Golden Age Mysteries are one of my default things to read when I don’t know what I want to read. I thought I’d share thoughts on a few of the less famous mystery writers to cross my radar:

-Victor Luhrs: responsible for The Longbow Murders, a fairly bonkers historical mystery where ruthless, brawling warrior-king Richard the Lion-Hearted solves a series of murders with the help of a twerpy scribe/narrator/Watson wannabe and some brief forensic work on ballistics from Robin of Locksley (yes that Robin of Locksley, and no he’s not in this very much). I enjoyed this old-school take on Richard I, portrayed here as a brash and hot-tempered man, but not a stupid one. The narrator, who’s kind of useless and spends a lot of time thinking patronizing thoughts about his “poor, fat” wife, is a less appealing character. The book does sell that combination of deep-seated respect for religious subjects, with a comparatively casual attitude towards the clergy, that you see in actual medieval works.

Mystery parts are kind of shaky; the author tries to pull off a “least likely person” twist but hasn’t developed the character well enough to sell the twist. Heck, the author doesn’t even seem to realize that some of the goofier aspects of the mystery (murderer using a long bow at close range and leaving taunting notes around) could be an attempt by the murderer to build up an image of themselves very different from the actuality, to deceive the investigators. Still, I found it more entertaining than alot of works by more respected mystery writers. If you like Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, this has a fair amount of Garrett-style flippancy, and feels a bit like a Lord Darcy prequel set in Richard’s time (when they haven’t discovered the magic/psionic stuff yet). If you get your ideas about the Plantagenets from Becket, Lion in Winter, or Robin and Marian, stay away – this book will annoy you because it’s operating from a completely different set of preconceptions about what the Plantagenets were and what historical fiction should be.

-Christianna Brand (think I read most of her mysteries): Competent, middle of the road mystery writer who seemed to think she was some kind of expert in conveying psychological nuance and atmosphere – I thought she was rather a fail at both. To me, Death of Jezebel was about the most enjoyable of the ones I read, followed by Heads You Lose and Green for Danger (her best-known work).

-Gladys Mitchell: I randomly grabbed Watson’s Choice, a book from the middle of her long-running Mrs. Bradley series, mostly due to the Sherlock Holmes masquerade angle. The Holmes stuff was fun, but the actual murder and murderer were poorly thought out, the protagonist and her sidekicks were boring, and the most interesting character was a stereotypically haughty and macho Latin bullfighter with a minor amount of “hidden depths.” Second most interesting was the dog.

-Edmund Crispin (Case of the Gilded Fly/Holy Disorders): some musical composer guy with an Oxford education decided he wanted to be John Dickson Carr when he grew up. Spoiler alert: he made a terrible John Dickson Carr, with no sense of pacing, no ability to flesh out the gothic/creepy bits both he and Carr love so much, and so little skill in humor and characterization that he made Carr(1) look like Jane Austen by comparison. Did he have any good points? Well, if you need vivid descriptions of the inconvenience of traveling by rail in 1940s England, Crispin is your man. His “impossible murders” are interesting, but his solutions are not, and he has a tendency to hand you all the clues you’re going to get upfront and spend the middle of the book on character stuff (about which, see above). Gilded Fly also has an interesting portrayal of what a miserable job “properties manager” can be in the theater. Since it’s sometimes a starting level position for people who became more famous as actors or theater managers/directors, it’s kind of enlightening about those people’s preoccupations, and what they went through on the way up.

-Victor Whitechurch: Crime at Diana’s Pool is mostly famous for the fact that he sat down and wrote the initial setup and crime without knowing whodunnit, and worked the rest of the book out from there. The edition I had included an introduction where he tells his readers approximately when the first burst of inspiration ran out, and invites them to invent their own explanations of what happened. If you want to write mysteries and are still figuring out how, you might find this a fun exercise. Aside from that, it’s a competently clued, rather generic piece of work with a strong howdunnit component, and a fairly weak whodunnit. He also wrote short mysteries with a railway theme starring a character named Hazell Thorpe; I’ve found these pretty boring as mysteries but somewhat enlightening about railway procedures of the period. The main thing I will say in Whitechurch’s defense is that he just *feels* like a nice guy through his text; I suspect I would have gotten along better with him as a person, allowing for the attitudes of the period, than I would have any of the other authors reviewed here.

(1) who was generally considered to be rather a cartoonist when it comes to humor and characters, and not always a successful one.