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Overview: Elizabeth Ferrars was one of the most distinguished crime writers of her generation. She was described by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine as ‘The writer who may be the closest of all to Christie in style, plotting and general milieu’. Born in 1907 in Rangoon, Burma, the author grew up in Hampshire, England, before studying journalism in London. Her first crime novel, Give a Corpse a Bad Name, was published in 1940. During her career, she wrote more than seventy novels and became immensely popular in America, where she was published as E.X. Ferrars. In 1953, she became a founding member of the British Crime Writers’ Association and, in the early 1980s, was awarded its Silver Dagger for a lifetime’s achievement. She died in 1995.
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
1. Something Wicked (1983)
No longer on the sprightly side of 70, Professor Andrew Basnett is looking forward to retirement, to really digging into the biography he plans to write of an obscure 17th-century botanist, to settling into the little village where he’s borrowed a cottage while his flat in town is being renovated. It all sounds peaceful and bucolic, even if the village murderess lives right up the road. But the case never came to trial, says Basnett’s nephew, lender of the cottage: She had the perfect alibi.
Not entirely comforted, Basnett is yet more unnerved when a blizzard hits, knocking out the power and igniting powerful memories, throughout the village, of that similarly snowy night six years ago when Mrs. Hewison….well, when someone shot Charles Hewison through the head. It doesn’t really help that there’s now been another murder and that Pauline Hewison, once again, had motive to spare.
2. Root of All Evil (1984)
If Andrew Basnett were a savvy mystery reader rather than a retired professor of botany, he would know that an invitation to spend Easter weekend at the Berkshire estate of a wealthy distant relative always involves at least one murder. This one delivers a death threat, an imminent disinheritance, a theft, and two corpses—good thing the quiet professor is around to suss out the family’s secrets.
3. The Crime and the Crystal (1985)
In this, his third adventure, Professor Andrew Basnett takes a brief break from his usual stomping grounds in the Little English Village, opting to spend Christmas in a Small Australian City instead. He’s visiting Tony, an old colleague with a newish wife, and he’s barely had a post-flight snack before he’s made aware of a cloud hanging over the marriage. Jan, Tony’s bride, is widely believed to have bashed her first husband over the head, and though she was acquitted of the murder, Tony himself is starting to have uncomfortable second thoughts. Things don’t get any more comfortable when, at a family dinner, one of the guests is done in, killed with a chunk of the same crystal that put paid to Jan’s first husband. And Jan herself? She’s disappeared. Only the Professor, it would seem, can banish the clouds of distrust and reveal the truth, clear as crystal.
4. The Other Devil’s Name (1986)
Andrew Basnett may be retired from academia, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped his former colleagues from dumping problems in his lap. This time around it’s the peppery Constance Camm, whose neighbors keep disappearing. Miss Camm and her sister, Mollie, might be tempted to shrug things off, were it not for a frightening letter. "I know where you buried the body," says the letter, but…to which disappeared neighbor does the letter refer? And why was it sent to Mollie, who hasn’t been burying anything? Spurred by a desire to help a friend (and—admit it!—by his own curiosity), Professor Basnett starts poking around. But his efforts uncover more than one village skeleton, and they may call up more than anyone has bargained for.
7. A Hobby of Murder (1994)
Retired professor Andrew Basnett had been at a loose end since he’d finished writing his book, and a country visit with friends seemed just the diversion he needed. But when seven friends gather to welcome him to their village, conviviality soon turns to crime as guests suddenly start dying – and Basnett finds himself seeking a clever killer who is sure to strike again.
8. A Choice of Evils (1995)
Bigamy and blackmail at an arts festival in the sleepy seaside town of Gallmouth, England, lead to murder in the last mystery in the Andrew Basnett series, written before the author’s death in 1995.
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