CATHERINE AIRD – A Most Contagious Game. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1967. Bantam, paperback, 1982. Rue Morgue, trade ppbk, 2007. First published in the UK: Macdonald & Co., hardcover, 1967.

   Catherine Aird excels at portraying the English countryside’s village life with all its petty prejudices, the gentry and near-gentry, and the castles and ruins that dot the landscape.

   Her series sleuth, Inspector C. S. Sloan, deals with them in the fond yet frustrated manner of a native. Sloan is competent yet low-key, a good foil for the oddities of the suspects. His associates, Superintendent Leeyes, who views each case from the perspective of whatever night-school course he is taking, and Constable Crosby, whose only skill is fast driving, are rather forced and the least believable characters in the series.

   Aird’s best work is outside the Sloan series. A Most Contagious Game gives us Thomas and Dora Harding, a couple portrayed with such fine strokes that they seem to have been taken whole from real life. At fifty-two, Thomas Harding has worked himself into a heart attack and subsequent retirement to an oddly restored Elizabethan country house.

   He is frustrated by the limitations his health imposes, and he is bored. Dora vacillates between encouraging his diversions and fearing he will bring another attack upon himself. The concerns of this couple and their interplay give the book a very solid base. But add to that Harding’s diversion — in tracking down the peculiarities of the remodeling of his house, he finds a secret compartment, a priest’s hole, and in it a 150-year-old skeleton.

   Another body, this time of a young woman, is found, and Harding’s search for both killers leads him to the guilty secrets of villagers past and present.

   Additional Aird titles are The Stately Home Murder (1970), Parting Breath (1977), Passing Strange (1981), and Harm’s Way (1984), all of which feature Inspector Sloan. Aird has also written a play and several works of nonfiction.

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   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.