Customer Reviews

Dead As a Dinosaur: A Mr. and Mrs. North Mystery

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People who haven't discovered Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries are in for a treat. I like them better than Nick and Nora Charles. Other couples mysteries that are worth a look are: Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence series and Takis and Judy Iakovou's Julia and Nick Lambros series.

Mr. and Mrs. North exist pursuant to the popularity of Nora and Nick Charles of THE THIN MAN. As was the case in the Dashiell Hammett work, Mr. and Mrs. North are a smart urban couple--stylish. The setting is New York City. The series gave rise to a television show.

Gerald North lives with his wife Pamela and their three cats in an apartment. He is a typical New Yorker. There is a likelihood of finding him eating eggs benedict in a famous night club. He is a publisher.

A Dr. Preson decides someone is trying to drive him crazy by producing streams of people through want ads--tree surgeons, masons, various kinds of other people. Preson is a curator of fossil mammals, a paleozoologist. Dr. Preson is one of Jerry North's published authors.

A house invader enters Preson's apartment and takes the labels off of the bones there. The labels are on the bones merely as a convenience. Preson's sister Laura drinks some milk from his refrigerator. It is laced with phenobarbital.

Preson's family reports that he is an excitable man. His family has been concerned about him for about a year. Then it is learned that Preson has succumbed to an overdose of barbituates. Orpheus Preson dies of repiratory paralysis.

It is hard for Pam and Jerry North to disentangle the mysteries surrounding Preson's demise. They had believed the paleozoologist to be sane. The Norths set off in search of the manuscript for volume two. The manuscript is located, but it is incomplete.

The decedent had been connected with an institute, a small museum. It is a musty, dusty affair. Pretty soon Preson's family is prepared to contest the will and his brother-in-law turns up murdered at the institute. Needless to say, the North couple is charming.

Pam and Jerry North lead a strange chase among old bones to catch a killer.

When Dr. Orestes Preson, distinguished and scholarly mammalogist, found that someone was inserting classified newspaper advertisements in his name, requesting candidates for various unlikely jobs to appear for interviews, he called in the police. They weren't much interested. Their interest became lively when Dr. Preson's sister was discovered drugged in his apartment, and acute when a definite murder attempt was made.
Pam and Jerry North come into the picture since Jerry is Dr. Preson's publisher, a happy publisher, too, for the learned Curator of Fossil Mammals has the touch that converts research into bestsellers. Soon they are very much involved in some strange doings among the cases of ancient bones in the Bradley Institute of Paleontology.

Sergeant Aloysius Mullins and Captain Bill Weigand assist the Norths as they get into full swing in their sixteenth mystery. In a setting reminiscent of cave man days, a strange game of hide- and-seek is played out. The climax is a wild chase in which Pam emerges the heroine.

Pam and Jerry North have given pleasure to hundreds of thousands of mystery fans. Their latest adventures furnish another example of why the Lockridges, through the years, have attracted so large a following.

Mr. and Mrs. North solve murders. 'Dead as a Dinosaur' is the first I've read, and I enjoyed what the Lockridges, the husband and wife writing team, have created. We have a dinosaur museum, cave men and a dead scientist or two, which make for an unusual collection stuff, and the mystery gives the Norths much to puzzle over. The dialogue is witty. The suspects are interesting, and the first murder is insidious in its own special way.

This particular book comes well after the mystery series has begun and the main characters and their associations with the police are well established, but that doesn't hurt at all. The only drawback is the ending, where the crime-solvers and the suspects spend too much time moving from room to room during those final chapters, which turned out not to be as climatic as they should've been. But for an early 50's mystery it is worth the read and it's more engaging then some current mystery fiction.