Initially, L. J. Hurst worked in the backrooms of the media industry. He now divides his time between work for an international scientific publisher and a rather more British independent bookseller. In years past he was a regular attendee at the Shots on the Page Festivals from whence Shots Mag sprung
DEATH IN WHITE PYJAMAS & DEATH KNOWS NO CALENDAR by John Bude
THE WOMAN IN THE WARDROBE, by Peter Shaffer
This review of three novels in two volumes is written on the supermarket cereal box principle: the content is a lot less than you would hope from the container. The Woman in the Wardrobecan be recommended as a light-weight whodunnit, particularly for its detective, “Mr Verity”, a gruff old cove in the Dr Fell or Gervase Fen line, and its setting, a seaside town very much like Mapp and Lucia’s Tilling.
The two John Budes are a trial and not a legal one. While you get nearly 450 pages for your £8.99 you are paying for filler. Death In White Pyjamas (1944) is over half way through before the murder takes place, and though the method has been set up earlier, the majority of the story is a country house drama of a failing acting company and the character contests between members whose motives for murder are spelled out blatantly.
Death Knows No Calendar (1942) was worse to my mind, as the amateur detective, Major Tom Boddy, is even more uncomprehending than Nigel Bruce’s Dr Watson in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmesfilms. As with Death In White Pyjamas, the set-up is overlong, while the final revelations of motive and the fiery denouement are rushed.
What can be praised in all three titles is the murder method. The revelation in The Woman in the Wardrobe of how the victim came to be shot in the back a second time in a locked room is a fine case of poetic justice.
Some people might be “murderees” (I think Martin Amis coined the term, for people who are obvious victims) but it does require a lot of suspension of disbelief to read about John Bude’s victims. Death Knows No Calendar’s murderer has killed once, is only just stopped from killing again using a frightfully complicated infernal device, and would be a master of deception if his murder method did not require its victim to be prepared to stay in a room that smells of petrol. The murder method in Death in White Pyjamas is fiendish and grotesque and therefore, paradoxically, more gripping to read – Bude makes it complicatedly mechanical but even in a simpler form it would be horribly evil.
It is not a great recommendation, though, to say “Read these books because the revelation is so well done” if one cannot say the same about everything that has gone before, and while there are other titles in the British Library Crime Classics series that deserve that credit. In John Bude’s case that includes books by John Bude.
