At first, there didn't seem to be any rational motive behind the explosion that destroyed the headquarters of the Excelsior Joinery Company on Green Lane in the small British village of Evingden. It happened one evening right around 8 P. M., blowing out many of the windows of the homes and businesses along the lane. When neighbors tried to fight the fire at Excelsior's building, they were horrified to discover that three men had been trapped inside the building - all killed in the initial explosion. The three men were all members of Excelsior's Board of Directors; two other directors had not been present at what appeared to have been a very irregular meeting of the board. The Yard sent in Superintendent Littlejohn and his assistant, Inspector Cromwell, in an effort to make sense of a crime that seemed to have no real motive and an overabundance of suspects. You'll find the details in Surfeit of Suspects, a 1964 mystery by George Bellairs. 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.
Regular visitors to my blog will recognize the name of George Bellairs as another of those authors who began writing mysteries during the Golden Age and continued to do so for decades thereafter. Like those others, Bellairs too has been largely forgotten, but the British Library is in the process of re-publishing some of his nearly sixty novels as part of its series of Crime Classics, which is published in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks.
In Surfeit of Suspects, it is quickly apparent to investigators that the explosion which killed three of Excelsior's five directors would almost certainly mean the end of the road for the company. Excelsior was flat broke, and one of the directors had become something of a specialist at pressuring banks to provide just enough funds to allow the workers at the company to be paid. There seems, on the surface, to be no particularly good reason for the murders – until Littlejohn and Cromwell, the regular sleuths in Bellairs's series mysteries, begin turning up evidence of a long-running and complicated scheme involving financial chicanery and local politics. There is no shortage of suspects, either. The two investigators manage to peel away layer after layer of false trails and financial hijinks to reveal the roots of a carefully plotted and well concealed conspiracy.
I’ve read a half dozen or so of George Bellairs’s novels so far, and I find them quite entertaining and carefully plotted. Surfeit of Suspects is no exception. Give it a try.
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