Thursday, May 19, 2016

Head of a Traveller by Nicholas Blake (Fontana, 1962)

Yet another prize from my Lifeline Bookfair Crime Spree!


They found the body in the Thames--the head, weeks later, in a string bag hanging on a tree.
 Short and sweet--and oh, boy, doesn't it make you want to read more!

Mind you, the blurb makes the book appear more hardboiled and gritty than it is.  And if it had been published in America, and started with the discovery of a headless corpse floating in the Hudson or San Francisco Bay, this book probably would be that kind of detective story.  One would expect the hero (either a jaded PI or a world-weary cop) to track the murderer through the mean back streets of the city, encountering various underworld types along the way.   However, Head of a Traveller was written by a British author, and the detective is a gentleman amateur who tracks the murderer to the country estate of a poet!




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