"Death on the Riviera"

For the two English police detectives, the search began rather pleasantly. They were hunting for a British forger, an expert at producing counterfeit French banknotes. He seemed to have gone to earth somewhere on the French Riviera, so the two detectives found themselves traveling from the bleak cold of a London February to the warm sunshine of the Riviera. But they soon found that their hunt for the counterfeiter wouldn't be as easy or as straightforward as it seemed. They also found themselves caught up in something they hadn't expected: a mysterious death which might have been suicide, or accident - or murder. You'll find the details in Death on the Riviera, a 1952 mystery by John Bude, now being brought back into print as part of the British Library's Crime Classics series, published in the U. S. by the Poisoned Pen Press (which provided me with a copy for review). Death on the Riviera is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.

John Bude, another of those prolific Golden Age authors whose work has fallen into an undeserved obscurity, wrote Death on the Riviera fairly late in his career. It features Detective Inspector Meredith of Scotland Yard, who appears in several of Bude's books. He is accompanied here by Acting Sergeant Strang. They are pursuing a counterfeiter named Chalky Cobbett, whose dexterity at producing almost-but-not-quite-legitimate French banknotes was a source of considerable irritation to both the French and English police. Finding Cobbett should be fairly simple and straightforward - but that proves not to be the case at all. The two detectives also find their paths crossing regularly with several other people, all of whom appear to have some connection to the Villa Paloma, an estate owned by a wealthy and rather eccentric Englishwoman named Nesta Hedderwick. She has a number of people living there as her guests, and it soon becomes clear that just about everyone staying with her may have something to hide – often several things. And then there is a sudden death, and the detectives find themselves investigating what might be a suicide - or a very carefully planned and seemingly impossible murder.

The book has a clever plot, with some lovely surprises along the way, as Bude juggles a number of different story lines before tying them together to find unusual and very clever solutions to the mysteries here. This new British Library Crime Classics edition of John Bude’s Death on the Riviera features an introduction by British mystery writer Martin Edwards, providing more background about Bude and his work. I think you'll enjoy this book. Official publication date is March 1, but your favorite mystery bookseller (or Amazon) will be happy to get it for you.