Bodies in a Bookshop

By -
Bodies in a Bookshop, by R. T. Campbell

This is a fun mystery from the Golden Age of British mystery.  R. T. Campbell wrote several mysteries during WWII, and I'm not sure if they all feature Max Boyle and the Professor, but certainly it sounds like this is part of a series.  They are an oddball little team, orthodoxly eccentric amateur detectives and pretty funny.

Max Boyle is a botanist, assistant to Professor John Stubbs.  The professor loves a good mystery, and for some reason the local Chief Inspector invites him along on his investigations and even asks his opinions.  (Sounds legit.) 

Anyway, Max is the sort any bookish blogger can love, and one day while he's browsing in a favorite bookshop, he finds the owner and a stranger mysteriously dead in the back room.  Max, the professor, and Inspector Bishop are promptly vaulted into a puzzle that winds through many a back room of a bookshop or print gallery.  It's a very fun mystery.


One detail about the author made me laugh; his real name was Ruthven Campbell Todd, and under the name Ruthven Todd he was familiar to me in a different literary form.  When my daughter was little, she used to love to read Space Cat stories, which date from the 1950s and are complete cheeseball science fiction for kids.  So here's a Space Cat picture for you.


Comments

  1. hopeinbrazilMay 3, 2013 at 1:26 PM

    This sounds like a fun book. Thanks for bringing this author to my attention.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more