Murders for May

Murder is not fun, but a witty detective story is a hell of a lot better than the pressure from reading a “psychological thriller” let alone the tedium of the oft-repeated plot lines of so many current C-grade novels, as in the reunion-brings-to-the-fore-long-buried-secret ploy. Now where yesterday did I read that?

So, yet again, I must start with the pleasures of sifting the past. My book of the month, Leo Bruce’s Jack on the Gallows Tree (1960; British Library Crime Classics, 2026, £10.99), will strike some as very dated, with Deene and Gorringer deployed again as if in the 1930s, but it is well-written, has an excellent central device, and is pleasantly short. Suffering from jaundice, Deene is sent to recover at the spa resort of Buddington, only for two elderly women to be found murdered on the same evening. The “social politics” are somewhat dated: “‘You keep saying that there was a powerful intellect behind this murder. What on earth can farm labourers and such have to do with it,?’” but the grotesques deftly outlined work well notably Colonel and Mrs Baxeter who, as nudists, vegetarians, pantheists (‘“Our cathedral is the open air”’), and much else, offer a marvellous source of fun as well as charcoal and hazelnut biscuits. The snobbish Miss Tissot is another caricature of note.

“Bruce,” the pseudonym of Rupert Croft-Cooke, repeatedly comments on detective novels, as well as offering a warning in the text for readers: “‘You may have guessed long before yesterday who the murderer was, but it could be nothing more than a guess if you did not know his motive. Guessing is easy … but it has to be backed by something more cogent.’”

Penguin, meanwhile, has launched in Britain a new series, American Mystery Classics Collection, which in fact is the British edition of a series published in America by Penzler Publishers and edited by the excellent Otto Penzler. The first, Golden Age Detective Stories (2026, £10.99), thus appeared in New York in 2021. And it is a good collection, with each short story prefaced by a note on the author by Penzler who also writes the overly short introduction to the book. The first, Charlotte Armstrong’s “The Enemy” (1951) has a calm start:

They sat late at the lunch table and afterward moved through the dim, cool, high-ceilinged rooms of the Judge’s library where, in their quiet talk, the old man’s past and the young man’s future seemed to telescope and touch. But at twenty minutes after three, on that hot, bright June Saturday afternoon, the present tense erupted.

Anthony Boucher’s “The Stripper” (1947) is a case of academic murder; Mignon Eberhart’s “Postiche” (1935), a Gothic tale of family rivalry; Erle Stanley Gardner’s “The Case of the Crimson Kiss” (1948) a brilliant Perry Mason with sexual jealousy to the fore; H.F. Heard’s “The Enchanted Garden” (1949), an ingenious murder but indifferent writing; Baynard Kendrick’s “5-4=Murderer” (1953) has a blind detective confronting deadly deceit, while Frances and Richard Lockridge’s “There’s Death for Remembrance” (1955) offers a timely warning about reunion meals. Stuart Palmer’s “The Monkey Murder” (1947) takes pulp fiction to new heights, while Ellery Queen’s “The Adventure of the African Traveller” (1934) is a recognisable Golden Age crime, not least in its precise clues, hotel setting and knowledge of social mores. Patrick Quent’s “Puzzle for Poppy” (1946) has inheritance as the motive, Clayton Rawson’s “From Another World” (1948) sees a magician as the detective, and Craig Rice’s “Good-Bye, Good-Bye” (1958) returns to inheritance and offers a dim view of religion and psychiatry.

Mary Roberts Rinehart’s “Locked Doors” (1925) has her detective nurse in a haunted Gothic household but with a less than feared outcome. Set in a failing house, Cornell Woolrich’s “The Mystery in Room 913”, (1938) has a room plan designed to help work out whether the death was suicide or accident, only for more deaths to occur in the room. There is reference to “The Speckled Band”.

Turning to the present-day, Heidi Perks’ It Ends Here (Penguin, 2026, £9.99) is a warning about going for a coffee on the Isle of Wight. A hostage situation brings together multiple narratives and the timetables of past and present. The reunion crime story is given a “freshish” take which works well here, but let us hope it does not launch a thousand imitations.

Tariq Ashkanani’s The Hollow Boys (Viper, 2026, £18.99) is very different in tone and setting. The disappearance of two young boys, assumed drowned, and then the return of one claiming to be the other, is the background to this well-etched account of a dying American town, with emptiness the forcing place to cruelty. The author’s note at the end is a salutary account of how books develop. Powerful book; not one if you are feeling low.

Although set in the world of Victorian tricksters and music halls, Bridget Walsh’s The Spirit Guide (Pushkin, 2026, £10.99) is much more accessible, with Minnie Ward, the protagonist again in the third of the Variety Palace Mysteries. Well-etched characters, a bracing tone, lots of humour, The story becomes one of fraudulent spiritualism and the cruelties of men to women, and the mix of essentially two narratives works well. One to enjoy.

A jury determining the most contentious trial of the day, that of a nurse accused of being a serial killer, is the setting for L.J. Shepherd’s One of Your Number (Pushkin Vertigo, 2026, £14.99), with the jury interrupted by the lockdown caused by a chemical attack. The total fantasy of course is an incompetent Prime Minister. Jurors manipulating and being manipulated, in part by the play of their prejudices, are the plot ploys which are given an accelerant when the accused escapes. Readers of her debut, The Trials of Lila Dalton, already reviewed in this series, will know that Shepherd is a powerful writer, an effective plot-smith and a master of tempo. All are on display here, as are the idiosyncrasies of jurors; the tactics of counsel (Shepherd is a barrister), including arguing whatever suits them is possible; the claustrophobia of dealing with the psyche of a serial killer; the nature of paranoia; the impact on readers of the play of different timelines, before and after the chemical attack; an ear for language; and social commentary: “Men thought they hated makeup when really they hated a certain type of poorly applied makeup” or “The ban on electronic items … seemed to cause some of the younger jurors physical pain”, “it wouldn’t have seemed like grooming to Geoff, because he was a bald middle-aged man with a tough-guy job, not a little girl on the internet.” There is a reference back: “There was nothing immediately apparent as to how it had been done. Leonie half expected to find a piece of burnt rope and a bit of candle wax on the floor. Like in a Golden Age novel.”

Family secrets and tensions are to the fore in Adele Parks’ Our Beautiful Mess (HQ, 2026, £9.99). The story is classic summertime very easy to read, with the writing not exactly strong on adjectives: “Institutional racism would mean that if Ekon avoided a bullet and spoke up about Bear, anything he said would be ignored. The pigs would be all to happy to send him down for a long time.”

Family secrets are differently to the fore in Sophie McKenzie’s The Imposter (Canelo, 2026, £9.99), with an unknown daughter turning up to a dinner held to celebrate a dead plutocrat. Inheritance politics play out, but much of the writing is of the “You know, we wouldn’t be here if Dad had made Tommy feel more valued” type. Or “A click of the back gate. I spin around. Gasp. Adam is walking towards me.” I cannot recommend this book. It is, I am certain, not written by AI, but possibly the latter would have done better.

The writing is better in Thom Braun’s Obadiah Grange (Troubador, 2026, £10.99), the second of his stories in which the young Charles Dickens plays a key role in fighting murderous Thameside child abuse in a scandal that goes from the lowest to the highest. The sequel to Hungerford Stairs, the book captures Braun’s combined skill at historical fiction and knowledge of nineteenth-century fiction. I prefer the sections focused on Inspector Hesketh rather than the Dickens counterparts as the former are more to the point. Braun very skilfully uses his story to provide the background to Dickens’ mature fiction. Another point of the novel is that the underlying problem (child abuse) is timeless and not solvable in the way a mystery and a murder might be.

I am not a fan of claustrophobia, not least when linked to water, so Haruo Yuki’s The Ark (2022; English ed. Pushkin Vertigo; 2026, £14.99) is admired, but not liked. Ten hikers are trapped underground in a flooding chamber, only for the group, confronting the need to leave someone behind in order to save the rest, to be faced by murder. A very grim story of deceit and violence, with a devious killer and an ingenious plot.

“A blanket of cloud above, so thick it looked like a ruffled duvet”. The Tailor (Head of Zeus, 2026, £16.99), the latest in Tim Sullivan’s superb George Cross series, delivers a well-written and gripping tale from the outset. Plus lots of observations many will recognise, as in “This was a complex question to answer. The difficulty further complicated by his breaking the cork in the bottle.” The East Asian direction may not convince all, but is very ably plotted; and there are also some amusing references to the genre as in “Again, he’d been watching too much TV or reading too much Mike Herron.”‘

The AG ordered the probe. Ratfuck Bob Kennedy’s got a bug up his ass. He ordered a massive Intel file check on domestic CP dinks and possibly resultant field investigations. Said dinks might bust out rogue in the wake of the nuke tiff. Eddie Chacōn’s the fed overlord.. He’s the AG’s pet lawyer-goon…. My head swirled. The Dexies merged with the A-bomb drink and rerouted my bloodstream.

Well, of course, everyone who is well-read will easily spot the style and content characteristic of one of the leading novelists of the last half-century. If you cannot hang your head in shame. The appearance of another of his novels is an event. At 518 pages, this is longer than I usually tackle, for so many long works in the genre mistake length for quality [the same is true of history books], and the authors frequently traverse their backsides accordingly [think Horowitz, Osman, and, very differently, too much late Le Carré]. It is the inimitable style of James Ellroy. LA-set, Red Sheet (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2026, £22) is set in October-December 1962 and deals with the ‘Mini-Red Scare’ that followed the Cuba Missile Crisis. Ordered by Bobby Kennedy, an investigation into Communist Party activities in Los Angeles spins out to involve such luminaries as Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Hefner, state and city politics, pornographic films, long-term Communist agents, booze, drugs, goons, casual violence, press and other corruption, a range of lurid lights on life all shot through with the abbreviated prose of thought: a skill in syntax that most lack. Well worth attention, not least with present-day unpredictabilities shaken in a glass of imponderables. 

“She wasn’t in the habit of leaping from plausibility to certainty. People were complicated, motives layered.” With writing like this it is not surprising that the eyes can glaze when tackling Philippa Perry’s Shrink Solves Murder (Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99), a “cozy crime” story in which a supposed suicide near Beachy Head is revealed to be anything but. The fictional settlement of Westlinke is displayed in an attractive pictogram map, the best feature of the book. There is a mixture of unoriginal description — the bald with their “gleaming billiard balls”, but also more arresting phrases as with middle-aged men at Glastonbury: “Their nostrils were frosted like margarita glasses.” Easy-to-read and just right for the calmer end of the holiday trade and for those who live in the Home Counties.

Lynne McEwan’s Dead Man Deep (Canelo, 2022, £8.99) is touched off by the discovery of the corpse of an unknown fisherman on a MoD firing range, surrounded by hundreds of phosphorus shells from an arms dump. A good, clear start plus some lines that were new to me as in “I’m not in the business of pissing on anybody’s chips.” A calm series with well-observed characters and readily-understandable plots that do not push too hard on plausibility.

Andi Osho’s Most Wanted (HQ, 2026, £9.99) is very different in tone, setting and content. Crime as a means of breaking into the intractable London housing market. Descriptions are pithy: “Slim but doughy like he’d have to be subbed after half an hour in a five-a-side match.” Goes for wit and offers an easy read with relaxing jokes: “a pepper spray. I thought it was for my food.”

Faith Martin’s The Last Word is Death (HQ, 2025, £9.99), is a 1925-set attempt at a more mannered plot, one  set in a resort hotel where an unpleasant guest is found dead in the writing room. Writing is easy, albeit unmemorable, and the images could do with work to make the reader feel that an effort has been made. Enjoyable for those who want a light read.

The success of Japanese detective novels has been a publishing phenomenon of recent years and a number of publishers have established strong lists in translation, not least Penguin. Its latest, Seicho Matsumoto’s Twilight in Musashino (original 1959-60; 2026, £15.99) is set in 1959 and begins with a  young female flight attendant found strangled in the outskirts of Tokyo. The story is wound back to explain why the murder occurred and is then pursued to probe the investigations by both police and journalists. The story is one of corruption with a Catholic church mission in Japan used for smuggling and the black market, beginning with sugar and moving on to drugs. The clerics are personally corrupted by their attitudes and by sex, while society is prone to influence-manipulation. Matsumoto (1909-92) had a critical view of Japanese society and this is very much on show in this novel, with the psychological drama resting on a bleak perspective of a pervading corruption and a dissolution of values that is also captured in the description of the Tokyo that is being created. The style is clear and there is a message. This story is based on an actual crime in which a foreign priest, the leading suspect, was allowed to return home because the government wished to avoid a public scandal. Matsumoto uses the novel to explain the murder and to present it as a systemic crime. There is a bleakness here that is stronger than in many Japanese detective novels.