The Crime and the Crystal

In this, his third adventure, Professor Andrew Basnett takes a brief break from his usual stomping grounds in the Little English Village, opting to spend Christmas in a Small Australian City instead. He’s visiting Tony, an old colleague with a newish wife, and he’s barely had a post-flight snack before he’s made aware of a cloud hanging over the marriage. Jan, Tony’s bride, is widely believed to have bashed her first husband over the head, and though she was acquitted of the murder, Tony himself is starting to have uncomfortable second thoughts. Things don’t get any more comfortable when, at a family dinner, one of the guests is done in, killed with a chunk of the same crystal that put paid to Jan’s first husband. And Jan herself? She’s disappeared. Only the Professor, it would seem, can banish the clouds of distrust and reveal the truth, clear as crystal.

Morna Doris MacTaggart was born in Burma in 1907 and sent at the age of six to a prestigious boarding school in England. After an early marriage and the publication of two novels, in 1940 her life was turned upside-down when she both met Robert Brown and published Give a Corpse a Bad Name (as E.X. Ferrars), her first mystery and the first in what would become the five-book “Toby Dyke” series. She and Brown married in 1945 and in 1951 moved to the US, though they returned to the UK only a year later, sickened by America’s turn toward McCarthyism. In 1953 Ferrars helped found the Crime Writers’ Association. The couple lived in Edinburgh for 25 years, during which Ferrars wrote more than 35 crime novels, finally returning to series mystery―first with the “Virginia and Alex Freer” books and then with “Andrew Basnett”―in the late 1970s, after a move to Oxfordshire. She died in 1995, having published more than 75 novels and numerous short stories, nearly all of them involving dead bodies.