Glover, Robert -- Murderer's Maze (1951)

A one-off from an otherwise apparently unknown author. The book gets off to a good start: mad inventor James Wilde is dying, and his loathed relatives and employees gather round his deathbed: petulant Edward, money-strapped Henry, an archaeologist, Arthur Finch, once James's assistant, now fired, and Rita Avalon, Edward's secretary. James has made a most peculiar Will: his fortune has been converted to gemstones, and after his death one of the other four will be given a clue to its location. Should they die before they find it, another clue will go to the second of them, and so on. Doctor Paston, James's private physician, pronounces his client dead, and the race is on.

Carr could have worked wonders with a notion like this, but Glover is no Carr. By page 23 Edward, Henry and Finch are all dead, and Rita Avalon is due to come into possession of her clue. Luckily she has two faithful male devotees: her boyfriend Peter Studd and Finch's downstairs neighbour, Rob Robinson. Rob writes detective stories, which apparently elevates him to two-fisted tough-guy status, while poor Studd is relegated to following orders and getting coshed at regular intervals. Everyone but Rita gets coshed quite frequently, in fact, and it's a miracle that most of them come through without major brain damage. Rob has a run-in with the suave Major Rivers, who owns a nightclub, automatically marking him as a villain of the first water, with apparently unlimited resources. Rita and Studd are abducted, Rob goes after them, and by the halfway mark the book has settled down to an interminable sequence of chases and counter-chases. Nobody is remotely surprised when the psychotic James reappears from a secret passage, or when his mind clears at the moment of death and he forgives everyone. It's that kind of book.

But it's still quite readable, and the best thing in it is the urbane Major Rivers, who very nearly manages to demonstrate his complete innocence in the teeth of overwhelming evidence. Villains like this really should be up against James Bond, not an author surrogate whose only method of dealing with crime is to dash back and forth at high speed.

Jon.