Created by M.R.D. Meek
Pseudonyms include Alison Cairns
(1918-2009)
According to one blurb, England’s fat, balding fortyish LENNOX KEMP is a “struck-off solicitor turned inquiry agent.” Er, disbarred shyster becomes a private peeper, anyone?
Anyway, while waiting to be reinstated (the events leading up to his disbarment are related in the first book in the series, With Flowers That Fell (1983), he earns his daily bread as an op for the London-based McCready’s Detective Agency, commuting back and forth from the quiet suburb of Newton, He’s not particularly hard-boiled, displaying a surprising emotional vulnerability, but he gets the job done.
Eventually, Lennox gains a wife, Mary (a quietly efficient American who occasionally does a little detecting to help hubby out), and is reinstated to the bar, and this low-key yet often elegant series, full of rich characterization, and sharp writing, continues, with Kemp as a particular hands-on type of attorney, part Perry Mason and part Lew Archer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A member of the Crime Writers’ Association for many years, and an author whose books were published in the States under the illustrious Crime Club imprint, Scottish-born M.R.D. Meek was actually Margaret Reid Duncan, a retired lawyer and lifelong reader of crime fiction. She was sixty-five before she published her first mystery novel, With Flowers That Fell, in 1983, which introduced Lennox Kemp. Her last novel in the series, written when she was eighty-six, was the appropriately titled Kemp’s Last Case. She was wrote a couple of mysteries under the pseudonym of Alison Cairns, featuring a young lawyer, Toby Wilde.
UNDER OATH
- “Meek exhibits admirable control, spinning out an intriguing mystery plot held together by believable and sympathetic characters.”
— Publishers Weekly on Postscript to Murder
NOVELS
- With Flowers That Fell (1983) | Buy this book
- The Sitting Ducks (1984) | Buy this book
- Hang the Consequences (1984) | Buy this book
- The Split Second (1985) | Buy this book
- In Remembrance of Rose (1986) | Buy this book
- A Worm of Doubt (1987) | Buy this book
- A Mouthful of Sand (1988) | Buy this book
- A Loose Connection (1989) | Buy this book
- This Blessed Plot (1990) | Buy this book
- Touch and Go (1992) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Postscript to Murder (1996) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- If You Go Down to the Woods (2001) | Buy this book
- The Vanishing Point (2003) | Buy this book
- Kemp’s Last Case (2004) | Buy this book
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- The Streets of London
Let them take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London…
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
