Forgotten Book - This is the House

I've mentioned the crime fiction of Shelley Smith (the pen-name of Nancy Bodington) admiringly on this blog quite a few times over the years. Yet for some reason I've never got round to reading her third book, which dates from 1945 - even though I must have owned a copy for twenty years or more. This is the House was the first of her novels to be published in the Collins Crime Club, following two which appeared under a less prestigious imprint. The publishers describe her here as an author of 'outstanding merit', and I agree.

This is the House is an ambitious detective novel, full of interesting ingredients, especially by the standards of its time. Yet one has to bear in mind that it is, to an extent, an apprentice work, and I'd be the first to admit that it has several flaws. It has, however, earned rapturous reviews from such good judges as John Norris as well prompting a rather mixed reaction from Kate Jackson and Steve Barge

The title comes from the nursery rhyme 'The House that Jack Built', a rhyme which supplied a title for a very different detective novel, much later, by Eileen Dewhurst. However, I wasn't convinced that the use of the rhyme was much more than a gimmick. There's also a 'sort of' locked room mystery - the second murder in the book - which had a rather unsatisfactory explanation.

There's a pleasing amateur detective, Quentin Seal, who happens to write detective novels, and above all an unusual if fictitious setting in Apostle Island, most southerly of the Windward Islands. The local colour is well done, although now it's extremely dated. One of the characters has a pet gibbon and there's a Ukrainian refugee in the cast of characters. A mixed bag in more ways than one. But Shelley Smith would continue to develop her crime writing skills over the next decade, to considerable effect.