CLASSIC CRIME
HALL OF MIRRORS by Christopher Fowler (Bantam €23.70) A WARM welcome back to the oddest, and the funniest, duo in detective fiction. Arthur Bryant is the brains of the partnership, a shambolic character who finds answers by bizarre intellectual routes.
The contribution of John May is more physical. A debonair ladies’ man, he takes up the chase after Bryant has pointed the way.
Their latest outing is a trip down memory lane to the Sixties and to the early days of their collaboration. As bodyguards to a star witness in a bribery trial, they join their client at a country house party where their host, a drug-addicted aristocrat, is intent on selling his crumbling pile to a business tycoon who refuses to leave his room.
While trying to protect their man from multiple attempts on his life, Bryant and May are diverted by a murder or two that somehow connect to the prospective property deal.
A master of tight plotting, Christopher Fowler offers thrills and laughs in equal measure. THE MIDDLE TEMPLE MURDER by J. S. Fletcher (Collins Crime Club €12.05) SHADES of Conan Doyle hover over this centuryold mystery.
But in the place of his great detective we have an ambitious young journalist who, having stumbled over a dead body near his office in London’s famed Fleet Street, decides to scoop his rivals by tracking down the murderer.
And to be fair to him, Frank Spargo is nothing if not dedicated to the chase.
Finding on the corpse the name and address of a barrister friend, he begins to unravel a criminal conspiracy that threatens to destroy the lives of those closest to him.
The clues are liberally dispersed while introducing a cast of memorable characters and settings, ranging from a decaying market town to a bleak outpost on the moors. MURDER BY MATCHLIGHT by E.C.R. Lorac (British Library €12.60) WE ARE in wartime London at the height of the Blitz, with bombs falling and a blackout in force. But this does not deter one young government scientist from taking a late night stroll in Regent’s Park, where he sees a brutal killing.
Enter Chief Inspector Macdonald who pieces together a reconstruction of the crime. The stresses and strains of the home front intensify a drama played out against public indifference to a single murder when so many lives are threatened daily. Believing society must protect the innocent, Macdonald pursues his quarry to a dramatic climax.