Dead fiancées, spirit hands, and Russians! (Oh my!)

Back when I reviewed Paul Gallico’s Too Many Ghosts, I wrote that “From what I can discern, Too Many Ghosts is his only entry into the mystery genre, and it’s a pretty damn good one at that.” As it turns out, this was a lie on my part, and so, I went to confess my literary sins to Father Brown. He advised me that as penance, I should read and review the sequel, The Hand of Mary Constable. So here I am today …

First off, this book is entirely different from its predecessor. Too Many Ghosts was a mix of a supernatural mystery and a comedy, with only a few creepy scenes and a marvellous impossible problem. The Hand of Mary Constable seems to reverse this statement: it has a marvellous atmosphere, but its impossible problem ultimately is not given such an interesting solution.

Whoever's Behind This Haunting Will Have a Long Chat With Mother Superior...

It is incredible what you can find during an afternoon at your local library. After my recent review of William DeAndrea’s Killed on the Ice, when I found myself at my library, I couldn’t resist looking at the shelf to see if there were more DeAndreas, even though I knew there weren’t (thanks to the magic of the Internet). When I started to walk away towards the door, something caught my eye, and I stopped at the next shelf. A hardcover book with an altogether too-familiar spine was sitting there on the shelf—it was a Black Dagger Crime edition of Too Many Ghosts, by Paul Gallico (best-known, perhaps, as the author of The Poseidon Adventure, which made for an unreasonably delightful movie).

I really like the way old Dell Mapback editions would start out, by telling you what the book would be about, listing the most intriguing-sounding things about the plot. I will try to do the same.