John Bude

 John Bude, pseudonym of Ernest Elmore, wrote approximately thirty crime novels, of which I have two: The Lake District Murder, published in 1935, and The Sussex Down Murder, published in 1936, both recently republished by the Poisoned Pen Press in their British Library Crime Classics series.  Both books are police procedurals following the investigations of Inspector, later Superintendent Meredith as he methodically unravels complicated crimes.

The Lake District Murder starts with an apparent suicide in a lonely country garage in the Lake District in England that eventually leads Inspector Meredith to uncovering an elaborate conspiracy which culminates in several murders.  

Grade:  A.  

In The Sussex Downs Murder, the bloodstained hat and battered car of a missing man, John Rother, are found abandoned in a lonely part of Sussex.  Later, bones turn up in bags of lime supplied by the missing man's brother from their jointly owned lime kilns.  Since the brother, William Rother, is known to have been at odds with his brother, who was believed to have been in love with William's wife, and since William is John's sole heir, William looks like the obvious suspect.  When William's body turns up in a chalk pit complete with suicide note, it looks like the case is over, until Superintendent Meredith patiently demonstrates that the easy answer is not always the right answer.  

Grade:  A.

Wish I had a couple more of John Bude's books.  

And, in the vein of "be careful what you wish for", it turned out that I did have another book by John Bude, The Cornish Coast Murder, his first attempt at a mystery novel.  This one, first published in 1935, seemed a bit more labored than the two others.  Julius Tregarthen, an unpleasant and overbearing local magistrate, is discovered shot dead in his house one stormy night.  It looks at first as if he was shot from the path along the cliff, but why were there three bullet holes in the windows, when one shot would clearly do the job?  The local vicar, a fan of mystery novels, helps the police inspector puzzle it all out.

Grade:  B.

John Bucan, The Thirty Nine Steps

 John Buchan's suspense novel, The Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1915, is a classic spy and pursuit novel.  Mining engineer Richard Hannay, having made a modest fortune, has recently returned to England from Africa and is feeling bored and disenchanted with life in London.  Longing for adventure, he takes in a neighbor, Franklin Scudder, who regales him with a tale of a conspiracy to assassinate an important public figure who is due to arrive in London in three weeks, and who is soon after found stabbed to death in Hannay's apartment.  Knowing that both the police and the mysterious people who murdered the man will soon be pursuing him, Hannay find's Scudder's notebook and takes off for Scotland to elude them and to decode the notebook, from which he learns that the real plot is to steal England's naval secrets.  

The chapters in the book were originally published as a magazine serial, which enhances the suspense.  It's a classic, but suspense novels aren't to my taste.

Grade:  B-.

Simon Brett

     I've always like Simon Brett's Mrs. Pargeter books. Mrs. Pargeter is definitely not your typical elderly Englishwoman detective; since she inherited from her late husband a fair amount of money, a strict moral code ("tell nothing but the truth, but not necessarily all of it"), a set of skeleton keys and a list of shady "business" contacts, there's not much that stands between Mrs. Pargeter and getting at the truth of the matter once she starts looking into it.  

In A Nice Class of Corpse, Mrs. Pargeter has moved into a residence hotel on the south coast of England.  Within days, two of the elderly residents have died under suspicious circumstances, and Mrs. Pargeter discovers that a substantial quantity of jewelry has gone missing.  

Grade:  A.

Having decided that the surviving residents of the hotel are looking backward to memories and not forward to life, Mrs. Pargeter buys a house in an up-scale suburban neighborhood, where she discovers that all her new neighbors have secrets they'd rather not have revealed, and that the woman from whom she bought the house is now Mrs., Presumed Dead.  The woman's husband is the logical suspect, but when he turns out to have an alibi, her suspicion turns to some of her new neighbors and their well hidden secrets.  Simon Brett indulges in some pretty savage social commentary on suburban life in 1980's Britain in this one.  

Grade:  A.

In Mrs. Pargeter's Package, she accompanies an old friend on a tour to the Greek island of Corfu. The friend dies; Mrs. Pargeter believes she was murdered and she herself becomes involved in an old Corfu family feud.  

Grade:  A.

The Body on the Beach is the beginning of a new series centered in the small town of Fethering on the south coast of England.  Carole Seddon finds a dead body of a middle aged man on the beach as she's walking her dog one morning, but by the time the police get around to investigating it, the body has disappeared.  Nettled by the police dismissal of her as a hysterical middle aged woman, Carole and her enigmatic new neighbor Jude undertake the investigation themselves.  

Grade:  B

I've read several of Brett's Charles Paris books, but apparently didn't keep any of them.  As I recall, Charles Paris is a struggling English actor with a fondness for alcohol and is one of the few ornaments of the British stage who did not make it into the cast of I, Claudius.