The End of the Web

September 4, 2017
Silly melodrama wrecks the superior set-up of this reissue—Sims’s second Ed Buchanan novel, first published in 1976—in the British Library Classic Thrillers series. After lecherous middle-aged London antiques dealer Leo Selver dies in what looks like a tawdry sex scandal, his widow asks family friend Buchanan, a former policeman and boxer, to clear the dead man’s name. Unfortunately, Buchanan immediately attracts the malevolent attention of the vicious masked fiend responsible for Selver’s demise—and for the deaths of several other people pursuing a blackmail-handy list of the would-be traitors who were willing to betray Britain to the Nazis during WWII. Fortunately, when it comes to carrying out his nefarious schemes, the masked man behaves like a blithering idiot. And so it goes—until the story ends in a frenzy of wild activity and unresolved plot lines. To his credit, though, Sims (1923–1999) handles the initial characterization and setting well.

September 1, 2017
Poisoned Pen exhumes a 1976 novel by Sims (1923-99) as further evidence in support of the proposition that "life is an obstacle race with most of the obstacles grouped at the far end."Antiques dealer Leo Selver, still an incorrigible girl-chaser at 50, thinks he's struck gold when sometime model Judy Latimer returns his appraising gaze in kind. He's soon caught up in an on-again, off-again tango in which he alternates between fantasies of sex with her and sudden chilling spates of withdrawal on her side or his. Will they or won't they achieve their hearts' desire? In the end, they do, but before they can confirm whether it really is their hearts' desire, they're both murdered by a mysterious stalker who's already dispatched Leo's friend and hard-edged furniture dealer Sidney Chard, whose smashed kneecap provided his assailant with a killing advantage. His starting cast deceased, Sims shifts gears to provide a workmanlike if not exactly inspiring replacement, Ed Buchanan, a rolling-stone former race-car driver whose parents were longtime friends of Leo's family. It's Ed, encouraged by Leo's estranged wife, Beatrice, who makes the rounds asking questions among Leo's friends in the antiques community, shrugging off readily predictable attacks by well-placed crooks and eventually discovering a list of mostly dead British notables that will lead him to a killer who's surprising only because he's such a minor character. More proficient than The Last Best Friend (reviewed below) but less distinctive; after the brilliantly overheated opening movement, the detection is strictly routine, with little to show at the appropriately inconclusive fade-out.

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October 1, 2017
This addition to the British Library Classic Thrillers series, which has done mystery fans an enormous service by resurrecting out-of-print crime novels, has a lot of narrative punch to it. Author Sims, an antiquarian bookdealer and former member of the Bletchley Park code breakers, presents a series of interconnected murders having to do with the dodgy antiques trade in the 1970s. The main character, Leo Selver, is a complex, enormously sympathetic antiques dealer, who plods through an empty life of small conquests in the antiques trade and in bed. Sims gives a breathtakingly scary account of what happens to Selver's business associate and to Selver's latest bed partner. More murders follow, while a brashly confident former cop investigates. Sims proves to be an expert plotter here and quite deft at quickly summing up character. He's also adept at using the interiors of rooms to represent characters' inner lives. British crime writer Martin Edwards provides an insightful introduction to this 1976 mystery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)