Corpse at the Carnival by George Bellairs (Thriller Bookclub, 1958)

Another Lifeline Bookfair treasure!

 

In his latest thriller, George Bellairs takes us back to the lovely and haunting Isle of Man.

It is holiday time in Douglas, and a carnival crowd engulfs a solitary, elderly man, who is peacefully gazing out to sea.  When the procession passes, the old man quietly dies.  He is found to have a knife wound in his back.  He is, at first, merely an anonymous victim, known casually to a few locals as Uncle Fred.  Superintendent Littlejohn, called to visit his old friend the Rev. Caesar Kinrade, Archdeacon of Man, on his way home from a police conference in Dublin, is asked by his comrade Inspector Knell, of the Manx C.I.D., to give him a hand in the case, unofficially.

As the inquiry progresses, Uncle Fred is virtually brought to life again by Littlejohn.  The lost years of his past are found again, his friends and his foes appear, the events leading up to his strange death fall in line and, gradually, the picture of the murderer appears.

The Case of the Restless Redhead by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pan, 1962)

 

She had a neat figure, plenty of bad luck--and red hair.

They caught her with stolen diamonds--but as she told the story it was a frame-up, and Perry Mason believed her.

Then came news of more serious crime--and Mason found the charge against his client was murder.

It never fails.  No matter what a client initially hires Perry Mason for--to settle a parking fine, to get a divorce--before the end of the book they're up on a charge of murder.

My advice to anyone thinking of consulting Perry Mason?  Don't.

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Pan, 1953)

Found on the "Vintage" table at last weekend's Lifeline Bookfair:

THE LOST WORLD, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous novels, is the story of four men's expedition to a remote plateau in South America, cut off from the surrounding country by unscaleable perpendicular cliffs.  Here, in an area the size of the English county of Sussex, strange creatures long extinct in the outside world have survived from prehistoric times, including the huge pterodactyl, half bat, half bird; the reptile-headed iguanodon, forty feet high; the terrifying carnivorous dinosaur; and the horrible ape-men.  The adventures of Professors Challenger and Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and the journalist Malone are breathlessly exciting, and lead up to the climax of their return to London to confound their sceptical critics.
The idea for the tale was suggested to the author by the fossilized footprints of a prehistoric monster found near his home on the Sussex Downs; the then read Professor Ray Lankester's book on extinct animals.  He took the name of Professor Challenger from the wooden ship Sir Charles Wyville Thomson (the zoology professor whose lectures he'd attended at Edinburgh University) had dredged the seas for new forms of animal life; but he gave Challenger the black beard and booming voice of another former Edinburgh professor.  Conan Doyle enjoyed the character whom he thus created so much that he imitated him in real life, and, according to his biographer, Mr. John Dickson Carr, "made Challenger a completely uninhibited version of himself."  The Lost World, first serialized in the Strand Magazine, was an immediate success and was later filmed.

 Pan started publishing paperbacks in 1947, but this is the earliest example of their output I've found so far.    The back cover reads less like a blurb than a mini-essay!

Anna, Where Are You? by Patricia Wentworth (Hodder and Stoughton, 1959)

Another find from the Lifeline Bookfair:

about this book

The twentieth ' Miss Silver ' mystery.
Anna sounds a dull, uninteresting girl, but when she stops writing after three years of intensive post-school correspondence, Thomasina becomes anxious about her old school-friend.  In her last letter Anna spoke of a new job without giving any details, and then, to quote Thomasina, she disappears.  The case is put before Miss Silver... "Just a girl who has stopped writing."

 Here we have a dynamic cover illustration (Who is that girl?  And who or what is menacing her?) paired with a downright clunky piece of prose on the back of the book.  Let's hope the potential buyers of this publication found the front cover more intriguing than they found the back cover off-putting.

Rocket Invasion by King Lang (Curtis Books, 1950)

I found this on a stall at the Sunday Markets in Port Adelaide:

 

... a digest-sized publication so down-market that it doesn't even bother with a back cover blurb.  Instead it gives us an advertisement for this:

 

Glama, the Oriental Charm of Luck and Love!

Turning from the advertisements to the story, Rocket Invasion follows the adventures of a former Space Corps officer with the odd name of Chan Houston, his inexplicably hot girlfriend Loraine Castle, and his somewhat smug android, Norbert.   (Maybe he's overcompensating for his name.  Who on Earth names an android "Norbert", anyway?)

Norbet is clearly the brains of the outfit, a sort of Jeeves with Gears.  It's just as well someone is on the ball, because Earth is about to be invaded by a force of blue, sword-wielding humanoids.  And though the story is halted several times to tell us androids cannot lie--Norbert spends a lot of his time telling plausible porkies to the aliens who have Houston and company prisoner.

King Land was a pseudonym for George Hay, John W. Jennison and E.C. Tubb. 

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (Fontana, 1959)

Found on a stall at Fishermen's Wharf Markets in Port Adelaide:

 

Thundering along on its three days' journey across Europe, the famous Orient Express suddenly comes to a stop in the night.

Snowdrifts block the line somewhere in the Balkans.  Everything is quiet and passengers quickly settle down for the night, including Hercule Poirot.

In the morning an American millionaire is found stabbed, many times--Poirot is very much wanted.  The untrodden snow seems to prove that the murderer is still on board.  Poirot begins to think--and a brilliantly ingenious solution is found...

 And without a doubt, the solution is brilliant ingenious.  (No, I'm not going to tell you what it is.  This blog is a Spoiler Free Zone!  If you haven't already read Murder on the Orient Express--one of Christie's best known books--do so and find out the solution for yourself.)

This is the sort of plotting that earned Agatha Christie the sobriquet "the Queen of Crime".  At times her prose was merely functional, her characters two-dimensional, her attitudes snobbish and old-fashioned.  She was never adverse to using stereotypes, particularly when depicting foreigners or members of the lower classes.  However, she knew how to weave together the real clues and red herrings to create a mystery that kept the reader guessing right to the end.

Cupid Rides Pillion by Barbara Cartland (Arrow, 1968)

Found in a dusty corner of the shed part of the Green Shed (and pounced upon because it's perfect for this blog):

 

England under Charles II was a gay, pleasure-loving land.  And Lady Panthea Vyne enjoyed it to the full, for she remembered only too well the dark days of Cromwell's Iron Rule.  She remembered Christian Drysdale, too, Cromwell's bestial tax-collector who had been her husband for a few short hours, until she had been rescued by a mysterious Highwayman.  Five years later, at the richly colourful court of Charles II, others learned her secret, including the jealous Lady Castlemaine... and as the dangers besetting her drew closer, Panthea put her faith in the man whose life was in equal danger--the mysterious, yet strangely familiar Highwayman.

If the fact that the author is Barbara Cartland doesn't alert you to what kind of book this is, surely the fact that the heroine is named Panthea Vyne, must!

Anyway, for those of you who came in late, this was Barbara Cartland:

... self-appointed expert on Romance, upholder of traditional values, step-grandmother of Princess Diana, and the very prolific writer of over 1,000 books.