Blueprint for Murder by Roger Bax is a reprint of a crime novel originally published in 1948. I do like these older books being available to buy and I picked this one up in a charity shop on my holiday in Scotland in June 2025 – this challenge has rescued it from the to-be-read piles and I am very pleased that I have read it.
This is one of those crime stories where we know the murderer before the crime is committed. In fact, for a lot of the book we follow him as he plans the crime meticulously. The victim is a successful businessman who owns a paint factory and who intends to leave his fortune to be split between his son and his nephew. One of them, however, wants it now but is determined not to be caught and creates a complicated plan showing that he was elsewhere when the murder took place.
The detective for this book is Inspector James, who I understand features in a number of books by this author. He is pretty sure who the murderer is but can’t prove it or break his alibi until the pressure causes things to escalate and ends in a thrilling chase.
The detail of the period which the author includes in this book really adds to its enjoyability for the modern reader. We see how the recent war has changed many things and has taught people to kill to save their own lives, something which they then apply to circumstances after the war. There’s a lot about cars which break down, the prevalence of fog and the existence of bombed out houses which have not been cleared.
I really enjoyed this story. I liked the way in which it was told and how the reader knew more than the investigator. The author is careful, from the beginning, to ensure that we have no sympathy for the murderer and so provides some other characters with whom we can relate, and even a love story.
I am passing this book, which is in excellent condition, onto my favourite Oxfam bookshop where I hope that it will find a new reader who enjoyed it as much as I did.
Anne Is Reading 