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Toby Dyke #1
Give a Corpse a Bad Name
On a cold winter's night, a man is run over while lying drunk in the middle of a Devon lane. Driving the car is local resident Anna Milne, an attractive widow from South Africa. It could be an unfortunate accident, but strange coincidence hints at more. For the dead man also comes from South Africa. And he has Anna Milne's address in his pocket... In conjunction with the police, it is Toby Dyke, ex-reporter and man of no fixed occupation, who investigates the curious circumstance of the stranger's death.
- GenresMystery
162 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1940
44 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Ferrars
91 books27 followersAka E.X. Ferrars.
Born Morna Doris McTaggart in Rangoon, Burma of a Scottish father and an Irish-German mother, she grew up in England where she moved at age six. She attended Bedales school and then took a diploma in journalism at London University.
Her first two novels, 'Turn Single' (1932) and 'Broken Music' (1934), came out under her own name, Morna McTaggart. In the early 1930s she married her first husband but she left him, moved to Belsize Park in London and lived with Dr Robert Brown, a lecturer in botany at Bedford College in 1942. She eventually divorced her first husband in October 1945 and married Dr, later Professor, Brown.
It was in 1940 that her first crime novel 'Give a Corpse a Bad Name' was published under the pseudonymn that she had adopted, Elizabeth (sometimes Elizabeth X. - particularly in the USA) Ferrars, the Ferrars her mother's maiden name. This novel featured her young detective Toby Dyke, who was to feature in four other of her novels.
When her husband was offered a post at Cornell University in the USA, the couple moved there but remained only a year before returning to Britain. They travelled with her husband's work, on one occasion visiting Adelaide when he was a visiting professor at the University of South Australia, and later moved to Edinburgh where her husband was appointed Regius Professor of Botany and they lived in the city until 1977 when, on her husband's retirement, they moved to Blewsbury in Oxfordshire where they lived until her sudden death in 1995.
She continued to write a crime novel almost every year and in 1953 she was a founding member of the Crime Writers' Association of which she later became chairperson in 1977.
As well as her short series of works featuring Toby Dyke, she wrote a series featuring retired botanist Andrew Basnett and another series featuring a semi-estranged married couple, Virginia and Felix Freer. All in all she wrote over seventy novels, her final one 'A Thief in the Night' being published posthumously.
Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor described her as having "a sound enough grasp of motives and human relations and a due regard for probability and technique, but whose people and plot are so standard".
Gerry Wolstenholme
November 2010
Born Morna Doris McTaggart in Rangoon, Burma of a Scottish father and an Irish-German mother, she grew up in England where she moved at age six. She attended Bedales school and then took a diploma in journalism at London University.
Her first two novels, 'Turn Single' (1932) and 'Broken Music' (1934), came out under her own name, Morna McTaggart. In the early 1930s she married her first husband but she left him, moved to Belsize Park in London and lived with Dr Robert Brown, a lecturer in botany at Bedford College in 1942. She eventually divorced her first husband in October 1945 and married Dr, later Professor, Brown.
It was in 1940 that her first crime novel 'Give a Corpse a Bad Name' was published under the pseudonymn that she had adopted, Elizabeth (sometimes Elizabeth X. - particularly in the USA) Ferrars, the Ferrars her mother's maiden name. This novel featured her young detective Toby Dyke, who was to feature in four other of her novels.
When her husband was offered a post at Cornell University in the USA, the couple moved there but remained only a year before returning to Britain. They travelled with her husband's work, on one occasion visiting Adelaide when he was a visiting professor at the University of South Australia, and later moved to Edinburgh where her husband was appointed Regius Professor of Botany and they lived in the city until 1977 when, on her husband's retirement, they moved to Blewsbury in Oxfordshire where they lived until her sudden death in 1995.
She continued to write a crime novel almost every year and in 1953 she was a founding member of the Crime Writers' Association of which she later became chairperson in 1977.
As well as her short series of works featuring Toby Dyke, she wrote a series featuring retired botanist Andrew Basnett and another series featuring a semi-estranged married couple, Virginia and Felix Freer. All in all she wrote over seventy novels, her final one 'A Thief in the Night' being published posthumously.
Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor described her as having "a sound enough grasp of motives and human relations and a due regard for probability and technique, but whose people and plot are so standard".
Gerry Wolstenholme
November 2010
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 5, 2016
Anna Milne, an attractive, recently arrived widow from South Africa, reports to the police station in a sleepy Dartmoor village that she has run over a drunkard while driving home in the dark. Sergeant Eggbear investigates the circumstances with the help of his friend, freelance journalist Toby Dyke, and Toby's enigmatic companion, known only as George. What seemed on the face of it to have been a simple road accident soon begins to look far more like murder -- a murder that lies at the center of a web of intrigue going back decades.
Ferrars's writing was, at least in this early stage of her career, extremely cumbersome -- the book in many ways reads more like the work of a (very minor) 19th-century novelist than something published in 1940. There's also a sort of lack of confidence in the prose, as if Ferrars were well aware that she wasn't fully in control of her material. The novel's quite short, which is a good thing; much longer than 160 pages and I think the task of wading through the stodgy narrative might have defeated me.
Which would have been a pity, because Give a Corpse a Bad Name is far from without interest. It's the first of five novels featuring the now largely forgotten fictional sleuth Toby Dyke and his Watson, George. Unusually, though, here it's the Watson who appears to be the better, more astute detective; he's frequently if not always out ahead of his Sherlock in the ratiocination game as well as being the one of the pair who does things like sneak into people's houses in search of evidence. Another way in which the novel breaks the usual Golden Age mold is that, at its end, the two young things who've been pursuing their love despite the implacable opposition of the girl's mother do not attain the happiness together that they've been seeking.
In short, the book's worth reading as a part of the history of detective fiction -- and in this context it's pleasing that Langtail have reissued it, because it should probably be on the shelf of anyone with a genuine interest in the genre -- but, if you merely want a gripping mystery (and why not!), you might better look elsewhere.
Ferrars's writing was, at least in this early stage of her career, extremely cumbersome -- the book in many ways reads more like the work of a (very minor) 19th-century novelist than something published in 1940. There's also a sort of lack of confidence in the prose, as if Ferrars were well aware that she wasn't fully in control of her material. The novel's quite short, which is a good thing; much longer than 160 pages and I think the task of wading through the stodgy narrative might have defeated me.
Which would have been a pity, because Give a Corpse a Bad Name is far from without interest. It's the first of five novels featuring the now largely forgotten fictional sleuth Toby Dyke and his Watson, George. Unusually, though, here it's the Watson who appears to be the better, more astute detective; he's frequently if not always out ahead of his Sherlock in the ratiocination game as well as being the one of the pair who does things like sneak into people's houses in search of evidence. Another way in which the novel breaks the usual Golden Age mold is that, at its end, the two young things who've been pursuing their love despite the implacable opposition of the girl's mother do not attain the happiness together that they've been seeking.
In short, the book's worth reading as a part of the history of detective fiction -- and in this context it's pleasing that Langtail have reissued it, because it should probably be on the shelf of anyone with a genuine interest in the genre -- but, if you merely want a gripping mystery (and why not!), you might better look elsewhere.
September 21, 2015
This is a relatively short Golden Age novel that I've had sitting on my Kindle TBR for some time. I hadn't realised it was the debut title in a series of 6 novels. An interesting feature of the list is that the final title was published over 50 years after the fifth, and only a couple of years before the author's death. Not only that but it appears to have been the first of Elizabeth Ferrars' published work.
The plot is a complex one which poses some intriguing questions. Why does the local lord of the manor claim the dead body is his son whom he hasn't seen for some fifteen years, while Lady Maxwell says that it isn't. And who is sending anonymous letters to Toby Dyke to spur on his investigation?
And does Toby Dyke get it right or wrong at the end? Is he too clever for his own good?
This is a novel that has weathered the test of time quite well.
The plot is a complex one which poses some intriguing questions. Why does the local lord of the manor claim the dead body is his son whom he hasn't seen for some fifteen years, while Lady Maxwell says that it isn't. And who is sending anonymous letters to Toby Dyke to spur on his investigation?
And does Toby Dyke get it right or wrong at the end? Is he too clever for his own good?
This is a novel that has weathered the test of time quite well.
October 25, 2016
The first in the Toby Dyke series, and yet the reader is supposed to accept that he already knows who Tyke and George are, with little presentation. At first I thought they were passing navvies or gypsies or something, but no--they're the main character and his sidekick! We are also supposed to accept Dyke as already having a reputation with the police in this particular tiny little berg--not London or Edinburgh, but someplace down in Devon. Really?
The narrative is full of pregnant pauses, significant looks and interruptions just as something vital is being said, again on the assumption that the reader can pick up and rightly interpret them. Well this reader couldn't, which means that it seemed to be all over the place, confusing and yet dull; not to mention Ferrars' coming out with gems such as this description of a cottage on the edge of Dartmoor: "desolate as the dream of a fear-ridden mind." Granted the book was published in 1940, but Dyke describes one character as being "as twisted as swastika"! Really? (Even George thinks this is so off base that Dyke corrects his simile.)
It is a bit more credible to have an opportunistic murderer than the carefully timed and planned killings of many golden-age detective novels; I grew up in a village with the occasional murder, and I'm here to tell you they do tend to happen on the spur of the moment. However, the "surprise" ending made me want to throw the book across the room! I found this book very dissatisfying, but it is the author's first. At first I objected to the obligatory comparison with Agatha Christie, but then I remembered how dissatisfying I found The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Adversary. Perhaps another day, I'll give Ferrars another chance.
The narrative is full of pregnant pauses, significant looks and interruptions just as something vital is being said, again on the assumption that the reader can pick up and rightly interpret them. Well this reader couldn't, which means that it seemed to be all over the place, confusing and yet dull; not to mention Ferrars' coming out with gems such as this description of a cottage on the edge of Dartmoor: "desolate as the dream of a fear-ridden mind." Granted the book was published in 1940, but Dyke describes one character as being "as twisted as swastika"! Really? (Even George thinks this is so off base that Dyke corrects his simile.)
It is a bit more credible to have an opportunistic murderer than the carefully timed and planned killings of many golden-age detective novels; I grew up in a village with the occasional murder, and I'm here to tell you they do tend to happen on the spur of the moment. However, the "surprise" ending made me want to throw the book across the room! I found this book very dissatisfying, but it is the author's first. At first I objected to the obligatory comparison with Agatha Christie, but then I remembered how dissatisfying I found The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Adversary. Perhaps another day, I'll give Ferrars another chance.
March 6, 2014
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TBR Busting 2013
Dut Doo
TBR Busting 2013
Dut Doo
September 22, 2019
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Very interesting characters throughout.
June 26, 2020
The Toby Dyke series is priceless!
January 29, 2017
This is one of the books that I heard about from the Classic Mysteries podcast and it again is one that lived up to its description.
Anna Milne accidentally runs over a man from South Africa. But was it an accident? And just who is this man? Mrs. Milne is a widow, also from South Africa, and the man had her address in his pocket. Could she have known him? A local prominent landowner claims that the dead man is his son but the landowner's mother says it's not. Who's mistaken?
Toby Dyke, former crime reporter, is in the area on holiday but is willing to give it up for a good mystery and some pay.
It took me awhile to read the whole thing but I overall enjoyed the story.
Anna Milne accidentally runs over a man from South Africa. But was it an accident? And just who is this man? Mrs. Milne is a widow, also from South Africa, and the man had her address in his pocket. Could she have known him? A local prominent landowner claims that the dead man is his son but the landowner's mother says it's not. Who's mistaken?
Toby Dyke, former crime reporter, is in the area on holiday but is willing to give it up for a good mystery and some pay.
It took me awhile to read the whole thing but I overall enjoyed the story.
Want to read
April 19, 2019Synopsis: ex-reporter Toby Dyke, along with the local police, investigates the circumstances of a stranger run over by a car while lying drunk.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews