A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage wins hands-down for the title that arrests. Asia Mackay’s book however is not out till 14 January 2025, so I will review later.

Tetsuya Ayukawa’s The Black Swan Mystery (2024, £9.99) is the latest Japanese detective novel published in English translation by Pushkin Vertigo; the original won the Japanese Detective Writers Club Prize in 1960. This excellent work shows a frequent Japanese interest in rail timetables, which are reproduced in full detail. Nevertheless, the book is well-written, fair-play, and consistently interesting about Japanese culture, not least the impact of the war.

The British Library Crime Classics bring us one of the more noted works of Richard Austin Freeman (1862-1943), Mr Pottermack’s Oversight (1931; 2024, £9.99). This was one of his classic inverted mysteries, in which at the outset the reader is introduced to murder and murderer, and the plot therefore concerns not a “mystery” but the revelation of solution, in this case by his most prominent detective, Dr John Thorndyke, an expert in medical jurisprudence who, like Pottermack, is adept with equipment and techniques. This might weary some readers, but is frequently fascinating, while the extent to which Pottermack returns to his task in order to thwart Thorndyke maintains the interest. There is a helpful introduction as well by Martin Edwards.

Metropolitan Mysteries. A Casebook of London’s Detectives (2024, £10.99) is another of Martin Edwards’ superb compilation for British Library Crime Classics, and he supplies an excellent introduction to what is a sequel to his Capital Crimes (2014). The selection is good apart from an appearance of the oft-reprinted Conan Doyle “Bruce-Partington Plans”: it would be much better to have brought to the fore one of his non-Holmes pieces. The collection begins with Sayers’ “Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran,” which is somewhat slight and dated but worth a read. Baroness Orczy’s “The Miser of Maida Vale,” a clever tale of inheritance by murder, is in large part a how-done-it, Henry Wade’s “The Real Thing” is an improbable why-done-it tube murder, while his better-plotted “These Artists!” is a crime set in the Bohemian world of artistic Chelsea, with the protagonist PC John Bragg up on the prejudices of 1938, upset about models posing nude and hostile to “A nasty looking customer, foreigner of sorts.” World War One is present as a memory of the smell of “Dead Hun” and “the year of horror carved from his impressionable youth,” modern art and artists get short shrift and “sheep’s brains” is a favourite dish of Bragg. Josephine Bell’s “The Case of the Faulty Drier” is an effective account of a hair-salon killing, while Anthony Berkeley’s “Unsound Mind” offers an impressive plot and a deadly wife, and Anthony Gilbert’s “Man in Bond Street” a slight piece. The murder of the Foreign Secretary is the problem in Eric Bennett “Death on Nelson’s Column,” while John Dickson Carr shows his various skills in “The Crime in Nobody’s Room” and “The Locked Room.” Margery Allingham’s “Mum Knows Best” is lightweight, J. Jefferson Farjeon in “Sergeant Dobbin Works it Out” and Michael Gilbert in “Back in Five Years,” add wit, Raymond Postgate in “The Dead Man Climbed Upstairs” another murder on the Tube, Malcolm Gair “Murder in St James’s”, terrorism, and William Fienburgh, a one-time Labour MP, murder in Parliament.

It is always interesting to intersperse novels with works on crime fiction, and not least if the latter includes contributions by novelists. So for Writing the Murder. Essays on Crafting Crime Fiction edited by Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst (Dead Ink, 2024, £10.99) includes pieces by Paul Finch, Jennie Greengrass, Charlie Higson, Vaseem Khan, Tess Little, Tim Major, Tom Mead, Saima Mir and Louise Welsh, as well as others with relevant expertise such as Barry Forshaw, the FT crime and fiction critic. They cover the writing and reading of detective fiction, and offer specific essays on Christie, Doyle, Highsmith, historical crime fiction, “impossible crime” and “Cop Stuff: Fact or Fantasy”. Most of the writers have informative things to offer, notably Paul Finch’s criticism of police procedurals, Barry Forshaw on Highsmith, and Tess Little’s deft opener, but Jessie Greengrass underplays the role of London in Christie and is wrong to suggest there is no “unageing version of rural Edwardian England,” Saima Mir is very weak, and Andrew Gallic’s brilliant pastiche of French theory and academic style goes on a little too long. Worth reading.

Also worth noting Ian Rankin’s talk at the Cheltenham Book Festival on 10 October in which he said there was “almost no necessity” for detective fiction to be longer than 300 pages and that he read longer books last. Fully agree.

From the striking start on a ferry in an all-too-Scottish setting, very well-realised, Philip Miller’s The Hollow Tree (Polygon, 2024, £9.99) turns to well-trodden paths including a hidden past, memories of betrayal, the occult and political conspiracy. What a surprise! Tories are the villains, as well as morally degenerate in a plot that mistakes the Gothic for any stretch of the credible. Maybe Miller could try his hand at something that has less push-button predictability. At any rate, despite the poverty of the plot and the half a dimensional character of the villain, some of the writing is very fine and his comparisons are good: “He had seemed dour, unremarkable, like an undrunk cup of grey cold tea…. his hidden shallows.”

The Hollow Mountain (Polygon, 2024, £9.99) is the latest in Douglas Skelton’s successful Rebecca Connolly series. Focused on a Glasgow which rejects the places where “all you hear is the price of quinoa and how little Tarquin is having to acknowledge his disappointment over not making the fucking croquet team”, this is a cold case mystery about the death of one of the “Tunnel Tigers,” the underground workers in the Cruachan project, the major achievement in Scottish hydroelectric power. The quest for information rapidly becomes dangerous in a toxic Scotland where the Far Right, one “only a white cat short of being a Bond villain,” is on the rise and in the shape of the political party Spioraid nan Gáidtheal, and even more key élite financiers in the background have penetrated the independence movement, while there are malign throwbacks to the 1960s. Elspeth’s death is handled poorly but an impressive work.

Lionel Ward’s debut novel The Shakespeare Thief (Onyx Publishing, 2nd edn, 2024, £10.99) is bookishly witty, with the protagonist, Elliot Todd, and the author, running independent bookshops, in Ward’s case the excellent Brendon Books in Taunton’s marvellous hideaway, Bath Place. The murder during a signing of Harry Nielsen, a noted Shakespearean impaled by a Pickelhaube, is followed by the revelation of the theft of a First Folio. A well-handled plot and attractive characterisation, and the pace works on the whole, but Ward would benefit from honing down his explanatory digressions and writing in a sparer style. A good starting basis for what promises to be a most interesting series.

Death in the Arctic (Penguin, 2025, £16.99) is the fourth of Tom Hindle’s highly successful detective novels. The last, Murder on Lake Garda, had a plot of greater surprises, but the new book, although the victim, culprit and reason could be relatively easily worked out, is a better read, and the “how-done-it?” is most impressive. The setting, a luxury airship on an inaugural trip to the North Pole, works very well. A minor suggestion, repeating something I noted last time but did not comment upon. The bound proofs should be sent out once corrected to pick out minor flaws, for example on page 48, line 5 up, it should be she not he, while on page 76 uninterested and disinterested are confused. A first-rate book that I really enjoyed.

The Case of the Lonely Accountant (Riverrun, 2024, £12.00) is a very impressive work by the successful depicter of Oxford murder, Simon Mason. In this, the sister volume to Missing Person: Alice, the “Finder” is introduced, a reserved, poised, ex-copper, now a freelancer working for the police who finds missing people, in this case a Chief Accounting Officer and Vice President for Asset Management who abruptly leaves from an office meeting in Bournemouth in 2008 and, with his clothes found at the seashore, disappears. Legally presumed dead in 2015, this is the account of an attempt by the “Finder”, on behalf of Dorset Police, to track down a puzzling, but highly tangential, business card found by his widow in his effects years later. Really works well and, at 198 pages of generously printed text, amply fulfils Ian Rankin’s recent admonition against long works. Psychologically, a rich exploration that is full of merited excitement.

So also with Paula Hawkins’ The Blue Hour (Penguin, 2024) which I greatly preferred to her The Girl on the Train. Psychological thriller, adept murder story, excellent writing, first-rate descriptions, and the excesses of artistic creativity, obsessional friendship, and an edge of the world island.

Dominic Nolan’s White City (Headline, 2024, £20), his fourth novel, is a major success, covering the years from a major robbery of high-value mail bags in 1952 to the Notting Hill Riots in 1958. Crime and corruption in London, the multiple interactions of gangsters, police and other interests are to the fore and this ‘behemoth’ devours the characters. The poverty of experience and lifestyle in bomb-damaged London is ably brought out, as is the extent of racism. The writing is often gritty, but also inventive: “Chiswick isn’t a place. It’s an idea.… You have Hammersmith and Brentford and in between you have people with notions.” The protagonist watches a rag and bone man and his cart “roll squeakily up the road for a full minute, one which felt as it began sometime in the Middle Ages.” Strongly recommended, albeit bleak.

Although I found the description of an arrival at Tisbury reminiscent, I am afraid I only made it to page 102 of the 391 pages of Alex Pavesi’s Ink Ribbon Red (Michael Joseph, 2024, £18.99), in which a friends’ country house leads to a mystery stories game in which long-standing grudges come to the fore in murder. It did not engage me. Sorry, but I was not ‘utterly hooked.’

Runaway Horses (Italian original, 1983; Bitter Lemon Press, 2025; £9.99) follows the Lover of No Fixed Above in being the second of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s books to be published by that press in translation. Meeting the Rankin test for text length, this is a book that moves from the earthly to the occult, mixing murder, the supernatural, sex and witty social commentary in a puzzle set against the background of the Palio. Worth reading if you like your murder with an occult element.