Forgotten Book - The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye

Over the past few years, Dean Street Press have reprinted the work of a wide range of relatively obscure detective novelists. I wrote introductions for books written by Sir Basil Thomson and Winifred Peck, and one of the other revived authors, Peter Drax, also strikes me as very interesting. But I think that probably the best 'find' of all in the extensive DSP catalogue is Brian Flynn. His revival owes everything to the doughty advocacy of Steve Barge, who blogs as The Puzzle Doctor.

Flynn was a writer with plenty of good ideas and he was adept at weaving complicated and sometimes unusual plots. These strengths are on display in The Mystery of the Peacock's Eye, the third in the long series of Anthony Bathurst novels, dating from 1928. This is the first Flynn book that Steve read and, as he explains in his introduction, it's the story which caused him to become a Flynn obsessive. (His intros, by the way, are crisp and informative).

Steve describes it as a 'long-lost classic', and the first thing I must say about the book is that the solution came as a complete surprise to me. I appreciate the cleverness with which I was led up the garden path. I was also amused by the way in which Flynn, who had a weakness for purple prose and a tendency to write in a verbose and old-fashioned way, turned one example of pedantic dialogue into a rather nice clue.

I also rather liked the way in which Flynn used a couple of the most tedious tropes in Golden Age detective fiction - a fabulous jewel taken from India, and a crown prince from one of those Ruritanian countries - and did something unusual with them. Nor is Bathurst as irritating here as in some of the other books by Flynn that I've read. The characterisation is mostly thin, it must be said, and as a result it's not easy to keep some of the characters distinct in one's mind. But this is an enjoyable mystery and well worth reading.