Gladys Mitchell: (Not So) Speedy Death

I was totally unaware of Gladys Mitchell until stumbling on The Stone House: A Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site sometime last year. Jason Half, the site’s creator, is doing incredible work with the tribute. It fully convinced me to try Mitchell, and I am not sure I would ever have prioritized her without it. It’s so unusual to find a dedicated tribute site to any Golden Age author (minus Christie) that my interest was piqued, and after reading the persuasive “What Makes Gladys Mitchell Special?”, she went to the top of my list. A series whose strengths are tone, style, and setting?  Each book surprising, with diversity in style and plott?  Particular emphasis on memorable characters!? Yes, please. Where do I sign up?!

Unfortunately, that wasn’t immediately clear. There aren’t audiobooks available of Mitchell’s work. (A shame, it turns out, because after just one book I think this is exactly the type of prose that would sing in audio.) I experimented with text to speech but it didn’t produce a satisfactory patter that is so crucial to bright young things of 1920s fiction. So I held on to the epub I’d bought and kept Mitchell near the top of my list even as I checked out other less prominent authors whose work has been moved to the audio format. In the time since discovering The Stone House, my eyesight has finally stabilized and improved after the surgery I had a year ago. This month, for the first time since 2019, I began to read long texts again with my eyes. I haven’t managed physical books yet, but through the wondrous accessibility of ereaders, I am once again a person who can read with my eyeballs. I started with a sprint through half a dozen nostalgia reads of some childhood favorites,* and when I felt ready to try something longer, I turned immediately to 1929’s A Speedy Death. 

It didn’t disappoint! Which is a surprise:  first books are often rough, and I tend to approach them with low expectations. There are issues with it, but my overwhelming experience was one of pleasure. The pacing was bad and not all of the characters were distinct, but Mitchell’s sleuth, Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, made the book leap off the page. She isn't in it much in the first half, but when she becomes more prominent, the book became just ... fun. I had a great time with it. I found myself wanting to join Mrs. Bradley in avian cackles of humor at times. 

Quickly, some negatives:  the pacing is rough. I'd like to call this a romp, since it is amusing, but as with so many country house murders, there were some draggy chapters where the closed circle of suspects mostly sat around talking with each other in different combinations about what happened. It doesn't feel very speedy at all so who knows where that title came from. The plot is a so-so mystery, but even with the pacing issues, it never falls into the boring swamp that I often encounter in the novels of Allingham or Marsh. The Stone House calls this plot "cluttered" and I think that is a very apt way to phrase a critique. From sentence to sentence, the writing is uneven. Sometimes it sparkles and sometimes it really doesn't. One symptom of the early novel, I presume, is a silly reliance on adverbs, sometimes presented in threes. At first I thought this was a quirk of Mrs. Bradley's speech, but it appears in the prose itself. In other places the prose is bold and confident, clever and characterful. I particularly liked at the end where chapters detailing a murder trial (oh, yes, there's a trial! this is regular law and order!) switch prose styles between the prosecution and defense. Neither is one great monologue, but Mitchell deftly quick changes her third person style to two very different lawyers. It was a delight. Seeing how Mitchell grows as a prose stylist is one of the things I'm most excited to keep reading to learn.

Hey, that was supposed to be my paragraph of negatives, and I quickly wrote myself into praise. Here's another negative that I think is less of one than it seemed at first, and this is a spoiler so stop reading and just get the book if that is a concern:  the first victim, Everard Mountjoy, is apparently trans, and the stereotype of the sex-mad lesbian burbles in the background of much of the book. The discovery that Mountjoy is not biologically the adventurous man he presented is something that immediately threw up bright red flags to me. And while it's not great by any means, it's somehow less offensive than many more contemporary novels, and not at all close to the evil bigotry that has infected so much of British literary culture in the 21st century. I won't pretend it's progressive:  the whole twist exists solely to titillate, it barely matters to the plot or characters, it's a pure shocker. The characters are shocked, too, and they don't know how to assimilate the new information, but not in a way that felt hateful across the board. The master of the house, Alistair Bing, frets over scandal, particularly because his daughter Eleanor was quietly engaged to Mountjoy. But that makes sense, and it is clearly a concern of the character because others react different. The first driver of the amateur investigation is not Mrs. Bradley but another houseguest, Mr. Carstairs, who is the first champion of the theory that Everard Mountjoy was murdered when others suspect accident. Carstairs' investigation and interest is motivated by a firm truth:  he liked Mountjoy, and discovering that his biological sex was different from his gender presentation doesn't lessen his sadness at losing a friend or his belief that Mountjoy deserves justice. Carstairs' loyalty for Mountjoy isn't misplaced: it becomes clear throughout the book that Mountjoy was not some evil lesbian entrapping an innocent woman into a false engagement; there's no lurid backstory about why he was living as a man. Mitchell's disinterest in using the reveal as anything but an early twist weirdly makes for an almost neutral treatment of transness:  Mountjoy is just some guy. 

I am quite sure that it's unintentional, I'm absolutely not claiming that Mitchell was some visionary progressive on LGBTQ+ issues, especially because there's still quite a hefty background of "mad lesbianism" in the mind of Mountjoy's true murderer, and later the second victim, the unfortunate daughter of the country house Eleanor Bing. Eleanor is at once nymphomaniac and femmecidal. It's another thing that should be offensive but isn't, really, because it's just so pulpy... and because her descent into stark murdering madness is treated with some sympathy, and isn't actually triggered by discovering her fiance Mountjoy's transness, or by her very obvious sublimated lesbian desires, or even the discovery that her father and brother were having sex. Eleanor unravels through a convergence of shocks and traumas and those are among them, but Mrs. Bradley, a very fanciful sort of psychoanalyst, seems to understand Eleanor mostly as ill. So, she, uh, murders her. Yeah, in book one of a 70-odd book series, it's established that our detective and heroine is a murderer herself. What a roller coaster! I hope I don't have to say that in real life I don't think mentally ill people should be killed. But Mrs. Bradley's act of murder is presented as a mercy:  there is no space in Eleanor's life and society for her to get help. Continued violence is inevitable, and that violence will only beget more, rippling throughout the family in circles of tragedy that Mrs. Bradley sees clearly and chooses to stop. One of my favorite things about Poirot is how he grapples with his own agency and place in the cycle of violence, but that's an aspect of his character that develops over so many books. I think it is terribly interesting that Mitchell went right for that jugular with her detective! But where to go from here?! I do plan to keep reading to find out. 

*That’s Diana Wynne Jones:  I found a podcast chronicling her work so I read the first six of her books in actually speedy succession, some with audio and some with my eyeballs. She’s not mystery, but she remains as magical and delightful as I remember from childhood! 

Capsule Reactions: March

Well, I got the job I mentioned very passingly in a previous post, so my reading time remains impacted by the horrors of moving. While I’ll get my free time back, I may actually have less time to listen to books at this new position. As I advance in my career, I unsurprisingly have less time to multitask with audio. The job I had during the height of covid was a career dead end, but it also had 12 hour shifts where I could listen to books… those were the glorious days for reading! I read a book almost every day!

Now that my eyes seem to be capable of reading text again, I am thinking of trying to read with my eyes again as well as listen, but I fear I’ve lost the habit and the ability to concentrate on just one thing. You would never believe that I used to read 100+ books a year when I was young at this pathetic rate. Oh well! I am going to try to focus on enjoyment rather than numbers. 

Along with In the Woods by Tana French, I read three audiobooks: 

• The Librarians by Sherry Thomas (2025):  Since I like Thomas’s romance/mystery Lady Sherlock books, I was pretty excited to hear that she was going to try a modern set mystery. I was a little disappointed in this book but I’m not gong to go into it at length. The mystery fell down for me (ultimately more of a thriller??), and the ensemble cast and all their romantic interests made it feel crowded. Still, I will totally read a sequel if it gets one; there’s potential here for it to find a grove. 

• The Examiner by Janice Hallett (2024):  This was a little treat for myself after getting news about the job:  the Hallett book set in academia that I’ve been saving. While I think my first book by Hallett (The Alperton Angels) is still my favorite for its daring blend of many media formats and its most successful mystery, this might be my second! I enjoyed the setting of a master’s program in art a lot; lampooning academia is something I'm very on board for. Of all the books I’ve read by Hallett, this one had some of my favorite characters. Jonathan and Jem are both fantastic!  Like all the audio adaptions of Hallett's epistolary style, this is an absolutely stellar audiobook that is elevated by its excellent readers. Jem is a little in the vein of the striving Izzy from The Appeal, but much less annoying. I really rooted for her in a way I rarely do for Hallett's characters. Jonathan is sad and sweet and interesting. The friendship between the two characters, as the eldest and youngest in a Master’s program, was genuinely well written and probably the most touching and human thing I’ve read from Hallett so far. It deserves a post of its own, but I don’t have the time… maybe when I read the others I’ll do a post on all of them together. 

•  Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie (1948):  I listened to most of this on a short road trip with my spouse. I thought it a little strange that I’d never really heard anyone talking about it, but after listening to it, I understand why:  it’s a less successful attempt at the novelistic approach that Christie seemed to be exploring in something like The Hollow, where the mystery is oddly balanced with the characters and setting. At first I thought there was a lot to say about why it is less successful, but after a bit of time between finishing it and now, I’m not so sure I have much to say about it except that the pacing is much more of a problem here than in other Christie books that have a loooong setup before the murder. At first I found the characters promising, but they spiraled out of interest very quickly into typical Christie tropes, and I think this book may have one of the worst forced romantic pairings in all of her oeuvre. On the other hand, Hugh Fraser gives a delightful performance and is often very funny; I was so happy that my spouse chuckled along with me at many points. The side characters are great, but the book falls apart dramatically once it stops being a novel about a family's struggles in the immediate postwar and becomes a mystery novel. 

I'm working on finishing Ngaoi Marsh's Colour Scheme, which I started reading in February (!) and set down! I've also recently gotten a Lucy Foley novel from the library after hearing a lot of glowing things about her... we'll see if I agree.

 

In the Woods with Literary Mysteries

 I’ve been trying to figure out how to handle a post about my discontent with contemporary literary mysteries, and sort of wondered if I should hold off writing about Tana French until I post that. That draft, which has gone through several iterations, always has the same claim:  Tana French is one of the reasons I keep flinging myself against the literary mystery genre despite disliking what I find more often than not! Though I keep up with her work, she is an author I’ve been reading almost from the start, and I got to wondering if I would like the Dublin Murder Squad, and particularly its first and most controversial book, 2007’s In the Woods, as much now that my taste has turned away from literary fiction. And, well, I did! In fact I liked it even more than I did when I read this around 2009. 

Spoilers for In the Woods Ahead! 

It’s almost 20 years old and it’s good. Either go read it, or read the post and damn the spoilers… The thesis of my little essay is that the book was no less enjoyable if you know what happens. 

In the Woods is described as a hybrid police procedural and psychological thriller, and I would consider these the hybrid subgenres within the umbrella genre of literary mysteries. It is about a detective, Rob Ryan, who is haunted by the unsolved disappearance of his two best friends in childhood. He was with them on the day they were abducted or murdered, but suffers amnesia. This unsolved case seemingly intertwines with another case of a murdered child set on the same estate which Rob,
now a detective, investigates with his partner Cassie. Will the modern case unlock the old one? To the shock and rage of many readers, the answer is no! French only solves one of the cases! The seeming connection between the two cases is a red herring, and Rob ends the book without answers or closure about what happened to his two best friends (and himself) as a child!  

I’m very familiar with the controversy that surrounds In the Woods because I was working in bookshops soon after it came out, and often recommended it to customers. I have listened to so many grievances about this book. If it came out today, I wonder if In the Woods would even register as having a controversial ending. Since its publication, there have been nearly twenty years of the literary mystery subgenre growing and proliferating across NPR’s best of the year lists. Some of those books don’t even solve one case! I remember the ending bugging me too, and I tried to pitch it to people with the explicit warning that it did break the rules of the mystery genre and end ambiguously on one of its two mysteries. I liked this book well enough to become a lifelong Tana French fan, but I disliked it enough that I never went back to reread the Dublin Murder Squad semi-series from the top. My opinion before this reread was:  it’s an okay book, the worst of the series, with a heavy handed and very obvious contemporary mystery and an unsatisfying literary flourish of ambiguity with the cold case. I remembered it as a rather poor police procedural but a promising start to a fine career in literary mystery. 

My opinion after re-reading? In the Woods is in fact a damn good police procedural and it is a great example of literary mystery done right. It’s both better than I remembered and much more enjoyable to reread than it was to read the first time around. It is a shockingly good first novel: polished, engaging, and self assured. It won a bunch of first novel awards in 2008, and it deserved them; I’d feel comfortable arguing that it’s one of the best first mystery novels of the 21st century so far. 

I do think French’s influence may have led to a lot of tropes and trends in literary mystery that I hate. If everything in In the Woods weren’t so well executed, I would probably dislike the book! But even from the start, Tana French was an undeniable talent:  her ability to balance character with theme with plot only got better, but it was there from the start. Like most literary mysteries, In the Woods has something that it is really about bubbling beneath the surface mystery. Unlike most literary mysteries, In the Woods  is good. It doesn’t have a singular and very boring thematic intent (often my feelings about literary mystery is that they’re just too thematically simple).  In the Woods is thematically rich. Beneath its two surface mysteries, it’s about the stasis that childhood trauma casts on some lives; it’s about magical thinking; it is about the fragility of friendship; it is about how some people are incapable of growth or change or escape, so broken that they will try to destroy anything and anyone who does want to be fully human. 

The two cases aren’t both a perfect fit for all of these themes. On one hand, the ultimate disconnection between the two cases was something that really bugged me after I first read it; I and my irate customers yearned to have at least a tidy parallel if not an outright solution to both. On the other hand, I wonder if the themes would be too heavy handed if the two cases had more parallels? Some ideas are too complicated to break down into two tidy parallel plots, and I think the long shadow of childhood trauma certainly qualifies as a complicated topic if it is done well. That said, those who have read the book might have read my list of themes and thought I was talking about the perpetrator of the contemporary case, teenaged psychopath Rosalind Devlin, who manipulates a boyfriend into killing her little sister rather than let her move away to pursue her dreams and talents (and potentially overshadow Rosalind). But as much as Rosalind is the criminal, Rob is the villain of his narrative, and those themes most accurately describe him. The real story of the book is not Rosalind’s monstrous violence. It’s not the crime in the past or the emptiness in Rob’s memory, but the way these have stunted him and made him intolerant of adult love, human change, growth. And yes, I suppose, the way his trauma makes him monstrous in a way that is a bit like Rosalind’s inborn monstrosity. 

When I praise the characters, I do mean mostly Rob. The characters are all filtered through what readers are quickly meant to understand is an unreliable narrator. Now I happen to like Cassie and think she’s fascinating, especially in how she occasionally breaks through Rob’s controlling narrative and all the things he doesn’t want to admit. But it’s a first person book, and ultimately Rob is the character who matters the most. He’s not very likable, which in fact I like a great deal about him: it's hard to do unlikable well. He’s interesting and mostly very believable to me as an adult living with the wounds of shattering trauma. I think it is fascinating how well French paralleled the tight bonds of childhood friends, the way their identities bleed into one another and they function as a singular unit, with Cassie and Rob’s relationship as partners–or, at least, within Rob’s experience of Cassie and Rob’s relationship! By the end of the book, it’s clear that Cassie wanted the juvenile friendship to grow into something adult:  not necessarily romantic or sexual (though it’s clear she’d be open to that), but she is ready for and capable of growth. Rob doesn’t just not want their relationship to change, he is absolutely incapable of it. Stunted by the loss of his friends and his memory, his greatest desire is to be part of a unit in the way that only childhood friends can be, and he lashes out at Cassie for her willingness to let the nature of their closeness change. Throughout the book, Cassie observes that children think differently from adults, and it was only on reread that I appreciated how much of Rob’s unreliable narration is a demonstration of his childish magical thinking. I also picked up that Rob's susceptibility to Rosalind's manipulation is related to his own trauma-stunted personality. It’s delicious how carefully constructed his unreliable narration is, and that is the sort of thing that is only really visible on reread. 

As strong as Rob and Cassie are, my longstanding inner criticism of the book was that the culprit of the modern murder, Rosalind, was cartoonish and silly. And, well, this is one critique that I’m not going to overturn. Rosalind is not French’s best, but to be fair I almost never like a fictional psychopath, especially a youthful one. Most of the rest of the Devlin family (except the mother, barely a character) are interesting and well drawn, especially the victim herself and her father, both of whom have stellar and heartbreaking scenes. Character and voice are French’s strength and always have been. 

Finally, plot. I have claimed, and I do believe that both plots are well balanced with both themes and character, unusually so for a literary mystery. This may be my bias speaking, but I think plot tends to be one of the first things to fail in literary mysteries. In the Woods is too long, as most literary mysteries are... But I’m not sure what I would cut to make it shorter. I suppose the whole character of Sam and the subplot of his investigation into real estate investments as the cause of the murder could be excised entirely, making a more focused book, but Sam feels like such an integral part of Rob’s delusional projection of his two lost childhood friends onto his adult colleagues that if I were editor, I couldn’t cut him. The killer and solution to the contemporary mystery are fine, actually, because the procedure of the police procedural in this book feels good. Oh, of course it’s fictionalized, but everything makes sense and I do think enough clues are given to a reader who cares about fair play. The sense of something rotten in the Devlin home is a classic hook, and I think French does a good job with misdirection towards both parents, especially when questions arise about whether or not Jonathan Devlin, who was a teenager when Rob was a child in the same estate, could be connected to the disappearance of his friends. 

Perhaps instead of plot I should talk about pacing. It’s here that the secondary mystery, Rob’s childhood crime, is crucial:  it, along with the disintegration of Rob’s sanity, creates tension and interest even when the main case is stagnating. Did I mention that Rob is keeping his identity a secret to most colleagues except Cassie? That is one part of the book that super doesn’t hold up:  it would never happen. But it works as a source of tension in the narrative:  will Rob be discovered and taken off the case or fired? Can he keep his head together or will it lead him astray on solving the new case?  Having the old mystery allows the new one to flounder and stagnate in ways that I think are probably a little more realistic than the propulsive plotting common to police procedurals on TV. It also lets the A plot of the modern mystery be a little simpler than (if I’m remembering right) later mysteries in the Dublin Murder Squad series. The pacing does fall off a cliff at the end of the book in that French didn’t seem to know how to end it at all. It goes through multiple false endings, many potential last lines, before finally just petering out. That’s okay with me, first book stuff. It’s very hard to write a novel I’m told. 

Rob’s fights with his own memory and the effect they have on his relationships and ability to do his job are sad and tense, and all the sadder because they lead him nowhere. I was basically a child when I first read this book, and now that I’m old and familiar with different genre conventions, the irresolution of Rob’s personal mystery doesn’t bother me. Ambiguity and psychological wretchedness are very noir, as is Rob’s status as the villain of his own life’s narrative. I think French’s choice to ultimately leave the earlier case unsolved is actually a brilliant character decision:  on this read, by the end of the book I was convinced that the solution to that case really did lie in Rob’s head and only Rob’s head. It flits around the edges of his narration (and I do have a theory or two about what happened), but Rob is too cowardly to face it, too fragile and too rigid. Rob’s pernicious stasis ultimately destroys his partnership and friendship with Cassie, but it is also responsible for the lack of resolution to the earlier case. It is not ever explicitly stated in the text, but I think it is quite subtextually clear that if Rob could let himself grow up and allow his relationship with Cassie to evolve, she could support him through the horror of unlocking his mind to discover the truth. The old crime remaining unsolved not a bait and switch because Rob’s inability to face his past and the brokenness that stops him from growing are integral parts of his character. That’s his story, and it is sad, but it’s not unrealistic or unsatisfying. We might not get the literal solution, but by the end of the book on my reread, I understood why the old case would never be solved, and I was satisfied with that understanding.

I dearly wish Tana French would return to the Dublin Murders books. It’s been ten years! I do love the Cal Hooper books, and I get the sense that she’s interested in exploring justice more than policework these days, but I love the way this series is structured:  by moving from one protagonist to another, selecting a supporting character from one book to take over the next. Book two in this semi-series is Cassie’s book, and I seem to remember that it has almost no mention of the events of book one or of Rob. I recall not liking it quite as much, finding the central conceit more difficult to get on board with. I plan to reread it very soon while In the Woods is still fresh so I can compare. 

Capsule Thoughts: February 2026

I didn’t read as much in February as I usually do, and I wasn’t able to finish any of the posts I was working on. This is because my energy got redirected into a sudden professional opportunity. I’m not sure if that opportunity over, but I hope to at least read more in the coming month! 

Cop-Hater (1956), Ed McBain
I initially had written a separate post about this book complaining in detail about its virulent misogyny. But I’m not sure it’s putting on my blog:  it’s not like I need to explain or justify to myself that this is something I don’t like in books I read for entertainment. Suffice to say I wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of page time devoted to objectifying women’s bodies when I picked up this book after reading many glowing recommendations of the 87th Precinct series. It was seriously distracting and made me uncomfortable, especially in audio format. Almost every single point of view detective is introduced with a chapter at home as he beholds his sex object, and these women run a gamut of misogynist tropes that is frankly disturbing:  a literal deaf-mute, submissive sex kitten; a withholding minx; a sleeping Madonna. Maybe I’m just not very familiar with pulps, but after reading so many contemporaneous books written by women, this was a disaster. Anything enjoyable was overshadowed. I’d like to read more McBain because the recommendations I’ve received are so earnest and glowing, but I’m not sure I can keep going chronologically. Maybe I’ll skip a few years or even a decade??? 

Cinder House (2025), Freya Marske
Not a mystery and not a novel, this novella is a retelling of Cinderella with a fun premise:  what if Cinderella were a ghost, murdered by her step family? This murder is explicit, but there is another that haunts the edges of the book that wasn’t ever explicitly excavated. So it was a little mystery adjacent in that sense. Marske writes romantasy, I guess, and this little novella was very focused on the relationships which is a little of a disappointment because it actually has rather interesting fantasy worldbuilding. I enjoyed it, but with most novellas if I enjoy them, wished it were longer. 

The Hollow (1946), Agatha Christie
What a book, what a book! I’m working on a stand alone post dedicated to it but I feel like all my thoughts were blown away by high altitude of all my work travel. I hope it doesn’t go the way of Five Little Pigs and turn into a draft that I feel like I can’t finish without a reread! Not that rereading this would be bad:  I think it is the sort of Christie that could, actually, stand for a fairly immediate revisiting, it is that complex with characters. 

I have a few books halfway finished that I’m trying to get back to after my pause. I even wondered if I was experiencing a reading slump, something that can happen to me after I read a truly excellent book like The Hollow. Maybe I was, but then my free time evaporated. Hopefully a forced break will reinvigorate me with the books and series I was reading. 

Capsule Reactions: January 2025

Sometimes there just isn’t much to write about a book, but I have a few thoughts I’d like to get out of the noggin.

The Silk Stocking Murders (1928), Anthony Berkeley
I said I was probably going to revisit the works of Anthony Berkeley Cox in 2026, and I did. And, uh, well. It wasn’t an improvement on The Wychford Mystery. The Silk Stocking Murders is one of the most odiously antisemitic mysteries that I’ve ever read from the Golden Age of Detection (GAD), which is really saying something because many books of this era are antisemitic. It is also pervasively sexist. Because I am interested in the development of the serial killer thriller subgenre, I toyed around with whether I wanted to write a full post about it… but in order to get there, I’d need to either write through or set aside the absolutely rancid bigotry of the book. It’s too prominent to pass by quickly, and what is there to even say that hasn’t already been said? Many old books have various bigotries, but they’ll usually have other things of value. This is not one of those books. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, and the highest value it has is serving as an example of a historical work that does not manage to transcend the bigotries of its time or its author. Despite having two terrible experiences reading Cox’s work, I will still probably read his more famous books eventually. But at this point, those will be out of historical curiosity about the genre and not for pleasure. 

The Tainted Cup (2024), Robert Jackson Bennett
This book was enjoyable! But, despite being sold to me as a fantasy/mystery genre mashup, the mystery side of things was pretty slim. I would categorize it more as a political thriller than a mystery, and the fantasy side definitely comes first:  it’s set in a world like Pacific Rim, beset by kaiju, with a creepy and cool biohacking sort of magic. It doesn’t really fit here because it would be difficult to write about coherently without explaining all the lore and magic etc. But I am giving it a shout out for having fun with some mystery tropes. One thing that is borrowed from the mystery genre is the Sherlock/Watson dynamic between the detective and the sidekick. This trope is always, always fun when it is done well, and I enjoyed it here. The narrator, the Watson character, is biomagically altered to have perfect recall, but that doesn’t give him understanding. It’s a fun way to justify first person narration where clues are noticed and recorded for the reader, but not understood. I liked the book a lot and already bought the sequel. 

Last Call at the Nightingale (2022), Katharine Schellman
This isn’t the first contemporary mystery novel set in the 1920s that I’ve read, and I’m sure that it won’t be the last. It’s a historical setting that I try again and again, searching for something that will really capture me, yet nothing really has. This one was enjoyable enough and I don’t have a lot to say about it. However, it did give me an epiphany:  the reason I keep choosing contemporary mysteries in the ‘20s is because of my love for the Golden Age of Detection. It’s so obvious, I don’t know why I didn’t realize it consciously! It also explains why I tend to be vague dissatisfied with these books:  they aren’t anything like GADs, they’re not intended to be. I wonder if I’ll enjoy them more if I adjust my expectations? Or maybe I should admit that, while I like historical mysteries, this era may be too overshadowed by the Golden Age to satisfy me? 

The Darkness (2015?, 2018 english), Ragnar Jonasson 
This was the first in a series of recent Icelandic crime novels. I'm not the biggest fan of Nordic Noir but I do partake every once in a while. This book has both the strengths and weaknesses of the Nordic Noir. It was a strange and dark book, very atmospheric, and I have no idea how it’s going to be a series. The main character, Hulda, is a detective on the eve of retirement, and though she’s stated repeatedly to have been a very good detective, it isn’t shown throughout the book. She makes a series of devastating mistakes that were frustrating to read, but she is an interesting character: I like a difficult middle aged woman detective. The audiobook was good: briskly narrated, and I liked the concise style. I’m not sure about the ending, but I will probably read at least book two out of sheer curiosity.

If You Can’t Say Anything Nice

I’ve alluded enough times to my soft policy of what I do and don’t write about here that I feel it’s worth writing up in a post of its own to link to. 

I don’t write about every book that I read. This is for a couple of reasons: 

1. This isn’t a review blog! I am not chronicling the entirety of my reading life. I don’t have time for that, but mostly, I don’t want to put the pressure on myself to feel like I have to come up with public-facing thoughts about everything.

2. I don’t like everything I read, and I don’t want to build a habit of saying negative things about living authors in public. 

The first reason is fairly self explanatory, but what about the second? I have access to my stats, I know that absolutely nobody is reading this website. I have no audience and maybe never will! It’s not something I expect (who even reads blogs in 2026!?) and I’m not trying to market myself or publicize this space. I have even questioned myself severely about why I chose to write a public blog instead of continuing to keep a private journal and the answer is convenience as much as anything:  notebooks are heavy and get full up and it can be hard to find a thought again for reference. I want to be able to search and index my thoughts. A private google doc or private blog could work, but I want to be able to pull up my thoughts to reference on any device, anywhere, without having to sign in. For this purpose, a blog just makes sense.

So, these are public thoughts, and I do feel a responsibility to be professional and reasonably kind about the hard work of living people. “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” isn’t a rule I necessarily live my life by, but also, why not err in that direction? I’m anonymous, but I am a professional in a book-adjacent field and as a professional, I simply wouldn’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say at a conference or event.

Sometimes I’ll start writing a post and come back to my draft and feel like my words are mean. One lesson I’ve learned about the internet is that it is a small place and for all that it’s full of bots, it also has real people. Almost no living author is so big or so inhuman that they may not be googling for reviews and reactions to their work. I don’t want to be in a position of making anyone feel bad for trying to make art and entertainment. The stakes are low for me, but emotionally high for others. So what if I hated a book and didn’t finish it? Who cares? Beyond absolute record keeping (which I can do more privately), I’m not even sure I do. If a theme or trend in contemporary publishing really bothers me, I think I should be able to write about them without relying on specific examples.

This doesn’t mean I won’t ever voice a critique about a book, but if I am writing publicly about a book by a living author, it means that even if I have critiques, I overall liked it! No holds barred for the dead, though, nor for works that are objectionable to me in ways that go beyond taste and preference.  

Suspects as Narrators and Detectives: Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope

Immediately after I complained about the group of suspects standing in for the detective, I read the first three Vera Stanhope books by Ann Cleeves and found the same thing, particularly in the first two:  suspects, or civilians within the circle of suspects or potential victims, conducting their own speculations and investigations. Interestingly, it doesn’t bother me as much when Cleeves does it! 

Before I get into my thoughts, some quick background:  I’ve read and really enjoyed Cleeves’ Shetland and Two Rivers books (in fact, Shetland has been on my reread list because I remember liking them), but hadn’t touched Vera. No particular reason except maybe they were a little more difficult to find, or maybe I have been low key saving them for a rainy day. I’ve been on a Britbox gift subscription and the show Vera was recommended to me. I thought about watching before reading, but since this is a series I’ve always intended to get to, and because it seems like most episodes aren’t actually adaptations of the books, I decided to prioritize the first few books which do make up the first season. I’m not terribly fussy about spoilers--my feeling generally is that if I am going to enjoy a book, I’ll enjoy it no matter what I know going in--but I do like to pay attention to and think about adaptation choices. So I bought the first few and made them my Christmas break reads! 

The Crow Trap (1999), the first book, is apparently unloved by fans because Vera doesn’t make an
appearance until midway through the book. Instead, the first half passes point of view duties between three scientists as they live together in a cottage while working on an environmental survey in advance of

a commercial quarry development. One of the women is grappling with the apparent suicide of her friend. One is having an affair with the developer. The third and youngest of the scientists whose mind we live in is murdered, and Vera Stanhope makes a dramatic entrance one third of the way into the book to solve her mystery. It’s even later still until the third person close POV drifts into Vera’s mind. Even then, after the point she bursts into the narrative, Vera’s main role is in squatting in the corner of the cottage encouraging the two surviving scientists in their own inquiries. When we get it, her inner monologues are more focused on her memories of the cottage and her father, with relatively little puzzling out of the case itself. If I were to describe Vera's characterization in this book, I’d call it impressionistic and literary:  she is a character, but in the model of literary mystery, the way she engages with the crime is through the lens of the personal. Her narration is devoted as much to remembering her father and childhood as it is to deducting and detecting. She doesn't feel quite like a person yet the way Jimmy Perez of Shetland did immediately. (I think Jimmy Perez is a fantastically written character.) It’s funny that Vera is so fuzzily characterized in the first book because all three of the other POV characters are very well defined, and very distinct from one another. 

Vera is strange in the book. On the surface there is a similarity to Detective Cockrill, whose presence in Brand’s books I dislike so very much (so far):  both are ominous presences, watchful, physically off-putting; both treat the civilians with a distinct lack of care. Like Cockrill, Vera is introduced as a cynic and a misanthrope. Vera actually reminds me a little of Christie’s Miss Marple, and I have got to think that it’s impossible that Cleeves wasn’t putting a spin on that character at least a little bit. Like Miss Marple, Vera uses her appearance (in this case, middle aged, overweight, unlovely) as a disguise, to lure her suspects into a false sense of safety. Like Marple, she moves in small towns and has an understanding of the dynamics and subaltern histories of small communities that can only be won through living in one for decades. And like Marple, her physique is sometimes a limit, and she may deputize others to ferret out bits of information to bring to her.

Even if The Crow Trap never did circle around to giving point-of-view into Vera’s mind, she would be an active investigator:  Vera manipulates the surviving women into serving as her delegates in interacting with suspects, especially encouraging their interest in the earlier suicide. Whether this is because she really thinks they may be on to something, or because she has an abiding interest in local gossip isn’t quite clear. Another key feature of  The Crow Trap is that the surrogates aren’t suspects. This makes their cooperation with one another and with the detective much more realistic and palatable. As the title alludes, they are bait, and while Vera’s thinking and motivations for this unorthodox gambit aren’t very deeply explored, it is a textual choice she has made, and her presence in their lives during tea times and evening drinks makes sense:  she's watching over them. Even while physically passive, Vera is mentally proactive, and the reader is very much aware of it.

I understand why fans would be confused by the structure of the first book, especially if they were coming from the show, but it doesn’t bother me. I can be ambivalent about alternating narrators, but I do like when books have an intentional structure like this one does, and I like when the reader is given more information than the characters. The first third of this book almost has a Rashomon structure, with different points of view on the same event. I also like that the characters themselves have secrets from each other and Vera, and that some of those secrets survive the book–a theme that continues through all three. 

The Crow Trap was published in 1999, and the second book, Telling Tales, was published in 2005. I wonder if Cleeves always intended this to be a series, or if perhaps The Crow Trap was written as a stand-alone novel. I could easily believe this. Telling Tales (2005) is, I think, more representative of the series: while the close third person POV does continue to shift between Vera and people related to the crime, the division is more even, with no delay in Vera's appearance. Vera is more deeply characterized in book two:  she emerges as a definite alcoholic; her dynamic with other officers and with her second is more clearly defined and described; and her complicated feelings about suspects and bystanders to crime is explored. At least in the next two books, she doesn’t explicitly deputize surrogates to detect for her, though her interest in and reliance on gossip remains. The Vera in Telling Tales has the feeling of a character being developed for a long series in the way that the character in The Crow Trap doesn’t. I wasn’t surprised to see similar themes and characterizations continued in Hidden Depths.

In the first book, I felt that the characterization and distinction of the side characters/secondary narrators/surrogate detectives was a strong point. This strength continues through the next two. Even with more intentional characterization, Vera herself continues to feel a little like an enigma, but Cleeves is good at creating point of view characters who have some involvement with the case. These characters don’t continue between books, and the way that they end can feel abrupt. I would guess that for some readers, this is upsetting:  open-endedness is somewhat at odds with a genre that inherently is about solving mysteries, uncovering secrets, and tying up loose ends. In Cleeves’ hands, I like it. I think it’s very intentional what she does and doesn’t choose to resolve, and I don’t mind that griefs are unresolved, that ruptures in relationships are unrepaired, that secrets stay secret.  

Though I did quite like the first two books, Hidden Depths (2007) was my favorite of the three, even though the solution to the mystery was abrupt and under-clued, with a particularly poor motive. I don’t think I read Cleeves for the mysteries, but rather for the pleasure of joining a sharp observer in putting small communities and complex personalities under a magnifying glass. I particularly liked this book because I think one of Cleeves’ strengths is scientific communities. One of the Shetland books I remember liking particularly was about bird watchers, and both books 1 and 3 touch on this community as well. Cleeves is good at describing the rituals and dynamics in isolated communities, particularly scientific communities, to people like me who have no experience with them and never will. 

With these three books out of the way, I’m ready to start watching the show, and I am very excited to see how Brenda Blethyn (a great actor!) interprets a character who is so complex on page. Even though it’s my understanding that the book and the show diverge fairly quickly, I am definitely planning to continue reading the Vera Stanhope books! Writing this made me want to cue up book four, but I will wait and finish the two books I'm working through right now first (both speculative fiction, though they have some overlap, so maybe they'll show up here).
 

2026 Predictions: Themes and Anti-Resolutions

I don’t like setting myself up to failed expectations around the new year, but I do think it’s fun to do a survey of the state of my reading, including some of the themes and categories I’m interested in reading in the coming year. And I do have some anti-resolutions:  authors or types of books that I am consciously going to try to read less of in 2026! 

Themes and Modest Goals

Series reading:  While I might read books in a series on an extended schedule, over years, I like to have a selection of series that I am actively reading. I hate being without a book, and get a lot of titles from long waits or interlibrary loan; rotating through a few series ensures I never have to decide and always have a book available when I need it. I’m also a bit of a mood reader, so I like to have several options depending on my mood and capacity! After auditioning quite a lot of new series in the first months of last year, I feel good about where I am in my series reading:  I’m persevering in my fraught relationship with Peter Robinson; I just started Ann Cleeves’ Vera (I’ll write about it soon!); and I have Jane Casey and Andrea Penrose to sprinkle in for lighter reads. This is a good stable of genres and authors to choose from. I wouldn’t be surprised if I finish at least one of these series in 2026.

Rereading:  Ever since I read The Searcher a year ago and was reminded of how much I like Tana French, I’ve had a yen to revisit her Dublin Murder Squad books! I may also continue with rereading some of Michael Connelly’s Jack McEvoy subseries, since I am more or less caught up with Bosch and Ballard. I would like to finish my reread of Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey books this year. I haven’t mentioned it, but I’ve been similarly PD James over the last few years and while I don’t know that I’ll finish that project (her books can be so literary that I space them apart), I do want to continue! 

History of Mysteries:  My goal is to continue with Christianna Brand and with my ongoing read through of all of Agatha Christie. After rather disliking Anthony Berkeley’s The Wychford Poisonings last year, I want to give him another try:  I liked the mystery but hated the characters and the tone (so. much. spanking!). I’d also like to get back to Ngaoi Marsh, whose books I mostly enjoy but who I fell off of mid series:  I didn’t read any of her books last year! I may also explore some honkaku:  at a minimum, I’ve already bought The Decagon House Murders, so I will certainly read that! 

Cozies:  For a long time, I’ve had a goal to find some cozies that I like. I’m not on very good terms with the sub-genre, but the world is hard and it would be nice to have some lighter reads in the stable. I sampled some in 2025 without much luck, but my goal is to keep trying! 

Stand-alones and planned one-offs: I’m very much looking forward to reading another of Janice Hallett’s delicious epistolaries; I sampled The Examiner and am on the wait list for it at my library. Working in academia myself, I expect I'll either love it or have a lot of critique! I’ve decided one Hallett a year is probably reasonable pacing to keep these fresh. With a little trepidation, I intend to try Kemper Donovan’s ghost writer series (of course I know of him from the podcast, and the trepidation stems from being afraid I won't like it). One of the blogs I read often loves Perry Mason, so I’m going to give an Erle Stanley Gardner a try (I’ve already picked out my title and ordered it from the library!). 

Anti-Resolutions: Who I’m Giving Up in 2026

Instead of making resolutions about what exactly to read, I am giving myself anti-resolutions:  authors and categories I am giving myself permission not to read anymore! Though I may come back to them, I’m putting them back on the literal or proverbial shelf for the year: 

Margery Allingham:  There’s some stuff to like, but of the Queens, she is far and away my least favorite. I extremely struggled to finish the last book of hers I read. That was Death of a Ghost, which I thought at first was an improvement only to be disappointed. It exemplified one of the problems I have with Allingham:  her interminable endings that just seem to stretch on and on and on. 

Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus:  A lot of authors who I like (and thus whose taste I theoretically trust), love these books. The fictional Ruth Galloway is always enjoying the latest Ian Rankin book. But I just couldn’t get going with the series in 2025! I like some aspects, but there are also elements in the early books that I find extremely repellent, especially in audio. The early part of the series, at least, is not for me. I might pick up the series a little later in to see if I like it better:  maybe there’s a point where the author finds his stride. 

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club: Nothing against the man personally, he seems clever and nice. And nothing against fans of the series: I can see why you like them, there’s a lot of charm here! I just can’t get into these books. There’s an ironic remove between the characters and the narrator that I commonly encounter in British fiction. I don’t mind it in some cases (i.e. Mick Herron’s loathsome spies), but I just can’t connect with this series or its characters and I think I’m done trying. I do plan to try the movie adaptation, though.

Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct:  Maybe!? These came so highly recommended that I am loathe to give up, and I haven’t even been able to finish book one! Usually I give series 2-3 books to find their footing, but every once in a while I dislike a book so much that I question the policy, and Cop Hater is a struggle. Even though it's extremely short. I do still want to give the series a fair shake since it’s beloved, but maybe not this year, and like Rankin, maybe I’ll try a later book in the series to see if the aspects I dislike have improved at all. 

Literary mysteries: I have so many blog drafts of articles about literary mysteries that came out in the last couple of years, and I’ve held back on publishing them because they spiral out into sour rants. This is my anti-resolution that I’m most likely to fail because I am perpetually tempted back by positive reviews from prestigious outlets! But for my own happiness, I’d really like to take a year off from reading literary mysteries! Except for a few trusted authors, I can't think of the last time I truly enjoyed a new one. If I were to break down the genres and sub-genres is the books I don't finish, I think literary mysteries might top it. So no more! I'm taking a year off! Probably. 

That does it for my thematic predictions and my anti-resolutions! If I'm still writing a year from now, it will be interesting to see how I do ... when I made art resolutions for 2025, I immediately forgot them, but I ended up doing most of them anyway! Maybe the biggest prediction of all:  I expect this post to fall into the memory hole instantly, and anything I do to meet these predictions will be entirely by accident!