FFB: Johnny Under Ground

Patricia Pakenham-Walsh (1923-1977) was born in Dublin, the daughter of a father who served in the Indian civil service, retiring as a high court judge in Madras. Patricia joined the WAAF in 1939 during WWII as a a flight officer, experience which led Peter Ustinov to hire her as a technical assistant on his film Secret Flight in 1946.

She was Ustinov's personal assistant for eight years and penned her own screenplay, School for Scoundrels in 1960 (made into a film with Ian Carmichael, Terry-Thomas, and Alastair Sim). She married John Moyes in 1951, and although they divorced and she later remarried, she kept her married name of Patricia Moyes as the pen name for novels featuring C.I.D. Inspector Henry Tibbett and his cheerful Dutch wife, Emmy.

The Tibbett duo appeared in 20 novels, beginning with Dead Men Don't Ski in 1958 and wrapping up with 1993's Twice in a Blue Moon. The sixth entry in the series, Johnny Under Ground from 1965, further put the author's WWII training to use via the plot and Emmy Tibbett's background, with Emmy uneasily planning to attend her twentieth Royal Air Force reunion. Emmy had been a naive nineteen year-old auxiliary officer at Dymfield Air Base during the war, when she fell in love with the handsome RAF hero pilot Beau Guest. She was later devasted when Guest seemingly committed suicide by deliberately crashing his plane into the North Sea.

When Emmy attends the reunion, she learns Guest's widow wants to publish a book about the history of her husband's former military unit, which Emmy reluctantly agrees to help research. That isn't the only surprise in store—Emmy is shocked to find out she was the very last person to see Beau Guest alive, and that everyone connected with the fatal flight seems to have something to hide. Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett gets drawn into the mystery and realizes his wife has stumbled onto something sinister. But Emmy is determined to dig into the past, even after the other collaborator on the book is murdered and anonymous letters make it clear someone won't hesitate to kill in order to keep old secrets buried.

Although the Tibbett series technically falls into the police procedural category, the crimes are off-stage and the feel is more of a "cozy" or traditional mystery. As The New York Times Book Review noted, Moyes "handles indecorous events with a minimum of violence and fuss and makes drug dealing seem more like bad manners than bad morals."