4 reviews for Lady Here’s Your Wreath
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Lady Here’s Your Wreath
by James Hadley Chase
Description:
Reporter Nick Mason witnesses an execution and gains a clue from the condemned man, sending Nick into a network of crime and murder!
About The Author
René Lodge Brabazon Raymond was born on 24th December 1906 in London, England, the son of Colonel Francis Raymond of the colonial Indian Army, a veterinary surgeon. His father intended his son to have a scientific career, was initially educated at King’s School, Rochester, Kent. He left home at the age of 18 and became at different times a children’s encyclopedia salesman, a salesman in a bookshop, and executive for a book wholesaler before turning to a writing career that produced more than 90 mystery books. His interests included photography (he was up to professional standard), reading and listening to classical music, being a particularly enthusiastic opera lover. Also as a form of relaxation between novels, he put together highly complicated and sophisticated Meccano models.
In 1932, Raymond married Sylvia Ray, who gave him a son. They were together until his death fifty three years later. Prohibition and the ensuing US Great Depression (19291939), had given rise to the Chicago gangster culture just prior to World War II. This, combined with her book trade experience, made him realise that there was a big demand for gangster stories. He wrote as R. Raymond, James Hadley Chase, James L. Docherty, Ambrose Grant and Raymond Marshall.
During World War II he served in the Royal Air Force, achieving the rank of Squadron Leader. Chase edited the RAF Journal with David Langdon and had several stories from it published after the war in the book Slipstream: A Royal Air Force Anthology.
Raymond moved to France in 1956 and then to Switzerland in 1969, living a secluded life in Corseaux-sur-Vevey, on Lake Geneva, from 1974. He eventually died there peacefully on 6 February 1985.
Skryf Review
“Good Reading”
Naman
Chase Novels were a fad during my college years in the late sixties and early seventies. I just read this book to see if my taste for this kind of mystery novel was still there. Unfortunately, not. It is well suited for the younger me but not the older me. I still enjoyed it because it evoked the younger me which is now a latent energy. Nevertheless, Chase novels retain their character as usual.
Anmol
This is one of those books where the characters put down their drinks only long enough to light a cigarette. James Hadley Chase, using a pseudonym, provides us with another noir story with a sometime newspaperman as the hero and two or three or twelve plot twists too many. His uncertain geography is also a lot of fun. Still, he just keeps plugging away and except for an occasional use of “shan’t”, the language succeeds in achieving the intended hardboiled effect. The plot more or less makes sense, and there is a great scene where a fresh corpse needs to be disposed of – but also proves to be of some use during a fight. The pleasure of Chase’s books seems to fade a bit with each one I read, however. Putting words down on paper – his own or someone else’s – was too easy for him. And how good he ever top Miss Blandish?
arif
Larry Richmond, the President of the Mackenzie Fabric Corporation, had been murdered… Since many big names, including the Commissioner of Police, were stakeholders in the business, the press had been told to lay off. However, when Nick Mason, hot shot journalist, was contacted over the phone by a woman with a metallic voice, and called to expose the murder frame-up, Mason was intrigued. By then, he had met an irresistible girl called Mardi, from the Mackenzie Corporation, and married her. Soon, he was neck-deep in trouble… because Mardi was actually a murderess and at the bottom of the whole mess….