Forgotten Book - More Dead Than Alive

Roger Ormerod (1920-2005) was a member of the first panel of crime writers in which I ever took part, in a local library in Liverpool, quite an unforgettable occasion even if it was more than three decades ago. I remember him as a pleasant, quiet individual, but I never got to know him well. We did, however, have a mutual friend in Eileen Dewhurst and I now have a copy of a book he inscribed to her, More Dead Than Alive (1980), which I feel is a pleasant memento of that long-ago evening we spent together.

Despite the clues on the dust jacket cover, I hadn't realised that this is a locked room mystery until I took a closer look at it. This was the penultimate book in his series featuring private eye David Mallin (who drives a Porsche!), and the story is narrated by Mallin's wife Elsa, but in many ways - in particular because of the focus on plot rather than character or setting - this is a book that is in the Golden Age tradition.

Elsa has been staying at Kilvennan Castle, an eerie old pile on the coast, with her old schoolfriend Clarice, who happens to be married to Konrad Klein, the renowned escapologist, whose act has fallen on hard times. Elsa forms part of a house party in the Golden Age country house tradition, but the socialising is rudely interrupted by Konrad's sudden disappearance from a closed room high above the cliffs. Has he thrown himself out? Is he pulling some kind of stunt? This is the problem that David and his business partner George have to solve.

Roger was a very different writer from, say, John Dickson Carr. Whereas Carr enveloped his puzzles in all kinds of macabre adornments, sometimes with lashings of humour, Roger had a plainer style. But there's no denying that this is an ingenious story, told at pace. The fact that the book was published by Robert Hale, who focused on the library market (he later created two new series and moved to Constable) probably meant that this one soon disappeared without trace, rather like Konrad Klein. But it deserves a better fate than Klein's.