POLICE AT THE FUNERAL - Margery Allingham

From 1931 we have Albert Campion solving the murder of a loathed nephew in a country house, a house still living in Victorian times run by the 80 year old matriarch.

Its pretty standard whodunnit fare, lots of suspects and red herrings strewn about. All the information is given to the reader to solve the mystery but it plods along so pedantically it gets to the stage where the reader couldn't be bothered.

This is the fourth Campion novel by Allingham and evidently the series picked up,so perhaps this one was an off day rather than representative of the entire series. (Published 1931)

THE FOUR FALSE WEAPONS - John Dickson Carr

If you like locked room mysteries or old fashioned crime stories with no gratuitous violence, you'll like this book.

Published in 1948, its from the 'golden age' of the crime novel. Clever plots revolving around a corpse that nobody in the novel is particuarly fond of - so there's no mourning or anything like that, just the unravelling of 'who dunnit'.

John Dickson Carr or Carter Dickson or Carr Dickson or Roger Fairbairn was a prolific crime writer , he wrote approximately 70 crime novels, plus plays and short story collections.

This novel here features a corpse which of course has been murdered, with a plethora of murder weapons and suspects.

It is left up to ex-Surete master detective Henri Bencolin to solve it. This French detective is no where as annoying as the Belgium detective created by a contemporary of Mr. Carr's.

But solve it he does and it takes some figuring out.

The most interesting thing in the book is a card game called Basset, which is very rarely played due to the fact that it can ruin a punter very quickly. But the explanation and the card play itself are much better that anything Ian Fleming wrote in Casino Royale.

And lastly, this was first published in 1948 but the edition I have is a Great Pan published in 1961 and I just love the art work and the effort that went into the covers of these novels.