It has been a reasonably busy month on the blog, with 21 posts, although I did rather lose my reading mojo at the end of the month. However, some new books arrived from American Mystery Classics yesterday, so hopefully I will be able to find it again.
I managed to review 11 books in March, and pleasingly most of them were books which have been sitting on my TBR pile for a while. Not all of these were a raving success, but some were very enjoyable, and it felt good to finally get round to reading them. I recently counted how many books I have on my physical TBR pile, and the total is 143! I was surprised as it didn’t look that bad! I think many of them are thin paperbacks which take up less space, hence looking like a smaller pile. But before I got too down-hearted I did remind myself that I read nearly 150 books a year and have so far read 40, so 143 on my pile doesn’t seem too bad in the end. After all any bookworm needs an adequate number of books to choose from.
March also saw me publishing a series of posts that chart my 50 favourite mysteries from the 1940s and it was great to hear from readers which books they love from this decade too. I also published a set of three puzzles all to do with modern British female crime writers. There is a logic puzzle, two hidden word puzzles and a final puzzle which puts your knowledge of crime fiction and geography to the test. Answers for these puzzles will be appearing later in April.
For March’s Book of the Month, I am having three winners (as it’s my blog and I make the rules lol), one modern and two classics. Beginning with the most recent book, my favourite modern mystery was…
I was a bit sceptical going into Susie Dent’s Guilty by Definition (2024), as celebrity-written crime novels can vary considerably in quality, and I had previously tried to start it a few times and got no further than the first few pages. However, I am glad that I persevered past the opening chapter, as the author does offer an interesting and intriguing cold case mystery. Dent is good at seeding her narrative with gradual developments, so there is no dearth of new information in the middle. The setting and the characters are also well done, creating a fictional world you enjoy spending time in, making this an engaging read.
As to my two joint classic crime winners, the first is a novel that has been sat on my TBR pile for nearly 6 years…
Murder by Jury (1932) by Ruth Barr Sanborn is possibly the earliest example of a mystery novel featuring a juror being murdered by another jury member, whilst deliberating a trial. The claustrophobic nature of the setting is used to great effect, and I found this to be an entertaining dialogue-driven story, and it keeps you keen to find out what happens next. The issue of social pressure is also deployed well within the tale, providing plenty of potential motives for bumping off the victim.
My second vintage mystery book of the month sees a return to the work of Richard Hull…
My Own Murderer (1940) is an inverted mystery told from the point of view of a solicitor who has a client land on his doorstep one night, asking for help, as they have just murdered their valet who wanted to blackmail them. The interest lies not in what has happened, but in what will happen next and where will this initial situation take these two characters. It is a narrative structure which is highly dependent on the psychology of the protagonists, as their relationship is far from cordial and instead is quite toxic. There is a cat and mouse element to it and a sting in the novel’s tale. This is perhaps not Hull’s most complicated of mysteries, but I found it to be a well told one.
Looking ahead into April, I finished my first book of the month last night, The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito (1943) by Erle Stanley Gardner. I think it will be one of my top favourites by this author and I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts on it, later this week. So the bar for April’s reading has already been set quite high. My next read will be Murder by the Clock (1929) by Rufus King, an author I have not tried before. After that I will be reading the next title in my Green Penguin Book reading challenge, The Four of Hearts (1936) by Ellery Queen. After that we will have to see what I am in the mood for!
What books do you hope to read in April? And what was your favourite read of March?