A full-blown murder mystery would overload a short story, but for some reason Christmas crime works well in short form, as witness the series of classic books that recently tailed off with Murder by Candlelight . It's refreshing to have a chunky new collection, some from high powered modern thriller writers - and the vast majority of the stories are well worth reading. I think it's fair to say that few come up to the really great classic Christmas mystery shorts, but I very much enjoyed, for example, C. L. Taylor's How to Commit Murder in a Bookshop - I think many published authors would quietly identify with the targeting of agents, publicists, marketing people and the like (leaving readers and booksellers safe). Russ Thomas gives us a dark old Christmas house scare with The Red Angel , and there's amusing murderous fluffiness in The Wrong Party . Some good twists too - for example in Samantha Hayes' dark Frostbite,  while Sarah Hilary's Marley's Ghost gi...

In a mystery, things are often not what they seem - but usually a book cover is a fair indication of what a book is. In this case it isn't. You'd think this was a cosy Christmas murder mystery. No, it's not. You would think it would centre on a murder at Holly House. It doesn't. Admittedly there is a murder in the said building, but it's a marginal part of the plot as a whole. Of itself, this isn't necessarily bad, but there were other elements that put me off too. The book is supposedly the memoir of a failure of a detective inspector, sent in the early 1950s to a village on the North Yorkshire moors as punishment for a misdemeanour. The village, Elderby, itself is decidedly reminiscent of the village setting of the old TV show Heartbeat , but somehow this village supports a police station with an inspector, a sergeant and a couple of constables. Inspector Grasby is faced with an increasingly complex situation as death follow death, aided or hindered by a femal...

It's that time when sensible people take a break from the internet. There won't be any blog posts next week, but I'll be back soon. Meanwhile, there's a great carol below... For those of us who celebrate Christmas, have a great one - and an excellent 2025 to all. Having sung in choirs pretty much all my life, I'm a huge fan of good church music. Here's one of my favourite carols, Arthur Oldham's setting of Remember O Thou Man , which I first discovered when singing at the Oxford Physics Department carol service (don't ask) - it's not very well known, but well worth a listen. If you like a bit of musical history (source The New Oxford Book of Carols ), the words date back to the early seventeenth century, appearing as 'A Christmas Carroll' in Thomas Ravenscroft's 1611 Melismata: musical phansies fitting to court, citie and country humours to 3, 4 and 5 voyces . It's not known if the tune Ravenscroft used was original or a traditional o...

The problem with much of our approach to the environment is that it's driven by fuzzy feelings, rather than logic and connected thinking. This has come up recently in respect to missing links in the renewable energy grid, but can also be seen in our approach to electric vehicles, the knee-jerk environmental reaction to nuclear, the way environmentalists embrace organic food and much more. Way back, I wrote a book called Ecologic to try to address this lack of clear thinking. It won a prize, but didn't have much impact other than getting me labelled a ' green heretic ', which I have accepted as a badge of honour. Sadly, though, bringing logic to green issues continues to be a problem. The example that brought this to mind was the news that the massive Scottish Seagreen offshore wind plant has only been able to provide one third of its potential capacity this year - it sold 1.2 million gWh to the grid, where it could have provided 3.7 gWh. The reason for the disparity i...

Watching the mildly entertaining Man on the Inside on Netflix, I was struck by a painful mirror image of the bad old days. In the series Ted Danson plays a bored, retired engineering professor who takes on a job as an undercover investigator for a PI to investigate a theft in a retirement home. We get some stereotype old people behaviour, but also some embarrassingly hypocritical sexism. I'll come back to that in a moment, but to put it into context, I've also recently been rewatching the excellent 2006/7 TV series Life on Mars . In the show, the 2006 detective Sam Tyler played by John Simm hallucinates himself into a 1970s Manchester police team after a brain injury, working under the wonderfully unreconstructed Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Something Tyler constantly attempts to battle is the casual sexism of the male detectives, which (allegedly) had changed significantly by 2006. Now back to Man on the Inside (made in 2024, not the distant past). Two female inhabitants of...

As a fan of Sherlock Holmes on the lookout for a Christmas mystery, this seemed an ideal purchase - and it's not bad. But it's not great either. There have been some excellent modern Holmes ventures - think, for example, of Anthony Horowitz's House of Silk , and even more so his brilliant Moriarty . And on the whole Tim Major makes a reasonable effort of fitting with the characters as we know them - but there are two issues with the way the book's written. To give it some context, this is a story featuring Irene Adler (who the TV show Sherlock demonstrated well was ideal for taking Holmes in something of a new direction), who is setting Holmes a series of puzzles, starting with an odd sounding vocal performance which he studies at some length as sheet music. All the puzzles, it appears, are to be thefts with no theft - perhaps the cleverest these involves a stolen painting that never existed. And there is some entertainment as Holmes and Watson attempt to get a grip on...

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from December 2014 Over the years, magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi have shown time and again that they have ideal skills for spotting and debunking fraudulent claims of magical abilities and mental powers. In the Telegraph newspaper, though, Will Storr had a go at 'debunking the king of the debunkers', demonstrating that Randi himself, now 87 (according to his article, or 86 according to Wikipedia), was not all he seemed. [Randi died in 2020.] For me, this was a wonderful example of entirely missing the point. Storr made three main accusations. That Randi has at some point been doubtful about the science behind climate change, that he was intolerant to drug users and that he had lied about replicating Rupert Sheldrake's dog experiments, in which Sheldrake claims to have shown that at dog was able to predict when its owner would return home. The first two, frankly, are hardly worth considering as they are classic type errors. Bei...

Back in 2016 I belatedly reviewed Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash - it seemed a good time to revisit and dive into it a little more than was possible in a straightforward review. Back then I commented 'If you like the kind of science fiction that hits you between the eyes and flings you into a high-octane cyber-world, particularly if you have an IT background, this is a masterpiece.' That certainly holds true of the first half. Perhaps the closest parallel here is the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception .  Both are scintillatingly delightful, but tail off at the end. The movie, still one of my favourites, loses it somewhat when it turns into a sub-Bond action movie and then ends oddly. By contrast, Snow Crash gets distinctly bogged down by an interminable section where main character Hiro is doing the metaverse equivalent of library work on a convoluted theory that combines the Babel story and some Chariots of the Gods - like uber-speculation, which becomes som...

Jack Gatland (real name Tony Lee) has an extremely slick writing style - it feels almost like an American crime writer producing a novel set in the UK. The setting is reminiscent of a police version of Mick Herron's Slough House intelligence service novels, televised as Slow Horses . Where that series involves a set of misfit, but in their odd way highly capable, spies, here we get the brilliant rejects of the police service, collected as 'The Last Chance Saloon'. Herron's series predates Gatland's by five years - yet despite only starting it four years ago, the prolific Gatland has already produced 20 titles in the DI Walsh series, with other books alongside. You might imagine this would result in sub-standard writing. There are certainly more little errors than I would usually expect in a professionally published series, but Gatland has some excellent over-the-top plotting, and really keeps the tension up and the action flowing.  To illustrate, I can give an examp...

Not for the first time, I was inspired by listening to the excellent The Studies Show podcast . In their 26 November edition, Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie introduced collider bias, which is a horrible statistical anomaly that can make it seem that a study shows something entirely different from reality. What's particularly worrying is that, as the podcast demonstrates, many scientists aren't aware of this potential issue. I had assumed collider bias would be something to do with the kind of huge statistical analysis necessary to interpret what's going on in a piece of equipment like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - but in reality the 'collision' in question is simply down to the way a pair of arrows point to the same location on a kind of flow diagram. What this statistical anomaly can produce, though, is the kind of result we love to hear (and scientists love to find) - results that make you go 'Huh? That's surprising.' Examples given included that...

REVISIT SERIES -  Edited posts from February 2010 and March 2015 I've long marvelled at the success of the wonderfully unscientific concept of homeopathy. This is a double-length post pulling together two homeopathic adventures. Just over a week ago there was a mass overdose of medication sold by responsible companies like Boots. [I'm pleased to say, since this post, Boots has stopped making homeopathic remedies, though they currently still sell a handful of products.] Across the world people took vastly more than the recommended dose. And nothing happened. The reason? They were overdosing on homeopathic medicine. The campaign was known as 10:23. The strange numbering refers to  Avogadro's number . This is a number that delights chemists - it's the number of atoms in a mole of a substance. The actual number is around 6x10 23 , where 10 23 is 1 with 23 zeroes after it. The reason this is of relevence to homeopathic medicine becomes clear when you realize how these medic...