REVIEWED BY BOB ADEY:

   

JOHN BOLAND – Negative Value. Boardman, UK, hardcover, 1960. No US edition.

   The Earl of Staves is being blackmailed on account of some compromising photographs of his daughter. She commits suicide and he gives the job of investigating the matter to an employee, John Poynder. Poynder, although not a professional sleuth, soon discovers that other members of the debutante set have also been blackmailed and with the help of attractive Druscilla Lane, he eventually unmasks the criminals.

   The first part of the book is by far the best and the author paints a convincing, if unattractive, picture of the deb scene, But the investigation itself is a little disappointing and rather fortuitous (though Poynder is of course only an amateur). The Earl himself came over as rather an unsympathetic character and one might have hoped for a twist in the tail [sic] that gave him something of his desserts. There isn’t any.

   Light, undemanding, relatively uncomplicated.

– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 4, Number 2 (April, 1981). Permission granted by publisher/editor Jeff Meyerson.

   
UPDATE: John Boland, who died in 1976, and who is not the John [C.] Boland still active today, has over two dozen crime novels in Hubin under his own name and two as James Trevor. Practically unknown in the US, he was the author of The League of Gentlemen (1958), which was filmed in the UK the next year. If ever John Poynder appeared in another novel with a case to solve, Hubin does not know about it.