Category Archives: 06. A Century of Crime

1938: The Wall by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The Wall
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1938
Genre: mystery: golden age (1920-1949)
Pages: 399
Project: a century of crime

Murder visits a seaside mansion in this gothic mystery from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author known as the American Agatha Christie. The house called Sunset has been Marcia’s summer home for her entire life. Both of her parents died there, and she and her brother spent their youth exploring its rambling hallways and seaside grounds. They love the old house, but Marcia’s sister-in-law has never taken to it. Juliette loathes the sea, and soon comes to loathe her husband, as well. After they divorce, Juliette pays a final visit to Sunset, demanding alimony. She is there for a few tense days before she disappears. It takes them a week to find her body. The peace at Sunset has been shattered, and Marcia must work quickly to keep her beloved childhood home from being forever spoiled. Somewhere in the creaky old mansion, a murderer lurks. Will Marcia be accused of the crime? Or will she be the next victim?

I have absolutely no idea why this book is titled “The Wall.” There is no wall. There may have been a ladder, but it was definitely not central to the plot. Having now gotten that out of the way, I really enjoyed this mystery, first published in 1938.

I retired just over two years ago – July 3, 2023 was my last day of full time work. I jokingly told all of my friends and family that July 4, 2023 was my personal Independence Day. I’ve never been the biggest fan of summer, but since my retirement, I’ve decided that I enjoy it a lot more. There’s something to the idea that summer is for slowing down, and vacationing, and endless hot days spent on the patio. These are pleasures I couldn’t take advantage of as a full-time, practicing lawyer with a busy caseload and a stressful job.

It took me basically two years to shake off the feeling of unease that I wasn’t doing retirement right, or that I would be going back to work soon. So, this summer is the first summer that I’ve really been able to lean into the idea of summer. Part of doing that has involved seeking out books that feel like summer to me.

This is a long introduction to one of the reasons that I enjoyed this book so much. It is set on one of those New England island/coast places where rich people spent their summers, in a grand but fading house, among the New York set that comes up to escape the city heat for the months of July and August. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? As long as you don’t get murdered.

It was August by that time, and August is the gay time on the island. Usually my calendar then is filled from morning until night, from club pool to lunch, from lunch to golf or a sail on the bay, and after that cocktails here and dinner there. But during the early part of that month I did little or nothing.

I have always disliked August – for many years, it was my least favorite month. I would like August if it was a gay time, filled with pools, lunches, sails on the bay and cocktails (I also dislike golf, so that’s not a draw). I’m trying to hate August less.

This is the third or fourth book by Mary Rinehart that I’ve read, and they all (so far) have shared a theme: the narrator is a young woman, usually from a wealthy family that is in decline (perhaps they lost all of their money in the Depression), there is a murder, she is vaguely involved, and there is a masculine love interest of some sort. I snagged this one on sale for $1.99, and I have a few more available to read. I’m looking forward to them.

1939: The Big Sleep by Philip Marlowe

The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
Rating: ★★★★½
Series: Philip Marlowe #1
Publication Date: February 6, 1939
Genre: noir
Pages: 231
ReRead?: Yes
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime

When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything a well dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

So begins The Big Sleep, the first of the novels featuring Philip Marlowe, the most famous and longest lasting of the hardboiled detectives in the noir tradition. Chandler writes like Hemingway, if I enjoyed Hemingway (and he wrote about crime). He has been imitated so many times that he is almost a parody of himself, except that he is so good.

I think I have read most of the Marlowe books previously, but never with any sort of intention. I have definitely not read Playback, the last of them. Has anyone read it? It never seems to be mentioned and may not be very good. I’m not sure if I’ve read The Little Sister. I’ve definitely read Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake and The Long Goodbye.

Chandler’s L.A. is a place, a character and a feeling. Nostalgia is a trap, and in the case of Marlowe, it’s a trap that is grimy, well-worn and slightly sordid. I don’t live in L.A., visit it only occasionally, and can barely think of it without thinking of Marlowe and Bosch, two characters that I associate most firmly with it.

The thing about The Big Sleep is that the plot is almost entirely beside the point. Everyone says that Chandler was all about character and place and I believe this to be true. Each sentence is beautifully crafted to convey a feeling – as the reader, I can see his characters; they are archetypes, but they are his archetypes and no one else’s, except for all of the admirers who came after and all of the compatriots who came before but maybe didn’t do it quite so well. I can see the places he writes about, as well, and smell them, and hear them, I can see the outline of the palm tree in the diminishing light, and smell the slightly unpleasant odor of salt water and sewage.

We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind. A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark. A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay in the fog. The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness.

Damn. That is so good.

But, back to the plot, which is convoluted and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It is fable at this point that when Chandler was writing the script for the movie adaptation, he was asked about one of the murders and who had committed it because the book overlooked identifying the perpetrator. It is reported that he said that he didn’t know. He had forgotten to resolve the plot point, and no one reading the book seems to have cared very much.

And isn’t it crazy that this book – which feels completely modern – was published 86 years ago.

1927: The Tragedy at Freyne

The Tragedy at Freyne
by Anthony Gilbert
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Scott Egerton #1
Publication Date: January 1, 1927
Genre: mystery: golden age (1920-1949)
Pages: 230
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

When Sir Simon Chandos is found poisoned in his library, with a confession in front of him and a phial of morphia tablets on the table at his side, suicide is the obvious deduction. This is a dreadful shock to the members of the house party gathered in his picturesque old Norman country house, Freyne Abbey. But the discovery of a trivial discrepancy, by one of the guests, turns the suspicion in the direction of murder, and from that slight clue the amateur detective, Scott Egerton, unravels the web of an exceptionally brilliant and cold-blooded plot…

Anthony Gilbert was the penname for Lucy Malleson, who also wrote under the name Anne Meredith. The first book I read by her was Portrait of a Murderer, published as Anne Meredith, which was reprinted by British Library Crime Classics to much success in 2017.

The Tragedy at Freyne is the first in her Scott Egerton series, and is a classic British country house closed circle/impossible crime mystery (these are obviously not the same trope – one can have an impossible crime without it being a closed circle, and vice versa, but I don’t want to go into more detail, in an effort to avoid major spoilers).

The set up is a weekend house party* at Freyne manor. The host, Simon Chandos, is found dead in the morning after a night of revelry and drama. There was an effort by the murderer to make it look like Chandos committed suicide, but this is quickly debunked.

The four of us—Bannister, Egerton, Dacre and I—had slept in adjoining rooms the previous night, the other side of the wing being closed, so that the step Miss Dennis had heard might have belonged to any of us, except for the lameness to which she testified. Above our rooms were the servants’ quarters, in a long wing stretching out in an ungainly manner from the side of the house, like a clumsy chicken trying to extend her leg, and fearful of being nipped.

There are a lot of twists and turns in this golden age mystery. There are also a fair few (typical) obnoxious statements about women, like this one:

As far as reason goes women have not progressed much from the stage of the savage whose head can hold only one idea at a time. That’s where men score. They do, as a rule, take the impersonal standpoint; women see life as individuals, and it’s as individuals that they regulate their lives. Law-givers? No sane man wants to see laws made by women. To begin with, not one in ten has a grain of respect for the law she wants to create. Lady Chandos hasn’t; Miss Dennis hasn’t. As for Miss St Claire, I don’t suppose she cares either.

Everytime I read something like this, I laugh out loud, thinking about men in public life who take nothing from the “impersonal” standpoint. But, I digress into politics (Trump. I’m talking about Trump). As a person who reads a lot of vintage fiction, it’s like water off of a duck’s back for me. What’s a woman – who is also a lawyer and a former prosecutor – supposed to do but laugh at this sort of nonsense.

Which brings me to the next point – as a former prosecutor, I often find myself thinking about whether or not the mystery presented wasn’t just solved, but was it also prosecutable? It’s obviously not a requirement that the “case” be prosecutable at the end of the book, but it’s interesting to think about. Many times I conclude that they are not.

This one, I would say, gets a yes from me. There are some solid clues that would make solid, admissible evidence to present in court. There is one piece of evidence related to typewriter print matching that is quite fun. If you remember typewriters, they had very unique characteristics (off kilter, damaged or faded portions of letters, spacing mismatches/issues, etc) that would be able to be linked with absolute certainty. Opportunity with respect to the morphia is well thought out. There is also a clear and compelling motive.

The murderer is a particularly nasty piece of work who leaves quite a path of destruction in (his/her) wake.

This one is available for kindle from Spitfire Publishers Ltd for a mere .99 in the U.S. For fans of golden age mystery, I recommend.

*Sadly, no one has ever invited me to a weekend house party at a manor in the English countryside, with or without murder.

1971: The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

The Day of the Jackal
by Frederick Forsyth
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: June 1, 1971
Genre: espionage
Pages: 434
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime

He is known only as “The Jackal”—a cold, calculating assassin without emotion, or loyalty, or equal. He’s just received a contract from an enigmatic employer to eliminate one of the most heavily guarded men in the world—Charles De Gaulle, president of France.

It is only a twist of fate that allows the authorities to discover the plot. They know next to nothing—only that the assassin is on the move. To track him, they dispatch their finest detective, Claude Lebel, on a manhunt that will push him to his limit, in a race to stop an assassin’s bullet from reaching its target.

I decided to read this after finishing the Peacock adaptation starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch, which my husband and I watched last month.

I had some fairly significant frustrations with the series, most importantly, I found basically the entire plot to be unworkable. Without going into too many spoilers, the entire series revolves around the release of some kind of a digital app that is going to drop on a specific date & at a specific time, and that a bunch of bad billionaires, including one played by Charles Dance (damn, can that man inhabit the evil rich dude character), want to derail because it is somehow going to reveal their financial chicanery to the normie plebes. They hire the Jackal to commit an impossible assassination.

My problem with the plot, and it’s a biggie, is that there is absolutely NO REASON EVER GIVEN as to why the irritating, Musk-ish, tech guy – who knows that he is the target of an assassination plot – doesn’t just release it early and make his assassination irrelevant.

Also, by the way, this iteration of the Jackal is the most incompetent master assassin of all time. The showrunner’s desire to humanize him really got in the way of him being convincing as the worlds greatest assassin. And the agent hunting him, played by Lashana Lynch, is no better, and may actually be worse. Anyway, I kind of enjoyed it, but it mostly annoyed me.

So, moving on to the book! After I decided that I would go back to the source material, I checked my kindle library and sure enough, I already owned it. This happens to me with somewhat embarrassing regularity – I bought it in June, 2018, probably because I thought my dad might want to reread it. I think it might have been be a reread for me as well, but if it was, I read it at least 35 years ago, and remembered nothing of it. There was no sense of background familiarity as I read.

The book is far superior, in my opinion. It doesn’t suffer at all from the plot problems of the television series. It’s a very engaging and believable spy thriller that relies on a lot of historical detail about the relationship between the target of the assassination – French President Charles De Gaulle – and the assassins – his former officers in the OAS who become disillusioned when he withdraws from Algeria, a former French colony. The Jackal is convincing as a baddie, but doesn’t quite reach anti-hero status – he is utterly amoral and ruthless. The French police officer hunting him is a very compelling character, and displays a lot of the best characteristics of law enforcement. He is humble and persistent, never flamboyant or attention-seeking.

The last 100 pages or so are absorbing. I really wasn’t sure how the book would end, so the tension was thick right up to the last moments.

I really love vintage spy thrillers – every time I read one, I want to read more.

2016: When the Music’s Over by Peter Robinson

When the Music's Over
by Peter Robinson
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Inspector Banks #23
Publication Date: July 14, 2016
Genre: mystery: modern (1980-present)
Pages: 421
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

When the body of a young girl is found in a remote countryside lane, evidence suggests she was drugged, abused and thrown from a moving van – before being beaten to death.

While DI Annie Cabbot investigates the circumstances in which a 14-year-old could possibly fall victim to such a crime, newly promoted Detective Superintendent Alan Banks must do the same – but the crime Banks is investigating is the coldest of cases. Fifty years ago Linda Palmer was attacked by celebrity entertainer Danny Caxton, yet no investigation ever took place. Now Caxton stands accused at the centre of a historical abuse investigation and it’s Banks’s first task as superintendent to find out the truth.

As more women step forward with accounts of Caxton’s manipulation, Banks must piece together decades-old evidence. With his investigation uncovering things from the past that would rather stay hidden, he will be led down a path even darker than the one he set out to investigate…

When I was thinking about my 2023 reading, I decided that I wanted to find a new, long-running series and immerse myself in it. I cast about a bit, and settled on the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson. I read the first one, Gallows View, (originally published in 1987) in January, 2023. I read Children of the Revolution, the 21st entry in the series, in January 2024. At that point, I took a break. The 22nd book in the series, Abbatoir Blues, isn’t available as a kindle book through my library, and I just sort of lost my series mojo.

There are a total of 28 books in the series as of now – Robinson is still writing about Inspector Banks.

I decided that it was time to catch up with Inspector Banks in 2025. I’ve requested that elusive 22nd book as a print edition through my library, and checked out When the Music’s Over, which I am using for the 2016 entry.

The plot of When the Music’s Over was cribbed from real life. I’m not particularly up on notorious English crimes, but even I had heard of the incidents that provided the basis for this novel: the Jimmy Savile scandal and the Rotherham child exploitation ring. (In odd moment of serendipity, (that fucker) Elon Musk has suddenly decided to be interested in the Rotherham grooming gangs at the exact same time I read this book. I hate that guy, even if what happened in Rotherham is indefensible.)

I felt like Robinson did a pretty good job meshing the two plots. The thematic coherence of the child abuse scandals – one historical, but with impacts continuing into the present, one current day – worked really well. He also split the two investigations between Banks and Annie Cabbot. Each of them displayed their personalities in their respective investigations. DI Cabbot charges in with her usual lack of discretion, and newly promoted DS Banks predictably gets himself into trouble with his superiors. It’s an open question as to whether he will retain that promotion in the aftermath of his investigation.

I am frequently annoyed by DS Banks, but I invariably come back for more. That must mean something, right?

1967: The Man on the Balcony by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

The Man on the Balcony
by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö
Translated from: Swedish
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Martin Beck #3
Publication Date: January 1, 1967
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 194
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

The chilling third -- and breakthrough -- novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by the internationally renowned crime writing duo, finds Martin Beck investigating a string of child murders. With an introduction by Jo Nesbo: "Sjöwall and Wahlöö have shoulders that can accomodate all of today's crime writers. And we are all there."

In the once peaceful parks of Stockholm, a killer is stalking young girls and disposing their bodies. The city is on edge, and an undercurrent of fear has gripped its residents. Martin Beck, now a superintendent, has two possible witnesses: a silent, stone-cold mugger and a mute three year old boy. With the likelihood of another murder growing as each day passes, the police force work night and day. But their efforts have offered little insight into the methodology of the killer. Then a distant memory resurfaces in Beck's mind, and he may just have the break he needs.

This is the third book in the Martin Beck series, which was published in Sweden and translated into English. The fourth book in the series, The Laughing Policeman, won the Edgar Award.

This is a classic police procedural – Martin Beck is all work and no play. It is focuses on Beck, although some of his colleagues have supporting roles, and it’s focused on the hard graft of investigating crime. Beck is a damaged protagonist – his personal life is in shambles, he is pretty much miserable all of the time. The characters feel very real. I’ve known a lot of police officers – I was a prosecutor for over a quarter century – and most fictional police officers feel about as real as the cowboys played by John Wayne in classic Westerns.

These guys, though, they feel real. They can be petty and irritable. They are not larger than life, rather they grind out the day-to-day work of solving crimes. They are manifestly unhandsome, they are of average, or sometimes even below-average, intelligence, they are plodding. They do not have magical powers of insight or understanding and, in fact, sometimes things are basically beating them in the face before they figure out what is going on. But, they figure shit out. That’s how real police work happens. With detectives putting on their shoes and socks and knocking on doors and talking to people.

I used to read a lot more Nordic Noir than I do now – especially Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallender series, and, of course, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. I’m trying to hit crime books that were sort of defining of various aspects of the genre as part of this project, and the Martin Beck series, in many ways, is the source material for all of those authors who came later.

My library has all 10 of the Vintage kindle editions that were re-issued in the 1990’s.

1970: Death in the Grand Manor by Anne Morice

Death in the Grand Manor
by Anne Morice
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Tessa Crichton #1
Publication Date: July 1, 1970
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 220
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of crime

'For God's sake don't get the idea that you're Miss Marple. It could quite conceivably lead to your being whacked on the head.'

The narrator of this classic mystery is fashionable young actress, Tessa Crichton-obliged to turn private detective when murder strikes in the rural stronghold of Roakes Common. Leading hate-figures in the community are Mr. and Mrs. Cornford - the nouveaux riches of the local Manor House - suspected by some of malicious dog killing.

Tessa however has other things on her mind when she goes to stay with her cousin Toby and his wife Matilda. There's her blossoming career, for one thing, not to mention coping with her eccentric cousins. Also the favourable impression made by a young man she meets under odd circumstances in the local pub. If it wasn't for that dead body turning up in a ditch . . .

The murder mystery will lead Tessa to perilous danger, but she solves it herself, witty, blithe and soignée to the last. The story is distinguished by memorable characterisation and a sharp ear for dialogue, adding to the satisfaction of a traditional cunningly-clued detective story.

Death in the Grand Manor was originally published in 1970. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

I had never even heard of this series when DSP announced that they were reissuing it. Death in the Grand Manor is the first book in the series, published in 1970. There are a total of 23 books, the last of which, Fatal Charm, was published in 1989. Whenever I think that I’m fairly well-versed in the history of crime fiction, someone comes up with a 20 book series that I’ve never encountered.

I liked this first book, but I didn’t love it. Having said that, I was intrigued enough that I will seek out a few more books in the series, especially since they are available for the kindle for $3.99 each.

I was 4 when this one was published, and I think part of what I enjoyed was the time period. I was just starting law school in 1989, when the final book was published. One of the things that attracts me to the series is the feeling that I will be able to reimmerse myself in a time that feels very familiar to me from my childhood, although I grew up in the U.S. and these books are set in England. Based on this first entry, the series isn’t exactly “cozy,” but it’s also not a police procedural or any kind of noir.

I started it in December, as my last Dean Street December book, but didn’t finish it until January 2, 2025.

The Heckler by Ed McBain

The Heckler
by Ed McBain
Rating: ★★★½
Series: 87th Precinct #12
Publication Date: January 1, 1960
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 288
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

"There are crazy people all over, you know that, don't you?" Spring was intoxicating the city air, but the harassing anonymous telephone calls planting seeds of fear around town were no April Fool's joke. Crank calls and crackpot threats reported to the 87th Precinct by a respected businessman were not exactly top priority for detectives Carella and Meyer -- until a brutal homicide hits the papers. Connections are getting made fast and furious, and there's a buzz in the air about the Deaf Man, a brilliant criminal mastermind. Now, the 87th Precinct is buying time to reveal the voice on the other end of the line -- as the level of danger rises from a whisper to a scream....

The 87th Precinct series spanned nearly 50 years. The first book, Cop Hater, was published in 1956; the 55th, and final, book, Fiddlers, was published in 2005, after the death of the author at age 78.

A few years ago, the bulk of the series went on sale in its ebook format for $.99 each and I bought most of them. At this point, most of them are available on the KU library, so I’ve been able to borrow the ones that weren’t on sale for free. This is book 12, and was published in 1960’s. If you’re counting, that means that McBain published 12 books in 4 years, which is a pretty remarkable pace, even for books that tend to be around 250 pages.

I decided to read this series, in part, because I was interested in how an author might treat the changes in policing in real time. In my real life, I am a retired prosecutor. Between my first year as a new Deputy D.A., in 1996, and the year I retired, almost 28 years later, in 2023, policing, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system underwent massive changes. Those massive changes were on the heels of earlier, even more massive changes. The forensic sciences, crime scene investigative tools, recording and photography, the introduction of women into both policing and the legal field, and changes to the legal landscape make the policing of 1956 – or 1960 – almost unrecognizable to what we do today.

I obviously wanted to use one of the books in this series for my Century of Crime project. My plan for the project is to limit myself to one book per series, so I’m filling 1960, but will continue to read the series into the future.

As to this book, it’s a fun one. It’s my understanding from my research that the primary antagonist introduced in The Heckler, the Deaf Man, continues to appear off and on until the end. There is also a fun little reference to the Sherlock Holmes canon and the story “The Redheaded League,” that provides some structure to the mystery.

Nonetheless, this is a book that was very clearly written by a man and published in 1960. Women are purely decorative and substantively irrelevant. There are no women in the squadroom. If a woman is mentioned at all, it is either as a wife or as a sexual object. I’m hoping very much to see this change over the course of the series.

ACOC 1946: Murder within Murder by Frances & Richard Lockridge

Murder Within Murder
by Frances Lockridge, Richard Lockridge
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Mr. & Mrs. North #10
Publication Date: January 1, 1946
Genre: mystery: golden age (1920-1949)
Pages: 301
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of crime

Mr. and Mrs. North seek the killer of a terribly unpleasant society woman

Miss Amelia Gipson doesn’t tolerate foolishness. She doubts she’s ever made a mistake, and it’s unlikely she would change anything about her life—even if she knew she was in danger. While researching a famous murder case at the public library, she becomes ill at her desk. Within minutes, she’s dead. Miss Gipson would be pleased with the coroner. He doesn’t muck around when delivering the cause of death. There’s simply no question: She was poisoned.

Fortunately, Miss Gipson was one of Jerry North’s authors, which means that the accomplished amateur sleuth has another case on his hands. With the help of his utterly brilliant—if slightly strange—wife, Pamela, Mr. North soon finds that the question isn’t who wanted Miss Gipson dead, but who didn’t.

Murder within Murder is the 10th book in the Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Murder Within Murder is the 10th book in the long running Mr. & Mrs. North series, which spanned two decades. The first book, The Norths Meet Murder, was published in 1940; the final book, Murder by the Book, was released in 1963. I previously posted about the first three Mr. & Mrs. North books in 2020, in a post titled Mr. and Mrs. North and Their Glam and Fab Murder Life.

Since 2020, I have been making my way through the 14 books that are available from my local library. I’ve read 1 through 8, and for some reason my library skipped #9, Death of a Tall Man, picking up with the series at book 10. Sadly, I’m nearly to the end of what’s available to me for free. Once I finish with the library inventory, Open Road Media/Mysterious Press has reprinted the entire series for the kindle, and I will have to decide if I am going to buy book 9, and 16 through 26.

I probably will, because I love this series. It’s light and funny, without being twee or cozy. Pam and Jerry North are exceptionally entertaining amateur sleuths, constantly getting themselves mixed up in murderous happenings. If Tommy & Tuppence Beresford hosted cocktail parties in a glamorous 1940’s NYC walkup, they might have been Pam and Jerry North.

The side characters are also so good – their Detective friend, Lt. Weigand, is solidly pleasant without being bumbling, and his wife, Dorian, is a nice additional to the crew.

This specific mystery is a good one as well – some of the series entries are stronger than others, and I would rate this one fairly highly. It has one of the victims that you love to hate, as a reader, everyone has a motive, and there are suspects galore.

Given how popular mystery series adaptations are, I’m a little bit surprised that no one has rediscovered the Norths because, with the right casting, it would make a great Netflix/Hulu/Prime series.

Dean Street December: Death In The Forest

Death in the Forest
 by Moray Dalton
Rating: ★★★
Series: Inspector Hugh Collier #9
Publication Date: January 1, 1939
Genre: mystery: golden age (1920-1949)
Pages: 338
Project: 2024 read my hoard, a century of crime
"The man's heart was dicky. It couldn't stand a shock. The question is-what shock?" Roger Frere is delighted to meet the lovely Celia Holland. But Celia is leaving for the South American republic of San Rinaldo, taking a post as governess. When Celia gets accidentally mixed up in a bloody San Rinaldo revolution, she manages to return to England . . . and finds herself plunged into murderous local mysteries. A stranger has been discovered in the forest, having apparently died of sheer fright. Roger, now married, lives at Frere Court, with his bride Nina, plus a grasping stepmother and a theatrical half-brother. Also in the neighbourhood is Major Enderby, a solitary individual, retired after service in India. 
The Major seems to knowing more than he lets on about strange events in the area. These now include creepy nocturnal prowlings by a creature unknown; the poisoning murder of a housemaid; and an attempt to dispose of Celia Holland using a gift of dates-sprinkled with ground glass. 
Inspector Collier comes down from Scotland Yard to learn what's going on. He is presented with a truly extraordinary problem, one which should baffle and enthrall the devoted Dalton reader. Death in the Forest was first published in 1939. This new edition includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

Dean Street December is hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home. You can find her main post here.

This was a very weird golden age mystery by an author with whom I have very limited familiarity. I read her Christmas mystery, The Night of Fear, back in 2021, and liked it, although I remember only the barest outlines of the plot.

It’s hard to discuss this book without spoiling it, because what makes it weird would be a spoiler. Let’s just say that I wasn’t expecting one of its plot points in a mystery published in 1939. The Forward by Curtis Evans very carefully doesn’t spoil the book, and he continues the Forward into an Afterward, where he does delve into the rather unique plot device that Dalton employs here.

There’s also a fairly long section of the book that occurs outside of England, in “San Rinaldo,” a made up South American country described as “one of the smaller and more backward of the South American republics,” where the main character, Celia, has taken a post as a governess to two young girls. There is an uprising in San Rinaldo, and Celia barely escapes with her life and returns to England.

All in all, I think that the book was just too strange for me and I didn’t really connect with it. I didn’t not like it, but it also wasn’t really my jam.

I have at least one more book by Dalton, One by One They Disappeared, on my kindle, but I’m unlikely to get to it before the end of the month. I’m planning to try to read one more Furrowed Middlebrow book, Murder While You Work, by Susan Scarlett this year.