Thu 10 Aug 2017
Archived Mystery Review: PATRICIA MOYES – Down Among the Dead Men.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
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.
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.
August 10th, 2017 at 11:22 pm
The strangest crossover in genre history was Nicholas Freeling’s Van der Valk in a Tibbets mystery and the Tibbets in a Van der Valk (TSING BOUM I think).
August 10th, 2017 at 11:28 pm
From my review of DEATH AND THE DUTCH UNCLE, I see I said:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=12879
“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…”
I never read anything by Nicholas Freeling.
August 10th, 2017 at 11:33 pm
I found Moyes’ work uneven, but when she was good, she was very good — one of the last consistent practitioners of the classic “fair play” detective novel writers.