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, producing some 75 books in four series between 1960 and 1986, an average of three titles a year.

Three of the series are police procedurals set in and around Los Angeles, California. She was one of the earliest female authors to tackle this 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.

Crime For Christmas (Morrow, 1984) was the 12^th book of 13 about the Glendale, California, police force published under the name Lesley Egan. The lead character was originally Sergeant Vic Varallo, an Italian-American, but the series turned into an ensemble. Lieutenant Charles O’Connor had a prominent role in the books and Linington added Delia Riordan, a female detective foisted on reluctant O’Connor who came to accept her as one of his team. The book opens in early December with a spate of thefts and drug overdoses. As the holiday shopping madness kicks into gear, a department store altercation, a murder-suicide, and more robberies add to their caseload, along with the disappearance of a well-to-do older woman. There’s a large quantity of blood in her garage and the team fears the worst but have no leads to track.

Linington excelled at portraying the drudgery of routine police work. Crimes are committed faster than the team can process them and most of them have no real clues to follow up. While occasionally they manage to solve some cases, most of the ordinary crimes go unsolved, just as in real life.

As always in Linington’s books, the personal lives of the characters are integral. Delia’s father has just died after a long illness and she finds herself at a crossroads. Varallo has settled into domesticity finally, as has O’Connor. Linington didn’t write enough books in this series to marry off the rest of the detective squad the way she did in her Luis Mendoza series but I expect that was her intent.

Anyone who has read many of Linington’s books knows she loved animals. She worked animals into all of her stories. This title has a small black dog who can’t stay away from the police department and a stray tabby cat who settles into O’Connor’s office to have kittens. Linington conscientiously finds homes for all of the kittens and the mother cat by the end of the book. Would that all stray cats found homes so easily in real life.

It isn’t possible to talk about Linington without mentioning her deep conservatism. Her success as an author gave her a platform to vent to a degree in her later books that I am not sure would be tolerated today. I do not remember noticing the right-leaning commentary when I first read these books years ago but it jumps out at me now. Anyone tackling her oeuvre for the first time needs to be prepared.

She was a strong believer in gender roles. She did not live long enough to see the complete demise of the one-income household. Her reaction to the present-day need for some families to hold down three and four jobs to survive would no doubt send her into fits. Likewise her glorification of the police simply would not stand up to the many law enforcement scandals of the past thirty years.

Between her sociological commentary and the economic changes since these books were written, Linington’s books have not aged well. But her significant output, her near-flawless plots, her pioneering use of ethnic minorities as main characters, and her innovation in the police procedural subgenre make her an author that cannot be overlooked by any serious student of crime fiction. Consider her books a well-documented snapshot of a time that is gone. Highly recommended.