Some quotes to fuel what one hopes will be a fine year in detective fiction …
…hunches may suggest something of which the detective is not yet aware. A powerful, yet invisible force. Therefore, it’s perfectly fair to include them in the narrative, so long as they are not the defining feature. The most important thing is to play by the rules…. Conan Doyle was a first-class cricketer … rules are essential for civilisation, as much as for detective fiction … None of us wants to be constrained by our form…. our novels should always contain a human dilemma at their heart…. All those vicarages and libraries and home counties houses, they were killing fields. The college quads and luxurious hotels were never remotely safe. They were replete with menace and threat. For some reason I think Hubert was saying, … that there has never been any place you can really feel safe.
— Dialogue given to Dorothy L. Sayers in Jane Thynne’s excellent Midnight in Vienna, pp. 234-7.
Greg Matthews is a hugely successful thriller writer… Anything and anyone was Garibaldi’s guiding principle when it came to reading, but he was always discriminating, sifting the good from the bad, the well written from the clunky, the ones likely to last from those instantly disposable. That was why he had only read one Greg Matthews novel.
— Bernard O’Keeffe’s The Final Round, p. 122.
Investigating a mysterious death you’re personally invested in requires you to live on a hyper-rational plane while simultaneously throwing all rational thoughts out the cognitive window. One has to take enormous leaps, truly believe in tenuous links between disparate details…. He thought of the detective books his mother had read in secret on their holidays in Skegness. There was always a locked room.
— Chris MacDonald, In the Shadows, pp. 147, 339.
I see endless TV personalities logrolling each other’s cosy crime novels written by someone else) in “festive” book roundups. The books are all rubbish and the logrollers don’t even read them (any more than the authors do). But if they don’t do it, it’ll be embarrassing when they bump into each other at Christmas parties.
— Giles Coren, The Times, 6 Dec. 2025, p. 30.
And there are bold statements flawed by error. For example:
Detective fiction emerged in the 19th century as science, including the evolutionary and forensic kinds, advanced. Reason rattled faith. Fictional detectives were omniscient idols of a secularising world…
—- Anon., The Economist, 29 November 2025, p. 81.
Actually, no. Try reading my The Age of Nightmare. The Gothic and British Culture, 1750-1900.
For absolute nonsense, turn to Tom Holland, who, for the Sunday Times of 7 December 2025, described the Jack the Ripper killings as “the first true crime story of the modern age,” adding that they “establish the entire template for both detective fiction and true crime.” Consistent at least in error.
Get the English tea ceremony right and the results were most refreshing. WeiWei added milk to a mug of boiled water, then smushed the teabag on the mug’s side with a spoon until the drink darkened to warm beige. She slung the bag into the sink with a wrist flick as graceful as a dancer’s. It was brewed hotter than normal tea, so preparation was followed by a cool down period that formed a pause for contemplation …
Jian found a document with a cover design of whimsical beasts holding up a shield. Not more fantasy nonsense, despite initial appearance: it was a British passport.
Book-of-the-month is Simon Lewis’ No Exit (Sort of Books, distributed by Profil Books, 2026, £9.99), the sequel to his Bad Traffic. Inspector Jian and his daughter have taken refuge from corruption charges in China, and London becomes a setting for a violent émigré life centred on gangsterism, gambling, and kidnapping, as status and, for some, thrills are pursued. Jian is the redeemer, casually, but necessarily, fatally violent as he disentangles the complexities of plots within a alongside others. Very well paced and written. Deserves purchase. My book of the month.
The British Library Crime Classics offers another E.C.R. Lorac, this time Still Waters (1949, 2025, £10.99). A mistake though: It is subtitled “A Lake District Mystery”, and there is a cover accordingly, but is set further south, in Lunedale, north Lancashire. There is the return of the reliable Detective Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald and of the Hoggetts from her The Theft of the Iron Dogs. The writing contains much of interest for the period:
… all these controls play Old Harry with Private enterprise…. a train which was already very late…. all her London friends prefer to spend fortunes on trunk calls instead of twopence halfpenny on a sensible letter…. a “brochure – revolting word…. You’ve got something, to use the debased lingo of to-day…. “Firewood. There’s been quite a racket in that line, hasn’t there, with the coal shortage…. When I was first in the force, there was virtually no crime in this area. Occasional drunks, occasional tramps, some petty larceny – but nothing that couldn’t be dealt with summarily. To-day, with black market and deserters and maniacs and perverts – well, by gum, anything might happen anywhere – the violence which permeates the world…. on my [Judge Warrender] last homeward voyage from India…. “A hundred Players! Glory! I’m right out.” “they’d never be allowed to use that land for breeding dogs alone: the county agricultural committees wouldn’t let them” … with a man’s body prone at his feet … it wasn’t anything like a detective novel … something paralysing about it.
A calm story which will not upset. Well-constructed and grounded ably in place and people.
Even so, from recent arrivals in the same series, I prefer Michael Gilbert’s Sky High (1955; 2026, £10.99). Set in the tranquil village of Brimberley, this provides a “cozy crime story”, set around Liz Artside, an army-widow and church choirmaster, that is so much more accomplished (and shorter) than the Osman sprawls of the present. The differences of a very past world are set forth and then there is an explosive entry of the main plot, with murder the corollary. The after-echo of “the war” is very much present, in character and career, but, in this case, it is both world wars (“Masters had died on the Somme, like a lot of other good fellows”), as well as post-1945 imperial policing:
In Jerusalem, in 1947, he [Sergeant Gattie “the absolute mainstay of their police choral society”] shot a [Irgun] gentleman in a bowler hat who was on the point of tossing a hand grenade into the back of a car I was driving. What are we doing about supper?
Rural society is tight, with Liz a friend of Robert Cleeve, the Chairman of the County Council, who is against “grocerish” County Councillors, Tom Pearce, the Chief Constable, and General Sir Hubert Palling, a prominent veteran.
The old world lingers on, not least in memories: “it was exactly the way old Canon Bessemer used to shake his finger when he spoke of Sin,” but also in cuisine: “Gwen’s Tea Parlour … the glaucous egg on a partially warmed pile of beans that constituted Gwen’s staple supper dish.” The latest copy of Country Life “depicted the glories of Belton Park, in Essex”: “You wouldn’t guess from them that the gardens are overgrown, the roof lets in the rain, and only the East Wing is really habitable at all.” The plot becomes somewhat far fetched, and increasingly so, and the last stage is frenetic. There is a clue to which Agatha Christie was in part to return in At Bertram’s Hotel (1965). Well worth reading.
The past is very differently on offer in Faith Martin’s A Dangerous Train of Thought (HQ, 2026, £16.99), the third of her Val and Arbie Mysteries. Set in 1926 in Cleeves Lea Manor in “south Yorkshire”, this is a murderous weekend party in the splendid home of Sir Bayard Cherville. The usual collection of misfits is the occasion for murder, with tales of a ghostly train in the background. Wodehouse meets Christie, though a few silly mistakes. For example, Cherville is not a peer. A seasonal pleasure. Enjoyable.
Bernard O’Keeffe’s The Final Round (2021, Muswell Press, pb. 2022, £8.99) is a matter of backfilling after reading his excellent subsequent outings for Detective Inspector Garibaldi, notably Private Letters. The Thameside murder of Nick Bellamy with his Oxford college scarf stuffed into his tongueless mouth turns attention to a charity quiz that ends with a surprise round suggesting that one of six Oxford contemporaries was dishonest if not worse. And we are off on the murderous streets of Barnes, though cyanide is less easy of access than is suggested unless you can handle Form 23/T/416, secret, which is a signoff for using cyanide for official purposes: what you have to do is to mis-assess the quantity actually required. But remember, you must fill in your EDI form first.
A much grimmer setting is provided in Saïd Khatibi’s The End of the Sahara (2022; English translation, Bitter Lemon Press, 2026, £10.99). Set in 1988, the story focuses on the quest to discover the killer of Zakia Zaghouni, a nightclub singer at the Sahara Hotel. The author’s note announces that the novel “tells the story of the end of socialism in Algeria” and that “the hotel stands in for Algeria, and Algeria for all countries that cultivate historical amnesia and indifference to others”. In practice, this well-plotted and ably constructed story is about much else, including the perils of family division, maternal control, paternal violence, male desire, lust and violence, dictated marital choices, incessant corruption, appalling public health, callousness, corruption and cruelty. It is an account of the failure alike of state control (notably as symbolised by a lack of running water) and Islamic social practices, and of the small-mindedness of the related poverty as well as of a material culture running on empty. The book is at once harsh, even stark, not least in terms of the conditions of life and the nature of prison conditions, but is also hypnotic, and is well worth reading. It is social commentary as well as an impressive detective novel amidst the travails of family and the ruins of relationships.
Also backfilling with Neil Humphreys’ Marina Bay Sins (2015; Muswell Press, 2022, £8.99), the first in the Detective-Inspector Low series, a superb introduction to the seedy side of Singapore life, business, and ethos. Low, a brilliant bipolar force of nature, is sent to investigate the apparently impossible murder in a luxury hotel of an Australian, and we are away into a high-energy story of competing plots, the power of the police, the corruption of government, the reach of criminality, food, sex and Singlish. Quite brilliant; and the novel ends with a total surprise.
Humphreys’ Rich Kill, Poor Kill (2016; 2022, Muswell Press, £9.99) finds Low searching for a White killer who moves from murdering an Indonesian cleaner to attacking others who are higher placed in the caste society: “Dead foreigners inconvenienced the statisticians … but dead locals antagonised voters. Politics had no respect for the dead. But then, the dead had no respect for politics.” Low is an iconoclast, criticising those who run all: “an arse kicker, a number cruncher, he’s everything we think we need and nothing we ever want. He’s a robot.”
The Minister … Low loathed everything about the man – his conceit, his innate sense of superiority and unshakeable belief in the educated few controlling the lumpen masses; the automated charm, the ingratiating swarm and the overwhelming certainty of always being right. Men like the Minister never patronised. They genuinely believed in what they were saying.
So also with Chris MacDonald’s second novel, In the Shadows (Michael Joseph, 2026, £18.99), a brilliant story beginning with a 1977 Prologue in which the body of Nereus Forbes, a David Bowie figure, is found in a locked room in his Chelsea townhouse. This apparent overdose becomes a what happened, set in the developing pop world of the 1960s and 1970s as well as in the present. The interplay between “Nereus”, Graham a backing player, and Sadie, becomes the background to the attempt by Graham’s daughter Winter to discover and understand the past.
This might not appear a book for this reviewer, as I have never “done” drugs or taken to pop, but the plot is excellent, the characterisation works well, the writing is well-judged: “Whitby … she was surprised Dracula didn’t turn the boat round when he saw the place”, and the story came to absorb my attention. Well done.
Heidi Amsinck continues her Copenhagen-set Jensen series with The Woman in the Wall (Muswell Press, 2026), £10.99) which begins with the discovery of a bricked-up corpse in an affluent apartment and focuses heavily on male cruelty to women, both old cases and current ones. Her journalist is in the midst of danger and violence, aside from the differently troubling cases of her parentage and her personal relations with Henrik Jungersen. Good but at risk of becoming formulaic.
Tom Hindle’s A Killer in Paradise (Century, 2026, £18.99) poses a problem for the reviewer. There is a certain familiarity with the idea of the university reunion leading to a murder focused on a long-held secret. I find these plots rather depressing and predictable. This reviewer has read too many of them. More positively, as a critic, it is possible to compare and contrast, and Tom Hindle’s Costa Rican-set, Anglo-American reunion is the best I have read of this type. There is a predictability that is brilliantly overthrown by a plot-turn. The writing is generally good, but there are a few lapses as in “You wouldn’t reinforce to whoever found the body that they’d been murdered.” One to read and an encouragement to those who do not know his work to read others.
“Should I get hold of a lawyer?” Slater gestured to the rats still scurrying over the ground.
“Take your pick, pal.”
I do not go in for serial killers, but was greatly impressed by Jack-in-the-Box by Pat Black [no relation] (2026, Polygon, £9.99), another in his excellent, blunt, Glasgow-set DCI Lomond stories. The murderer is not too difficult to guess, but the method foxed me, and the setting and plot were excellent, with a Glasgow of newly-minted houses as well as dereliction, gangsters and disrupted families, police rifts and rubbish food. An impressive work and at the right length.
Set in a snowy Rottingdean in 1943, Nicola Upson’s The Christmas Clue (Faber and Faber, 2025, £10) deploys Elva and Anthony Pratt, the creators of Cluedo, in an imaginary tale of murder at a country hotel, Tudor Close. Brisk and ably plotted, with some satisfying twists and a well-realised couple at the heart of an efficient and effective story.
A Flash of Firearm. Short story competition, the flash at the start not being the shot but light on a revolver carried within the coat.
