Forgotten Book - Death in Budapest

It's often forgotten just how many Golden Age detective novels - not just thrillers by the likes of Ethel Lina White or Francis Beeding - written by British authors are set in foreign, exotic (at least at that time) locations. Agatha Christie was responsible for plenty, of course, while E.R. Punshon ventured to the south of France, Freeman Wills Crofts fictionalised a Mediterranean cruise holiday, and so on. Today, my focus is on another example. Death in Budapest, by Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell (that is, Eric Maschwitz) is an entry from 1937 in their series featuring Inspector Simon Spears. My own copy of this book bears the above inscription from one of the co-authors: 'To Mother - to add to her collection of other responsibilities! with love from Val.'

Gielgud and Maschwitz were colleagues at the BBC in its early days, two dynamic and talented innovators who played an important part in the Corporation's development. Maschwitz became a renowned songwriter, while Gielgud eventually moved into television. Gielgud, unlike his friend, remained committed to crime fiction and was one of the early chairmen of the CWA. He sounds to me like a fascinating man.

Both men had continental, Jewish heritage, and their fascination with Europe gives their story set in Hungary (which has a few wry observations about the treatment of Jews, as well as about the Nazis) an added tang. It's a very readable story which reunites the two BBC men, Julian Caird and Max Wycherley, who appeared in the authors' most famous novel, Death at Broadcasting House. I suspect there was an element of self-portrait in both characters.

The duo travel to Hungary for a well-earned holiday, only to find that they are staying in a hotel where an international police conference is taking place, and their old acquaintance Spears is attending. So, in an amusing if minor diversion that doesn't entirely enhance the credibility of the story, are all the top detectives of fiction, including Wimsey, Poirot, Father Brown, and Mr Fortune. I was also entertained by discussion about the famous murderous m.o. in Dorothy L. Sayers' Unnatural Death.

We learn that Caird, like Wimsey (and Gideon Fell, Nicholas Slade, and Carolus Deene) is a Balliol men, and he encounters someone he knew at college who has now transformed himself into an opera singer, the tenor Arturo Cecil. Cecil is besotted, for reasons I found hard to fathom, with a truly awful diva called Beatrice Rocca, whose rascally husband is pursuing an affair with an equally unlovable Hungarian singer. Meanwhile, Caird falls for a young American woman who wants to become a detective.

Needless to say, murder follows. The essential plot of the story didn't greatly appeal to me, but overall that didn't really matter. The tourist stuff does involve quite a lot of padding, but Gielgud and Maschwitz have such fun with the material that I found myself carried along quite merrily.