Death Came Through the Snow (1957) by Frits de Winter

Frits de Winter was a Dutch journalist, translator and a second generation detective novelist whose father, Jan de Winter, wrote juvenile mysteries and more than twenty novels about the Limburg police inspector, Paul Nijst – which apparently enjoyed some popularity during the 1960s. Frits followed in his father's footsteps and debuted as a 19-year-old with De dood kwam door de sneeuw (Death Came Through the Snow, 1957). Five years later, Frits returned to the genre and published five novels, De dode moordenaar (The Dead Murderer, 1962), Dood op een zomerdag (Death on a Summer Day, 1963), Bloedgeld (Blood Money, 1963), Muziek, maanlight en moord (Music, Moonlight and Murder, 1964) and De papiermoorden (The Paper Murders, 1964), under the penname "Fred Summer."

I've been interested in Death Came Through the Snow ever since learning it existed, because a classically-styled detective novel written by a teenager brought James Yaffe, Leonard Thompson and locked room mysteries to mind. That and just look at the cover! I would have gladly taken on a gamble on it, but the book has been out-of-print for nearly seven decades and secondhand copies, cheap or overpriced, appeared to be scarce.

So kept quiet and never alluded to Frits de Winter or Death Came Through the Snow on this blog, because why draw unwanted attention to any copies that might turn up? Well, copies not only proved to be scarce, but even rarer, less often sighted than a planetary alignment – snuffing out most of my hope of ever reading it. But then, to my very great surprise, Delpher digitized and uploaded a whole slew of Dutch detective novels including De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow! Delpher is a project of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) to preserve the paper trail of Dutch culture by digitally preserving old newspapers, magazines and books. Legally downloadable to read and study at your leisure. That means exploring the ruins of the Dutch-language detective story is back on the menu.

This time, I'm spoiled for choice for easier access to some potential interesting, promising-sounding novel for future reviews, but first wanted to take that gamble on Death Came Through the Snow. Even though July is not the best time to be reading and reviewing a Christmas mystery. Let's find out whether De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow belongs on that frustratingly short list of good, traditionally-styled vintage Dutch detective novels or another bust.

Death Comes Through the Snow takes place sometime in the late 1940s as Bob Welters, a Dutch journalist, is traveling from the Netherlands to France with his wife, Charmaine, to spend Christmas with her uncle, Vincent de Blancheville – who resides at an old, now war damaged castle. Not only the castle suffered battle scars, but De Blancheville was practically blinded and only employs ex-soldiers who hobble around on prosthetic limbs with horrendously scarred faces. So a cozy place to celebrate the holidays, but Bob and Charmaine aren't the only invitees. Firstly, there are Jean and Paul de Blancheville, twin brothers, cousins of Charmaine. Countess de Taronne, a widow, who's De Blancheville's nearest neighbor. Guillaume Poruc, an arms manufacturer, who brought along his exasperating wife, Madame Poruc. Charles Homles, a self-styled amateur sleuth, who's accompanied by his wife and an old army general from the First World War, De Battance. Finally, Pierre Bondôle, a friend of De Blancheville, who plays butler for the occasional.

So, as the conclusion of the third chapter says, "the guests for the Christmas party with Death had arrived" and they wake up the next morning to find the world covered in a thick, white blanket of snow, but Guillaume Poruc is missing – apparently didn't sleep in his bedroom. They eventually discover his body hanging from a huge, stone cross in the ruined chapel of the castle! And, not unexpectedly, the snowfall cut the remote castle and nearby village off from the outside world. No police coming for at least two days. So it's up to Bob and Homles ("he had taken a correspondence course to become an amateur detective") to play emergency sleuths. They can't prevent from another member of the Christmas party briefly disappearing before turning their hanged, theatrically posed corpse is found.

Not what I expected or imagined from the title and cover art. I imagined and hoped on something in the spirit of the Henri Bencolin mysteries written by a young John Dickson Carr barely out of his teenage years, but the first-half shaped suggested early Ellery Queen from International series (e.g. The Egyptian Cross Mystery, 1932). So wasn't entirely dissatisfied and went into the second-half with good hope of finally reporting back on a worthwhile Dutch detective novel, but that second-half was also the point where De Winter lost interest. The plot became a mess with a third murder and an attempted fourth, briefly teased as a locked room mystery, which turned out to be separate plot-thread from the first two murders. It needlessly muddled and complicated a plot that was already unraveling itself. And not in a good way.

Despite two amateur detectives, it's the murderer who suddenly exposes themselves when time came to wrap things up. From all the characters that could be arbitrarily picked from the cast of characters, this character is the worst and most disappointing De Winter could have picked. While motive possessed a glimmer of originality, it was entirely wasted here as the murderer was ever so slight mad. So it's fortunate Death Came Through the Snow is a short novel you can race through in a couple of hours and that I got to read it for free or else I would have been really angry and disappointed. At least I know now De Winter's Death Came Through the Snow is not some grand, long-lost and hopelessly out-of-print, out-of-reach classic of the Dutch detective novel. The next few reviews of these forgotten, Dutch mysteries should hopefully see an uptick in quality. Wordt vervolgd!

A note for the curious: one small detail I forgot to mention is that Frits de Winter placed Death Came Through the Snow in the same fictitious universe as his father's Paul Nijst series. When Bob learns Homles fancies himself a detective, he smiles and recalls his friend Paul Nijst, Chief Inspector in Maastricht, "who hated nothing more than amateur detectives." That makes me wonder if he borrowed Bob and Charmaine from that series.

A Murder is Announced (1950) by Agatha Christie

Some years ago, while reviewing Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), I claimed the biggest difference between the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series is that the latter never produced a genre classic or even a great detective novel – like Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). Even some of Christie's standalones, like And Then There Were None (1939) and Towards Zero (1944), rank higher than the best Miss Marple novels. The comment section had one answer to that: A Murder is Announced (1950). So decided then to give it a reread one of these days to see if it can stand spine to spine with Christie's best Poirot and standalone mysteries.

A Murder is Announced opens on the morning when the inhabitants of the village of Chipping Cleghorn get their morning papers. Their local Chipping Cleghorn Gazette has an eyebrow raising ad: "a murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks at 6:30 p.m. Friends please accept this, the only intimation." Everyone who reads the announcement assumes some sort of party ("The Murder Game—That kind of thing"), but Miss Blacklock and Miss Bunner, of Little Paddocks, didn't plan or advertised a murder party – suspecting Miss Blacklock's younger, mischievous live-in cousins. Patrick and Julia Simmons claim innocence and so they decide to go along with it to see what happens. Sure enough, friends and neighbors begin to arrive at the appointed time.

There's Mrs. Swettenham and her son, Edmund, Colonel Easterbrook and his wife, Laura, Reverend Julian Harmon and his wife, "Bunch," and a pair of spinsters, Hinchliffe and Murgatroyd – who love to play amateur criminologists. Furthermore, there's the cook, Mitzi, who's afraid to be murdered and a young woman, Philipa Haymes. So this group is gathered at Little Paddocks when the lights go out when a masked, hooded figure with a flashlight and revolver stormed into the house yelling, "STICK 'EM UP." Two shots are fired followed by a third. The masked man lying on the floor, dead, who turns out to be a Swiss man, Rudi Scherz, who works as a receptionist at the Royal Spa Hotel. Detective Inspector Dermot Craddock is tasked with finding out what Rudi Scherz was up to and how he died? Was it an elaborate robbery attempt or did he try to shoot Miss Blacklock under cover of a stick up? Did he accidentally shoot himself, took his own life or was he cleverly murdered?

So, first of all, I have to agree with the people, who defended the book, that the plot has a fantastic hook and Miss Marple shines as a detective. She arrives in Chipping Cleghorn shortly after Inspector Craddock's primarily investigation with, what he calls, "a severe attack of Nosey Parkeritis." Miss Marple almost seems better fitted for the post-WWII Britain than those tight-knit, unchanging villages from the 1930s and '40s.

It has been remarked that Christie started to decline and struggle with the modern world when the 1960s rolled around, which translated into uncharacteristically poor, unpopular novels like At Bertram's Hotel (1965), Third Girl (1966) and Passenger to Frankfurt (1970) – capped by Postern of Fate (1974). An incomprehensible mess of a mystery novel. That's not the case here even though Chipping Cleghorn is not an isolated village that was left untouched by the deep changes of the post-war upheavals. Chipping Cleghorn is as much affected by post-war austerity and shortages as any other place. A time of ration books, identity cards and not exactly legal barter systems to get an extra pound of butter or cut of meat. And discussion around the radio set on "the horrors of atomic warfare." More than the austerity, rationing and the possibility of nuclear war is how "the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart." Nobody could really be sure anymore who there neighbors really are, even though most people think they know. A not unimportant plot point tailored to Miss Marple's talent as a detective. Just a harmless, old lady asking questions whether people remembered such and such, thumbing through photo albums and picking up pieces of gossip, but neither does she neglect the more tangible, physical clues. A Murder is Announced is loaded with clues and red herrings, which is what makes Christie's best novels so fun to reread (especially when you only remember parts of the solution).

I had more or less forgotten about the two additional murders confronting Miss Marple and Inspector Craddock. Christie, as so often, handled these additional murders very well as they're not "dummies" to pad out the story or liven up the plot. Rudi Scherz was even in this post-WWII Britain a stranger and outsider, but the second and third murders strike closer to home. And those murders have a genuine emotional impact. Which in turn gives weight to the tragic conclusion. By the way, A Murder is Announced has given me a new understanding of The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962). I always believed The Mirror Crack'd could have been the classic Miss Marple novel and Christie's last hurrah as a mystery writer had she not dulled the blow of the first murder with its fantastic and original motive with several muddled, unnecessary murders of unimportant characters who didn't matter. Christie obviously tried to pull another A Murder is Announced and missed.

Only thing that can be said against A Murder is Announced is that's nigh impossible not to spot the murderer early on. I dimly remember from my first, long-ago read being suspicious of this character, but even that came with the up-sight of getting a masterclass in plot construction, clueing and misdirection. Christie demonstrates how to effectively muddy waters while simultaneously laying out a clear, fairly clued path to the truth.

So that finally brings me back to everyone who went to bat and defended A Murder is Announced. Where they right calling A Murder is Announced near peak Christie worthy of the laurels it received. Well, yeah, having reread it, they might have had a point. Don't let it happen again.

Out for Delivery: "The Jersey Devil" (1971) by Edward D. Hoch

Some months ago, I reviewed a short story from Edward D. Hoch's Captain Leopold series, "The Rainy-Day Bandit" (1970), which Alessandro favorably compared in the comments to the subject of today's review, "The Jersey Devil" – originally published in the October, 1971, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Famously collected in Leopold's Way (1985).

"The Jersey Devil" begins when Captain Leopold gives Lieutenant Fletcher a lift home following a long shift working on a barroom knifing when the police radio gives out an alert of a house alarm. Leopold and Fletcher are only a block away. So they go to investigate and chase two figures fleeing the burglarized home, a young man and woman, who escaped. But not without a fight. Leopold broke his wrist when trying to grab the man, ripped his pocket and spilled most of the loot. A valuable collection of stamps belonging to Oscar Bailey, a collector and dealer, who's still missing one of his most valuable stamps from his collection.

That missing stamp is "a rare Hawaiian Islands stamp, two cents, issued in 1851," but Leopold is drawn to one of the recovered, unusual looking stamp. A large, brown and poorly printed stamp showing "a crude drawing of a winged demon flying over a row of houses" with words across the top – saying "Jersey Devil—Ten Cents." Bailey is very evasive about that stamp calling it joke with no value, but there's where the case should have ended for Leopold. However, Leopold decides to consult a stamp collector from the area, Dexter Jones, who tells him the Jersey Devil is part of "a semisecret, privately-owned postal system operated in competition with the government" ("...isn't that against the law?"). This operation is run by the owner of a New Jersey trucking company, Benedict Corflu. A character I would like to have seen more of and found his illegal, but convenient and tacitly tolerated postal system fascinating.

After this, "The Jersey Devil" regrettably takes a different track as Dexter Jones is shot and killed. I have to admit it's a small, technically achievement how Hoch constructed the plot to allow for a last-minute solution, but the need for a body spoiled this story. The thief really made a mad dash up the escalation ladder by going from pawing a stolen stamp to first degree murder, especially when the story itself pointed out the culprit had a ready-made excuse (ROT13: cergraqvat gb svaq vg jura erzbivat gur pnfg). So, technically, the plot holds together, but not convincingly. I know that's rich coming from someone whose obsession with locked room mysteries and impossible crimes has been called alarming and a red flag galore, but the murder here had the same effect as dropping a brick through wet tissue paper.

“The Jersey Devil” had a good and promising start, but the ending left me unconvinced and underwhelmed. It should have been just about the stolen stamps and shadowy postal system. So not one of my favorite Captain Leopold stories.

The Case of the Running Man (1958) by Christopher Bush

The Case of the Running Man (1958), the 52nd entry in the Ludovic Travers series, rang in the last phase of Christopher Bush's decades-long run as one of Britain's premier mystery novelists as two more would appear in the late 1950s and counting down the final ten over the following decade – published between 1960 and '68. Bush was also one of the then rapidly shrinking group of Golden Age writers who made out of the Atomic Fifties into the Swinging Sixties, until Michael Innes turned out the light (Appleby and the Ospreys, 1986). None of them fared as well in adapting to the changes and upheavals of post-WWII Britain as Bush. Some even prefer the trim, sleek private eye novel that the series became in the 1950s to the elaborately-plotted affairs of the 1930s.

I'm still in two minds which period I prefer, because there's a bias favoring earlier novels like Dead Man Twice (1930), The Case of the Missing Minutes (1936) and The Case of the Green Felt Hat (1939). I'm simply partial to unbreakable alibis, linked corpses and the occasional impossible crime, but, while different from the 1930s novels, the best of the 1950s and '60s have an attractiveness of their own. Novels like The Case of the Three Lost Letters (1954), The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956) and The Case of the Russian Cross (1957) are tidy, compact mystery novels discreetly carrying on the Golden Age detective story. The Case of the Running Man can be counted among those better novels from this last period in the Ludovic Travers series.

Travers, "a collector in a very humble way," is killing some time by wandering around Christie's to view the antique furniture and pictures. There he meets an elderly, practically blind collector, William Weddall, who's being assisted by his American chauffeur, Sam Martin. Weddall is an eccentric character and was taken aback when learning Travers is a private detective heading his own agency, "a very reputable one," but recovers and asks for a business card – because he has "a pretty important assignment in the near future." Over the following weeks, several small, but curious, incidents happened involving Weddall. First of all, Travers spotted him at the station deliberately missing his boat train while being tailed by a private investigator from City Detection Ltd. Secondly, Travers receives his important assignment from Waddell over the post asking him to fly to France to post a letter in Paris. Further more, Travers was hoaxed for some reason over the telephone and eventually receives two visitors, Sam Martin and Scotland Yard's Inspector Jewle, who want to talk with him about Weddall's untimely death.

Weddall's home and estate is Hinchbrook Hall, "show-place for his antiques and paintings," where he fell from a top floor window ("...and his head wasn't at all a pretty sight"). Suspiciously, an unidentified man was seen running away from Hinchbrook Hall right after Weddall's death. So an accident is presumed, murder is suspected. And the reason why Jewle asked Travers to come down to Hinchbrook Hall to have a look around. Sam also turned to Travers as he believes Weddall was murdered and wants to hire him to find the killer.

I should point out here that the 2022 reprint of The Case of the Running Man was praised for its depiction and treatment of Sam Martin, a black man, who had a very un-British master/servant relationship with Weddall even for 1958 ("very democratic... the way, for instance, he and Sam were more like friends"). That's why Sam engaged Travers to find Weddall's killer. So, really, Sam's just a character in a detective story like the rest of the cast with his actual, not wholly unimportant, contribution being a client of the Broad Street Detective Agency – handing Travers a reason to play his card very close to the chest. Travers needs to do a good deal of digging and thinking in a case with no obvious motives and immediate suspects. A case where the behavior of the victim is as baffling as his own death and second, unambiguous murder could bring a solution either closer or pushing it farther away.

This is, of course, glossing over nearly every character and the finer plot details making up The Case of the Running Man. Like I said, the Ludovic Travers novels from this period tend to be sleek, compactly-plotted mysteries and The Case of the Running Man is a very sleek, compactly-plotted mystery and going into the finer details edges closely to spoiler territory. While sleep and compact, The Case of the Running Man has two smudges. Firstly, the plot probably would have worked even better had been presented as inverted mystery as the obvious murderer was propped up by a fantastic motive and alibi-trick. I have seen one, or two, variations on this motive before, but it's still great and believe this is the earliest example on record. Secondly, the alibi-trick, while absolutely grand and strengthening the ending, it's a literal throwback to one of the earlier novels. Bush employed a variation on this alibi-trick even better twenty years before. Again, the alibi-trick is still great, tightly executed and ensured a satisfying conclusion. But not quite good enough to place it among the top tier titles from this series.

Other than that, The Case of the Running Man comes highly recommended to longtime fans of the series.

The Dairy Devil (1975) by Ton Vervoort

Back in 2022, I concluded my run of reviews of the lamentably short-lived, surprisingly classically-styled Inspector Floris Jansen series written by the Dutch editor, translator and chess player Peter Verstegen – who published his detective novels under the name "Ton Vervoort." A run of reviews starting in 2021 with the sometimes Ellery Queen-ish Moord onder astrologen (Murder Among Astrologists, 1963) and concluded with the spy procedural Moord op toernee (Murder on Tour, 1965). Moord onder the mantel der liefde (Murder Under the Mantle of Love, 1964) deserves a special mention as a series highlight and an unmistakable Dutch detective novel, but pretty much finished the series. Or so I thought.

Vervoort wrote three short stories of which at least "De juwelen van een weduwe" ("The Jewelry of a Widow," c. 1960s) features Inspector Floris Jansen, but not sure about the harder to find short stories "Burleske aan de galg" ("Burlesque on the Gallows," 1965) and "Het alibi" ("The Alibi," 1968). Further more, there's a dossier novel and a special, shortish science-fiction mystery. That last one turned out to have been an unexpected, overlooked final entry in the Floris Jansen series making it one of most curious of all genre curiosities. I mean, how many detective characters have bowed out of the genre from a future timeline in an alternative reality? But first things first.

De zuivelduivel (The Dairy Devil, 1975) is more of an illustrated short story than a short novel, commissioned by the Centraal Schoolmelkcomité, which was distributed free of charge among the secondary school students in Den Haag (The Hague) attending schools with new, subsidized refrigerators for school milk – a project of the then Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. There was also contest with a boatload of prizes attached to The Dairy Devil, but more on that later. Vervoort packed a lot of world building, sometimes visionary world building, into this short story-ish science-fiction mystery taking place in an alternative 1990, then still 25 years into the future, when the country had slipped into a soft dystopia.

When it comes to the visionary part, Vervoort was sometimes decades ahead of our timeline as the euro had already replaced the gulden, everyone communicated with videophones (smart phones), students attending classes through wirevideo (zoom) called "multimedia distance learning" and predicated a Chernobyl-like disaster. This one took place in the United States. Where he missed the boat was water driven cars and the entire country running on green energy, but there's also the political climate where a radical, green feminists party has seized power who demolished all but the historical center of Amsterdam to build huge, chalk white teepee tent-like solar-and wind powered buildings. Worst thing that can happen in this society is not going to a now comfy prison, but being sentenced to a spell in a social reeducation camp.

Most of important of all, the changes to the language as everything is now written phonetically and Vervoort wrote The Dairy Devil in this new, dumb down Dutch spelling. It's not exactly an Orwellian kind of New Speak, but it makes everyone sound like they were just punched in the mouth.

This is the strange, completely altered society in which André Geuskens, an old school bank robber, is released following a lengthy term in prison. André is reluctant to leave his lazy prison life behind to work as a janitor at a mega school, but it's either taking that job or go to a re-education camp. André reports to Adriaan Suurbier, history teacher and vice-principle at a mega school, who has some problems of his own. A generous offer to let the elderly, previous owner of the building he purchased as an investment has come back to bait him when science made life extending breakthroughs – practically guaranteeing Mrs. Terpstra would be celebrating her 100th birthday. Adriaan needs to get rid of her and sees an opportunity in André to create a cast-iron alibi, because they're both bald, chubby guys.

Adriaan also works part-time for a dairy company where has to hand out prizes to every hundredth customer who leaves a certain department store with one of their new dairy products in their shopping cart, until getting to the thousandth customer. So he manages to get André to take his place for the day, while Adriaan strangles Mrs. Terpstra and stages a burglary. Yes, this little book was handed out to children alongside their carton of milk and straw. Adriaan has his airtight alibi with André as his unwitting accomplice when Floris Jansen, now Chief Commissioner, appears on the final page. Jansen has no lines in this story, but he has a list and yellow cape Adriaan/André wore for the dairy job. And that's where The Dairy Devil ends!

The next page says, "you will not find the solution of the detective story in this book," but "if you have read the story carefully, you can discover for yourself why and how" got caught. Students are asked to write how they think Jansen solved the case. The ten best solutions can win one of the super prizes (cassette recorders, portable radios, photo cameras, etc.) and a hundred consolation prizes (Ton Vervoort's own detective novels). Prizes were awarded during a festive meeting during a dairy congress in 1975 and every participant would receive a booklet over the mail with the best solutions and Vervoort's own solution. I tried to do some armchair archaeology wizardry and enthusiastically started digging around, but have not been able to find anything about this dairy congress, the prize winners or the booklet with solutions. Considering it took place half a century ago and involved students from a select number of schools from only one region, the booklet with official ending is probably lost to history. Another volume for the Phantom Library.

So here's my solution: When Adriaan was instructing André on the dairy job, he told him to expect a winner roughly every hour, but André is not particular keen on working long hour and not above cutting corners. André likely figured that the only thing really expected from him was producing a list with the ten winners of the day. So why hang around all day counting people with dairy products in their cart when he could simply pick the first ten and call it a day. Does it really matter if they were actually the hundredth, two-hundredth or thousandth customer who bought those products that day? Not to André. When the police started contacting the winners to check Adriaan's alibi, they discover he really doesn't have an alibi at all. It would also turn André from an unwitting accomplice into an unwitting hero who spoiled a killer's plan. I can also see some technical-minded students suggesting the button Adriaan pressed to switch off Mrs. Terpstra's high-tech TV might have been a recording button capturing the murder and its aftermath. Not a solution I would have accepted, but the kind of creative thinking that would probably be awarded with a Ton Vervoort paperback.

Ton Vervoort's career as a mystery writer and his Floris Jansen series didn't strand for a lack of creativity, imagination, variation or interest. Who else would bring his series character back after a ten year hiatus for, what's basically, a walk-on cameo in a limited distributed book for school students in a specific region... that also happens to take place in an alternate future. The Dairy Devil is not a top shelf detective story, but it deserves a prominent, top shelf spot in the detective story's curio cabinet. 

A note for the curious: I forgot to work this into my rambling, but back in May, I reviewed Edward D. Hoch's The Frankenstein Factory (1975) set in an alternate, early 2000s and published the same year as The Dairy Devil. Vervoort's alternate 1990 looked a more like the 21st century than the alternate 2000s from The Frankenstein Factory. No internet or cell phones and the story's "Computer Cops" operate from an office in the World Trade Center. Just something I noticed.

By the way, if you ever disagree with me on something and you want to call me names in the comments, but you don't know the correct racial slur for Dutch people, I accept zuivelduivel. It would be a shame to let it go to waste.

Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026) by Benjamin Stevenson

Last year, I tried the first of Benjamin Stevenson's Ernest Cunningham novels after some initial skepticism, but Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone (2022) sold me on Benjamin's hilarious, classically-styled meta whodunits and quickly followed it up with Everyone on This Train is a Suspect (2023) and eventually Everyone This Christmas has a Secret (2024) – bridging the gap with the non-series Last One to Leave (2022). Benjamin dominated "Murder in Retrospect: The Best and Worst of 2025" as my find of the year. Only drawback to writers from this early, burgeoning second Golden Age is that you can't dip into their complete body of work at your leisure. We now have to wait for the next one to be written and published.

I was more than a little curious when Everyone in This Bank is a Thief (2026) was announced as the title of the fourth Ernest Cunningham novel. A bank robbery and hostage situation is not exactly synonymous with the Golden Age detective novel. Ernest himself admits only example of a bank robbery in classic crime fiction is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed-League" (1891), but, at the same time, holding up a bank has a quaint and retro vibe in 2026. So was curious to see how Stevenson was going to work a bank robbery with hostages into a grand old detective story.

Everyone in This Bank is a Thief opens with Ernest Cunningham, mystery fiction expert and amateur detective, trapped inside a bank vault with about fifteen hours of oxygen left to go and decides to write down everything that happened up until his imprisonment – basically a record scratch, freeze frame with the text "you're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation." So how did he end up trapped inside a sealed vault? Ernest wanted to put his experience and successes as an amateur detective into practical use by starting his own detective agency, but he and his fiancee, Juliette, have been unable to secure a business loan to get started. From Sydney to Perth, they have been turned down by every bank and even a shady, diamond-toothed loans shark called their business plan high risk. So it was an unexpected break when they received an invitation from Winston Huxley, owner of Huxley's Bank, "one of the oldest family-owned banks in the country."

So they travel to the old gold mining town of Huxley, but it turns out Winston Huxley wants Ernest to do a job. Huxley's brother, Edward, is co-director and head of security who changed the code of the bank vault in the basement before disappearing. Now they can't get to the cash or safety deposit boxes to serve their rural, old-fashioned customers and could seriously damage their reputation if it gets out. Ernest needs a bank loan and Huxley needs a detective ("open my vault, and I'll open your agency"). A good deal, however, when they leave his office to get to work, they find someone in a black hoodie, fencing mask and gun holding up the teller. One push of the panic button, the alarms started wailing and shutters came down trapping everyone inside the bank. Ernest and Juliette become two of the bank robber's instant hostages as the police and media begin to gather outside.

This group of hostages consist of the security guard, Felix, the new receptionist, Michelle, a movie producer, Remy Allard, a teenage gaming streamer, Eric, a priest who doesn't speak, Father Gabriel, and a young, dying girl and her caring grandmother, Cordelia and Laverna. And, of course, the director himself. Ernest calls himself a reliable narrator who writes the complete, accurate truth and that goes for the book title. Everyone present is planning to steal something, one thing or another, but "not everyone is conducting a full-on heist" ("that would be ridiculous"). This gives way to a pleasing, increasingly entangled plot, developments and complications. For example, the masked bank robber demands a single dollar from the inaccessible bank vault and cracking the new code is one of Ernest many headaches. And, if things aren't complicated enough, someone gets murdered under seemingly impossible circumstances. A case of apparent case of spontaneous human combustion in front of Ernest that turns his fellow hostages in potential suspects. What he decides to do next also makes him a bit an amateur idiot. And that's a plus for the overall story!

Like I said in previous reviews of this series, Stevenson understands how to lie through his teeth without writing a single untrue word coupled with the comedians touch to exaggerate in order to clarify, which I consider to be invaluable tools for writing and plotting mysteries – especially when handling a dozen different plot-threads. It also allows to stretch things just a little without doing any actual damage to the plot or characters. I mean, I loved the bit with the parrot ("I am not a clue").

So the plot never became muddled and the story remained crystal clear as the various, sometimes intertwined, plot-threads slowly get picked apart. I particularly liked Ernest solution for "the world’s slowest bank robbery," one of the individual problems, but Stevenson practically delivers on all of them with the overall solution tying everything to the central plot taking the whole cake. Only time I thought Stevenson was stretching things a bit too far was (ROT13) gung gur cybg unf gjb pbzcyrgryl vaqrcraqrag pnfrf bs fcbagnarbhf uhzna pbzohfgvba, but other than that, Everyone in This Bank is a Thief is another superbly done, retro-GAD novel. A retro-GAD novel with an atypical framing and backdrop for a classically-styled detective novel, but one that feels "deliciously old-fashioned" in this day and age. Ernest, our always reliable, resourceful narrator and one of the Great Detectives of this Golden Age revival, is really starting to resemble a battered, scarred warhorse. I fear Stevenson is going to turn him into a nine-lives cat and the series by killing him off in the tenth book.

Fortunately, the fifth Ernest Cunningham novel won't be out for at least another year and a tenth novel not before 2032 or 2033. See how handily I turned that pesky luxury problem into neat coping mechanism?

Anyway, it's amazing a series like this was a mere pipe dream only 10, 15 years ago and now they keep rolling off the press. So you can expect Everyone in This Bank is a Thief to make an appearance on my 2026 best-of list and I'll bridge the gap to the next Ernest Cummingham novel with Stevenson's Either Side of Midnight (2020) and Find Us (2021). Stay tuned!