Fri 27 Feb 2026
Archived PI Mystery Review: BAYNARD KENDRICK – The Last Express.
Posted by Steve under Uncategorized[2] Comments
BAYNARD KENDRICK – The Last Express. Captain Duncan Maclain #1. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1937. Dell #95, mapback edition, 1945. Lancer, paperback, 1970.
Although not Kendrick’s first book, this is the first adventure of Duncan Maclain. who is probably his most famous detective. and that largely because he is blind. What I’d never realized before is that Maclain is a private detective, not a policeman.
There is also a germ of a decent story here, what with a dying message and a subterranean tour of New York City’s subway system, but it is so clumsily told it defies belief. What is obvious takes 50 pages to tell; inconsistencies are mostly ignored. Ptooie.
— Reprinted from Mystery.File.5, May 1988.
February 28th, 2026 at 3:29 am
Kendrick was perhaps better at suspense and characterization than detection to be fair, but this was my first MacLain and first Kendrick read in relation to the Longstreet television series and I became a lifelong Kendrick fan.
I didn’t find it much different than most more or less classic American mysteries of the period, not in a class with the best, but well within the second tier.
Kendrick somewhat ironically considering your feeling his prose was clumsy he wrote a major novel about a blind soldier coming home from the War that became a major film with Arthur Kennedy in the lead.
Horse races I suppose.
February 28th, 2026 at 12:38 pm
Oof. I owe you and any of Kendrick’s many other fans an apology. No, I didn’t care for the book all that much, but that last line I think now is unforgivable. I should have deleted it when I could, but right now I can’t.