John Piper #05 - Death Counts Three

Leopold Horace Ognall (1908-1979) was a British author that wrote novels and series titles using the names Hartley Howard and Harry Carmichael. The three series titles that Ognall gained the most success was that of Bowman, a private-eye, Quinn, a crime-reporter, and today's subject at hand, John Piper, an insurance assessor. 

Piper, who would later team with Ognall's Quinn, made his debut in The Vanishing Trick in 1952. Piper was the star of the show in his first four solo books, School for Murder (1953), Death Counts Three (1954), and Emergency Exit (1957). But, early on Ognall had a place for Quinn and positioned him alongside Piper beginning in 1952's Death Leaves a Diary and continuing for another 30+ novels through 1978. 

Being an insurance agent, I wanted to test the waters of the John Piper mysteries by starting with an early installment, the aforementioned Death Counts Three. It was published under the title The Screaming Rabbit in the U.S. 

In the book's opening pages, readers learn that Piper is a widow. His wife died in a car accident. Also, a character asks Piper about a prior mystery he was involved with, the discovery of a dead woman in his apartment (I assume in Deadly Night-Cap the year prior). Piper arrives at a large estate named Sicklehurst and introduces himself as an assessor for the Anglo-Continental Insurance Company. He's there on an invitation from Sicklehurst's owner, Edith Ellerby. She's a successful author who has requested an assessment and policy to cover some valuable items in her possession. 

Over the course of the day Piper is introduced to Edith's extended family and business associates. However, things go awry when the groundskeeper goes missing. Piper volunteers to help search and is later coaxed into staying overnight as a type of detective. In the night, Piper has a note slid under his door to meet a young girl guesting at the house. However, when he arrives at her bedroom he discovers she's been stabbed to death. Shortly thereafter he's knocked unconscious and awakens to a grand mystery of whodunit.

Despite some beautiful covers in both British and American editions, my sampling of the John Piper series was rather boring. Ognall can write efficiently and his style is similar to a female mystery writer, something perhaps written by Mignon G. Eberhart or Mary Collins. It isn't hardboiled or gritty, but instead relies on a lot of dense dialogue and lengthy discussions on each character's history and past relations with other characters. By assembling over ten guests, the suspect list is long and cumbersome for Piper and readers. If you are in the mood for cozy Golden Age of Detective-Fiction then you can probably do much worse than Death Counts Three. I wasn't feeling it and the book took me nearly two weeks to read.