Search Results for 'Patricia Moyes'


REVIEWED BY MARYELL CLEARY:

   

PATRICIA MOYES – Angel Death. Inspector Henry Tibbett #15. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1980. Holt, Rinehart &Winston, US, hardcover, 1981. Henry Holt & Co, US, paperback, 1982.

   Angel Death is a gripping suspense novel set in Moyes’s fictitious group of Caribbean islands. Inspector Henry Tibbett and wife Emmy are on vacation at the small hotel operated by their friends, the Colvilles; they plan a week’s sailing in a rented boat as well. At the Colvilles also is Miss Betsy Sprague, an interesting and lively old lady. On her first leg of the journey back to Britain she unaccountably disappears after making a phone call to tell the Colvilles that she has spotted the daughter of an old friend, a young woman who is supposed to have gone down with her boat.

   Convinced that Betsy has been murdered, the Tibbetts set out to find her killers. In the course of this Henry suddenly changes. His behavior becomes both manic and paranoid. He won’t let Emmy stay on the boat with him; he sends a telegram to Scotland Yard resigning; he takes off sailing with two young couples.

   Does he have a plan which depends on this weird behavior? Or has he been drugged? The Governor and police of the islands suspect him of being subverted by drug smugglers, and issue a warrant for his arrest. While this reader was breathlessly wondering how and when Henry would get back to normal, not one but two hurricanes strike the islands.

   Emmy has an unwonted opportunity to be a detective on her own. Henry turns up on a foundered boat after the first hurricane, his memory for the intervening time confused and mostly lost. The second hurricane brings it back, Together, he and Emmy foil a plot that is much grander than the smuggling of drugs. As usual Moyes brings her people to life and makes all of this wild action seem quite believable.

– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 6, Number 3 (Fall 1985).

PATRICIA MOYES – Who Is Simon Warwick? Henry & Emmy Tibbett #14. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1978. Holt Rinehart & Winston, US, hardcover, 1979. Holt/Owl, paperback, 1982.

   Primarily a legal puzzle, this adventure of Henry Tibbett and wife Emmy also has a murder to be solved, as well as some last minute derring-do. At stake is an inheritance of some million pounds or more, and there are two claimants, both with solid evidence of being a long-lost nephew.

   Barzun & Taylor call this a “mediocre tale,” but is quite often the case, I disagree. I enjoyed it immensely, in spite of Moyes’ tendency toward stiff, formal dialogue. Moreover, Barzun & Taylor don’t seem to know who it was who died — they think it was the nephew — but they claim the “gimmick is visible a mile off.” I guess I’m rather unsophisticated about such matters. It never entered my mind. This is finely tuned detective novel, solidly done.

— Reprinted from Mystery*File #23,, July 1990.

PATRICIA MOYES – Down Among the Dead Men. Henry & Emmy Tibbets #2. Holt Rinehart & Winston, US, hardcover, 1961. Ballantine U2240, US, paperback, April 1965. Henry Holt, US, paperback, 1986. First published in the UK as The Sunken Sailor (Collins, hardcover, 1961).

   When the Tibbetts go on vacation, murder a usual is not far behind. Invited by friends to go sailing for a week in the North Seam they discover themselves instead find the killer of a man temporarily marooned on a fog-covered sandbank.

   For a while in this book there is more talk about boating than I cared to know, but once the mystery begins, the at least full attention is paid to it. There are lots of clues, most very well hidden, and except for a middle portion which sags rather predictably, this is fine stuff.

— Reprinted from Mystery*File #23,, July 1990. (very slightly revised).


Bibliographic Notes:   Henry Tibbett was an Inspector, later Chief Superintendent, with Scotland Yard. Somehow or another, his wife Emmy invariably found herself mixed up in many if not all of his cases. Nineteen of their adventures together were published between 1959 and 1993. Patricia Moyes died in the year 2000 at the age of 77.

PATRICIA MOYES – Black Widower. Henry Holt & Co., US, hardcover, 1975. Penguin, US, paperback, 1977. Owl / Holt Rinehart Winston, US, paperback, 1985. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1975.

   When the racy Lady Ironmonger, wife of the new Tampican ambassador to the United States, promises to become a distinct political liability to her husband’s career, it occurs to someone that murder can sometimes become a necessity. It’s a long way to Scotland Yard from the Georgetown section of this nation’s capital, but since Tampica is a newly independent British colony, the few minutes of delicate diplomatic maneuvering that it takes to get Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett involved are easily managed.

   A deal for a U.S. naval base on the island turns out to be quite important, and with the scene jumping back and forth between Washington in springtime and the breath-taking vistas of the Caribbean, one looks forward with anticipation to the eventual unraveling of all the little secrets that the staff of a minor embassy can possess.

   However. Moyes seems to be greatly out of her depth working with a motive depending so greatly on high finance and international politics. The feeling is overwhelming that she’d feel much more at home with the domestic malice of the “body in the library” sort of tale. Some characters, never well defined, remain murky to the end, and with such an obvious clue as to the killer’s identity, I can only say I wasn’t overly impressed.

Rating:   C plus.

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

PATRICIA MOYES – Death and the Dutch Uncle. Holt Rinehart & Winston; hardcover, 1968. Owl, paperback, 1983. Original UK edition: Collins Crime Club, hardcover, 1968.

PATRICIA MOYES Death and the Dutch Uncle

   After not reading her books for years, for no good reason I can think of, I’ve recently enjoyed several of Patricia Moyes’ detective novels, coming to think of her as one of the few remaining practitioners of the old-fashioned detective novel.

   As this book shows, however, she should stay away from writing thrillers, or books where Inspector Tibbett (and wife Emmy) get tangled into international intrigue.

   It begins innocently enough, with the gangland slaying of a small time gambler and miscellaneous hoodlum (appropriately nicknamed “Flutter Byers”) in a private bar. What connection could there be between this death and PIFL (the Permanent International Frontier Litigation)? A recent squabble between two obscure African nations brings this backwater London agency into the headlines, and Tibbett surprisingly finds himself right in the thick of it.

   As long as he stays in London, he seems to be on solid ground. It’s when he takes off for Holland (with wife Emmy) as part of a one-man (plus wife) effort to save one of the members of PIFL from an assassin’s bullet that that the novel began to lose its way.

   Not even the mention, several times over, of Inspector van der Valk helps that much, although it does give Tibbett some sort of support in a jurisdiction the recently promoted Scotland Yard superintendent simply doesn’t have. (Van der Valk himself never makes an appearance.) And of course Emmy gets into trouble…

   What I objected to even more, however, was the clumsy attempt to have a clue that means nothing to the reader (*) become a major key to the mystery. Moyes then compounds the insult by refusing to let us in on the explanation Henry gives Emmy on page 171.

   A minor matter, perhaps, but after spending as much time on this case as I had up till then, I thought I deserved something more than being blown off like this.

    (*) Well, unless you know Dutch, that is. I certainly don’t, and I’m also still miffed about the time it took to go back through the previous 170 pages to see if there was anybody with the name Filomeel I’d missed. (As it turns out, I did and I didn’t.)

Rating:   D plus.

— This review was intended to appear in Mystery*File 35. It was first published in Deadly Pleasures, Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1993 (somewhat revised).


[UPDATE] 10-16-11.   As you can tell, I felt let down by this one. What I can’t tell you is anything more about the book than this. I don’t remember it, not at all.

   Let me return, though, to my first paragraph, in which I referred to Moyes as one of the last practitioners of the old-fashioned (British) detective novel. I still believe this to be true, some 18 years later, though of course there have been some contenders who have come along since then.

   Kathi Maio’s 1001 Midnights review of A Six-Letter Word for Death, to be found here on this blog, agrees with this stance. On the other hand, I fear that in the same passage of 18 years, Patricia Moyes has become all but forgotten. I can’t say why, and perhaps it is not so. Opinions welcome!

A REVIEW BY MARYELL CLEARY:
   

PATRICIA MOYES – Who Is Simon Warwick?   Holt Rinehart & Winston, US, hardcover, 1979. Paperback reprint: Owl Books, 1982. UK edition: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1978.

PATRICIA MOYES Death on the Agenda

   Moyes brings the classic “missing heir” theme up to date in this suspenseful mystery. In a fit of remorse toward the end of his life, Lord Charlton makes his American-adopted nephew his sole heir. On Lord Charlton’s death, his “modestly-situated solicitor” Ambrose Quince has the responsibility of finding the nephew, if possible.

   Two claimants turn up, both with papers to prove their identity. Then one is murdered, and the other is the obvious suspect. But, to Inspector Henry Tibbett, nothing is that obvious. There are others who would benefit if the missing heir stayed missing, and the remaining claimant might well be eliminated in one way or another.

   Curious questions arise: how did each claimant come by the papers each had? Why does the remaining one so strenuously insist that his wife not come to England to be with him in his trial for murder? Why was Lord Charlton so sure that he would have recognized his missing nephew?

   Though readers may have their suspicions about the murderer, the suspense does not let up until a spine-tingling trap closes in the final pages.

– Reprinted from The Poisoned Pen, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 1986.



Editorial Comment: Maryell’s review of Death on the Agenda, also by Moyes, appeared here earlier on this blog.

A REVIEW BY MARYELL CLEARY:
   

PATRICIA MOYES – Death on the Agenda. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1962. Holt Rinehart & Winston, US, hc, 1962. Paperback reprint: Owl Books, 1984.

PATRICIA MOYES Death on the Agenda

   Moyes is a dependable writer; her protagonists, Henry and Emmy Tibbett, are solid and capable, though happily not past a little flightiness now and then.

   This time they’re in Geneva for a meeting of the Permanent Central Opium Board. The cast is international; the scene is Switzerland, both its wealth and its natural beauties playing a part in the story.

   One of the interpreters, John Trapp, is found murdered in one of the offices of the subcommittee Henry is chairing, under circumstances which make Henry the obvious choice as murderer.

   Intrigue about the drug traffic and intrigue about love make the motive hard to determine. Opportunity is even worse, for scarcely anyone but Henry could have done it, so it seems.

   The Tibbetts get to know one of the wealthiest couples in Geneva, and Henry has a belated fling with a lovely young staff member of the subcommittee. Once again Henry and Emmy emerge as real and likable people, enmeshed in a plot that’s not their own, and doing their best to get out of it by finding the real murderer.

   Which they do.

– Reprinted from The Poisoned Pen, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 1986.



A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Kathleen L. Maio:


PATRICIA MOYES – A Six-Letter Word for Death.

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1983. Holt Rinehart and Winston, US, hc, 1983. US paperback reprint: Holt/Owl, 1985.

PATRICIA MOYES Sex Letter Word for Death

   In the late Fifties, as many of the Golden Age masters of the British mystery were retiring or expiring, new blood (so to speak) entered the field. Many of the younger generation turned their hands to more realistic mystery forms, but a few novices stayed with the old ways and true.

   Such a writer is Patricia Moyes, whose dedication to the classic British puzzle has been a comfort to cozy fans since Dead Men Don’t Ski (1959).

   A Six-Letter Word for Death is but the latest in a long-running series featuring Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard and his wife, Emmy. It is a classic country-house mystery set on the Isle of Wight. A publisher invites a group of pseudonymous mystery authors called the Guess Who for a weekend house party.

   Meanwhile, Henry (invited as guest expert and lecturer) has received a series of clues by mail crossword-puzzle sections indicating that the party guests may an have skeletons in their closets. When murder follows, Tibbett’s investigation intensifies to a classic, if overly melodramatic, confrontation with suspects and murderer.

   Moyes manages to poke a bit of affectionate fun at mystery fiction and its creators. She also creates a traditional tale much more satisfying than some of her recent work set in the West Indies. Moyes takes a touch of the police procedural, a dash of the husband-and-wife mystery/adventure, and creates a very pleasing product in the style of the Golden Age.

   A Six-Letter Word for Death is one of Moyes’s best mysteries of the last ten years. Other notable Tibbett cases are Murder a La Mode (1963), Johnny Under Ground (1965), and Seasons of Snows and Sins (1971).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

IT’S ABOUT CRIME
by Marvin Lachman

PATRICIA MOYES – Falling Star. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1964. Holt Rinehart & Winston, US., hc, 1964. US paperback reprints: Ballantine U2244, 1966; Owl, 1982.

PATRICIA MOYES Falling Star

   The publisher Holt, Rinehart, and Winston has been reprinting most of the mysteries of Patricia Moyes in its Owl series, and Falling Star has been one of them. While it is not one of her stronger books, most other authors would be glad to claim it.

      The motive and murder methods are not convincing, however, and the number of suspects too limited for a really strong puzzle. Nonetheless, the author’s experiment of eschewing third-person narration in favor of a story teller who is a movie executive and also a bit of a prig (and not too bright) works well.

   Also, Moyes’s series detective, Henry Tibbett, continues to be likable and efficient, if somewhat bland.

– From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 10, No. 3, Summer 1988          (slightly revised).


From Wikipedia:

PATRICIA MOYES Falling Star

    “Patricia Pakenham-Walsh, aka Patricia Moyes, was an Irish-born British mystery writer. [She] was born in Dublin on January 19, 1923 and was educated at Overstone girls’ school in Northampton. She joined the WAAF in 1939. In 1946 Peter Ustinov hired her as technical assistant on his film School for Secrets. She became his personal assistant for the next eight years.

    “Her mystery novels [beginning with Dead Men Don’t Ski in 1959] feature C.I.D. Inspector Henry Tibbett. One of them, Who Saw Her Die (Many Deadly Returns in the US) was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1971.

    “She married photographer John Moyes in 1951; they divorced in 1959. She later married James Haszard, a linguist at the International Monetary Fund. She died at her home in the British Virgin Islands on August 2, 2000.”

REVIEWED BY MIKE TOONEY:

   
(Give Me That) OLD-TIME DETECTION. Autumn 2020/Winter 2021. Issue #55. Editor: Arthur Vidro. Old-Time Detection Special Interest Group of American Mensa, Ltd. 36 pages (including covers). Cover image: The Radfords’ Who Killed Dick Whittington?

   As is his usual wont, in this latest edition of Old-Time Detection Arthur Vidro has once again delivered a valuable compendium of information about classic detective fiction, resurrecting long-forgotten pieces as well as showcasing up-to-date commentary about the genre.

   When, in 1951, Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen (the editor) got together to compile a list of what they considered to be a “Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction,” they probably had no idea that their compilation (commonly called the “Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones”) would still be worth consulting seventy years later. One of their choices for the list is Clayton Rawson’s locked room classic Death from a Top Hat (1938), which receives Les Blatt’s scrutiny. Another “cornerstone” is Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928), which Michael Dirda, in contrast to the usual consensus opinion, does not regard as “the first modern espionage novel.”

   Two now largely forgotten detective fiction novelists worth spotlighting are the married writing team of E. and M. A. Radford; they receive their due attention in Nigel Moss’s essay, which sadly notes that despite a long writing career “the U.S. market eluded them.” Moss also highlights the play, that rare theatrical bird, an honest-to-goodness whodunnit, derived from the Radfords’ sixth novel, Who Killed Dick Whittington? (1947).

   While he was still living, impossible crime expert Edward D. Hoch turned his attention to Agatha Christie’s short fiction and found most of it praiseworthy: “If the short stories often are not the equal of the best of her novels, they still sparkle on occasion with her vitality and ingenuity, reminding us anew of the pleasure of a well-crafted tale.”

   Dr. John Curran, the world’s foremost expert on all things Christie, has nice things to say about Mark Aldridge’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, in his opinion a “must-have book for the shelves of all fans of the little Belgian and his gifted creator.” Curran also includes little-known facts about Agatha, only a few of which yours truly was aware.

   Continuing with the Christie theme is a talk by Leslie Budewitz aptly entitled “The Continued Influence of Agatha Christie”; “she was,” says Budewitz, “first and foremost a tremendous storyteller.”

   Then come a couple of apposite reviews, both by Jay Strafford: Sophie Hannah’s The Killings at Kingfisher Hill (2020), starring Hercule Poirot; and Andrew Wilson’s I Saw Him Die (2020), the fourth in a series of novels making the most of that Queenian fictional trope of featuring a detective fiction writer as, well, an amateur detective.

   The center piece of this issue of OTD, both figuratively and literally, is Stuart Palmer’s entertaining story “Fingerprints Don’t Lie” (1947), in which Hildegarde Withers, sans Inspector Piper, solves a knotty murder in Las Vegas.

   Continuing with Charles Shibuk’s series of paperback reprints from the ’70s (at the time a noteworthy and welcome trend for classic mystery buffs), he highlights works by Nicholas Blake (Mystery*File here), Charity Blackstock (Mystery*File here), John Dickson Carr (of course!; Mystery*File here ), Agatha Christie (also of course!; Mystery*File here), Raymond Chandler (ditto; Mystery*File here), Henry Kane (Mystery*File here), Patricia Moyes (Mystery*File here), Ellery Queen (Mystery*File here), Dorothy L. Sayers (Mystery*File here), Julian Symons (Mystery*File here), Josephine Tey (Mystery*File here), and editor Francis M. Nevins’s (Mystery*File here) nonfictional The Mystery Writer’s Art, “obviously the logical successor to Howard Haycraft’s The Art of the Mystery Story (1946) . . .”

   Several pages of contemporary reviews of (mostly) classic mysteries follow: Jon L. Breen about Robert Barnard’s School for Murder (1983/4) and Evan Hunter’s “factional” Lizzie (1984); Harv Tudorri about Ed Hoch’s Challenge the Impossible (2018); Ruth Ordivar about Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Angry Mourner (1951); and two reviews from Arthur Vidro about Barbara D’Amato’s The Hands of Healing Murder (1980) and John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night (1965): “with maturer re-reading, I am dazzled . . .”

   The issue wraps up with letters from the readers and a befitting puzzle about Agatha Christie.

   All in all, Issue 55 is definitely worth adding to your collection.

   If you’d like to subscribe to Old-Time Detection:

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