Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 67, No. 3. Whole No. 388, March 1976

The Jury Box by John Dickson Carr

This month, for the first time in our own poker game, I have been dealt four of a kind, all big ones. Let’s get it straight. Though very different in mood, pace, background, and technique, all four books under discussion have at least two features in common. Each tells a gripping human story which will hold you to the end. And each (mirabile dictu!) is a true detective novel, with formidable problem solved by deduction from visible clues or by police routine intelligently directed.

You may prefer one approach; you may prefer another. That’s a matter of taste, which must always be left open. These four items have been ranked according to the order in which your mentor most enjoyed them, it being understood that I enjoyed and approved them all.

Loren Mensing, still-young professor of jurisprudence in Publish and Perish, by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. (Putnam, $6.95), engages our sympathy as he tries his wits on an exciting murder mystery in the classic style of Trent’s Last Case or Calamity Town.

As a working lawyer before his academic employment, Loren has drawn mutual wills for Graham Dillaway and Dillaway’s new wife, Hope Foxworth, both successful novelists of erratic personality.

It’s a deadly business. When Dillaway dies in that mountain-hut fire, together with some man of dubious antecedents, Loren is hired to unravel the tangle. Though he finds a girl he believed he had lost, the deadly business grows even deadlier until somebody’s grimace in an elevator provides the last link.

Don’t think you have solved everything until it’s all over; Mr. Nevins, a newcomer already master of his craft, has set traps for the overconfident as well as the unwary. This very sophisticated performance, told with absolute fair play and much charm of style, offers the most attractive mystery in months.

Despite its exotic setting and atmosphere, John Wyllie’s The Butterfly Flood (Doubleday, $5.95) follows the same fair-play pattern.

In the emerging West African republic of Akhana, still haunted by ancient beliefs, our attention centers on big Dr. Quarshie, wise, tolerant, highly cultured African physician who serves as healer, national conscience, and, when necessary, detective.

When the headless body of an unknown white man is found on a sacred rock beside the river, it may be tribal ceremony or some less formal cause. Colorful characters, white mingling with the black, whirl in their danse macabre against a background vividly described by one who knows it well.

The tempo increases on every page. How our stout-hearted Dr. Quarshie takes up a murderer’s trail, from the first revealing clue to the last pursuit and its climax among the crocodiles, are notable features of another attractive mystery worth your attention.

As we join the cutthroat turmoil of The Wilful Lady, by R. G. Jeffreys (Walker, $6.95), we are whisked back through time to the boisterous England of the year 1802, during one brief interlude of peace with Napoleon.

A beautiful red-haired girl escapes from captivity on shipboard in the Thames off Wapping, not long before Lieutenant Robert Kemble, Royal Navy retired, is stabbed in his frowsy lodging nearby. Once more we investigate with Jeremy Sturrock, swaggering Bow Street Runner as formidable to wrongdoers as he is irresistible to women.

Red-haired Lydia, wilful American heiress, has become enmeshed in plots against her life, her fortune, her good name. Aided by Dr. Ian McGrath, the young Scot who loves Lydia, Sturrock plunges in to foil the plotters. If much of the speech seems cruder than need be, if formal police tactics did not yet exist, this pre-Scotland Yard sleuth unmasks several villains for the spectacular and satisfactory end.

Though murder victims dating back thirty years are unearthed from one grave in Richard Forrest’s A Child’s Garden of Death (Bobbs-Merrill, $7.95), this ancient crime has immediate and grim application to the present day.

Investigating three buried corpses, Rocco Herbert, police chief in rural Connecticut, enlists the help of his old friend Lyon Wentworth. Wentworth, picturesque author whose hobby is ballooning and his wife a state senator, has the right gift. With both amateur and professional using police resources to supplement their wits, they uncover plots updated as well as backdated, and trap their quarry in this admirable exercise of narrative skill.