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“I stood staring about the room, and the first disadvantage of living in a basement apartment occurred to me. Jumping from a window would bring no release”. The much-missed Rue Morgue Press reprinted only four Jeff and Haila Troy novels from husband-and-wife team Kelley Roos. The Frightened Stiff (1942), the third, opens magnificently and wastes barely a word right up to THE END, so let me say this now: someone needs to reprint this series. Not a few selected titles as we’d likely get from the (excellent) American Mystery Classics range, but the whole kit and caboodle. Sure, some will be better than others, but I refuse to believe that they don’t deserve rediscovery.



Sometimes you just have to bite a bullet: following the
There are times when it’s possible to pinpoint the exact moment when a novel doesn’t fulfil its promise, and given the intricacy of many novels of detection these can sometimes be very keenly felt. Perhaps the detective is an absolute duffer (an accusation frequently levelled at Freeman Wills Croft’s Inspector French), or the guilty party comes disappointingly out of nowhere (as in John Dickson Carr’s The Blind Barber), or perhaps the solution offered up to a brilliant problem is a shade on the simplistic side (the disappearance from the locked bathroom in John Sladek’s otherwise-superb Black Aura springs to mind). For this second novel by husband and wife team Kelley Roos, I’d say the main problem is in the selection of the victim: the setup is excellent, the characters are a delight, and come the murder…the most obvious victim is selected and the book never quite recovers.
