For those of us who love classic, traditional mysteries, this is a good time to be a fan. With publishers seemingly eager to bring back classic authors from mystery's Golden Age, modern readers are being given a new chance to fall in love with authors and their detectives who had slipped into partial or complete obscurity. Most of these books have come to us from England, and when we talk about that Golden Age, we're usually talking about English books. So it's a real pleasure to see a revival happening in American books from roughly the same period. Consider, for example, the books written by Frances and Richard Lockridge about a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. North, who appeared in some 40 books, as well as movies, radio and television, beginning around 1940. This week, let's look at a 1958 book about the Norths called The Long Skeleton. 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.
Pam and Jerry North, for the most part, didn't really solve the murders they discovered - they left that job to their friend, New York City Police Lieutenant (by the time of The Long Skeleton, promoted to Captain) Bill Weigand. But the Norths were always involved in some way - they seemed to attract dead bodies. As a general rule, Pam North, in particular, would take some key role both in discovering the body and in uncovering the murderer, but it was mostly Weigand who really did the work involved and, often, came up with the solution first. If you're familiar with Nick and Nora Charles, the creations of Dashiell Hammett in The Thin Man, you will recognize Pam and Jerry North as the same kind of people. The Norths even have a pet - a cat named Martini. Pam, in particular, was famous - or infamous - for leaps of thought-defying logic that were difficult to explain but which - eventually - would make perfect sense. As for Jerry North, he was a publisher himself, with little desire to be mixed up in so many murderous affairs.
A lot of that is on display in The Long Skeleton. The Norths are due to have their New York City apartment painted - which means great upset in the apartment, including the nearly unbearable smell of paint. So the Norths decide to move to a nearby hotel until the painters are through. They settle in (with Martini the cat) at the Hotel Breckenridge and go out to dinner. When they return to their hotel room, they find a dead body in the bedroom. They also find their friend, Captain Weigand, is out of town on another case, and they are at the not particularly tender mercies of Weigand's boss, who detests finding the (often troublesome) Norths anywhere within several miles of any of his murder cases.
And then, there’s a major complication, with the arrival of one of Jerry’s authors – a man with a tremendously successful best-selling book, who was going to be one of the guests on that interviewer's program. And it becomes painfully clear to Jerry North that there’s a major problem with that book and that author – a problem that could mean the end of North Books.
It’s a very good story, bringing in elements of the publishing business, the mechanics (and ethics) of the television interview show, and, of course, the murder – or should I say “murders”? It’s written with wit and good humor, quite funny in several places, and with an interesting mystery to be solved. The Norths are a fascinating couple – too bad about how they seem to act as magnets for murder. The Long Skeleton is available from MysteriousPress/Open Road Media in e-book format; there are a number of relatively inexpensive print copies out there as well, and it’s certainly worth your reading time.
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