idea for a film based on the lives of two families, the Royles and Stuarts, whose fabulous lives and sensational insults had kept gossip-writers busy for twenty years. But the story took a fresh turn when Jack Royle and Blythe Stuart decided to marry. In the midst of all the ballyhoo and while the studios were making the most of the joyful publicity, their honeymoon plane crashed, and they were killed. Ellery now found he had work on hand of a different type, especially when mysterious playing cards kept arriving in the post.’
May – Trent Intervenes (1938; 1953) by E. C. Bentley
Synopsis
‘Some short stories, neatly and concisely written, in which Philip Trent, artist, connoisseur, and private detective, is the central character. All of the stories revolve round one or two essential clues; clues, moreover, which would only be noticed by an investigator with Trent’s particular qualities.
THE GENUINE TABARD. A neat confidence trick, involving a clergyman and unique objets d’art.
The SWEET SHOT. An ingenious golf murder.
THE CLEVER COCKATOO. A case of poisoning.
THE VANISHING LAWYER. A sunlamp is one of the clues that enables Trent to track down an absconding solicitor.
THE INOFFENSIVE CAPTAIN. Missing diamonds and a mystery letter.
THE FOOLPROOF LIFT. Murder of a blackmailing valet.
THE BAD DOG. A criminal with an alibi.
THE PUBLIC BENEFACTOR. A persecuted man is gradually driven mad.
THE LITTLE MYSTERY. Some seemingly insignificant factors explain the mystery of the attic.
THE UNKNOWN PEER. A connoisseur of wine disappears.
THE ORDINARY HAIRPINS. A golden-haired opera singer “commits suicide”, but Trent thinks otherwise.’
June – Alibi Innings (1954; 1958) by Barbara Worsley-Gough
Synopsis
‘To be murdered on the occasion of the annual cricket match between the Squire’s eleven and the village side was perhaps typical of Elizabeth Elliot, the Squire’s wife. She had always been the fly in the ointment, as contemptuous of her husband’s passion for cricket as she was of his pedigree cattle and his quiet country life. The only detectable sweetness about her was in the saccharine of her trashy but highly successful novels. Not surprising that she should be murdered, nor that almost everyone at the Manor had excellent reasons for wishing her dead.’
July – Death of a Millionaire (1925; 1950) by G. D. H. and Margaret Cole
Synopsis
‘It is said that the first problem of a murderer, once he has committed the deed, is to decide what to do with the body, how to dispose of it, or at least how to give the impression that someone else has disposed of it. No such difficulty appears to have worried Hugh Restington’s murderer. He took his victim away with him in a cabin trunk which he lugged around from one big London station to another, taking a different taxi each time. The police could not establish where he eventually went to, for he had vanished, trunk and all. The question uppermost in the minds of Scotland Yard was not so much what he had done with the body – but why he had taken it with him. The identity of the murderer was easily established. The whole case was at once very simple and yet very baffling. Hugh Restington was a millionaire interested in a Siberian Mining Concession, and he had come to London in order to close this business deal with a big commercial corporation. The day after his arrival he had disappeared. And so had his secretary. Nobody appeared to know anything about the secretary, and it was then that the police began to wonder about Mr Restington.’
August – The Battling Prophet (1956; 1960) by Arthur Upfield
Synopsis
‘Ben Wickham had developed a system of such accurate weather prophecy that farmers, foreseeing a drought, sacked labour and refrained from buying phosphates and machinery. This brough him many enemies, for governments were faced with unemployment and big companies had unsold stock on their hands. When Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte learns that he has died – apparently of hoo-jahs (D.T.s) – he suspects murder, and, acting as a “temporary private eye”, he follows the trail till he comes to the heart of the mystery.’
September – The Immaterial Murder Case (1945; 1954) by Julian Symons
Synopsis
‘If you like your detection not too serious (in fact at times downright funny) and slightly crazy, you will enjoy The Immaterial Murder Case. It seems that there was once an art movement called “Immaterialism” whose practitioners believed in painting that wasn’t there, and a whole lot of people got mixed up in it including a variety of art critics and their wives and a man named Samuel Johnson. What was revealed when an Immaterialist ghost smashed an immaterial piece of sculpture? Teak Woode, the thickest-witted detective in fiction, has this and many other crazy problems to deal with.’
October – The Case of the Rolling Bones (1939; 1955; 1960) by Erle Stanley Gardner
Synopsis
‘Perry Mason sat quietly in his office and complained to Della Street that life was dull. Two minutes later he was neck deep in trouble. It involved Alden Leeds, black sheep of the Leeds family. It seemed that when Uncle Alden was much younger he had run away to Alaska. There he had struck gold and become entangled with a Klondike dance-hall girl. Now that girl had reappeared and staked a claim on Alden. His heirs took one look at her and objected strenuously. They objected so strenuously that Alden’s life became complicated. The complications included blackmail, a pair of dice that just naturally rolled naturals, and a Los Angeles bathroom containing a corpse.’
November – The Mask of Glass (1957) by Holly Roth
Synopsis
‘Jimmy Kennemore, of the U.S. Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps, woke up in hospital and could not move for plaster casts. Twenty-four hours earlier he had been a normal, pleasant young man, working on a completely routine investigation. Regaining consciousness, he found himself injured and disfigured, and his red hair turned to white. Now, through his pain-fogged mind, he had to begin the desperate and tortuous piecing together of the monstruous events that had led to a shocking night of violence and deprived him of identity, friends, and future. But there were other events to come, events that were to assume the proportions of a nightmare and to carry him forward into that international No-Man’s Land where human life is the cheapest and most expendable commodity.’
December – Dead Lion (1949; 1953) by John and Emery Bonett
Synopsis
‘Cyprian Druse was a powerful literary exquisite who wrote fewer words for more money than any man living. A ruthless satirist and parodist, he was safe from satire and parody himself because he produced nothing creative: he only destroyed, and like a vampire fattened his own reputation on the blood of his victims. Feared, hated, respected, and, by many women, loved, he was not liked by anyone at all: and then, suddenly, he died. Murder was not suspected until, in a locked cabinet in his room, his nephew Simon found six gramophone recordings of six women passionately declaring their love for him – six women who all had good reason for wishing Cyprian dead.’
Over to You
Do you have any reading goals (big or small) for 2025?
Have you read any of the titles above? If so, would you recommend them?