The Jury Box by John Dickson Carr[8]

Detection keyed with liveliness, I am happy to report, looms very large this month. Three of the four are fair-play mysteries, one featuring a tough Bow Street Runner in pre-Victorian Britain, while our fourth item provides superior cops-and-robbers from today. There’s something for everybody; your mentor has no gripe.

Beginning with a skyjacked plane whose bandit bails out with nearly half a million in ransom off the coast of the British Honduras, The Inside Man, by George Harmon Coxe (Knopf, $5.95), sweeps at a pace as unfaltering as its ingenuity and skill.

Private Investigator Jack Dunbar and Attorney Dave Barry, hired by East Coast Airlines to recover the ransom money, must fight foul tactics, from muggers to worse, as soon as they land at Belize, Honduras. A small plane, stolen locally by some unknown pilot to pick up the skyjacker at sea, is found wrecked and sunk, with the money missing but the skyjacker shot dead inside.

Assisted by Inspector McCain of the official police, our two investigators keep their balance amid picturesque characters from the sympathetic to the sinister, from attractive Mrs. Marion Morgan to enigmatic Pilot Delgado and his nightclub girl.

The principal clue, although fair and honorable, is so ingenious that you may miss it altogether. Of equal ingenuity is the hiding place for the missing money as in smooth, literate prose we race towards disclosure and finale. George Harmon Coxe, that reliable old master, has never written a better story.

It seems unfortunate that such first-class detection as Appleby’s Other Story, by Michael Innes (Dodd, Mead, $4.95), should be downgraded in its publisher’s subtitle as “a novel of suspense.” Mr. Innes, another old master, belongs on a higher plane.

At Elvedon Court, his stately country house from which certain paintings have already been stolen, Maurice Tytherton is murdered just before a courtesy call paid by Sir John Appleby, now retired Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.

If more than one British element seems all too familiar — the crochety victim, the once-disowned son returning from abroad, the ill-assorted guests among whom almost every man seems emotionally involved with the wrong woman — our author adds new ingredients to a plot far trickier than at first it would appear.

Just how crooked is the shady art dealer? What clue can be provided by the statue below the window? Both atmosphere and robust humor sustain us as academic-minded Sir John Appleby applies literary as well as factual deduction, and snares a crafty murderer into the flight of no-escape. Here is classic mystery classically and admirably solved.

Richard Falkirk’s Beau Blackstone (Stein and Day, $6.95) finds our old friend Edmund Blackstone, hardest nail of the Bow Street Runners under Magistrate Sir Richard Birnie, once more enmeshed in trouble during the troubled eighteen-twenties. With all England’s attention on steam locomotion, that new phenomenon, gangs of navvies have been toiling to complete the Stockton and Darlington Railway, a distance of fully twenty-five miles.

Not only has some highwayman (inspired by whom?) held up the stage-coach with the workers’ pay, but there are rumors of a Great Train Robbery to be tried as soon as Stephenson’s Rocket takes the road. Blackstone the redoubtable must frustrate all plots.

Disguising himself as a laborer, he soon collides both with Highwayman Challoner and with Petro, “king of the navvies,” who has never lost a fight.

But Blackstone mustn’t lose. Amid women as different as Josephine the missionary and Rookery Molly, Petro’s mistress, or men varying from Frying Pan Charlie to dignified Sir Joshua, murder and riot stalk the line until the highwayman’s last throw, the train’s triumphant journey, and the masks-off moment when our hero traps the villain behind it all. Don’t miss this one.

The roaring crooks’ chronicle of Zaleski’s Percentage, by Donald MacKenzie (Houghton Mifflin, $5.95), centers on a historic jewelled cross. Recovered from Nazi looters during the war by British-based Poles under Casimir Zaleski, it is now on display in London. Zaleski, aging and shabby, still feels dishonored because the British have never acknowledged his feat. If he resteals the cross for sale, his needy friends will be avenged.

Thus begins battle, with the Poles and Canadian Kirk Fraser caught between hostile forces before a blazing finish when honor is satisfied and all good men are happy.

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