Viewed through the golden glass of the vestibule where we first meet him, wondering where he’s left his ticket of invitation and fuming inwardly because he can’t enter without it, he looks like a dogfish in aspic.
George Bellairs is a classic English mystery writer. I wasn’t familiar with his work before I bought He’d Rather Be Dead, first published in 1945. The book has much to commend it.
Sir Gideon Ware is the newly-elected mayor of the English seaside resort town of Westcome. He is a ruthless property developer who built the town into its present prosperity through hard work, loud promotion, flexible ethics and corner-cutting. At a dinner given to celebrate his victory, he falls under the table during his speech, and dies. Cause of death: strychnine poisoning.
Police Superintendent Boumphrey of the Westcome police is very good at keeping tabs on the citizens’ comings and goings, and even at keeping files on them, but feels this case to be above his pay grade. So he applies to Scotland Yard to send one of their detectives (this happens all the time in novels, but I’ve read the Yard never actually does this) to investigate. They send Inspector Littlejohn (he has a first name, but I can’t recall it), who proceeds in a quiet and matter-of-fact manner, working steadily to uncover the secrets of Sir Gideon’s past, and the force from that past that has now struck him down .
What I liked best about He’d Rather Be Dead was the prose. Author Bellairs had the gift of turning out a very apt sentence, like the one at the head of this review, or this one:
Mr Brown’s smiling lips parted to disclose two copious sets of teeth crowding upon one another like passengers for the last bus.
Not quite Wodehousian, but excellent in its own way.
The mystery itself involved a systematic progression through suspects and evidence, without a lot of fireworks. Characterization was not memorable, and even Littlejohn himself doesn’t leap off the page – almost all we learn of him is that he’s in a happy marriage. He isn’t even physically described until almost the end of the book – which loses him points with this reader.
But I must admit that I didn’t guess the murderer, though I thought I did.
I might possibly read another Inspector Littlejohn book, but He’d Rather Be Dead didn’t grab me a lot. The prose was excellent, but the key was pretty low for my debased modern reading tastes. I don’t recommend against the book. There’s much to be said for it.