I have been having a real Golden Age of Crime blitz in the last month or so. I recently reviewed Bats in the Belfry and The Thatched Roof Murder by E C Lorac. Link here.
I decided to do some investigating and found that this was the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958) (who wrote under the pseudonyms E. C. R. Lorac and Carol Carnac). She was a British crime writer. The youngest daughter of Harry and Beatrice Rivett, née Foot, she was born 1894. She was a member of the Detection club and was a very prolific writer, writing forty-eight mysteries under her first pen name, and twenty-three under her second Carol Carnac. So armed with my trusty calculator (pen and paper) I worked out that I have 71 titles to track down and read. What joy.
I have been on Amazon, the World of Books, Alibris and Abe books and found a few and fairly reasonably priced. So I bought them. then I nipped over to ebay and here found quite a few, again some reasonably priced. So I bought them as well. One seller had three paperbacks to sell but I drew the line at his price and reluctantly left them. A week or so later I received a notification from ebay who, presumably had noticed my interest, that the price of these books had been dropped by about £15. I still balked at the amount so sent a message to the seller offering him a price for them. I aimed it fairly low and got a reply asking for £5 more and I could have them. So I did and now I have those as well. At the moment I own twelve so a long way to go and doubt if I will ever get there.
I went online and discovered that my library systems has six so have reserved them. I also discovered the Internet Archive which has digitized books to borrow, for free, and have already managed to borrow a few. I am on the waiting list for others.
I am calling a halt now as I think the acceptably priced titles are now on my shelves. Plenty of others but the prices are outrageous and when I saw a first edition of a Carol Carnac book was fetching over £4000. Realised that they were way out of my league.
I have been in touch with the British Library who, as you know, have this wonderful Classic Crime series and I was told that there has been such a positive response to the two recently published titles that they will be publishing some more. Hooray!
If any of you out there have any books by this author lurking in attics, check them out.
I have also been reading Freeman Wills Croft. Again, my interest was piqued by the British Library publications and I went on the hunt for more. Once again, you can find them but there are some that are difficult to track down and very expensive indeed. Then a dear friend, who incidentally loaned me the entire Miss Silver oeuvre some years ago, came up trumps again with about fifteen by this author. Many of them are the wonderful original green Penguin paperbacks and a delight to see, though I do admit that the type is a bit hard on the eyes these days. No matter, they are excellent and I am working my way through them.
FWC has, as his main protagonist, Inspector French who is meticulous in tracking down every single avenue of clues until he solves the puzzle and arrests the murderer. I love the detail, many of which are so esoteric that they pass me by but I find them fascinating (much as I found the code in Have his Carcase by D L Sayers and the pealing of the bells in Nine Tailors). Freeman Wills Croft was a railway engineer and so when reading Death of a Train, for example, he goes into minute descriptions of how a train was sabotaged. I found it totally engrossing but, as I have already said, did not understand a word of it. No matter. The tension built and built though I was at a loss to understand how he achieved this and I simply could not put it down. This is the favourite of all of his that I have so far read.
He has written 35 books, most of which feature Inspector French though there are some stand alone ones. The Groote Park Murder which I am reading at the moment is such an one.
I have mentioned in my review of the Lorac reprints that her detective, Inspector McDonald, reminds me of Roderick Alleyn a bit as he is a tall elegant man with charm and a wry sense of humour. French is rather different. He is described as being slightly plump but has a cheery happy manner that he employs to relax people and get the best out of them. He does suffer a bit from pomposity as he has a propensity to be overly pleased with himself when he has a solution to the problem, usually with a flash of insight in the middle of the night. But he is rather endearing.
So far I have read 15 and another twenty or so to go. So with these two authors I feel I am going to be kept very busy indeed.
I do love the Golden Age of Detection and there are still so many authors to discover. Too many books, too little time.....
