Late Phoenix [Paperback]

Catherine Aird (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1973

Decades ago, Germans bombed the village at Lamb Lane. But now redevelopment is under way. During the excavation, a workman finds the skeleton of a pregnant girl with a bullet lodged in her spine. The trail is definitely stone cold when C. D. Sloan takes on the case.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From AudioFile

This entry in Aird's popular C.D. Sloan British mystery series was published in 1971. Some of the characters who become prominent in later works in the series do not appear, but Inspector Sloan, Constable Crosby, and Dr. Dabb are sufficient for the present. The action involves an old murder discovered at a WWII bomb site, followed by a new and related murder. Robin Bailey seems to perfectly understand his cast of characters in this endearing and entertaining series. His C.D. Sloan is wry, patient, and ever so slightly stolid. His Constable Crosby the enthusiastic, yet thoughtless young idiot with whom Crosby must work. His Dr. Dabb deep-voiced and business-like as he cuts up the cadavers. Bailey's pacing reflects Aird's gentle humor and highlights her sly social commentary. Well done. R.E.K. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Services; New edition edition (August 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 000613291X
• ISBN-13: 978-0006132912
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A dead body rising from the ashes, April 21, 2002

By 

Michele L. Worley (Kingdom of the Mouse, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Late Phoenix (Audio Cassette)

I recommend Robin Bailey's unabridged narration. As always, he's the perfect reader for an English cozy mystery, and a fine actor. He can slip into and out of the voices of young constable Crosby, an old man whose lungs were damaged by poison gas in WWI, an overweight woman with a bad leg in a doctor's office, and many more, all without missing a beat.

The Battle of Britain, of course, didn't just involve the bombing of London; even thirty years later, Lamb Lane in Berebury is still a bomb site. (The council and the owners have been fighting for years about the building plans.) Now that everyone has their act together, the bomb rubble is being cleared - and the excavator hits just the wrong (or right) place: the skeleton of a pregnant woman was buried on the site, dating back to the war. Even before the autopsy, Dr. Dabbe doesn't buy the theory that a bomb would have laid her out so neatly with no visible crush injuries, so Sloan is stuck with an investigation that the superintendent would be just as happy to write off as 'historical' rather than 'possible murder', but there are suggestive points: the absence of any identification - or wedding ring - on the body, for one. Other missing pieces include a hue-and-cry for a missing person (there wasn't any) and the required notification of the local archeologists about the construction (the notice never arrived - if it was ever sent). And when the archaeologists had arrived in spite of everything, someone had moved their pegs out of the danger zone.

Inspector Sloan, beginning his digging while the contractors are banned from continuing theirs, turns up various interesting tidbits: the memories of the older members of the Berebury force and the firefighting and rescue teams of the time, as well as the receptionist of the doctor's office across from the site (the old doctor himself died a few months ago). The Waite brothers, sons of the old couple who used to live in the bombed house, both left after the war, but only Harold inherited it, and promptly sold the site; Leslie, a black sheep, was disinherited. Why? And why did the self-made buyer want it but let it get bogged down in planning fights for so many years - or did someone else engineer the delay? And how and why did the clearance plans finally get approved?

Apart from interesting sidelights on living through bombing, not once but over and over again, we have Miss Tyrell, breaking in the new Dr. Latimer as the late Dr. Tarde's successor, and William Latimer's own attempts to find his feet in Calleshire's medical community as a first-generation doctor.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Curiously inconsequential, March 6, 2007

By 

Michael Moricz (Astoria NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Late Phoenix (Paperback)

While I'm emphatically the right sort of audience for what we might call (for want of a better term) the genteel British mystery tradition, I found myself feeling entirely undernourished by the end of this book. Ms. Aird seems to have none of the requisite skills (beyond the rudimentary ability to tell her story in a coherent way) that keep readers returning to writers like Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh or even Patricia Wentworth (who, formulaic and inconsequential as she can be, at least usually writes about likable people with distinct personalities).

The details of the mystery at the heart of this book are solid enough, but she manages an unusual feat in the genre: an Inspector we feel we barely know and with whom we cannot really connect. And that's the most detailed of her characterizations! As the book begins, we are introduced to a Dr. Latimer and his receptionist, and they remain the most vividly drawn characters in the whole novel, but they are not really main characters at all. Everyone else in the town (developers, dotty old former Home Guard members, archeologists) have literally no apparent personalities at all -- Ms. Aird paints them so superficially and in so noncommital a nature that they never have any life on the page.

She does attempt to give some eccentricities or idiosyncrasies to some of the members of the Police force, but even these remedially filled-out characters are one-dimensional at best, from Inspector Sloan's meandering superior, obsessed with the hippies at "Dick's Dive" to the police doctor, who hints at a bit of the curmudgeonly, but only appears in about 8 pages total.

Weirdest of all, no-one feels real at all, a sense heightened by the oddity of WAY too many characters all randomly quoting obscure literary phrases at each other. I mean, we could believe that ONE character might do this, but Ms. Aird would have us believe that this whole town does this, including our ostensible hero Inspector Sloan "muttering" little quotes from plays or poetry while interviewing a witness or making official enquiries.

None of it rings true, it doesn't add up to anything, and unless you're just trying to get to sleep, I don't recommend this book to anyone. It's just a pale and insubstantial imitation of a kind of mystery writing that has been done better countless times.

There's nothing embarassing or unprofessional about the writing. There's just nothing of distinction or endearing quality about it either.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Late Phoenix", March 27, 2003

By 

Horselover_Fat (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Late Phoenix (Hardcover)

There's a strange familiarity I found with the characters of 'A Late Phoenix' which is only apparent in the greatest of writers (Crane, Zelazny, Fitzgerald, Tyler, and for the more 'mysterious' variety - Sayers, Stout, Tey, Christie, and Mortimer). Crosby is always great as the comic relief (always reminding me of friends I've had in school or more often than I'd care to think about, myself :P). Also of listening to the audio book, Bailey's performance is masterful and has a minimalist professonalism - he's no David Suchet...to his credit.
Aird is, in my opinion and rather arguably, one of the greatest mystery writers of all-time (Sayers, Stout, and Christie being the others).
I've read quite a few mysteries and this has to be one of my favorites because it doesn't just stick to the immediate mystery, there are countless other 'mini-mysteries' within it (like all good mysteries have). Also because the 'main mystery' behind this story is something to be solved on an incredibly difficult scale, because the protagonist must solve something that happened way way in the past (as it was Tey's 'A Daughter in Time').