One of a series of a police procedural known to me previously only through repeats of an old TV series. These books were reissued in the last decade or so, but the original date of this particular novel was actually 1971 so the lack of mobile phones and other modern technology - the police are typing up all their reports on typewriters, for example - might throw some readers. I wasn't too confused by that as I knew the repeated series had been made around the 1980s. The old date accounts for certain attitudes towards women, and for a nickname given to one character in his boyhood which involves an insulting term that certainly would not be allowed now; slightly odd that the publisher didn't adjust it as the nickname is used only once and in itself is not an important plot point.

The novel is fairly well written and moderately interesting, and is quite a short book printed with large font so a quick read, but I realised 'whodunnit' about half way through. There were some red herrings, mainly around the culprit's motive, in an attempt to throw the reader off, but on the next to last page, the protagonist Wycliffe states exactly the motive I had identified halfway through. So, nice to get it right, but usually crime novels come as a surprise at the end and this didn't. I don't think therefore I will bother with any more of these. ( )

Wycliffe and the Guilt Edged Alibi, by W.J. Burley, opens with the discovery of the body of the much younger wife of a prominent Cornish man, son of a dynastic business empire. It takes no time at all to determine that she was murdered, and given the prominence of the family and the fact that she was also the half-sister of a nationally known politician, it is not surprising that Chief Superintendent Wycliffe is called upon to investigate. As he interviews witnesses and tracks down clues, Wycliffe soon finds that there are very few people who can be ruled out as a suspect, and he is running out of time to identify the culprit.... This is one of a series of British detective novels written in the 1960s and 1970s, some of which became the basis for a television series in that country. I like Wycliffe: he is a complex, self-doubting and sometimes brooding character; and I like the Cornish settings of the tales, along with the quite well-drawn characters of the various villagers and others in any given story. I don't much like the near-continuous, very casual sexism in these books (and I suspect they avoid racism only because they're primarily set in a time and place that was populated almost completely by Caucasians), but I am also aware that they are of their times, and in 1971, when this book was published, such attitudes toward and treatment of women in fiction mirrored that of life. I'm glad I live in more enlightened times, and that I am able to place these books in context, thus to at least reduce my indignation. Oh, and the characters all smoke, too. Constantly. If you can stand such things, however, these books are quite entertaining, and so deserve a mild recommendation from me. ( )