A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Bones of Contention by Edward Candy

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The Director of London’s Museum of Pathological Conditions in Childhood, a Mr. Murivance, is dumb-founded by the unexpected arrival of a female skeleton in a steamer trunk. A few days later, he is found dead, apparently of natural causes but the exact cause of death cannot be solidly determined.

Some days after that one of his colleagues, Miles Latimer, is shoved through a rickety balustrade. He wakes up to find himself trapped in a private nursing home run by his would-be murderer. The attempted killer is keeping him doped up to stave off his remembering what really happened.

This inverted mystery could be counted as either an academic mystery or a mystery involving doctors and nurses. Adding suspense are the trusty standbys of “doctor gone off the rails” and “kept prisoner in a hospital” not to mention both “old-school deference to authority” and “experienced nurse smells something fishy.” Not to mention, “concerned friends and allies” and “loyal fiancée.”

I highly recommend this one. Like Edmund Crispin but not as silly, more like a lighter Michael Innes, if that can be imagined. This 1954 novel is like early P.D. James, given the medical settings too. I didn’t get some of the differences in medical customs, such as why surgeons are “Mr.,” not “Dr.” But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the highly literate and witty prose.

Edward Candy is the pseudonym of Barbara Alison Neville (1925-1993). She was born in London and educated in Hampstead and University College, and later earned a medical degree. She practiced medicine and had a family of five children while writing about a dozen books, three of which are medical mysteries, this one, Which Doctor and Words for Murder, Perhaps.

According to the Evidence by Henry Cecil

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” goes the formulation by the English jurist William Blackstone. But in this 1954 novel, due to a lack of evidence a serial killer is acquitted, and goes on to kill not one but two women. An ex-commando, Alec Morland, takes the law into own hands and dispatches the serial killer over the edge of a cliff.

The evidence tying Morland to the murder is tenuous, but Morland’s fiancé Jill worries that suspicion will never be dispelled and thus blight their family life. She asks con man turned stockbroker Ambrose Low to figure out a way to get Morland to trial and get him acquitted. Low turns to witness tampering (interfering, in British English), which blows up in his face.

Henry Cecil was a barrister and high court judge himself so his views on evidence, judges, juries, lawyers, and clients are worth listening to. His legal fiction from the Fifites and Sixties is still in print, because his wit, style, intelligence, and deft plotting still provide much interest and sheer reading pleasure. The writing is lucid, simplified for the lay reader, but we never feel condescended to.

While this is not a typical whodunit, I still recommend it to mystery fans. Cecil’s humor is very English, wise, and humane. He uses Wodehousian characters such a dim-witted colonel to delightful effect, putting them in situations designed to exploit all comic potential.

Come to Dust by Emma Lathen

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The title of the seventh mystery starring banker John Putnam Thatcher is a quotation from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline: “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust.”

Despite this somber tagline, Lathen’s comic procedure continues in the usual manner. That methodology involves the send-up of an industry or institution. In this case, the ducks in the barrel are the hapless upper-level college administrators, party animal alumni, knuckle-dragging students, and blockhead parents, all connected to the Ivy League halls of august if fictitious Brunswick College.

A recruiter for the college disappears, perhaps with a $50,000 bond representing a gift to the college. At the half-way point of the book, a pesky prospective student is stabbed to death. The mystery end of things is secondary to the attention on characters and their milieu. The college administrators focus first on fund-raising and second on recruiting new students instead educating current students. The alums focus on football, the annual excuse to party like they were 30 years younger. As for the students, one janitor says the young person he gave directions to could not have been a student because he was “too polite.” Chowderhead parents and muttonhead benefactors are alternately getting hysterical and threatening litigation. Readers who work at a university will snicker in recognition that things haven’t changed much since 1968.

The series hero remains Wall Street banker John Putnam Thatcher. He is in rather a supporting role in this outing. This is balanced by Lathen’s sly observations about being female in male-dominated big business. Lathen was the pen-name of Mary Latsis and Martha Henissart, two Boston business executives with doctoral degrees. Anybody who’s worked in an office will recognize the authentic feel of how people who’ve worked together a long time get along. Also interesting are their takes on Sixties phenomena such as friction between the generations and the urge among the middle-aged to do like Siddhartha, which Lathen considers an irresponsible shirking.