Despite the whimsical title, this turns out to be a serious mystery set in the Inter-Libraries Despatch Association, involving adultery, drug trafficking, and murder. It is also something of a romance between novelist and typist Barbara Smith and bad-boy microfilm maker Mark Allan. As a reader whose ideal mystery writer is Agatha Christie, I found the book rather unsatisfying. I have trouble identifying with a heroine who is miserably and rather inexplicably in love with a man who is mean to her and everyone else. Moreover, there is little or no surprise in the solution to the mystery. I like Papa Poirot's neat fixings, not the unhappy mess left behind at the conclusion of this novel. I also like Dorothy Sayers a great deal, and Lord Peter Wimsey is not as blithe as Poirot, but this was just altogether too depressing. Too much seething discontent, not enough detection. ( )

Our story takes place at the Inter-Libraries Despatch Association (ILDA), a centralized interlibrary loan service that takes requests from students and professors at regional universities and procures the articles and books they need from an international list of libraries. The reader is usually with Miss Barbara Smith, a young University graduate who is working in the Location department, typing up requests and compiling responses. One of her co-locators, Mrs. Warren, is everything you would hope your colleagues not to be: gossipy, loud, both offensive and easily offended, and possessing of a grating laugh that she spurts out at all times, whether it is appropriate or not. In fact, no one in the library seems to care much for Mrs. Warren. She snoops about when Mark Allan (the microfilm and photostat man) and Mrs. Bridgewater (who does the accounts) have a workplace romance. She butts in when Barbara tries to get some work on her romance novel done during work hours. She insults people in the cafeteria and teases the young typists until they cry. No one would be sad at all were she to leave the library all together, but everyone is rather surprised when she shows up dead, stuffed into a bag of books scheduled for deposit in the basement stacks.

In classic mystery style, everyone has a motive and no one really has an alibi -- one of the library workers has to have been the killer, but as the detectives unravel a complicated tangle of insults, slights, drug smuggling, eccentric personalities, suspicious conversations and worthy war records the trail to the real killer becomes more and more murky.

And then another librarian is murdered.

The real mystery in this mystery is not that hard to figure out, and it quickly becomes more of a psychological study of the characters -- particularly Barabara Smith, the naive romance writer, and Mark Allan, the dashing ex-soldier who handles microfilm on the 4th floor. That isn't a bad thing, though -- for a book I bought based on its title, it really is a well-written and complex mystery novel.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2008/05/dewey-death-1958.html ] ( )