A Man Lay Dead (1934)
Blurb:
My review:
A preposterous tale that can only be excused by the fact that it was the author’s apprentice work, obviously to Sayers and Christie. The situation is wholly generic: murder is done under cover of ‘The Murder Game,’ and all the suspects boast cast-iron alibis. The murderer’s is clever rather than convincing, but even this is undone by the complete absence of clues. It is not, however, the central murder that damns the novel, but the sheer badness of the extraneous elements. The fatuousness is embarrassing: Alleyn and Bathgate are both at the nadir of their ingenuousness, while the passages with grubby brats are irritating in the extreme. The final straw is the intrusive and irrelevant “Russian element,” which badly dates the tale; indeed, the preposterous bratsvo-torture scenes are reminiscent of Walling and Wallace at their worst. The previous owner showed his disapproval by scribbling Cyrillics in the margins.