Forgotten Book - Men for Pieces

Thanks to Steve Barge, who blogs as The Puzzle Doctor (and if you don't know his blog, it really is consistently interesting and I recommend it unreservedly) and Dean Street Press, most of Brian Flynn's long-neglected detective novels are available again at modest prices. I've read several of them, and the latest is Men For Pieces, which was the 36th Anthony Bathurst mystery and first hit the shelves in 1949.

The title comes from Omar Khayyam, suggesting that Brian Flynn was keen on literature. However, it has to be said that his own writing was unsophisticated. He was mostly published by John Long, whose main market was the libraries and they don't seem to have bothered much with the tedious task of editing. I could quote innumerable examples of Flynn's clunky prose, but perhaps this simple example will suffice: 'Senora Garcia looked incredulously surprised.' 

But even if Flynn wasn't, in terms of the quality of his prose, a good writer, he was a pretty good storyteller and more specifically he had a real gift for coming up with interesting ideas for mysteries. At the time this book appeared, he had been published for almost a quarter of a century, and there were times when I felt the padded and ornate style suggested a certain loss of energy. 

A young man who works for a bank goes missing unexpectedly, and a young woman who is devoted to him becomes concerned. She involves Bathurst and he discovers the missing man's body - an apparent suicide. There's a lot of inconclusive discussion, and no shortage of red herrings, one of them (an enigmatic note) a bit irritating - but the story really comes alive in the later stages. After a slow start, the puzzle proves to be unexpectedly ingenious. I'm not convinced, mind you, that Flynn plays totally fair with the reader in the way that he presents some information, especially relating to two key characters.

Good editors make a big difference to their authors. For instance, I have no doubt that my own writing has benefited from the work of several very good editors over a long period of time. Brian Flynn's writing gives me the impression of an affable man - in this book, for example, there's a very witty reference to a crime writer called Charles Wogan, which happens to be his own pen-name - and I think he would probably have been receptive had his editor made a serious effort to help him to improve his writing skills. Ruthless editing of the first two-thirds of this book would have improved it, for sure. Nevertheless, in all the books of his that I've read, there has - at the very least - been something of real merit that made me glad that I've overcome my reservations about his style. So I'll be very happy to read more.