THE EDGE magazine | Book reviews | Jennie Melville - Windsor Red

Windsor Red
Jennie Melville
Crimetime Publishing paperback, 192 pages, £4.99

Coffin in Oxford
Gwendoline Butler
Crimetime Publishing paperback, 190 pages

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 its 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. •

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