Howard Skyman
8 books read for LibriVox
- Wallace at his breeziest here: Kate runs a whole gang of hardened crooks by being smarter than everyone in the room, and watching Scotland Yard's Michael Pretherston fall for the woman he's meant to catch is half the fun. Light, fast, cheerfully implausible, and it knows it.
- Two brothers killed with poisoned darts in a hedge maze, and Sir Clinton Driffield working it out while telling poor Wendover almost nothing. If you like your Golden Age puzzles clever and a bit cold-blooded, the detective included, this scratches that exact itch.
- Phoebe is the fun here: clever, unsentimental, fully aware her grandfather sells butter and her suitor is a dull rich boy she could run like a business, and Oliphant lets her be right. Quiet, wry Victorian social comedy, so skip it if you need big drama.
- A doctor called out in fog goes to the wrong house and finds a dying man. Connington then lays out every combination of murder, suicide, and accident in an actual grid and eliminates them; austere, logical, satisfying like a worked proof.
- One of the gentler Thorndykes: a young doctor finds a body in a Highgate pond and gets pulled into the dead man's wax-modelling workshop, where a quiet romance blooms alongside the sleuthing. If you like your detection patient and scientific rather than flashy, this is comfortable company.
- Fair warning, this is pulpy Edgar Wallace, written fast and paced faster, so don't expect deep characters. But Saul Arthur Mann, the fussy little man with a filing system that seems to hold everyone's secrets, is fun, and the murder plot twists gamely enough for a rainy afternoon.
- Pure 1920s pulp, and it knows it: Leon Gonsalez driving too fast and theorizing about criminal skulls while men drop dead in London from what looks like snakebite. If you want a villain like Dr. Oberzohn, gleefully sinister and slightly absurd, this is a fun evening, not literature.
- You’d enjoy this for its wonderfully strange Pacific-island premise, where explorers uncover ancient beings preserved in a temple and get drawn into their old feud. It’s slower and more earnest than Haggard’s adventure novels, but the mix of lost-world romance, prophecy, and uneasy reflections on civilization has a peculiar, dreamlike pull.