Josephine Bell was the pseudonym of Doris Bell Collier Ball (1897-1987), a British doctor who began writing to produce a badly needed second income after the death of her husband. She started publishing detective novels in 1936 under her pen name, using her medical background in many of them. Bell invented several series characters, including Dr. David Wintringham, barrister Claud Warrington-Reeve, Dr. Henry Frost, Inspector Steven Mitchell, and Amy Tupper, and they often collaborated. In 1953, Bell helped found the Crime Writers’ Association and served as chair from 1959 to 1960. Wikipedia says she wrote nineteen novels and forty-five mystery novels, as well as radio plays, short stories, and series for women’s magazines. There are multiple sites with bibliographies but none of them match exactly.
Jose Ignacio Escribano summarized Bell’s life and work in March 2020 on his blog A Crime Is Afoot, https://jiescribano.wordpress.com/2020/03/17/josephine-bell-1897-1987/.
Nick Fuller listed the works of Bell on his blog The Grandest Game in the World, https://grandestgame.wordpress.com/list-of-authors/josephine-bell/, and added his rating for each of the titles he has read. Nico van Embden on his Crime & Mystery Fiction website, an invaluable resource for European and UK crime fiction, shows a slightly different list of titles by Bell: https://embden11.home.xs4all.nl/Engels/bell.htm
Sergio Angelini on Tipping My Fedora assesses several titles by Bell: https://bloodymurder.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/death-at-half-term-1939-by-josephine-bell/
A Flat Tyre in Fulham was first published by Collins in 1963. Macmillan published it in the U.S. in 1963 under the title Fiasco in Fulham. Then Ballantine published it in soft cover in 1964 under the title Room for a Body. This propensity for renaming books leads to the incomplete or duplicative bibliographies that are so misleading to researchers and readers. It’s a habit that publishers seem to have lost, fortunately.
Under any title, it’s a quite readable book. Petty criminal Len Smithson steals a Jaguar from the airport long-term parking lot to use as the get-away car in an armed robbery. A few minutes before he is due to collect his fellow crooks, a tire goes flat and he has no choice but to abandon the expensive vehicle in a residential area. Len takes too long to find a replacement and misses the rendezvous. In the meantime, his colleagues have cornered a van carrying a large amount of cash and are intent on emptying it. Unfortunately, they have no means of escaping, members of the public intervene, and the police arrive quickly.
The Jaguar is finally impounded and traced to Sir John Drewson, an eminent philanthropist who had left a message for his flighty niece to retrieve the vehicle from the airport and return it to his home in Sussex, which she failed to do. The police urge her to arrange to replace the tire and remove the car from their impound lot. When the mechanic she hires opens the trunk to retrieve the tire jack, he finds a body that has been there for several days.
Determining the identity of the victim and the cause of death and how he came to be in the trunk of Sir John’s car and what Sir John had to do with it exercised Inspector Steven Mitchell considerably. Eventually barrister Claud Warrington-Reeve became involved too.
Threads about the robbery gone awry, the scatty niece and her boyfriend, the body in the trunk, and a girls’ remand home result in an interesting if somewhat scattered narrative until the connections among them begin to emerge. The slickly planted twist near the end is good.Â
Based on the reviews I found and my own experience, Bell’s work is uneven. I found this book more polished in plot, writing, and characters than the first of her mysteries I read a few years ago. Definitely worth considering for a TBR stack.