Mon 24 Mar 2025
An Archived Mystery Review: MARY ANN TAYLOR – Red Is for Shrouds.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
MARY ANN TAYLOR – Red Is for Shrouds. Raven House, paperback original, 1980.
This second Raven House mystery is, if nothing else, a good sight better than the first, Crimes Past, by Mary Challis. (It was Jeff Meyerson, by the way, who was the first to suggest to me that “Mary Challis” is actually Sara Woods. The evidence is strongly convincing.)
I haven’t heard of Mary Ann Taylor before now either — much of the Raven House line seems to consist of unknowns and/or writers hiding with obvious embarrassment under phony bylines. In this particular case the author has a follow-up out already (Return to Murder, Raven House #23). It also takes place in the small town of Bolton, exact location unknown, but apparently somewhere in the western plains
Police Chief Emil Martin puts his career on the line in this one. A series of murders has nearly wiped out the town’s population of red-haired women, and murder is a crime that Martin has hardly had much experience with. After a while the townspeople start getting antsy, and in a very real sense it is he who finds himself on trial.
By category you’d have to call this a police procedural, but it’s a down-home folksy sort of one that big-city inhabitants aren’t going to enjoy and appreciate half as much as those with small-town roots. By nature, it’s also a puzzle story, and as such the surprise comes a bit at the expense of the characters as they’ve been constructed up to then — but only a bit.
Good, wholesome mystery entertainment.
Rating: C plus.
March 24th, 2025 at 8:55 pm
Used correctly, Google can be your friend. I couldn’t have known this when I wrote this review, but the author’s name really was Mary Ann Taylor. The two books published by Raven House came toward the end of a somewhat lengthy career of writing romance fiction.
Check out her bibliography here:
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/t/mary-ann-taylor/
March 25th, 2025 at 6:49 am
Sara Woods was not Mary Ann Taylor, no, but she was Mary Challis, Margaret Leek and Anne Burton for Raven House, adding 10 books in 1980-81 to the 4 others published under the Woods pseudonym. (Her real name was Lana Bowen-Judd.)
At one point I had a Raven House subscription, but read few of them and got rid of them all, other than the two by our friend Richard Moore.
March 25th, 2025 at 7:24 am
Like Jeff, I have Richard Moore’s RAVEN HOUSE mysteries, but none of the other books. For a few years, RAVEN HOUSE books were common and cheap. I see a copy maybe once a year now…usually beat-up and tattered.
March 25th, 2025 at 12:52 pm
Raven House was a short lived imprint for Harlequin Books in the early 80s, designed for mystery fiction only. Here’s a link to another blog containing some of the history of the line and a “complete” list of the books they produced:
https://canadianfly-by-night.blogspot.com/2012/10/harlequin-mysteries-raven-house-part-i.html
Complicating matters, there were two mostly overlapping series of books. I’m not sure now how that came to be. Perhaps one of them was for subscribers only.
At one time the books were extremely common in used bookstores, but as George says, they’re no longer very easy to find. As I recall, they were semi-collectible at the time, but even if so, they aren’t amy longer. by any means. Pretty much forgotten, I’d say.
March 29th, 2025 at 10:22 pm
The main contribution of Raven House for collectors was probably being the house that printed James Fox’s last Johnny Marshall book, possibly the last entry of the Nick and Nora/ the North’s married teams from the Forties and Fifties.