Peter Lovesey - The False Inspector Dew

I like good classic English whodunits, although there are very few of them. This 1983 novel was a pleasant surprise.

Although it’s written in the style of the 1920s, it actually plays with the genre itself. It is based on the real-life case of Dr. Crippen, but the story follows Baranov, a dentist, and his wife Lydia, who plans to travel to America to try her luck in films. Things become complicated when Baranov meets Alma, a somewhat eccentric girl who sees the world through the lens of romantic novels. She falls in love with him, and together they devise a plan to kill Lydia and throw her into the river.

However, another murder occurs on the ship. Baranov, traveling under the false name Walter Dew, is mistakenly taken for the famous inspector. The ship’s captain accepts him as an authority and asks him to lead the investigation.

This is where the novel becomes truly interesting—not because of the question “who is the killer,” but because of how a man, simply through his behavior and confidence, manages to convince everyone around him that he is someone else.

Amanda Cross - Death In A Tenured Position

Death in a Tenured Position is a crime novel written by Amanda Cross, the pseudonym of literature professor Carolyn Heilbrun.

The novel tells the story of the first woman to receive a tenured position at a formerly all-male college. Instead of triumph, she is met with indifference, passive aggression, and institutional coldness. The mystery element is present, but atmosphere dominates — a pervasive sense of isolation, academic vanity, and quiet cruelty. In the end, it is revealed that her death was not a murder but a suicide, which casts the entire narrative in a darker and more unsettling light.

Heilbrun herself was a distinguished scholar and feminist critic who taught for many years at Columbia University. Throughout her academic career, she spoke openly about the subtle and overt discrimination women faced within universities, particularly in elite institutions that were slow to accept women as intellectual equals. Under the name Amanda Cross, she used detective fiction not only as entertainment but as a vehicle to explore gender politics, professional exclusion, and the emotional cost of institutional resistance.

Late in life, Heilbrun chose to end her own life at the age of seventy-seven. While it would be simplistic to read the novel as autobiographical, the themes of isolation, aging, autonomy, and the pressures placed upon accomplished women inevitably resonate more strongly in light of her personal history.

R. Austin Freeman - A Certain Dr Thorndyke

In this novel one man on a ship to Africa buries his friend and assume his identity. Then he finds on the journey home a nice girl and fall in love with her. But he is also a criminal and wants to escape the law, although he isn't quite a criminal, because his sister father stole the gems, and in the process of events, after careful investigation by Dr Thorndyke they are in no worry of arresting. R. Austin Freeman (1862 - 1943) was an inventor of inverted detective story, when we see the crime first and the following of criminal, and in the second part investigation of inspector. R. Austin Freeman was best known for his novels about forensic doctor-investigator Dr Thorndyke and is probably progenitor of all these modern forensic crime writers. Raymond Chandler praised his work, writing in a letter to Hamish Hamilton : "This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre and he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected."

He also wrote an essay The Art Of The Detective Story, in which he said : "The reader had seen the crime committed, knew all about the criminal, and was in possession of all the facts. It would have seemed that there was nothing left to tell, but I calculated that the reader would be so occupied with the crime that he would overlook the evidence. And so it turned out. The second part, which described the investigation of the crime, had to most readers the effect of new matter."

Freeman paid a great deal of attention to details, and carried out the experiments described in his books to ensure that they worked and would give the expected results. He also went to the trouble of visiting the places he wrote about so that the details in his descriptions were correct.

De Balcam says that "Freeman displays a mastery of craftsmanship" in every story, and that he always used the language of the trade concerned. Freeman is "a man who writes of things that he has seen, handled and understood, and not of things that he has met only in print, or in a hazy, inattentive observation". This is a critical aspect of Freeman - he tested the methods he used.

Elizabeth Sanxay Holding - Lady Killer

Solid crime novel about group of men taking a cruise on the ship. One of them is very curious, and then finds a dead womans body in a cabin of the ship. But nobody believes it and when other things happen, she grow more and more baffled. Why is she so curious? I thought in the end she will prove to be a murderer, but ex-cop who is on the ship describe her as a sick woman looking everywhere for a murder or some crime. In the end it reveals that another woman killed her husband lover, who was planning to get her money and take away to some remote place. Raymond Chandler praised her, calling her 'the top suspense writer of them all'. And literary critic Anthony Boucher said 'that for subtlety, realistic conviction, incredible economy, she's in a class by herself'.