Warmth and the travails of travel, the prospects for those who are ill of waiting for many hours in pain while junior hospital doctors decide whether they fancy doing any work, and the need to stay indoors lest crazed cyclists mow you down on walker-only pavements, turn one’s mind to murder, or at least the fiction thereof: otherwise dear reader you are likely to be arrested for hate crimes for reading this.

Let us start in a city of which I know nothing, Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. The Hand That Feeds You by Mercedes Rosende (2023, Bitter Lemon Press, £9.99), the translation of a 2019 Spanish original published in Montevideo by a writer, lawyer and journalist, is, at once, magic realism, mordant satire, and a murderous jape. Set in 1971, the cast includes the strongly impressive Ursula Lopez; her more conventional sister; a murderous, totally corrupt and very Catholic creepy lawyer, Antinucci; his crooked police ally; an honest (female) police rival, Captain Leonilda Lima; and Montevideo’s troubled milieux, from crooks to the curious. The city is dystopian, and there is much gloominess as well as stale air. The book deserves reading, carrying you on with its surprises and its air of the unexpected. There is a feel of Pulp Fiction about this fantasy.

One of the great pleasures of this publisher is that you can move on from one milieu to another. So, from Montevideo, I switched to the Franco-Swiss borderland near Basle for Hansjörg Schneider’s The Murder of Anton Livius (2023, Bitter Lemon Press, £9.99), the translation of a German original published in 2007, with the translation supported by the Swiss Arts Council. Schneider, who lives in Basle, has published ten in the series, of which this is the third to be translated into English. The setting is atmospheric in place and mood. It is a case of borderlands, not only in the physical setting which reveals the extraordinary and often farcical difficulties personality and protocol place in the face of Franco-Swiss attempts to co-operate (The Bridge with depth and wit), but also temporally, between 1943 and the present, and in temperament, the last possibly reflecting the elderly author who was born in 1938. Schneider is also an accomplished playwright and there is a theatrical char

acter to much of the novel, notably the scenes in bars which are also reminiscent of Simenon plays:

‘“…I had heard a professor at the university, Gottlieb, the psychologist, mention your name – he had written a book called Modern Crime Detection –”
“Yes. A book that an intelligent criminal should send as a gift to every detective he knows.”
“Perhaps … he said that you were not susceptible of analysis because you had intuition from the devil…”’

The story begins with an allotment find, that of an elderly man killed by a shot and then hung up by a meat-hook. The journey takes a while but leads to the Third Reich. Those, such as ex-President Trump, Sir Max Hastings, and other luminaries who have mistakenly praised its armed forces, might care to reflect on the methods of recruitment employed by the Germans in Alsace. The novel is sophisticated, well-written, witty, as in the description of the pompous, class-obsessed author of detective novels, and short. I was very impressed.

Changing country, Seishi Yokomizo’s The Devil’s Flute Murders (1973; Pushkin Press, 2023, £9.99), is one of the Kosuke Kindaichi stories. Set in 1947 as the old order departs, the story brings to the fore the faded aristocracy, beginning with the disappearance of Hidesuke Tsubaki, a former viscount, flautist, and possible robber, who disappears and is then found murdered (or is he?), we move to a closed-room divination after which Kimimaru Tamamushi, a former count, is found killed. The detective is not of this social eminence, but has the Holmes-like acuity (though not style) to move the needle of initiative back. Atmospheric and interesting, a Golden Age murder that is well plotted but also powerfully observed socially. Pushkin has published translation of four others of the novels of Yokomizo (1902-81).

Let us move on, unconventionally, to a crime story that is far removed from murder; indeed a story of crime unearthed by a patient historian. Horace Farquhar. A Bad Man Befriended by Kings by Alistair Lexden (2023, Conservative History, £10.00), is the tale of a rogue who rose to the heights, to be both the first Treasurer of the Conservative Party (1911-23), Master (1901) and later Steward (1906) of the Royal Household, and the first and last Earl Farquhar (1922-3), having earlier made Baron (1898) and Viscount (1917), as well as the friend of Edward VII and George V. With exemplary archival research, Farquhar demonstrates that Farquhar was a rogue and fraudster, and suggests that his route to the top may have been as the lover of the first Duke of Fife, the son-in-law of Queen Victoria; Farquhar later stole a large sum of money from the Fife family trust. He more generally emerges as a shady banker and friend of fraudsters. As Lexden notes, Farquhar was ‘uninhibited by moral scruples.’ His writing is witty, scholarly and properly sparse, Farquhar being dissected in seventy pages including notes. The fortune that vanished, much left to the royal family in his will, is the topic of the arresting closing chapter.

As another unconventional addition, readers who were put off by the lumpy, overlong and self-regarding parody of himself that Anthony Horowitz managed in his novel Magpie Murders should be pleased by his far more successful screenplay in the television version where the two narratives are skilfully intercut and dramatic tension built up and then sustained. Usually, I would recommend the novel not the television version, but not in this case.

It is often instructive to return to the start. Appearing in 1934, the first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance (Farrar and Reinhart; Bantam Crime Line, 1992; $6.50), began a series of 73 of these most idiosyncratic of detective novels. The author, Rex Stout (1886-1975), had made money through inventing a school banking system. Having written widely in magazines, and then produced two novels, Stout turned to the Wolfe stories, on which he focused from 1940. A friend of P.G. Wodehouse and active as a ‘left liberal’ (his term), who was bitterly anti-German and broadcast in favour of the war effort, Stout fell foul of the FBI but was bitterly anti-Communist and supported the Vietnam War. Eulogised for his detective fiction, Stout was brilliantly successful in creating a world that had echoes of that of Holmes, Watson, the Baker Street household and the Irregulars, but that was somewhat less clinical in the style: ‘Dear old progress, I thought, you haven’t changed a bit since I saw you last except you’re covered with wrinkles and your teeth are falling out.’ The plot is a brilliant instance of the discarding the probable to arrive at the improbable truth, with persistent questioning by Wolfe landing the villain.

Meanwhile, the tension between the private detective and both the police and intellectuals is as ever to the fore. So with Horowitz as with Stout. In Fer-de-Lance there is a degree of scepticism about scientific methods and modern intellectualism.

James Wolff’s The Man in the Corduroy Suit (Bitter Lemon Press, 2023, £9.99) is a welcome alternative to so much of the spy fiction with its addiction to violence and/or, as with the latest James Naughtie I recently reviewed, simply poor writing. Suspicion is a key theme, as well as the potentially closing consequences of personality:

‘The flat smells of a thousand cigarettes. Years of suspicion and paranoia cover the walls like layers of old paper.
….
We only exist as children, and spend the rest of our lives performing the same loop, like birds alongside a train, and we are wounded in the same place, and we crash to the ground again and again with the same banal finality. The only thing that changes is the patch of ground.’

There is an element of Mike Herron’s Slough House series, but also a degree, particularly toward the close, of magic realism. An effective and very readable account of tensions and suspicion within MI5, with a plot full of impressive reveals and some questions.