Wallace, Wychford, Wimsey: What I Read in May 2025

I'm still playing catch-up with the monthly reading updates. Thus, it is September and I'm still on May. Fingers crossed I meet myself in the present before the end of this year... This wasn't a month that particularly reflected my reading goals for 2025 — Reading A Lot, But Differently — but I hope you will find something interesting below nonetheless.

The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace

I read this in advance of a podcast episode about the book and enjoyed myself more than I expected. I think I had allowed what I knew about Wallace's difficulties publishing this book — he ran a write-in competition for the solution, but worded the prize conditions badly and ended up bankrupting himself – to colour my impression of the actual fiction. I was surprised to find that this fast-paced story about a trio of mysterious vigilantes who come to London to threaten a politician into reversing an extradition decision had some points to make about authoritarianism that felt rather relevant to today.

A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen

I forget where I sourced this recommendation, but I borrowed this vastly popular TikTok romantasy novel from the library because I definitely read somewhere reputable that it did interesting things with Norse mythology. I regretted picking it up almost immediately, but kept going to the end partly because I'm stubborn and partly because I still had hope that it might improve. It did not. This is a garbled, badly structured story about a power struggle in a vaguely Viking world, in which warlords fight over certain characters who carry a drop of a particular Norse god/goddess's divine blood and thus have special powers.

I do feel like I understand the appeal of this genre a bit more after finishing this book, though, and that feels valuable. A Fate Inked In Blood is completely flat, with no narrative arc at all. It's just a sequence of set-piece incidents that happen one after another, breathlessly, without any raising of stakes or ratcheting up of tension. After the inciting incident in the first chapter, it feels like no character has time to sit down, sleep or draw breath, which made the pacing odd to me. It all feels very "and then and then and then". No building of suspense that is then released. I read the first Sarah J. Maas book a couple of years ago and found it to be the same. And I now think this is on purpose: I think these books are written to be consumed in the same way that a soap opera is, so that in each episode/fifty page stretch you get some dramatic events and it keeps drawing you onwards to the next batch. I don't make that comparison in order to diminish either artform (writing soaps is a skill like any form of screenwriting, to my mind) but it is a particular style of writing targeting a certain kind of consumption. And it's not for me! I had my period of intense Neighbours fandom, and I'm not currently looking to replace that with a version told via mediocre prose and set in maybe-Denmark.

Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead

I fear that I have become a curmudgeon about contemporary crime fiction that explicitly references the golden age of detective fiction. Because I have been disappointed so many times before by novels purportedly written by "the new Agatha Christie" (there was one in March), I now approach every book of this type the same way I do films full of jumpscares, ie with caution, grumpiness and plenty of peering through my fingers. That concern was not at all justified in the case of this book, which is excellent. Death and the Conjuror is written by someone who really knows their stuff when it comes to 1920s crime fiction and wears that knowledge lightly, deploying it to full effect in this original impossible crime story detective by a former stage magician. The author was my guest on the aforementioned episode about The Four Just Men and when I learned about Tom's passion for the work of John Dickson Carr and Edgar Wallace, his own fiction came into focus for me. I'll be continuing with his series whenever I have the opportunity.

Stranger than Fiction by Neil Clark

Again, read for my episode about The Four Just Men. This is a fairly functional biography of Wallace, which was usefully for checking names and dates. I don't know that I could recommend it as reading for pleasure, as it lacks a biographical interpretation or argument beyond "Edgar Wallace was a better writer than everyone thinks", which is a bit entry level.

Lady Molly Of Scotland Yard by Baroness Orczy

I first read this collection of short stories about an aristocratic woman detective at Scotland Yard many years ago, when I happened upon this nice pocket-sized edition in a secondhand bookshop. At the time, I mainly knew Orczy as the author of the Scarlet Pimpernel series and had no idea that she had been a founding member of the Detection Club (largely on the strength of Lady Molly and her "Old Man in the Corner" stories). You can absolutely tell that Lady Molly belongs to an earlier era of crime fiction — the book was first published in 1910, after all — but I remember enjoying them as sensational capers in the Conan Doyle vein.

I reread this book now in advance of it being the Shedunnit Book Club's selection for June, and was surprised to find it hard going. Lady Molly irritated me and the lack of actual detection in her adventures was irksome. I don't think this is a reflection of the book, necessarily, but rather an indication that it's not always that fun to be required to read things rather than choosing them when the right mood strikes.

The Wychford Poisoning Case by Anthony Berkeley

This book, rightly, has a bad reputation among enlightened fans of golden age detective fiction. It has several very unsavoury scenes where a young woman of nineteen is forcibly spanked in a drawing room by her older male cousin, in the presence of her parents, for "bad behaviour" that adds up to her having a languid manner and differing opinions about how to have fun from her elders. Berkeley was a peculiar and unpleasant man, but even he had the grace to note, later in life, that he regretted this one: "I blush hotly whenever I look now at its intolerably facetious pages," he said.

Those passages are all the more unwelcome because this is otherwise a really good novel. Berkeley takes the events of the 1889 Florence Maybrick poisoning case and transplants them to the mid 1920s (the book came out in 1926). A woman in a provincial English town has been accused of killing her husband with arsenic. He was a hypochondriac and their house was full of the stuff, so absolutely everybody believes she did it, but there's no direct evidence of guilt. Berkeley's sleuth Roger Sheringham is convinced of her innocence, in fact, because her motive and psychology are not that of a murderer. Berkeley was really early to considering the mental side of crime in fiction — most authors at this point were still preoccupied with secret passages, clever misdirection and unbreakable alibis — and I enjoyed seeing how he grappled with it.

Family Matters by Anthony Rolls

This, along with The Wychford Poisoning Case and Strong Poison (below), was read as research for my conversation with chemist Kathryn Harkup for this episode of Shedunnit about "poison books". I hadn't read any Anthony Rolls before, but it came up in research as being an interesting poisoning mystery so I dived in right before the deadline, planning on skimming it at great speed.

However, I really enjoyed this tale of a very unpleasant man who is so horrible that two people try separately to poison him at the same time, coincidentally choosing substances that cancel each other out so he continues in bafflingly rude health. (This isn't a spoiler, by the way, the book is told as a howdunnit so you know who is doing what from the start.) I liked it so much that I had to slow down and savour it.

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

This was a re-read, of course, and a delightful one. The dramatic introduction of mystery novelist Harriet Vane to Sayers' fiction is excellent and luckily for me, involves a complicated arsenic plot and so fit into my podcast episode very well. This time, I really appreciated how well Sayers built tension into her plot by setting the clock ticking on Wimsey's investigation in the first chapter with a judge ordering a retrial. I also rewatched the Edward Petherbridge adaptation (any excuse) and noted that the director brings out this aspect well by having him walk past the same advertisements and posters in different scenes, showing how time is running out for him to solve the case.

A Blunt Instrument by Georgette Heyer

All the Heyers are starting to blend together now! I'm beginning to think that her detective fiction is not seen to its best advantage when read close together as I have been doing (with the eventual goal of producing a podcast episode about it this autumn). This one has many of her usual hallmarks: an unpleasant patriarch killed, an eccentric, a damsel-in-distress, an artsy heir to said patriarch, and a sensible, wise-cracking women to whom the heir will be engaged by the end of the book. It is a formula I like, though, and I enjoyed the G.K. Chesterton touch to the solution.

That was, belatedly, my reading for May: nine books, bringing me up to 50 for the year so far. I'm bang on the pace needed to hit my target of 120 in 2025.

This wasn't a well-balanced or especially satisfactory month of reading. I managed no serious non-fiction (that Edgar Wallace book was basically a long Wikipedia article), did not finish an audiobook, and my only non crime reading was a decidedly mid romantasy novel. That's what happens when I get behind with the podcast research in work hours: I just start doing it in my leisure time instead. Here's to doing better in the future.

If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.

Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that I receive a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookseller that (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.