Dead Man's Effects
(1945)
In America as The Cat's Whisker.
<>1945 Doubleday Doran blurb:
Called into a
Sunday conference with Lomas at Scotland Yard, Reggie Fortune was
given the bare facts quickly.
‘Help!’
Reggie said, and proceeded to review the case in memo fashion:
Man’s corpse burnt unrecognisable in haystack fire of
unknown origin, same night as girl was drowned near by, unknown
whether accident, suicide, or murder. The one definite fact is,
both died. How and why they died contemporaneous with German
bombing adjacent to fire and stream, wholly indefinite, chances
innumerable.
When Reggie got
on the scene he found the situation even more complicated by the
presence of British, Canadian, and American troops between whom
bad feeling was running high. Reggie had a hunch that the deaths,
the bombing, and the bad feeling were closely linked. It took a
while and needed alert brainwork to piece the many little clues
together, but Reggie came through and cornered a mastermind who
had an equal flair for mass killings and individual murders.
H.C. Bailey is a master of the cleverly plotted, faultproof
story, and his well-known creation, Mr. Fortune, is an
intellectual sleuth of the old school. Faced with the unusual but
very real problem of psychological sabotage among troops, Reggie
produces some timely and important truths about the international
situation as a whole.
My review:
A better than average treatment of Fifth Columnists in wartime
Britain. Although there are plenty of murders, the reader will
have a hard time working out who is responsible for the Fifth
Columnist activity and for the murders committed in Raddonshire.
In the second half, the scene shifts to London, where more
murders are committed. The solution is satisfying, the villains
inevitable, and the staccato style does not detract from the
vividness of the fast-paced whole.
To
the Bibliography.
To
the Bailey Page.
To the
Grandest Game in the World.
E-mail.