Nigel Derry is somewhat trepidatious about the upcoming weekend with his “Aunt” Gwenny. It’s an Easter holiday, but he wants to get her approval for his relationship with her daughter, Sheila. Needless to say, it goes about as badly as possible. If Sheila wants to inherit anything, she will have nothing to do with Nigel. After some arguments and a knife fight between the other guests, Gwenny heads off for Europe.

Nigel is then summoned to join her by a telegram from (you guessed it) Le Touquet. But when Gwenny’s naked body is found stuffed inside her trunk, things take a much darker turn. Enter Inspector Blampignon (from Death On The Riviera) who has to untangle all the threads and find a murderer…

First of all, Happy Birthday to the Crime Classics range! 10 years since John Bude first returned to our shelves and now, after a gap of four years, he’s back with this… oddity.

Bude is a bit of an inconsistent author. I was quite pleased to stumble across the non-reprinted Trouble A-Brewing, only to find it a little dull, whereas Death Makes A Prophet is one of my favourite Crime Classics tales. Death On The Riviera is also a fun one, whereas this one, well, I think Bude was trying something clever and I’m not convinced that it really works.

The first section is from Nigel’s point of view, and this section is really rather good, as we learn some of the insights into the family and friends and follow Nigel as he navigates the various incidents as people and events conspire to set up the murder.

And then, as Gwenny leaves, it becomes a third person narrative following the good Inspector, and while the case is pretty interesting, the narrative doesn’t work too well, as we lose the investment we made in the characters, particularly Nigel, who we ment in the first section. Indeed, while Nigel is a suspect, he’s barely in the second section of the story as Blampignon goes from suspect to suspect, blundering around until he spots something that I’d guessed quite early on. There’s also a slightly weird structure to the ending, when we follow our hero as he corners the villain and I was expecting a final “but this is the real killer” moment that never came.

All in all, fans of Bude will enjoy this, but I don’t think it’s his best work.

A Telegram From Le Touquet is out now from the British Library. Many thanks for the review copy.