Seven of the best

Call the Dying is the seventh novel in Andrew Taylor’s Lydmouth series. He started it in 1994 and by setting it in the 1950s he recreates the English detective novel in what is perhaps its heyday but with subtle additions. In the first couple of novels the reader is aware of 1950s dress, behaviour and drab, postwar atmosphere far more than in contemporary novels of that time. There is the added realism of frustrated lives and hidden sexuality played out against the background of the moral mores of the era. Now, though, some of the picturesque aspects of the novels have diminished.

In Taylor’s last and best Lydmouth novel, Death’s Own Door, the love affair between Detective Chief Inspector Richard Thornhill and the journalist Jill Francis came to an end with Jill returning to London. Call the Dying starts a few years later with the return of Jill to Lydmouth as temporary editor of the Gazette to help out when her friend and ex-employer has a heart attack. She has hardly settled into her chill, bleak modern flat before discovering the body of Dr Bayswater, the retired local doctor, murdered in his sitting-room. The most obvious suspect is Jill’s neighbour, good-looking Dr Leddon who has taken over the practice, but other odd things are happening around the town. A commercial traveller goes missing and one of his gloves is found under Dr Bayswater, somebody is pissing through the letter- boxes of respectable citizens, and employees of the Gazette are being intimidated. Then there are the diary notes written by someone who is becoming more and more desperate, distrait and possibly dangerous. Altogether this is a nice mix.