So the year has turned once more and here we are, heads bent to it again, battling the January gloom. A opportunity perhaps to try and flex the mind, scrape off some of those flakes of rust. Books help, of course, as books help with most things. I’m having a dabble with StoryGraph to track my reading this year, currently running alongside Goodreads which I have used for quite a number of years now. I had forgotten that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but frankly I would be massively hypocritical to say this was the main reason I am looking to move. Instead it is the appeal of a more attractive and user friendly UI and hopefully something that’s a bit quicker, at least in the app version. There is also more data analysis available which might be fun, although I know without any technology to help me that the majority of my reading is detective fiction, followed increasingly closely by mid-century middlebrow fiction, often broadly in the romance genre.

In terms of detective fiction then, it’s been something of a mixed bag recently. All of the new-to-me detective novels set in the festive period that I read in 2024 were disappointing. This may say as much about me as it does the books, but I found Brian Flynn’s ‘Exit Sir John’ and Christopher Bush’s ‘Dancing Dead’ to be fairly dull and dreary reads. I persevered, but almost wish I hadn’t for they both rather soured my mood towards the season almost before it began. Both are too puzzle orientated for my tastes, and Bush in particular suffers dreadfully from employing the technique of explaining the thinking processes of his detective (in this case the tedious Ludovic Travers) in excruciating detail. I’ve read other early Bush novels in the Travers series and came away with the same impressions, so why I thought that this one might be different/better eludes me. Later books are, I’m told, better, particularly when Bush switches to the first person narrative. Perhaps a resolution for 2025 ought to be to try one. Or to studiously avoid altogether. Both are options.

Brian Flynn’s Anthony Bathurst is slightly more appealing than Travers, and ‘Exit Sir John’, being a late example of Flynn’s work (book 34 in the series, republished by Dean Street Press) shows a degree more maturity. As a post-WW2 (1947) it manages to retain something of a flavour of pre-war times which can be both a pleasure and a frustration. It feels therefore rather like a book which isn’t quite sure of its place in the firmament and whilst this is understandable for a writer for whom the vast majority of their work was produced in the ‘golden age’ of the interwar years, my preferred late 1940s and early 1950s works are those where the writer embraces at least the possibilities of a more hopeful and equitable society. That said, ‘Exit Sir John’ does touch on the post war turmoil for the upper classes quite nicely, although the personal appeal for me is that the country house setting is one ‘High Fitchet’ in Monfitchet in Essex, this being the English base for the spread of my surname, itself ‘imported’ from Normandy.

Disappointing too is the 2024 Christmas addition to the British Library Crime Classics series. Originally published in 1948, Elizabeth Anthony’s ‘Dramatic Murder’ was ‘lost’ for 75 years and I have to say that on the evidence it might have been better to stay that way. I’m sure that others will find something of pleasure in it, but I am not sure what that might be. Perhaps those interested in the theatrical world might find amusement in the rather two dimensional and stereotypically daubed characters, but in truth I suspect they would find them to be the loathsome caricatures that irritated me during the days when I trudged through the book, regularly putting it down and picking it up again in the vain hope it might get better. Or end soon. I persevered, but could hardly recommend that anyone else should do likewise. My most pleasant memories of the book, by some margin, are the glasses of sherry (a very old Palo Cortado and a delicious Oloroso) I consumed whilst reading.

Better by some considerable distance in terms of my Christmas detective fiction reading were some relatively new-to-me re-reads. Best of all remains Clifford Witting’s delightful ‘Catt Out Of The Bag’. Originally published in 1939, this in the fourth of the peerless Inspector Charlton series, although this time out Witting returns to play with a first person narrative contributed by bookseller John Rutherford, as utilised in his debut ‘Murder In Blue’. It works well, for Rutherford is an eminently likeable character and he act as a nice counterfoil to his wife’s Uncle (Inspector) Harry Charlton. Anyone looking for a top notch piece of classic English detective fiction with a Christmas setting should pop this on their shelf of reliable re-reads and revisit regularly. Elsewhere, Bovey Tracey resident Molly Thynne’s terrific 1931 novel ‘The Crime At The Noah’s Ark’ (which I wrote about at this time last year) also rewards a re-read, as does Moray Dalton’s ‘The Night Of Fear’ from the same year. Pretty much everything I’ve previously written about Dalton (here, here and here) is applicable to this Christmas story of murder and masquerade, and I recommend it heartily.

Similarly recommended, but without the festive setting, is E.C.R. Lorac’s ‘Murder In Vienna’ which was re-published towards the end of 2024 in the British Library Crime Classics series. This again was a re-read for me, though this time thankfully without all the typos of a badly scanned digital edition. It’s not quite from Lorac’s top drawer, for after a wonderful few opening pages where the writer’s gift for capturing landscape is shown in her lines about flying over the Kent coast at Dungeness, the book does rather lurch into something that feels like a tourist leaflet for Vienna. It’s to the writer’s credit that the book recovers from this and manages to configure itself into something that elegantly straddles the murder/spy thriller genre. This is a tricky literary landscape to inhabit as the shadows of Le Carre and Ambler are so strongly cast. Lorac does a fine job and her story of shrouded identities and uncertain motivations is pleasantly entertaining. It is again, however, Lorac’s gift for conjuring a sense of place that is what lingers longest after reading, and if her accounts of Vienna retain something of the sheen of a tourist information guide then the depictions of the suburb of Hietzing and its nearby hills and forests are much more convincing. If they never seem quite as evocatively captured as the Lunesdale landscapes beloved of her Inspector/Superindentent Macdonald then this is hardly a criticism for the Lorac novels set in those hills are as fine as anything in the genre. ‘Murder In Vienna’ then is something of an outlier in the Macdonald series, but no less entertaining and recommended for all that.

Another outlier in terms of the output of the British Library Crime Classics series is the recently re-published 1973 novel ‘Tea On Sunday’ by Lettice Cooper. Cooper’s is a name I know from the wonderful Persephone Books reissue series, but I had not picked up on the fact that she had dabbled in detective fiction. Now, whilst much is made in the publicity for the reissue that it is written in “the vintage mystery style” I’m not convinced that this marketing angle is worth a great deal. The book may follow a ‘traditional’ murder mystery structure (the murder happens early in the book; there is something of the ‘closed room’/country house in that there seems to be a definitive group of suspects; the detective, in this case Inspector Corby of The Yard, explores each suspect in turn) yet one could say as much about many such books from any period. Does this make it ‘vintage’? I am sceptical. Indeed, much of the book feels like a distinctly period piece, being evocative of the late 1960s and early 1970s, or at least evocative of this period as subsequently portrayed in other media. There are references to young men with long hair and (witheringly) to clothing that might be a bed-spread, and there is something of a run-down and rather sordid desperation that is at odds with illusions of glamour and prosperity. There is deceit, corruption, duplicity, mental illness, jealousy and, most troubling of all (spoiler alert/trigger warning), a degree of misogyny that boils into a piece of domestic violence that feels rooted in victim-blaming. That aside, the cast of suspects are mostly very well drawn and the multiple potential motives are interesting and believable enough to keep the reader entertained.

The blend of settings that take in London and Yorkshire is well balanced, with Inspector Corby’s dash to the West Riding of Yorkshire (one assumes that the fictional Hithamroyd is modelled to a degree on Mytholmroyd) making for a necessary change of place and pace. It allows Copper to pull on personal experience of place (her ‘National Provincial’ novel of 1938 is set in the Aire region which would have been, broadly speaking, the landscape of her youth) and she does this admirably. Indeed, ‘admirable’ is a word for ‘Tea On Sunday’ for it is a book that does a fine job of balancing good writing with the necessities of the detective fiction genre. That it never quite reaches the heights of excellence in either realm is no great criticism and certainly no reason not to add it to one’s shelves.