To be honest, James Teasdale's family didn't have much use for him. Teasdale was a "commercial traveler" and small-time shopkeeper, and he used to go off on long business trips, come home to Yorkshire for a weekend or so, (usually to some contempt from his wife and daughters) and go away again. But the family was in for a very rude awakening indeed when the body of a man identified as Jim Lane, who ran a small-time traveling game at carnivals around England, was found floating in the Dumb River, near the city of Ely, many miles away from Yorkshire. Because Jim Lane turned out to be James Teasdale - and it quickly became clear that he had been living a double life. His Yorkshire family apparently knew nothing about Jim Lane - or about the woman he lived with while running the carnival game. And since Jim Lane had been stabbed in the back, Scotland Yard Superintendent Littlejohn and his assistant, Sergeant Cromwell, were going to have their hands full trying to figure out who had murdered him - and why.
It's another fine puzzle from the British Golden Age (and beyond) author George Bellairs, a 1961 mystery called The Body in the Dumb River. It's being re-published next week as another volume in the series of British Library Crime Classics which are published in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks. The publisher provided me with an Advance Reader's Copy for this review. It is the subject of my audio review this week on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you are welcome to listen to the complete review by clicking here.
The Body in the Dumb River - that's "dumb," as a synonym for "silent" - provides another example of George Bellairs’s skill at creating a complex problem and turning his sleuths loose searching for a solution. There are plenty of red herrings here, to be sure. There are also some memorable characters, especially the victim, as we learn more about the double life he had been leading, and the whys – and the people – involved in that secret life. The book certainly is more of a police procedural than a puzzle-plot mystery, but Littlejohn and Cromwell are an appealing pair of investigators, and The Body in the Dumb River is another excellent entry in the series of books by George Bellairs, being given new life in these British Library Crime Classics. I think you will enjoy this one.
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