Barbara Elizabeth Linington (1921-1988) was an inexhaustible American author who wrote under the names Elizabeth Linington, Anne Blaisdell, Lesley Egan, Egan O’Neill, and Dell Shannon. She initially wrote radio and stage dramas and then turned to historical fiction. She hit her stride when she began writing mysteries in 1960, producing some 75 books in four series between 1960 and 1986, an average of three titles a year.

All four series were police procedurals set in and around Los Angeles, California. Encyclopedia.com points out that the lead character in each of her series is a distinct ethnic minority in the great melting pot of Los Angeles, which gave a sociological perspective to her work. For in-depth analysis, see https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/linington-elizabeth. She was one of the earliest female authors to tackle the police procedural style, and she came to own it. One of the inaugural titles in the Library of Congress Classic Crime series is Case Pending (Morrow, 1960), Linington’s first mystery and the first book in the Luis Mendoza series.

The main character in her fourth series is Ivor Maddox, a sergeant at the Wilcox Avenue Station in Hollywood, California. By this time the format of her books had been set: an ensemble cast of law enforcement personnel investigate multiple crimes while their personal lives unfold across the arc of the series. Her recognition that crimes do not occur one by one and that police have to juggle priorities to solve them all was a major stylistic breakthrough.

Ivor Maddox is a book collector. The first title in his series Greenmask! (Morrow, 1964) opens with his renting a small house because he could not find an apartment big enough to hold his books. He’s wrestling with the arrangement of his collection when he’s called to an assault that is expected to become a homicide. The owner of a small sandwich shop is found with severe head injuries. Next to him is a set of Los Angeles maps wrapped in green ribbon with a note: “This is Number One! Greenmask!”, conjuring up detective novels from earlier in the 20^th century. The killer wasted no time, dispatching a widow in an apparent burglary gone wrong a day later, only leaving the county maps with the Greenmask message to let the police know it was deliberate. Maddox was intrigued to see the second victim was reading John Dickson Carr when the predator broke in. By the time the third victim was discovered, the entire office knew they had a 1930s-style serial killer on their hands. An entertaining subplot is the introduction of one of the investigative team to classic mysteries. He is found head-down in a book throughout the story.

For all of her progressive attitudes toward ethnic minorities, Linington was deeply conservative about gender roles and it showed in her books. That’s one reason they don’t hold up well to re-reading more than 50 years after they were published. Another reason is her tendency to assign prices to everything. While this detail gave the books verisimilitude at the time they were issued, it only serves to highlight just how old they are now. Her plotting, though, is brilliant, and her characters are original. Misdirection is used skillfully and there are always multiple credible suspects. None of these books have been digitized so would-be readers have to rely on secondhand sources. While working through all 75 is really too much to undertake, although I’ve read them all, looking at a few in each series is highly recommended. This particular title is of likely interest to students of Golden Age mysteries because of the many references to period authors.