Helpful Score: 1
I didn't think it was as good as the first one of his I read (THE WIND BLOWS DEATH) but it was still interesting to ba back in 1940s England. There's a war on, although we only see it through a few references. I couldn't believe there was actually such a thing as the Bureau of Pin Control, so I looked it up - there wasn't. There was definitely a lot of poking fun at bureaucracy, not to mention mystery writers, but it does take a while for the eventual victim to become a corpse. With a older mystery like this I figured the author would be giving the reader lots of clues, so before the corpse even turned up I tried a tentative but lucky guess at the murderer. And sadly the romance was completely unconvincing. There are a few bits of dialogue that would draw gasps of horror today, just a warning, but all in all it was an enjoyable trip back in time.
