L. A. G. STRONG – All Fall Down. Collins Crime Club, UK, hc, 1944. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hc, 1944 (shown). Canadian paperback: White Circle #221, 1945.

    All Fall Down is much the same kind of book [as Death and the Night Watches, by Vicars Bell, reviewed here earlier] and even better.

    [That book was described, in part, as “another of that enjoyable sub-genre, the English village murder, chock-a-block with well-distinguished local characters.”]

    Inspector Ellis McKay has just finished a difficult case, so his friend, used-bookseller Paul Gilkison, takes him with him to appraise the library of Matthew Baildon, bibliophile and domestic tyrant.

    Unfortunately, before they are well-started, someone assists Baildon’s overloaded bookshelves in collapsing on his head. McKay takes over the investigation and proves himself to be, in addition to a bookworm, a trencherman, happy napper, and composer, as well as a shrewd judge of human nature.

    Here the brow-beaten woman is the wife and the daughter’s hope for escape the university, not marriage. But these two have a wonderful auntie to comfort them, and the girl has two tutors competing for the chance to improve her mind — an excessively-healthy male with an invalid wife and a female with the need to dramatize her humdrum life. Turns out [deleted] did it, but the unlikeliness of this after years of abjection did not spoil my pleasure in what went before.

    In this case, McKay becomes friends with his local counterpart, Inspector Broadstreet, with whom he has later adventures that I’m looking forward to reading.

   Bibliographic data. Strong’s entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, includes five novels and five short story collections. Inspector McKay appears in four of the novels. Of these, the ones in which Inspector Broadstreet also appears, as Bill suggests, is unfortunately not noted. Of the author himself, L. A. G. Strong was born in 1896, and he passed away in 1958. Al Hubin also says: “Born in Plympton; educated at Brighton College and Oxford; author, editor, journalist, and reviewer; Assistant Master at Oxford.”

McKAY, INSP. (Chief Insp.) ELLIS     [L. A. G. Strong]
      All Fall Down (n.) Collins, 1944.
      Othello’s Occupation (n.) Collins, 1945. US title: Murder Plays an Ugly Scene. Doubleday, 1945.
      Which I Never (n.) Collins, 1950.

      Treason in the Egg (n.) Collins, 1958.