J. J. Connington
5 books
- Two brothers killed with poisoned darts in a hedge maze, and Sir Clinton Driffield working it out while telling poor Wendover almost nothing. If you like your Golden Age puzzles clever and a bit cold-blooded, the detective included, this scratches that exact itch.
- A seaside hotel, a death among the dunes, and evidence that hangs on tides and footprints in wet sand. Connington plays scrupulously fair and rather dry; if you read mysteries in order to solve them, he's your man.
- You’d like this if you enjoy catastrophe fiction that worries about food, transport, labor, and who gets admitted to safety. As a crop plague dismantles Britain, Nordenholt’s plan to preserve a hand-picked million gives the novel its hard, uncomfortable edge, though its social attitudes are distinctly of the 1920s.
- A doctor called out in fog goes to the wrong house and finds a dying man. Connington then lays out every combination of murder, suicide, and accident in an actual grid and eliminates them; austere, logical, satisfying like a worked proof.
- If you like a fair-play puzzle worked out like a proof, this delivers: a theft of Leonardo medallions during a masked ball, secret passages, a family ghost legend, and Sir Clinton Driffield staying dryly two steps ahead. Come for clues, though, not for warm characters.