Top Ten Obscure Golden Age novels that deserve to be better known

Following on from last week's post, here's an admittedly idiosyncratic list of obscure Golden Age novels that are fairly hard to find (at the moment) but which in my opinion deserve to be more widely known. One thing that most of them have in common is that they are unorthodox - the books by Connington and Bowers are the only really conventional ones of the type people associate with the Golden Age. I suppose I'm making the point that the Golden Age was more varied than many people believe...

10. Death Has a Past by Anita Boutell. This variant of the "whowasdunin" is set in England but written by a very talented American. What a shame her career was so short.

9. Nightmare by Lynn Brock. An odd book, quite different from his convoluted mysteries starring Colonal Gore, and an ambitious study in psychology. A downbest ending is a flaw, but it's a very interesting book.

8. Poison in the Parish by Milward Kennedy. Kennedy was influenced by Anthony Berkeley, and was almost equally innovative, although not with the same degree of success. This is a fascinating and original spin on the village mystery which deserves to be much better known.

7. No Walls of Jasper by Joanna Cannan. This is a very impressive piece of work, so good that I felt quite distraught when I read the same author's more orthodox novel The Body in the Beck, and found it tedious. But at her best, she really could write. This book is somewhat in the Francis Iles vein, but quite distinctive. It just pushed out of the list Portrait of a Murderer by Anne Meredith, which I also recommend.

6. The Divison Bell Mystery by Ellen Wilkinson. This was the solo detective effort of "Red Ellen", the left wing Labour MP who was a prime mover in the Jarrow Crusade. The House of Commons setting is very well evoked, and the book is free of didacticism. The plot is so-so, but never mind, the story is very readable.

5. The Sweepstake Murder by J.J. Connington. This is a really clever and enthralling story, a fresh take on the "who will be next?" theme that makes And Then There Were None so irresistible.

4. The Grindle Nightmare by Q.Patrick. A very clever mystery with a great US setting and an astonishingly dark storyline. An unforgettable book. I'm very much indebted to John Norris for supplying me with a copy.

3. Middle-Class Murder by Bruce Hamilton. Brother of the better known Patrick, Bruce wrote a few extremely interesting novels. This is very much in the Francis Iles tradition, and is really well done.

2. As for the Woman by Francis Iles. This book was a commercial failure, and marked the end of the novel-writing career of Anthony Berkeley, aka Francis Iles. Hardly anyone seems to like it. So why do I rate it? Because it's an intriguing and unusual novel, which repays careful study. More on this topic in the future.

1. A Deed Without a Name by Dorothy Bowers. My choice of this as number one is, I readily admit, partly influenced by sentiment, but it would be a grim world if there were no place for a bit of sentiment every now and then. It's a nicely clued whodunit of real merit, by a writer of genuine ability and it evokes the "phoney war" nicely. Yes, it is not perfect, but I think it's utterly heartbreaking that Bowers died of TB months after being invited to join the Detection Club and at a time when she hoped her life was changing for the better. Had she lived, I'm confident she would have become a major star. And the good news is, this book is the easiest to find of those on this list. It was reprinted by the splendid Rue Morgue Press a few years ago.

Forgotten Book - The Body in the Beck

I decided to read today's Forgotten Book, The Body in the Beck, for two good reasons. First, the author, Joanna Cannan, was a good writer, as her excellent early novel No Walls of Jasper shows. Second, as the title of the book suggests, this is an early Lake District mystery story The book was first published in 1952, more than half a century before Hannah Scarlett was a gleam in my eye.

The story begins with a well-known Oxford don and mountaineer, Francis Worthington, discovering the eponymous corpse. However, he carries on fell-climbing, and only alerts the police when he returns from his ascent. This is rather typical of Francis, who is just surfacing from an unsatisfactory affair with a married woman. He really doesn't behave as well or as sensibly as he should do.

The body turns out to belong to a nasty piece of work called Hawkins, and Inspector Price from Scotland Yard is summoned to investigate. Price is a memorable character, verbose, puritanical and left-wing. It's plan that Cannan's sympathies were very different from his. Yet Francis really isn't much more likeable and it's small wonder that he becomes the wreteched Price's main suspect. This is rather tedious, since we know he is innocent.

I found Price entertaining and rather different. I also felt Cannan captured the Lakeland atmosphere well. But there is a snag. The detective puzzle itself is hopeless. There are no interesting suspects, the victim is a cipher, and the solution is unpleasant and unsatisfactory. I find it odd that a genuinely gifted writer should have produced a book that is quite so flawed. You guessed it - I was deeply disappointed. I remain an admirer of No Walls of Jasper and I don't rule out reading more of Cannan. But one good character and a great setting are not enough to make a good novel.

Forgotten Book - No Walls of Jasper

Few crime books by notable writers are as forgotten as my Forgotten Book for today, No Walls of Jasper by Joanna Cannan, first published in 1930. Yet the book's neglect is in many ways astonishing, because not only was it ahead of its time, it is also very well-written, and reads extremely well more than 80 years after it first came out. I can only blame its lack of fame on the title, which is taken from a poem by Humbert Wolfe (who? you may ask - he was apparently very popular in the Twenties), and which is rather off-putting and inappropriate.

In some ways, the book is in the same vein as Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles. Yet the Iles book came out a year later, so it was hardly derivative. Another comparison might be with C.S. Forester's earlier novel, Payment Deferred, or possibly Lynn Brock's later Nightmare. But Cannan's book is distinctive, because of its stylish and readable prose, and because a competent plot is in many ways subordinate to a study of character.

Julian Prebble works for a publishing house, and is fed up with his pretty but down-trodden wife, Phyl. He has two sons, of whom he is a proud but distant father, and he does not earn enough to be able to impress a coquettish author on his list, the glamorous Cynthia. However, he does have a rich and rather disagreeable father, and when it occurs to Julian that his Dad's demise would solve all his problems, his thoughts turn to murder.

I really enjoyed this one. It's a book to savour, because Cannan's description of people and relationships, and Julian's desperate quest for respectability ring so true, even so many years later. Joanna Cannan wrote other mysteries, which I haven't read, but if they are half as good as this book, they must be worth reading. She became better known for children's books, and her daughters became famous writers of pony stories. And perhaps that's another reason why No Walls of Jasper has for so long been overlooked. Writers so easily get pigeon-holed, and that is a real shame.