2024 is my 9th year of blogging, and despite slowing down a bit in recent years, I have managed 107 posts this year. When I started my blog in 2015, I never really considered that I would have written as many posts as this or that my blog would still be running after all this time. The way people are interacting with social media and the way they use social media to access content about books has changed quite lot during this period, but hopefully I am still relevant to some readers out there.
To acknowledge this blog post milestone, I thought I would share with you some of the books that have landed on my TBR in last month or so. Do you spot some good ones in the pile, that should get bumped up a notch or two? Or maybe there is a title which catches your eye which you want to track down for yourself?
Starting at the top of the pile (see the photo above) we have…
Jack Iams is an author I have been curious about for a while. I have also been on the lookout for new-to-me Christmas set classic crime novels. As this epic Christmas mystery ranked list shows, I have read the odd one or two, and finding new ones is getting harder each year. So Iams’ Do Not Murder Before Christmas (1949) fitted the bill nicely, with the plot being centred on Uncle Poot, a toy maker who is murdered on Christmas Eve. A newspaper editor and a social worker decide to track down his killer. Looking online this novel has garnered some positive reviews from fellow bloggers. Curtis Evans who writes at The Passing Tramp commented that:
‘Iams’ narratives go down like the smoothest of eggnogs, and you can easily read Do Not Murder Before Christmas in an evening (I especially liked the chapter titles, which are adapted from the poem “The Night Before Christmas/A Visit from St. Nicholas”). It’s a good example of American detective fiction at that time, with its zippy narrative and streamlined mystery.’
Furthermore, Tracey at Bitter Tea and Mystery said, ‘this book was a pleasure to read’, whilst Bev at My Reader’s Block found this story to be ‘an extraordinarily fun American mystery’. So, it sounds like I have picked a good one here. I won’t be reading this one straight away, for the obvious reason of wanting to save it until December. My copy of this novel seems to have originally been sold from the Book Nook in Illinois. It’s certainly accrued a few air miles since then!
The next book joining my TBR pile is a review copy Galileo Publishing kindly sent me of Clifford Witting’s The Case of the Busy Bees (1952). This will be my 10th Witting read and the cover and the title definitely look inviting.
On a first glance, the crime setup looks interesting as the police have to split their resources to cover more than one crime:
‘Could there be any connection between the theft of a tomahawk from Monk Jewel museum and a notorious gang of violent thieves who called themselves ‘The Busy Bees’? Sergeant Bradfield is sent to investigate the theft while Detective-Inspector Charlton is looking into what he feels are the far more significant crimes of The Busy Bees. But then a gruesome murder takes place and it begins to look as if there could well be a connection between the two?’
Galileo Publishing are doing a great job of bringing Witting’s books back into print, which is all the more important given how hard some of them are to track down second hand.
I am going to share the next two titles as a pair, since they are the second and third titles in the Shady Hollow series by Juneau Black. This is a series and an author I only came across by accident earlier this month, but the first book was such a hit that I went and picked up the next two titles, having spotted them on the Oxfam Website.
I am fond of anthropomorphic animals, but I think it does take skill to create a convincing fictional world where such creatures populate it. Even more so when you are also trying to write a murder mystery. Black (penname for Jocelyn Cole and Sharon Nagel) does well on both scores, and I was thoroughly captivated by the setting and characters they create. In Cold Clay (2017) the discovery of a skeleton buried beneath an apple tree sees the well-loved coffee owner, Joe the moose, being arrested for the crime, whilst in Mirror Lake (2020), an eccentric rat ‘claims her husband – who is standing right next to her – has been murdered.’ Is the rat claiming to be her husband an imposter? In both cases local reporter Vera Vixen sets out to find the truth.
I first tried Mabel Seeley’s work a couple of years ago, reading The Listening House (1938). It is a mystery which was reprinted by Berkeley Prime Crime, and they reissued another of Seeley’s stories, The Chuckling Fingers (1941). During some online book browsing I came across this latter title and since the price was right, I thought I would give it a go, as I remember enjoying The Listening House.
There is much peril in store for the female lead Ann Gay before she can prove that the increasingly violent pranks being inflicted on the Heaton family, have not been caused by her friend Jacqueline Heaton. Ann believes she is being framed and proving her innocence becomes even more important when the pranks lead to murder. The Saturday Review of Literature thought The Chuckling Fingers was ‘first rate’ and they describe it as a ‘shivery yarn of vengeance murders in lumber magnate’s family.’
Crime fiction with quirky and/or metafictional elements is something I am often drawn to, and it was this interest which led to my next acquisition, Rupert Holmes’ The McMaster’s Guide to Homicide: Murder Your Employer (2023).
Here is the blurb which fills you on what it’s all about:
‘Who hasn’t wondered for a split second what the world would be like the object of your affliction ceased to exist? But then you’ve probably never heard of The McMasters Conservatory, dedicated to the consummate execution of the homicidal arts. To gain admission, a student must have an ethical reason for erasing someone who deeply deserves a fate no worse (nor better) than death. The campus of this “Poison Ivy League” college-its location unknown to even those who study there-is where you might find yourself the practice target of a classmate…and where one’s mandatory graduation thesis is getting away with the perfect murder of someone whose death will make the world a much better place to live.’
I have never read anything by Holmes before, so I am not sure what to expect. Hopefully the premise will live up to its potential.
Conversely, Out of Control (1945) by Baynard Kendrick will be my third read by this author. I think in America it might have been reprinted as an eBook, so it might be easier to access over there. Unlike the other two I have read, Out of Control, the 6th Duncan Maclain mystery is an inverted one, in which a blackmail victim decides to deal with their problem permanently.
The images above are for the Dell Mapback edition (left) and Mysterious Press edition (right). My own copy is less visually exciting, a jacketless hardback by Methuen & Co.
My next addition is for a round robin mystery called The President’s Mystery Plot (1969).
It has an unusual production history with all of it, bar the final chapter, being serialised in 1935. The final chapter in which the mystery was finally solved was written in the 1960s by Erle Stanley Gardner. The idea for this story began when apparently one day in 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to his friend, Fulton Oursler (editor of Liberty Magazine):
“How can a man disappear with five million dollars in any negotiable form and not be traced? […] For years I have tried to answer that problem. In every method suggested I have been able to find a flaw. The more you consider the question, the more difficult it becomes. Now – can you tell me how it can be done?”
Oursler was clearly a man who was good delegation as his reply was: “Suppose […] that we were to ask the leading writers of the United States to solve this problem. Why could they not all collaborate on a mystery story in which your problem is dramatized in the person of a man faced with this predicament?” Aside from Gardner finally pulling an ending together, thirty years after the rest of the story was produced, the other contributing authors were: Rupert Hughes, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Anthony Abbot, Rita Weiman, S. S. Van Dine and John Erskine. I have only heard of and read three of these authors: Gardner, Abbot and Van Dine. So, if you know anything about the others do let me know.
If Rupert Holmes’ novel was a modern mystery wild card, then I think Addison Simmons’ Death on the Campus (1935) would fit the bill for classic crime wild card, it being a novel and author I know little to nothing about.
This story was reprinted by Coachwhip Publications and as the title suggests it is an academic set mystery:
‘A killer is loose on campus! Amateur criminologist Professor Philip Yerkes has been found shot dead in his locked office at Chatham House, and the dread digit of suspicion is now pointing at two of Yerkes’ own university colleagues, John Hardwick Bailey, one of the country’s foremost Shakespeare scholars, and Thaddeus Davis, noted authority on English poetry. Can young Professor Ben Ingram, who discovered the dead man’s body and is desperately in love with Professor Bailey’s beautiful daughter Mary, exonerate his friends—when even he has reason to doubt their innocence? What does neurotic youngster Leonard Crane know about the affair? Or smoothly handsome Guido Luciano? And just where is that odd janitor, Schultz? Can Professor Meade, the scandal-averse university president, keep those blundering police flatfoots at bay in the bloody groves of academe as Professor Bailey tries to find a satisfactory solution to the case?’
It feels like I have not read many new-to-me academic mysteries of late, so hopefully this title will fill that gap nicely. It is hard to tell from the blurb if this is a locked room mystery or not, as it all depends how the victim was locked in his office and also whether there were any obvious alternative entrances.
We have now reached the bottom of the pile, and the final recent addition to my TBR, Kristen Perrin’s How to Solve Your Own Murder (2024). It has some familiar elements, such as the murder victim, Frances Adams, being someone who in the busybody manner knows far too much about the other people in her village, and very little of it good.
However, the victim’s motivation throws in variation, as the reason for her doing this is because Frances was once told in 1965 by a fortune teller that she would be murdered, and over the next sixty years, she tries her best to find out who her killer is intended to be. Yet despite all France’s detective work, she does not beat her murderer and the challenge of unmasking them is given to Annie, her great-niece and if she is successful then she will be able to inherit all of her great-aunt’s wealth. Again, this was another purchase made due to an intriguing premise.
STOP PRESS!
ONE MORE BOOK HAS JUST JOINED MY TBR PILE FROM TODAY’S POST.
Book post is always good post in my opinion and Cornell Woolrich’s Waltz into Darkness (1947) just popped through my letter box a short while ago, hence it not being included in my photo above, which I took yesterday. I have enjoyed my two other forays into Woolrich’s work to date: The Bride Wore Black (1940) and Deadline at Dawn (1944). Waltz into Darkness received a full 5-star rating from Jim who blogs at The Invisible Event, so I am hoping this will be another good one.
So, what books have recently joined your TBR pile? And which ones have you been eyeing up as possible future additions? Here are some I am keeping my eye on…
