"Death With Blue Ribbon"

While I continue to enjoy my end-of-August-stay-off-the-Internet break, let me point out that over at Classic Mysteries, this week's podcast features a review of "Death With Blue Ribbon," by Leo Bruce. You can listen to the full review by clicking here.

"Death With Blue Ribbon" is set in the world of so-called "haute cuisine," and does some skewering of food pretensions. Carolus Deene, a former commando turned schoolteacher, takes on a group that has set up a "protection racket" among British restaurant owners. It's quite simple: pay up - or someone could get very sick by eating your restaurant's food.

It's nasty enough as a blackmail racket; it's even nastier when a particularly unpleasant restaurant critic is murdered. Deene eventually sets out to destroy the racket - at a fairly significant risk to his own life.

Academy Chicago Publishers have brought back a lot of the Leo Bruce books, so they are readily available. Here's another author and detective you ought to try.