Those of us who enjoy classic mysteries from the Golden Age and beyond have every reason for optimism as we head into the new year of 2016. A growing number of publishers, both large and small, are looking back at classic mysteries written by long-forgotten authors who had been quite popular in their day. Some of the books by those authors are being brought back now in new editions which will give today's readers great new opportunities to discover the joys of traditional mysteries.
A case in point would be Let Him Lie
Jeanie Halliday, a neophyte artist, had bought a small house called Yew Tree Cottage from its former owner, Jeanie’s ex-school-mistress and – she believed – good friend, Agnes Drake, now married to a man names Robert Molyneux. The cottage and the nearby scenery were picturesque, ideal for painting, and Jeanie loved the fact that her friend Agnes would be living nearby.
Only Jeanie was learning the hard way that nothing was quite as it seemed. Agnes certainly had changed. She was no longer as good a friend as she had been – she seemed to have become far more self-centered, even selfish, than Jeanie remembered. And some of the superstitious local residents weren’t at all happy about plans to open an ancient burial site known as “Grim’s Grave,” for exploration because they feared the long-dead inhabitants of that prehistoric tumulus would carry out a supernatural revenge on anyone who dared to open the grave.
And then Agnes’s husband, Robert, was shot and killed, right on the grounds of his own home. There were plenty of witnesses, yet nobody claimed to have seen the fatal shot fired, nor could anyone say who had fired it. And Jeanie Halliday would find that, in a case of murder, almost everyone has something to hide and asking too many questions can be extremely dangerous.
This new edition of Let Him Lie comes with an introduction by mystery scholar Curtis Evans who provides additional information about this little-remembered author. It's good to see Ianthe Jerrold back in print.
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