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    The Dead Shall be Raised and The Murder of a Quack
    Unavailable
    The Dead Shall be Raised and The Murder of a Quack
    Unavailable
    The Dead Shall be Raised and The Murder of a Quack
    Ebook382 pages6 hours

    The Dead Shall be Raised and The Murder of a Quack

    By George Bellairs and Martin Edwards

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

    "[W]orthy of Agatha Christie at her fiendish plotting best." —Booklist STARRED review

    Two classic cases featuring Detective Inspector Littlejohn.

    In the winter of 1940, the Home Guard unearth a skeleton on the moor above the busy town of Hatterworth. Twenty-three years earlier, the body of a young textile worker was found in the same spot, and the prime suspect was never found—but the second body is now identified as his. Soon it becomes clear that the true murderer is still at large...

    * * *

    Nathaniel Wall, the local quack doctor, is found hanging in his consulting room in the Norfolk village of Stalden—but this was not a suicide. Against the backdrop of a close-knit country village, an intriguing story of ambition, blackmail, fraud, false alibis and botanical trickery unravels.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSourcebooks
    Release dateOct 3, 2017
    ISBN9781464207358
    Unavailable
    The Dead Shall be Raised and The Murder of a Quack
    Author

    George Bellairs

    George Bellairs was the pseudonym of Harold Blundell (1902–1985), an English crime author best known for the creation of Detective-Inspector Thomas Littlejohn. Born in Heywood, near Lancashire, Blundell introduced his famous detective in his first novel, Littlejohn on Leave (1941). A low-key Scotland Yard investigator whose adventures were told in the Golden Age style of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, Littlejohn went on to appear in more than fifty novels, including The Crime at Halfpenny Bridge (1946), Outrage on Gallows Hill (1949), and The Case of the Headless Jesuit (1950). In the 1950s Bellairs relocated to the Isle of Man, a remote island in the Irish Sea, and began writing full time. He continued writing Thomas Littlejohn novels for the rest of his life, taking occasional breaks to write standalone novels, concluding the series with An Old Man Dies (1980).

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    Reviews for The Dead Shall be Raised and The Murder of a Quack

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This book contains a pair of Scotland Yard Inspector Littlejohn murder investigations. Each story is set in the English countryside during World War 2, although the war effort plays little or no role in the stories.They are essentially police procedural whodunits narrated by Inspector Littlejohn. The inspector's thorough and slightly plodding sleuthing results in the unmasking of the killers in each of the stories.For me, Bellairs excels in his descriptions of the people the inspector interviews in the course of his investigations and the communities in which the crimes have occurred. The characters make the plots secondary to the storytelling.Martin Edwards's Introduction is as usual interesting background to the stories as well as the authorThe stories are good but relatively unexciting reading.
    • 3/5
      A mixed bag for me -- I found The Dead Shall Be Raised to be a real slog, but eventually managed to force myself to finish it. Murder of a Quack, on the other hand, was a quick read and quite enjoyable. And I didn't notice any racist comments in this one, unlike the others I've read.
    • 3/5
      An unusual double volume, with two short novels, each written in 1942.The first, The Dead Shall Be Raised, is by far the lesser book. The plot, involving a corpse from the WWI era being dug up by the Home Guard in the early part of WWII, is fairly interesting, but the story lacks that marvelous spark of humor that makes most Littlejohn mysteries so enjoyable.The second, The Murder of a Quack, is delightful. A hilarious opening scene has a police constable, who is well-meaning but unsure of himself, struggle with finding a corpse in a locked osteopath’s examining room. This sets the tone for the entire story, and the plot becomes rather secondary to the characters and their foibles. Old crimes, counterfeiting, blackmail, a second murder—this book has it all. Littlejohn isn’t flashy, or brilliant, or even particularly witty. He’s a good, patient, dedicated detective who will work as long and carefully as he needs to in order to solve crimes.I gave the first story two stars (it’s well below Bellairs’ best work), and Murder of a Quack four stars, so a combined three resulted. I’ve been happy to have found a new-to-me author whose books aren’t taxing, but still quite satisfying. Bellairs said, more or less, that his original idea wasn’t to set the world on fire with his prose, but to give British readers mysteries that would be absorbing enough to distract them from the horrors of the war. I’m so glad he did—these are perfect anti-stress reads without being sappy in any way. I hope more readers will give him a try.
    • 3/5
      The book was sent to me by the publisher Poisoned Pen Press via Netgalley. Thank you..These two novellas, each about 150 pages, were written during the height of WWII and provided a means for mystery fans to escape to a place where evil is punished and the rule of law prevails. They can be classified as cozy mysteries with minimum gore and a good puzzle to solve.The first selection The Dead Shall Be Raised finds Detective-Inspector Littlejohn on a Christmas holiday to visit his wife who has been staying in the Pennines to avoid the London blitz. She has become friends with the wife of Superintendent Haworth and it is only natural that the husbands would like each other. When the body of a presumed murderer is discovered by the Home Guard, a twenty year old murder investigation is reopened. If the murderer did not kill the victim, who did? And who killed him? The two policemen have to chase down witnesses still alive and depend on the interviews and notes of the retired policemen, When an important witness is himself murdered it is obvious that someone does not want the truth to be discovered.In The Dead Shall Be Raised a popular bonesetter (chiropractor?) is murdered and Littlejohn has to find out why anyone would harm the popular old man. Was it his nephew who stood to inherit his uncle’s money. Or was it someone else who became worried because the victim seemed to be too interested in some past crimes. Does someone in the village have a criminal past to hide?These are both very readable stories. A bonus is the look at how folks coped during WWII. However, there are some descriptions that took me out of the story. It was jarring to see the phrase “n….. in the woodpile” and to read a description of a pompous magistrate as having “Negroid features and bulging eyes.” But casual racism was a fact of life in the 1940’s. It shows how far we have come and that is a very good thing.
    • 3/5
      Ok but didn't really find them all that interesting or involving.