Reviews

Lay Her Among the Lilies by James Hadley Chase

paul_cornelius's review against another edition

3.0

The three Vic Malloy detective novels were published one after the other from 1949 to 1950. The first one, You're Lonely When You're Dead, was a stunning break from the postwar London-based stories JHC had been writing, all of them claustrophobic and dark. His second Malloy novel, Figure It Out Yourself, dropped off quite a bit from the mythic West Coast metropolis and its environs of Orchid City. And this, the third novel, Lay Her Among the Lillies, is yet another step down. JHC seems to have exhausted the potentialities of Vic Malloy pretty quickly. And the last two books simply extend the character into a new set of adventures, each of which is fairly mundane and easily predictable. Two set pieces save the stories, the chase through the mine in Figure It Out Yourself, and the climb up the cliff in this book. And that is enough. Despite it all, JHC still gives you story worth reading. But just to show how lazy he became with this series, you only need to look at the beginning of chapter nine, where Malloy describes the trip to his cabin along the beach. Most of the first paragraph is a word for word repetition of the same passage that appears in the first Malloy novel.