Forgotten Book - Death at Hallows End

The starting point for Leo Bruce's 1965 Death at Hallows End is the mysterious disappearance of a solicitor. Duncan Humby seems to have vanished into thin air while visiting a remote village called Hallows End. There he intended to see a client called Grossiter, who wanted to change his will. In the time-honoured fashion of characters in detective novels who are about to disinherit people, Grossiter has also died, albeit apparently of natural causes.

The police have got nowhere as regards finding the missing lawyer so his partner, Thripp, asks Carolus Deene to help. When Carolus goes to Hallows End, he encounters - as usual in these novels - an entertaining range of individuals, including a pub landlord with a taste for trendy dialogue, and a chap called Stonegate who is determined to get as much publicity as he can for being the last man to see the missing solicitor. But is his evidence reliable?

Carolus believes that the best place to start making enquiries is the local pub, a nice idea, I think. There are a few interesting plot twists and in the end, Carolus explains everything as a sort of after-dinner entertainment for his headmaster, a policeman, and a few others who are connected in some way with the case. There's a slight element of anti-climax to this, but arguably it's a better way of ending a book than a contrived scene in which the hero's life is unnecessarily endangered by a decision to confront the villain without back-up.

I did feel, however, that there were some signs that Rupert Croft-Cooke (who wrote as Leo Bruce) was getting either a bit lazy or a bit bored with the Carolus Deene stories by the time he wrote this one - the fourteenth in the series. There are occasionally inelegant passages - and this from an author who could at his best be very stylish - for which one can possibly blame the proof reader or copy editor. There are also one or two devices that I recognised as reworked versions of ingredients from his earlier books. Perhaps he was in a rush to meet a deadline. Yet despite some shortcomings, this is a readable entertaining story which merits revival.