Murder for Christmas (1949) by Francis Duncan

One of the more obscure mystery writers to reemerge from the shrouded mist of the past during this current Renaissance Age is "Francis Duncan," a pseudonym of William Underhill, who authored twenty detective novels over as many years and were largely forgotten for decades – until Random House decided to reprint him back in 2015. Murder Has a Motive (1947) and So Pretty a Problem (1950) were undoubtedly worthy of being resurrected.

Back in October, Dean Street Press revived the work of an equally obscure, long-since forgotten writer, Francis Vivian, whose detective stories beg to be compared with Duncan.

Most notably, they both have likable, humanist series-detectives and, stylistically, appear to be very similar. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, posted a comment on my review of The Sleeping Island (1951) saying how Vivian's Darkling Death (1956) reminded him of Duncan's Behold a Fair Woman (1954). There are, however, differences between the two. Duncan was a more polished, literary writer with a firmer grasp on characterization, but Vivian tended to have tighter, better clued and more original plots (e.g. The Singing Masons, 1950) – which makes them more satisfying as pure detective stories. And the biggest difference is that Vivian's Gordon Knollis is the consummate policeman, while Duncan's Mordecai Tremaine quintessential amateur sleuth.

Vivian made me want to return to Duncan's detective fiction for a second look and had saved one of those recent reprints for those cold, dark days before Christmas.

Murder for Christmas (1949) has all the trappings of a traditional, wintry Christmas detective story in the spirit of C.H.B. Kitchin's Crime at Christmas (1934), Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938), Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca (1941) and Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel (1972). But the writing lifts this one above your average, Yuletide mystery novel.

The stage of the story is an ancient hall, Sherbroome House, which had been the seat of the Barons of Sherbroome for centuries and sighs under the weight of history, but their descendants had not lived in the house for generations and the place became overgrown, derelict and dreary – until Benedict Grame bought it. Grame is a Mr. Pickwick of a man who loves "the atmosphere of the Dickensian Christmas" with "all of the festivities we associate with the season." So, once every year, he gathers a group of relatives, friends and associates at his house "to enjoy Christmas in a really old-fashioned way."

A new addition to the party this year is the retired tobacconist, hopeless romanticist and potent murder-magnet, Mordecai Tremaine, who has a deep-rooted passion for criminology and sentimental literature – reading the treacle-laden magazine Romantic Stories throughout the series. Tremaine always reminds me of Agatha Christie's Mr. Satterthwaite. An elderly, benevolent and sentimental soul who gets all dreamy-eyed when confronted with young people who are deeply in love. But this close ally of lovers everywhere also has a shadow-side to his personality.
 

Tremaine has an appetite for detection, "the excitement of the chase" and "the keenness of testing his brain against the cunning of a murderer," but he's aware the price of his hobby is "the destruction of a human creature." A mystery is something he simply could not resist. And the promise of a mystery is what lured him to Sherbroome House.

A postscript had been added to Tremaine's invitation by Grame's confidential secretary, Nicholas Blaise, telling him there's "something wrong" at Sherbroome House.

When he arrives at the house, Tremaine finds exactly what you'd expect from a Christmas party in an old-fashioned mystery novel: there are two young lovers, Roger Wynton and Denys Arden, but her guardian, Jeremy Rainer, is dead-set against the marriage. Grame's hermit-like sister, Charlotte, and a close friend, Gerald Beechley, who has a penchant for practical jokes. Rosalind Marsh is the cool-headed, cynical owner of a curio-and art shop and Lucia Tristam is a widow with her sights set on either Grame or Rainer. Professor Lorring is "drawn after Ebenezer Scrooge" and openly defies the spirit of Christmas. The party is rounded out by a married couple, the Napiers. Just about as unexpected, Tremaine finds that the jolly, good natured spirit of the season is only on the surface. And that the party has an inexplicable animosity towards the lavishly decorated Christmas tree.

So the snow-covered countryside provides "a seasonable background" to the apparent jolly Christmas party at Sherbroome House, but to Tremaine everything feels unreal. And has the feeling that, sooner or later, you were going to find yourself in the middle of a nightmare.

Well, the inevitable happens when the household is awakened very early on Christmas morning by screaming and they find a "fantastically clothed body sprawled under the Christmas tree" that had been despoiled of its gift. Someone had shot Father Christmas!

The policeman placed in charge of the investigation is Superintendent Cannock, a friend of Inspector Jonathan Boyce, who has been told about Tremaine and wants to use him as "a sort of unofficial observer," but his fellow guests are aware he's a detective and are as reluctant to talk to him as they are to the police – making it all the more difficult to sort out the pack of lies confronting them. However, Tremaine slowly, but surely, unravels a cruel, complicated and fascinating plot that resulted in the unfortunate murder of Father Christmas. A plot that, in some ways, reminded me of Nicholas Brady's The House of Strange Guests (1932). But the plot also has its weak points.

Duncan was a good writer, who knew how to tell a story and characterize, which is probably why all of the important clues hinge on the behavior of the characters, but these are more hints than clues. And they're not enough to help you pinpoint the murderer or the motive. There are barely any physical clues and important pieces of information are given too late into the game or not at all, which distracts from an otherwise well-written story and clever plot. A long-time mystery reader can probably half-guess, half-deduce the murderer's identity, but crossing the t's and dotting the i's is a lot harder to do. And finding out the somewhat original motive is next to impossible.

So, purely as a detective, Murder for Christmas is not going to make the shortlist of all-time best country house mysteries, but as a seasonal detective story, the book is definitely a cut above most Christmas mystery novels – a category of detective fiction that has yet to produce a genuine classic. What makes Murder for Christmas stand out is the great, often evocative writing and actually making the Christmas celebration part of the plot (e.g. the village carollers, the Christmas tree and the Santa Claus customs). Something you can't say of every Christmas-themed detective novel.

Unless you're an old humbug, Murder for Christmas comes recommended as a pleasant, leisure read for the holidays.

There's a Reason for Everything

"People kill other people... for all sorts of reasons that don't seem to make sense to anyone else."

- Chief Inspector Jonathan Boyce (Francis Duncan's In at the Death, 1952)

Over the past three months, I've been working my way through a small stack of detective novels by Francis Duncan, which were reprinted last year by Vintage and counts now five of (reportedly) nine titles from the author's series about a retired tobacconist, Mordecai Tremaine – who's also an amateur criminologist and professional murder-magnet.

Regardless of his attraction to violent crimes, Tremaine is a hopeless romanticist and a "sworn friend of lovers." A sentimental soul whose "chief delights" is reading the bright, "refreshingly idealistic fiction"  published in Romantic Stories and this colors his role as detective. So you can basically sum him up as a literary relative of Agatha Christie's Harley Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite (who are also described as friends of lovers). Simply a delightful and sympathetic character, but one who, somehow, got tossed on the trash heap of obscurity and waned there until 2015 – when the previously mentioned published reissued Murder for Christmas (1949). A success that lead them to reissue four additional titles in 2016.

I mentioned in my previous reviews how Duncan evidently knew how to put a plot together, but he also had an eye for the backdrop of his stories and this is illustrated in the bright, eye-catching covers of the new editions. Three of the four recent reprints were all set near the sea: an isolated house on the cliffs (So Pretty a Problem, 1950), a seaport town (In at the Death, 1952) and a sun-soaked island (Behold a Fair Woman, 1954), but one of the earliest books in the series has a far more traditional setting – a quintessential village in the English countryside.

Murder Has a Motive (1947) reminded me of Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) and Mrs. McGinty's Dead (1952) with a slight touch of the gloomy lunacy of Philip MacDonald's Murder Gone Mad (1931).

The backdrop of the book is a small, snug and seemingly idyllic village, named Dalmering, but there's a dark, disturbing undercurrent beneath the surface of ordinary, everyday village life. A "shadow of evil lay heavily over the loveliness of Dalmering." The idea and aesthetics of the treacherous tranquility of village life has been run into the ground on the Midsomer Murders, but when Duncan tackled the subject it was still fresh enough. And he even had a somewhat original take on it.

Dalmering's population is divided into two camps: one of them consist of the permanent, long-time residents ("the older Dalmering, the true Dalmering") who've lived there for many generations, while the second camp, known as the "Colony," are only temporary residents of the place from London – who had discovered "its unspoilt beauty." Tremaine travels down to Dalmering to spend a holiday with two old friends, Paul and Jean Russell, who run a busy country practice and invest a great deal in the social life of the village, but tragedy has struck the place on the eve of his arrival. A member of their community has become the victim of a "dark, brutal murder."

Lydia Dare moved around in the circle of the Londoners and was engaged to Gerald Farrant, but, on the evening of her death, she had dinner with Martin Vaughan. A self-made man with archaeology as his hobby and it was known he was in love with Dare, which gave one of the strongest motives when she was murdered on her way back to home. She was found stabbed to death in the early hours of the morning on a well-worn pathway through a small copse.

As said before, Tremaine sympathies were "on the side of romance" and the fact that the victim was about to be married "weighed with him the most." To strike at the young and happy was "to arouse him to wrath" and awakened "the smouldering, deep-seated chivalry of the Galahad who dwelt within him," but the case is far more complicated than it first seems. For one thing, his friends and hosts received a small, but useful, legacy as a result of Dare's death. Giving them a ghost of a motive. However, there are also the intertwined, often hidden relationships and potential motives of the other villagers, which all seem to be connected to the local amateur dramatics society. They're rehearsing for an interesting stage play in three acts, Murder Has a Motive by Alexis Kent.

Well, from here on out, it becomes difficult to discuss the plot in close detail, because Murder Has a Motive is Duncan's most descriptive and character-driven mystery novels to date, which also has some very nebulous clueing. There are some physical clues, such as a pair of "roomy, wooden-soled Somerset clogs," but the solution is reasoned from what certain characters knew, did or must have done. So, technically, the reader has a shot at solving the crimes, however, this is not an easy task since the murderer is batshit crazy, which makes the book-title a bit ironic.

All of that being said, the book still worked as a detective story, albeit more along the lines of Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949), which also gave a glimmer of the real-life effects a homicidal maniac can have on a community.

The killer from Duncan's tale committed three murders (last one was particular gruesome) and this placed the village in "the blinding glare of frightening publicity," which begins to worry the police after the second and third murder – because the press-hounds will be showering the investigators with scorn, accusations and bitter criticism. You also get a taste of the vivid newspaper prose from some of Fleet Street's most colorful writers after the second body is found. So, in that regard, the story really gave you the feeling that a large, outside world had cast its eyes on this small, secluded place when the murders started to happen.

I also want to point out the opening of the third chapter, in which Tremaine and Inspector Boyce bump into each other near the scene of the crime. Boyce immediately hurls an accusation at his old friend that, "whenever anyone gets killed," he discovers the body or is nearby. And how he should be called "the murder magnet." Tremaine defends himself by pointing out that the murder was all over when he arrived, but it's interesting to see how this series used that exact term. Other GAD-period writers have pointed out how their characters attracted murders wherever they went, but Duncan actually used the term "murder magnet." It's something worth pointing out.

Well, I wish this review had a bit more substance to it, but, suffice to say, Murder Has a Motive is an unconventional village mystery and a fairly solid entry in a wonderful series of detective novels. A genuine rediscovery worthy of our current Renaissance Era. I sincerely hope Vintage decides to complete this series by reissuing the remaining titles. Here's hoping!

The Mills of God Grind Slowly...

"Mills of the devil, more likely!"

 - Superintendent Sugden (Agatha Christie's A Holiday for Murder, 1938)

William Underhill was the man behind the nom de guerre of "Francis Duncan," a pen name he used for twenty-some, long-forgotten detective novels, published between the late 1930s and early 50s, but his work garnered renewed interest when a major publisher reissued Murder for Christmas (1949) in 2015 – followed a year later by four additional titles. I reviewed two of them, So Pretty a Problem (1950) and In at the Death (1952), which showed how undeserved his decades-long spell in obscurity was. A talented novelist who knew how to construct intricate and clever plots!

So, I decided to snatch up the remaining two titles that were released last year. Both of them star Duncan's warmhearted series-detective, Mordecai Tremaine.

The titles in question, Murder Has a Motive (1947) and Behold a Fair Woman (1954), were commented on by John Norris, from Pretty Sinister Books, in the comments of my review of So Pretty a Problem – which proved to be very helpful in picking between the two. According to Norris, the former "leans heavily on shock factor with a high body count" and "a truly bizarre motivation for all the deaths," while the latter was described as "the best of the lot" with complex plot and "a somewhat tragic climax." Obviously, I went for the reportedly best one of the lot.

Behold a Fair Woman brings the retired tobacconist and hobby detective, Mordecai Tremaine, to the picturesque, sun-drenched island of Moulin d'Or to spend a fortnight with friends, Mark and Janet Belmore. The idea, or hope, is to escape from his detective's curse that always brings a body or two on his path and the island seems to be an ideal place for such a purpose.

Moulin d'Or appears to be a harbor of tranquility with a modest tourism industry and most of the money is made by growing tomatoes in green houses, which form "a sea of glass" on the landscape, where the only serious crime took place a hundred years ago – when a wealthy, gold hoarding miller had his throat cut. The sole reminder of this unsolved murder is an old, dilapidated mill reputedly haunted by the murdered miller. Unfortunately, this brief back-story about the ruined windmill only dabbed some local color on the canvas of the overall plot.

Anyhow, upon his arrival, Tremaine encounters a host of characters who are either living on the island or spending their holiday there.

As a passionate reader of Romantic Stories, Tremaine approves of "a cheerful, pleasant little crowd" consisting of four young people having fun on the beach, but soon notices undercurrents between Geoffrey Bendall, Nicola Paston, Ivan Holt and Ruth Latinam. Tremaine is also introduced to a married couple, Alan and Valerie Creed, who have become semi-permanent residents of the island, but why did he feel like having met Valerie before? He also makes acquaintance with Major Ayres and Mrs. Burres, resident guests at the Rohane Hotel, which is run by Ruth's brother, Hedley Latinam, but he seems to have given his most loyal customers a notice – as they'll be out of the place by the end of the month. Finally, Tremaine struck up a friendship with a local tomato grower, Ralph Exenley, who shares his interest in amateur criminology ("Tomatoes and crime! They make an odd pair").

Well, these character-introductions, conversations and basic setup of the plot gobbles up the first half of the book. A portion that also consists of Tremaine exploring the island and finding crumbs of food in the deserted windmill, seeing lights out at sea and accidentally overhearing a conversation. He was on holiday "to forget that such a thing as crime existed," but, when a body turns up inside a water-tank of one of the green houses, he realized he had been "attempting the impossible."

The first half of the book is well-written and does a fine job in conveying a holiday atmosphere with something dark and evil lurking beneath the surface, but, as said, it takes a while to get there and this may frustrate readers who prefer a neat corpse in the first quarter of a mystery novel – or even in the first chapters or pages. However, my main objection to this is that the first half only showed the treacherous surface of the case and, as a consequence, Duncan had to cram all of the meat of the plot into the second half of the story. And the problem with that is the plot is not exactly waver-thin. On the contrary!

Behold a Fair Woman is made up of an intricate, maze-like web of hidden relationships, double identities and numerous potential motives, which makes the plot a tight-rope affair when it comes to fair play. Granted, all of the information is fairly shared with the reader, but some of that information came very, very late into the game. Because most of the important plot-points had to be crammed in this second half. It often came just in the nick of time, but late enough to seriously hamper the armchair detective in arriving at the correct solution. However, Tremaine himself does not arrive there until the very last moment, during the tragic finale, when the sudden rush of events allows him to connect all of the puzzle pieces inside his head. So, I'm probably needlessly nitpicking here again. Let's just say some of the information arrived a bit late.

In any case, I still very much enjoyed Behold a Fair Woman. The backdrop of the plot was as beautiful and tranquil as the illustration on the front-cover suggests, which proved to be an excellent stage for the intricate detective story Duncan imagined. Some readers might be annoyed at the leisure pace of the first half, but the reward comes after the murder is committed and Duncan reveals the webwork of a plot he craftily spun around the seemingly innocent events from the first hundred pages.

However, I recommend readers who are new to Duncan and Tremaine to start with the excellent So Pretty a Problem, which has a fascinating premise and is a locked room mystery to boot! A locked room novel that never seemed to have been acknowledged as one. Even the late Robert Adey overlooked when he compiled Locked Room Murders (1991)!

So, let me close this review by saying that I might pry Duncan's Murder Has a Motive from my TBR-pile sooner rather than later. Stay tuned!

Trouble in Paradise

"Some of us, mon cher, see beauty in curious places."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs, 1943)

Last month, I reviewed In at the Death (1952) by "Francis Duncan," the penname of William Underhill, which was one of his last detective novels that was recently pulled from literary limbo by Random House – where it languished for over half a century. So far, under their Vintage label, five of Duncan's mysteries have been salvaged and were reissued beautifully illustrated book-covers.

Well, I found In at the Death good enough to warrant further investigation into Duncan's work and one title, in particular, beckoned my attention: So Pretty a Problem (1950). Surprisingly, the book revealed itself as a full-fledged impossible crime story that was completely overlooked by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991). I realize this may not sound very convincing to regular readers of this blog, but I was unaware of the books' status as a locked room mystery and it was not what initially attracted my attention – which was the pretty color-scheme of the front-cover, I swear! However, it did make me like this particular title and its author even more.

So Pretty a Problem finds Mordecai Tremaine holidaying in the coastal town of Falsporth, Cornwall. Tremaine is a retired tobacconist, a sentimental reader of Romantic Stories and an amateur criminologist with a tailing reputation as a murder-magnat, but he has promised his friend, Chief Inspector Jonathan Boyce, not "to become involved with yet another body." As to be expected, this promise was doomed to end in a bloody and violent death.

Tremaine was on the beach, taking a peaceful catnap in a deck-chair, when a woman approached him and uttered these startling words: "Please. Come quickly. Please. I've killed my husband."

The woman in question is Helen Carthallow, wife of the now late Adrian Carthallow, who was the enfant terrible of the artistic world and used his widely varied talents with the paintbrush to stir up controversy – earning him a number of enemies. But the one who ended up shooting him was his wife. However, she claimed "it was an accident." They were joking around and Adrian gave her his firearm, but she had no idea it was loaded and the gun went off. Or so she says.

Inspector Penross and Tremaine immediately notice several inconsistencies in her statement and the crime-scene poses a number of questions: who defaced an unfinished portrait by heavily smearing it with paint? Who moved the writing desk to the middle of the room and why? Why were medical forceps and sunglasses present at the scene of the crime? Why did Helen mutter, "there's no one here," when she and Tremaine reached the top of the stairs leading to the Carthallow house? On top of these questions, the medical evidence does not preclude suicide!

So, either the shooting was a premeditated murder or Helen tried to make a suicide look like an accident to secure his life insurance, which came with the usual suicide clause, because the involvement of a third party seems all but impossible.

The house where the shooting took place, called Paradise, stands "on a headland that's broken away from the main cliff" and "can only be reached by an iron bridge." It reminded Tremaine of a medieval stronghold and when the tide was full water swept under the bridge itself, which turned the whole place into an island and completed "the illusion of a moated caste" - even having a (sort of) watchful guard for the bridge. A sick, bedroom-bound woman, named Matilda Vickery, who has a clear view from her window ("my spyglass") of the cliffs, the winding path and the bridge.

Matilda can see everyone who goes across that bridge and she was having a painful episode on the day of the murder, which kept her awake, but the handful of people she saw could all be accounted for. So the death of the artist is either a domestic tragedy, whether it is murder or suicide, or they are faced with an impossible crime!

However, here's where Duncan made a stylistic mistake in the telling of the story. So Pretty a Problem is divided into three sections and the first part, "Quary: At the Time of the Corpse," tells how Tremaine was roused from his deck-chair and plunged into a murder investigation. It makes the reader genuinely curious about how this crime was accomplished. But, after roughly sixty pages, the second part, "Background: Before the Corpse," takes a lengthy detour into the past. A one-hundred page flashback detailing how Tremaine came into contact with the famous painter, fleshing out the character of the victim and showing some of his artistic shenanigans – like "the Christine Neale affair" and "the controversy over The Triumphal March of the Nations."

Duncan was a good writer with a pleasant, intelligent writing-style, which made the middle section not exactly a chore to read, but this portion should have preceded the discovery of the murder. After the opening chapters, you want to get on with the book as a detective story and not be thrown into a character study. So, not a mortal sin, but something you should keep in mind when you pick this one up.

In the last part of the book, "Exposition: Following the Corpse," the red herrings are separated from the genuine clues and questions from the opening chapters are being answered, which show that the crime was, indeed, a locked room murder. The explanation nicely fitted the scene of the crime and was, while relatively simple, a solid and not an entirely unoriginal example of the form. What I particular liked was the motive for this subterfuge: the murderer was aware of the fact that the sick woman, at the window, could see who was crossing the bridge. So this person had to do some trickery to remain unseen.

Somehow, I managed to overlook a prominent clue to the second-half of the trick. I had to thumb back into the book to see if it was actually mentioned. Yes, there it was for all to see. But I simply did not notice it. The locked room trick is not in the same league as the best by the likes of John Dickson Carr or Edward D. Hoch, but, as said before, not a bad one and rather liked it. And the fact that I did not expect a locked room added to the enjoyment.

Anyway, Duncan also did a fine job in explaining the other plot-threads, which revealed the events surrounding the murder were heavily influenced by the Merrivalean "blinkin' awful cussedness of things in general." A potentially perfect murder torn asunder by the unpredictable machinations of the heart. The solution is only marred by the somewhat vague motive of the killer, but that's only a minor complaint.

Regardless of some minor imperfections and smudges, I found So Pretty a Problem an enjoyable and fairly cleverly constructed detective novel, which had a genuinely interesting and baffling premise. But as good and enjoyable as this well-written mystery novel is its detective-character, Mordecai Tremaine. A gentle soul who loves romance stories, young lovers, criminology and has a heart that yearns for mystery and possesses a lovely imagination. Several times, he allows his over-active imagination to venture "into realms where fantastic things might happen." As he imagines the time when smugglers used the caves in the cliff or envisioned the crime-scene as a medieval castle. He also has a great taste in art, as is shown when he visits the National Gallery, where "he was genuinely stirred by the clear lines of the Dutch school." Tremaine is one of the most warm and likable detectives from the (late) Golden Age period.

So, I will definitely return to the other ones from this series in the (hopefully) not so distant future. Stay tuned!

House Call

"I have had too much experience of life to believe in the infallibility of doctors."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's "The Thumb Mark of St. Peter," from The Thirteen Problems, 1932)

William Underhill was the man behind an, until recently, long-forgotten and obscure pseudonym, "Francis Duncan," which was plastered across the front-covers of roughly twenty detective-and thriller novels – mostly published between the late 1930s and early 50s. Duncan employed two specific series-characters, Peter Justice and Mordecai Tremaine, but they slipped from the public conscience not long after their creator retired from writing. They remained all but forgotten until very recently.

Last year, Random House, under the banner of their Vintage Murder Mysteries, which also includes reprints of Nicholas Blake, Edmund Crispin and Gladys Mitchell, published a brand new edition of Duncan's Murder for Christmas (1949). It was the second entry in the short-lived Tremaine series and was warmly received by readers, but, at the time, nobody really knew anything about the author. Even the publisher was unable to find any biographical information.

As reported in this article, the publisher send out a call for information and they received an answer when Duncan's son spotted a copy of Murder for Christmas at his local bookstore. What a surprise that must have been!

So now they had an actual name and a back-story for the author, which was put to good use for their next spate of reprints and this run seems to encompass the remaining titles from the Tremaine series – all of them wrapped in beautiful, colorfully illustrated book-covers. Yes, the pretty colored covers is what really attracted my attention to Duncan. What can I say? I may be autistic. Anyway...

I decided to sample one of his mystery novels and ended up settling for the fourth one in the series, entitled In at the Death (1952), which had a tantalizing synopsis. And the plot definitely has an interesting take on the figure of the nosy, meddlesome amateur snoop.

Mordecai Tremaine is a retired tobacconist and a sentimental soul with a weakness for romance fiction, but the elderly gentleman also acquired "a reputation as a solver of mysteries" and Chief Inspector Jonathan Boyce, of Scotland Yard, once described him "as a murder-magnet" - which could very well be the first time this term was used to describe an amateur detective. There is, however, one difference between Tremaine and his colleagues: Boyce was able to use the reputation of his friend to convince the Commissioner to have Tremaine "accompany him on his next case." So he can watch an official police investigation from the start in "the role of unofficial observer."

This agreement is pretty much the setup for In at the Death, which begins with an interrupted game of chess between Tremaine and Boyce. The telephone call summons them to the seaside town of Bridgton, but first, they have to collect "the murder bag" from the offices of Scotland Yard. As is told in the first chapter, there's always a murder bag packed and ready at the Yard. The content of each bag can be termed as "the first-aid equipment of detection," but, sadly, this interesting tool of the professional police-investigator was soon forgotten about by the author.

Tremaine was initially thrilled and excited when he saw the bag and assumed the tools in them would be used as a contrast to the woolgathering method of the amateur detective. Unfortunately, this was not the case, but still a very minor blemish on an otherwise fairly solid plot.

The plot concerns the sudden and brutal death of a local doctor, Graham Hardene, who was found in the hallway of an empty, derelict house by a patrolling police-constable. Dr. Hardene was murderously struck on the side of the head with a lump of stone and this suggested to the local authorities that murderer just might be the internal tramp of crime-fiction, but soon the "highly satisfactory ingredients" of "an interesting murder" began to manifest themselves to Tremaine and Boyce.

Why was the doctor carrying a firearm? Who lured him to the deserted house with an emergency call? What frightened his receptionist and what did his housekeeper refuse to tell the police? Can the motive for his murder be found in his recent meddling in local politics, which put him in direct opposition with one of the town's most prominent citizens? What role do the crabby patient, the mysterious sailor and the cub-reporter play in the whole affair? And is there a link between the death of Dr. Hardene and two previous, seemingly unrelated and unsolved, murders in the district? Questions, questions, questions!

These questions are, largely, answered in a process of elimination as Tremaine and Boyce gather information and talk with, mostly, unwilling participants in the case. But, one by one, they scratch names and potential motives from the list and the only black mark against the story is that a vital piece of information, regarding the back-story of the doctor, is only given in the final quarter of the book – which seriously hampers the readers' ability to arrive at the correct solution before the halfway mark. Once you know the back-story of the victim, you should be able to identity the guilty party. Although the suggested false-solution, towards the end, which suggested an interesting, but ultimately disappointing, least-likely-suspect, can easily throw one off the scent again.

So, plot-wise, In at the Death is not a picture-perfect detective story, but still good enough to not disappoint and technically still qualifies as a fair-play mystery. But, again, some of the information should not have given at such a late stage in the story.

However, the best aspects of the book were definitely the solid story-telling, setting and the kind character of Tremaine. Duncan knew how to spin a yarn and conjured up a peculiar atmosphere with the backdrop of the story, which is "a fascinating mixture of the old and new" of "the romantic and the practical" typical of old places that became thriving (industrial) towns – showing the relentless change modern life has wrought on the developed world in the post-WWII world. However, modern readers will find that the town of Bridgton still has some of those delightful, old-fashioned remnants, such as tradesmen (i.e. milkmen and bakers) making home deliveries, which adds considerable charm to the overall story. Tremaine is simply a kind, likable character who has a special affinity for young, happy couples. He somewhat reminded me of Agatha Christie's Mr. Satterthwaite.

So I did not regret this gamble at all and will definitely return to this series in 2017. The plot descriptions of So Pretty a Problem (1950) and Behold a Fair Woman (1954) still hold my interest. As do the bright, pretty colors of their cover illustrations.