Smallbone Deceased

Smallbone Dceased is a classic crime novel from the 1950's. It's a remarkable book with an excellent plot, well-written characters, clever dialogue and a baffling mystery at the heart of it.

The story begins when a new member joins the staff of the law firm of  Horniman, Birley and Craine. We see the members of the law firm through his eyes as he gets to know them. He's learning his way around the firm and figuring out how they do things when a murder is discovered - one of the partners finds a dead body in one of the large, sealed deed boxes that the firm uses to store important documents.

The police are called in and the entire staff is under suspicion. The murder took place weeks before the body was discovered, so there can't be the usual searching for clues and looking for prints. A lot of the investigation involves interviews with the members of the staff, asking them about their whereabouts on specific days, trying to verify their statements and reconstruct events as they happened.

It's a lot of leg work and procedural stuff that the author manages to make very interesting. The writing is superb, the pacing is perfect, and the narrative keeps you hooked until the end. This is a great read.