We’ve returned, as we always will, to the French Riviera, this time for Australian author Max Murray’s mystery novel Good Luck to the Corpse. It was originally published in a 1952 Dell mapback edition, which we’d love to have found, but we were unable. Instead we bought this 1958 Pyramid edition with cover art by William Rose.
The story is mostly set in Nice, and opens with a man dying at a Casino Mediterrane roulette wheel after winning multiple spins in a row and accumulating 640,000 francs. He’d been poisoned, and the clues lead to counterfeit dollars, international refugees, a language school, and the possibility the school is being used to launder money.
The hero in this one is unusual. He’s Julian Ashford, who lived all his life in Asia before walking from Burma to India carrying his young son Tyler on his back to escape Japanese occupation. The boy is now ten, and wanting a normal life for him, Julian has enrolled him in school in Nice. Little does he know that the boy’s mother—his undivorced wife Risa—lives there too, and is now part of the South of France upper crust into which the threads of murder seem to extend. As far as the suspect school goes, that’s run by beautiful Penelope Whitecliffe, and she seems oblivious to any wrongdoing.
With these types of books we always talk about a sense of place, as in the ability to convincingly transport readers. Good Luck to the Corpse isn’t as satisfying in that way as other South of France novels, but the mystery is good and the characters are interest sustaining. Murray actually did spend considerable time on the Côte d’Azur, as did so many mid-century writers (boy, the French must have gotten tired of foreign authors passing through researching novels) but as readers we’d have liked more local color. We will give him kudos, though, for setting the action around a language school. There are many such places on the French Med even today.
Another aspect of the tale that worked well was the little boy angle. We cringed at first, but Murray doesn’t bother with anything as unlikely as having the kid somehow help solve the mystery. We’ve run across that before and disliked it. No, the kid serves to ground Julian and affect his decisions. As usual the cops in this story are offbase and hostile, so Julian finally solves the puzzle in one of those parlor gatherings with which mystery readers are so familiar. It works fine, and leaves Max Murray on the list of authors to read again if we run across another of his books. We recommend this one. And back to the cover briefly, it has nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with the story.
