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Lend a Hand to Murder

Page history last edited by Jon 15 years ago

Creasey, John as Michael Halliday - Lend a Hand to Murder (1948)

 

Promising title for a routine thriller. Food lorries are being hijacked in post-war Britain. When Mr. Parkinson, an employee of a food supply firm, is killed, his colleague Martin Lester is suspected -- and not just by the police. Several people pay a visit to his boarding-house to retrieve papers he is believed to have stolen from Parkinson; among them the delectable Isabella Crane. Martin, of course, is innocent, and when he falls in love with Isabella the police decide to try and use him in their search for the inevitable mastermind behind the gang.

 

Creasey fans will be able to fill in the rest from the thirty or forty similar novels he wrote under one name or another. There is nothing really wrong with this one but nothing of particular interest or value either. Other thriller writers -- Charteris, Wallace, Buchan and even Dornford Yates spring to mind -- always seem to have had some kind of motivating passion. Charteris had his loathing for the nanny state, Buchan his love of the countryside, Wallace his affection for the Thames and Yates his good old Anglo-Saxon snobbery. Creasey's works are pure surface by comparison. The components are slotted together moderately well, but not one word in the book indicates that it was written by a real person with emotions and appetites. Torture, murder and abduction are used purely as convenient plot devices, and nobody really gives a hoot about the predictable surprise at the end. When computers write thrillers, this is the kind they will write.

 

Chinese food for the mind.

 

Jon.

 

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