THE BACKWARD REVIEWER
William F. Deeck


PETER PIPER [THEO LANG] – The Corpse That Came Back. Random House, US, hardcover, 1954. First published in the UK: Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1952, as Death in the Canongate.

   The fairly portly chess-playing Detective-Inspector O. (as in Oliver, though his name isn’t Oliver) Gray of Scotland Yard is in Edinburgh to attend as many concerts as possible at the International Festival. When the local police ask him to take a hand in the investigation of the appearance of the corpse of Bailie Andrew Maclachlan, who had planned his own funeral to the minutest detail and had been cremated, or so everyone thought, Gray disrupts, but only a little, his plans.

   He manages to get in his sightseeing, giving readers a splendid rendering of the tourist’s Edinburgh, and the musical offerings of the Festival while discovering why the corpse has turned up most unexpectedly.

   A police procedural both interesting and amusing, one of seemingly only two featuring Gray. This is a pity, for Gray is a delightful character.

   According to Random House, Lang wrote under a pseudonym while he was in the British Army during World War II because he didn’t want to go through the red tape of getting permission to write. After writing several books on walking trips, Lang wrote a series of books about the antiquities of Scotland.

— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1989.


Bibliographic Notes:   Bill was in error, or rather two, when he wrote up his notes on this book. There were three Inspector Gray books, the other two being Murder After the Blitz (Hurst, 1943) and Death Came in Straw (Hurst, 1945), neither of which had US editions and hence are as scarce as hen’s teeth today. And Piper’s real name was Theo Langbehn, although he did write one mystery as Theo Lang.

   As Peter Piper, he wrote two other works of crime fiction, both in Hubin, with no series characters noted. What has always been a problem for me, is trying to keep from being confused between the author Peter Piper, and the character Katherine “Peter” Piper, who appeared in seven works of detection fiction by Amelia Reynolds Long, but I think I finally have them straight now.