Geoffrey Homes was the pen name of Daniel Mainwaring (1902 –1977), an American novelist and screenwriter. He was born in California, where he attended Fresno University. He held various jobs, including migrant fruit picker, private investigator and reporter, before turning to writing in the 1930s. He eventually left fiction to become a screenwriter for movies.
Mainwaring released one novel under his name and the remaining books under Geoffrey Homes. His series characters were Jose Manuel Madero, LA reporter Robin Bishop, and PI Humphrey Campbell. Mystery File of February 20, 2011, sorts them by main character: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=8177 .
For a discussion of Mainwaring’s successful screenwriting career, see David Handler’s article on CrimeReads: https://crimereads.com/the-unsung-godfather-of-film-noir/
In Then There Were Three (William Morrow & Company, 1938) Campbell is working for Oscar Morgan of the Morgan Missing Persons Bureau detective agency and calls on Bishop for assistance in locating Marjorie Keenan, the only child of a wealthy businessman, who called off her wedding the day before it was scheduled to occur and disappeared.
Soon after Campbell and Bishop meet, Marjorie’s strangled body is discovered, quite accidentally. This part is the high point of the book for me, as the place of hiding was ingenious, one of the most unusual I can remember. I’ve read that murder is easy, it’s getting rid of the evidence that’s hard. And this hiding place was staggering in its ingenuity. I am something of a fan of creative victim concealment. See Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert (Hodder and Stoughton, 1950) and Genealogy of Murder by Lee Martin (St. Martins, 1996) for other resourceful and innovative ways to make the indisputable signs of murder disappear.
The pool of potential suspects is limited and a couple of them are violently removed during the course of the story, so it was easy to guess the killer. I am always disappointed when the author has failed to bamboozle me, although at this point in my extensive reading career it is admittedly a tough task and perhaps it is an unreasonable expectation on my part.
Both Bishop and Campbell are great characters. Homes liked to give his detectives undetective-like traits: Campbell only drinks buttermilk and plays the accordion at all hours; Jose Manuel Madero is an expert knitter. The scenes where Campbell is offered alcohol and asks for buttermilk are entertaining. Bishop is, at least in this book, the better detective but perhaps Campbell displays his skills to greater advantage in other stories.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention how well Homes/Mainwaring writes. He has a flair for creating vivid mental pictures that no doubt led to his success as a screenwriter. Simply beautiful creative writing.
Homes is worth investigating further. No reprints but most of his books can be found through secondary sources or interlibrary loan.