To Davy Jones Below
Murder aboard a trans-Atlantic liner in 1923–what a perfect setting for a by-the-clues detective story! Daisy Dalrymple, in her ninth mystery adventure, has just married Detective Inspector Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard, and they’re off to America so he can give Mr. Hoover some help in organizing his new Investigation Bureau.
As in the snowbound manor house, a staple of many a British (and American) mystery, being on board ship means the suspects have nowhere to go. While the plot is not quite up to Agatha Christie standards–not if I knew the key to the mystery some 150 pages before the newlywed Fletchers–it’s still a delicious pleasure to read a detective story which is exactly that. Lots of interrogations, false leads, blunt instruments and other old-fashioned paraphernalia, in other words, in a time and place (mid-ocean) quite capably evoked.
