The Dead Shall Be Raised and The Murder of a Quack

by George Bellairs

Overview

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

"[W]orthy of Agatha Christie at her fiendish plotting best." —Booklist STARRED review

Two classic cases featuring Detective Inspector Littlejohn.

In the winter of 1940, the Home Guard unearth a skeleton on the moor above the busy town of Hatterworth. Twenty-three years earlier, the body of a young textile worker was found in the same spot, and the prime suspect was never found—but the second body is now identified as his. Soon it becomes clear that the true murderer is still at large...

* * *

Nathaniel Wall, the local quack doctor, is found hanging in his consulting room in the Norfolk village of Stalden—but this was not a suicide. Against the backdrop of a close-knit country village, an intriguing story of ambition, blackmail, fraud, false alibis and botanical trickery unravels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781464207358
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Series:	Inspector Littlejohn Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	365
Sales rank:	82,076
File size:	593 KB

About the Author

GEORGE BELLAIRS was the pseudonym of Harold Blundell (1902–1985), a prominent banker and philanthropist from Manchester who became the author of a popular series of detective stories featuring Thomas Littlejohn, which were published for nearly forty years.

George Bellairs was the pseudonym of Harold Blundell (1902–1985), an English crime author best known for the creation of Detective-Inspector Thomas Littlejohn. Born in Heywood, near Lancashire, Blundell introduced his famous detective in his first novel, Littlejohn on Leave (1941). A low-key Scotland Yard investigator whose adventures were told in the Golden Age style of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, Littlejohn went on to appear in more than fifty novels, including The Crime at Halfpenny Bridge (1946), Outrage on Gallows Hill (1949), and The Case of the Headless Jesuit (1950).

In the 1950s Bellairs relocated to the Isle of Man, a remote island in the Irish Sea, and began writing full time. He continued writing Thomas Littlejohn novels for the rest of his life, taking occasional breaks to write standalone novels, concluding the series with An Old Man Dies (1980).

Editorial Reviews

08/14/2017
Det. Insp. Thomas Littlejohn of Scotland Yard is the model of a calm, rational policeman, as shown in the two novels by Bellairs (1902–1982) in this solid entry in the British Library Crime Classics series. In The Dead Shall Be Raised (1942), the body of iron worker Enoch Sykes is dug up near the spot where, 27 years earlier, he was believed to have murdered his friend Jeremy Trickett, a fellow iron worker, before fleeing and disappearing. Now it’s clear that someone else killed the two of them, so Littlejohn must solve a double murder anchored in the past. In Murder of a Quack (1943), Nathaniel Wall, a bonesetter beloved by all except competing orthodox doctors, is hanged from his own medical apparatus, and Littlejohn must hunt for the motive in order to discover the killer. The two mysteries with their village settings are prosaic—no car chases, no master criminals—but assured prose, well-drawn characters, and the atmosphere of 1940s wartime England make them well worth the reader’s time. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"...worthy of Agatha Christie at her fiendish plotting best, centers on an elaborately staged crime scene and a vast field of suspects, including village doctors who are envious of the victim (a "bone-setter," or homeopath). Both of these tales are deeply satisfying reads..." (starred review)

Booklist - Connie Fletcher

2017-07-04
Scotland Yard's Inspector Thomas Littlejohn shines, or at least glows softly, in this pair of reprints from 1942 and 1943.The longer first tale begins with the interruption of a Hatterworth performance of The Messiah by news of the discovery of ironworker/poacher Enoch Sykes' dead body. Since Sykes has been missing since 1917, you'd think that this sensational find would close this case. But it reopens it instead, because everyone in Hatterworth assumed that Sykes had murdered Jeremy Trickett, another ironworker whose friendship with him had been fatally undermined by their rivalry for the attentions of Mary Tatham. Now that it seems more likely that the same person killed both men, local Superintendent Frank Haworth wants Littlejohn, who thought he was on holiday, to help track a murderer who's escaped detection for over 20 years, and the two of them work together to uncover a surprisingly unsurprising malefactor. The shorter but more sharply characterized second novel asks which member of the little community of Stalden killed unlicensed bonesetter and homeopathic healer Nathaniel Wall and hung his corpse in his surgery. The natural suspect is local physician Dr. Alexander Keating, who'd long resented his rival's greater popularity. But Littlejohn, called down from London, digs deeper into the case and comes up with a more unexpected motive and murderer. Less of the unobtrusive wit that marked Death of a Busybody (2017)—readers will wait a long time for gems like one suspect's "air of stupid sophistication"—but still considerable nostalgia value for readers who'd rather revisit England at war than ponder 21st-century America at peace.

Kirkus Reviews