MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH – Remains to be Seen. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1976. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1976.

   Two minor bureaucrats in an obscure Washington office. to justify their salaries not to mention their jobs, start in motion a chain of unlikely events that brings the close attention of several world powers down upon the British descendants of a Russian prince who escaped the Bolsheviks two generations before.

   That two of Davydov’s sons, now named Davis, are undertakers is quite crucial to the Plot and to the success that the third son, a dreamer and a fourth-rate poet, has in finally finding himself and quite rightly rising to the occasion.

   With some quick shuffling of a dead body or two (you knew?) and a hi-de-do comic routine as minor everyday problems escalate out of control. Butterworth entertains without ever producing real in-the-aisle laughter, lacking the spark of truly insane genius that would set the affair out of the ordinary.

Rating: C plus.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 2, No. 4, July 1978.


Bibliographic Notes:   Michael Butterworth (1924-1986) has thirteen books listed in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, all non-series books such as this one. He also wrote two books as by William Dobson, three books as by Sarah Kemp (series character: Dr Tina May), seven as by Carola Salisbury, and one as by Anne-Marie Sheridan.