Mon 14 Dec 2020
HUGH PENTECOST – Death After Breakfast. Pierre Chambrun #13. Dell / Scene of the Crime #6, paperback, 1980. Previously published in hardcover by Dodd Mead, 1978.
I’m sure that everyone with an interest in paperbacks at all has seen this new series of Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime mysteries from Dell. Chosen by the respective proprietresses of two of the country’s first specialized mystery bookshops, so far the series has emphasized detective novels of a recent vintage over Golden Age reprints. Even so, there have been a few of the latter included among the ones I have received so far, notably Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case and A. A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery.
Of the others I’m familiar with, those which are reprints of recent hardcover mysteries, there seems to have been a noticeable attempt on the part of their authors to add a sizeable amount of characterization to their work – and in some cases, like The Brandenburg Hotel, by Pauline Glen Winslow, and McGarr and the Sienese Conspiracy, by Bartholomew Gill, this seems to have been done at the expense of the plot, unfortunately.
This one is a Scene of the Crime selection, and I missed it when it came out in hardcover. What else can I say? Everyone should read a Pierre Chambrun novel sometime, but other than that there seems to be no reason at all why anyone would want to read more than one.
Even when he turns up missing, as he does in the first half of this one, the Hotel Beaumont (of which he is the manager) might go on running as smoothly as ever for a while, but that’s only another measure of how completely his personality dominates the scene.
In his absence, the nymphomaniac chairwoman of the Cancer Fund Ball is found brutally murdered in her room, and a bomb threat is taken very seriously.
Pentecost is, if nothing else, always smooth and easy to read. The greatest handicap he faces in continuing the Chambrun series, of which there are a great number already, is the enormous effort and amount of maneuvering required to get all the principals in his coolly-calculated melodramas together under one roof, even one as large as the Beaumont’s.
Rating: C
UPDATE: There were in all 22 in the Chambrun series, the last being Murder Goes Round and Round (1988).
December 14th, 2020 at 7:34 pm
I was a much bigger fan of Jericho, the Park Ave. Hunt Club, and Peter Styles than the Chambrun series, though as you say they were always smoothly written.
December 14th, 2020 at 9:15 pm
I’m with you, David. Pentecost wrote a lot of Chambrun books, so other people obviously liked them, but as I said or implied in this review, for me it was, you read one, you’ve read them all.
December 14th, 2020 at 10:15 pm
Now here’s a coincidence even I don’t believe. On Curt Evans’ blog a while ago, he reviewed a book by Anne Morice, and recommended it as a late appearing book in the Golden Age tradition, probably from the 1970s.
Taking his comments to heart, I went looking for anything I might own by Morice, and luckily I found one right away. I’m reading it now.
But here’s the thing. It’s the middle book of a Detective Book Club 3-in-1 edition. Guess what book three is. Guess what book came up next as I’m making my way through this paticular issue of MYSTERY FANcier to reprint my old reviews from.
You’re right. One and the same.