… courtesy of the British Library. Two more sleeps before opening though ..read more

I’ve had a bit of a rest for a couple of months, during which my blog traffic has gone through the roof, which fact should probably teach me something about leaving well alone, but hasn’t. Here I am back with, if not a bang, a whimper. This is what I’ve been reading… I’ve had a couple of John Rowland titles from the British Library on my shelves for a few years now. Murder in the Museum (1938) sees the pooterish Mr Henry Fairhurst assisting Scotland Yard’s hunt for the killer of three Shakespearean scholars. The later Calamity in Kent (1950) is another one for my collection of mysteries w ..read more

Every month on Past Offences a merry band of bloggers read and review the criminous output of a particular year. I call it Crimes of the Century, and this April we were looking at 1977. Fittingly enough, our first entry was for The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter, who sadly passed away at the beginning of the month (you can read his obituary at the Guardian). According to Jose Ignacio at A Crime is Afoot, the third Inspector Morse novel is… … well crafted and very amusing reading. A nice example of a classic Post-World War II detective novel. A professional policeman is in charg ..read more

(aka Blogger tries clickbait headlines) Earlier in the week I announced that I’d completed reviewing all 106 in the CWA’s list of the 100 best crime and mystery books, and promised to let you know which books I thought genuinely deserved a place in that list. My favourites (with their ranking in the CWA list) are: 6. Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca (1938) 7. Raymond Chandler: Farewell My Lovely (1940) 12. Hillary Waugh: Last Seen Wearing … (1952) 16. Francis Iles: Malice Aforethought (1931) 19. Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None (1939) 26. Margery Allingham: The Tiger in the Smoke (1952 ..read more

Where else, Major, might one find a London bobby, a solicitor’s clerk, a baronet, an ex-Army chap, a greengrocer’s daughter and a – a bohemian eccentric, not to mention a chemistry student – all gathered in one room to discuss one subject? An anxious wait this month for my Crimes of the Century book to arrive from America ended on Friday morning, when my copy of John Sladek’s Invisible Green got here just in time for me to read it before the end of April. I’d heard it was a good book – JJ from The Invisible Event recently called it ‘last possible hurrah for the classically-styled detecti ..read more

Since beginning Past Offences I have been quietly working my way through the CWA’s 1990 list of the 100 best crime books, a list which begins or end with The Four Just Men (#100) and ends or begins with The Daughter of Time (#1). With the publication of my review of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (#19), I have officially completed the list. You probably sensed the disturbance in the force. Even more impressively, I actually read more than 100 books because the CWA cheated. The Collected Sherlock Holmes Short Stories (#21) is five books, not one. And Len Deighton’s Game ..read more

If this had been an old house, with creaking wood, and dark shadows, and heavily panelled walls, there might have been an eerie feeling. But this house was the essence of modernity. There were no dark corners – no possible sliding panels – it was flooded with electric light – everything was new and bright  and shining. There was nothing hidden in this house, nothing concealed. It had no atmosphere about it. Somehow, that was the most frightening thing of all… Some five years ago, I began a personal challenge on Past Offences: to read and review all one hundred of the CWA li ..read more

‘I am, in fact, something of a poet. A poet of fear.’ Lucy Moffat, the translator of The Iron Chariot for new publisher The Abandoned Bookshop got in touch a while back to see if I’d be interested in taking a look at the first appearance in English of this Scandinavian classic. The pitch was certainly interesting, so I agreed at once. Sven Elvestad (1884-1934) was a Norwegian journalist and author. He is best known for his detective stories, which he wrote as Stein Riverton. No less a Norwegian than Jo Nesbø calls Riverton a great writer and the founder of the modern Norweg ..read more

Men with brains and ability can be found all over the world, moreover there are always others coming on to fill their places, but such Jacobean rooms as this are not to be found all over the world, nor are they to be reproduced. The ceiling was finely moulded, and the walls panelled with oak, stained and darkened by the passing years. The dominant colour of the room was dark red or red-brown, the carpet was one or the other, the drawn curtains dark red, and two generous fires at each end of the room lit up the ruby tints of the decanters of port on the table and the splash of scarlet of a doct ..read more

Every month at Past Offences an intrepid band of bloggers proffers their opinions on a particular year on crime fiction. I call it Crimes of the Century. The stakes were high this time. Regular player JJ recently made a case that 1937 was the Golden Age of the Golden Age. Would our findings back him up, or send him back to the drawing board for more graphs? Brad blew in first with a flurry of snowflakes and his review of J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White: Mystery in White strikes me more as a comforting British novel full of nice people you want to spend time with, but there’s some crimi ..read more