Barbra Colley

 Barbra Colley's Death Tidies Up features Charlotte La Rue, the owner of a New Orleans cleaning company, Maid For A Day.  When one of her employees finds a dead body of a man whose funeral Charlotte attended two years before, Charlotte knows something is fishy in New Orleans historic Garden District.  Grade:  C.   

V. C. Clinton-Baddeley

 V. C. Clinton-Baddeley's Dr. Davie books, published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, have long been favorites of mine.  Dr. R. V. Davie is an elderly fellow of St. Nicholas' College, Cambridge University, who has a fondness for detective novels and opera.  His natural curiosity about people and the world often leads him into unusual situations. 

 
The sudden death of a university lecturer during the course of a public speech in Death's Bright Dart leads Dr. Davie to investigate the speaker's murky past, a stolen blowpipe, and the production methods and use of arrow poisons. This one involves some tricky calculating of the college's internal geography that I found confusing, although there is a map to help figure it out.  Grade:  B for the mystery, Grade A for the pleasure of Dr. Davie's company.   

My Foe Outstretch'd Beneath The Tree finds Dr. Davie involved with a mysterious death at his London club; a member, a former police officer, has been found dead in the club's central garden apparently a victim of suffocation.  Only a few hours earlier, Dr. Davie had enlisted the man's help to play a cassette tape recording or a language lesson with a strange addition and a few bars of a familiar opera aria.  Again, Grade: B for the mystery (I really don't think it would work), Grade:  A for the wry humor and captivating writing.   

Only A Matter Of Time finds Dr. Davie attending the King's Lacey music and poetry festival.  Dr. Davie's quiet and entirely unofficial investigation of the deaths of an old antique dealing friend and of the secretary of an industrial corporation  raises the question:  were the murders the product of events in the past, or the result of modern industrial espionage?  Grade:  A.  

Revisiting the Devonshire village where he was born for the funeral of his boyhood friend Robert, Dr. Davie encounters unsettling information about Robert's interest in the death of a neighbor in No Case For The Police.  His curiosity soon leads him to poke his nose into that matter, of course.  Grade:  A.  

Dr. Davie attends a student commedia dell'arte performance at a London drama school in To Study A Long Silence during which one of the actors is killed shortly before he is due to go on stage to take final bows.  Naturally, Dr. Davie wants to know how and why.  Grade:  A.  

Sadly, the author died shortly after completing the last book, and after rounding up the investigation in London, Dr. Davie returns to his beloved Cambridge and falls asleep in his chair.  

Douglas Clark

Now it's on to the work of Douglas Clark whose Scotland Yard detective team of George Masters and William Green specialize in difficult cases involving medical or pharmaceutical issues.  Although Masters and Green initially dislike and irritate each other, the team is so successful that the Yard won't break them up.  I don't have all the books, so I'll just go with the ones I have, published from about 1970 into the 1990s.  

2 Dec 2024

Masters and Green are called in to investigate the sudden death of a young diabetic woman in Sick To Death.  Otherwise healthy, the woman suddenly went into a diabetic coma and died overnight; when her insulin supply was found to be useless, the team is called in to investigate.  Grade:  B. 

 

4 Dec 2024

A popular resident dies of poisoning at the house of the most hated man in a tight suburban neighborhood in Premedicated Murder, and Masters and Green are called in to solve it.  Although the unpopular man is the universal choice as murderer, he had no motive.  But who did?  I felt the plot of this one was a bit far fetched.  Grade:  B.

6 Dec 2024

When the third member of a secure British government research facility dies in a mountaineering accident in Dread And Water, it looks as if the deaths of two other scientists from the same department in similar circumstances also might not have been accidents.   Masters and Green have to detect a highly unusual murder weapon.  Grade:  A.   

10 Dec 2024

Table D'Hote finds the team of Masters and Green on the verge of finally splitting up; their two sergeants have moved on to promotions, and William Green is two years away from retirement.  He's been given permission to look for another assignment, but nobody wants to take on an officer that close to retiring.  Perversely, he now decides he wants to stay, and George Masters keeps him on to tackle the case of a doctor's wife who has died unexpectedly under suspicious circumstances.  Grade:  A.

13 Dec 2024

On their way to investigate the sudden death of the senior partner in a firm of real estate agents and auction brokers in The Gimmel Flask, Masters reveals that he scents local corruption as well as murder.  On thing I like about this series is that it allows for the gradual evolution of the relationship between Masters and Green.  They still irritate each other from time to time, but by this point they are functioning with much more mutual respect.  Grade:  A.   

16 Dec 2024

When their car breaks down near an abandoned church, Masters and Green poke around in the churchyard while their sergeants go for help in Heberden's Seat.  Naturally, their exploration leads them to discover a dead body in the churchyard well.  I felt the plot of this one didn't hang together too well and the solution was pretty obvious.  Grade: B.

18 Dec 2024

The man Masters' mother-in-law, Bella, intended to marry has died of a heart attack after being shot by a poacher in Poacher's Bag.  The local police have arrested the poacher and and are satisfied with their case, but Bella is not; she wants Masters and Green to investigate the matter.  They are reluctant to "poach" on the locals' turf, and must proceed diplomatically.  Grade:  B.  

19 Dec 2024

The popular headmistress of a posh girls' school dies suddenly of poisoning from seeds of the laburnum tree in Golden Rain.  A cursory investigation by the local police fails to reveal how she might have ingested the seeds, so Masters and Green's team is called in by the local bigwigs.  Grade:  B.

21 Dec 2024

Hatred is said to be The Longest Pleasure.  When a rare type of botulism breaks out in four different parts of England, the authorities assume foul play and assign Masters and Green to track down the source.  This one is a cracking good read; the suspense is so good that in spite of the fact that I've read it several times before,  it still kept me up most of the night.  Grade:  A+.  

31 Dec 2024

I read four books over the holidays, so I'll do them all at once.

An intoxicated young hoodlum is taken into police custody and dies in a jail cell overnight from an unusual intoxicant in Shelf Life.  Complicating matters is the fact that he is the father of the duty sergeant's daughter's unborn baby.  That's enough to get Masters and Green's team called in to sort matters out.  Grade:  B.

An even more unusual situation occurs in Roast Eggs, when Masters is appealed to by an old barrister friend; he's in the middle of prosecuting a murder case and fears that the man accused of murdering his wife by setting their house on fire will be acquitted.  Masters has only the weekend to come up with the necessary new evidence before the trial resumes the following Monday.  Grade:  A.

Elderly Mrs. Carlow has driven her family and neighbors nuts for years with her arrogant and manipulative behavior, often resorting to overdosing on her heart medications when she wants attention.    When another overdose proves fatal, the question is whether she intended to commit suicide or was murdered; complicating matters is the fact that the local coroner, the police superintendent and other local notables are all related to her, either by blood or by marriage in Vicious Circle.  Since they cannot ethically investigate the matter themselves, Masters and Green are called in to investigate.  Grade:  B.  

The Monday Theory involves the death of a popular newspaper columnist and her boyfriend from death by arsine poisoning.  The mystery is OK, but I was annoyed by Clark's using an obnoxious straw man (or woman in this case) to lambaste political liberals.  Grade:  C for that reason.  

2 Jan 2025

Bill Green receives a letter from an old acquaintance from his days in the British Army during WWII in Dead Letter.  The letter states that the writer has witnessed a murder and that a senior police official was involved.  Worse yet, the letter is unsigned and does not give the writer's location.  The team is forced to sift through the memories of old soldiers from Bill's unit to try to identify the writer, who is clearly in fear of his life.  By the time they do identify him, he is dying, victim of an apparent hit-and-run accident, so the team is forced to try to find the site of the first murder, and identify the bent copper, on their own.  Grade:  A.  

3 Jan 2025

George Masters has been given an assignment so secret that he can't even tell his team about it until just before they need to go into action in Jewelled Eye.  The assignment is to find out who kidnapped an important scientist working on a cure for cancer, and determine what has become of him.  As usual, the team has to assess the evidence and then make intuitive leaps to come up with the solution.  Grade:  A.

7 Jan 2025

Masters and his team have been asked to review the files of eleven murder cases of women that have occurred in the Northern District over the past year to see if they can spot any common theme among the murders in Performance.   Masters does so and predicts that another woman will be murdered on or shortly after December 3rd, the date of the next full moon.  He and the team are attending a performance of Handel's Messiah when a popular contralto collapses onstage at the height of her triumph.  Grade:  A.  

In Storm Center Masters is recovering from the gunshot wound he suffered in Jewelled Eye.  Although he is on sick leave, he's been asked to deliver a series of lectures at the Police College, ostensibly a paid vacation on which he can take his wife and son along.  Of course, it turns out that the head of the college has an ulterior motive for requesting his presence; he wants him and his team to investigate the unexplained disappearances of two young men, five years apart, that seem to involve one of the College's foreign students.  Grade:  A.  

10 Jan 2025

The Big Grouse has Masters and Green hunting for the traveling sales representative of a plastics company who disappeared seven months earlier.  Their hunt takes them to the locality where the man worked; they find his car, but no sign of a body.  Grade:  B.  

10 Jan 2025

The son of a professional colleague of Masters and Green has been poisoned while participating in a sailing race at sea in Plain Sailing.  With no knowledge of sailing terms and techniques, and no apparent motive for either suicide or murder, Masters finds himself a bit a sea, too, in the chaos and confusion of a sailing community in the middle of an important competition.  I found this one a bit confusing; in fact, I'm still not entirely sure who dunnit or why.  Grade:  B.  

14 Jan 2025

A wealthy industrialist and friend of George and Wanda Masters, who suffers from a debilitating disease, has invited them to his birthday party in Bitter Water.  They can't attend, but when a young actress who did attend dies mysteriously a few days later, Masters and Green are called to investigate.  They find that the actress had fallen into the swimming pool at the party where she may have contracted the infection that killed her.  Grade:  B.  

So that's it for the works of Douglas Clark.  Although these books are technically police procedural mysteries, Masters and Green rely less on traditional police procedures and more on George Masters' flights of intuition and imagination than on routine investigation techniques.   

  

 

The "Cozy" Sub-genre

  The "cozy" sub-genre of mystery fiction seems to have arisen in the late 1980s or early 1990s.  From my observation, they mostly seem to be pleasantly entertaining stories without much graphic violence or bloodshed.  The central characters seem to be almost exclusively women who are not detectives or otherwise involved in law enforcement, most with one or more female side-kicks, and most with some vague male romantic interest in the background.  Many of them involve some sort of "Ye  Olde Tea Shoppe" type of business or occupation and, sadly, appear to know absolutely nothing about proper police procedure or even much about the legal system, inventing whatever they need to make their plots work.  

What set me off on this rant was the Jill Churchill book I just finished re-reading, A Farewell To Yarns.  At the end of that otherwise entertaining book the police detective, Mel VanDyne, 1) agrees to not arrest the suspect until after the church Christmas bazaar is over at 6:30 (no arrest warrant); 2) fails to call for backup when his police driver is out of action due to a broken wrist; 3) fails to transport a suspect to the police station for questioning; 4) uses a civilian to witness a suspect's confession; 5) then allows that suspect to move around the house without escort (no search warrant, either); and 6) fails to notice enough bath water running for the suspect to drown.  There are undoubtedly more, but those are more than enough to get him fired for incompetence and worse yet, annoy me.  

I will probably be adding to this post as I encounter other "cozies" as I progress through my collection, sigh.  

Jill Churchill

Jill Churchill

Jane Jeffrey series

2 Nov 2024

When Jane Jeffrey, a recently widowed suburban mother of three kids, and her best friend Shelley, who lives next door, are confronted with the murder of Shelley's substitute cleaning lady in Grime and Punishment, they decide to lend the police a hand in solving the case, uncovering a lot of nasty secrets in Jane's suburban Chicago neighborhood in the process.  Jill Churchill's books are in the "cozy" sub-genre of mystery fiction; the books are woefully deficient on police procedural methods, but they're written with style and humor and tend to be good fun.  Grade:  A.

4 Nov 2024

An old friend of Jane's has come to visit with her newly discovered son, whom she had given up for adoption, in tow in A Farewell To Yarns.  The young man is graceless and downright churlish, and when the friend is discovered stabbed to death, Jane and Shelley wonder if the young man was the intended victim if not in fact the murderer.  When he is also murdered, they have to reformulate their theories.  The police procedures at the end of the book are so ludicrous that they spoil an other wise entertaining book, an unfortunate characteristic of the "cozy" sub-genre.  Grade:  B, mostly because of the clunky ending.  

6 Nov 2024

When an odious member of the writing class Jane and Shelley are taking is murdered after consuming food supplied by Jane in A Quiche Before Dying, Jane has to interpret some obscure clues to find the killer.  Grade:  B.  

7 Nov 2024 

In A Knife To Remember, Jane and Shelley's back yards have been rented out to a film company making a movie in the vacant land behind their houses.  Jane overhears a prop man blackmailing someone in the cast; when he is murdered a short time later, she and Shelley again lend a hand to the police to track down the killer.  Grade:  B.  

8 Nov 2024

In From Here To Paternity, Jane and Shelley and their families visit a Colorado ski resort that Shelley's husband Paul is considering as an investment.  Also at the resort are a conference of genealogists, descendants of immigrants from an obscure Balkan country, some of whom believe that the current owner of the resort is the rightful Czar of Russia, who is currently beset by a local tribe of Native Americans.  Naturally several murders occur for Jane to sort out.  I liked this one because Jane arrives at the solution using some basic genealogical methods.  Grade:  B.  

12 Nov 2024

Jane's son Mike has a summer job in a newly opened deli in Silence of the Hams, where an obnoxious local attorney is discovered dead under a rack of hams during the grand opening of the store.  When the attorney's paralegal is found murdered after attempting a spot of blackmail, Jane and Shelley put their heads together to figure out who dunnit.  Grade:  B.  

War and Peas finds Jane and Shelley involved in the affairs of the local museum, dedicated to the agricultural discoveries of the late "Pea King".  When the director of the museum is murdered during a reenactment of a Civil War battle, Jane and Shelley again get to work to solve the mystery.  Grade:  B.  

13 Nov 2024

Jane and Shelley are part of a committee to check out a remote conference center in Wisconsin for a high school summer camp program in Fear of Frying.  As they are stumbling around in the darkness in search of Jane's wristwatch, they find the dead body of one of the committee members.  But when they report it to the local sheriff, the body has disappeared, only to resurface later, very much alive.  Grade:  B.  

14 Nov 2024

As if the garish display and blaring music from the new neighbors next door wasn't enough of a headache, The Merchant of Menace finds a scandal-raking TV reporter showing up on Jane's doorstep with a camera crew to record the Christmas carol singing of her neighborhood and dig up whatever dirt he can.  On top of that, she has Christmas with her obnoxious former mother-in-law and her prospective future mother-in-law to look forward to this year.  There's an odd feeling of nostalgia about this one, published in 1998:  computers that operated with floppy discs and dial-up connectivity, kids who talked to their friends on landlines, and no Google to investigate the dubious past of the various suspects.  Grade:  B.  

16 Nov 2024

Jane has taken the job of wedding planner for a wedding to be held at an old hunting lodge in Groom With A View and begins to regret her decision when the cast of characters begins to arrive; the bride's domineering father, the handsome but sleazy groom, two dotty aunts, assorted bridesmaids and a florist who's convinced that there is buried treasure on the property.  Then the seamstress falls down the stairs, or was she pushed?  Grade:  C.

17 Nov 2024

Mulch Ado About Nothing finds Jane and Shelley signing up for a class in gardening, hoping it will inspire them to do something about their own gardens.  When the instructor is severely beaten, they have to consider whether any of the other class members might be responsible for it.  Grade:  C.  

18 Nov 2024

Shelley is considering taking on a job as decorator for the renovation of an old house she calls The House of Seven Mabels, although Jane reminds her that they're dormers, not gables.  When the contractor is pushed down the basement stairs and killed, the mostly all female work crew are considered suspects.  This one didn't really hold together for me.  Grade:  C.  

19 Nov 2024

Jane and Shelley attend a mystery writers' convention held at a local hotel in Bell, Book and Scandal.  Since Jane has now finished the novel she's been working on, she hopes to connect with an agent and an editor in the hopes of getting it published.  When one of the editors is poisoned and an obnoxious book reviewer is assaulted, Jane and Shelley go to work to figure it out.  This one spent a lot of time discussing the nuances of breaking into the publishing industry.  Grade:  C.  

20 Nov 2024

In A Midnight's Scream, Jane and Shelley become involved with an amateur theatrical production as Shelley auditions caterers.  Frankly, this one didn't hold together very well for me.  Again, the police procedures were faulty.   Grade: C.

21 Nov 2024

The Accidental Florist winds up the Jane Jeffrey series with her marriage to detective Mel Van Dyne.  It's not a very engaging mystery; most of the book is spent setting forth in excessive detail Jane's planning the wedding and her efforts to thwart both her former mother-in-law and her new one.  Grade: C.

I'm kind of glad to be done with the Jane Jeffrey series.  The first few books were entertaining, but as the series progressed they became increasingly stuffed with domestic details that had nothing to do with the mystery, the characters became less realistic and the police procedures did not improve much.  I'm wondering if perhaps Jill Churchill became so interested in researching and creating the Grace and Favor series set during the Great Depression that she simply churned out the Jane Jeffrey series just to keep it going.  

23 Nov 2024

The new series starts with Anything Goes, published in 1999.  Set in 1931 during the Great Depression, down and out socialites Lily and her brother Robert Brewster inherit a huge mansion on the Hudson River from their late great-uncle Horatio Brewster.  That is, they sort of inherit it; it comes with the condition that they must live in the house for ten years with only short absences allowable each year, and the substantial fortune that goes with it is to be managed by the estate's lawyer, Mr. Prinney, who, along with his wife, also lives in the house.  As they learn more about the house, Lily also learns that local opinion is that the boating accident in which their uncle died was not an accident, but murder.  Grade:  A.

26 Nov 2024

In order to make the huge mansion they're living in pay something for them to live on, Lily and Robert decide to host a gathering of fans of a best-selling but reclusive author Julian West in In The Still Of The Night.  West turns out to be an embittered, sarcastic man, scarred both physically and emotionally by his service in the Great War.  When one of the guests who claims to have known the author in the past is murdered during the night, Lily and Robert have to get to work to figure it out.  Grade:  B.  

27 Nov 2024

Bodies keep popping up in unexpected places for Lily and Robert to find in Someone To Watch Over Me, including a mummified one Robert finds in an old ice house on the property.  The main interest of this book though is the continuing portrayal of the effects of the Great Depression on the local population and the country as a whole, especially the violent suppression of the Bonus March on Washington, D. C. by veterans of WWI as witnessed by local reporter Jack Summer.  I'm giving this on an A for that reason.  Grade:  A.  

28 Nov 2024

A heavily disguised man appears at the mansion requesting to rent a room where he and others can meet in privacy in Love For Sale.  Since he's offering to pay a hefty sum in cash for it, Lily accepts.  When he's later found murdered and turns out to be a well known fundamentalist "preacher" with unsavory habits and a long list of enemies, suspects abound.  Of even more concern to Lily and Robert, though, is the missing teacher for whom they are filling is as temporary teachers.  Grade:  B.  

29 Nov 2024

Lily and Robert are again filling in as temporary employees, this time at a local nursing home where an elderly man is soon found murdered in It Had To Be You.  The plot of this one just didn't make much sense to me, but the depiction of the effect of the Great Depression on the lives of the people involved continues to be excellent.  Grade:  B.  

30 Nov 2024

Who's Sorry Now seems to be the last book in the Grace and Favor series.  Siblings Lily and Robert Brewster meet a new resident, a tailor who recently arrived from Germany.  Although he's a native born US citizen, his tailor shop is soon vandalized with a swastika and attempts are made to burn it down, mirroring the book burnings rampant in Germany at the time.  When an inoffensive local man is killed, Lily and Robert step in to help solve the case.  Grade:  B.  

I was sorry to see the Grace and Favor series come to an end; it was meticulously researched and well written, clearly conveying the economic and social distress of that period in history.  

Agatha Christie--The Seven Deadly Sins

 I had never heard of this before, but recently ran across a reference to the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins in some of Agatha Christie's mystery novels.  The sins, in order of appearance are Pride, Lust, Wrath, Sloth, Envy, Gluttony and Avarice.  The novels that portray these sins are The ABC Murders, Evil Under the Sun, Five Little Pigs (Murder in Retrospect), Sparkling Cyanide (Remembered Death), A Murder Is Announced, At Bertram's Hotel, and Endless Night.

I'm not sure I agree that these particular books represent each sin attributed to it, so I'll try to remember to examine each one as I read it with that in mind.  

I guess I could agree that Pride plays an important role in The ABC Murders.  The murderer is so suffused with pride in his own abilities and a xenophobic contempt for anyone not British, that it leads him to challenge Poirot publicly to catch him and continues to taunt him throughout the book.  

The next sin, Lust, is embodied by the murder victim, a beautiful woman who will stop at nothing in the pursuit of the object of her lust in Evil Under the Sun.

Five Little Pigs is the vehicle for Wrath, although the use of poison seems unusual; you might expect Wrath to express itself with a sudden, impulsive or violent action, rather than a more calculating one such as the use of poison.  

Sloth is supposed to be the sin of Sparkling Cyanide (alternate title:  Remembered Death).  That one is kind of a stretch, although Christie does give sufficient clues to the solution.  

Envy is the deadly sin of A Murder Is Announced.  I think I can agree with this one; years of thwarted ambition could make the murderer envious of someone who was able to exercise their talents to achieve their ambitions, particularly when there is a huge amount of money at stake.

The sin At Bertram's Hotel is Gluttony, although not illustrated in quite the usual context of food that gluttony usually occurs.  

I think I stuck with Endless Night long enough to agree that it's fair to say that Avarice is the sin illustrated there.  

Agatha Christie--Miss Marple

                                                                                                        Updated 2 Nov 2024

 Miss Jane Marple an elderly, white-haired spinster living quietly in the placid English village of St. Mary Meade, makes her debut in 1928 in the short story "The Tuesday Night Club" in which a group of six people take turns telling stories of mysterious events which only the story teller knows the outcome.  Miss Marple surprisingly is the best of the lot of them, coming up with the correct solution every time.

Miss Marple herself does not find this odd because she believes that human nature is pretty much the same everywhere and that people tend to behave in predictable patterns.  She uses everyday, commonplace events from village life to discern these patterns of human behavior and solve the mysteries.  

We learn more about Miss Marple and the village of St. Mary Meade and its inhabitants in Murder At The Vicarage when she helps the police identify the perpetrator of the murder of Colonel Protheroe.  One of my favorite Miss Marple books is The Moving Finger, set in a peaceful English village beset with the venom spread by an anonymous letter writer.  The vicar's wife decides to call in a specialist in human wickedness to sort it out and summons Miss Marple, who does just that.  

In re-reading these books, I found it interesting that Agatha Christie took care to keep her social environment up to date, with solitary villages giving way to sprawling suburban housing developments and rail and bus transport losing out to a culture largely dependent on automobile transportation, but that Miss Marple is able to take it all in her stride and continue to rely on her knowledge of human nature and behavior, no matter what the cultural context she finds it in.