A COMBINATION OF pastiche and affectionate homage, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (Faber, £12.99, offer £11.99) is also a rather good whodunnit in its own right.

That is not surprising: Gilbert Adair is a writer of high quality, in several different genres. He sets his novel in 1935, at the height of the golden age of detective fiction, though he is a better writer than John Dickson Carr or Agatha Christie, the main objects of his enjoyable tribute.

Adair sticks closely to the conventions of the period, even to indulging in occasional bits and pieces of light cheating. It is Boxing Day in a country house on the edge of Dartmoor, in the middle of a snowstorm.

In the attic, an exceptionally objectionable gossip columnist lies dead, shot. The room is locked from the inside, there is no other way anyone could have got in or out, and it cannot be suicide because the gun is missing.

The house has been isolated by the snow, so the killer must be someone still inside. As tradition demands, just about everyone there — including a vicar, a doctor, a colonel, an actress and a writer of detective stories — has a motive; several fear that the deceased will expose their darkest secrets. A retired copper who lives nearby investigates. A delightful entertainment.

Jean-Patrick Manchette, who died in 1995, was and remains France’s king of noir fiction. His novels are short, sharp and shocking, low on adjectives, high on matter-of-fact violence and bereft of moral judgments. But he writes with a bleak, tragic beauty that ensnares more than it repels.

In The Prone Gunman (translated by James Brook, Serpent’s Tail, £7.99, offer £7.59), Martin Terrier is an efficient assassin, coming to the end of the ten-year stint he’d given himself before returning home to the woman he desired. She has not waited for him, and his employers persuade him to carry out just one more job, killing an Arab oil sheikh. It doesn’t go to plan and much bloodshed ensues.

Brilliant, though not for the squeamish.

Depths (Harvill Secker, £16.99, offer £15.29) does not feature Henning Mankell’s detective Kurt Wallander. Far from it. Labelled a psychological thriller, it delivers far more of the first word of that description than the second. It is a meticulous, despairing, chilling (in more ways than one) journey through the tormented mind and soul of Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a Swedish naval engineer during the First World War.

He specialises in the use of depth soundings to assess which channels Swedish warships could navigate. On his ship’s exploratory journey into a cold and remote archipelago, he comes across a young woman, Sara Frederika, living alone on a barren skerry.

He has a wife in Stockholm, but becomes obsessed with his new-found love. He commits a murder, and begins a mental decline. There is a haunting quality to Mankell’s writing in Laurie Thompson’s translation, and he is good at isolation and loneliness, but Depths is a depressing book and it is difficult to care about its hero.

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