Death in Ambush by Susan Gilruth is to be published as a British Library Crime Classic in the run-up to Christmas this year. It's described on the cover as 'a lost Christmas murder mystery' and this is true enough. At the time of writing, there isn't a single copy of this one available for sale, anywhere in the world.
Inevitably, this prompts the question - is it any good? And my answer is - yes, definitely. I expect this book to become a popular title when it hits the shelves, because it ticks a lot of boxes so far as vintage crime fans are concerned. This is a village poisoning mystery with a lively female narrator, Liane 'Lee' Crauford, who has come to stay with her friends the Sandys family in the run-up to Christmas and finds herself, rather to her delight, embroiled in a murder puzzle.
A particular reason for her delight is that the official investigation is led by a Scotland Yard man, Hugh Gordon, whom she met in Gilruth's first book. It's obvious that Lee and Hugh have a thing for each other; indeed, they make surprisingly little effort to hide the fact. What is interesting and unusual about this for the time is that Lee is married - her husband Bill is away on a training course, so unable to join her at Staple Green until Christmas.
I'm grateful to both Barry Pike and Jamie Sturgeon, both of whom are fans of Gilruth, for giving me information about her and her novels. I'm not going to anticipate my introduction to the new edition in any detail, but suffice to say that this book dates from the early Fifties and was the second of seven books featuring Lee and Hugh Gordon and charting their developing relationship over the years. Gilruth's last novel came out in 1963, but on the evidence of this book, she doesn't deserve the obscurity into which she's fallen.
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