death in high provence: volume 27

A British detective goes undercover in the South of France to investigate a suspicious death in this twisting mystery.

A British ministry official wants Inspector Littlejohn to look into the death of his brother and sister-in-law who were killed in an automobile accident outside a small village in southern France. Though the French police ruled it an accident, the official isn’t satisfied. Something seems wrong.

With no jurisdiction in Provence, Littlejohn must investigate unofficially. So, he and his wife decide to vacation in the area. Soon witnesses start disappearing, the couple discovers they’re being followed, and the local marquis tells Littlejohn that it may be time to go back home. But the detective isn’t going anywhere until he solves the deadly mystery that reaches back to a shooting incident from before World War II.

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).