The Crayfish Dinner

by Carlton Keith

First edition. A presentation copy from the author, signed on the front free endpaper. The sudden disappearance of Jared Cowley, blood-stained bedroom, and a missing $150,000--all indicate foul play. Book illustrator Leah Landreau wants some answers. She asks handwriting expert Jeffrey Green to help and together they turn up some startling facts, leading to a pearl necklace and a crayfish dinner in Ohio. A Favorite Sleuth book. vii , 181+1 pages. cloth, dust jacket. small 8vo..

181 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

A pseudonym of Keith Robertson.

Reviews

[Karl]

This hardcover edition of “The Crayfish Dinner " is volume 25 in the Garland Publishing, Inc. series of books printed as “50 Classics of Crime Fiction 1950 – 1975” chosen by Jacques Barzun & Wendell Hertig Taylor and is a re-print, originally published in 1966 as a hardcover by Doubleday.

Small print run. No dust wrapper.

The list of 50 Classics of Crime Fiction 1950–1975 can be found here although I just noticed that the order of the books in this list is not correct:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/8...

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: a woman asks Jeff Green for help as her tenant is missing. He had left money for a crayfish dinner for his buddies. Jeff finds murder.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jeff Green, Manhattan document expert and sometimes sleuth, is approached by the attractive artist Leah, who is worried because her tenant, Jared Cowley, disappeared suddenly from his old farmhouse in Pennsylvania. He left a mysterious note hinting at unspecified dangers catching up with him, as well as 1000 $ to organize a crayfish dinner for the 6 members of his weekly poker club. Jeff drives out to Pennsylvania to see the farmhouse for himself and finds a dead body, a member of the poker club. He meets all the surviving members of the poker club : a lawyer with the outlook of an overgrown Boy Scout, an embittered antiques dealer, a local businessman who can't shut up about his family's ties to the American Revolution, and a construction engineer who's knocked about the world. Gradually a picture of Jared Cowley as a charming adventurer begins to emerge. Jeff also hears that shortly before he disappeared, Jared showed his poker cronies a pearl necklace that he claimed was worth a quarter of a million $. Between following wannabe blackmailers and getting clobbered over the head in a case of mistaken identity, chatting with retired bankers or cajoling an Ohio chef into making a special crayfish dinner, Jeff is every inch the amateur detective as he pieces together the story.

The book was nothing special as a mystery, but it had a certain flavor of the early sixties. In the very first pages, Leah appears in an outfit of yellow, cerise and violet. When she reveals that she shacked up with Jared in Paris in the late 50s, this still has some shock value. There are occasional references to the war in Korea- not Vietnam. So there was a certain period charm to it.

[Regine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dated, but pleasant.