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Leo Bruce is the nom de plume of Rupert Croft-Cooke, who wrote some 125 mysteries, biographies and memoirs. He died in 1980. There are twenty-two mysteries featuring Deene, of which Academy Chicago has already published eleven. Death at Hallows End starts the new hardcover series. The remaining novels will be published over the next several seasons. First published in 1964, Death at Hallows End--like all Carolus Deene novels--appears in the U.S. for the first time under an American imprint.
Bruce (pseudonym of Rupert Croft-Cooke) has been writing erratic, old-fashioned British mysteries for over 40 years, but he has been little published here; Albert Park is a 1964 entry in his Death. . . series for amateur sleuth Carolus Deene - a schoolmaster/historian who, with no police or press authority and precious little charm, blithely seems to gain the talkative cooperation of one and all. His current case: three unrelated women stabbed to death in the well-evoked grey and dreary streets of a middle-class London suburb. Nearly the entire book consists of Deene's fulsome inquiries - and there are some lively character portraits of neighborhood women and occasional flashes of wit. But the real mystery here is why the police don't solve the case in half the time it takes Deene; and the modest appeal is to those highly susceptible to English-style atmosphere and chat. (Kirkus Reviews)
