Death Treads Softly: Volume 26

Two separate murders put CI Littlejohn on a devious killer’s twisting path in this long-running British mystery series.

Finlo Crennell, the former harbourmaster of Castletown, was reported missing one week ago. Now he’s turned up in London, wandering the streets and suffering from amnesia. He has no recollection of where he’s been or how he got here from the Isle of Man. When Chief Inspector Littlejohn is asked to escort the man home, he assumes the job will be quick and painless. But less than twenty-four hours later, Crennell is found brutally murdered.

Littlejohn assumes the case and soon has a second murder to investigate. A bankrupt farmer, Charlie Cribbin, was killed in the same manner as Crennell. Could the two men be connected? And what happened to Crennell during the week he was missing? Littlejohn must connect the dots if he has any hope of tracking down the killer before he strikes again.

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).