Not a bad little story, not so much a whodunnit as a will-he-get-away-with-it. Will have to track down the author's other titles. ( )

I grabbed [Blueprint for Murder] off a bargain shelf at our local bookstore. It's a mystery-suspense novel by an author who was popular in the '50's but has fallen out of favor since.

Well he has fallen out of favor with me too.

Creepy cousin comes home from World War II and hooks up with his uncle and his good cousin, who run a paint factory in post war Britain. There’s a motor launch in there somewhere too.

Creepy cousin has done some dirty deeds in the war (collaboration, basically) and he wants to get his hands on some cash and blow this pop stand.

So he sets up a "perfect alibi" murder involving hitchhikers and switched signposts and for a while all is ticking along nicely.

The murder too.

But guess what! The murder is discovered by the beautiful medical student who lives next door, and she and the good cousin fall in love, and little cartoon cupids swim around cooing little love songs.

And then the creepy cousin hijacks the motor launch (Rule Number 6: if you introduce a motor launch in chapter one, it has to come back in the story in chapter 19) and tries to make it to Holland. And it’s a cracking storm. And the good cousin and his new lover interest stow away aboard.

The Colombo TV show made mysteries where you know who the murderer is from the jump look easy. It ain't. This very dated very obvious pot boiler is case in point ( )

Post-war crime novel, in which a wealthy man is found murdered shortly after his son and nephew have returned from service at the end of World War 2. The two young men are the obvious and only reasonable suspects, but one of them has the perfect alibi. So perfect that Inspector James is suspicious... This isn't a whodunnit, because the book opens with the nephew's flight from a German prison camp and his progress across Europe towards England -- and the psychological damage he's taken over the years of war. He's determined to live the good life when he finally gets home, and that means planning the perfect murder in order to get his share of his uncle's estate, and enough money to clear out to a new life in South America. The first few chapters cover how he perfects and practices his plans, with a very ingenious method of creating an unbreakable alibi. The plot then shifts to the police investigation of the murder, with the painstaking attention to detail needed to investigate the crime, and finally to the killer's discovery that someone could expose him after all, and his hasty attempts to cover up and then escape. Well-plotted and well-paced, with a rising thread of tension as it becomes apparent that Arthur will have to kill again to escape the hangman's noose. Bax has done a good job in creating a killer who has been hardened by his experiences and understands his own capacity for violence only too well. ( )

Roger Bax is the pseudonym of Paul Winterton,who also wrote as Andrew Garve. Although 'Blueprint for Murder' is sub-titled An Inspector James Mystery,the good Inspector plays little part in the action or in the solving of the crime.
The story is split into two fairly equal parts,the first dealing with the planning of the murder,which albeit somewhat unlikely,is rather clever in its details. The second part sees the murderer on-the-run,and his attempts to escape justice. The book was first published in 1948 and is typical of the period. I certainly feel that it should be better known and appreciated by Crime-fiction readers. ( )