Fatal Frost

The late R.D. Wingfield's famous scruffy detective lives on again in this the second book featuring the early investigations by Frost. It's 1982 and Frost is currently a Detective Sergeant though due to the absence of most of the higher ranks at Eagle Lane he's doing the job he'd eventually rise to in Wingfield's books. James Henry is the working name of a duo of writers attempting to capture the beloved character. It always seems to me that the character has had as many negative habits pinned to him as possible but with the mission of making the detective still likeable. He smokes so heavily even the smokers feel ill, he hardly changes his clothes even in a heatwave, rarely goes home, drinks on the job, though to be fair so does the rest of the squad-room and he's cheating on his wife. Really he's the only fully formed character in the book along with the heavily caricatured Mullett. They're polar opposites, equally disdainful of each other but the two of them are stuck together. It's a situation that sort of underpins the whole series and generates most of the amusement. The other characters don't really have a lot to them, which sadly includes the new guy, DS Waters, Denton's first black policeman. It's a strand that had potential but it never really goes anywhere and pulls its punches when touching on racism within the force during the 80s.
Fatal Frost is a very readable and entertaining police procedural, with several cases ongoing which sort of overlap in places. Looking in on a younger Frost is a great idea. The little touches of period detail tend to pop out of the narrative unexpectedly. It's a bit like driving over unseen speed bumps. They jolt you out of the story because they don't quite blend into the contemporary perspective. Two quid would have been two quid, and bins would have been bins, with no mention of what material they were both made out of. As someone who was thirteen at the time I can appreciate the nostalgia evoked but it does seem to have a slight retrospective feel to it that probably doesn't compare to books actually written in the 80s. It's not a big problem though. I'd certainly read any more books in the series. So crack open a can of Harp lager, reach for a pack of Rothmans (maybe not), stick Alison Moyet on the record player and dive into the 80s with that scruffy bloke with a dead cat in his car.
Review from an advanced reading copy.

Dracula's Guest

Victorian Vampire Stories! Well I don't know about you, but I'm sold already. Michael Sims begins his collection by making excuses. Not all of the stories are Victorian, either by era, locality or the holder of the pen that spawned them. I'm still sold. And this is despite Sims' efforts to shake me from my purchase with a stumbling beginning to the collection. To get to the good stuff we have to climb over the scattered rough debris of several supposed true accounts preceded by  Sims' introduction, filled with personal asides and  an unconscionable concluding paragraph, which seems to hold up Stephanie Meyer as some kind of guru and ultimate literary culmination of the genre.
Each story begins with a short essay from Sims that include some biographical information of the authors and an examination of their story's place within the literary development of the Vampire genre, particularly in how they might have influenced Bram Stoker.
Byron's incomplete effort, conceived on the same famous night that would birth Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, gives way to his friend John Polidori's story featuring his Vampyre, a bloodsucker hardly indistinguishable from Byron himself. The vampire as a seductive parasite is prevalent throughout the collection, the main plot being generally either the victim's struggle to free themselves from their wasting doom as in Tieck's Wake Not The Dead or Gautier's The Deathly Lover, or the same scenario featuring the victim's friends trying to break the spell as in Anne Crawford's A Mystery of the Capagna.
Limits of the genre aside, there are some excellent stories here, like the unattributed The Mysterious Stranger, without which Stoker's Dracula would surely have turned out differently; Mary Elizabeth Braddon's challenging atmospheric Good Lady Ducayne; M,R,James' Count Magnus, finding a more comfortable home here away from the ghosts and demons of his anthologies and Aleksei Tolstoy 's doomed Family of the Vourdalak. Sometimes it's just a moment in the story that sets it above other stories like the nightmarish slow invasion of the room by the long fingered blood sucker picking the lead from the window glass in Augustus Hare's And The Creature Came In.
Not all the stories are of such high standard though. The first chapter of Rymer's Varney the Vampire is included here, hugely popular in its day and even influential, but whose peculiar style reads often like an extended list of stage directions. Thankfully we are spared the remaining 108 instalments. Aylmer Vance and the Vampire by Alice and Claude Askew, a sort of supernatural investigator hybrid of Holmes and Watson crossed with John Silence but without much flare, wit or invention. Other stories score high on the creep-o-meter but are questionable as true vampire stories e.g. What Was it? & Let Loose.
The anthology concludes with the title story,  billed as an omitted chapter from Dracula, though I would surmise that it was more of a false start by Stoker before he committed to the epistolary format.
I recommend this book for all connoisseurs of the vampire story and its literary evolution, vampire lovers or just seekers of chills before bedtime.

The Con Man

The year turns and another 87th Precinct book breezes through. It's April in Isola. The cruellest month? Cruel enough anyway as the con is well and truly on. McBain relishes in his chosen theme. The con and the conmen themselves get a thorough going over by McBain's philosophically edged examination. The detectives of the 87th are trying to reel in a couple of tricksters who are working their way through the confidence trick handbook, fleecing the rich and poor for a fortune or a dime. Arthur Brown and newly promoted Bert Kling are hitting the streets trying to luck out for a lead on the pair. But it's Steve Carella who discovers a far more sinister and deadly conman at work. The river deals him a woman, dead for some time, a tattoo of a heart encircling the word MAC almost hidden on the flesh of her hand and a mysteriously emptied bank account. As ever the characters are great and becoming more familiar by the book. With the investigations waiting for that one killer lead, McBain revels in dangling them in front of the wrong eyes at the wrong time. Some of it gets dangled by our eyes too through print outs of missing persons reports, Criminal identity cards and, somewhat indecipherably, dental records. Carella is recently back from his honeymoon with new wife Teddy who is deaf-mute. This one works up to a particularly suspenseful finale with Teddy aiding in the investigation.

The Cold Dish

Walt Longmire is the Sheriff of Absaroka county in Wyoming beneath the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains. He's marking time until his retirement, mourning the loss of his wife while he drinks himself to sleep each night in front of a tv with a speciality for static in a half built cabin.
When the body of Cody Pritchard is found, seemingly shot by an antique rifle, Walt has to shake off his doldrums to discover the killer. Because Cody Pritchard was one of four boys who raped a young Cheyenne girl and then got off almost unpunished. With most of the population of the county in the suspect frame, including Walt's best friend and most of his colleagues this wasn't the retirement run he was looking for.
I'm definitely going to be checking out the rest of this series. Absaroka is, according to Walt, one of the places people plan all their life to retire to... and then pack up for Florida after feeling the bite of their winter. The cast is largely of a certain vintage with Walt himself being a big guy with a long history behind him. The sense that the characters have all lived a life with plenty of stories to be told is one of the constants throughout the narrative with the author (Craig Johnson) filling us in with Walt's wry wit and self deprecating voice as the plot pushes forward. The natural and sometimes treacherous beauty of the region mixed with both real and fictional local history, Cheyenne culture and spirituality makes for a very palatable tasty feast of a crime novel.
I knew nothing of the tv series when I first picked this up but I'll probably have to add Longmire to my to watch list.

The Necropolis Railway

Andrew Martin's The Necropolis Railway introduces the character of Jim Stringer onto the Edwardian mystery stage. Stringer starts out as a fairly wet behind the ears young bloke fresh out of Baytown (that's Robin Hood's Bay to us tourists). He's dead set on making a life and a career for himself on his beloved railways. His head is full of the romance of the railways, the rose coloured ideal straight out of the Boy's Own Paper or his revered Railway Magazine. His first job as a porter at the sleepy little station at Grosmont is a severe disappointment, being both the completely wrong career line  with no prospect of crossing over to engine driver, and seemingly no more exciting duties than primping the flowers or cleaning out the khazies. One day he meets a mysterious stranger who promises to get him onto the right track among the bustle and prospect of London, cleaning the engines that ply the funeral run from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery . Before long he's summoned down south to begin his new life but all is not quite as it seems. He steps into the shoes of a predecessor who was very likely murdered. Suspects abound and his life is made doubly difficult by being labelled a company spy by his workmates. With most of his dreams shattered Jim tries to unravel the mystery before he ends up as dead the last bloke, while trying to woo the girl of his dreams (his landlady).
Andrew Martin's writing is crammed packed with period detail and the day to day minutiae of the railways, colourful characters, a complicated mystery that doesn't seem to want to lie down with the other corpses and a coming of age character piece. The obvious glamour of steam engines clashes with the harsher realities of Edwardian London. It's probably not going to be everybody's cup of tea and some of the vernacular is probably going to annoy some folks but if you love anything to do with steam locomotives, Edwardian England and mystery stories you just might enjoy it as much as I did.

British Robin

Camera Critters

Ok so it isn't Christmas yet but Robins just make me think of that time of year, so when rustling up a quick ditty to accompany this picture I couldn't avoid mentioning Christmas.


On turned earth,
or handy perch,
a garden friend
til end of year.
A flash of red,
an evening song,
the poster boy
for Christmas cheer.

                    Michael Finn

The Magistrates of Hell

You wait 15 years for a new vampire laced James Asher book and then two come along almost at once with Magistrates of Hell following on neatly from last year's Blood Maidens. Retired spy James Asher sails to China in 1912 to investigate the discovery of a body very like the mutated vampires he encountered in St Petersberg. Accompanied by his wife and Dr Solomon Karlebach, Asher bases his investigation within the cosmopolitan confines of the Legation Quarter in Peking under the blind of a purely academic interest in philology and folklore. Keeping an even lower profile is Asher's ancient Spanish vampire ally Don Simon Ysidro. Usually these books have Ysidro treading on the territorial toes of the local nest of urban vampires but China's vampires are something different. Incredibly ancient and not altogether sane they mostly remain aloof and hard to pin down. With Ysidro hampered by their elusiveness, Asher has to rely more on his human allies, the Van Helsing like vampire hunter Karlebach and the Japanese Samurai Count Mizukami. Asher and the Count actually make quite a dynamic pairing out in the wilds among the swarming rabid rats and equally the double dealings and murder within the city and the Legation. Barbara Hambly dishes up a more b-movie action based script than usual but it remains faithful to the series tone, is well researched and  maintains the levels of threat and anxiety common to Hambly books.  As ever Hambly know how to entertain.