CLASSIC CRIME  | Daily Mail Online

MURDER BY MILK BOTTLE

by Lynne Truss (Raven Books £14.99, 320 pp)

No one could ever accuse Lynne Truss of holding back. Her forays into the criminal underworld of Fifties Brighton are not so much reminiscent of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock as of the Gunfight At The O.K. Corral.

The body count is impressive, with three people seen off with milk bottles before a convention of gang leaders start testing their guns on each other.

It hardly needs adding that all this is played for laughs. But, if any doubt remains, Truss gives us a police headquarters where the mastermind of a long list of felonies is the charlady, dispensing tea while collecting advance information about CID raids.

Meanwhile, the cerebral, if naive, Constable Twitten, ever the victim of good intentions, does his inadequate best to keep the show on the road.

If you enjoy knock-about farce played at hectic speed, this is the book for you.

THE WOMAN IN THE WARDROBE

by Peter Shaffer (British Library Crime Classics £8.99, 208 pp)

Before heading towards fame as a playwright, Peter Shaffer tried his hand at crime fiction. His first effort from 1951, The Woman In The Wardrobe, relies on a locked room mystery for its plot.

The victim, a blackmailer of a particularly nasty disposition, has enemies galore, all with imaginative ideas on how to rid themselves of their tormentor.

To unravel a complex plot we have two detectives, the amateur Mr Verity and the retired professional Inspector Rambler, who score off each other and against a hapless young police inspector who has trouble keeping up with their ruminations. As do we all. But the light tone and lively repartee between the protagonists carries us along happily to a genuinely surprising pay-off.

MURDER TO MUSIC

by Margaret Newman (Agora £8.99, 224 pp)

Music may be the food of love but it can also incite jealousy, revenge and even murder.

Owen Burr is a rising star of the concert podium and a leading figure in an amateur choir accustomed to performing with professional orchestras. Burr’s chance of a breakthrough comes with an invitation to conduct an original choral work at the Festival Hall in London.

The evening is a triumph until, taking his bow, he keels over with a bullet in his head.

It falls to Superintendent Hudson to sift through a motley collection of suspects, a task made no easier for having his wife-to-be, as he hopes, a member of the choir.

First published in 1959, Murder To Music was Margaret Newman’s only venture into detection. It is our loss that she did not give more of her literary talent to crime fiction.

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