#1146: Murder in Blue (1937) by Clifford Witting

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Murder in Blue

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Maybe it’s the changing of the seasons, but I am really struggling to maintain interest in a lot of what I’m reading at present. Latest victim is Murder in Blue (1937), the debut novel of Clifford Witting, whose first half flew by in a whirlwind of delightful wit and intriguing possibilities…only for me to have to drag my way through the final 60 pages to a conclusion I’d lost interest in long before. And yet this sounds like exactly my sort of thing: plenty of clever false leads, lots of intelligent speculation, an apparently simple murder made devilishly complex by Witting’s undeniable intelligence of design (c.f. Let X be the Murderer (1947)). So, wherefore the capitulation? Let’s investigate…

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#1143: Death on Bastille Day (1981) by Pierre Siniac [trans. John Pugmire 2022]

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Death on Bastille Day

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Published approximately a year ago, this translation of Un Assassin, Ça Va Ça Vient (1981) as Death on Bastille Day kept eluding my attention if only because I was holding out for a paperback edition. The vagaries of publishing have restricted it to Kindle only, however, and so I come to this story of a man in two places at the same time — dancing in front of some witnesses, while committing a murder in front of another — rather belatedly. And while I’m grateful for the opportunity to have read it, as with all translated works, I can’t help but feel that it would make an excellent short story, lacking as it does sufficient intrigue to support its far from excessive length.

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#1140: The Rose of Death (1934) by Walter S. Masterman

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Rose of Death

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An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman meet at university, where they form a club with the intention of talking about unsolved crimes. Several years later, in the manner of these undertakings in fiction, they stumble upon a fresh case and decide to take it on…only to realise that they’re mixed up in something Much Bigger Than They Imagined. Fortunately, Hugh Marsden is the ward of legendary Scotland Yard man Sir Arthur Sinclair (ret’d.) and they’re able to enlist that great personage in their predicament. Less fortunately, Sinclair has been ill for some years now, and his powers appear to be on the wane. And danger circles ever-closer…

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#1137: Catch-As-Catch-Can, a.k.a. Walk Out on Death (1953) by Charlotte Armstrong

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Catch as Catch Can

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When Dee Allison’s itinerant uncle Jonas Breen pulls one of his sudden appearing acts and then promptly dies, leaving the overwhelming majority of his fortune to his newly-on-the-scene 18 year-old daughter Laila, the problems sown in the family are only just beginning. When the unworldly Laila runs away from home, unaware that she has eaten poisoned food which has already killed their housekeeper, Dee and her fiancée Andy Talbot are in a race against time to find the young woman before she, too, succumbs. And with some elements of the family possibly happier if Laila were dead, since that would solve their own financial woes, well, then you have a plot on the boil.

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