So much for variety. What’s consistent is the quality, which is exemplary.
Think the English have a monopoly on the classic, fair-play detective stories that flourished between the two world wars? Think again, says this lineup of 14 all-American reprints dating from 1925 to 1955.
The keynotes here are variety and consistency. There are classics like Ellery Queen’s brainy “The Adventure of the African Traveler” and rediscoveries like “Postiche,” by Mignon G. Eberhart, whom editor Penzler aptly describes as the Mary Higgins Clark of her day. Fans of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Anthony Boucher’s Sister Ursula will find the sleuths in the rare short stories “The Case of the Crimson Kiss” and “The Stripper.” Pamela and Jerry North meet murder at a class reunion in Frances and Richard Lockridge’s “There’s Death for Remembrance,” and the Great Merlini solves a locked-room murder in Clayton Rawson’s “From Another World.” H.F. Heard’s “The Enchanted Garden” is a floridly written Sherlock-ian pastiche about the mysterious Mr. Mycroft; Chicago lawyer John J. Malone talks a suicidal woman off a ledge and solves her actress mother’s apparent suicide in the pungent “Goodbye, Goodbye!” Neighbors come together to help solve the case of a poisoned dog in Charlotte Armstrong’s “The Enemy”; a much wealthier dog narrowly escapes a second poisoning in Patrick Quentin’s “Puzzle for Poppy.” The principals in Baynard Kendrick’s “5-4=Murderer” draw no closer together than you’d expect people at a truck stop to do; the family home in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “Locked Doors” might as well be a prison. In the longest story, Cornell Woolrich’s house detective investigates a series of fatal leaps years apart from a single hotel window in “The Mystery in Room 913.” The only serious disappointment is the absence of John Dickson Carr and Rex Stout.
So much for variety. What’s consistent is the quality, which is exemplary.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61316-215-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: American Mystery Classics
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
