When I counted up how many books I had read in December, the total looked quite impressive, 28. Well, it did until I counted how many of those books were Garfield collections (Answer: 12). Nevertheless, I still managed 11 books for the blog and even a review for a Death in Paradise jigsaw.
It was a busy month for the blog as it was that time of year when I host the Reprint of the Year awards. If you missed the results, then here is a link. During December I hoped to reduce the Christmas mystery section of my TBR pile and I did pretty well, reading seven out of the eight I mentioned. Although I did feel one of the mysteries had little to nothing to do with Christmas/the Christmas season, so I won’t be adding it to my epic ranking list of Christmas mysteries. I will be adding the other six in due course.
December also saw me completing my short story collection reading challenge, and I did a roundup post which you can read here. Having finished one challenge, I decided to launch one for 2025, this time going for a Green Penguin reading challenge. I have not really set myself any other challenges for the blog, other than the universally held one of trying to keep on top of my TBR pile (which given the deluge of books I received at Christmas, may be a little tricky!). If you would like to see which books I got at Christmas, I did a post. A few further books entered the pile after this post, as I levelled up on the Bookmarks website (a survey website Penguin Books run). I am now a Humbolt Penguin! The prize was £100 worth of Penguin books, and I did go for some of their crime fiction reprints (surprise surprise), such as I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich, but among other books I have also put in for a copy of the forthcoming Horowitz title. So that will be a nice book surprise for later in the year, when it turns up.
After all that blog-admin I can now move on to the Book of the Month and in the end, I decided to award it to one of my Christmas mystery reads: Jack Iams’ Do Not Murder Before Christmas (1949).
Iams has an engaging writing style and is good at keeping up the pace, which I felt balanced out the lack of direct sleuthing. The motive for the murder is an interesting one and linked to the victim’s work in specific way.
My current read is The Ghost It Was (1936) by Richard Hull, which is the first book in my Green Penguin reading challenge. After that I am not sure what I will pick next to read. What are you reading at the moment? In the next week I hope to post a comparative post concerning two mysteries which are both centred on the same true crime.
Finally, if you are a fan of Philip Macdonald or Richard Hull, then you might be interested to know that I have a few books for sale on eBay. It can be hard to get seen on that website, so I thought I would spread the word on here, since if you are reading this post, then you’re likely to have a passing interest in classic crime fiction.