DEATH OF JEZEBEL

An impossible crime featuring a severely limited number of suspects returns to print for the first time since 1949.

Seven years after Johnny Wise killed himself upon discovering his fiancee, Perpetua Kirk, in a compromising position with actor Earl Anderson, the surviving parties are reunited for a medieval stage pageant managed by sugar daddy Edgar Port that features a castle, knights in armor, a damsel in distress, and more violent death. No less than three characters—Perpetua, Earl, and enticing, blackmailing Isabel Drew—receive anonymous notes telling them they’re going to be murdered. As icing on the cake, Inspector Cockrill, an acquaintance of Perpetua’s who’s come down to London from Kent for a police conference, gets his own note assuring him that it’s no joke. One of the threatened parties, strangled and tossed from the stage castle balcony in front of hundreds of eyewitnesses by a killer who somehow got past Susan Betchley, the wardrobe mistress stationed at the set’s only entrance, fails to survive opening night, and a second is found soon afterward strangled and decapitated. Nostalgic readers who know their Brand (1907-88) will expect a mind-boggling set of complications, a playful atmosphere that extends to dubbing stage knight Brian Bryan “Brian Two-Times” and 17-year-old knight George Exmouth “Motherdear,” and an endless series of false climaxes based on mendacious confessions and carefully planted red herrings before the curtain finally comes down. An additional bonus is the rivalry between rumpled Cockrill and oblivious DI Charlesworth from Scotland Yard.

Despite the inspector’s claim that “this is not a detective novel,” that’s exactly what it is, in spades.