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.   

Ernest Bramah-- Max Carrados Mysteries

Ernest Bramah's blind detective Max Carrados "sees" more clearly than sighted Scotland Yard detectives.  Having lost his sight, Carrados has developed his other senses to enable him to pick up on clues others miss.  

This book of short stories, Max Carrado Mysteries, was published in 1927, fourteen years after Carrados made his debut in mystery fiction.  Some of the abilities Carrados has developed after his accidental blinding, such as the ability to read newspaper headlines and handwritten words with his fingertips and his capacity for being able to pick a specific book off a shelf with unerring accuracy seem a bit far fetched, but Ernest Bramah apparently wrote an essay detailing cases where real blind people had developed each of the abilities he attributes to Carrados.  

A bit more difficult to swallow is the occasional intervention of the supernatural into some of the stories, such as "The Strange Case of Cyril Bycourt", where an electric power plant built on top of a mass grave of plague victims influences the lives and health of several people.  Still, the stories are entertaining and worth reading. 

Grade:  B.

I had forgotten that I had another book of Max Carrados short stories, Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, published by Dover in 1972.  This book incorporates two of the stories from Max Carrados Mysteries, but it also contains earlier stories, including the first Max Carrados story, "The Coin of Dionysis", first published in 1914, which explains Carrados' name change, the accident that resulted in his blindness, and the relationship with Louis Carlyle, the inquiry agent who brings him difficult cases.  I found most of these stories interesting and well worth reading, too.

Grade:  B+

Anthony Boucher

     I don't recall having read The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, published in 1940, in the past, but probably did so.  The Baker Street Irregulars, as any fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories knows, were a rag-tag gang of street urchins who assisted Holmes on several of his cases.  In this book, they are a literary Sherlock Holmes fan society, dedicated to the preservation of "the Sacred Writings", the Sherlock Holmes stories.  There is, in fact, a real Baker Street Irregular society, founded in 1934 by Christopher Morley that continues to this day and upon which the society in the book is based.  

    The society in the book is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the real group; the fictional members are concerned about the proposal of a Hollywood film studio to make a movie of the Holmes story The Speckled Band, a story that caused me nightmares when I read it as a child.  The Irregulars believe that the scriptwriter chosen by the studio, an ex-detective named Stephen Worth, has nothing but contempt for the Holmes stories and will turn out a screen play that will make a mockery of the Sacred Writings, so some of their members converge on Hollywood to make sure that does not happen.  

    Worth is apparently murdered shortly after they arrive at a mansion provided by the movie studio, but the corpse disappears, and a series of adventures evoking the Holmes stories befall the Irregulars over the next few days, until a very real corpse turns up.

    I found the story an interesting Golden Age puzzle, even if it's a bit labored with all the references to the Holmes stories crammed into it, down to having a housekeeper named Mrs. Hudson and a not-too-bright police sergeant named Watson.   

Grade: B.  

    I found The Case of the Seven Sneezes to be a disturbing book, mainly because of a series of cat killings that may or may not relate to several human murders.  Members of a wedding party have gathered on an island to celebrate the Silver Anniversary of the wedding of the owners of the island.  Shortly after they arrive, they find they are completely cut off from the mainland with no means of escape, and a servant on the island is found injured after an attempt was made to cut his throat, echoing an unsolved murder that occurred on the eve of the wedding in 1914.  With a cast of unpleasant characters so confined, is it any surprise that more murderous attempts follow?  

Grade:  C.  I'm not reading this one again.  

John and Emery Bonett

In Dead Lion, Simon Crane, a young American literary agent, arrives in England intending to visit his uncle, Cyprian Druse, a noted dramatic critic and literary lion, only to find his uncle recently dead in an apparent accident.  Unsavory facets of his uncle's life began to appear, and Simon suspects his uncle may have been murdered, possibly by a woman with whom Simon has fallen love.  Sorting out her involvement from the half dozen other potential suspects keeps Simon busy.

Grade:  B

Earl Derr Biggers

 Another Golden Age mystery author, Ear Derr Biggers, is best known for his Chinese detective, Charlie Chan.  I don't have any of those books, but I do have The Agony Column, published in 1916, which I found mildly interesting.  

A young American visiting London on the eve of World War I amuses himself reading the posts in a newspaper Personals section, known as the Agony Column.  He falls in love with a young American woman and tries to attract her by writing a series of letters to her give details of a murder that has occurred in his apartment building.  As the plot develops, it becomes clear that war is imminent and that they will need to leave England immediately

Grade:  B

I was unable to finish the second story in this book, Fifty Candles, because the book was crumbling in my hands.  The glue had failed, the spine was coming loose and pages were falling out; I'll have to do some repair work before I can resume this one, although it wasn't really interesting enough for me to feel much desire to do that.