George Bellairs is another British author who began a long and productive career during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Regrettably, as with so many other fine authors of the period, his name and his books have mostly been forgotten over the years since his death in 1985. Fortunately, some of Bellairs's best books are being brought back, both in print and as e-books. One of them, A Knife for Harry Dodd, originally published in 1953, will be back in print later this week from Agora Books, which sent me an e-book version for this review. It is a rewarding read. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to that complete review by clicking here.
You have to feel sorry for Harry Dodd. Somebody hated him enough to stick a knife in his back as he left a nearby pub. Harry managed to make it to a telephone booth and call home – or, rather, the place where he was living, which, frankly, wasn’t much of a home – and alert Dorothy Nicholls and her mother, the two women who lived with him, to his urgent need for help. Neither of them could drive a car, but Dorothy did manage to drive to the place where Harry had made his call, but:
It was only when they picked him up that the pair of them discovered that Dodd had been stabbed in the back. Whimpering, they struggled to get him to his feet, and then they found the blood. All they could think about was how to get him in the car…Dorothy contrived to get the car home by taking a loop road instead of turning, and when they got Dodd to his own fireside, he was dead.
Inspector Littlejohn of Scotland Yard found himself facing a case of murder that seemed to make no sense, a case where the evidence, and the suspects, never quite seemed to add up the way they should. Harry Dodd proved to have a great many more secrets than anyone had suspected - but could any of those secrets have provoked someone into killing him? It won't be long before additional murders will add a real sense of urgency to the investigation. A Knife for Harry Dodd, by George Bellairs, is an excellent mystery, written with wit and leavened with humor, with many memorable characters.
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