Death of an Airman, Christopher St John Sprigg
I didn’t like this as much as most of the other British Library Crime Classics, and I can’t put my finger on why, really. It wasn’t worse than them in any palpable well, and probably better than one or two, and I rather liked the Bishop as a character. Perhaps it was a certain feeling of inevitability — having read Kerry Greenwood’s (obviously more recent) Cocaine Blues and Dorothy L. Sayers contemporary Murder Must Advertise, certain things seemed immediately obvious.
Mind you, when I say I liked the Bishop… after the opening of the story, he wasn’t much of a character; none of them were, really. Maybe that was my problem: it felt more like a puzzle than anything at times, and the two Inspectors were pretty indistinguishable (actually, were they both Inspectors? the details are slipping away already).
It’s an interesting read as part of an overall revisit of the Golden Age, and it’s not bad, but this is not one of the more surprising and absorbing of the series of reissues. I’m not in a hurry to read anything else by Christopher St John Sprigg, even if they republish one of his other works.
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