His Own Appointed Day, first published by Collins Crime Club in 1965, was D.M. Devine's fourth crime novel. The paperback edition came out three years later and the back cover included this review from Julian Symons in The Sunday Times: 'A real detective story in the classical tradition...The answers in the final chapter came as a total surprise.' High praise from someone who was supposed not to be keen on classical detective stories.
So I had high expectations when I started reading and I can say right away that I was not disappointed. This is a book which shows not only Devine's considerable skill as a writer of whodunits but also his ability to create interesting characters and unusual scenarios. It really is surprising to me that his work is not better known. The only explanation that springs to mind is that he was writing at at time when ingenious plotting had fallen out of fashion. He also (like Symons) perhaps suffered from the lack of a regular series character.
We begin with a sixteen year old schoolboy called Ian Pratt. He's clever but difficult, and there are some indications that his behaviour has changed recently for the worse, although we don't know why. He is determined to leave school and home behind him, but then he disappears. The lack of interest in his disappearance at first is quite striking, but once a cop called Nicolson takes an interest in the case (and also in Ian's sister Eileen). a puzzling set of circumstances emerges.
Devine is very good here - as he was in The Sleeping Tiger - at shifting suspicion from one suspect to another, and doing so quite credibly. He published thirteen novels prior to his relatively early death at the age of 60, first as D.M. Devine and then writing as Dominic Devine. I've read less than half of them so far, but I've enjoyed everything of his that I've read and I'm keen to discover the rest of his work.
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