Crossover Cover: Case for Three Detectives

 

Are you a fan of Golden Age detective fiction?

Then you'll love the first Sgt. Beef novel by Leo Bruce, which has appearances by thinly veiled versions of Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, and Father Brown!

For more information, be sure to pick up a copy of my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3 when Meteor House publishes it! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!

Crossover of the Week

October 1937

CASE WITH NO CONCLUSION 

Sergeant Beef is hired by Peter Ferrers to clear the name of his brother Stewart, who is in custody for the murder of the family doctor. Beef mentions his fellow detectives, Lord Simon Plimsoll, Nigel Strangeways, Anthony Gethryn, Albert Campion, and Dr. Gideon Fell, as well as his cousin Sergeant Matthew Beef, John Meredith’s assistant. Peter says Inspector Meredith, Inspector French, and Amer Picon were all too busy to take the case. Crime reporter Angus Braithwaite had been peeved by the certainty of success of various private investigators of whom he’s read, from Holmes and Blake to Thorndike and Mason. Plimsoll, Picon, and Monsignor Smith are quoted in Braithwaite’s paper, The Daily Dose, about Beef’s failure to solve the case and prevent Stewart’s hanging. 

1939 novel by Lionel Townsend, edited by Leo Bruce. Lord Simon Plimsoll, a disguised version of Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective Lord Peter Wimsey, met Beef in Bruce’s Case for Three Detectives. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot also appeared in that novel under the pseudonym “Amer Picon,” and G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown as “Monsignor Smith.” Wimsey, Poirot, Father Brown, Philip MacDonald’s detective Anthony Gethryn, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell, Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke (to use the correct spelling), and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason (who is actually an attorney, not a private investigator, though he did often make use of P.I. Paul Drake’s services in his cases) have all been included in the CU. This novel brings in Nicholas Blake’s detective Nigel Strangeways and Francis Gerard’s Sir John Meredith and Sergeant Matthew Beef. One of the characters mentions going to see the Shirley Temple movie Little Miss Broadway, which came out on July 29, 1938. However, the next novel in the series, Case with 4 Clowns, takes place from April 25-May 4, 1938, and mentions the events of this book as having occurred six months ago at the beginning. Therefore, I am placing it in October 1937.

This crossover writeup is one of the hundreds included in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, to be published by Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!

Crossover Cover: Night Watch

Sherlock Holmes meets G.K. Chesterton's priest and amateur sleuth.

Crossover Cover: The Rainbow Affair

In this wonderful tie-in novel for the classic spy show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., David McDaniel has Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin meet Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Father Brown, John Steed and Emma Peel, Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith, the Saint and his nemesis Inspector Teal, John Creasey's Inspector Roger West, and Manning Coles' Tommy Hambledon, most of whom are unnamed, though Holmes appears under the alias of William Escott. There also references to James Bond, Neddy Seagoon from the British radio program The Goon Show, and John Creasey's Richard Rollison (aka the Toff) and Department Z.