Sat 12 Jan 2013
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: JEAN LILLY – Death Thumbs a Ride.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[4] Comments
William F. Deeck
JEAN LILLY – Death Thumbs a Ride. Dutton, hardcover, 1940. Black Cat Detective Series #6, digest-sized paperback, 1943.
“Two murders would probably have gone unsuspected during the last year if Eunice Hale had not eaten a chicken croquette of questionable virtue.” The two murders were the death of a woman, of apparently natural causes, at a tourist camp in the Adirondacks and the presumed hit-and-run death of a senator’s gardener in the same area.
Even with the aid of the chicken croquette they would have remained unsuspected except for the interest of vacationing district attorney Bruce Perkins, who is asked to investigate a jewel theft but prefers to find the alleged hit-and-run driver and begins to doubt the naturalness of the woman’s death.
While the opening sentence is a good one, the rest of the prose does not get any better than slightly above pedestrian and the characters are essentially lifeless. Lilly somewhat makes up for this with her primary setting, unusual in mysteries, I believe: a lower-middle-class tourist camp. (Could there be such a thing as an upper-class tourist camp?)
Lilly also provides a, for the most part, fair-play mystery. For the most part, I say, since I could find no explanation, and I certainly couldn’t figure out how the gardener died, or even if it was murder. Maybe the Black Cat publication was abridged and the publisher neglected to mention it.
Bibliographic Notes: Death Thumbs a Ride was the last of three recorded cases for DA Bruce Perkins, and the last of four crime novels written by Jean Lilly:
LILLY, JEAN (McCoy), 1886-1961. Born in Milford, Michigan; died in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.
The Seven Sisters (n.) Dutton 1928 [Connecticut]
False Face (n.) Dutton 1929 [Bruce Perkins; Academia]
Death in B-Minor (n.) Dutton 1934 [Bruce Perkins; Long Island, NY]
Death Thumbs a Ride (n.) Dutton 1940 [Bruce Perkins; New York]
Thanks to Allen J. Hubin and Crime Fiction IV for the above information. Also note that the contemporaneous Kirkus review suggests that there are no loose ends, at least in the hardcover edition.
January 13th, 2013 at 9:45 am
That’s hilarious! That’s like that Kirkus review was a direct rebuttal on the “loose ends” question.
January 13th, 2013 at 10:12 am
I’ve done some research that I failed to do last night. It looks like Kirkus and Bill Deeck may both have been right. According to Ken Johnson’s Index to Digest Paperbacks
http://bookscans.com/Publishers/digestindex/digestindex.htm
the Black Cat edition, the one Bill read, was abridged but not so acknowledged.
I’ll bet Bill was right. The Black Cat edition maybe did cut some info out about the how the gardener died.
January 13th, 2013 at 10:18 am
As a PS to my previous post, I have quite a few of the digest-sized mysteries published in the 1940s, but while the covers are often very nice, I’ve usually made a point of never reading them.
Sometimes the original book may be awfully hard to find, but if the story in the paperback has been trimmed, what’s the point of reading it?
In this case, by the way, you can obtain a decent hardcover copy of DEATH THUMBS A RIDE for $35 without a jacket on ABE, or one with one for $55 — if anyone is so tempted by Bill’s review.
January 14th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
I know, I don’t read a digest either if I can avoid it.