1. The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr

I think I may be done with the locked room mystery.  I delved into it after reading several articles sharing the top examples of the sub-genre (and introduced me to some of the rich history of Japanese detective fiction) and read several.  I'm told that this one is the absolute pinnacle, though it sure took me a long time to find (I finally cornered it in a very well-organized used book store in an Abbotsford mini-mall (The Bookman, long may it live).  I believe it had a cameo in the latest Knives Out movie.

I'm a lazy reader.  I want the narrative to take me for a ride while I sit back and enjoy myself.  Locked room mysteries are designed to make the reader engage and try and figure it out for themselves.  I actually have made an effort (and had some partial successes, including with this book), but I need the rest of the ride to be entertaining.   Most of the locked room mysteries I've read really put all the work into the clever murder and it becomes a slog for me to read.  This one was particularly guilty of that.  I just didn't connect with the context.  It was supposed to be London but there was minimal atmosphere or character.  There were multiple investigating characters, though I guess one detective.  I figured out one of the major puzzles, but in order to actually put it all together, I would have had to write down a timetable.  

Ah just read that Carr was American, who did live in England.  That explains the lack of atmosphere.  It's an ersatz British mystery.  It was the holidays and we had lots of lovely family activities, and I had quite a lot of work around moving my mother into assisted living, but a book this thin should not take me 2 weeks to read.  I thought it was me, but I cranked through two great pulp crime books right after this one (I'm behind on my reviews), so I think that is it for me with the locked room mystery sub-genre.

[Apologies, kind of a negative way to start the year. I was in a bit of a reading rut and after this one have gone on to pick books that are fun to read, so picking up a bit of steam for 2026.] 

 

56. The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side by Agatha Christie

I'm struggling to get my daughter to read books.  She is a fast reader and does well in school but just doesn't have the strong desire to read.  For some reason she is fixated on It (the Stephen King book) which I won't let her read because of the super creepy ending.  I also won't let her watch the recent two-part movie because it is absolute dogshit and would ruin all that is good about the book.  I gave her Salem's Lot which I later realized is one of King's most boring books.  She read that but it did not ignite a Stephen King fire in here.  I got her Firestarter which hasn't started.  I know for some reason Agatha Christie is trendy among younger readers so I got her a couple of what I thought were classics.  She started this one and just couldn't keep going.  I took it and read it and can see why.

What is quite good about The Mirror Crack'd is the portrayal of the older English village and the development of the modern estates next door to it.  What's not so good is the mystery itself.  I can see how a 13-year old would not find this all very engaging, especially one who has no real exposure to the subtleties of British social culture.  I was a bit disappointed myself in this one.  The set up is good.  A fading and neurotic British movie actress has moved in with her wealthy producer husband to the old aristocratic mansion of St. Mary Mead.  At a reception in her new home, one of her guests is poisoned and it becomes clear that the poison was meant for the actress.  The more exciting storyline honestly is if Miss Marple can get out from under the thumb of her well-meaning but way too keen and strict caregiver (Miss Marple is quite old at this point).  The mystery itself heads off into a couple of dead ends and the resolution, while clever, is not that satisfying.

Anybody know what are the really good Christie's that will get a 13-year old hooked?  Or any other books.  She is deadset against fantasy and especially all these fantasy series that are popular these days.

55. The Mark of the Warrior by Paul Scott

This behaviour of mine is really not going to reduce the on-deck shelf.  It's reached its horizontal limit, to the edge of the chest of drawers, at which point my rule is not to buy anymore books and only read those on deck.  And yet here I am finding this nice-looking British paperback from my key time period about soldiers in the colonial theatre at the Chainon thrift store.  I would not have bought it if I hadn't also found the Lifegames adult Choose Your Own Adventure book.  Somehow, that enabled me to buy this one as well.  And then I read it right away too!

Mark of the Warrior is the story of Major Craig, an older soldier in the Burmese theatre who is now heading up a training unit in India.  We learn early on that he was leading a retreat when one of the men drowned crossing a river.  This becomes a big deal for him (though we learn it already was) when the dead soldier's brother, A.W. Ramsay, is one of the trainee recruits.  The big philosophical theme is that most men are not made for war, but there are a small minority whose being is basically perfectly suited for the sacrifices of men fighting men. They are natural hunters and put their instinct to survive and kill ahead of their other emotions.  Major Craig is not one of these men.  Cadet Ramsay is.

 

The location, the training exercises and the characters are all richly drawn.  I just really have an issue with the theme itself, especially when it is blasted in the reader's face.  You know how it is going to end up and it is just all so '70s war hero revisionism.  The conflict is that Craig puts Ransom in the lead of one of the two teams in the final, competitive training exercise.  Ransom's team is the local guerrilla army and they are supposed to sneak attack the other team. Ransom gets way to into it, forcing his men to suffer through extra-long marches with minimal rations to simulate potential reality.  Craig encourages this for various thematic reasons that don't really compel (guilt over his brother's death? to release the real soldier in him?  who knows).  

 

I guess I'm being extra critical as it is a well-written book.  I don't know how as an author you could get a richer story out of the setup without having some heavy psychological conflict.  Personally, I would have been happier just to read the setup and playing out of the simulation without all the thematic angst.  But that kind of thing didn't and doesn't sell thanks to the hegemony of the dogma of "conflict" in the  literary world.

 

54. Life games #1 - Woman Up the Corporate Ladder by Angela Harper

This was a crazy thrift store find, a Choose Your Own Adventure for the 1980s career woman.  I wonder how well it did at the time.  I can see how somebody would have come up with this idea as CYOA's were extremely successful in the 80s.  However, the demographic seems like a major leap.  For some reason, the concept of the reader taking an active part in the narrative (which is also the base concept of role-playing games and ultimately video games) seems for some reason to really only resonate with nerdy types, which back in the 80s was predominantly male (and young, though less predominantly).  Happily, this is slowly improving, but I still don't see a market for "normal" grown-ups to read books like these.  I'd be curious how well they did.

This book was a fun read, more fun than I expected.  I thought at first that I might just flip through it or read a few of the storylines.  I ended up reading every single possible outcome.  It's very digestible and a real page turner because every decision leads to a different path and you want to learn what happens.  It actually gets somewhat outrageous, though never totally insane.  You can end up in Brazil, have affairs with your boss (or reject his advances), decide to take a bribe, go after opponents and so on.  There are a lot of ethical decisions, yet not a consistent ethical message.  Sometimes doing the right thing, doesn't end up so well and sometimes making a bad decision can work out for you.  It felt a bit random.  There were some quite bleak and sad endings as well.  

I feel like a man wrote this, but I am not super confident about that.  I'd love to hear a backstory on these and I'll keep my eye out for them.

53. Dungeon Crawl Classics core rulebook by Joseph Goodman

I had to get the Erol Otus cover

If you want to find a reason for my lack of reading in the last couple of months, it is to this tome that you can point the finger.  I did actually read it cover to cover, which I don't believe I have ever done for a tabletop role-playing game before.  However, "reading" an RPG book, usually then triggers a myriad of other activities, such as hunting down multiple other source materials (such as adventures and supplementary rulebooks, older versions), going online to ask questions (an entire internet history is here in the TTRPG sector from usenet to fora to blogs to G+ and today to Discord), creating your own content and finally actually playing!

All these things have happened.  Now that I have had a chance to actually play and GM, my mania has subsided to a more consistent, sustainable level and I have picked up linear non-fiction books again.  So I will limit this post to a broad review of the DCC core rulebook and leave the TTRPG nerdiness to other places of expression.

Goodman Games started out designing adventures for D&D 3rd edition and kept doing that right into 5th.  As D&D evolved, I guess he realized that the system was not fitting the kinds of adventures they were making, which tended towards the kind of fantasy found in sci-fi and fantasy fiction from the mid-twentieth century, which in turn was the material that strongly influenced the original versions of D&D.  It is extremely hard to pinpoint any one playstyle, but very broadly speaking, D&D back in the 80s had less powerful player-characters and was focused more on dungeon exploration and what we call "emergent story" where narrative would come out of whatever weird shit happened in a dungeon.  The term "murder hoboes" captures it well.  In today's D&D, the adventures and campaigns are structured around long-term narratives involving character development and the PCs are insanely powerful ("Fantasy Avengers").  Death is really no longer an option.

Beyond the D&D RPG system, it is the famous "Appendix N" that influences DCC the most. This was a section in the back of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide that listed the fiction that influenced D&D. It is an exceptional list of some genre classics and some relatively obscure.  

DCC builds on the spirit of orginal D&D but has its own slightly more complex ruleset that involves lots of great random tables.  The book is just under 500 pages but probably only 100 pages is actual rules.  The bulk of the book are the spells. Each spell has a table of results which vary wildly and are a blast to read. I laughed out loud several times.  

Engaging with an RPG is an ongoing, dynamic and multi-media experience.  You read it, you talk about it with others, you play it and ultimately, you run it as a GM (gamemaster or what they call "judge" in the DCC world, to emphasize the notion that you are there to interpret the outcomes based on the rules, not guide them).  There is no ultimate understanding of an RPG.  It's a dialectic.  I played in a few online one-shots and then ran a few sessions with my friends.  It went fairly well, but we didn't get in deep enough to really take advantage of the crazy magic.  Another friend is now the GM, which is great as I only have to play, but if he wants to take a break, I'd be happy to get back behind the screen.

Magic is powerful but not without consequences
in Dungeon Crawl Classics

52. The Mind Mappers: Friendship, Betrayal and the Obsessive Quest to Chart the Brain by Eric Andrew-Gee

I am a regular patient at the Montreal Neurological hospital.  I didn't even really consciously know about its existence before I was diagnosed by them (very fortunately too) with a rare neurological disorder that falls under the category of Multifocal Neural Neuropathy (MNN).  I'm one in a hundred-thousand!  In my case, I am very, very fortunate.  First that it was caught quite early (I started noticing weakness in my right hand, a reduced shooting range with my jump shot and at its worst the inability to turn the ignition key in a car).  Second, that I am in Canada and where we have universal (sort of thanks to the neo-liberal fucks and incompetents in government constantly trying to destroy it) health care. And third that I live so close to the Neuro, because as it turns out, this is an amazing medical institution with an incredible history and an ongoing commitment to both research and care of their patients.  

I now go in once a month or so for IVig treatments where I get pumped full of expensive blood byproducts to get my antibodies to behave correctly and stop erroneously attacking my mylene (the sheathing that insulates your nerves).  Some of the damage is permanent (which manifests itself as a weakness in my pinky and ring finger on my dominant hand; many cases are much worse affecting both hands and feet and impacting walking and handling) but it appears that the disease has been stopped altogether.  It's super chill, I get a comfy chair and good wi-fi and just work and sometimes take a nap.  The nurses are elite and the other staff super efficient.  Everybody is really nice.  Not to mention Dr. Massive who identified the problem (after several misdiagnoses from other doctors).

So I have experienced firsthand the excellent of the Neuro from the great care and expertise that I have received and am receiving first hand.  But it is this book that taught me the history behind it.  I was looking forward to reading this book, but a bit skeptical as these kinds of less-than-academic histories tend to lack depth and bend the history towards narrative. I think there is a teeny bit of the latter here, but the historical context was very efficiently done.  What makes the book really effective, though, is that it is truly moving.  For this reader, it had the effect it intended, which was to elevate the unsung partner of one of Canada's most famous doctors.

The hook is the famous Heritage Minute which most Canadians of a certain age featuring Dr. Penfield, the rock-star neurosurgeon who advanced the field massively in the 20th century.  Penfield is the known name but he began his career and worked closely with another doctor, William Cone.  Cone was the one who excelled at surgery and had the best bedside manner.  He obsessed over hygiene and technique as well as ensuring patients were emotionally taken care of.  Penfield was no slouch in these areas, but his real passion was in the research and writing, which Cone did not like.  Penfield was the charismatic one and Cone hitched himself to his star, seemingly driven by his love for is friend more than anything else.   

These kinds of journalistic histories are not usually my jam, so I was surprised by how well put together The Mind Mappers was.  It's a very readable, informative and ultimately quite touching telling of an important history of Canada, Montreal and science.  

51. The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs

[written Nov 19, 2025 because I put off writing this for weeks as explained below.] 

Wow, I really hit a block with the 50 books blog for the first time in years!  The obvious cause is a recent head-first plunge into the world of tabletop role-playing games, but I wonder if there is a deeper fatigue at play that has allowed/enabled me to avoid writing book reviews for almost two months.

Very briefly, I played RPGs back in the 80s when D&D first exploded and then stopped with adolescence and other social pursuits.  I got pulled back in in the late '90s and then got deep into it (online fights and everything) in the early aughts and then dropped out again with the birth of my own child.  

During the pandemic, my friend groups and I were having regular zoom calls and decided to start a 5e game online.  We have been playing sporadically but consistently since then.  Something happened a few months ago where I got sucked way back in and am now demonstrating all the classic behaviours of the true addict (online talking about it way too much, buying all kinds of beautiful books, playing in a second group locally and in one shots online; it's bad!).

So to slowly drag this back to actual reading, I've been spending most of my reading time, reading game books, which you don't usually read linearly (they have rules, settings, etc. it would be kind of like reading an encyclopedia straight through).  I did actually read one from beginning to end and I will count that in this blog, but overall my reading has fallen way off.

Before the sickness truly set in, I did read this second Tarzan.  Somebody somewhere recommended this one and The Jungle Tales of Tarzan as particularly good and I found both of them in Vancouver.  I did enjoy The Return of Tarzan overall, but had mixed feelings.  First of all, with Burroughs, one has to account for the racism and eugenics.  It's less present here just because the first half of the book takes place in Europe so less opportunity for him to describe the various disadvantages of the non-whites.  But it goes hard in the second half.  It's bad and I condemn it but I'm still going to read the books.

To me as a reader, the literary problem with Burroughs is that he has a lot of potential with the Tarzan concept and he just kind of barfs it all over the page.  His miraculous education and rise to the role of gentlemen (due to his racial superiority of course which is intrinsically tied to class in Burrough's world) makes Tarzan a great vehicle for the contrast between the stiff laws of civilization and the powerful release of the savage.  You need to build this up gradually, though, and use it sparingly at the right moments.  Instead, Tarzan is just kicking the shit out of groups of people multiple times right away, while, super annoyingly, never actually killing the one serious bad guy.  It's just so bald that Burroughs is keeping the Russian spy alive to maintain a central narrative, but he does it by violating the the rules of Tarzan's own character.  It's bad.

On top of that, there are all these convoluted plot lines which ensure that Tarzan and Jane won't get together.  They literally pass each other on separate ships in the night.  I've avoided the plot this whole time.  Basically, the first half is in Europe and involves said Russian spy doing bad shit to a rich guy.  Then they all go to Africa and get shipwrecked and Tarzan comes to rescue them.

Before he can rescue them, though, we get the main plot of the second half which is Tarzan going back to the tribal village in his old stomping grounds and defending them against Arab slave raiders.  Here the book gets really fun.  It's almost Conan the Barbarian territory; real pulp stuff.  He discovers an ancient city filled with gold and these weird pygmy descendants from space who were once purebred but got all corrupted with time or some shit.  The hilarious part is their queen is still super hot and genetically pure and she saves Tarzan from being sacrificed because she is hot for him.  It's quite wacky and super entertaining and with a bit of tweaking could be a cool origin story for the Kingdom of Wakanda.