Death at the Wedding

London: Geoffrey Bles. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1947. 2nd printing. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [light shelfwear, one-time owner's initials plus date & place of purchas and a brief editorial comment written in ink along edge of rear pastedown (concealed beneath rear jacket flap); the jacket is just a bit edgeworn, and lightly soiled on ther rear panel]. One of this author's numerous mysteries featuring Chief Inspector William Austen of Scotland Yard, first introduced in 1939, at which point Ms. Hocking already had a couple of dozen books under her belt, about evenly split between crime novels and straight novels (the latter under the pseudonym "Mona Messer"). ThIs one has Austen reluctantly attending a wedding, as a favor to a friend, and thereby being conveniently on hand when the bride mysteriously drops dead. Reilly's "Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers" is somewhat dismissive of Hocking -- "She always produces a quiet, amiable mystery, of a type now classic" -- but she clearly has some kind of following, as her books are generally quite scarce (except, oddly, in cheap French and Spanish translations). .