Frame-Up, first published in 1964, is a characteristically snappy murder mystery by Paul Winterton, who by that time was writing as Andrew Garve and had abandoned his earlier pen-names Roger Bax and Paul Somers. A couple of times in Garve's work, he has author characters bemoan the fact that their publishers like longer books, and this is an excellent example of how Garve favours economy of style, although not at the expense of good storytelling. In fact, if he'd tried to pad this book out beyond its natural length, the story would not have worked as well as it does.
John Lumsden, an artist getting on in years and with perhaps more money than talent, has an unexpected visitor one evening. Not long afterwards, his dead body is discovered in his studio. He has been strangled. This is a case for Chief Inspector Charles Blair (apparently renamed Grant in the US edition for some reason, perhaps to avoid confusion with another writer's character) and his sidekick, Sergeant Harry Dawson.
They only have three credible suspects to consider, and this helps to explain the relatively short length of the novel. These are Lumsden's nephew Mike Ransley, George Otway, who is a sort of protege of Lumsden, and the housekeeper Kathie Bowen, who had her sights set on marrying Lumsden, mainly for his money. I must admit that I tend to prefer whodunits with a bigger pool of suspects, but Garve juggles suspicion around the three candidates with considerable skill.
There's a hoax phone call reminiscent of that in the Wallace case and the story also makes good use of two devices that Garve utilised in several of his detective novels - the framing of someone for a crime they didn't commit, and an ingeniously constructed alibi. One tends to think of Garve as a writer of adventure stories and thrillers rather than as a specialist in classic-style whodunits, but I'm almost tempted to think that he was as good at constructing a clever alibi as that master of the Golden Age, Freeman Wills Crofts.
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