Windsor Red
Jennie Melville
Crimetime Publishing pbk, 192 pgs, £4.99

Coffin in Oxford
Gwendoline Butler
Crimetime Publishing pbk, 190 pgs

Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)

This matched pair of Brit-crimers are reprinted through the newly inaugurated publishing auspices of Crime Time magazine: the 1988 Melville is making it's first showing between softcovers; the Butler, amazingly, is from 1962. The former promises a "Charmian Daniels Mystery" full of snatched kiddies and headless torsos, where its rather more sedate companion - "A John Coffin Mystery" - brought murder to Oxford long before Morse.

'Jennie Melville' is a pseudonym for Gwendoline Butler, whose popularity in libraries is evidence of her way with melodrama, and these prove that she can turn a tale on a sixpence. But be warned: these are very English and rather bloodless if you've been nurtured on US hardboiled.