Murders for June

Murder of the Month is Peter Hanington’s The Darkest Tide (Baskerville, 2026, £22). Brighton is the setting and grit to this novel — a work that could enter the running for this year’s “The Great British Novel” if only detective novels were formally permitted to enter the stakes, as opposed to being there anyway, as with Bleak House. 

In appearance, this is a truly brilliant “what is going on?” and “who is doing the killings?”, linking 1969 to 2019, with violence to the fore as people disappear and maybe the same bodies turn up on Brighton beach, minus head and arms [to avoid tattoos being found]. But with the explanations buried in the wider story, this is an account of the decline of Britain and of a generation. Gangsterism in Brighton, undermined and betrayed by a corrupt cop from the world of London clubs, has been taken over by Albanians, the head of whom is obsessed with Enver Hoxha, and the surviving members of the old firm, now part of Operation Cockney Coffin Dodger, struggle with the indignities, smells and dementia of old age, trying to find purpose, love and reliable racing tips. The sense of the past is endlessly refracted, not least with the antique shop that is the central place alongside the care home, where lives grasp at the past, whether watching old pornographic blackmail films or dressing in 1960’s style. The Whisky-a-Go-Go is now a decrepit flat. The police superintendent is racist, there is sadism as well as violence, romance comes from speed-dating, and very short chapters keep the pace up in a really impressive new series named after Susan Colton, the nurse daughter of one of the old Firm. Excellent.

Alessandra Ranelli’s Murder at the Hotel Orient (Baskerville, 2026, £16.99) is the Debut Murder of the Month. Set in a very opulent and discreet Vienna “love hotel”, this centres on Sterling Lockwood, the enigmatic American concierge who joins Golden Age style to explicit sexuality. The writing is to the point — “Her white silk dress was conservative enough to pass in high society but snug enough to preoccupy the imagination” — and allusive — “A cord of tension hung between them with the weighty chill of a strand of pearls”. Descriptions can be ornate. They certainly engage the attention:

The Orient was beyond old-fashioned … Watches seemed to pause once brought inside, like the threshold held a cork in the bottle of time.…

Anticipation was the key to seduction. Here, it was a job requirement.

… no outfit was complete without someone’s gaze clinging to her.

The only group who could outdrink a British stag party was a book club.

Murders in the sanctum make Lockwood a sleuth, and both plot and style impress.

The 150th of the British Library Crime Classics is an occasion for great celebration in these dire times. Some of the reprints are clangers, occasionally very badly so, but there is a general consistency of first-rate works rescued from neglect, not least in the case of E.C.R. Lorac’s novels. Unfortunately, the 150th is not the strongest by a detective novelist whose ingenuity is a gem, John Dickson Carr, in this case writing as Carter Dickson. The Unicorn Murders (1935; 2026, £10.99) fits into the interwar pattern in which implausible espionage plays a role, as in some of Agatha Christie’s weakest plots. Set in the Loire Valley, this is a tale of an impossible murder. One of the Sir Henry Merrivale stories, and certainly reflecting the fascination with France Carr picked up through his time there.

Vincent Starett’s Murder on ‘B’ Deck (1929; Penzler Publishers, 2026, Penguin, 2026, £10.99) appears in Penzler/Penguin’s American Mystery Classics series. It is of the age before the “hard-boiled” story. This is an Americana of wealth, opulent lifestyles, cosmopolitanism and everyone called Bill. There are attempts at wit as in: “There’s a type of woman that is incapable of deliberate falsehood and yet incapable of telling the truth”. As in the Carr, the intelligence world plays a role with an ex-spy bound to be in place in order to pursue the killer. An easy read, enjoyable and undemanding, one of the first of the liner stories.

I am often criticised for devoting so much time to reprints but there are reasons. First, many are very good or potentially so, and readers deserve a discerning attention to a branch of literature that many enjoy and that performs a key role in rescuing works from neglect. Secondly, many new books are less than rewarding. Thirdly, reprints do not tend to benefit from the sales pitch devoted to new ones, not least, and often especially, weak new works. Fourthly, other reviewers tend to focus on new books and deal with the challenge of reprints largely by ignoring it. Lastly, there is the interest of the parameters and idioms of a past age. That contrasts with new books set in the past. Some can be good, even very good, for example those of Martin Edwards; but there is a profound difference in that they lack the contextual nuances of those written at the time.

In the same series as the Starett comes Frederick Brown’s The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947, Penzler 2021; Penguin, 2026, £10.99). The killing of his father in working-class Chicago leads the narrator, Ed Hunter, to seek the help of his Uncle Ambrose, a fairground stallholder, to go “hunting in the dark alleys for a killer,” with cockroaches in the bars. There is a dig at conventional Golden-Age detective magazines: “…There’s a yellow silk cord around his neck and he’s been strangled, but not with the silk cord … murder isn’t like that.” A very good plot, a well-observed account of people and places, a ‘hardboiled’ story that is highly impressive.

Also in this series comes Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (Penzler Publishers, 2022; Penguin, 2026, £10.99). In its 14 items, this ranges widely, with the classic locked room, notably John Dickson Carr’s “The Third Bullet”, complemented by others that meet Penzler’s definition of “a crime that appears to be impossible”. The solutions range from time-travel to a pantomime horse allowing murderers to arrive unnoticed. Great fun.

Murder in the Midday Sun (Profile, 2026, £9.99), is the latest of Cecily Gayford’s selection for her Vintage Murder series. Ten in all, with a fine selection of plots and psychologies, from John Dickson Carr’s “The Wrong Problem”, a variant on the improbable, to Ruth Rendell’s “The Vinegar Murder,” a hard-edged look at childhood, “a looking-glass country where so often one is obliged to believe six impossible things before breakfast.” Adultery and killing retold through a child’s refracting vision. Superb. Edward Hoch’s “The Theft of the Bermuda Penny” has a well-planned fraud focused on a false identity. Edmond Crispin’s “A Country to Sell” is slight and not murderous, but satisfactory. Michael Gilbert’s “Cousin Once Removed” finds a murderer mistook. James Holding’s “The Grave Robber” is a fraud involving Egyptian antiquities, while, as in “Death in the Scillies”, Julian Symons brings forth a murderous relative. Anthony Berkeley’s “Mr Bearstowe Says…” refers to “a dilettante, if he had any money. But he hasn’t. So he dilettantes on other people’s.” A predictable outcome but a very good story. Val McDermid’s “The Wagon Mound” treats British Council adultery and its deadly consequences. “In a Telephone Cabinet” by G.D.H. and M.I. Cole is an ingenious explanation that calls out for reimagining for the world of mobile phones.

Also in this series comes Murder at the Beach (2025) which includes ten short stories. They can be short and slight, notably Julian Symons’s “The Conjuring Trick” and Michael Innes’s “The Coy Mistress” (a smuggling tale). Others are longer and more accomplished, with murder a side-effect of obsessive sexual jealousy in Ellis Peters’s well-realised “At the House of the Gentle Wind,” a warning about archaeologists and the second-rate. H.C. Bailey’s “Case VI: The Leading Lady” lightens the tone with the somewhat affected language of the Reggie Fortune stories, language and content that can grate as also in Anthony Berkeley’s “The Man with the Twisted Thumb” (“Monte Carlo … more respectable than Hull on a wet Sunday”) and Catherine Aird’s “Child’s Play”. E.C. Bentley’s “The Ordinary Hairpins” is accomplished as is Peter Lovesey’s “Oracle of the Dead”, Margery Allingham’s “Three Is a Lucky Number” takes us into the head of an unsuccessful murderer, as does Joan Aiken’s “The Black Cliffs”, the latter with a dry wit.

Instead of historic [written in the past] we have historical [ie set in the past] with Robert J. Harris’s Crescendo (Polygon, 2026, £9.99) following the pattern of his earlier works, not least on Hannay and Holmes, with iconic characters ably captured in tales of derring-do. The narrator, Bobby Burgoyne, his dreams of “the Great American Novel” going awry, is hired by Alfred Hitchcock as the scriptwriter for Crescendo, only to discover that the novel on which it is based is a true mystery and that he is plunged into a Hitchcock-type plot with murders to move the story along. Set in 1959, there are echoes also of Chinatown and of Marlowe. Well-paced, ably-plotted and with characterisation, dialogue and writing all working. Deserves much attention and, to take the spiral further, a film. History repeats itself but with differences. Whets my appetite for more by this author.

Following five earlier Seishi Yokomizo’s novels available from Pushkin Vertigo, most recently the excellent Murder at the Black Cat Café, comes She Walks at Night (1973; 2026, £10.99). My book of the month, this is a brilliant novel at several levels, not least the translation by Jesse Kirkwood. A novel in two halves, each with a different setting, and with the second deploying the private detective Kosuke Kindaichi, it is told by the detective novelist Yorata Yashiro, and this offers another level to the story, that of a writer reflecting on what he sees, as in:

Confronted with a case this bizarre, even an unimaginative hack such as myself is compelled to reach for his pen.

Yet, there are other resonances, notably Gothic fiction, and themes and stages accordingly. The former include feudal lineages and links, bad blood, an old-fashioned saga of fate and prophecy, sexual desire, incest, sleepwalking, decapitations (three) and a haunted sense: “explaining the intricacies of this bizarre case to these rational-minded police officers.… the peculiar atmosphere that reigned at this estate …. The flash of lightning had revealed a scene of unearthly horror. A man was standing on the crag above the waterfall. His Inverness cape billowed behind him like the wings of a bat while, in his right hand, he held the sword aloft. Rain was pouring off him in great torrents…. It was the hunchback.”

At times, we go over the top: “the entire situation was beginning to feel like a scene from some farce.”

This draws on a wider theme: “They were like actors in a play …. Like scenes from a film reel … could she really have staged that gruesome killing all by herself? …. It was as if the malevolent mastermind … happened to possess a novelist’s talents for narrative, for each discovery seemed to come at precisely the right time.  It was as though, just as a film was reaching its climax its reel had snapped.”

The Gothic is readily present: “A plot so fiendishly intricate that its creator began to seem almost diabolical in my imagination.” This is writing in which lightning is “as bright as burning magnesium” and darkness “so thick it was as though the world had been doused in black lacquer”. An ingenious plot and a great read which, mercifully, is the right length.

Turning to the present-day, Michael Connelly’s Ironwood (Orion, 2026, £33), another of his Santa Catalina stories begins with a drug deal that turns fatal for the police, and continues with the hunt for a serial killer. Pacy, ably-structured, well-written, this is better than the previous Santa Catalina story and creates an impression of the difficulties of policing in an idyll. A very good holiday read, though possibly less so if you plan to go California hiking.

Taking forward Alex from his A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering, Andrew Hunter Murray moves him from the metropolis to Scotland in Bad Deeds (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2026, £18.99). Not my humour, partly because there is a lack of subtlety. Plot involves a Scottish aristocratic estate for sale, a quartz deposit and assorted opportunists. Light.

Ilona Bannister’s Five (Juniper, 2026, £16.99) is graver and better-observed, a microcosm of society on a railway platform, with death foretold at the beginning and ever-present throughout. Do keep away from the edge.

London is also the setting for Remi Kone’s Just Kill (Quercus, 2026, £22), which is better written than the last two discussed and avoids the search for humour or wryness that can so frequently go wrong. Following her Innocent Guilt, Just Kill is a great success. Well-written, with 136 very short chapters to move the plot along, this is an account of a hot and murderous London told primarily from the perspective of DI Leah Hutch, a British Nigerian woman with a complex family background, who finds herself facing murders and disappearances that make no sense. Draws you in very successfully. I found the espionage angle implausible; although implausibility is scarcely a bar in detective novels. Deserves to do very well.

Turning to thrillers, which for Americans seem to be in part the replacement for the “hardboiled” fiction, the most arresting, due to the author, is James Comey’s Red Verdict (Head of Zeus, 2026, £20) in which a Manhattan murder with Novichok leads to the uncovering of a Russian scheme to acquire American drone secrets. A fine display of acronyms as the expertise of a former Director of the FBI takes readers through espionage and courtroom drama in an effective and succinct novel that deserves to do well.

Turning to British espionage, David Goodman’s Solitary Agents (Headline, 2026, £20). A training mission turns deadly, raising the question of infiltration. A tough view of the British is the backdrop to a story that is good on tradecraft. Training for the Service. Some fine writing, not least about Scotland where Goodman lives, as of Rosyth: “a pervasive feeling that someone had got bored in the middle of building the place and forgotten to add a high street.” The reality of a bureaucratic Service is captured more successfully than in American works: “Presumably there’d be a form to fill in after the exercise. There was always a form.” The story is successfully inserted into modern power-politics and both drama and pace build very well. An accomplished thriller.