JAN ROFFMAN – One Wreath with Love.   Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1978. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1979. No paperback edition.

   Jan Roffman has written nearly a dozen mystery novels by now, so it’s be exceedingly presumptuous of me to try to generalize anything about her writing from a sample of size only one, but (as I’m often resigned into doing) I will anyway:

   On the basis of this book, she has a tendency to overwrite, even badly, especially in the early chapters, but in the process of doing so, she creates a good many characters whose lives are as ingeniously intertwined as they are in the best of soap opera tragedy.

   I’m pleased to report that the overwriting begins to disappear as the characters become more familiar, or so it seems, and by the end, tears will come close to falling. Murder is involved, but we know who did it in chapter one, in which a particularly repugnant death scene is used to build an almost watertight alibi.

   Many of the characters in this book are afflicted with various stages of senility or insanity, and maybe that’s what I mistook for overwriting. Roffman is clearly adept in creating people out of touch with reality. The contrast is at its most effective when an under-disciplined seven-year-old named Tilly makes a friend of the dottering old lady who may have caught sight of the killer.

   There’s also the rapidly failing mind of the ex-wife with a not-so-reliable ghost haunting her, and so in turn Chief Superintendent Deacon is annoyed.

   This is not a detective story, but all the same, I think it can easily get under your skin.

      Bio-bibliographic data —

   Jan Roffman was a pen name of Margaret Summerton, who died in 1979, according to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, but that’s about all the personal information I have about her. Even though the US edition of One Wreath with Love was published before the one in the UK, I’m sure she was British.

   Under her own name, Summerton wrote 14 novels, with 10 of them also appearing in the US in hardcover. When they were reprinted here in paperback, usually by Ace, they were invariably marketed as gothic romances. The Sea House, the cover of which is shown below, is a prime example.

   She also wrote at least 10 books as by Jan Roffman. I can’t give you an exact count, because two books published under that byline in the US have as yet not been matched up with their UK counterparts — and it’s possible there aren’t any.

   One Wreath with Love was not published in paperback, but other Roffman books were, and once again, the marketing division at Ace assumed that they would sell best as gothics. They were probably right. Shown is the cover of The Reflection of Evil, aka Death of a Fox (US) and Winter of the Fox (UK).