Inspector McCarthy was just going to bed, in the middle of the night, when he heard the scream. It came from somewhere outside, in the midst of a blacked-out Soho, gone dark because of the war and the threat of German bombs. The inspector ran outside, colliding with a constable, and, between them, they managed to find the place where the scream must have originated - only to find a bloody knife, an even bloodier handkerchief, pools of blood on the ground - and no body.
And so begins a lurid - and very entertaining - thriller from the tail end of the Golden Age - A Scream in Soho, by John G. Brandon, first published in 1940. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
That scream, apparently, was no ordinary scream (can there be an "ordinary" scream at five minutes past one in the morning?). Here's the way it is described in Brandon's story:
“For a scream in the early hours of the morning in Soho, even from a female throat, to stop dead in his tracks a hard-boiled constable who had worked in that cosmopolitan quarter for years, it had to be something entirely out of the ordinary, as, indeed, this one was!”
It proves to be the beginning of a case that will involve all sorts of bloody murders, the theft (by Nazi spies) of super-top-secret military plans for protecting London from German air-raids (which, in fact, were about to begin in reality all too soon), and fascinating and dangerous characters, including a cross-dressing German spy, a murderous midget, a skilled pickpocket who helps the police, the boss of a dangerous gang of killers and thieves, an Austrian Baroness; several Nazi thugs, and assorted killings, kidnappings and thefts, not to mention a truly chilling super-criminal who considers Inspector McCarthy to be something of an impediment to his plans for Nazi world domination.
Still with me? I realize that I’m not putting all that into any kind of coherent order, because that’s not really the point of a thriller – and A Scream in Soho is indeed a thriller, far more in the tradition of writers such as Edgar Wallace than of the puzzle-oriented Golden Age authors. John G. Brandon continued to write thrillers at an astonishing pace between the early 1920s and his death in 1941. According to the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, A Scream in Soho was one of eleven mysteries written by Brandon in 1940 alone. With that in mind, if I am required to suspend considerable amounts of belief, or to accept a number of improbable coincidences for the sake of a good, exciting story – well, there are modern thriller writers who demand the same again and more. I don't often read thrillers these days, but there is something about the premise of A Scream in Soho that I find irresistible. Give it a try and see if you agree. It has been reprinted, with a new introduction by Martin Edwards, as one of the series of British Library Crime Classics, published in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press, and it's available either in paper or as an e-book.
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