Curiosity is the test of detective stories. If it is continually whetted all faults can be forgiven. If it is not, then all graces of style and character tend to remove the novel into another class. Comparatively few of the goods that bear the label are detective through and through; the boys' book of adventure, the nursemaids' novelette, the tale of mystery and terror, the drawing-room melodrama, the tough school's callisthenics and all other types of popular fiction mongrelize the strain.
There is almost a thrill of discovery in recognizing the pure breed and this is what Miss Bowers gives us in A Deed Without A Name. She begins quietly and unpromisingly with a young man of Chelsea whose tales of poisoned chocolates, a push in the back on a railway platform and a narrow escape from being run down in the street suggest a persecution complex or self-dramatization that he will grow out of. Of course, he would climb a wall and let himself in by a back-door rather than enter his home in the usual way. And then the crimes begin. Miss Bowers' story is exciting because it steers clear of familiar ways. There is no Fuss over detectives' personal appearance or idiosyncrasies and though she cannot overcome the prevailing passion for apt quotations she keeps them for chapter headings instead of dialogue. Her business is strictly the unravelling of a murder mystery. Plodding police methods are unassisted by hunches, amateur or professional. The task is tackled like washing-day by constable, sergeant and inspector, acting on information received from a prying housemaid. Whether you spot the guilty party or not make little difference. The very nature of the crime has an interest that forbids the skipping of odd chapters. Miss Bowers brings a fresh box of tricks on the stage just when the audience was becoming jaded. Her illusions may amount to the old business of vanishing live 'uns and producing dead 'uns, but they seem new. She ranks with the best.
-- The Times Literary Supplement
Good intellectual titillator in an adroit follow-up of Shadows Before. Innocuous Archy Mitford nosed into another murder and paid the price. Slow moving Pardoe of the Yard pulverizes all the clues -- and runs down blackmail into kidnapping into murder -- and eventually gets his man.
* Kirkus Reviews *
In A Deed Without a Name Miss Dorothy Bowers tells of the murder during the black-out of a young man already the victim of mysterious attempts on his life, of the disappearance of a millionaire, and shows, with a high degree of constructive skill, how Chief Inspector Pardoe adds one faint indication to another to prove that the two crimes are closely connected. Probably most readers will soon guess the identity of the murderer, but the clues that provide the solution to the mystery are devised and followed up with an ingenuity certain to keep those readers always interested. Especially admirable is the way in which the murderer's name is given early in the story - for those, that is, who have the necessary insight and knowledge.
-- E.R. Punshon * Crime & Mystery *
