MURDERER AT LARGE

✍ Scribed by W. Howard Baker

• Book ID: 111247595
• Publisher: Mayflower-Dell Books
• Year: 1965
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 761 KB
• Series: THE SEXTON BLAKE LIBRARY · 5th series (Sexton Blake)
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Notes: After a brief respite, Sexton Blake leaps (or maybe that should be 'limps') back into action with this first novel in the fifth series of his library. MURDERER AT LARGE is the name of a 'real crimes' TV show ... and it appears that someone on the production team is taking their research a little too seriously. So Sexton Blake enters the scene and, with a little help from Edward Carter (and it really is a very little), starts to hunt down the killer. He immediately finds himself surrounded by archetypal TV personalities who he has to deal with one by one until the killer is exposed. The plot is so thin and dull that it's not worth dwelling on.

Blake does a lot of reminiscing at the start of this story and it really is the best part of the book — way more interesting than the murder mystery itself. There's a strong sense that a great deal of time has passed, that he has lived through many decades. This acknowledgement of his UNION JACK days feels very strange because Blake, Tinker, Mrs Bardell and Pedro appear to be exactly the same age as they were all those years ago. There's an untold tale here ... see THE SEXTON BLAKE TIMELINE!

Trivia: Blake is still running his detective agency from offices in Berkeley Square; the ones established at the start of the 'New Order' in 1956. However, away from his business premises, he's back in Baker Street, though not in the rooms he'd occupied during his Golden Years. At some point, he'd moved out of those and the house had been sold and divided up into offices. Now, for old time's sake, he has purchased the building back and lives in a specially converted top floor apartment. This arrangement may have been added as a result of the real-life alterations to Baker Street which, by the mid-1960s, didn't much resemble the place where Sexton Blake and Sherlock Holmes had lived many decades before. The house is 'almost opposite' the underground station ... which supports the location suggested in UNION JACK issue 1,493 THE PLAGUE OF THE ONION MEN (1932).

This was anthologised in THE SECOND SEXTON BLAKE OMNIBUS (see above).

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ The characters in this tale are sketched out so two-dimensionally that they simply don't convince as real people. Unfortunately, that includes Blake himself, who probably suffers the most, being little more than a cypher once the reminiscing scenes have passed; he's Blake in name only. As for Tinker, he has nothing to do and spends less time on the page than Mrs Bardell (who doesn't seem herself either). It's remarkable that back in the days of the UNION JACK a new high quality adventure was published every week while here we have a novel that must have had a far longer deadline but which can't hold a candle to those old stories. Had this been anything other than a Sexton Blake adventure, I'd have given up on it halfway through. The character deserved much more.