Geoffrey Valentine Galwey, who wrote as G.V. Galwey, was one of the many people who worked in advertising who also tried their hand at writing crime novels. Galwey sounds like an interesting man and is described in his obituary in The Independent as a 'Dickensian character'. He only published three novels, but two of them were reprinted as green Penguins - quite an achievement. The Penguins aren't hard to find, though I've never seen a hardback edition of any of his books.
I was drawn to The Lift and the Drop (1948) by the blurb, which makes clear that this in an unusual variation on the 'whowasdunin' type of mystery. Here, a lift in a large office building is tampered with so that it crashes to the floor, killing several (but not all) of the passengers. Who was the villain trying to kill? A nice premise, for sure.
This novel has two strengths. First, the chief investigator, Inspector Bourne, is an intriguing, three-dimensional character. Galwey evidently enjoyed writing about him. Second, the writing generally is of a high standard, so that even when the story wanders off in unexpected (and, it must be said, not entirely satisfactory) directions, it remains pleasingly readable.
There's an insightful review by the late William F. Deeck here. I share his reservations and I think that this book is clearly the work of an amateur (but definitely talented) crime writer rather than a professional. Galwey spends too much time exploring aspects of the story that he finds interesting rather than focusing on narrative drive. The off-hand way in which the culprit's identity is an example of his casual approach. He appears to have given up writing novels after producing three books; perhaps his heart wasn't really in it. But he was someone with genuine literary gifts and although the plotting of the story doesn't live up to the potential of the premise, I enjoyed it as something a bit out of the ordinary.
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