The scene looked depressingly familiar to Los Angeles Homicide Squad detective Lieutenant Luis Mendoza. He was investigating the murder of a young woman, a crime that looked like it might just be another random and senseless killing. But he had a hunch that he had seen a very similar case, a few months earlier: the murder of another young woman, a case which Mendoza had been unable to solve. He found himself wondering if the two cases might be linked.
You'll find the answer in Case Pending, a 1960 police procedural, the first of Dell Shannon's popular books about Lieutenant Mendoza. A new edition of the book is being published this week by Poisoned Pen Press, a Sourcebooks imprint. They have been publishing the popular British Library Crime Classics in the United States for the past several years. Now, working with the Library of Congress, they have started a new series of classic American mystery fiction, called (not too surprisingly) Library of Congress Crime Classics. The publishers provided me with an e-book of Case Pending for this review. It's also the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to that original review by clicking here.
I will admit that Dell Shannon's name was new to me - and shame on me for that. "Dell Shannon" was one of the pen names used by author Elizabeth Linington, who wrote several popular series of mysteries and is said to have been the first woman to write what we call today “police procedurals.” As modern detective fiction leans pretty heavily toward that kind of story, Case Pending seemed to me to be a good place to broaden my horizons beyond the traditional, puzzle-plot-oriented mysteries that I usually write about here and on the podcast
Lieutenant Mendoza is called to the scene of a murder, where the body of a young woman has been discovered in a lonely field. At first there appear to be very few clues, and Mendoza fears that it may be the work of a psychopath. But gradually, small step by small step, police routines and interviews begin to fill in some of the missing details. And Mendoza begins to get a very strong hunch that this murder may have been committed by the same person who killed another young women six months earlier. And Mendoza knows that a killer like that would be quite likely to kill again…
But that’s only one of the crimes which face the police in Case Pending. Slowly, skillfully, the author finds ways in which the different cases occupying the police seem to intersect with each other, and each plot twist contributes in some way to the ultimate solution.
Mystery scholar and historian Leslie S. Klinger has contributed both an in-depth introduction to the book and several footnotes appended to each chapter, clarifying points that may be obscure to today’s readers. The whole package is excellent, giving readers an overview of Dell Shannon’s writing and a wider look at the popularity and mechanics of the police procedural, which remains one of the major sub-genres of today’s mystery field. I do recommend Case Pending highly.
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