Slippery Ann (1944)
In America as The Queen of Spades.
Blurb:
My review:
The aim of the game, as the title suggests, is "to catch one of the men with the women who would damn him" on a charge of involvement in the large-scale robberies, black market activity and Fifth Column espionage committed in the coastal town of Sturton (of which a map would be nice). Although there is less of him than the reader wants, Josh Clunk, that villainous lawyer (acting, for once, with the full co-operation of Supt. Bell and the local police), it is who discovers the connection between the attempt made on the life of a dock offical, the false accusation of housebreaking in London and the dead body in the quarry. Although the twists and turns of the plot are as complex as Mitchell at her least inhibited, the reader's attention is kept throughout, and the whole situation is made ownderfully clear with the unmasking of the surprising murderer in an extremely sinister and tense scene displaying Bailey's mastery of lunatic psychology. The double twist at the end is, for once, organic, and its resolution allows Clunk to go one step further than Vitellius Wolfe in his lust for food: he blackmails the murderer (who escapes justice) into keeping his family in chocolate cake and pastries for the rest of their days! Mr. Clunk may be a devotee of Marie Antoinette, but we are devotees of Mr. Clunk.