Cruising through eBay last fall, always a dangerous pastime, I found a group of books in the short-lived Unicorn Mystery Book Club. The subscription service published four crime fiction novels in a single volume, beginning in 1945 and ending in late 1952. The 83 volumes are rare and I was delighted to find about 20 of them at a price I was able to pay. I have yet to find overlap between the titles Unicorn selected for publication compared to the more ubiquitous Detective Book Club anthologies. One of the 1950 volumes contains Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov, Just for the Bride by Dorothy Park Clark, The Owl and the Pussycat by Owen Cameron, and Bland Beginning by Julian Symons.
Julian Gustave Symons (1912-1994) was a versatile author of biography, social history, criticism, poetry, military history, and crime fiction. He succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985. In 1982 the Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association. For more about Symons, see A Crime Is Afoot, https://jiescribano.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/julian-symons-1912-1994/
Bland Beginning (Gollancz, 1949; Harper, 1949) is the third and final book about Detective Inspector Bland but it functions as a prequel set in 1924, displaying Bland’s investigative abilities before he joined the police force. It starts simply enough: Tony Shelton contracts an engagement with Victoria Rawlings, the granddaughter of a minor Victorian poet whose writings about his raucous youth shocked his contemporaries. As an engagement gift he buys a rare volume by the poet. Victoria is showing off the book to friends and one of them assures her it is a forgery. Tony is offended and is determined to prove the book is original. His successive interviews with experts pull him into theft, assault (his own), and multiple murders.
From the perspective of a mystery reader, I found the story slow until the murders begin, well into the book. Tony is an unlikely protagonist; his only real talent lies in playing cricket. Tony’s father might be my favorite character. He’s much more intelligent than his rather dim son but still manages to refrain from meddling in his heir’s life. The killer was well hidden and as usual I did not see all of the clues pointing in that direction.
A bibliomystery that will appeal especially to collectors of first editions. Part of the plot is derived from a real forgery scandal first broached in 1934 in a book by two literary scholars named John Carter and Graham Pollard entitled An Enquiry Into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets. The book suggested that Thomas James Wise (1859-1937), a pre-eminent book collector, had been dealing in fake materials, while the authors privately believed that Wise was himself the forger. Later investigators were not so courteous and named Wise as the producer of many of the rare pamphlets he sold. Printing changes such as ink types and paper manufacturing provide compelling evidence.
See other comments on this book on My Reader’s Block, https://myreadersblock.blogspot.com/2012/04/bland-beginnings-review.html, and Do You Write Under Your Own Name?, https://doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/2024/12/forgotten-book-bland-beginning.html