The British Library continues issuing its welcome re-releases of Golden Age of Detection classics. This time, they have paired two mysteries by George Bellairs, The Dead Shall Be Raised and Murder of a Quack, in a single volume in its Crime Classics series. The book is officially being published this week in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press, which made a copy of the volume available to me for this review. It's also the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
What the two novels have in common is the presence of Detective Inspector Thomas Littlejohn, who was the principal detective in a long series of books by George Bellairs that were written over a career spanning some 40 years. The book contains two fairly short novels, originally published in 1942 and 1943, along with an excellent new introduction by mystery author and historian Martin Edwards. With the exception of Inspector Littlejohn, there is really no overlap between the two books. He’s an honest, hard-working and intelligent detective backed by the resources of Scotland Yard, with a good sense of humor and an all-important ability to work with the local detectives who are investigating the crime.
In The Dead Shall Be Raised, Inspector Littlejohn finds himself trying to solve a very cold case indeed. In 1917, two young men in the town of Hatterworth had a bitter quarrel over a young woman. One day, the body of one of the two men was found lying on the moor; he had been shot and the second man had disappeared. It was thought at the time that the second man had murdered his rival and then escaped by enlisting into the army under a false name (remember, Britain was in the midst of a world war at the time) and had undoubtedly been killed in action. The case was closed.
23 years later, in 1940, workers digging a trench on the moor (preparing for another world war) unearthed the body of that missing man. Quite clearly, both men had been the victims of the same killer. So now, police, under the leadership of Inspector Littlejohn, must try to reopen the investigation after more than two decades - and there are strong signs that the real murderer may still be alive.
The "quack" of Death of a Quack is a bonesetter, a person who could manipulate joints (as Wikipedia puts it) but had no formal medical training. In this case, the bonesetter, Nathaniel Wall, was highly respected in the village of Stalden. He was, in fact, the second generation of bonesetters in his family, and people found him infinitely better at both medicine and at dealing with his patients than they did the town's regular doctor, a heavy-drinking and disagreeable man whose mistakes were legion. One day, the village constable finds the body of Nathaniel Wall who had been partially strangled and then hanged in his own consulting room. Scotland Yard is called in, and Littlejohn is sent to Stalden to work with the local authorities to discover who might have had a motive to kill someone as widely respected and admired in the community as this bonesetter.
Both mysteries are quite short - each around 180 pages - and they show off Inspector Littlejohn's humor as well as his very intelligent clue-gathering and investigating. This is another very readable installment in the British Library Crime Classics series, and I recommend it quite highly.
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