The Body in the Dumb River

October 28, 2019
First published in 1961, this workmanlike volume in the British Library Crime Classics series finds Bellairs’s Scotland Yarder, Tom Littlejohn, now a superintendent, in the county of Fenshire, where he’s helping the local police wrap up a forgery case. Since a torrential storm that has caused flooding has left the police shorthanded, Fenshire’s chief constable asks Littlejohn to assist with a murder inquiry. James Lane, who ran a ring-toss stand at the Tylecote fair, was found in the Dumb River with a stab wound in his back. Littlejohn learns that Lane’s real name was James Teasdale, an artist who only stayed with his wife, Elvira, at their Yorkshire home on weekends. His name was not Teasdale’s only untruth, as he accounted for his absence during the week to Elvira by claiming that he worked for a firm that had him traveling around several counties. The superintendent looks for motives and suspects in both parts of the dead man’s life. Traditional whodunit fans looking for a well-written puzzle will be satisfied, even if this isn’t Bellairs’s finest work.

December 1, 2019
The British Library Crime Classics series continues to breathe new life into books written during and shortly following mystery fiction's golden age. This solid procedural, originally published in 1961, features Scotland Yard detective Tom Littlejohn, who has just finished a case in East Anglia when another one demands his attention. A man found murdered in a local river had, it turns out, been living a double life. His snobby family thinks he traveled for a sales job, but he actually ran a carnival booth at different fairgrounds, which allowed him keep them in a modicum of style. When the double life is exposed (including a younger woman who helped with his booth), the family is shocked, though some not as shocked as others. Bellairs, a pseudonym for Harold Blundell, a banker and philanthropist, neatly marches the narrative through a series of complications neatly and does a good job of bringing a dead man to life, after the fact.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)