“Murder in the Museum” by John Rowland is a really good, old-fashioned police detective murder mystery story, taking place in the mid-1930s in greater London, a classic “who-done-it”. While this genre has never really appealed to me – for a variety of reasons, one of which is that they are usually slow-paced and boring – but I took a chance on this one, and it paid off.
A lot of dialogue between Scotland Yard detective Shelly and his loyal side-kick sergeant Cunningham fill many of the pages. In fact dialogue is the key style in all these stories, I’ve come to experience. And usually there are 2 good guys on the police force working together to solve the mystery, thus the necessary dialogue between them. There’s a real mystery here, with real people, at once some silly and some believable, and few meaningless distractions, as often is the case, and very few pages and pages filled with what I call an author’s needless “flight into irrelevant wordy detail.
There’s a damsel in distress, an evil mad-man, and several characters one could only describe as pure British stereotypes, but they’re good ones. It’s a tidy story, entertaining and fast moving, somewhat complex, yet not overly so. You have to work as hard as the detectives to uncover the murderer and his motive. There is a plausible denouement. Thus, the story wraps up in a few pages, followed by a few succinct pages to track the future fate of the major characters.
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