Thin Air

Keith Calder #19

by Gerald Hammond

Few in the Scottish Highlands can match gunsmith Keith Calder’s knowledge of firearms. Fewer still have solved as many crimes as Calder, so it is fitting that Gerald Hammond’s unique, most popular amateur sleuth is called upon to solve a particularly vexing murder. Old Murdo, tenant farmer at Easter Coullie Farm, is found lying in a field with a bullet through his head. There is no shortage of suspects in the cranky old man’s murder, but the method is so ingenious that Detective Sergeant Ian Fellowes is baffled. Enter Keith Calder, who is able to reconstruct what just might have happened… Gerald Hammond has written another mystery richly imbued with Scottish atmosphere and gun lore, and populated with very real, human characters. Praise for Gerald “Gerald Hammond’s series about gunsmith Keith Calder is rewarding indeed.” - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Born in 1926, Gerald Hammond lived in Scotland, where he retired from his profession as an architect in 1982 to pursue his love of shooting and fishing and to write full time. After his first novel, Fred in Situ, was published in 1965, Gerald became a prolific author with over 70 published novels. Most of his novels were published under his own name, but he also wrote under the pseudonyms Arthur Douglas and Dalby Holden.

Genres: Mystery

139 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 3, 2019

About the author

Gerald Hammond, (Gerald Arthur Douglas Hammond) son of Frederick Arthur Lucas (a physician) and Maria Birnie (a nursing sister) Hammond; married Gilda Isobel Watt (a nurse), August 20, 1952; children: Peter, David, Steven. Education: Aberdeen School of Architecture, Dip. Arch., 1952. He served in the British Army, 1944-45. Although born in Bournemouth, Hampshire, England, he worked in and retired to the country he most loved, Scotland.

He also writes under the names of Arthur Douglas and Dalby Holden. He was an architect for thirty years before retiring to write novels full-time in 1982. He has written over 50 novels since the late 1960s.

His novels center around guns, shooting, hunting, fishing, and dog training.

Reviews

[Viva · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won't explain the characters or the setting as this is a book series and should be started from book 1 to make the most sense.

Spoilers ahead. These latest Keith Calder books are almost like short stories as I'm finishing them in a few hours and they're less than 10 chapters each.

The protagonist this time is Simor Parbitter. The book starts with a rabbiting session. Apparently rabbits are a bit of a pest, eating crops and the locals get together once in a while to exterminate them. This includes shooting, ferreting them out of their warrens and laying cyanide gas into their burrows. The rabbits are then eaten (not sure about the gassed ones though).

Parbitter, Ronnie, Fellowes and James are called to old Murdo's property to do that. Old Murdo seems to be a curmudgeon, a crusty old fellow and not liked by anyone (this is explained later on when a brain tumor affecting his personality is found). As the rabbiting session winds down, Parbitter turns around the corner of a barn and see Mrs. Murdo faint over Old Murdo's body. At first they think he had a stroke, then they find a wound in his head.

Fellowes being the local Detective Sergeant immediately takes charge and establishes a crime scene and starts questioning everyone. The book seems to stall by listing every and any possible method of killing Old Murdo and looking at everyone as a possible suspect. Even the reader could have eliminated most of the present characters as suspects.

The book drags on, on what and whom could have killed Old Murdo. Then Keith Calder comes back, reads Parbitter's notes and immediately solves the crime. When he explains the crime to Fellowes, the readers are treated to a bit of treatise about air guns. The crime is then solved.

The entire plot seems to revolve around the idea of an air gun being a murder weapon but I didn't find the story very interesting at all. At least I learned a little about air guns and rabbits.