Baynard KendrickBesprekingen

Not enough to convince me I want to read any more by him.

This was fun. I have never heard of this golden age detective before. A little silly, of course, and over the top, but a good read nonetheless.½

Interesting mystery, set in contemporary (ca. 1942) New York City. Old mysteries regarding a supposed murder-suicide, and a collapsed bank, have suddenly resurfaced. A blind investigator is brought in to find out the truth, and in a cunning bluff, unmasks the criminal. This was the kind of thing that the Max Carrados mysteries should have been, but wasn't. Interesting characters, and the setting is fun.

Unlike Blood on Lake Louisa, this has an urban (Miami, Florida setting and involves the murder of a gambler who is actually a burglar. The detectives are Stan Rice and a competent policeman, Vincent Leroy.

For some reason, for years I thought this was set in Canada, but it is actually rural Florida. According to the blurb, Kendrick was best known for stories involving a blind detective, and he did charity work for blind veterans, but the detective in this is a rural sheriff whose 'Watson' is in fact the local small-town doctor.

There is a lot going on in this Gold Medal, as a college languages professor decides to run away from marriage with a very rich very beautiful girl and take a job as a chauffeur for a while so he can have time to write. Bad mistake. The family he gets involved with, an older husband, a beautiful young wife, an adopted (and also stunningly beautiful) French daughter, and their son, who isn't too ordinary himself, turn out to have lots of dark secrets and vices. This is about as sordid a pulp story as I have read and must have been more shocking in 1952, when I think it was originally published. The author weaves the sado-masochism into the professor's ironic first person account of his adventures. His narrative style is pretty good and as a professor of languages he likes to use a few obscure words now and then that you will need to look up in a dictionary. (Which is great since I read the book on a Kindle, and the Kindle's excellent built-in dictionary made finding out what Hayward was talking about a breeze.)

The problem with the story, however, is that it just moves along from one event to the next. Despite the torrid goings-on (sex, murder, and various perversity), the novel doesn't really generate much suspense. As events take place, the reader is just about as bewildered as the professor is. The professor also has an annoying habit of acting against his own best judgment and resisting (multiple times) the urge to get away from the crazy family he has become involved with. The author also doesn't help matters by making frequent forward-looking statements such as "He was also answering an invitation to get mixed up in two of the juiciest murders California had ever seen."

All in all, not a bad read if you just concentrate on enjoying the various episodes.

I became a fan of the pulp Duncan Maclain whodunits after seeing one of his Dell Mapbacks. I later saw that Ernest Hemingway also owned this book.½