posted on 23 Jul 2023

Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells

Reprinted in Collins’ Detective Story Club series, Murder in the Bookshop was originally published in 1936 and was one of US author, Carolyn Wells’ sixty-one Fleming Stone mystery novels. 

Wells began her writing career – which ran to over 170 publications – by writing poetry, humour and children’s tales but after ten years or so, she had an epiphany while listening to a writer of mystery stories reading her work aloud to an audience. Her conversion to the trade of mystery writing was total and she went on to be extraordinarily popular and outsold all her peers. But, following her death in 1942, her reputation with the reading public fell away almost as quickly as it rose and now her work is little known and much of it out of print.

Murder in the Bookshop is, I’m afraid, one of the clumsiest and least satisfying Golden Age mystery I’ve read and it left me at a loss to see why she was so feted during her writing career. The story itself is pretty straightforward: a rather stuffy middle-aged but wealthy book-collector, Philip Balfour, is married to a much younger but magnetically attractive wife, Allie. Balfour has a dedicated, talented librarian, Keith Ramsay and a more feckless son, Guy who no longer lives at home.

Bookseller, John Sewell has procured a very rare and very expensive book to add to Balfour’s collection but, one evening, Balfour and Ramsay go to Sewell’s shop after hours only for Balfour to be attacked and murdered and Ramsay chloroformed. Ramsay immediately becomes the key suspect – a status that is confirmed by the fact that he and Balfour’s wife are in love and so has two motives for murder: getting his hands on the wife and the valuable book.

However, everyone believes Ramsay is an upright cove and couldn’t be the murderer – anyway he has an alternative story of how the two men were attacked by a mystery man in black wearing some kind of frilly face mask. Sewell introduces Allie to Fleming Stone, a cunning detective known to the bookseller, and he’s retained to assist the police with their investigation.

I’m not revealing any more of the plot here but it plays out amongst a very small cast of no more than a handful of characters and there is one further murder that does, at least, inject a little more pzazz into the proceedings. But it really would take a lot more than that to lift this leaden tale from the ground – and a considerably more skilful writer.

Fleming Stone is perhaps one of the least charismatic detectives I’ve encountered and spends a good deal of the book as much in the dark as we are. When he does act, it’s in the most inexplicable ways – placing himself and other people in unnecessary danger.

I don’t say this very often but give this one a wide berth and spend your time and money on something else.

The book’s got a good jacket though……

 

Terry Potter

July 2023