Airing in a Closed Carriage by Joseph Shearing
First published in 1943 under the pseudonym Joseph Shearing, Marjorie Bowen’s Airing in a Closed Carriage combines historical fiction, psychological examination and crime writing. Now part of the British Library Crime Classics series, it is a quietly unsettling exploration of suspicion, cruelty and the suffocating…
Appointment in Paris by Jane Thynne
Jane Thynne is best known for her series of novels following Clara Vine, an Anglo-German actress working for British intelligence during World War II. She started a new series in 2024 with Midnight in Vienna, which followed cast-out spy Harry Fox and Stella Fry, fresh…
Interview: Alex Gerlis
Over the last 15 years, Alex Gerlis has become something of a specialist when it comes to espionage novels set during World War II, and his writing is going from strength to strength. In 2024, he began an exciting new series with Every Spy a…
Blood Vengeance by Douglas Jackson
The third of Douglas Jackson’s Warsaw Quartet follows Blood Roses and Blood Sacrifice and sees Polish investigator Jan Kalisz taken from occupied Warsaw and dropped in to northern Scotland at the orders of Winston Churchill himself. Krystina Kowolska, resistance agent and a mionor member of…
Death in High Heels by Christianna Brand
A debut back in 1941, Christianna Brand’s Death in High Heels opens with the light, breezy tone of a comedy set in the world of retail fashion. Something akin to Are You Being Served? or Mr Selfridge perhaps. However, beneath its witty surface lies a…
The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson
Christmas Eve, 1943. Bored and depressed at spending the War working in a Birmingham munitions factory, Anthony Pratt looks forward to finishing his nightshift and then travelling with wife Elva to the Tudor Close Hotel in Rottingdean, a village outside Brighton. Before World War II,…
Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk — Murder at the Black Cat Cafe serves up two sinisterly cerebral cases cracked by Kosuke Kindaichi, Seishi Yokomizo’s sublime series detective. While the motive, means and opportunity differ quite considerably, the nefariousness at the heart of both novellas is firmly…